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This isn’t the first time he’s been kidnapped as Robin—he’s a teenager now, and he’s been tied up and cuffed and trapped so many times he’s lost count—but this feels so much worse than shouting insults at Penguin through the bars of a giant birdcage. He’s on his knees, ankles and wrists tied together, and they gave him something that makes his head just fuzzy enough that he can’t focus on getting out of the knots.
It’s also making him ridiculously warm, though that could be the massive spotlight trained on him. The light is nearly blinding, and all Dick can see beyond the edge of the stage is darkness.
Dick is thirteen, and Robin. He knows what this setup is. He knows he’s not in Gotham anymore—the drive after they drugged him was hazy, but not hazy enough to not be able to tell that they left the city. He knows that they know he’s an omega—the patch of skin where his scent blocker was still feels irritated and warm—and he’s listening to the announcer extol the great pleasures of taking Robin’s first heat.
Dick is Robin. He knows what an omega trafficking auction looks like. Dick is thirteen. He wants his dad so badly he’s struggling not to cry.
His first heat isn’t supposed to come for months, maybe even longer—just because his scent started shifting from neutral pup to a more omega honey doesn’t mean he’s anywhere near ready to be mated.
“I’ve got forty thousand, do I hear fifty thousand?” the announcer calls out, and there’s a fresh swell of muttering. The flush inside him rises.
Unfortunately for him, a lot of bad people think otherwise, and Dick doesn’t know what they gave him, but he can tick off the symptoms on the list he got in Health class, one by one by one. He’s definitely going into a heat.
“What about sixty?” the announcer sounds very pleased, “We have sixty, how about seventy-five?” It’s making Dick’s stomach turn, how eager they are. How much money they’re planning on spending to—to rape him.
Dick’s been chafing at Bruce’s restrictions—it’s the whole reason he went out on a solo patrol—but right now, he’s very sorry that he disobeyed him. He wants his dad to come and save him. But Bruce is injured, laid up in bed with a couple of broken ribs and a twisted ankle, and Dick felt like he had to prove something, and now no one knows where he is.
“Hundred? Anyone for hundred? Come on, look at him, how many of you have been waiting to see Robin on his knees?” The muttering increases and Dick breathes in and out, ignoring the gag in his mouth, trying to push down panic to work at the knots.
He needs to escape before the heat fully kicks in, before the drugs rob him of his last bit of sense and turn him into the mindless, delirious omegas that he always sees in trafficking dens, he needs to escape—
“Two hundred,” a rough voice calls out from the back of the room.
The silence in its wake is enough to send splinters of dread down his spine.
“T—two hundred,” the announcer says slowly as a buzz starts up again. It seems less excited and more nervous than before, and Dick squints, trying to see through the darkness. “Do we have two hundred and ten? Two hundred and ten, anyone?”
The whispers grow louder, and Dick can hear the announcer swallow.
“Two hundred, going once. Going twice. …And sold to—to Mister, uh, Death—”
“Wilson is fine,” the rough voice interrupts, closer. And closer still, until Dick can make out the outline of a dual-toned suit. And closer, stepping into the light and sending the mutterings even louder.
The mask is half-orange, half-black, and has only one eyehole, and that’s all Dick needs to pin him down.
Slade Wilson.
Deathstroke the Terminator.
Dick doesn’t know a whole lot about him, but with the formation of the Justice League came the news of a lot of superpowered villains, and the mercenary exudes menace with every step. “Mr. Wilson,” the announcer looks pale. In the spotlight, it’s an unflattering look. “I—I wasn’t aware you were in town,” he says, much quieter.
Dick would also be very nervous if an infamous assassin was spotted near him. Dick is too busy working at the knots before that silent regard can fall on him.
“Heard you had a rare specimen for sale,” Deathstroke’s voice is deep and low and level, “And I’m partial to little birds.” The mask pivots towards him, and Dick freezes. It’s an uncomfortably searching look. “Any last details before we finalize payment?”
“Ah, yes,” the announcer is definitely sweating, “We—we require that you claim your purchases, so—so you don’t—”
“To lower the resale value, hm?” Deathstroke steps towards Dick and Dick feels the urge to scramble back but there’s nowhere to go.
The mercenary crouches down right in front of him, and pulls his mask off. His one visible eye is startlingly blue. “Don’t worry,” Deathstroke murmurs, “I’m not planning on selling.”
His expression is blank, no trace of mercy or compassion or—or anything at buying a kid young enough to be his own child. A gloved hand grips the back of Dick’s head, and there’s no fighting the grasp—Dick thrashes and struggles, but Deathstroke easily pulls Dick’s head back to bare his neck.
“Please,” Dick tries. “No,” he attempts to force around the gag. “Stop,” is the one that comes closest to sounding like an actual word, but Deathstroke ignores the garbled sounds as he bends down.
It hurts. Teeth and pressure and pain, a sharp slice that grows to throbbing even as Dick’s muscles loosen and ease, turning his limbs to putty, forcing him into a puddle that only remains upright due to Deathstroke’s grip.
Dick’s definitely crying now, from the pain and the misery and he—he’s been claimed, not the scenting and little nips that Bruce does, to claim Dick as a pup in his pack, but a bite, and Dick can’t—this isn’t the sort of thing that can be undone, and he’s been claimed by a mercenary, and if he had enough energy to panic, he’d be hyperventilating.
Instead, he’s sobbing on the edge of hysteria, all too attuned to the way Deathstroke picks him up, like Dick’s nothing more than a sack of flour.
“You know,” says an oily voice Dick doesn’t recognize, “We—quite a few of us, actually, Robin’s interfered in our businesses a couple of times, and we don’t mind shelling out some cash to watch you put him in his place.”
Dick’s next sob catches in his throat, swelling up to choke him. No. It’s bad enough that they—if they watch—what if Bruce sees it—
“I’m here to buy entertainment,” Deathstroke says flatly, “Not be entertainment.”
It’s enough relief to make him slump, but panic shifts to churning dread as Deathstroke carries him out.
He can feel his heat getting closer with every passing second, and his window of opportunity is vanishing.
Dread twists to sharp terror when Deathstroke dumps Dick on the hotel bed, but stutters in confusion when Deathstroke dumps a pile of pillows and blankets down next to him, and unties the rope and gag. He doesn’t touch Dick after that, leaving him to pull himself up on shaky limbs and spit the gag out.
Dick darts a look at the window. Deathstroke is looking away, if Dick can just get to—
He manages to take one step before his legs fail him, his bite escalating to shrieking as something inside of him draws taut. The claiming bond. The tether linking him to the world’s deadliest mercenary, and Dick’s going to start crying all over again if he doesn’t get a hold of himself.
“Let me know if you need anything else for your nest,” Deathstroke says dispassionately, and Dick looks again at the bedding. Looks up at the mercenary, sitting casually in a chair, and looks back, his stomach twisting.
Bruce always built the nest in the pack room in Wayne Manor, and Dick’s parents built their nest together. It seems like Deathstroke subscribes to more archaic notions.
Dick picks up the first blanket, and has to swallow down the rising bile. He’s going to be raped in a nest he made himself, and—and there’s nothing he can do about it.
The finality of it, the stark reality that he’s in a situation he cannot escape, are shackles around his limbs, and no matter how hard he struggles, he can’t break free. His nest is all wrong, there are none of his favorite blankets, or the lavender flower pillowcase, or Zitka, and it smells clean and sterile and horrible.
It smells like Dick’s tears, like misery and sadness and the growing honey scent of his heat, and Dick shuffles around on the bed as he attempts to follow his alpha’s bidding and build a serviceable nest. Deathstroke gives no direction, and Dick draws out the task as long as he can, stalling for a savior that isn’t coming.
He should never have gone out to patrol alone. If Batman comes and saves him right now, Dick promises he’ll always, always listen to everything he says.
The window shows a calm night skyline, and no dark shadow swinging closer.
Dick finally finishes arranging the pillows and blankets—his first nest, and the taste of it is sour in his mouth—unable to fidget with it any longer. His stomach hurts, the cramps both stronger and duller than he was expecting, and he tries to keep his breathing steady.
No one is coming for him. He can’t—he can’t stop this. Which means he has to figure out how to live through it.
He has to relax. It’ll hurt less if he relaxes, he knows this, but the logic is warring against the urge to curl up into a little ball and hide.
“I’m—I’m done,” Dick forces out, kneeling in the center of the nest. The mercenary looks up to give him a brief, assessing glance.
“Okay,” Deathstroke says, before turning back to his phone. Dick isn’t sure how much longer he has—his heat is almost upon him, and he feels hot and cold at once, and dizzy, and he wants his dad—and he needs to get this out before he goes incoherent.
“I,” he starts, and stops. He doesn’t even know how to say it. Does he beg? Hot tears are prickling at his eyes. “I’m not—” Deathstroke looks up from his phone, his mask still hiding his face, hiding his reactions, hiding any clues Dick could use to see if there’s a trace of mercy on his face.
There has to be. Deathstroke didn’t—take him, back at the auction, even though they offered money to watch, and he gave Dick pillows and blankets to make a nest, and he hasn’t hurt him yet, unless Dick counts the throbbing bite. There has to be a sliver of the mercenary that can be kind, Dick just needs to ask.
“I’ve never—done this before,” Dick whispers, staring at his knees, at the nude-colored leggings. “Please—” I don’t want to, Dick wants to scream, but he knows he won’t get that. All he can hope for is that it doesn’t hurt too much. “Please go slow.”
Dick knows enough, from school seminars and Bruce’s powerpoint and stray details from the cases Batman doesn’t let him too close to, to understand the mechanics of it. To know that even if he’s an omega, even if he’s in heat, it’ll still hurt because he’s too small, too inexperienced, and Deathstroke is huge—
“Kid, I’m not going to fuck you.”
Dick’s thought process stutters to a halt. Deathstroke is still staring at him, one visible eyehole pointed in his direction, but he’s made no move to get up from his chair or even put down his phone. Dick…doesn’t understand. Is this a trick? Is this a test?
“You—bought me,” Dick whispers, not intending it to be out loud, but the mercenary is superhuman, so of course he catches it.
“I’m not keeping you,” he says, slow and a tiny bit condescending, and trepidation firms fully into dread.
Maybe his next owner will be better, maybe Dick can escape and call for Batman—or maybe they’ll be a hundred times worse.
Deathstroke let him build a nest, Deathstroke didn’t hit him, and Dick’s mind is skipping back to every enemy he’s ever faced and sinking slowly into terror.
“We don’t mind selling out some cash to watch you put him in his place.”
“Please don’t sell me,” Dick manages to force out, his arms wrapped tightly around himself, because he can’t stop the mercenary. And if Dick—if Dick makes him angry, then—
“I’m not selling you,” Deathstroke says, and then pauses, “Well. Not technically, anyway. It’s more of a ransom.”
“Ransom?” Dick repeats, confused.
“Batman, kid,” Deathstroke exhales, loud and put-upon, “Asked him how much he’d give me to get his little bird back.” He waves the phone at Dick. “He’ll probably be here in a couple of hours.”
Oh.
Oh.
Dick isn’t—
Deathstroke isn’t—
He isn’t going to—
Deathstroke very kindly ignores Dick when he bursts into tears and curls up in a sobbing ball in his nest.
The third time the kid makes a pained moan, Slade forces himself to go check on him. His breathing and heart rate are regular, but this is the kid’s first heat, and it’s drug-induced on top of that. Slade wants to be nowhere in the vicinity of Batman if his little bird croaks.
He’s careful not to enter the nest—buying and then forcibly claiming a newly presented child was bad enough, Slade doesn’t need to violate his safety any further, and especially not in the middle of his heat—prowling around the edges to make sure that Robin isn’t dying. Unfortunately, it seems that the kid still catches a whiff of his presence, because that mask turns in his direction, skin gleaming with sweat and mouth panting open.
The kid makes another pained sound, but this is more insistent. Calling. Slade stays where he is as Robin uncurls and forces himself up on hands and knees, crawling to the edge of the nest.
Robin looks up at him, swaying and wordless, and holds out a hand.
Slade stares at him.
The kid makes that insistent whine again—pup calling for pack—and Slade extends his hand to meet the kid’s before he thinks through what he’s doing. He wants to jerk it back, but Robin is tugging him forward with a hum, into the nest, and Slade finds himself climbing in.
It’s been a while since he’s heard a pup call aimed at him. Adeline made it extremely clear that if she catches his scent in a mile’s radius of the children, she’ll take out his other eye. Slade had to settle for shipping gifts and watching his children through a scope. He hasn’t been in a nest in years.
It’s awkward—Slade is still dressed fully in Deathstroke armor—and he ends up collapsing a whole side wall of pillows, but he’s finally seated inside, with Robin making quiet hums where he clambered up into Slade’s lap.
He smelled like syrup-sweet cherries and lavender when they’d torn off his scent blockers. His scent started to change after Slade bit him, but they got out of there before it solidified to the caramel-and-grapefruit-and-mint scent it is now.
Slade hesitates, casting a glance around the room, but he’s swept it, and Batman is still an hour and a half out, and this place is as safe as Slade can make it. He slowly peels off his own scent-blockers.
Slade’s oranges-and-clear-water scent hasn’t changed—the claiming bond goes only one way, and undoubtedly Robin’s scent will change again when Slade breaks the bond, but it would be cruel to do so in the middle of the heat. Better to wait until Batman gets here.
Until then, his scent can pacify the kid, who practically buries his nose against Slade’s neck—Slade can feel his spine prickle at having teeth so close to his neck, pup or not—and goes boneless in a murmur of happy contentment.
Slade tells himself that an unhappy Robin means a pissed-off Batman, and since he’d like to keep his limbs where they are, it’s only logical to soothe the omega until his dad gets here.
He refuses to admit just how much he misses his kids.
Adeline’s ultimatum was clear—Slade isn’t allowed anywhere near the children unless he gives up Deathstroke, but Slade doesn’t know if he can. The job, the challenge, the sheer exhilaration of using his skills at the level they’d been designed for—he can’t give that up. Can’t go back to living in a cookie cutter suburb. It’s not in his nature.
Of course, his job has downsides too, namely infiltrating an auction to find out that they were selling baby omegas, and baby hero omegas at that, and part of Slade had seen a different child in danger, a different child silently beseeching him, and he just—couldn’t walk away.
Not a pup. Not when something inside him is empty, an alpha howling for his own pack.
Besides, Slade can more than recoup his losses from Bruce Wayne’s pocket, so the whole situation is fortuitous and not the impulse decision that other people might call it. Slade saw an opportunity and took it, and if he has to suffer a baby hero curled up on top of his armor for a couple of hours, so be it.
He may be trapped in place under threat of waking the pup up, but his mind is free, and he can slowly and carefully plot out exactly how he’s going to tear that trafficking organization to shreds. Joey is an omega, and Slade will never again suffer a threat to his children.
His arms curl a little tighter around Robin.
Any of them.
Slade definitely didn’t mean to fall asleep, but apparently quiet pup purrs are enough to knock him out. The more worrying part is that his instincts didn’t catalogue large, pissed-off alpha as a threat until Batman is literally looming over the nest, his scent muted but still clearly projecting horror-rage-give-me-my-pup-back.
Slade, with a healthy respect for alarmed parents, slowly twists until he’s no longer curled around Robin, and gently tugs the kid free. “Safe and sound,” Slade says, nudging the kid towards Batman, “Just like I promised.”
Batman’s glower intensifies. It turns into a solid, searing glare when Robin resists being moved. The pup wakes up enough to look around the nest, realizes he’s being herded to the edge, and pounces back on Slade.
The kid makes a grumbled, petulant whine when Slade tries to push him away, and latches onto him with a surprisingly tight grip, practically plastering himself to Slade’s armor. “Kid,” Slade says, sitting up and trying to get Robin out of his lap, “Come on, kid, your dad’s right here. Time to go.”
Robin loudly and nonverbally protests this statement, clinging to Slade like a limpet with high-pitched omega growls.
Batman’s expression, if possible, grows darker.
“You bit him,” comes out in enraged alpha, but Slade’s secure enough that Batman won’t attack him with Robin in the line of fire that he merely raises an eyebrow.
“If I refused to claim him, getting him away from the traffickers would’ve been significantly more difficult,” Slade explains, trying to pry Robin’s hands free without breaking anything, “Kid, that’s Batman. It’s your dad. Let go.”
Robin doesn’t even turn to look. Slade groans.
“What did you do to him,” Batman’s growls have reached a lower timbre, and Slade recognizes that he has a dwindling period of time before he’s declared Justice League priority one and hunted with extreme prejudice.
“Your scent blockers,” Slade says. His enhanced senses can still smell the muted scent, but the pup probably can’t. “Take them off, he doesn’t know it’s you.”
Batman bristles, but does as he’s told, and in an instant, they’re swamped by furious, stressed parent scent, hovering far too close to panic for Slade’s liking. He’s been cried on enough today, thank you very much.
Thankfully, Robin turns the moment the scent hits him, and stretches out a hand to Batman with an insistent pleading whine. Batman’s scent changes to something a little like relief, and Slade manages to make his escape when Batman tugs Robin into his arms.
He refuses to admit that there’s a void left behind. Robin isn’t his kid, the bond thrumming inside Slade means nothing, and all he has to do is check his account and make sure he got paid. A frantic Batman is a very generous employer.
“Shh, Robin, I’m right here,” Batman soothes in a much softer voice, “It’s okay, pup, we’ll get you home, you’re safe now.” Robin makes quiet distressed noises. “I know it hurts, sweetheart, but we’ll get you home and into our nest and it’ll be over soon, I promise.”
Slade’s empty hands spasm. He got to hold Joey for a second before he was rushed to the hospital, and Adeline shot him before he could go to him again. He never had the chance to reassure his own pup that he was safe and home.
He focuses on packing up, and not how every one of Robin’s increasingly plaintive sounds are tugging at him. One goes high enough to crack into an outright plea and Slade looks up to check what the hell Batman is doing to him.
Robin isn’t struggling against Batman’s grip, but he has a hand outstretched to Slade and is wearing an expression of acute distress. Batman is trying to soothe him, but it isn’t working. “The bond,” Batman growls when he notices Slade looking, “He wants his bonded alpha.”
Oh. Right. “I can break the bond now, but…” Slade trails off, and Batman looks frustrated. Omegas are highly sensitive in their heats, and breaking Robin’s first claim in his first heat is unlikely to end well.
“How much,” Batman bites out tersely, “For you to stay until his heat ends.”
The mask hides his expression, but shock filters out cleanly in his scent. Batman cannot be serious.
Robin makes an unhappy, almost defeated sound.
“Slade,” Batman hisses through gritted teeth.
“Round it up to four hundred,” Slade half shrugs, because he can’t exactly say he’s opposed to the idea, and at Batman’s nod, gingerly climbs back inside the nest. Robin’s distress fades into purring when he catches Slade’s scent, and Slade and Batman awkwardly sit side to side so Robin can sprawl out in both their laps like a brightly-colored cat.
The silence is so tense it’s nearly unbearable, only broken by Robin’s quiet little huffs as he falls back asleep, but it eventually eases into something that’s almost…manageable.
Batman’s petting Robin’s hair, but one of Robin’s hands is firmly clutching Slade’s fingers. Slade can’t resist swiping the inside of his wrist across the inside of Robin’s when Batman is looking the other way. It’s stupid, he shouldn’t be scenting a kid that isn’t his, that he bought and bit, but it eases something inside of him. And with three strong scents in the nest, with no choice but to mix together, it almost smells like pack.
Fuck. He—he enjoys his job, but he forgot how much he missed this. And it’s uncomfortable, and everyone’s in armor, and Batman is stiflingly tense, and it’s still the most relaxed Slade’s been in years.
Maybe he should try. Maybe he should show up at Adeline’s place and hug the boys and if she kills him, so be it.
Slade holds Robin’s hand and keeps pace with the pup’s breathing.
Maybe the cost of being Deathstroke is a price he’s no longer willing to pay.