"Renegade," a smooth, dark voice drawled. It sent shivers down Dick's back, sweat trickling down his spine beneath the layers of polyester and wool separating him from the Christmas cold. He didn't answer. "You were supposed to report hours ago."
"You never told me to," Dick responded. He relished in the fact that his voice didn't croak. It didn't sound weak or frightened at all. It took him a moment to realise that was only because he was no longer so uncertain as to what he wanted.
"I was testing you."
The park was surrounded in cars. Police cars, news vans, the cars originally there for the park itself, anything and everything. Yellow tape was being drawn as if the brown grass were already a crime scene and people were being waved back frantically. But Dick and Slade didn't move, looking at one another head on, suspended in time right beside the plastic playground slides.
"I was testing to see if you would come back and confront me about your own failures. You failed. I never took you as a coward, Renegade."
Dick was a coward before that day. It was that moment, when Slade said that Dick was a coward, that Dick knew he was a coward no longer. "I may be a coward, but you're a fool," Dick grit.
Slade stood stock still, his feet poised and his hands balanced on his lower back.
"Did you think you could keep me doing this forever? What's in it for me?" Dick challenged, his confidence growing as he automatically moved into a fighting stance, eyes narrowed at the man in front of him. The man that it had been drilled into him for five straight years not to defy, not to go against, and most certainly not to fight back.
There was a part of Dick that was scared. A part of him that wanted to crumble and beg for forgiveness, because it was so much easier and it was what he had been taught. He wasn't supposed to be doing what he was.
But he was doing it anyway.
"Food. A mentor. Training. Shelter. The ability to learn skills that only select individuals out of billions know. Very few people get the opportunities that you have had with me," Slade replied evenly. "If it weren't for me, you would be in a foster home with useless guardians who wouldn't recognise your potential."
"I wouldn't be a murderer," interrupted Dick.
Slade strode forward smoothly. "They had no potential. Not like you do. You're more important than they are. We're doing the world a favour, Renegade."
"No, just me," Dick growled. "By getting myself rid of you."
Slade's body was deathly still as he opened his mouth.
And Dick saw it coming. Years of training with that man allowed him to see it coming.
Without actually saying anything, Slade suddenly struck out with a weapon he must have kept hidden in the fist behind his back. If it had been a sword, Dick would have lost balance by springing back because his recovery time would have been shorter than the time it would have taken for Slade to continue lunging forward. However, Dick was well aware that a weapon small enough to be in Slade's fist was probably a projectile - and most of Slade's projectiles swung in an arc. Therefore, Dick only ducked.
Without missing a beat, Slade whipped out the sword strapped to his waist and stanced himself, sweeping forward to cut down on Dick. Dick crouched and sprung up near Slade's chest, causing the sword's blade to miss its mark, and as Slade brought the sword towards himself to trap Dick to him, Dick flipped into a handstand and kicked Slade's legs out from under him.
His confidence grew as Slade stumbled back.
Dick quickly got to his feet and threw a flat palm to Slade's face, but Slade easily blocked and threw a punch of his own. Too slow to move out of such close range, Dick's shoulder was nicked, throwing him off balance on one side. Slade spun around and attempted sweeping his apprentice's legs out from under him as well, only for Dick to spring into the air. When he landed, Slade was already swinging another hand, but Dick managed to catch it and yank Slade towards him. Slade stumbled for only a step before whipping out an eskrima stick and swinging it in Dick's face. Dick leaped back.
Using his own momentum in his favour, Slade planted the stick into the ground and kicked out with his legs, hitting Dick square in the chest and flattening the boy to the grass.
"If you couldn't beat me in training, how do you expect to beat me in a real fight?" Slade rumbled.
Dick groaned, his face scrunched up in exaggerated pain. Slade remained where he was, eskrima stick clasped firmly in both hands, staring down at his apprentice. Dick slowly got up and Slade only watched as Dick planted one hand into the dirt- and swung an explosive out from under his back.
Slade leaped to the side, barely missing the small pocket device as it exploded beside his ear. The assassin winced as the event caused ringing in his head, and Dick used that opportunity to rear back and lunge his stick into Slade's collarbone, causing the man to choke and stumble. He wasn't to be deterred for long, however, and Dick grabbed his other stick and planted that in the ground as well, using it to support his weight as he kicked off from a tree and ran in a circle through the air. He kicked Slade in the side of the jaw. Slade's head whipped back, but he managed to grab ahold of Dick's ankle as he kept turning, letting go when the boy kicked him in the throat, and caused Dick to fly a foot away. The apprentice bent his arms underneath him as he fell and sprang back up the second he hit the ground.
The two of them stilled, bodies ready to spring, but minds preparing for the other one to make the first move. They faced off. Dick panted and decided that hatred was definitely a tangible feeling. A tangible feeling that only grew and grew the more he chose to ignore it.
"Why are you trying?" Slade continued. "Aren't I like a father to you? Haven't I raised you?"
"You will never be anything like my parents," Dick growled.
Eventually, Dick was pushed back. The harder he tried to gain ground, the more ground he lost. Soon enough, his feet were padding against wood chips as they entered the playground on the other side of the grass, then there was grass again, and the fight continued on. Multiple times it should have ended with Slade as the victor, but Dick always got up again, and it reached the point that Dick was enraged to hypothesise that Slade was playing with him. He was testing him. Again.
He was even more enraged to discover that, despite Slade not being particularly serious, Dick was still losing.
He was pushed up against a tree. The cars and people and pedestrians and police and news reporters and everyone Dick had possibly seen yet in that city were only yards away, and he felt ashamed to be so closely watched. Everything Dick had ever done in his life had been a performance for someone or something, but at that very moment, Dick could only wish that he were left unnoticed. If it were that, none of anything would have led up to the fight that he was failing.
Failing.
Dick was failing a lot things recently.
Slade thrust forward with his sword. Dick sprang into the air and grasped a tree branch, flipping into the leaves. But as it turned out, Slade must have easily predicted such a move, for the blade hadn't actually been aimed at Dick. It had been aimed at the branch.
Dick tried to jump further into the plant, but he was tired and panting and too short of breath. The branches snagged at his uniform and his hair and his limbs, and he just couldn't kick fast enough or hard enough to get free. He thrashed, it tangled him further, and he was on the ground again before he knew it.
When Dick finally tossed the foliage off of himself, Slade's sword dropped to press lightly against his throat.
The crowd's shouting grew louder, the police's efforts more frantic. Dick frowned. Would Slade really kill him right there? He was completely surrounded by officials toting guns. It would be much harder for Slade to escape than it had been in most past events.
But there were also civilians there, and Slade was Slade. Already, Dick could see, as shadows behind his ex-mentor, reporters who must have slipped through and sneaked around. A good smoke bomb and the police wouldn't dare shoot in risk of hitting anyone innocent.
In other words, Dick was about to die.
And he couldn't bring himself to care.
The pressure of the blade was almost comforting in how it was so constant. He breathed deeply, causing the tip to dig deeper into his flesh. Really? That entire time, throughout all of Dick's life, it had just been as easy as putting a knife to his neck for all of it to be over?
Not quite. That was proven when he heard Slade say something, and Dick almost couldn't believe that Slade was letting a boy he had once been so obsessed with go. Maybe he had grown bored, or maybe he had understood that nothing would keep Dick forever at bay from his own desires. Then, when Dick offered no answer, he wasn't really paying attention to what Slade was saying anyway, the pressure was released. Dick didn't bother opening his eyes. The tension in the air was still there, the half screaming half dead silence of the crowd still fell as a backdrop. Slade was only getting ready. He was taking his time.
He was...shooting?
Dick's eyes snapped open. They snapped open to meet the expressionless grey eyes of his ex-mentor as the man's mouth parted ever so slightly.
And his entire body fell limply onto Dick.
Dick's palms were in front of his chest, supporting the weight of Slade's shoulders and the man's still laboured breaths. The ex-apprentice was staring wide-eyed at the ironic blue skies as he felt the blood leaking onto his stomach. He couldn't even hear the crowd screeching from the pounding of his ears and the gasps of his heart.
All he could feel was Slade's warm, weak breath against the side of his neck and the disgusting, revolting emotions that stirred in his gut and made him want to do anything to throw the man off of him. He wanted to, but he was too shocked. Everything was going too fast.
Dick blinked, and suddenly there was another mask in front of him. He wanted to back away, as far as possible, he didn't want to see another mask ever again, but that particular mask held out a hand as the police rushed forward.
"P-l-ea-s-se," the person pleaded. The sound was so soft, so pitiful, so nervous, and so horrified that Dick was instantly snapped out of his unpleasant reverie.
Without thinking, he tossed the bleeding man off of him, grabbed the boy's hand, reached into his belt, and the both of them disappeared.
"Just saying, arguments are exploding all over Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr, you name it, having to do with Central City's new 'infestation' of vigilantes. A city once considered one of the safest and sunniest in Keystone County now has parents locking their children behind closed doors 24/7. It's insane."
"I can agree with you there. Murderers saving murderers about to be killed by murderers."
"And what else? They have to be just kids! I mean, anyone remember that clip? We've never really seen Renegade in the light for so long, let alone by so many cameras. I swear, is he even over 5 ft?"
"Why are we talking about Renegade's height? I'm more concerned with the epic showdown of the century he and Deathstroke just had all over national television."
"Speaking of which, any news on Deathstroke's condition?"
"No. He was taken in by the hospital, but he didn't look like he was doing too good."
"And we care why? That man's a murderer. A cold-hearted, bloody murderer! We've been trying to kill him for years! So what, some kid decided to dress up and kill him themselves. Why should we complain?"
"Well, first of all, now we have two kid assassins on our hands."
"To be fair, I've never seen the new one before. You know, the one that saved Renegade's life? Maybe they're related or something, but I've been looking into it and I can't find a single thing about any assassin dressed like that."
"I don't think he's an assassin. If he was, wouldn't he have his own gun instead of stealing it from a cop car? The cops were so distracted by what was going on in the park that they didn't pay any attention."
"It's hard to believe that they totally ignored some kid dressed in all black and gloves with a balaclava and sunglasses."
"He had a super low hood, though? I'm pretty sure the scene in the park was more interesting anyway."
"Fine, well, assassin before or not, if Deathstroke is dead, he's an assassin now."
"Assassin? Are you kidding me? If Deathstroke's dead, he's a freaking hero!"
The woman driving the car rolled her eyes and turned down the radio, tuning out the crackling and arguing voices of the radio hosts. She peered up into the rearview mirror to cast a raised eyebrow at the passenger in back. "Hey, Walls, you doin' alright back there?"
"Yeah," Wally muttered, his shoulders slouched and temple pressed against the window. He frowned at the woman. "Why?"
"You've been acting weird."
Wally only shrugged, though. He drew in closer to himself, turning to stare back out the window. A few minutes of uncomfortable silence passed, the murmur of radio hosts filling the background, before Wally spoke again. "Aunt Iris, you're a reporter, right? Do you guys know if Deathstroke's...y'know?"
Iris West bit her lip, staring hard at the red light in front of her. "No, not yet. They haven't been letting anyone into the ER. If I'm honest, though, they shouldn't be paying to save him. I heard that he's going to be executed when he's out."
"Isn't that illegal?" Wally questioned.
"I thought so, too. I guess there's limits to your crimes, especially with so much evidence piled against you," Iris replied. She looked at his reflection skeptically. "Why do you want to know?"
"Just wondering."
She hummed but didn't pursue the matter. Instead, she turned into a parking lot and set the stick shift, pulling the keys out. She twisted around to look at Wally, who didn't react at all. "I just need to run inside real quick to turn in an article. You want to come in or stay here?"
"Stay here," he replied automatically.
Iris sighed, casting her nephew imploring eyes. When Wally didn't so much as acknowledge her, she gave up and pushed open the door. "I'll be right back," she insisted, running inside the building in front of the car that read 'CENTRAL PRESS'.
The quiet was all-consuming. Wally felt like crying.
How did Renegade do it? Wally couldn't see Renegade finding enjoyment in killing. Even so, the assassin still had no emotion regarding it - or if he did, he hid it too well. Yet, he did have emotion. Wally had seen it. Solemnness when the redhead first saw the assassin, panic when-
Wally's throat constricted. He quickly changed his train of thought.
Was it worth it? It was a suffocating waiting game that he played. He was obviously going to be caught. How could he not be caught? Wally was no experienced k-
Wally just had no experience. And he had done it in broad daylight. On national television.
Was it even possible for Wally not to be caught? He was only fifteen. He didn't want to go to jail for the rest of his life. He wanted a future. He didn't want to be-
He didn't want to be like Renegade. Alone, sad, and a prisoner. He didn't want to end up like him.
There was a vibrating buzz against the front seat. Wally didn't move for a second, intent on ignoring it. His bones felt very much rooted to his spot beside the back window. But as the buzzing went on, he figured that he really had nothing better to do and reached into the front seat for his aunt's cell phone. Barry Allen was written across the top. His breath caught.
"Uncle Barry?" Wally almost whimpered into the phone as he slowly leaned back into his seat. His heart hurt. It hurt so much that he felt tears pricking at the corner of his eyes and he suddenly couldn't breathe. It was over. It was all over for him. Barry was calling to tell Iris to drop Wally off at the station because Barry was an amazing forensic scientist, of course he had figured it all out. Of course he had figured out that Wally-
"Walls?" Barry replied, surprised. Wally's heart skipped a beat. "Jeez, kid, where'd your aunt leave her phone this time?"
Was Barry faking it? Wally debated that for a moment, gripping the phone case tightly in his fist as Barry voiced his confusion. No. Barry was a terrible liar. He'd be too mad at Wally to pretend to be light-hearted, anyway.
He closed his eyes, took a deep breath, and pressed the phone closer to his ear. "In the car. She went to drop off some articles at work," Wally replied, and he had to pause for a moment afterwards to re-evaluate what he had said. He was nervous. He knew that. But he wasn't stuttering. Why? He was supposed to be getting eaten alive by guilt. Guilt would make him stutter, make him cry, make him scream and feel terrible for lying to his uncle. Guilt would kill him.
"Dang it. Look, when she gets back, can you ask her to call me?" Barry asked with a sigh.
"Why? Did Deathstroke survive?" the teenager answered, perhaps a little too eagerly. Barry didn't seem to notice.
"Woah, straight with the interrogation, eh? Yeah, that killer got locked up on an island. Can't tell you where, but he'll be there a while. That isn't why I need to talk to her, though," rambled Barry.
"Then why do you need to?" Anxiety. Anxiety gnawed at his gut, at his thoughts, at the fingers that clenched the phone.
"It's just so weird," his uncle groaned. "But I need to find out if her reporter buds can send some videos of Deathstroke getting shot over to the police station. I don't know how, but everything we have got deleted. Hacked, probably."
There was no way. Wally fought to keep his mouth from dropping as he agreed to his uncle and closed the line. He was still staring ahead, not daring himself to be so hopeful, when the car beeped and Iris ran up and unlocked the doors. She sat herself down with a huff and twisted to look at him curiously.
"Hey, you alright?" his aunt inquired slowly.
Wally forced himself to snap back to attention. He offered her a brilliant smile, and her eyebrows shot up her forehead in surprise. "Totally. By the way, Uncle Barry asked me to tell you to call him. You left your phone in the car."
Iris nodded hesitantly. "Alrighty, then," she laughed, shaking her head in disbelief at her nephew's rapid change in mood as she held her hand out for her phone and dialed Barry's number.
"Hello?" she asked into the phone not moments later. Wally waited with baited breath, forcing himself not to bounce in his seat. "What?" the woman exclaimed, leaning over her steering wheel as her eyes widened. "How is that possible? No! No, our copies got stolen, too. I just sent an email to the Commissioner to see if he had anything that we could use."
Wally squealed. Iris paid him no mind. She figured out that she had a strange nephew long ago.
That was when Wally discovered that he didn't feel guilty at all. Just nervous. Nervous for being caught.
Because, in all honesty, Wally was glad that he had been the one to free Renegade. He didn't feel like a criminal. He felt like a hero.
It took a few days.
Dick was still getting over the...shock. Was that the right word? It felt too petty to be the word that described his situation. It was as if everything he had learned in the last five years of his life had been turned inside out. Really, it had.
Everything he had learned. The night after Deathstroke was locked up in Guantanamo Bay (Dick would have preferred starting up Alcatraz again and putting the man there as the only inmate, but it was the second best option that didn't result in sending him to Asia), Dick even found himself returning back to the man's haunt on the outskirts of Central. It was only when he stood outside and noticed that the security cameras no longer followed his movements that he realised there would be nothing there. He woke up the next morning in the cellar of a nearby bar, refusing to return to the empty haunt after all that had happened, expecting to hear Slade's crackling voice through the communicator demanding him to return.
He knew he had work to do, though. The day before, after throwing all of the smoke bombs in his arsenal to disappear as thoroughly as possible, Dick had run with his mysterious saviour straight into the nearby forest. Cliche, but his grappling hook would be too noticeable. Once obscured by the leaves, Dick had spun around and ripped the balaclava from the other boy's face.
Wally.
Dick hadn't waited for Wally to explain himself before stripping the boy of most of his black clothing, throwing some of the extra clothing that he had in his pouch for Wally to change, and fleeing. He had taken the clothes with him and didn't realise that it was because he hadn't wanted Wally to get found out until he was alone in the cellar again with his thoughts.
The day after, Dick got right down to the work of erasing Wally's tracks.
It was surprisingly difficult, considering everyone in Central got a different video and put it on a different website, and most of it involved guess and check, but Dick eventually managed to delete every single one. Hacking and red flagging almost every Instagram and Tumblr account belonging to a Central citizen took a good chunk of time from his life that he'd never get back, but it was worth it. If Dick had to see another frame of him getting his ass kicked by his ex-mentor, he wouldn't know what he'd do.
That, added with the amount of time that Dick spent mentally picking flower petals and wondering if Wally would ever want to see his face again, caused Dick to be a number of days late in returning to Wally's house.
Evening had fallen by the time that Dick silently slid the window of Wally's bedroom open. He wasn't in his room, and Dick could only assume that he was somewhere else in the house as the assassin crept around the space. He awkwardly stood around for a few seconds, staring at the comic book laid face down on Wally's pillow, before deciding to sit on the bed and open up its pages.
That was when the door chose to open. Dick tensed, not moving his eyes from the comic pages as he could only hope that the door had not been opened by a family member of Wally's. The situation would be particularly difficult to explain. After a few heartbeats, though, filled with the loud breathing of someone standing at the door, the room was softly closed off again.
Dick looked up. The redhead that he had hoped to see stood at the foot of his bed, looking intently at the ex-apprentice. After a moment, Dick closed the comic book and slid it onto Wally's nightstand, eye contact with the teenager never breaking.
"S'up, Renny?"
Out of everything that had happened, that was the last thing Dick expected to hear. He stared blankly, uncomprehending. Wally tilted his head and smiled. "Well?" the redhead prompted. "You're not Renegade anymore, are you? Never were. Not in my opinion. If you wanted to be Renegade, I can't see why you'd go through all the trouble that you did on Christmas." Dick could see plenty of reasons for fighting Slade, even if he had wanted to be Renegade. But Wally's optimism probably prevented the redhead from seeing that.
His reasoning was true, anyway.
"Why did you help me?" Dick asked, choosing to ignore what Wally had said.
Wally didn't even seem to think about his answer. "You were the one who deserved to win."
"I'm not some victim, Wally," insisted Dick. "I'm not the innocent one. I'm a killer, too."
"Were," Wally stressed, before frowning. "Were. Right? Were a killer?"
Dick paused, which only seemed to agitate Wally. "Yeah," he finally answered, quietly looking at his hands. "Were."
"Renegade's a killer," Wally said as he walked up beside Dick. The ex-apprentice was astonished to feel the bed dip under the redhead's weight as he joined Dick's side. Where in the world did Wally get his confidence from? "And you're not a killer. Therefore, by the Geometric Law of Deduction, you're not Renegade."
Dick narrowed his eyes at the other. "If I'm not Renegade, then what am I?"
Wally seemed to hesitate there, unsure of what consequences his actions would bring. But he was impulsive, and Dick decided that he really should have known that as the teenager reached forward and grasped the edge of Dick's domino mask.
Then, he peeled it away. Wally stared straight into Dick's blue eyes, view unobscured for once. Dick could only feel vulnerable, exposed, and with the sudden need to fill the silence with a word that he hadn't said in a long time. "Dick. I'm Dick."
That was when Wally realised something extraordinary. He hadn't been viewing the mask as a person. That mask wasn't a person and it didn't connect as one. But without it, with those eyes that crinkled awkwardly, Wally noticed a fact that he should have noticed before.
Renegade was only a boy. Like him.
Wally's smile grew wider as something exploded nearby and Dick jumped, instinctively grabbing Wally and shoving him down. He shielded the other with his body, but it took him a moment to figure out where the explosion even came from. Wally, flattened on the covers with the ex-assassin crouched over him, gestured with his eyes towards the window. Dick saw the lights reflecting over Wally's face and freckles, and when he looked up, he saw the same colours dancing across the sky. Wally laughed at Dick's stunned expression.
"Happy New Years, Dick," said Wally.
And the meaning, for once, rang true.
A/N: And with that, the end of Maybe You Think Killing. I so very much hope everyone enjoyed! I had a lot of fun writing this (for some reason, my favourite part of this chapter was when Wally was in the car, though I haven't figured out why), and it helped me get the hang of writing a little bit in between rounds of homework and rehearsal. Because this helped me practice with managing my time, too, I'm already working on another multi-chapter (which will be significantly longer). The summary is at the bottom of my profile, among other summaries of other stories I occasionally begin sketching out. Which story it is, though, you'll have to give your best guess.
Finally, a big thank you to all of those who reviewed - your comments have made me so happy! (I don't know how else I can express my gratitude - it makes all the time spent on this completely and totally worthwhile).
See you guys soon.