They regarded each other from opposite ends of a dining room table.
"Bruce, I love you, but you need help. And until you get it – until you change – you're not allowed near my siblings."
He receives a scoff and an ugly sneer for his trouble. "Are you trying to give me orders now?"
"I'm not trying. I'm telling you, promising you that if you cross this boundary – if you approach my brothers and sister – hell, sisters – before they can feel safe around you, I will retaliate like you've never seen."
"An empty threat-"
"Empty?"
Dick wanted to scream. Instead, he clenched the rage tightly into his core. So Bruce wanted details, wanted facts?
Dick could oblige that.
"You don't understand, Bruce. And you don't give me enough credit," he said with a chilling calm. He felt distant. Dissociative. Just what he needed to get through this conversation. "I've let you dismiss me, degrade me, damn near destroy me at times because I love you. Because maybe I'm too damned loyal. You raised me to be a soldier...and I've been faithful. We all have."
He tried to suppress the sharp pang in his chest. He needed to be numb. He needed to feel less in order to survive this encounter.
He could tell Bruce was about to make some snide comment about Jason, and if he did that, Dick would actually punch him. "We all have," he reiterated.
Bruce said nothing. Good.
"I've been faithful," he repeated, almost to himself. "But when you brought others into this life alongside me, you gave me a new responsibility: to care for them...and to protect them if need be."
"And you think they need protection from me."
"I know they do. And I know it because I've needed to be protected from you at times."
"You have never-"
"You hit me." That was a funny word, Dick mused. Hit. Could be present or past tense.
He wished it were past tense.
"You hit me, and your excuses for it get more and more flimsy as I get older." He swallowed an unwanted ball of emotion. "Because I've grown passive. Complacent. I let you hit me, and I let you get away with it...I could have kept letting you get away with it. I know myself."
He knew his own desperation for love. World's Second Greatest Detective, and he kept letting people use him. It galled him, it shamed him, and that heat carried him forward.
"But you should have known I would never abide the abuse of my siblings."
"Abuse? You really think-"
"Yes." Shut it down. The moment he let Bruce direct the conversation would be the moment he lost. "You struck Tim and nearly beat Jason to death."
There, the subtlest flinch. Bruce still drew the line at killing them, apparently. Great.
Bruce started, "I was trying to-"
"I'm done with your bullshit excuses!" Reign it in, Grayson. Do. Not. Escalate. "I've heard enough for a lifetime." Dick glared through slit eyes. "You know you're wrong, deep down. So I won't waste time with that."
Bruce leaned back in his chair with an intentionally relaxed air of superiority that almost worked on Dick.
But they'd been doing this dance too long, knew each other too well. And the stakes were far higher now.
"You've said a lot," Bruce stated, and stared him down with infuriating composure. "Things I suspect you've wanted to say to me for years."
No shit.
"But," the older man continued, "I'm not hearing the threat you promised."
Was Bruce testing him, or was he just cocky? Dick felt so tired of trying to figure him out.
"You want a threat?" His ears buzzed. Maybe he should try coming back to himself now. He knew this wasn't safe. He couldn't defend himself if he wasn't here. "Well...If you keep pushing me, you'll find out why exactly Deathstroke wanted me for an apprentice."
All at once, Bruce's demeanor changed. Leather arms creaked beneath his fingers. Outrage brought his teeth to bear.
"Yeah," Dick noted, dispassionate, "You never forgave me for that."
"You aided and abetted a mercenary for months."
Dick's hackles raised. "Not by choice."
His father stared him down and impossibly, heartlessly told him, "You always have a choice."
Well that was just Bruce's problem, wasn't it? Thinking that if they trained well enough, pushed themselves further, if they just tried hard enough, they could control what happened to them. He could appreciate this outlook for having created Batman, but the world didn't work like that. Sometimes the bad guys got what they wanted. Sometimes heroes became victims. They lived in an unjust reality, through no fault of their own.
Bruce used to believe that. Used to understand Dick's limits even as he ignored his own. Something changed. When had it changed? Maybe after Jason. After he pushed Tim as far as he could and saw results.
He didn't know. It didn't matter.
"He would have killed my friends," he said, searching his father's face for an ounce of compassion. Where had Bruce gone? What was this cruel imitation before him?
"The Titans knew the risks of the job and accepted them. Deathstroke's victims made no such choice."
How rich. As if Bruce would ever sacrifice Clark or Diana. Like he would ever let Selina come to harm if he could help it.
But if the old man insisted on delusional hypocrisy, Dick, again, could oblige him.
"You're right." Never mind that he victimized me too. "I learned a lot, watching that kind of ruthlessness up close. Things you refused to teach me."
The years since then had softened his fear, but he still remembered feeling trapped and small in Slade's presence. The mercurial man had no compunctions about beating loyalty into him. Had even been amused by his terror at times...No, Bruce had never been cruel for cruelty's sake. Slade was a different animal.
"You weren't there to protect me; I learned to protect myself. Do you know what he was ultimately grooming me for?"
Bruce glowered at him, recriminating. "To resume his work once he died. To be the next Deathstroke."
"...Yeah, no." He reveled in the instant of barely discernible confusion on Bruce's face. "That's just what he wanted everyone to think. I could never be a mercenary, and he knew that. You can't force a career on someone and expect them to excel...No, he wanted me, specifically, for a purpose."
Of course, Slade hadn't told him any of this until years after his "apprenticeship." He'd said it offhand, blithely as they worked together on a case.
Slade had laughed at his appalled reaction, then ruffled his hair and told him to stop worrying about it. (He'd long abandoned the hope that Slade would ever stop treating him like an errant child. Everyone else had come to terms with his adulthood – matured and changed right alongside him – but Slade was Slade. A rare constant.
Their relationship had so many unhealthy layers, but hey. At least Slade wasn't his father.)
"Think about it," he continued, "He passed his skills to me despite never expecting me to succeed him. Balanced cruelty with kindness so I'd be desperate to please him. Treated me like…" Like a son, he couldn't say, because Bruce would fly into a jealous rage, but he knew he'd been, at least partially, a substitute for Grant and Joey. "I know I came out of that situation with a form of Stockholm Syndrome. Slade tried to warp my mind, reverse my loyalties, and relax my moral standards. If he'd had me for longer, it might have worked." Dick shrugged as if the notion didn't trouble him, didn't still keep him up at night.
("You're a hunter, Richard," Slade liked to tell him, "An apex predator. Fear no one.")
He drew his performance around him like a shroud. Leaned forward and channeled (his master) Deathstroke's irreverent malice. He made himself bigger than he actually was, and Bruce looked disturbed across the table.
Be afraid, he allowed himself to think, Fear the hunter.
"Bruce," he nearly whispered, "I've been faithful. I've been loyal. I risked everything to make it back home to you. I was a teenager challenging Deathstroke because I wanted to be with my father again."
Something entered Bruce's expression; he had no idea what.
"And I did. I made it home, but why did he let me go? Why did he want me in the first place? Can't you guess?"
He could tell, by Bruce's careful stillness, that he'd started to figure it out. No arrogance remained in his mentor's voice when he said, "I'd made an enemy of Deathstroke long before he took you."
Oh, so now he'd been taken? Dick wanted to laugh, but held it back. In his current mindset, he just might sound like the Joker.
"Yes," he hissed regardless because Bruce needed to understand the danger before him. The sleeping dragon he'd poked too often. (He had scars from Slade and scars from Bruce, and he couldn't tell them apart.) Flames licked the walls of his chest. "Say it."
The silence between them stretched on, but Dick felt no fear. For the first time since childhood, he couldn't care less what came next. He knew himself. Knew the storm of his heart.
He pictured Tim's caged expression and Damian's concealed fear. Cass's shaken foundation and Duke's innocence and Steph's jaded eyes.
He thought of Jason's broken body, and hate made him lethal.
Incredulous, Bruce answered, "He was training you to assassinate me."
Dick leaned back in perverse satisfaction. "'Assassinate' implies some level of objectivity. No Bruce, if I were a weaker man, I'd have given into my training and simply killed you."
Bruce recoiled as though struck and got to his feet. "You don't have it in you."
Dick rolled his eyes. Tell the Joker that. He stood languidly, eyes on Bruce the whole time. Like a predator, for once, and not prey.
He said, "Want to bet your life on it?"