Roadtrip Vigilantes

by Beabaseball

Bruce Wayne gave up hope, stayed with the League of Shadows, and generally f*cked up his entire life until a little kid called Dick Grayson came along and saved him anyway. Now on Ra's al Ghul's sh*t list, they travel the U.S. in whatever car they can get their hands on, trying to piece their hearts back together again. A slightly different start to Batman.

this has been collecting dust for at least a month on my computer, and it just feels really good to finally get it out there. it started out as a 'haha, imagine an au where bruce stayed with the league' and ran away from me by 1am. i really like this au and have been considering writing shorter oneshots based on it if there's enough interest. i don't really have anything else to say. the fic's hopefully said it all. beta'd by a hellanon.

Bruce Wayne always intended to leave the League of Shadows. He just… never followed through.

When all was said and done, when it really mattered, 'almost' and 'intended' didn't really matter. He knows that. He knows that down to his bones. It's a fact he's lived with, had to learn to live with, ever since he was young.

He lived with it when he first began studying criminology and kickboxing. He lived with it when he fled Gotham with only the clothes on his back and a wad of money in his pocket. He lived with it when the nights were long and he still woke up the next morning in the woods, brushed the leaves off his clothes, and kept going. There was no excuse for leaving something at 'almost'—'almost' indicated a change in intention.

If the mugger that night only intended to get money, almost didn't pull the trigger? His 'almost' hadn't spared Bruce's parents. If Bruce Wayne left Gotham intending to save it, and instead sold his soul to the service of creating something greater? Well. All great passings of eras in history seemed marked with death.

The first time he is given the order to go kill, Bruce closes his eyes, screws his courage to the sticking-place, and falls in line with the League of Shadows.

He has a laundry list of reasons and excuses, but none he could point to as the primary culprit, which just makes it all the worse. He is the primary culprit. He still makes the list.

Because not having a clear plan of action for his return to Gotham makes him uncomfortable enough that he'd rather bide his time. Because he's being more pragmatic, setting his sights on all the evil of the world, rather than the petty crime of one city, even if it is his city. Because he is just that desperate for someone to talk to after all this time. Because he isn't happy in the League—he's often horribly uneasy—but he wasn't any happier before the League, and he isn't alone anymore. Because in the cut and dried world of assassination, no one tries to smother him with false pity. Because no one expects him to graciously accept condescension. To smile. Because he meets Talia.

She comes, initially, to observe his first kill. What makes her more than a fact or figure in his memory is the aftermath. She gets him through yet another day he would've preferred avoiding.

She rests her fingers lightly on his shoulders, steers him away from the corpse, and tells him that his tremors will pass.

So he doesn't betray. He doesn't flee. He doesn't like the work and he doesn't think Ra's is necessarily right all the time, but hell, the world is dark, and ugly, and maybe there are some diseases you can only cure by carving them out with a scalpel.

He stands by Talia, who shares many of his opinions. A right hand man. Potential husband and heir. They talk a lot, Talia and him—they talk about being loyal to Ra's. About when Ra's takes things too far, when they just wish he would breathe. About places they've felt safe. About how this cesspool of a world was allowed to occur. About how, much of the time, it feels like trying to turn an all-consuming tide. Talia is content with that—she has no ambition to change the world, not the way Bruce and her father do, but she still humors Bruce's fantasies of a world without crime. She humors him, and he stays. He stays, and they watch the Justice League form from a distance, laughing, what are those inexperienced fools doing, kidding themselves like that?

He stays, and years pass. He stays, and kills.

The League of Shadows prides anonymity, but Bruce couldn't ever really help standing out. Despite lacking a name, a face, and witnesses, he gains a reputation as assassinations come and go. He hears the murmurs, sometimes, when gathering information for a job, or while forcing himself to step outside for a day or so on his own, just to see the sun. One rumor that stays in his memory is murmured in a well-polished oakwood bar in Southern Germany. Young thugs, new to organized crime, being told about by a senior member that Bruce is the result of one of the League's successful genetics experiment. The fully realized form of a man-bat.

That story gets around fast. Much faster than he imagined was possible, even for gossip. It makes sense on some primal level, he supposes. But he isn't supposed to think on a primal level. He tolerates the rumors.

He hates bats, has ever since childhood, but he never contests the rumors. The scum deserve to think there is some unholy abomination delivering retribution in their final moments.

Even if it isn't true.

He doesn't know if he'll ever be able to say aloud, that's not true, I'm not a monster, but he tries to be as close to honest in his actions as he can. He tries to not be excessive. He tries to be careful about noncombatants and 'innocents,' and he tries to hold on. Hold on to the knowledge that he can still be discriminate, but, still—he knows some of the people he kills are parents. He knows that some of them will be found by their children. He knows what will happen to some of those children. He knows if he doesn't kill the parents, someone else will, and he cannot lose all his choices over two dead bodies again.

Talia tries to help him work through it (Ra's certainly doesn't; for all his genius, Ra's doesn't think about that sort of thing; it's part of where they disagree, but—) but Bruce's guilt is an ongoing condition, and one he simply has to ride out or force himself through.

There are tricks to forcing himself through it. Days of meditation. Days of respite. Steeling himself mentally beforehand. Not using his name on jobs. Not sticking around for the aftermath. Changes of scenery. Grounding techniques. Mantra. All of it helps divorce him from the moment of impact.

He has never killed in front of a child. He knows a paltry concession when he makes one, but it's what he has to give.

It's easier to force himself through the worst days when Talia's there. He can fend for himself, he has for years, but it's easier when Talia is there, though her consistent presence is a sheer impossibility. They both understand that. She won't always be there.

The current low is one of his worst. Not the worst, perhaps, but he has long lost track of how to measure pain, despite his best efforts. But it's bad. It will last. It will consume. Talia is elsewhere. It can't be helped. He wakes one morning in agony, and realizes he must act or he will drown. It's not an unfamiliar feeling. The same feeling drove him from Gotham all those years ago.

This time, it drives him back.

In the interest of recovery, Bruce requests a few days to return to his home city. There are only two tasks that require his physical presence in the city: to check on Alfred, and to remind himself why he's doing what he's doing. Why it was necessary to be the sort of monster that destroyed his life in the first place.

Those were the only two real reasons he returned to Gotham. No other. He refuses to believe in fate, so he can only assume that between the events, the timing of his guilt, and his impulsiveness, it's all just a grand, horrible coincidence.

Alfred is well. Unaware of Bruce's presence, but well. He's keeping in contact with his daughter in England. He's managing his affairs. He's walking down the street to purchase groceries at an organic market, and never once looks up as Bruce follows him from the rooftops. It's from the rooftops that Bruce spots the billboard—Haly's Circus, back in town for its annual show. Three nights of the world's most high-flying, death-defying performances, now on this side of the Atlantic.

Haly's Circus is a Gotham tradition, almost. The most ramshackle international circus anyone'd ever seen, set up in a backlot, with tickets so cheap that half Park Row shows up, and for three nights, there is color in Gotham.

In a fit of sentimentality Bruce goes to the circus, and becomes witness to someone else's tragedy.

It's Gotham. It's Gotham, and Bruce knows firsthand how you can't trust the cops to save anyone, to provide closure, to do anything more than shuffle you off to who-knew-where, unless there was someone out there with enough money to take you home.

Alfred got to take Bruce home—a silent tomb of a house that was his residence for the next eight years. Even so, he is horribly aware that some of the rumors about Wayne Manor came about because most bribes weren't used to keep kids with someone who actually loved them. The gossip chain at school informed him well enough what people thought happened in Wayne Manor. But he isn't in school anymore, and his tragedy isn't the only one out there. It's been years, and now, an even younger child might have to suffer his same fate or worse to survive.

The crowd evacuates the tent. The performers are shuffled back towards the trailers. It can hardly be called organized. Any questioning will happen outside. It will be a long night.

Bruce slips around the edges of the tent, skirting the awareness of the cops and performers alike. No one notices him, or if they do, no one thinks enough of him to question.

The boy is shivering on bottom riser without even a blanket, staring wide-eyed at the canvas bags covering his parents' corpses. No one bothers blocking his view. Bruce doesn't bother trying, either. Tearing your eyes away was hard. He understood. He's honestly just surprised the boy's already stopped screaming.

Bruce slides onto the riser beside the boy, making sure to be well in visible range, moving slowly but consistently. After a moment of deliberation, he mimics what one police officer did to him years ago, something no one's gotten around to doing this time, and starts speaking. He has a moment to wonder, vaguely, about what became of that cop from years ago, before Dick Grayson's eyes turn towards Bruce of their own accord. Only when Dick is watching him does Bruce reach out to touch the tip of the boy's shoulder blade. A careful, light contact.

He keeps talking, struggling to find words before realizing he's mumbling what will happen next. Tonight. Tomorrow. A rough outline of what the boy can expect over the course of this next week. A play-by-play. Advice on how to keep his head down, his heart strong, endure the horrible things people will say. Voice low, and careful, and conspiratory. Bruce isn't sure if the boy is hearing the words or mostly reacting to the sounds.

His stomach turns for a moment at a thought; remembering trying to politely listen to—everyone—trying to keep up with the courtesy he'd been raised to have while only wanting to sit, either undisturbed or screaming.

Maybe he should leave.

He should leave the kid, who seemed to be doing okay before. Grayson didn't need a stranger touching his back and trying to mumble to him while he's still—

Dick leans into the touch, sniffling and trembling. Bruce puts more pressure into his hand, palm against the boy's small back, giving him something to ground with. He keeps murmuring, not sure exactly where he is in explaining what will likely come in the future, but he doesn't tell the boy it will be okay.

Eventually, Dick slumps against his side, and Bruce wraps his arm around the boy's shoulder in a frail, unpracticed hug. He hasn't hugged anyone for—years. Now is really not the time to attempt an important one.

If he calls this trying to comfort, Bruce is pretty sure he's messed it up.

There isn't much he could do besides sit there. Bruce isn't exactly in a position to provide shelter, and what else would he do, threaten the whole police force over the boy's wellbeing and make a scene? Run background checks on every prospective adopter and foster family in Gotham and force one of them to take the boy in? There are other things he can do, things he can focus on, but the immediate obvious action is to bide his time with the boy, doing his best to ensure Dick's survival after these few minutes while the cops are looking the other way. When it becomes too risky to stay, when Bruce realizes the ringmaster is moments away from turning and spotting a stranger with what remains of his starring act, then it is time to move to phase two of the plan he'd unconsciously constructed.

Before retreating, Bruce tells Dick he'll come back. Tells Dick to not mention their meeting to anyone. That he won't let this be the end.

Then, he goes. He doesn't stay to see the rest of the proceedings. He already knows enough to be able to find Dick again. In the meantime, there are more treacherous things to track down.

000

The cops give up on the case fairly quickly, even by Gotham standards. There's no real push to pursue it. No one really cares about the circus brat beyond a shocking, sensationalist murder in a city full of shocking, sensationalist murders. Dick Grayson's in the system by the end of a day. His parents are examined and cremated. The circus leaves town by the turn of the week. The case is shelved.

Bruce comes in the night. He's not sure how else to visit people anymore.

It's a small room they have Dick in. Third floor. About the size of a closet. Two bunk beds are squeezed into the space on either side of the window. The boy's chosen a low bunk.

The plan is to tell Dick that Bruce hasn't given up on the case like the police have. To tell Dick that he's got a lead on the crime family connected with the murder, and he's narrowing down suspects at a frightening pace. That soon Dick will have a name, and a face, and retribution.

What actually happens is that the speech begins as he planned, but when he gets to retribution, Dick looks up at him—a scrawny kid, a month or two shy of nine at best, who has only gotten thinner, and paler, and bonier from stress over the last few days. He looks like he's been sleeping badly. Like he hasn't stopped crying for hours. Like he's forgetting he needs food and water—and his eyes are sharp, and bright, and intelligent, and he looks up and locks Bruce with those eyes and asks, "what would you do?"

It catches him up short. "What?"

"If you got the chance to kill the person who killed your parents," Dick says, in his very high voice, frowning a little. Bruce knows he hasn't mentioned his parents being murdered, but maybe the boy is being hypothetical, "what would you do?"

"I'd kill him," Bruce says without hesitation. Because he would. Without hesitation.

Dick frowns. Despite how sharp his cheekbones are, (far too sharp to be healthy for his age), it comes off more like a pout than anything else. "Have you killed people before?"

Bruce hesitates this time, because he doesn't think he should be hearing questions like that from eight year olds and treating it lightly. Still. There isn't much good that lying will do in this situation. "Yes."

"…a lot?"

"A lot of people. Yes."

"…does it make it stop?"

Bruce flinches. He closes his eyes and jerks backwards. He flinches.

Because he can still feel it in his chest. That knot. That tight, suffocating weight. The sort a doctor once told him potentially signified an oncoming heart attack, and maybe Bruce would have believed that if he hadn't had that same knot in his chest for the last decade of his life. If he hadn't sat on the couch a day before parents' funerals and wondered, will I carry this with me for the rest of my life?

His throat is dry, and he wishes he could lie about this. He wishes he were a better liar. Realizes Dick was never being hypothetical. Wonders how he could've been so transparent.

"No," he says instead, placing his fist over his sternum. Right over where the knot is. "At least. It hasn't for me. Not yet. But you learn to live with it. That part gets easier."

Dick mimics the gesture, curling one hand into a loose fist and placing it over his torso. The placement is a little different. His other hand is rubbing over his gut the same way one would after taking a hard punch, and Bruce thinks he knows what that means. Not everyone felt the impact the same. Bruce had felt it in his lungs.

"…I was ten," Bruce says, letting his fist drop down into his lap. His eyes drop, too. "We were coming out of the cinema. We'd been watching The Mark of Zorro. It was… it was a special occasion, both of my parents being able to get enough time out of their schedules to spend time with me. It didn't happen often. Spending a whole day with them both. When the film ended, it was cold out, colder than we'd expected, and I wasn't properly dressed for it. I was tired. Needy."

He sighs and buries his face in his hands. There are senses and quick-flashes of memories behind his eyelids that he doesn't know how to make sensible outside his body. Anecdotes he can't translate from sound and motion. He's already used so many words tonight. He exhales violently.

"They wanted to get me home quickly. Get me to bed. We took a shortcut in the alley behind the cinema."

This isn't helping the boy. He knows it isn't. Bruce hasn't dealt with his grief, not really, no matter how many people tell him he should be over it—should have been over it years ago—but the boy is leaning forward on his bed, listening, wide-eyed, and Bruce has to finish his story, has to tell him something, has to—

"They never caught him." Bruce pulls his face from his hands and looks Dick Grayson in the eyes without shying. "I don't want you to go through what I did. I don't want you to go through something worse. But you can survive this. You can survive this."

Bruce lays a hand on the boy's shoulder. And somehow. Somehow, he doesn't flinch away when the boy flings himself into Bruce's chest. Somehow, he doesn't flinch away from the hug.

The wiry arms wrap around his neck, and Bruce holds the boy around his middle, ignoring the hot and sticky mess that's forming on his shoulder. The knot on his sternum clenches. His chest constricts. Something warm and protective surges through him like adrenaline, and he cannot close his eyes to the boy.

"You can survive this."

000

They talk for a long, long time.

Talia tries to call him back to the island. Bruce says he's ill. He just needs a few more days.

The League's never had any real trouble out of him before. Talia favors him. Ra's wants his succession. Personal favors aren't unheard of. He gets three weeks.

Bruce has the murderer's name and location long before the deadline.

Dick deteriorates with each day, but Bruce does his best to visit as often as possible. He thinks the boy does better when there's someone to talk to—even if Bruce has lost his ability to really respond, he can sit there and let the boy talk. Let him vent. Let him tell stories about his parents. But finally comes the day, the night, when Bruce finally has something to say again, and tells Dick all about Tony Zucco.

Dick sits upright in bed, eyes blazing, fists balled in the sheets. "I want to see him."

Bruce grants his wish.

It's a horribly easy thing, spiriting the boy away. It helps that Dick is half-high on adrenaline and apparently determined to run on rooftops. He's an acrobat. He's incredible. He still has his shoes he wore for the show, scuffed from being used like sneakers, but they work well. Between the shoes and his pajamas, the boy doesn't seem to feel the autumn night chill. Bruce has to carry him on some of the longer jumps where he's afraid the boy will fall like his parents, but, for the most part, Dick flies behind Bruce through the unfamiliar city of Gotham without difficulty.

The initial plan was to leave Dick at the safehouse and deliver Zucco to him, but that plan is vetoed as each time Bruce tries to leave, Dick tries to follow him. He can't lock the boy away, and he can't abandon him on a rooftop halfway across the city from anywhere he might be familiar with. Bruce reflects he should have procured Zucco first and then brought the news to Dick, but of course, for some reason he had assumed Dick was an obedient child.

They corner Zucco at the southeastern docks, holed up cozy in a warehouse, not even the slightest bit concerned about someone trying to find him. It's the fatal mistake. He's already forgotten the circus, it seems.

He doesn't get the luxury of forgetting for much longer.

Bruce produces a small, dark apartment with one window, a length of rope, and a ten story drop into an empty alleyway. It's the least he can do.

He has other options, if Dick wants them: blades, fists, deprivation. Bruce can't give him guns, he can't, but—he can give Dick other options, if Dick wants them.

Mostly, though, Dick wants to talk. Wants to know why. The answer is awful, and anticlimactic, and tells the boy nothing new.

It's too petty a reason to kill someone. It's so fucking petty. It's money Zucco didn't even need. And why their act, why the act with a child and his parents in it, why not anyone else? Why.

Dick starts screaming midway through.

Screams like it's that night again. Screams that have been building up ever since he first feel silent, just a few minutes after the unimaginable.

He screams. He rants. He curses and bangs his knees against the floor. All the while, Bruce is there, watching and keeping Zucco helpless, even as an eight year old rants, and raves, and cries, and throws a verifiable meltdown on the floor of this seedy, empty apartment block. Dick's loud, and sobbing, and no one comes, which just reminds Bruce again that his city is a hellhole.

Every now and then, Dick storms—or crawls, or jerks—up to where Zucco's tied and looks about to punch him, but always flinches away at the last moment as if burned. Then dissolves into more tears.

It leaves Dick slumped on the floor, crying so hard his breathing stutters and his stomach audibly lurches, and it wouldn't be surprising if he puked. At one point, he curls into a ball and presses his forehead to the floor, tears slipping into his mouth and up his nose, gasping for breath and moaning.

Bruce is waiting. The whole time, watching Dick shake and tear himself open, Bruce is waiting. For the order that's become ingrained. For the only way this night can end.

Finally, finally, the moment comes.

Bruce is wound up, tense as a spring. He's ready to throw Zucco out the window, gather Dick up in his arms, and carry him out for a late-night comfort meal before returning him to his assigned room, fulfilled.

Dick pushes himself up off the floor, and Bruce knows this is it. Dick, red faced and uncoordinated, looks up with eyes unclouded, and Bruce is ready for the order.

"Since you caught him, he can go to jail now, right?"

He's—he's waiting for the order?

It takes Bruce a moment to understand what Dick is asking. His brain keeps trying to cipher it into a code for 'do it,' for 'end him,' for 'purge.' It takes him a moment to realize why, exactly, he can't figure out the codewords.

"I… can give my process to the police as an anonymous tip, yes," Bruce says after a moment of consideration. He forgets to look at Zucco. It doesn't matter at all, in the end, because Zucco isn't escaping from where he's tied, but later on, Bruce does wonder what Zucco's face must have looked like. Aside from Bruce himself, only Zucco must have been more certain of his oncoming demise. "but wouldn't you rather I killed him?"

Dick shakes his head. Shivers badly. Wipes his nose. Then, resumes shaking his head.

"I don't want my parents to've died just so someone else can die. Even if he's, even if he's scum."

It's that word, 'scum,' coming out of an eight year old's mouth—an eight year old victim of violent crime, who has every right in the world to kill Tony Zucco by eating his way through the man's intestines if he so chose—it's that word which snaps Bruce into believing him. But it's the words that come before it that echo through his mind.

"….are you sure?"

He has his orders. Technically.

He's not used to questioning the orders. Not without Talia around, and even then, not without privacy, and certainly not directly to the one giving the orders. But Dick nods his head and keeps wiping his nose, rubbing his eyes, trying hard to stop crying. His face is still twisted up in anger. His voice went raw several long minutes ago. When his eyes are exposed again, they are bloodshot, and wild, and furious. And Dick says, in a terrible little voice, "I don't want any more people to die."

Bruce imagines throwing Tony Zucco out the window. Imagines dangling him from his ankles, high above the city streets. Imagines sacrificing him to the alleys below. Imagines stepping out of the shadows and pulling a gun and demanding his wallet, and when Zucco gives him his wallet, he imagines saying this is what you did, this is what you did, this is what you and pulling the trigger.

Bruce—

—produces a bottle of chloroform, thinks 'always be prepared' in the tone usually reserved for gallows humor, and renders Tony Zucco unconscious.

He hoists Zucco over his shoulder like the man weighs nothing, hating that he has to carry this sack of flesh rather than the little boy still shivering in the center of the room, but unwilling to force the kid anywhere close to the man or risk losing grip on the descent.

He drops Zucco off, unconscious, in Commissioner Gordon's office at the GCPD's southernmost precinct. Corrupt as the cops are, the act itself leaves a bitter taste in his mouth, but he knows at least Gordon will get Zucco somewhere resembling the right place, so long as there's evidence and no one around to pull rank.

He reassures Dick as much, leaving out that he didn't even know Commissioner Gordon existed until a few nights ago, when a veteran cop called out Jim Gordon's name, and Bruce remembered a much younger officer saying, my name's Jim, and laying a coat over Bruce's then-skinny shoulders. An officer who personally requested to deliver the news of the dropped case to Wayne Manor. A cop who tried to check in on him, no matter how much Bruce failed to respond.

If there's any police officer who will try to get Zucco taken care of, it's Gordon. If Gordon's commissioner, all the better. But if he's as honest a cop as Bruce remembers, he'll need evidence.

The evidence Bruce now has to format properly and find sources and references for, if anyone's going to believe him. If nothing else, Zucco has enough of a history that he can be taken in on older crimes. But he killed the Graysons.

Organizing the evidence will take a while; not all night, but a few hours.

He takes Dick out for something to eat in the meantime. He can work while the boy drinks a chocolate milkshake and eats some fries.

He does not refuse when Dick offers a sip of the milkshake as a 'thank you.' He's not really sure what circle of hell he would go to if he did.

By morning, the evidence has been compiled and left in Gordon's office, on top of Zucco's newly conscious body. Bruce drugs him again. It's not healthy, but the original plan had been to throw him out a window and let him experience the sensation of plummeting to his death, so Bruce doesn't feel too guilty.

Dick is asleep. Asleep in the room he'd been assigned, in the house he'd been assigned, in this life he didn't ask for. He's apparently a little silvertongue, even curled under blankets three miles away, because his words keep resurfacing in Bruce's mind.

The five o'clock local morning news is slow. They haven't gotten word of the panic at the precinct yet. A different news station reports on how Superman was spotted talking down a jumper late last night. There's heavy implication there was more that happened—a few car crashes averted, a murderous bullet caught, a few muggings interrupted, before the main story of the morning. It's petty sensationalism. The actions are naïve and unrealistic. It's a fool's errand. It would be a never ending battle.

You had to cut out the root of evil to kill the tree and all its branches.

The League of Shadows had been established a thousand years ago for that very purpose.

…they had not yet destroyed the heart of evil.

Last night, in the span of several hours, Superman had stopped a handful of muggings, caught a murderous bullet, averted a car crash, and been there for someone in their most desperate moment, prolonging their life for at least a while. Last night, Bruce let an eight year old confront his parents' killer, handed the man's fate over to him, and given him back some control over life.

They were petty things. Paltry. Hardly worth even considering in the big picture. In the grand scheme of things.

But they were real. They were little worlds, little lives, perhaps made better by paltry actions. And Bruce remembered a childhood full of lying awake at night, staring at the ceiling, wishing for the sort of choice Dick Grayson had been given last night.

I don't want any more people to die unnecessary, pointless, goalless deaths—his mind supplied. He shook his head, dislodging the thought.

I don't want any more people to die because someone else was too petty and cruel to spare them.

It would… it would be nice, if that were the case. If evil and cruelty could be stopped without bloodshed. If that were the sort of hope someone could have and hold on to.

It was not the sort of thought one could entertain in the League of Assassins.

(just because you shall never achieve an ideal does not mean you may stop striving for it. That was one of his teachers. One of his wise, brutal teachers.)

Bruce looks back towards the television in the small, shoddy, darkened bunker and takes a deep breath, rubbing his temples. He's been living in this safehouse for three weeks on the League's dollar. He still has a week and a half before anyone expects him.

He makes coffee.

He will have to contact Alfred. It will be a long, awful, horrific, terrible, no good, very bad conversation, but he has endured worse things. Perhaps he has not endured worse recently, but he has endured worse. By the end of the talk, (if not by the beginning, with the rest of the talk as punishment) he is certain Alfred will agree to either legally adopting and raising Dick Grayson, or accepting the kidnapping and subsequent name change of Dick Grayson before raising him. Bruce will send money when he can. He will return to the League for a while, fulfill his duties to throw off suspicion, and wait until the next time he's assigned an assassination. Midway through the journey, he will disappear.

He contacts Alfred first, because while he will of course ask Dick's opinion before giving the final signal, he will also have to make sure there is in fact a place for Dick, first. He's confident there will be, but to promise a home and not deliver—that would be too great a betrayal.

He arrives on Alfred's townhouse doorstep at nine in the morning—it was rude to contact anyone before nine in the morning, that was one of the many things drilled into his skull over those long eight years—shuffles his feet on the welcome mat to prevent his knees giving out, and rings the doorbell.

The talk goes as well as Bruce expected. He wants to collapse afterwards.

He does. Alfred makes him sleep on the couch under three quilts, rather than allowing him to return to the safehouse. When Bruce wakes, it's late evening again, and Alfred insists on making breakfast. It's almost too easy to imagine he never left.

Ever since Bruce ran away from the manor and the only life he'd ever known, Alfred's been living in a small townhouse in Northern Gotham. It's a nice neighborhood not far from the Memorial Bridge. He has a comfortable amount saved up and is still technically in employ, being given monthly paychecks to occasionally go up and make sure the manor has not been ransacked. He will be able to provide well for Dick.

Feeling calm in the face of a plan going smoothly, Bruce takes a moment to read the news of Tony Zucco's discovery and subsequent arrest in Gordon's office before leaving to tell Dick the proposition.

Dick refuses.

Bruce, perhaps, should have remembered Dick was not an obedient child and taken that as a warning. But Dick refuses to live with Alfred, and even though Bruce talks him into a meeting that night, Dick is steadfast and doesn't seem willing to change his mind. Bruce stays calm and resigned, telling himself that no matter how mature and sharp the kid is, he's still a child and he's still going to be childish.

The resignation turns to horror when, even after a fine first meeting, Dick, seated at Alfred's kitchen table, turns to look at Bruce just as Alfred's left the room and says, "I still don't see why I can't live with you."

"I," Bruce says the first thing that comes to mind. It is horribly true. "am not a good man and would not be a good parent."

Dick snorts and crosses his arms. "I want to go with you."

Bruce rephrases. "I am a very bad person. Worse than Zucco."

Dick looks unimpressed. Maybe he doesn't believe it's possible to be worse than the man who killed his parents. Maybe if he's able to not condemn someone like Zucco to death, other crimes are also forgiven all the more easily—

"And there are even worse people after me," so Bruce has to keep being honest, because if he lies, Dick will know, and Dick will wonder if everything Bruce has said might be a lie. Including the reassurances that might have helped him survive the last two weeks. "and they will want to kill me. If they catch you with me, if they learn we're connected, they will want to kill you, too. I can't let that happen."

Dick looks a bit less unimpressed, but his arms are still crossed and he's still trying to frown, and coming up with a horrible little pout instead. His eyes are sparking blue again. Bruce would be glad for it if it the context weren't so concerning. "Then you can protect me. Besides, people've already tried to kill me, I'll be fine."

It's another one of those things that cuts Bruce to the quick, hearing an eight year old talk like that. He wonders if he used to talk like that, after the murder. He wonders how Alfred dealt with it. How many of the stress lines on Alfred's face are signed with Bruce's name?

"I can't protect you all the time," he tries, voice going lower as he grows more desperate, as Dick rebuts with, 'then you can teach me how to defend myself.' "Maybe there's someone out there even more dangerous than me." When that doesn't get through: "I've killed people, Dick."

His voice goes sharp at the end. His palms press flat on the kitchen table. He prays it gets through: that Dick understands, becomes disgusted, runs out the room to find Alfred, regrets everything—

Before Dick can react, Bruce continues. "I've killed people. I've hurt them. I've taken vengeance. I would have let Zucco drop. I have broken people intentionally. I have done it because they were awful, and cruel, and they didn't deserve to live for the crimes they'd committed, and now that I'm planning to get out, the people that I worked with will try to kill me and anyone I'm affiliated with."

"…You're trying to get out?"

Was that all he got? "And they will kill me."

Dick stands up, curls his fists at his side, and says, "I won't let them. If you want to change, you should be allowed to. And the other people can maybe do better, too."

Bruce realizes they are having completely different conversations. He registers that. Realizes Dick is still talking about Zucco, and the scum of the earth, and not wanting anyone else to die, while Bruce is talking about fear, and anger, and self-loathing, and betraying the only place that's felt like home since his parents died because of a few words said by a kid less than half his age in the dead of night.

While he registers all this, internally he is screaming, your parents have been dead less than a month. You are still in a crisis state. You are completely alone for the first time in your life. It would be completely irresponsible for me to get you any more involved than you already are. You are clinging to the first person who has given you stability and delivered on a promise, but I am dangerous, and you are a child, and I will fail you. In a best case scenario, I will be slaughtered in my sleep by the only woman I think I've ever loved and I cannot let you see that. I cannot die if you think of me as a rock. I'd have to fight back. What if I die in front of you? What if I kill in front of you?

He does not know, in that moment, if he would rather die or kill in front of Dick Grayson.

"I might be forced to kill again."

"I don't care. You won't. I want to go with you."

You're compromised.

He doesn't know when Alfred arrives or how much of the conversation he grasped, but when Bruce looks up, there Alfred is. Standing in the doorway to the kitchen, holding two platefuls of food and watching with wide, horrible, sad eyes.

Bruce makes the mistake of returning the gaze, and just as firmly as he knows he and Dick have been having two conversations, Bruce knows he and Alfred are thinking the same thing. Remembering the long, quiet halls of Wayne manor, with a single lonely boy walking through them. Remembering that there had been someone else in that house. That despite Alfred's best efforts, it still ended in Bruce sitting in this kitchen more than a decade later with so much blood on his hands, not all the sweet perfumes of the world could banish the scent.

"Take him," Alfred says to Bruce. "Go with him," he says to Dick. "If I suddenly appear with an orphan soon after your disappearance, they'll assume there's a connection. The other option is to leave him in the system, and looking at the young master now, I don't believe he would allow that. Especially considering what that Zucco villain might say. Not that I approve of you putting children in danger—but it appears the damage has already been done. If you can send him back here after some time has passed, I will happily take him in, but for now, it does appear that fleeing is the best option for Master Grayson."

In retrospect, Bruce thinks Alfred might have been a bit of an irresponsible caretaker. Or maybe this is a new development.

"But eat first." Alfred sets the plates in front of them.

Dick leaps with glee, and Bruce thinks that one day, he will view this as a sad memory. Right now, his heart is leaping just as high as Dick is.

They eat. Bruce tells Alfred what he can—about the League, about who might be after them, about who may decide to sneak around Gotham. Alfred will be less suspicious if he continues to move as he always had. Without a new child suddenly appearing in his care after surviving a double-murder with a mysterious conclusion, it will be easy for Alfred to be dismissed as irrelevant. If he is questioned, he won't be harmed in any way. It would cause too much of a stir and alert Bruce to the League's tails. Knowing he will be safer is the only reason Bruce can bear to leave Alfred behind a second time, but he does, eventually, leave.

Not before giving Alfred access to the Swiss bank account Bruce has kept hidden even from the League, and not before giving Alfred a crash course on being a one-man money launderer, but he does, eventually, leave.

The original plan is scrapped. He foregoes the League, instead sending Talia a message that he plans to return on the last date of his allowed leave-time, but contact will likely be scarce until then. He thanks her once more for her assistance. Then, before Dick's nighttime disappearance can even be reported, they take everything they can carry, find a thrice-resold Buick, and flee.

It's not ideal, but the moment Dick's disappearance is noticed, they'll be put on a timer, and he's unwilling to return to that room, not even for the night . No one will know when Bruce left Gotham, and as far as Alfred's concerned, he never returned. They can only hope that Dick's disappearance will simply be tacked up to just another runaway in a sea of Gotham's vanished children, and the timing of Zucco's capture simply an ironic coincidence. A terrible, ironic coincidence in a city full of them.

By sunrise, Gotham isn't even a speck in the rearview mirror.

The first long stretch of empty highway with no cameras or witnesses around, Bruce pulls over and shows Dick how to apply makeup, how to wear a wig so it looks natural, how to put in contacts and wear dollarstore glasses. What a great difference a little grease paint and change in posture can make.

Bruce teaches Dick how to set up false IDs that are so average they're invisible. Teaches him how to create a paper trail. How to avoid a paper trail. How to cry so that the desk attendant will hurry them by quickly. How to smile and chatter to charm the cleaning staff and waiters. How to tell people that Bruce is his uncle-brother-cousin, so when someone comes along looking for a dark haired assassin traveling alone, they will overlook tired Mr. Malone and his favorite little Robbie.

Lessons keep their minds off things—both Dick's mind and Bruce's. Makes them both feel a little more secure. They pass the one month anniversary of the Grayson's deaths that way. But in between learning to use Bruce's laptop computer and washing their shirts in the hotel sink, Dick doesn't stop pacing.

Bruce teaches him how to look over his shoulder without appearing to do so. How to detect poison in his drink. How to read a room in a glance. How to throw a punch. How to turn his flips into kicks. How to bite.

He realizes, sharply, after showing Dick a kata in their small roadside hotel room, that he does not have to teach Dick everything. He can intentionally leave out how to maim. How to torture. How to kill. Dick never has to learn those things. Dick can learn how to use his elbows and knees, and curl up to sleep on the bed closest to the door (for Bruce estimates the window is the most dangerous place in the room, when dealing with the League), and eat dry cereal out of a plastic one-serving cup, and watch television late at night, and he never has to learn how to intentionally kill.

000

It's Superman's fault, once again, that Bruce starts getting stupid ideas. That Dick claps in excitement when the news shows the alien onscreen at eight o'three after once again successfully stopping two murders and guiding a domestic abuse survivor to the police station, comforting her while she made her accusation and walking her to a shelter afterwards. But the highlight of the news show is the cellphone footage of an incident a few days before, when someone apparently tried to fight Superman—not with guns, or bombs, or even knives, but with fisticuffs. The footage is shaky because the hand holding the camera is so excited, but it's clear enough that Superman bemusedly tried to humor his assailant before simply holding him against the sidewalk and calling to a police officer across the street for assistance.

Watching the footage, Bruce realizes that Superman has no idea how to throw a punch.

Even if just humoring his opponent, his fist is all wrong. His wrists aren't straight. He looks like a toddler clenching their hands for the first time. Even when not intending to do damage, an experienced fighter should at least have the instinct to put his fingers in the right position.

It's Superman's fault that Bruce watches the ensuing photo op and has to fight down the urge to open up his laptop and start looking around the internet for other vigilante heroes.

Dick notices what must be a sour look on his face. A more sour one than usual. Dick asks what's wrong. Bruce loses his fight.

Their current hotel has free wifi. It's slow, but passable, and his laptop is old but just a few weeks in his possession, its IP unknown to the League. It's not ideal, but it is a good opportunity to teach Dick the basics of hacking and coding. They order Chinese for a late dinner and end up crosslegged on the floor, watching grainy security footage of Green Arrow's clumsy hand-to-hand after getting disarmed while interrupting a bank robbery.

"I could do that," Dick declares, shoving a whole dumpling in his mouth.

"I could do better," Bruce says, deadpan, and Dick laughs.

Bruce wonders if he's emotionally masochistic when he designs the suit. It serves his purposes—it's dark, hard to see at night, heavily armored but movable, and most importantly, a cowl that obscures his face almost completely, because it's his face that the League will be looking for.

Bruce can get the materials easily enough. He can get the armor, he can get fabric. He can get the scrap metal and electronics and chemicals to put together gadgets and electromagnets and smoke bombs, but it takes many careful, tedious payphone calls to Alfred's secure line for instructions and advice before the suit is anywhere near ready.

Dick's suit is simpler, if only because he refuses a cowl (he claims obstructing his ears bothers his balance. Bruce suspects he simply doesn't like the feel of it) and his armoring is of higher quality. It's lighter and more flexible, but what's there is much better material. It would be better if the colors weren't so eye catching, but then Bruce remembers the Flying Grayson's poster, the uniform they wore, and only asks Dick to think through if he wants to be pragmatic or honorable.

He already knows, of course, that Dick is honorable. Because he's a nine year old Dick Grayson, and ridiculous, and admirable, and Bruce is learning to not expect any less.

It's irony that they're safest when the masks are on. It's irony that they're safest when they're running over a small city's rooftops at night, interrupting crime and quietly whispering arguments over how to tap into police scanners. Dick makes a promise and keeps it, staying out of fights unless he has to, and Bruce never feels tempted to kill as long as he knows Dick is watching.

Bruce wishes he were back in Gotham doing this. Wishes he were planting his foot into a Gothamite mugger's face in the middle of Crime Alley. Wishes he'd never got whatever idea it was in his head that made him stay with the League. (Wishes he'd never met Talia.) Instead, they're halfway across the country in small-town Forsakenville, and there is one more teenaged girl running home without worrying about being followed.

They make the news by New Years: Roadtrip Vigilantes! A Giant and a Munchkin Battling Crime in the Great Plains?

They go out to eat at a 24-hour-breakfast diner to celebrate. Dick requests they laminate the newspaper article, and draws a smiley face on his pancakes in syrup.

He turned nine years old last month; his first birthday without parents.

He had a breakdown, and Bruce stood vigil beside him all night long.

000

"This'd work better if we stayed in one place," Dick says, three months into the debacle. The League of Shadows hasn't caught up to them yet, if they even know where to look. Bruce doubts they've connected a vigilante duo with their missing assassin.

For three months, they've kept afloat with cash pulled out of his Swiss account, and it's holding out well, but the worry that hits him each time he thinks about accessing the account to withdraw more almost makes it not worth it. Dick is still talking.

"I mean, we'd get a reputation and scare people off that way, so they wouldn't come back to that spot."

Bruce makes himself a cup of instant coffee with water from their hotel bathroom and prefaces his words with a long 'hmmm,' rather than telling Dick crime isn't quite that simple. He hasn't quite convinced himself to leave the bathroom yet, though the door is open. The hotel room is so small they'd be able to talk even if it were shut. "We'd still have to move on eventually. And when we did, the criminals would just return."

"Then can't we just stop them from being criminals in the first place?" Dick says, voice sweet, and Bruce has the sinking suspicion that while his back was turned, Dick took sugar packets out of their emergency coffee pack and has started eating it right out of the packet.

"That usually requires a local grassroots movement and overhaul of infrastructure I currently have no control over," Bruce says. He takes a sip of his coffee and considers that he might need a shave. "and I won't have control over that infrastructure in any meaningful way without becoming either a trillionaire or a dictator and ruling this country with an iron fist."

"You'd be a great dictator!" Dick chirps from the main bedroom.

"Ha," Bruce says, deciding he will finish his coffee, shave, and then they'll be on their way. "Let's not ever do that."

000

The next news article that comes out identifies Bruce as a man-bat.

He sighs and covers his face, hoping that when the League comes to kill him in the night, it won't be because some stupid reporter mistook him for a man-bat.

Dick understands the severity of the situation and very literally sticks his tongue out at it. He also very kindly designs a bat logo and tapes it to the body armor while Bruce naps around noon. When Bruce wakes, he sighs, cuts out the logo, makes a stencil out of it, and paints it on the armor's chest plate obediently.

By the time the week is out, their names on local media are officially Batman and The Terrible Traffic Light.

Dick is, again, appropriately serious about the situation.

Highly offended, he takes the leftover yellow paint they used for Batman's logo and scrawls call me ROBIN on the sidewalk in front of the local broadcast station, even going so far as to do it in front of visible security cameras and signing the message with a circled 'R'. It's the best footage anyone's ever gotten of either of them.

The video goes viral just as Bruce takes a detour to Chicago.

He sets up a another bank account in Chicago under one of the aliases they've been crafting over the last few months and soon receives a wire transfer thanks to Alfred. The Swiss banks were rather like the Cayman's—they didn't quite care if you were alive, legally dead, or illegally active, so long as you played their game. It makes money a little easier, even if it still feels like a monumental risk to even think about approaching a bank.

But if he wants to call Alfred to request more money, he still needs enough money to buy tracphones and other burners, and scrambling technology. He also needs the burner phones to… let Alfred know what's going on. That they're still alive.

Talia isn't the only one he feels bad about abandoning. He just hopes Alfred knows it.

000

Chicago's a big city. A dangerous city, and a good place to get lost in for a few days while Bruce figures out the finances without alerting anyone looking for them.

It's also just that they need time to stop. Dick's adrenaline from leaving Gotham, from being on the run, from being vigilantes—it's worn off, and what's left is a grieving child. A grieving child who still wants to run over rooftops, yes, but Bruce suspects that, just for a while, it would be best if Dick could wake up in a consistent place.

Dick's gotten over his culture shock of living with townies admirably, and he's used to traveling from growing up in the circus. All things considered, he's either adjusting well or playing the part like a professional, but even then, it's clear he misses his old life the same way people miss all good things they can never have again. At one point, Dick clearly considers proposing a meet-up with his circus, but quickly dismisses the idea without bringing it up verbally. There would be no way to explain the sudden re-emergence of a former troupe member who supposedly vanished off the face of the Earth in Gotham City.

Dick Grayson's face is not plastered everywhere. He's not on milk cartons or staring out from posters in store windows like he would've been had he gone missing twenty years ago, but he's in the missing children's archives and the amber alert went out months ago. For that alone, they cannot take the risk of anyone getting too interested in him and taking too close a look.

Even when the internet starts sparking in outrage over the realization that Robin can't be much more than a boy, they are still safer in masks then they are wearing their own skin.

000

Bruce's sense of danger is honed. A decade of anxiety and paranoia, sharpened over the course of years into a weapon. Dick's hyperawareness is new to him. Wild. Frantic. It sends him teetering into panic just as often as it gives him unwavering resolve.

With the grief catching up to him and their new activities as nighttime vigilantes, it's more important than ever that Bruce help him tame his nerves. At the very least, he has to teach Dick when to trust them; what his newly sharpened senses are telling him when they roar to life. Demonstrate that they're not things to hate, no matter how much they may feel like holding fire.

Typically, what happens goes like this:

Dick believes he spots something in the distance. A bad situation turning worse. Adrenaline thrumming, he leaps and Bruce follows his lead, letting his little lookout guide the way. If Dick gets in over his head, he has the heaviest hitter available to help him through.

Dick learns to read situations clear across town in this manner. He learns how to make calls, and he learns that he can make calls, and when he does, Bruce will pay attention, even if he doesn't necessarily listen or respond as Dick might like. They learn to read each other in the same way, to know when one is going left then the other should adjust their course accordingly. And if Dick thinks something's wrong, Bruce will trust him. Every bit of power returned is a victory.

Sometimes when they arrive at a scene, there's nothing to worry about. A misunderstanding at worst.

Sometimes, they make it just in time. Sometimes, they're too late. And sometimes—sometimes, between the two of them, they find something bigger. Human trafficking hidden under a façade of smalltown cheerfulness. Weapons smuggling. Drug rings stretching out feelers through whole counties and states.

They learn how to case things quickly. Assess small situations in a matter of seconds, and larger ones in a matter of minutes or hours. If a situation is too big for them to root out in two days, they enter what Dick calls 'detective mode,' and scout out as much information and evidence as they humanly can. It's organized and left as anonymous tips for the local PD when they skip town. With how quickly and quietly they work under their self-imposed time limit, most rings don't even know they've been dealt a blow until it's too late.

Sometimes, there are departments that don't use the information well. Sometimes, it falls into the hands of dirty cops before it can go anywhere useful. Sometimes, it ends in violence, too much violence, violence that can't be taken back — sometimes, everything goes smoothly, and there are no casualties when the arrests are made.

But no matter what, by the time things go down? Bruce Wayne and Dick Grayson are nowhere to be found.

Chicago might be a break to the pattern. Not only is it by far the largest city they've stayed in since fleeing Gotham, but it's the first city they've considered staying in more than a handful of days.

There is plenty to do in Chicago. Plenty of dark alleys to skulk in. Plenty of muggers to kick, to shock, to throw into dumpsters. If they're in the city long enough, they may even have time to lay the groundwork for destroying a drug ring—the sorts of things Bruce has no practical experience with following through on, but plenty of experience-based theories for. He just has to apply his experience in a different way than his teachers expected.

It's… nice. Taking his training and turning it into something good.

It's the little things. They're doing lots of little things. But some of the people walking the streets today might've ended up dead and their children alone in silent halls otherwise. It all feels much larger than Bruce ever thought it would, this piece-by-piece thing. But he wants to do it bigger. And better. And in Gotham.

The League would know immediately if he ever went home.

He cannot bring Dick there with him.

But if someone like Bruce can change, if Dick can want his parents' murderer to live, if even such unlikely things are possible, then maybe there's hope for his hellpit home after all.

Maybe this is a fight he will never win. Maybe Gotham will never be a good place to live. But just because a goal was unattainable didn't mean he shouldn't strive for it.

Didn't mean Gotham couldn't be better if enough people fought for her.

But he is in Chicago, not Gotham, and somehow he feels as if he should've known there were aliens in Chicago.

Martian Manhunter is one of the ones who keeps to himself. He's rarely caught on camera, he rarely gives statements or interviews, and if he's stopping street-level crime, no one is really talking about it. Of course, it figures he would be in one of the few actually large cities Bruce decides to stop in, and it figures that despite the ridiculous size of the city, Martian Manhunter would find them, regardless.

He corners them on a full moon night in a dead-end alley. There's no crime occurring in it, just a convenient place to stop and catch their breaths. Then the Manhunter appears in the mouth of the alley, floating three feet above their heads.

It's pointless hiding from him if the rumors of his psychic powers are true, but Robin hides anyway, and Bruce is proud of that if nothing else.

A flash-bang from Bruce. Another and a smokescreen from Robin. They flee together at the first opening, without a word or meaningful gesture, ignoring the voice that rings out clear as bells in Bruce's mind.

Manhunter doesn't pursue them. He just floats there in the moonlight. Watching.

Bruce barricades them in their eighth-floor hotel room, though he isn't sure what good a barricade will do against aliens.

"I'm ready to leave Chicago now," Dick says, stumbling away from the door and slumping against the side of his bed.

Bruce grunts his heartfelt agreement.

He withdraws a fair portion of Alfred's wired money and they're gone by morning.

000

Bruce assumes that vigilantes, superheroes, and aliens are perhaps territorial over their protected cities. He can understand that. They make extra plans to avoid any city known to have a resident hero—already a plan, but now, they map out those cities specifically to swerve around and skip over. Dick rides out the remainder of his current bout with grief in a hotel in Tennessee. They carry water bottles everywhere while they're there, unwilling to test the tap water.

For a while, it seems that avoiding hero-affiliated cities is enough. They're left alone into late springtime, when they make the mistake of brushing up against the Missouri-Kansas border.

Dick likes to watch. That is, he likes to find a shadowed place to perch and watch as whoever they've caught in the act is picked up by cops. Not all of them will be officially charged with crimes, especially if their victim flees before the cops arrive or doesn't later press charges, but the assailant will be in the database, and there will be a window of opportunity for their victim to safely come forward while their assailant is already in captivity. And Dick likes to crouch beside Bruce on rooftops and in small nooks, watching over the criminals until they're successfully picked up and moved. Average response time is about fifteen minutes. Some places do much better. Some are much worse.

On the Missouri-Kansas border, the response time is less than a minute, and the responder is not a cop.

"Hey, guys!" says the Flash. Dick shrieks and leaps several feet into the air.

Really, Bruce's instinct at this point is to just punch anything that makes Dick move like that.

"Woah!" says Flash, dodging to the side faster than the eye can see. "Calm down! I'm just here to say hi."

When Bruce moves to attack, Dick follows his lead, twisting in the air and aiming to slam his boots into Flash's shoulders. Startled, Flash moves. Dick barely clips the left shoulder. Midstep. It's still enough to send Flash stumbling a bit.

"—Though I guess if that's how you do it?" and Flash skids into a run that Bruce can only barely make out by the streak of yellow accents through the night. Dick vanishes from his sight entirely. So Bruce stands up straighter, makes himself larger, unfurls the cape to full lengths and draws as much attention as he's used to avoiding.

"How did you find us?" he growls, tracking the Flash as best he can. He has his training, he's killed metahumans before, but he's only had theories on how to fight someone as fast as Flash. All suggestions fell somewhere between fatal or crippling. Of the few of those techniques that might be adjusted to be minimally damaging, Bruce hasn't had time to relearn them with restraint, and where muscle memory is concerned, once fatal, always fatal.

"Heard you guys were in the area. I've been checking out all anonymous tip-offs these last two weeks just in case," Flash says, coming to a stop just behind Bruce's right shoulder. Out of the corner of his eye, it looks like he's smiling.

Trying to elbow his gut is instinctive. Flash sidesteps it easily. He sidesteps it right into the path of Robin's sweep.

Flash falls. He lands badly. Hits his head. It stuns him long enough for Dick to ziptie his hands and Bruce to tie his legs.

Only after he's tied securely (and Bruce has added a second, reinforced rope around his ankles after the initial knot was secured, because he wouldn't stop thinking about doing it if he hadn't) Bruce leans over the very startled Flash's face and begins checking as best he can for bumps and lack of focus without removing Flash' cowl. The Flash does not appreciate this, but seems to realize more of what's going on when Bruce holds fingers in front of his face and asks the number.

"He okay?" Dick chirps from beyond Bruce's vision.

"He should be fine," Bruce said, standing. "He's friends with the police forces in the area. If he doesn't escape by the time they're here, they'll release him without compromising his identity."

If Flash is surprised they care about his identity after this, he doesn't show it. Instead, he lays still and doesn't even try to escape his bindings, though Bruce has no doubt he could. They're just a delaying tactic. When fighting speedsters, the most important thing is figuring out how to slow them down enough to strike or flee. He remembers that much. He can make that much nonlethal fairly easily, even if the thought at the forefront of his mind is let's see him chase us with two broken legs.

"I'm sorry I startled you." When Flash speaks this time, it's with the steady, calm voice that Bruce associates with the most ruthless of his teachers, and with the therapist he was assigned when he was eleven. Both memories make his hackles rise. "I really did just want to talk. Let's start over. I'm the Flash, I patrol around Keystone and Central City. I know we don't know each other, but you're new to the business and you're really good, so I just wanted to—"

"—Robin," Bruce says, and Dick straightens up immediately. When Bruce turns to head to the edge of the building, he realizes Dick is limping. "…"

"I'm fine!" Dick says. He was not limping earlier tonight. "It turns out tangling with a speeding speedster is a really quick way to get… stop making that face, it's hard to make a joke when you make that face."

As far as Bruce is aware, his face had not changed. Dick rolls his eyes. "I can make the jump, B."

"Wait," Flash says. Miraculously, they do, turning together to watch Flash sit up without use of his arms, though he makes no move to do anything more than just sitting up. Even though they're about to leave him on the roof of a building with cops on the way and a criminal slowly coming-to in the alley below, his voice is still that calm, soothing, understanding tone that makes Bruce want to protect his back. "Let's just talk for a little while. No arrests. No accusations. We just want to talk to you and get to know you better—we being—is Robin—?"

Limp or no limp, Bruce scoops Dick off the rooftop and into his arms, and carries him as they vanish into the night.

They stay in their hotel for a week and keep a low profile, still training but taking care to not irritate the bruises crawling up Dick's legs from tripping a speedster going seventy miles an hour on a sidestep.

Keeping Dick from irritating it is a feat in itself. Bruce sees this at an opportunity to focus on Dick's upper-body strength, since he's already dangerous with his kicks when he's not injured.

Fortunately, upper body strength is easy to build, even while confined to a bed. Five pound weights aren't much until they've been held in a stress position for several minutes. Then, they're plenty exhausting. That exhaustion is just about the only thing that stops Dick from bouncing off the walls after three days in the same place.

At least 'low profile' this time doesn't mean never leaving the hotel room. Bruce hopes they don't get to that point, but knows it is likely to happen eventually. As long as they're not in the masks, Flash is unlikely to recognize them, and the town has so few cameras and is remote enough that so as long as he's careful around store entrances, it's easy to keep his face off record.

So they can go out to buy some groceries. Visit the library. The local cinema has a movie that's been out for months and is now on the discount rate, about to be taken out of circulation. Neither of them has seen the commercials. Dick asks to go.

The theater is made up of peeling yellow wallpaper and community donations. A college student mans concessions counter, selling tickets at the same time. There's no one else in the lobby. A glass mason jar is on the counter, with a cut piece of paper wrapped around it making a pun about begging for mercy. It's for tips. When Bruce gets his change back, he drops it all in the jar.

He's tense as they sit down in two tattered burgundy seats near the middle row of the theater, but otherwise fine. There are only three other bodies in the theater with them, two in a far corner and one down in front. Dick settles beside Bruce with a soda and small bucket of popcorn, grinning and bouncing his leg in anticipation. It's been a long time since either of them was in a movie theater. Bruce hasn't been in one since—

The lights dim, and his insides clam up.

He starts sweating midway through the opening commercials. He closes his eyes, takes deep breaths, and sips his soft drink, hoping the carbonation will settle his stomach.

He survives until the gunshots at the five minute mark.

He sets his soft drink down in the holder very carefully and rises from his seat, ignoring Dick's questioning murmur.

He's numb all the way down from his ears to his fingers, with only the sickening heat in his gut trying to crawl up his throat to focus on. He can't feel his legs. He walks evenly to the lobby.

The cinema's small enough they've only got three restroom stalls—male, female, and a unisex handicap stall. The male restroom is occupied. Bruce ducks into the handicap stall, locks the door, and gets on his knees in front of the toilet.

He doesn't vomit. He just kneels there, gasping, and half tempted to stick his finger down his throat, just in case that would get it all over with.

He's not sure how long it is before he hears a quiet, "Bruce?" on the other side of the door. "I'm coming in."

Bruce would have to unlock the door. He tells himself to stand up. He grunts and suffers a new wave of nausea instead.

The door opens, closes again, and the lock clicks. Then Dick is sitting on the tiles beside the toilet with a bent-out-of-shape paperclip in his hand. His other hand settles on Bruce's back, its gentle pressure present until Bruce can finally sit back again without feeling like all his guts are about to crawl out his mouth.

Once Bruce is upright, Dick shuffles a bit closer and wraps his tiny hand around Bruce's fingers.

They hide in the bathroom until Bruce can lie himself into believing that if they walk back to their hotel on the main roads, they'll be safe.

He doesn't like crowds on his best days, no matter how advantageous. Right then, with his eyes hot, his lungs clenching, and his intestines tying into knots, he especially does not want to face them. Doesn't want to be around more people than necessary, even if it's just walking down a busy street. Even just imagining it, he can feel their presences. Little pinpricks of observation on his skin, under his clothes, tightening the back of his neck and creating the hunch in his shoulders. He's not going to vomit, but his insides are on fire, and he knows they're all just waiting for him to break, for when he can't fake being okay anymore and smolders from the inside out—

He washes his face with cold water. Leaves the handicap restroom. Half of the movie's over by then. They exit the cinema. The booth attendant gives them a weird look.

All his instincts scream at him to not be seen, to find a nice quiet corner and wait this out. But they need to go back to the hotel. Dick needs dinner, and Bruce will feel better once he can do some exercises and meditate somewhere he feels relatively safe. They will not be able to go to the hotel through their usual back-alley shortcuts as he is now. He won't be able to make it, not on ground level, and rooftops are off limits in daylight. So he has to brave main streets and small crowds. He has to. He does.

Dick holds his hand the whole way.

Dick's an incredible kid.

000

They play cards in the space between the hotel's beds and watch the news in between slow practice and warming up, stretching Dick's stiff muscles and coming up with whispered plans on how to take down a speedster without hurting either party too badly. The result is Bruce brushing back up on his chemistry and eventually managing a prototype for a quick-hardening polymer foam that, once perfected, might stop a speeding truck in its tracks. The backup solution is a bomb filled with chemicals which create an artificial ice upon contact with the air. He's rather proud of it, despite himself.

They test small samples of both bombs in the hotel's tiny bathtub. It's possibly the most innocent thing anyone's ever put in that tub. The cleanup is terrible, and Bruce tests for effects on human skin by exposing his arm to each in turn.

The result is they have to quickly concoct a solvent for the polymer, which mostly involves Bruce instructing a laughing Dick, who has taken control of his oversized goggles and is using Bruce's white button-down as a lab coat, but who has two fully functioning hands.

They deduce there are no noticeable ill effects of prolonged skin contact, and that the foam destabilizes at an adequate pace when exposed to warm water or determined chiseling.

They cannot stay in one place very long. They simply can't. The League will track Bruce down eventually, but it will be faster if he sits and waits, if he develops a pattern. So they change their names every few cities. They don't always go out in costume. Sometimes they hit a city in costume and then drive as far as they can before buckling down for the night, to try and throw off anyone matching up people in towns at the same time as Batman and Robin. Summer comes in full swing, so they sleep at campsites or in the car on the side of abandoned roads. Some nights when it's so late it's early, Dick sleeps curled in the passenger seat while streetlights pass overhead.

In the dark, in the car, waiting at disabled stoplights and glancing for a moment over at Dick's sleeping form, Bruce feels the knot in his chest loosen, just a fraction.

It tightens again, because there is a bruise on Dick's arm, peeking out from beneath his rolled-up sleeves. Because Dick is lean and wiry with muscle after the last year. Because another anniversary has passed, and they got into a weird argument of a debate about whether anniversaries were the numerical date of an event, or the weekday's repetition. If an anniversary was the 26th of the month, or the third Friday of the month.

For Bruce, it has always been the 26th of the month at 10:47 P.M.. He assumes it must have been a Saturday, but he doesn't remember exactly. But he assumes it, because it was the only night his parents would be able to take him out. Because Saturday was his mother's slow night if there weren't a social. It was his father's busy night, but they both worked it out anyway, because all his father's nights were busy. All the news outlets said last night/one week ago/last year/one decade ago, on the twenty-sixth of September. That's how he remembers the date, even though the night is a blur between sharp, hyper-realistic relief and cloudy smudges of sound and color. But he remembers 10:47.

10:47, because if there's one thing Bruce remembers besides the chill, and the smell, and the sound of pearls in muddy water, it is his father's wrist thrown up in front of Bruce's nose, the watch face visible in the reflected streetlight, the seconds hand twitching somewhere between the six and seven. Its time burned into his eyes. He read it in the moment before the gunshots' echoes started to fade. Before the pearls washed down the storm drain.

Dick remembers it as Friday. The third Friday of the month. Because Saturdays were their biggest shows, but Friday was their opening night in Gotham. They arrived Thursday, set up, and spent Friday preparing for the city that Dick associated with black pushpins and shark jaws. Friday, because at the police station, one of the attendants groaned and stretched, saying no one should have to work this hard on a Friday. Because the social services worker said that all the group homes and shelters were full up this Friday for the weekend; it was too late at night for them to do much, so Dick would have to spend at least one night in juvie to get a roof over his head, and no, he couldn't just go sleep in his parent's wagon, we can't run the risk of that circus trying to steal you away.

It's a small fight. Not really a fight. It's partly because they're both still aching, and Dick is angry Bruce didn't tell him about his parent's anniversary, and Bruce is mad he didn't get to pay his respects this year, and it's really no one's fault, but they both go to bed feeling awful.

By the next morning, Dick is in Bruce's bed, snuggling him through their mutual nightmares. Bruce buys him blueberry muffins and hot chocolate for breakfast, and Dick makes a point of hugging him constantly and being as clingy as humanly possible, until Bruce is tempted to start calling him a monkey. They don't mention the night before.

They have to leave. They've lain low long enough.

Or—they've kept Batman and Robin's heads down long enough. Which isn't good for either of their health, apparently. It wasn't a good sign that Bruce felt more human, more okay, when dressing up as a Kevlar covered bat and running over rooftops at night with the intention of not killing anyone. That his kid is safer trailing behind him with a mask over his eyes, instead of sitting safely in their shared hotel room wearing his own face.

Really, none of it is a very good thing, no matter how you look at it.

Bruce can feel the timer ticking down, even if he doesn't know what the numbers are. Even if he doesn't know what's going to happen once they reach zero. For the time being, he can only drive them to a new city, pull on the cowl, and feel okay that Dick is there to keep him in check, and that no matter what violence Dick sees tonight, it's somehow helping ease that horrible knot in their chests.

They survive to see Dick's one year anniversary. They see his tenth birthday. His eleventh.

Batman lets Robin take point on patrol. They are swift, violent nights.

(Bruce finds more and more that he likes himself better as Batman. As the idea of Batman. As the man who is powerful, and a force of nature, but does not kill despite being a shadow. Mercifully, Dick seems comfortable with either skin, in either skin.)

They dodge vigilante heroes. They avoid JL-affiliated cities like the plague. They keep low to the ground, gain a reputation as a vigilante duo who can appear anywhere at any time, even as outrage over Robin wanes and waxes on newscasts and forums on a month to month basis. The League declines comment or condemnation. Wonder Woman, on national television, claims they have never given a statement on non-League heroes before and have no desire to set a precedent. The sour look on her face gives away her opinion, anyway.

If the Justice League is still trying to catch them, they aren't trying enough.

It is harder to avoid Bruce's League.

They are shadows because they blend, silently. Indistinct but ever-present. Bruce is only able to notice them encroaching because he knows them so well.

He withdraws all the money Alfred has sent them—the money's been laundered as if it were from something far more insidious than years of dedicated service as a butler and a boy billionaire's allowance saved up, and Bruce trusts that Alfred wouldn't have sent them any money if it would be easy to trace—and then Bruce closes the account, because even if Alfred is safe on the other side, the same can't be said for him.

He takes their current car and trades it in for cash at a local dealership before walking a mile or so down the road and purchasing a Hyundai Exel with a 'for sale' sign sitting in the owner's yard. He buys it on the spot. $1,100, almost twenty years old, with an incredible lack of miles on it. Bruce puts in window nets, flushes the system, coaxes the engine into running, and modifies the trunk in the empty midday backlot of their current hotel. Dick watches, helping when he can. It's not the first time they've done such things.

"I want to send you back to Gotham," Bruce says the next day, after they've hopped town, become blonds, and gotten a new hotel under a new name. He closes the blinds after glancing out of them briefly. They're on the ground floor, which he dislikes. Easy to flee from. Easy to be cornered in. Not that there's much choice. This hotel has only two stories.

"No," says Dick without hesitation. He's ten, and not much taller than he was when they met, but he's got more color in his face and meat on his bones than he did as that shattered eight year old whose room Bruce broke into. He's carrying two bags: a dufflebag of his day clothes, and a backpack filled with survival equipment and his Robin outfit. He drops them both at the foot of the bed and sets about immediately checking what sort of instant drinks selection this hotel has and what the bathroom situation is.

"They're catching up to me. I don't want you in danger." Now, over a year and a half down the line, Bruce knows that Dick takes him seriously when he says danger. Because Dick can drop and disable multiple full-grown men in a matter of minutes without getting a scratch, and Dick knows Bruce knows he can. So when Bruce says there's something that's too much, when Bruce says someone's dangerous, he means more than that they're quick with a knife or have no compunction about harming children. And yet:

"Yeah, I'll probably be in way more danger trying to hitchhike from Gotham back here to track you down again." Dick flips onto the bed closest to the door, claiming it as his, and kicks his feet up in the air. "If I get a car I can touch the breaks in, d'you think I could drive? I bet I could drive around the country looking for you. That might be fun."

"You've made your point," Bruce says, rubbing his temples, suddenly regretting teaching Dick stick-shift in that crossroads town in Virginia. "Don't do that."

Dick laughs at him, even while he's still paying attention to Bruce's stiff shoulders, to the tension in his neck. "So what's the plan, B-man?"

Bruce breathes again. It soothes him, a little. Being called that, however silly the nickname is.

Because Batman's plans never end in death. Sometimes reality ends in death, sometimes reality goes very wrong (—the second time Robin saw a dead body, it had fallen from a roof, and Batman hadn't been able to stop him from screaming, hadn't been able to coax him out of the flashback—) but Batman never began anything by planning for death. Even if he's not pulling on the cowl, something that's become a comfortable dividing line between his roles, it's still nice to have some sort of reminder that he can access that safety.

"We'll shelve the costumes for now," Bruce says, sitting on the bed across from Dick and resting his elbows on his knees. "It'll risk associating Bruce Wayne and Richard Grayson more, but it will keep your alternate identity more separate, and if you ever need to hide, all you have to do is put on the mask. You're young enough that if you go to a hero and ask for shelter, they'll give you the benefit of the doubt. They're soft and trusting. They'll—"

"—inspire you to rant about lack of caution and how you wish you could shake some sense into them. I know," Dick kicks his legs again. "If I get into a situation I can't get out of, head to a JL affiliate or their police stations and do a couple flips to prove I'm the real deal. Got it. What're we doing to avoid that scenario?"

Bruce sighs. "We keep moving. Don't go out more than necessary. No using real names, not even just first names, not even in private. We go out in disguise and continue paying only in cash. You have your list of excuses as to why you're not in school."

"Death in the family," Dick choruses, like they both aren't thinking it. "Visiting my sick grandparents and driving was cheaper than a plane ticket, so we're stopping here for the night. We're moving across the country and I'll go to school when we get there. I dunno, everyone's really worried but no one will really tell me why, but I have to stay with my uncle for a little while. We're going to a marriage, my cousin wants me to be a ring bearer. My step-sister's getting a baby and we're gonna go meet 'em."

"Right," Bruce says, and realizes his shoulders are relaxing with how calm Dick is, even as his heart constricts because he's taught him so well. He's taught this kid so well, taught him how to hide everything he is.

"So what else?" Dick says. "How're we gonna shake 'em?"

Maybe we'll get lucky, Bruce thinks, hateful, because he knows they won't. "Right now, it's just doing what I've already said. We lay low and wait for them to lose track of us again."

Dick sits up on his bed, frowning. "That's it?"

Bruce looks up at him, but doesn't ask his question verbally. Dick will tell him. He's reliable like that. Sure enough, Dick sits up on his knees a moment later, forehead wrinkling.

"How're we gonna know when they're not watching us anymore? Are we just gonna keep running forever?"

"We have no viable method of offense," Bruce tells him, laying his hands out flat in front of him. It's the most expressive he can allow himself to be when he talks about the League. He hasn't contacted Talia for over a year, and his last message to her was a lie. He tries to not think about that often. About the last lie he gave to one of the few adults who'd ever gone out of their way to be kind to him in a way that mattered. "We can defend ourselves, but if the League finds us and sends assassins, even if we put them in custody, the League can just send another assassin after us. They don't run out. They don't end. Their leader is functionally immortal, and while their assets are not unlimited, they're uncomfortably vast. When we consider opposing them, survival is winning."

And Dick doesn't like that. He clearly doesn't like it at all. "So, what, we have to find somewhere they'll never catch us? Or find somewhere safe to hide and just never leave it?"

Bruce says, "Yes," and Dick really doesn't like that. "We'll be found out eventually. We've known that all along. Which is why I want you to go back to Gotham and stay with Alfred. He'll take care of you."

And damn the kid, because even after all Bruce has put him through, he crosses his arms, sticks out his chin and says, "I'm staying with you," and Bruce knows he will not be able to refuse him.

They're cornered for the first time a week later. Ninja. A set of ten.

They're taking a pitstop in a small town they have no intention of staying in. Dick is dozing, curled in a sunbeam in his seat in the car. Bruce has bought gas, parked the car, and stepped inside the gas station to restock their water, protein shakes, and energy drinks. Basic hydration, meal substitute, and electrolytes.

Ergo: Bruce is attacked by ten ninja in a gas station while opening the cooler door, about to pick up a strawberry energy drink.

It's ridiculously lucky, and Bruce can't help but be unnerved at how often he's skating by on 'lucky,' lately. There are no other people in the gas station besides the cashier, who manages to press the emergency call button before being knocked out and pinned behind the counter by a stray display stand flying through the air. By the end, Bruce checks, and the cashier's heartbeat is steady and breathing unhindered, despite the bleeding cut on their forehead. There's little else he can do.

Dick woke and noticed the commotion around the time Bruce threw the seventh ninja through the window, into the parking lot. The ninja skids three feet and stops moving. Dick leaps over them and lands on broken glass; he confirms they're still breathing just as Bruce incapacitates the ninth and tenth of the ninja in the same movement.

"Cops are on their way." If they weren't already coming because of the call button, the broken window would surely do it. When Bruce speaks, he falls into the clip of Batman, because otherwise, staring at the familiar uniforms would make him fall into the tone he adopted on the job as an assassin. "There should be a camera room in the back somewhere. Find it. Destroy all the footage."

Dick nods and jimmies his way into the back rooms without any more encouragement. If the League didn't already know about Dick, it's unlikely any of the ninja got a look at him before being stunned or knocked out. Without the footage or witnesses, no one else will be able to give the information over. Always best to cover your tracks and hide your allies, just in case. Between tying hands to feet and making careful application of chloroform, Bruce still finds it in him to blindfold the ninja with their own masks. By the time he's done, Dick emerges from the backroom, hair smoking slightly and coughing.

"Done," he says, hopping over all the bodies, the fallen merchandise and display tables, and stopping in front of the same cracked glass cooler door where the fight began. He retrieves three strawberry energy drinks, four chocolate protein shakes, and two bottles of water. The result barely fits in his arms, but he carries it all valiantly, right out the hole in the window of the store, dumping it all in the backseat of their car without dropping a single bottle.

Bruce shakes his head, puts a small stack of twenties and tens at the bottom of the stack in the cash register, and follows Dick after searching the ninja's uniforms thoroughly. He finds nothing but weapons. He takes the smokescreens, explosives, and flash-bangs while leaving all the rest, no matter how tempting, for fear of internal trackers. He pauses a moment before snatching a few packs of gauze, bandaids, antibacterial ointment, a suture kit, and cold medicine off one of the still-standing gas station shelves as well, before heading for the door.

By the time he reaches the car, Dick is already in the passenger seat, strapped in and practically vibrating. "That was them?"

The car skids out of the parking lot and back on the road just as the sirens get close enough to hear. "That was a taunt. Ninja. Honestly."

Dick is grinning, but Bruce would be a fool to think he wasn't affected by a blatant, daylight assault on a 'civilian' persona. His hands are twisting in his pantslegs. In his grin, his teeth are clenched tight. Of course he has to ask, "How are ninja a taunt?"

"Ra's knows ninja aren't a match for me," Bruce says, watching the road, pushing eighty, and counting down the miles before turning onto a rural, forested road. The car rattles. "He's just letting me know he knows where I am."

"Oh," says Dick, looking down at his knees. The manic grin hasn't faded. Bruce thinks it might be badly concealed terror.

"He's given us more information than he intended, though," Bruce adds, because information has always been soothing. Dick straightens up again. His face seems a little less stretched. "He doesn't know about you. If he doesn't know about you, we aren't being watched visually, and they're following us through some other means. Maybe magic. Maybe hearsay. Maybe something else. I doubt they've seen us together, and that's a start."

That definitely gets Dick's attention. "How d'you reckon?"

Bruce reflects, perhaps, that he has not actually chosen particularly comforting information to try and soothe Dick with, but it's too late to back down now. Better the brutal truth than the torture of an imagination released.

"Because if he did, he would've made sure the ninja killed you while we were separate, before they went after me."

Dick's breathing shallows. Bruce's slows.

"…I can still send you back home. To Alfred."

Dick's breath hitches. "No."

Bruce pulls the car into a wide ditch at the side of the road, crushing a beer can and kicking up dirt in the process. Several bees ram themselves against the windshield. Their nest must've experienced a near-miss. Bruce feels a bit guilty, but has no time to reflect on it.

They switch disguises. Switch wigs. Switch clothes. Shove everything else in the car into the proper bags, even cramming Dick's raided drinks into his duffle ("Bruce, you paid for them, right?" "Hmh.") and dividing medical equipment between them. They do a thorough check for trackers that turns up nothing. The next town they go to, Bruce trades in the car, and they swap appearances once again several miles down the road for a battered old Toyota Camry, just in time to get caught in a several mile backup outside Tulsa.

The new car is more spacious, so they sleep in it for the night, driving no less than two hundred miles before swapping cars again, changing appearances in between gas station breaks and hasty diner meals. They're three states north east of the destroyed gas station before Bruce dares to stop again, swapping cars once again at a $4,000 loss before checking them into a roadside hotel and walking Dick to the local library. Dick asked, exhausted. Bruce gives in too easily. They're avoiding connecting to the internet with any of their current devices until they can ensure their IPs and scramblers are still safe. The library's their best point of contact to a world outside.

While Bruce sits beside him reading the free newspaper, Dick cozies up for a forty-five minutes allotted internet time. He patiently waits on the slow connection to load a forum page and searches through the duckduckgo engine for news reports on Anthony Zucco.

There's no updates on Zucco, not since the last one, months ago. No news is good news.

The forum header, once it finally loads, reads: Are Batman and Robin Dead?

000

Metropolis is a mistake.

It's been over two months since the ninja. They're worn down. Bruce hasn't yet stopped looking over his shoulder, fully aware that despite his assurances, Ra's might very well know where he is, who Dick is, and their vigilante identities. Very much aware that it might all be a taunt to make him feel in control before Ra's lowers the hammer.

How had the ninja known Bruce planned to stop at that gas station, if they had? How had they recognized him in his disguise, but not sabotaged his car or attacked the person sleeping within? Was it luck? Was it coincidence? Would he put Dick in even more danger by sending him away, was that why he kept caving so easily to the boy's refusals?

They're tired. They've been on the go constantly for over two years, but the last few months have been such a frantic scramble for anywhere that even Dick is tired of being in the car. Bruce especially is teetering on an edge, his nerves frayed like the end of a rope after hopping from place to place with nowhere he can really call familiar. Their funds are running low, which doesn't help matters. They have money to get them through another two weeks at their current pace, and then, if he doesn't find a fast, lucrative alternate source of income, he'll have to contact Alfred whether he wants to or not. They have cabin fever, a kind of manic energy building up under their skin that needs to be worked off, one that pushups and careful practice spars on the floor of roadside motels and in the empty basements of abandoned houses aren't going to shake off.

Bruce, more than anything, wants to pull on the Batman suit again and go stop a mugging. But he can't. Because what he actually wants more than anything is for Dick to live to see tomorrow, and damnit, he can't draw attention to them that way, even if Dick is just as twitchy for action as he is.

He wonders, vaguely, when he got the kid addicted to violence. At least he seems happier than Bruce did, two years out of his parents' murder.

Dick's nightmares have kicked into swing again lately, which does nothing for his mood. Not the sort of nightmares people in stories wrote about having—not nightmares that made sense. Dick has nightmares about two-headed cats being bad omens, nightmares of billboards on the roadside that spelled out curse words and vulgar song lyrics, ones of meeting someone who looks just like him, a mirror image, who has three and a half parents and Dick needs to come to the morgue right away to identify the bodies, but once he arrives, the floor tiles slip and vanishes from under his feet while he's walking across the floor, and then he's falling—

Dick doesn't wake up screaming. He wakes up sweaty, or wide-eyed, or full of nerves, but he never wakes up screaming. If he isn't already curled in Bruce's bed, he migrates there without a word.

Yet, during the day, he can smile and make nice. He has an appetite. He has no fear of asking questions, requesting things, or speaking to strangers. He doesn't flinch at loud noises or sudden movements.

He is doing so much better than Bruce was. So maybe the tradeoff is worth it. Bruce has no way of knowing, and he knows what Dick will insist, but maybe he'll feel differently ten years down the road, if they live that long.

The point is, even as relatively well-adjusted as Dick is, they are both in dire need of somewhere safe to just rest for a while. They need it. Just a few days without driving, without running, without thinking about where they'll wake up tomorrow.

When running from something like the League of Shadows, the United States was a good place to be. Highly fractured. Slow official informational transfer. Fairly predictable in their spying, and comparatively few public cameras. Large enough to get lost in. Black-markets so commonplace half the civilians don't realize they've engaged. For some people, hiding was as easy as going to a country without an extradition agreement. For hiding from the League? Bar traveling through the wilderness indefinitely and surviving off luck, skill, and bear-meat, the United States was a good place to go.

But if you want somewhere that was watched over? If you want somewhere that people liked to call safe?

You went to Metropolis.

Bruce takes a few moments to calm himself before proposing the move to Dick in their latest hotel room in a small Iowa town that filled the empty space between seemingly endless cornfields and potato signs. Dick doesn't take any calming moment before snapping his head up and saying, "What about the Justice League?"

"They have no idea either of our civilian personas even exist," Bruce says. "We've only been confronted while in costume. Unless Superman has a superpower he hasn't blurted to the presses about, we should be fine as long as we stick to protocol."

Bruce can respect Superman and what he does without being impressed by him. Bruce can be especially unimpressed with the alien's tendency to tell the press everything. Superman's half celebrity. He's concerned with his public image. He told the public the exact name and appearance of a material which could instantly inflict great physical illness and pain upon him.

Bruce thinks that a fast acting poison ingested or absorbed through the skin could work just as well, but he keeps those thoughts to himself, as well as the specific poisons he has in mind. It's been two years, but there are still a lot of thoughts he keeps to himself. Some of them, Dick wheedles out regardless of Bruce's best efforts. The worst, Bruce claims bad memories, and lets Dick feel better by accepting the boy's offer of making tea and watching whatever movie is playing on T.V.

Bruce can handle movies on small screens, apparently. He's glad for that, at least. He finds he still likes movies, despite everything.

When Bruce was a child, he had a collection of Kurosawa films; the release of a new film was one of the few things he would look forward to.

It was weeks ago when he had to explain to Dick who Akira Kurosawa was and what made his films so incredible, but by the end they'd both resolved to one day have a Kurosawa marathon. They haven't yet. Bruce intends to make sure they live long enough for it, though there's a strange part of his mind that insists as long as he intends to make them live until the Kurosawa marathon, if the marathon never happens, then he won't have to worry about Dick winding up alone or dead by the roadside. He suspects is the same part that wanted to hope his parents were killed by a nursery rhyme conspiracy, just so things would make sense.

He knows putting off the Kurosawa marathon wouldn't save anything. He can still feel the timer ticking down, and asks again, maybe a little desperately, if Dick would rather go back to Gotham than Metropolis. Dick flips into the air and aims a kick at Bruce's head. They faux-spar for a few seconds until Bruce has Dick pinned on the floor. The message is received.

Bruce goes to bed nauseous. He dreams he's sleeping in the same hotel bed, but when he lifts the pillow beside him and looks under it, there's a corpse staring back at him.

He spends forty minutes silent, listening to Dick breathing on the other side of the room. An hour before sunrise, they fold a large complimentary breakfast into napkins and drive East.

Metropolis has been around a while, but it grew up in the 20s. If Art Deco had a baby, it was the City of Tomorrow, grown in the shadow of the Great War, raised in the era of jazz, matured with existentialism while orchestrating the manufacture of World War II bombers from a distance. Metropolis was a blue collar town that liked to pretend it was born and bred of glamour and glitz.

From the way the early morning light bounces off the chrome skyscrapers and their pale, smooth construction, Bruce almost believes the lie.

Ain't no party like a Gatsby Party.

They'd driven through the day and into the night, dozing in the car again—this one a white Pontiac Grand Am whose headlights have given out twice thus far—hidden by an abandoned, crumbling wood-and-tin-roof garage along the side of a forested road. Eighteen hours later, they're in Metropolis, quietly comparing it to a whole city of Chrysler buildings.

"How long are we staying?" Dick asks, pressing his face up against the window, leaving oily smudges from his fingers and cheeks.

"The plan is a week," says Bruce, stopping at a light. Merging into the heavy traffic.

"Woah," says Dick, watching the sky.

"…"

"Shh," Dick says, "I'm looking for Superman."

Bruce wishes they'd gone to L.A., instead.

They stop by a diner and wait until after lunch before finding somewhere to stay. The hotel is nice. Nicer than they usually get, but it's also firmly in-town, which makes a fair amount of difference. It's nearing two in the afternoon—one of the slowest points of the day—and so the staff is relaxed and happy enough to chat a bit as long as Bruce smiles and is reasonable, and Dick is charming and asks flattering questions. Bruce apologizes for not calling ahead, the trip was a bit short notice and they're both still a little frazzled, but are there any discounts they could possibly get?

They're given a corner room—fifth floor; spacious, but not a handicap. He likes the versatility and escape routes a corner room offers them, but handicap rooms are scant enough that Bruce doesn't want to take one up for a week—with a generous discount and the reassurance that, yes, starting at 6am and lasting until 10am each day, there's a complimentary breakfast.

The first day, they just settle in. Take turns napping. Waiting. Watching. Still on high-alert, ready to be assaulted at any moment and forced to abandon their small hope at respite. Because it is a small hope. They're banking on Superman being a deterrent. On their trail being convoluted and hard enough to follow that they can afford a beak. On Metropolis' bustling streets being filled with too many witnesses for the League to feel comfortable.

They do stretches, mostly, and take turns choosing channels on the television between commercial breaks. Dick develops a fascination with a show about tattoos and body modification. Bruce tries to balance it out with engineering and technological progress marathons.

There's a used bookstore a few blocks from the hotel without any cameras inside. After Dick tries to backflip off the bed and nearly hits the ceiling on day two, they shuffle out and take up residence on the bookstore floor, well hidden between several shelves. Someone's sold a very recent coding book that Dick loses himself in. Bruce takes his time pulling out older, ragged novels and reading the handwritten notes on the inner covers; addresses to people who needed gifts, or to children, or someone who once simply mentioned an interest in the title. Sometimes Bruce can guess how many hands the book's passed through before it found its way onto these shelves. Sometimes, he wonders if anyone's hands touched the book at all between being gifted and being resold.

Since they're staying a week and have a nicer room, they buy groceries a little differently. They treat themselves to food that they don't have to wonder about cramming in a bag or the logistics of preserving in a car. They buy milk in a bottle, a rotisserie chicken, pre-bagged salad, and even a pint of cookie dough icecream. Dick requests strawberries and mango. They're not exactly in season, but Bruce can't deny him.

"When I was growing up," Bruce says once they're back in the hotel room, sitting on their claimed beds to eat. There's a desk in the room, but no real table. So he's on his bed with a paper napkin on his lap, facing Dick but not looking at him, trying hard to not twist his unfortunate piece of chicken between his fingers trying to not drop bits of breading on the white coverlet. Dick halts abruptly at the mention of Bruce's childhood, his spoon still dug into the pint of icecream and a hunk of dough dissolving in his mouth. "Alfred used to make cookies. All sorts. The chocolate chip were the best, but they were all good."

He's just talking. It's not something he does often—just talking. Dick does it often enough, and Bruce was thinking perhaps it would be okay if he tried, just a little. He's not expecting Dick to frown and jab his spoon into the icecream with extra force, as if proving something. "Stop trying to send me away!"

Bruce stutters. Not verbally. His thoughts do. They stutter.

They stutter badly enough he doesn't have a response, and by the time Dick starts glaring down at his icecream and eating it with renewed vigor, Bruce figures it's probably best to just stay quiet a while.

They try to sleep in the next day. They make it until eight. Things didn't go horribly at the bookstore the other day, so they scout out a library. It's connected to the local university. They can't borrow anything without a card, and they can't get a card without an address, and Bruce is too tired to sort through their now expansive list of aliases to find one suitable for something as small as borrowing a book. He uses the internet to look though the locale instead, while Dick has somehow found a stack of recent scientific journals to bury himself in.

Bruce finds a floundering movie rental store through the library, empty cardboard boxes propped into isles on wire racks. There are only a handful of Kurosawa films, but he'll take what he can get. He avoids some intentionally, trying to pick out the ones he remembers being most kid-appropriate—because he can at least try to shelter Dick, even if he's already failed him in the most painfully obvious ways.

There's no DVD player on the hotel's television, so they end up watching the movies on Dick's laptop. At one point, it was Bruce's laptop. Somehow, the ownership has migrated.

Dick is still in rare form when they begin the movies. They watch one through and then call a break period to recover from sitting: picking up more snacks, using the bathroom, and practicing small, close-quarters sparring by taking the mattresses off the beds and placing them on the floor as mats to muffle the sound of their falls. It seems to work well enough. No one comes up to interrupt. They do it several times through. A movie, and a break. Each breaktime spar last until they work up a sweat. It's still not quite enough, but it helps.

They watch Ikiru, about a businessman searching for happiness in the shadow of terminal illness. He has a year to live. He builds a playground.

Dick comments that he should've become a vigilante. Bruce shoves him off the mattress. Dick comes back up kicking. The spar is quiet, closer than usual. It lasts less time, concluding when Bruce finds Dick is ticklish, and abandons his chokehold to exploit that.

…Bruce thinks the businessman had the right idea of what to do with his life.

He also remembers, with clarity, the location of a small playground-park not far from downtown Metropolis, near an underpass. Most playgrounds had jungle gyms, if nothing else. It wasn't exactly proper gymnastics equipment, but perhaps, if they went closer to dark once the other families had largely filtered out, Dick could get some fresh air.

Perhaps it would all be okay.

But Metropolis was a mistake.

000

Bruce still wasn't sure how the ninja had found them at the gas station. They hadn't been attacked since that incident. It had truly seemed like they were off the radar for a while. He knew the respite was a risk, that they hadn't spent more than forty-two hours in a town since the gas station attack. He knew that eventually, they would either have to assume they were safe or be proven horribly unsafe. He knew he would eventually have to take the gamble.

By their eightieth hour in Metropolis, Bruce was almost feeling like he'd won.

He takes Dick to the park. It's on an elevated bit of cleared land, level with the entryway, but at some point in its past, part of the ground had been cut and lowered to accommodate a nearby highway, which sped by quite a distance below, with only a chain link fence and a steep slope to separate them. Still, the fence is a distance away from the playground and not nearly as rusted out as it could be. More importantly, despite the jungle gym being the furthest part of the playground from the entrance, it's still a far enough distance from the fence that Bruce doesn't have to worry about Dick getting overzealous and sending himself flying over the barrier. One part of the fence loops around, encircling the park until cutting off at the entrance area. The other disappears into a nearby treeline and walking trails.

Bruce keeps his back to the fence and has the treeline in his peripherals at all times. Then, position secured, he relaxes his shoulders down and watches the kid go at it for the first time in what seems like ages.

Flying. Flipping around on the bars. Laughing.

Bruce didn't need to bring a book or other entertainment. Watching the kid play is entertainment enough. Bruce suspects it always will be.

Still, Dick is out of practice. He stretches and starts out careful, easing his way back into things, and by the time he's throwing himself into the air high enough that Bruce has to restrain the now-ingrained urge to try and catch him, the boy has done enough to call for a breather.

The Metropolis water isn't terrible, but the water fountain is a bit of a walk. Dick elects instead to head to the much closer restrooms, a pale green concrete and wood enclosure closer to the main portion of the park.

Bruce stays near the jungle gym in the meantime, sitting down to watch him go, just trying to breathe and enjoy the evening air, despite the exhaust coming off the highway. Perhaps because of the exhaust. It isn't quite smoggy and cold enough to be Gotham, but a late August Metropolis-nearing-dark is giving it her best.

Dick slips into the restrooms, out of sight. Bruce takes another deep breath…

And dives to the ground.

The bullet whizzes right over his head and embeds itself in the dirt a few feet away.

He rolls and twists around, following the trajectory and spotting the gunman in a moment.

If you were to ask his opinion, going from ninja assassins to Deathstroke the Terminator? Was like being disappointed you couldn't kill a rat with a flyswatter, so you sighed and tried again with claymore mines.

Of course, Ra's hadn't really kept Bruce around for his opinions.

"So they weren't entirely lying about you being good," Deathstroke says, clicking his tongue and adjusting his aim. "But that was just round one."

Bruce feels a low growl bubble up in his throat and braces himself. His back is to the restrooms, now. Dick will have heard the gunshot. Hopefully, he knows enough to stay inside.

"Not much of a talker?" Deathstroke says, strolling a few steps out of the treeline, the gun still held loose in his hand. "I was told you'd be entertaining."

"Sorry to disappoint," Bruce says, tone flat, voice unwavering. "Now, what's it going to take to get you to go?"

Deathstroke taps his finger as if he were really considering the question. "I think the implication was your lifeless body floating down a muddy river. But, of course, I was given a little leeway on how to get you there. And it's been so long since I've had a challenge."

He fires twice more.

Bruce hates guns.

Running at the gunman is not advisable behavior. If Dick tried it, Bruce would've forbid him from donning the Robin suit for another month and forced him into hundreds of pushups. But Deathstroke isn't someone Bruce can take at a distance, and even if Bruce doesn't walk away from this, he isn't going to go easy.

The fifth bullet scrapes Bruce's torso and leaves a hole in his clothes; the bulletproof vest he's taken to wearing saves him the damage. By then, Bruce is close enough to disarm. His reward for twisting the gun out of Deathstroke's hand is a chuckle and a kick and punch to the thigh and sternum. He skids back a foot or two throws the ammunition cartridge and gun in opposite directions just in time to roll out of the way of Deathstroke's sword.

In the two years since meeting Dick Grayson, Bruce hasn't had a fight that worries him. He's been scared, perhaps—scared of Dick getting injured, of things going badly, of people dying in crossfire—but not worried. Certainly not worried he would lose. But he's arguably two years out of practice with serious opponents, having only street brawlers and practice spars with Dick to keep him sharp. Deathstroke the Terminator nearly takes his head off.

He twists around to try and kick out Deathstroke's legs. He gets one, but the other is in the air and the Terminator leaps out of the way before Bruce can really throw him off balance.

Without giving him much time to readjust, Bruce leaps back up to full height—never fight from the knees—and goes at Deathstroke with his fists. It's as foolish a strategy as it sounds, but it's what he has. He has a batarang on his person, but he's not trying to kill Deathstroke (he's not going to kill Deathstroke), so it's not something he wants to use at close range, lest he give into temptation and use it as a knife. Deathstroke may be enhanced, but he's still human, and still capable of bleeding out.

He is also still capable of broken wrists. When Bruce gets close enough again, he exploits that, and twists Deathstroke's arm hard enough to force him to drop the sword, even as Deathstroke lands a devastating knee into his gut.

The amount of body armor they're wearing is only one of many unfair advantages in this fight. Bruce isn't about to complain about unfair, but he is going to change his actions based on it. Hitting Deathstroke hard won't work—really, a pity—but it will work on Bruce, who at best is wearing a cup and a bulletproof vest over his vitals. Punching through Deathstroke won't work with the sheer amount of armoring he has everywhere but the face, and Bruce doesn't have the proper hand protection to do more damage to Deathstroke than to himself by punching his face, no matter how tempting.

He has to fight around Deathstroke.

He can do that. It's the style he's stressed teaching Dick, since the boy's too small and wiry to do much damage directly. Unfortunately, it's much more Dick's style, and there's a reason Bruce doesn't use it much himself.

The sword slips to the ground. Deathstroke slams his palm into the side of Bruce's head and sends him sprawling. He rolls back on his feet again just in time to avoid being impaled in the stomach by the recovered sword. The next time Deathstroke gets close, Bruce slips under his jab and grabs his arm, throwing him over his shoulder and sending him crashing into the chain link fence.

The fence gives a dangerous creak; several of the links breaking against the force of Deathstroke's impact. Still, the fence holds and acts as a net and stops the assassin from plunging into the busy traffic below. Apparently, that's somehow amusing.

"Ooh, that was dangerous," Deathstroke says, pushing away from the fence and walking slowly back towards the jungle gym. It buys Bruce a little time to recover. "Good. Ra's warned me you seemed to be getting a little soft."

"How did you find me?" Bruce says, hoping Deathstroke's talking about leaving the ninja alive, and not about taking in a stray kid or picking up the vigilante life.

"What's the phrase? An assassin never reveals his secrets," Deathstroke stretches lazily, flicking his sword from one side to another, over and over. The next assault is so sudden, the change in his posture so fast, Bruce only has time to duck and jab out at Deathstroke's stomach to avoid getting impaled. "I will give you credit, though. It was a valiant effort, Mr. Wayne."

Bruce growls. In the distance, he thinks he hears someone shouting, but ignores it. His one ear is still ringing and hot from the force of Deathstroke's palm, and he can't afford to get any more injured if he has any hope of escaping this fight.

And that was it, wasn't it? There was no escaping this fight.

Deathstroke didn't stop until his goal was accomplished. And if Bruce ran, Dick would be vulnerable.

"How much are they paying you?" Bruce says, though he knows it will be more than he can offer up. He has money in name, but all of it takes time to access, and Ra's has all the money of the world at his disposal. Still. He has to try.

"Something to the tune of several million," Deathstroke says easily. He doesn't think Bruce can pay it, either. He can't. Not out of pocket. Not even with a wire. He'd need time, and even then— "though if you're willing to force him higher, I always enjoy a good bidding war."

Bruce growls again and goes on the offensive.

If he's going to die tonight, he's not going to do it on the defensive.

He goes for the throat. Jabs hard and fast enough that not even Deathstroke can fully avoid his fist. The assassin gags and stumbles back, his blade ripping through Bruce's sleeve and slicing his arm. A spray of blood arches out. Bruce keeps advancing.

He should get distance. He does not have that luxury. So he gets in too close for the sword to be of use, slamming up against Deathstroke and staying there, blocking the sword arm with his side and slamming the meat of his palm up against Deathstroke's nose.

It breaks.

He gets his other hand near Deathstroke's neck a second time, which is a feat in itself. Bruce jabs his thumb against the assassin's Adam's apple. The choke is painful sounding, and the recoil so violent that when Deathstroke's hip twists around and slams Bruce in the side, they're both off balance and both fall to the ground in a grapple.

Blood's already seeping through Deathstroke's mask from his broken nose, and Bruce thinks he could've died from that, and he's not sure if the thought is in panic or disappointment.

From the grapple, Deathstroke is able to use his sword again. He rears up with the sword in both hands, poised to plunge into Bruce's chest. With Deathstroke on top of the grapple and pinning his legs, he doesn't have room to kick him off or roll out the path. Twisting to dodge the blade works once. It slices through the dirt by Bruce's shoulder, close enough to cut his jacket.

The second strike, Deathstroke just slides the blade sideways. The blade is too long and too close to the ground for a full strength stroke, but it will be enough to cut his throat.

And then something small and dark slams into Deathstroke's side.

Bruce thinks: please let Dick still be in the restrooms –

But the snarl he hears is familiar and animalistic.

Dick is there, tennis shoe in Deathstroke's face and teeth clamped down on his hand.

If Deathstroke is surprised at being attacked by a tiny almost-twelve year old, Bruce can't really blame him. The shock doesn't stop him long, and Bruce has to act fast to take any advantage of it.

His shoulder aches and his arm is still bleeding, but he rolls onto his front and pushes himself up just in time to watch Deathstroke slam Dick into the ground.

Bruce bodyslams him.

"Dick, run!"

Bruce pins Deathstroke to the ground and returns the favors of the last few minutes by saying fuck-all and punching his face. A small knife stabs into his thigh, far too close to an artery. Dick runs forward, shouting. Deathstroke shoves Bruce off hard enough to send him knocking into Dick. They both go down.

It must have been barely a minute since Deathstroke first arrived, and Bruce hardly has a moment to take inventory as he rightens himself and crouches protectively in front of where Dick is slumped on the ground. His arm's bleeding, his ear's ringing, he has a puncture wound in his upper thigh, and Dick is going to be badly bruised if they survive this.

Deathstroke, by contrast, has a broken nose and a bite mark, which he's examining with something like fascination. "You really did pick up a little heathen, didn't you, Wayne?"

"He's not involved in this," Bruce says, trying to block off Dick's form as best he can while holding one hand against his very worrisome thigh wound and watching each of Deathstroke's movements like a hawk. "Let him go."

"The things people think I do to children." Deathstroke tisks, shaking his head and shaking out his hand. If nothing else, he hasn't picked up his sword again after dropping it when Dick bit him, but his eye is dangerously narrowed, and his line of vision is definitely not anywhere Bruce wants it to be. "You asked me my price, Mr. Wayne."

Bruce didn't think it was possible to tense up anymore, but Deathstroke is unmistakably smiling behind his mask, and that is enough reason to tense, even before he continues.

"I didn't think you had anything to offer, but now I'm perhaps reconsidering." He adopts a lazy stance, not worried about this fight at all. He knows he'll win if this goes on any longer. "I've been considering taking on an apprentice for some time now. Give me the boy, and I'll let you go."

Dick sucks in a sharp breath, behind him. Bruce sees red.

He pulls the batarang out of his pocket and lunges.

Deathstroke prepares to parry another jugular strike. He doesn't expect Bruce to go to ground. Bruce is entirely too large to fight from below.

He ducks down at the last possible moment. Deathstroke shifts and strikes the back of his head. Bruce stabs the batarang through a crease in Deathstroke's boots.

He wonders how long it's been since Deathstroke screamed.

The arm that instinctively jerks down to try and dislodge the batarang? Bruce grips by the wrist and tugs down, even as he rises, his other arm going for Deathstroke's neck. There's a crack from Deathstroke's elbow. The shoulder pops.

Bruce shouldn't have been able to. He really shouldn't have been able to get so close to Deathstroke. Shouldn't have been able to do so much damage in such a short time, as if he were fighting an amateur. Not with Deathstroke's enhancements, his experience, his precision.

But when Bruce closes his hands around Deathstroke's throat, he realizes it is because before now, he was not fighting as an assassin.

With only one working arm, Deathstroke cannot break the choke. When they fall backwards, Deathstroke's the one who takes the brunt of the fall, grunting and gasping for breath, trying to flip them over and throw Bruce off balance. Bruce is stabbed again by some small knife. Deathstroke cannot reach his throat or stab through the vest at his organs, so he's again aiming for arteries. Bruce shifts and pins both arms at the elbows with his knees. He will not bleed out before Deathstroke chokes to death.

To death.

(I don't want anyone else to die)

If he lives, he will follow us. If I die, he'll take Dick.

Dick is watching.

Deathstroke kicks up and nearly dislodges him. Bruce grits his teeth and tightens his hold. He thinks he imagines the sound of a trachea collapsing.

If he lives he'll kill other people. This isn't like Zucco, isn't someone who can be contained. Scum of the earth.

The world will be a better place without him.

The visible eye is unfocusing. It closes.

(Maybe people can change)

Only if they want to. What reason would Deathstroke ever have to want to change?

(Just because an ideal is unreachable—)

It's another thing to believe in things that are irrational. To die for a foolish ideal, to let others die for your stupid ideals—

Deathstroke goes limp. Unconscious. Quicker than he thought he would. Strangling takes time. If Bruce stays on him just a little while longer, he'll be—

(You've killed for ideals. Ones you were less happy with. Lives that weren't yours to throw away.)

Dick's in danger if I don't. Unknowable numbers of people are in danger if I don't. Just once more.

His hands are trembling.

(What things are worth believing in?)

…

He removes his hands from Deathstroke's throat.

Deathstroke takes a gasping, horrible breath, and relaxes.

Bruce starts panting as if he were the one strangled.

He gets off Deathstroke's elbows and stumbles back a foot or so before falling down again, only just now remembering the stab wounds in his legs that some vague part of his mind is saying he should really get looked at soon. Something in him mumbles that, between the stabs and the cut on his arm, he's lost a lot of blood.

He doesn't have time for that. He turns, still breathing heavily, to tell Dick to run.

Only to find Dick standing almost immediately behind him, squared off against Superman.

His blood loss and adrenaline-addled brain lets him slip out a soft, "fuck," before he can censor himself.

"I told you he wouldn't kill him," Dick is saying. There's a tremor in his voice that matches the one in Bruce's arms. Dick's fists are clenched and his knees are bent, ready to leap into a fight at a moment's notice, even if it's Superman standing across from him.

Bruce is proud, for a moment. Proud, and riddled with guilt. But Deathstroke is breathing, so—

"I was just concerned," Superman says, looking on edge and unhappy. Probably an appropriate reaction to finding an eleven year old defending two assassins grappling on the ground. Assassin and an ex-assassin. Fuck. "When I heard you shouting—"

Bruce thinks, idly, that they need to leave immediately.

"Well you didn't get here fast enough, so now we've taken care of it," Dick says, not once lowering his guard. "So just take the orange guy in, and we'll—we'll be out of Metropolis in three hours."

"You don't have to—" Superman says.

"Dick—" Bruce says, struggling to his feet.

"Bruce—!" Dick shouts, turning towards him with wide eyes. "Look out!"

Deathstroke's upright.

He kicks Bruce with the stabbed-through leg and lodges the batarang in his hip. They're much closer to the fence than they were when it all began two minutes ago. Deathstroke's recovered his strength far more quickly than he should've been able to.

Oh, Bruce has the time to think as his side slams into the chainlink fence. He was faking. I fell for it.

The fence breaks, and he's tumbling down the hill towards the underpass. His head cracks three, four, five times on the ground—

That's all he knows.

000

Bruce wakes without movement or sound. A sharp, startled return to consciousness that's only betrayed by the slight speeding of his heart as he tries to discern his surroundings without opening his eyes.

Unfortunately, in such a quiet room, the speeding of a heartbeat is all Superman needs.

"You're in your hotel room," Superman says. When Bruce opens his eyes, the man of steel is standing at the side of his bed, frowning down at Bruce with his arms crossed in front of his chest. "He wouldn't let me take you anywhere else, not even the hospital. He stitched you up right in front of me; he wasn't even squeamish. So, how long'd it take you to train a kid to do all that, Batman?"

Bruce doesn't mean for his heart to start being so fast. Still, he only twitches when he hears Dick groaning from the other side of the bed, resisting the temptation to look at the boy only because all his instincts are screaming that turning a blind eye on someone so powerful right in front of him is a death wish. Lying down injured in front of him is not helping soothe that instinct in the slightest.

"'M sorry, B," Dick says, voice thick. "I—he saw through my backpack. X-ray vision. I forgot. I wasn't thinking."

"You thought," Bruce says, correcting him without thinking while his mind struggles to race. Dick's backpack. Robin's uniform. Stowed under the bed. Lining a mask with lead only worked to hide someone wearing it; it did nothing to hide that there was a mask, much less the rest of the suit and gear— "You may think differently next time, but you were thinking. Are you hurt?"

Dick sniffles. Bruce tenses again, feeling the tug of his new wounds. He still doesn't dare to turn and look. "Just bruises and scrapes. I disinfected everything already. I'm fine."

"You, on the other hand, are lucky to be alive," Superman says, still frowning. "And so is Deathstroke."

Dick slams his hand down on Bruce's bedside. Pain laces up his arm as the mattress bounces. "He didn't!"

Bruce thinks that this is terribly unfair. Words are hard to form. He tries anyway. To use his words, rather than the sound and motions that tell Dick he's exhausted and just wants to go back to sleep and pretend this all hasn't happened. There's no real choice right now. He can't wake up and find either League's come for them. "How long have I been out?"

Superman opens his mouth to speak. Dick cuts him off. "Twelve hours. I was worried."

Bruce twitches a smile and gives an apologetic grunt. Dick snorts in response, and Bruce would like to think the kid's smiling again.

He looks up at Superman, forcing himself to meet the man's eyes despite everything, and tries to take comfort that he's at least not seeing double, even if he still feels like lead. Maybe Superman won't see through him if he's lead. "What are you going to do with him?"

"With us," Dick says.

Superman takes a deep breath, as if he's the put-upon one in this relationship. "I'm going to contact the League. We've been interested in you for a while, especially the—contradicting reports we've heard. From there, we'll decide as a team what's going to happen."

"You can't arrest him," Dick says. A chair scrapes. He must be standing. "No matter what you think he did, you can't arrest him. He'll die."

Superman looks wide-eyed and distinctly uncomfortable. "Um?"

"That guy was after him because he betrayed a bunch of assassins," Dick says, and if Bruce had the energy to argue with him, he'd tell the boy to not spill secrets that weren't his own. "That's why we've been running. If you arrest him, he'll be found and they'll kill him—"

It's very comforting how confident Dick finally is in his impending demise. Bruce wonders how close he'd been to bleeding out.

"—and once they go after him, they'll come after me," Dick continues, as if Superman doesn't already look sufficiently horrified. "And if it's the guy in orange, he'll kidnap me and make me his apprentice because I bit him. I don't want to kill. Bruce doesn't want to kill. So unless you're gonna protect us, we're not cooperating at all, and you won't be able to stop us."

Bruce really can't help the second tired twitch of a smile on his face. He feels Dick's tiny hand lay down on his own. He gives a soft squeeze, and gets an equally soft one back.

Superman's eyes are still wide. Startled. But his face looks softer as he looks them over, his eyebrows lowering from stern disapproval to something hideously like pity. He hears Dick sniff and remembers the lessons on how to cry just the right way to get a desk attendant to hurry them by. The knot in his chest swells, and this time, it feels warm.

"Maybe we ought to discuss this more on the Watchtower," Superman says, hesitantly. "We can get you proper medical attention there, and—we won't detain you. If you can trust me on anything, please, trust that. I won't let them detain you. You'll just be guests in extenuating circumstances."

Bruce can feel Dick's gaze on him, now. The hand on his own tightens. "…you need to rest up somewhere safe, B."

He's right. It's probably a small miracle the League hasn't sent someone after them twelve hours after Deathstroke's encounter. Bruce still doesn't particularly want to go anywhere near the Justice League, especially not in his current condition, but if this day has proven anything—he's trained Dick well. Dick's an incredible kid.

"Defer to Robin," he manages to say.

He doesn't remember anything after that.

000

When Bruce wakes again, he's in a new bed, in a room that doesn't look at all like a hotel room. White walls, no windows, a metal door, and an IV stand to his left. Nothing else.

If it not for the person staring him down from the foot of his bed, he would have bolted the moment he regained consciousness.

As it is, he doesn't really think he could manage escaping an unfamiliar place with Wonder Woman on his tail.

"Where's the kid?" he growls. He settles for growling both instinctively and because he doesn't trust his voice to not crack if he tried speaking normally.

"In the bathroom," Wonder Woman says. The tone of her voice immediately reminds Bruce of what they decided after watching the press conference—what they inferred about Wonder Woman's opinion of Robin's controversial age. He decides it's safe to assume that opinion hasn't changed much. He also notes his thoughts are coming much easier than they were the last time he remembers being conscious. "It's the only time he's consented to leave your side. He also has made various demands about your privacy, including refusing to allow us to run facial recognition software or take a D.N.A. sample."

"And you honored that?" Bruce says, narrowing his eyes. It's a bit difficult to make a glare intimidating when he's lying flat on his back in a hospital bed, but he'd like to think he makes a valiant effort all the same.

"Yes," she says, amazingly. "He willingly submitted himself to the Lasso of Truth. Honoring his wishes is the least we could do."

Bruce struggles to sit up and glare properly. He does better than he thought he would. "So you didn't need my D.N.A. or a facial recognition. You just had to ask him who I was."

"Superman and I only know your first name is 'Bruce,' and only because he used that name before Superman's discovery of your identity as Batman, which is the only alias the other Leaguers have been told," Wonder Woman looks particularly irritable at that. Then again, Bruce reflects, the Champion of Truth watching over the bed of a man who's lived exclusively in lies for years—yeah, they were never going to get along.

"So what's your verdict?" he asks through gritted teeth. Best get to the point. If they're going to put him in lockdown the moment he's able to leave the hospital bed, he wants time to plan for it.

"We voted—" she says. And stops as Dick enters the room.

"Batman!" He's wearing a mask. It doesn't stop him from hurtling himself onto Bruce's bed and wrapping him into a hug. Bruce flinches and swims in nausea for a moment, but when he can move again, he slowly maneuvers his uninjured arm into a tentative hold on Robin's back. Wonder Woman clearly doesn't approve—about the tentativeness or the mere existence of the hug, he's not sure—but Dick savors it for whatever it's worth to him. "How are you feeling?"

"Un," Bruce says.

"Oh, sorry," Dick says, and releases him. "I guess it's understandable, though. You've been out for almost thirty hours."

Bruce is irrationally displeased about this information. Dick pats his shoulder comfortingly, while Wonder Woman just looks confused. "I took care of everything while you were out; but they insisted on having someone watch you the whole time. But I did my best to make sure they didn't slip you anything weird or do anything I didn't approve. And Martian Manhunter agreed to stay far away from you until you're conscious enough to consent to him being around. They talked for, like, half a day, and kept saying they won't tell me what they decided until you woke up. No new injuries or anything, still just a couple bruises. No one knows my name. They… uh, kinda know your first name? And we're still a little at their mercy. We're in space. B, we're in space, this is so cool. But, uh, the only way on or off is a teleporter system and a hangar full of little baby spaceships, and I think spaceships are more complicated than driving stick shift, so I'm a little stumped. On the up side, they've been really nice so far!"

He ends with two thumbs up.

Bruce hopes he doesn't have to tell Dick they're being nice because he's a kid and they suspect Bruce has been at minimum exposing him to dangerous situations. Which would not be entirely wrong, but. He hopes Dick is at least partly acting right now, and has not in fact gotten cozy with the Justice League in the thirty hours Bruce wasn't able to keep an eye on him.

But maybe it would be a good thing. If the Justice League's already attached to Dick, if Dick is already attached to them, then maybe he'll… leave.

Maybe he'll be safe.

Dick looks at his face and visibly wilts.

Without saying anything, Bruce has already said too much. He almost wishes he'd hit the traffic when Deathstroke threw him down the slope. Maybe Dick would've been willing to move on, if he'd died.

Wonder Woman clears her throat and steps forward. Dick hops onto the bed and leans against Bruce's lesser-injured side as she speaks. Bruce's hand hesitantly curls around Dick's far wrist. The boy relaxes. "As he said, we were waiting for you both to be conscious before presenting you with our… decision."

She pauses, apparently waiting for something. Bruce grunts. It's enough.

"We've reached an impasse. Some of us wish to… release you, Batman," she says, and Bruce does not miss that Robin's state of release is left unmentioned. By the carefully blank way Dick keeps his face, it doesn't escape him, either. Bruce would really rather they not have to fight their way off a spaceship, but if that's what this is leading up to— "while others would like to extend a hand of friendship, offering League protection, in exchange for cooperation."

Dick leans forward minutely. Bruce says, "Cooperation."

Wonder Woman looks uncomfortable. Or, not uncomfortable—ill at ease. "Essentially a… part time membership. Robin informed us of the situation with an organization called the League of Shadows. In exchange for information and occasional assistance in League affairs, we're willing to extend our protection to you both."

Bruce doesn't sneer, but doesn't stop his voice from dipping into sarcasm. "Do you really think the League will hesitate because of a handful of metas in colorful pajamas?"

"As opposed to your dreary pajamas?" Wonder Woman arches a single eyebrow. Dick snorts. Traitor. "Those are our options. I'm sorry if you dislike them, but they're what we have to offer."

Then, miraculously, her face softens in much the same way Bruce vaguely remembers Superman's doing before last losing consciousness. She moves to the edge of his bed and sits down on it by his feet, folding her hands in her lap and looking at him so earnestly he wants to fight. "We make it our business to help people in need. You're an adult, and if you decide you don't want our assistance, we'll honor that, but Robin's still a child—a talented child, but still a child. It's because of his wishes to not be separated from you that we're offering the second option. While you may choose for yourself, and Robin insists you've been keeping him safe and comfortable, we cannot condone sending a child off to certain death. Please understand that it's only because the situation is already unusual and some of our members are also vigilantes that we're even considering this. But we can't let Robin go knowing he's only got you for protection, when it's clear he is also now a target. We're just trying to do what's best for him."

"I'm right here," Robin says, scowling. But Bruce is listening.

"Did he tell you if you separated us or tried to make him stop being a vigilante, he'd run off on his own and probably get himself killed?" Bruce asks. Wonder Woman blinks in surprise. Dick gives a squawk of indignation. "I see."

Despite the situation, despite the honest direness of what Dick keeps threatening—Wonder Woman lets out a huff of amusement. "It's good to know he's consistent."

Bruce lets out a grunt of agreement, even though it's honestly a little horrifying. Dick elbows him in the side. It hurts. Bruce turns his head and stoically stares down at him until Dick mumbles a soft, 'sorry.'

Without looking away from Dick, so he doesn't have to keep looking at Wonder Woman's earnest face, Bruce asks, "What would a part-time Justice League membership look like?"

It would be nice to have someone to fall back on, if Deathstroke came back before Bruce healed again. It would be nice to know someone might arrive and save Dick, even if it's too late for Bruce. Keep him safe.

Wonder Woman explains to them what she can. It's not something the Justice League's offered before, apparently. It's new territory for them all. Assistance during major crises, information gathering and keeping an eye on the underworld in general, lending any special abilities to JL projects. To Bruce it sounds like crowdsourcing vigilantes. He can appreciate it as a concept, even if he dislikes the idea of being used. He can compromise, especially when it seems like compromise is going to be the only way to get Dick off this spaceship without sending the whole place crashing out of orbit.

"As for protection," Wonder Woman continues without a break, "We will provide a distress beacon that can be activated at any location and will send out a signal to all members of the League. Whoever is free or closest will zeta to the nearest location and assist."

"I'm assuming zeta locations are limited," Bruce says, inferring from what context he's been given that the 'zeta' refers to Dick's mentioned teleporters.

Wonder Woman nods. "Yes. Which is unfortunate and complicates any rescue attempts by delaying them. Things might be simplified by knowing your location beforehand, or by altering your routes to fit the zeta grid pattern already in place on earth. Another option would be for you to choose a territory, and we could construct a zeta tube in your chosen town, which would greatly affect response time."

Dick looks up and Bruce lets their gazes meet while they digest the new information. With consistent backup available, they might not have to run so much. They could stop. Breathe. Have respite. Know where they'll sleep each night. Plan for farther than two nights ahead. They could have a place to fortify. Cultivate a home-field advantage. Attempt lasting change in an area. Have a home, not a pitstop.

If they keep running, they'll lose steam eventually. It's unsustainable. Metropolis proved that, and too many other things.

Even through the mask, Bruce can see the face Dick makes when he huffs. His eyebrows furrowing down. An embarrassed smile on his face.

"It's okay, B," Dick says. "I'll be fine."

Wonder Woman looks between the two of them while Dick shakes his head. Now that safety is not the only question— Bruce wonders if Dick could ever be happy in the city that devours parents.

"The only way I'm going back to Alfred is if you come with me," Dick says, grinning. Like that's the end of it. "Okay?"

Feeling like a child, Bruce turns back to face Wonder Woman, and says, "Gotham."

000

Whatever sanity the Justice League had before, they have officially lost all shreds of it after hearing his chosen destination.

Dick chants, "A deal's a deal; a deal's a deal," until they give up trying to change Bruce's mind by arguing for anywhere but Gotham. Bruce is tempted to claim Hub City or Blüdhaven in retaliation. He doesn't, just in case they take the diversion seriously.

The second day of trying to argue the position, Bruce is feeling well enough to stand on his own, and they change tactics. "If there is even a hint that Robin is getting hurt because he's in Gotham—" is generally how they start.

At which point Bruce says, "You do realize that even if I comply to your demands exactly, this policy will just encourage Robin to hide injuries from me."

Dick grins sheepishly as Bruce turns the glare towards him, as if he weren't already thinking about how to do exactly that. The Justice League drops that tactic thankfully quickly.

By the third day, Bruce is about ready to honestly go through with his plan to steal a spaceship and see if he can figure out how to pilot it on the way down. Dick looks like he'd be happy to join him, even if he can make pleasant conversation when the Justice League members aren't trying to coax them out of settling in Gotham. Saying they don't understand what they're dealing with in Gotham. That it's completely different from the other cities they've been spotted in.

"We know it's different, that's why I wanna go," Dick says to Superman, perched on the edge of Bruce's bed, digging his heels into the mattress. "We've already operated out of Gotham before. You just didn't know we were there. We know what Gotham can do."

"You really don't," Superman says in his kindest voice.

"You have no right to tell him what he does or doesn't understand," Bruce snarls.

Superman startles and looks up at him instead, face still soft (Bruce hates to think it, but he suspects Superman is one of the ones who voted for partial membership—) and eyes horribly sympathetic. Superman nods once, looks back at Dick, and strikes up a new conversation about traveling, starting to tell stories of places he's flown to and inviting Dick to share a few of his own.

"It'll be nice to see Alfred again," Dick says the night before they're permitted back on Earth, sitting crosslegged his own cot, which had been brought into the room once it was clear he really had no plans to leave Bruce's side. In a show of good faith—and because he is certain nothing would bring the heroes running faster—Bruce hasn't disabled the security cameras in the room. But after ensuring there's no audio feed, there's still nothing to stop them from facing away from the cameras to avoid lip-reading. "I mean, I don't remember him very much. But I remember he was nice."

"He'll be glad to see us both alive," Bruce says, inclining his head and watching his hands. Alfred will be worried, after these last few weeks of silence.

"You said he made cookies, once," Dick says, glancing over hesitantly.

"I'm sure he'll be happy to take up the practice again," Bruce tells him.

They're going home.

"So what're we gonna do first, once we're in Gotham?" Dick says, fidgeting on his bed. The days of self-imposed stillness are clearly taking a toll on him. But he's giving Bruce the chance to make a list. Organize things. Bruce takes the opportunity. Maybe it will prove distracting enough to settle the boy.

"Contacting Alfred is priority. Finding trustworthy suppliers for our gear, since we won't have the advantage of constant movement anymore. Eventually, we'll have to establish a base of operations. …first, though, I was thinking we would get a car."

That gets Dick's attention. "…a nice car?"

Bruce grins, despite himself. It's not like the camera can see it. "A very nice car."

"With really cozy seats and a spacious backseat we can sleep comfortably in if we gotta?"

"And an autopilot option." Bruce nods.

"And a security function that zaps people who aren't supposed to get in." Dick starts bouncing on his knees.

"Tinted, video-scrambling windows."

"Connected to a private network!"

"A convertible."

Dick starts laughing. Gleefully adds, "cupholders!" and Bruce has spilled coffee on his lap too many times to even consider taking it as a joke.

They continue making suggestions, creating a mental list of necessities and particularities for their car. Engine, fuel type, transmission, wheels, and a million other smaller details down to paint color and the potential addition of tail wings.

It's a petty, paltry thing that he doesn't really deserve after all he's done. After he's already been graced with— after the knot in his chest hasn't ached in months. After the illness that sent him into helpless despair hasn't been able to paralyze him since meeting Dick. After four days ago, when he intended to kill a man. He doesn't deserve this moment. He doesn't deserve to imagine a kinder future. To be a part of it.

And this is just a small, silly part of that future. But he's lived out of a car for nearly three years. Dick's suffered through it with him. Now they have a chance to get a car they call all the shots in. Something they have complete control over. That they won't have to wonder when they'll next have to trade it in or abandon it.

Dick wants to call it the Batmobile. Bruce doesn't deny him. He's never tried to name any of the other cars. This one he's naming before it even really exists.

They're getting a car. There's people who will come to their aid when Ra's sends the next round of assassins. Dick won't be stranded and utterly alone if Bruce dies. Bruce is going home.

He's getting a chance to heal his hellpit city.

It's more than he could ask for. It's more than he deserves. But between Dick cackling on his cot, between muttered car facts and half-joke requests, he's thinking. A little in awe. And almost able to believe again.