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The phone rings for a full minute before Dick finishes putting his sleep clothes on and finds it under one of the couch cushions. It’s not like anyone’s going to use his civilian phone for any kind of emergency. They better not—Dick is done for the night, and after five hours of running around in unseasonably sweltering weather he is not getting back into the costume for anything. Someone else will have to take one for the team and save the world tonight.
He’s expecting it to be one of his brothers, or someone equally normal day-night routine challenged. So he doesn’t look at the screen as he dives onto the couch and hits answer.
“Yeah, what’s up?”
“Richard,” says a familiar voice to the accompanying tune of irregular gunshots. The shock of hearing this particular unexpected voice makes Dick overbalance and roll off the cushions and right on the floor. He hits his elbow on something on the way down too.
A burst of what sounds like machine gun fire brings him back to the real issue.
“Slade?” he asks, feeling a completely reasonable amount of apprehension settle in his gut. It can’t be anyone else, but Slade Wilson calling him doesn’t seem very plausible. The background noise is a cause for concern as well, but not more than the call itself.
He gets up and starts to pace around the room, too distracted to avoid stepping on some of the mess scattered across his floor. It’s probably nothing important if it’s on the floor anyway.
“Where are you, right now? What—?” Slade sounds—unsteady? “Goddamn, what the—” Whatever he’s saying gets drowned out by more gunfire and a distant explosion. Slade sounds not very coherent, even discounting whatever fight he is in. A fight that he called Dick in the middle of. Dick didn’t even know Slade had his number, or knew how to communicate in anything but creepy bathroom mirror messages “Just tell me—”
The next pause lasts long enough that Dick is pretty sure Slade is waiting for an answer.
“Are you okay?” It feels wrong to say those words out loud to Deathstroke, so Dick follows up with, “Tell me you aren’t shooting up my city. I will go out and track you down right now if you—”
“Shut up!” Slade interrupts with, sharp and impatient. “How close are we?”
Dick… really doesn’t know how to answer that. It feels like all the words have frozen up his brain and just plain abandoned him in this moment of need. “Uh.”
“Geographically, Grayson. I know where we stand otherwise.” Slade adds, which doesn’t really make things more clear. Dick didn’t, until this exact moment, know they stood anywhere at all.
“I’m—” Dick is bemused enough he’s about to just tell Slade his location, but a booming sound of an explosion somewhere close to the receiver cuts the call off.
Dick stops pacing and stands with the phone to his ear, listening to the dropped call signal for a while, and then pulls it away from his ear and looks at it. The entire call feels like a fever dream, and he’s not sure if it’s his or Slade’s, or both. Dick would also love to know where they stand, because up until five minutes ago he wouldn’t have expected a call like that in a million years.
The confusion makes him feel a little dazed.
Okay. Dick tries to apply some kind of logic to what just happened as he hunts down pieces of equipment hidden away in various stashes all over the apartment.
Deathstroke called him, incoherent and clearly unwell somehow, in the middle of a firefight, and the call ended with a blast somewhere close to Slade. Dick has no idea where he called from, but it’s unlikely he was anywhere in or around Bludhaven. The explosions alone would have caused a cascade of alerts to come Dick’s way.
But not very far, if he was asking for Dick’s location. Probably. If he was—unwell—enough to call at all, he might have been out of it enough to forget which continent Dick usually resides in. So Dick can’t exactly exclude any locations on that alone.
Dammit. There’s no way he’s going to ask Oracle, or even worse, Batman, to get him the location. No way he’s going to submit himself to being questioned on what he needs it for and why. Mostly because he has those same questions and no answers in mind as he boots up a laptop and does the work himself.
At least the confusion is steadily turning into annoyance and low-grade anger. It helps Dick focus and feel more awake. There better be a good reason for Slade dragging him into whatever mess he’s made.
- - -
It takes longer to trace the call than Dick would have liked. He ends up this close to actually asking for help with it, before he figures out how to make the system do it without sending anyone logs of what exactly he traced and where.
By the time he actually gets there, it’s the next evening. Even with the delay, the place is easy to recognize, though. The whole area is destroyed, enough bullet holes and small craters to make crime scene investigators busy for a month. Which is coincidentally exactly what’s going on—police and CSIs are crawling all over the place. Dick sneaks in through the back when most of them leave for the night, and checks the place out himself.
Next to the biggest explosion site—there’s still smoke rising idly from the crater a day later—he finds a charred piece of the Deathstroke armor under some debris. He stares at it for a while, not fully comprehending what he’s seeing.
So Slade was really close to the explosion. (And wanted to make sure Dick wouldn’t be? But no, that’s not something Slade would ever do, so Dick shakes the thought away.) Was he close enough to—
Fuck this.
All the bodies have long been removed, so even if someone got really fucking lucky and Slade was among them, Dick can no longer do anything about that. What he can do is figure out what the hell happened. He takes the armor piece with him, along with a full evidence bag of casings and explosive fragments, and sneaks back out. He doesn’t have a safehouse anywhere close enough, but he knows which lab to break into to get access to what he needs.
Another few hours, and he follows the trail of chemical residue to an office building that has about five times as many underground levels as the official blueprints show. Something someone should investigate.
There’s an alarm blaring already, when he gets access to the hidden levels, and the guards are distracted enough by it that they don’t notice Nightwing before it’s too late.
He finds out what happened to Slade when he gets to the third sublevel. There’s a cage, floor to ceiling bars and an energy field that looks hastily installed, with thick power cords tangled across the floor.
Probably earlier today, when they realized no bars, no matter how reinforced, would hold Deathstroke for long. Because in the middle of the cage, the orange of his armor charred almost all the way black, sits Slade. Dick stares at him unblinking until his eyes start to water. Slade looks worse than Dick imagined—covered in blood, bruised and generally more sickly than Dick has ever seen him.
Though on second glance, when Dick can force himself to stop taking in every detail of Slade and takes a look around, the blood probably at least partially belongs to the three dead bodies—two guards and someone in a lab coat—half-hidden by a shelf, a trail of blood on the floor showing they were dragged there from Slade’s cell.
There’s no obvious reaction to Dick’s presence at all. Slade is really out of it. Which makes this whole place an order of magnitude more concerning.
Dick finds a computer that looks like it might get him access to the cell lock and the field, but whoever these people are, they’re smart enough to have everything locked tighter than a fast hack will get him access to. So he plugs a cloning drive in and goes looking for the other end of those power cords.
A new alarm turns on when Dick powers down the force field, so he hurries back. Right in time to catch and steady Slade as he staggers out of the cell. Apparently they got the force field when he broke the entire locking mechanism off the regular cell door. At least Dick doesn’t have to waste time picking it.
Close up, he sees several darts sticking out of Slade’s armor. Most probably didn’t even go through, but he looks barely conscious, so they did manage to drug him somehow.
And then Dick notices the collar. Yeah, a suppression collar might have something to do with that. Dick wonders if they put that on him before or after Slade killed a few minders.
With one of Slade’s arms over his shoulder, and most of his weight braced against Dick seems to be the only way for Slade to stay even remotely on his feet. Dick gets an electronic key from his gauntlet, finds the lock at the back of Slade’s neck and waits ten seconds until the key overloads and brute-forces the collar open. Slade doesn’t even twitch.
His pulse is unsteady when Dick takes a glove off before he can talk himself out of it, and presses his fingers to Slade’s neck. Just for a few moments. Just so he can check, and feel that Slade’s skin is still warm and his heart still beating, even if too fast and irregular. Then he forces the collar open enough to get it off, and puts his glove back on.
Slade’s sickly pallor starts to slowly clear away the moment Dick pulls the collar off. He almost throws it away. But Slade wouldn’t want the thing lying around even with the lock fried, so he clips it to Slade’s belt instead.
“Come on, we have to move,” Dick says, but there's no indication Slade hears him.
With the alarms on, there isn’t much time before someone finds them, so Dick starts to drag Slade to the exit, only pausing long enough to get his drive back. Slade is impressively out of it—Dick isn’t even sure he has any idea where he is or who’s carrying most of his weight.
He must understand something though, or Dick would be doing about as well as the dead guards right now. And after a while he almost tries cooperating. Well, he doesn’t resist being dragged, at least.
By some stroke of luck they don’t have to fight anyone on their way out. So Dick drags a slowly recovering Slade out and then across unfamiliar rooftops. All the way to the motel he has a room at, under a rarely used alias. Slade might have a safehouse somewhere around here, but Dick has no idea where, and Slade isn’t up to answering any questions, not yet.
They get into the room through the window, and Dick finally drops Slade down on the bed. His whole body is complaining about dragging Slade’s weight all this way.
And now he’s at a dead end. He has no idea what more he’s supposed to do here, or if he did the right thing in the first place. So he takes off the costume, packs it away carefully, and takes a shower before putting on some aggressively unremarkable civilian clothes.
By the time he gets out of the bathroom, Slade is better. He is sitting on the edge of the bed, leaning forward and head hanging low between his shoulders like he doesn’t have the strength to keep it up. He looks mostly lucid, though.
“A copy of whatever was on their system,” Dick says as he throws the cloned drive on the bed. He doesn’t bother asking Slade not to kill anyone. He wishes there was a force in the world that could stop it from happening, but realistically the only thing that would happen if anyone tried would be more collateral damage. He should try anyway, he knows. He isn’t used to looking at a battle and thinking it’s unwinnable.
“Try not to kill anyone,” he adds. Just in case it works. “As a personal favor for getting you out of there.”
He hears a quiet snort, of disbelief probably, or maybe disgust at the very idea, and nods to himself. Just like he expected. He’ll send a copy of that drive to the JL. If everyone involved gets arrested before Slade gets to them, it might… delay the inevitable, but at least it’s something.
“And leave a big tip for the housekeeping when you leave. Room’s paid for until tomorrow noon.” Dick takes one last look at Slade, unnaturally tired-looking and yet still very much alive. He keeps the ‘Next time call someone else,’ to himself.
He had the naive hope that seeing Slade would make things more clear, but if anything, this has only made everything more murky and uncertain. The longer he stays the worse it gets, so it’s high time he got back home.
There’s no words that feel like a fitting goodbye between the two of them, so Dick just leaves without saying anything else.
- - -
Dick is having a pretty good night, at first. Some mob henchmen on a mission to take him out give him a decent workout. It’s almost slow as far as nights in Bludhaven go.
The fight takes a very strange turn when Deathstroke crashes it by literally crashing through the window, knocks all the henchmen out and drags Dick away from the place before another wave of them show up.
“What the hell, Slade?” It’s a legitimate question—since there aren’t a lot of good reasons for Deathstroke to be carrying Nightwing to an undisclosed location. Or, instead of an undisclosed location, maybe he’s being carried to… his own apartment? They’re definitely going the right direction for that.
The roof of Dick’s actual building ends up being the first place where Slade slows down enough for Dick to elbow him in the neck and twist out of his hold safely.
“And I ask again—what the hell?”
Slade only answers after pulling his mask off. “We’re even now. I don’t owe you anything.” He looks dead serious, too. Dick stares at him for a minute before he decides that yes, this is an argument he wants to have.
“I didn’t need a save!” He’s sick of getting saved when he neither wants or needs to be. He’s perfectly capable of solving his own damn problems. “And I didn’t save you to get you to owe me!”
“Just the same. We’re even now.”
“It’s just a rolled ankle!” Not even Batman would pull him for something so minor. Hell, Dick was going to use it as a decoy to get ‘captured’ and listen in on some of their plans before Slade crashed that option. “What were you even doing there?”
There’s something about that that Dick isn’t sure he wants to think about too much, but he has no choice but to—this is the first time in the weeks since their last meeting that Dick has even remotely been in any kind of danger. He’s had a pretty peaceful time of it, and a rolled ankle is the worst he’s had. How did Slade time it to be around when it happened?
“Have you been stalking me? No, don’t answer that, of course you have.” Dick rubs his face with his hand and remembers the gloves and the domino too late. It only makes him more annoyed. “What is wrong with you?”
“Why were you in Maine?” Slade asks, instead of trying to answer that one, no matter how much Dick would like to get the full list.
“You called me!” Maybe getting into Deathstroke’s face and having a screaming argument isn’t the sanest thing Dick has ever done, but he’s really goddamn frustrated. None of this is on him. Slade’s the one that faked his possible death dramatically just to get Dick to get involved. “You’re the one that made me go there!”
He takes a step forward as he’s talking, and of course the goddamn ankle makes him stumble. Slade steadies him smoothly, like it’s a normal thing for him to do. And then keeps his hand on Dick’s side.
“I didn’t make you do anything.” Slade sounds so goddamn condescending. And Dick is absolutely done with people treating him like a kid, like he isn’t just as good or better at this than every one of them.
“Oh, like you didn’t do it knowing I’d be forced to come bail you out,” Dick sneers. He knows it was at least part something else, something he really doesn’t want to consider right now, but he can’t help himself from adding, “That was why you called in the first place.”
Slade doesn’t deny it. Some part of Dick suspects it’s because Slade wants to admit to any other reason even less than Dick wants to acknowledge that other reason might exist. But the lack of any kind of answer is enough to make Dick see red anyway.
Dick was okay with forgetting the whole strange episode even happened. He was getting there, before Slade came here and ruined it.
Maybe if he’d done it immediately, Dick would have been less incensed. But he’s been following the details of that case, he knows where Slade’s been these last weeks, when he wasn’t busy stalking Dick.
“And all I asked for—if you were so set on making it up to me—was for you to not kill the—”
Slade interrupts him angrily, finally an actual emotion on his face. “You’re not stupid enough to think I wouldn’t.”
“Yes, well, maybe I was hoping you would, just this once,” Dick shouts, despite there being barely any distance between them, “not disappoint me!”
The ringing silence that follows feels like a knife’s edge, like any second they might throw down right here and now, and fight it out once and for all.
Dick has no idea which one of them moves first, but when their mouths crash together in a biting kiss, it no longer matters. Slade drags him closer, pulls them so close to each other it’s hard to breathe, and the kiss tastes like blood and iron, and a gathering storm. One that they should both know better than to get caught in.
But Dick also remembers thinking Slade might be dead for real, and how not at all like relief that felt like.
With a hit so strong it actually forces Slade to take a step back, Dick breaks the kiss. And then immediately kisses Slade again, just to bite him, and tries to maneuver them towards the fire escape when Slade takes it as permission to drag him close again instead of a fight.
He doesn’t seem fazed when Dick still tries to fight him; instead he pulls Dick’s legs up around his waist and half carries half manhandles Dick onto the fire escape. Being moved around so effortlessly distracts Dick for a moment, and he sinks into the kiss fully.
Then he remembers he shouldn’t be letting this happen and tries to fight again, even harder. Unwraps his legs from Slade’s waist and tries to put some space between them. Enough to let him hit harder. But Slade grabs his arm, twists it until Dick is forced to kneel and turn. He puts some of his weight on Dick and keeps him half restrained long enough to find and disable the traps on the Nightwing suit, and start pulling at it, trying to get it open.
For a moment Dick stays just like that, the side of his face pressed against cool metal, the steps and railings digging into his legs and his ribs uncomfortably. Slade is pulling his suit open, and will, Dick is pretty sure, fuck him right there, outside, on the fire escape.
And Dick almost wants to allow it.
But it’s his building, his fire escape where he knows three of his neighbors come to smoke. He doesn’t want them to find out he’s Nightwing just because they happened to stumble upon him half naked right outside his apartment window.
(He doesn’t think about how that’s his only objection; how someone seeing him get fucked by Deathstroke wouldn’t be much of an issue otherwise.)
Slade is too distracted by getting Dick’s pants open, he doesn’t notice when Dick reaches for the escrima stick. He does notice when Dick pushes it against his neck, as accurately as he can in the position he’s in, and tases him on the highest setting.
The charge is strong enough to stun Slade for a moment, and Dick scrambles out from under him and towards the window. He manages to get inside the apartment, but not very far, when Slade catches up with him and traps him against a kitchen counter. Dick pauses for a moment, slightly held back by not wanting to destroy his kitchen. Slade takes advantage of his momentary lack of resistance to finally get his suit open.
And then suddenly, instead of fighting, they’re still, just breathing each other’s air too loudly. Dick realizes he’s holding on to Slade’s shoulder; has one hand fisted in Slade’s hair while Slade keeps him in place with a hand on his hip and pushes his clothes down.
The only light is moonlight mixing with the orange-pink light pollution and falling over them in stretched out panels, but it’s enough to see by. Enough to see how close to awed Slade looks, suddenly.
Dick can’t take too much of it, not even with a domino hiding his own eyes from whatever Slade might find there in return.
He breaks the moment before it gets too intimate by trying to get pieces of Slade’s armor off with shaky, half-numb fingers, He drags Slade close with the grip he has on his hair. Slade obligingly bites his neck like he’s trying to get back at Dick for getting tased.
When Slade finally decides he’s undressed him enough, he presses lube-slicked fingers between Dick’s thighs, against his hole. Dick doesn’t want to know (really really wants to know) if Slade always carries lube on him, or if it’s part of his ‘stalk Nightwing’ kit. If this is all as much or as little of a surprise to him as it is to Dick, after that call and what followed it.
And then Slade pushes those fingers in.
Dick hits his head against the counter when he arches up with how intense everything suddenly is. Slade starts fingering him like he’s single mindedly trying to find what angle and pressure will make Dick scream and come on his fingers the fastest, and he’s stupidly good at it. Dick would fight him, make him slow down, or maybe he’d fight him down to the floor and ride him instead, but he can’t even remember how many limbs he’s supposed to have, never mind how to use them.
Surprisingly, or maybe not, Slade does stop before Dick comes. He moves Dick’s legs how he likes and makes enough space between them for himself. And then finally actually fucks him. He presses his cock in roughly, no hesitation, and Dick loves the shock of it, and then the burn right after. But then Slade does slow down after the first few thrusts.
It’s about to get too slow, slow enough to let Dick think again, and he can’t let that happen. Not now.
He wraps his legs around Slade’s waist and pulls him in hard and fast, making them both moan. It’s enough to make Slade get the message, as well. He fucks Dick fast and relentless, exactly how Dick wants it. It’s perfect, and it aches and sends shocks of pleasure all the way up his spine just right.
Too soon, Dick feels the tension in his own body coil up so tightly it has no other option but to break. He comes with a hoarse, breathless sound, muffled on a kiss that tastes like blood again.
And then it’s too much really fast, because Slade doesn’t slow down even a little—he fucks Dick through his orgasm and straight into overstimulation, and still keeps going. The whines Dick can’t keep silent might just spur him on. And Dick—doesn’t want him to stop. It goes right back to feeling good, and he’s almost annoyed when Slade finally breaks that relentless rhythm, and in a few more shaky thrusts comes, and stops completely.
They stay on the counter as they catch their breaths. The hot wet puffs of air against Dick’s neck keep reminding him he’s half on his way to another high, but one it doesn’t look like Slade is about to get him to. Most of Slade’s weight is pressing Dick down into the hard surface of the counter.
Everything feels uncomfortable, in too many ways to count. But Dick can’t bear the thought of Slade leaving so soon, so he whispers, “Take me to bed. My legs don’t work.”
Slade does.
- - -
The sun is already dawning when Slade finally leaves.
Dick is sitting on the railing of the fire escape in shorts and the thinnest, most form-fitting shirt he owns, underdressed for the pre-dawn cool. He listens to Slade buckle the last of his armor on, sipping coffee and admiring the slowly blooming bruises on his own wrists.
When his phone pings with an alert, it ends up being a text with surveillance photos of Deathstroke attached that says
-‘Deathstroke in town. Need assistance?’
Dick sends a quick
-‘Dealt with’
back. He’s almost certain Slade was only in town for him, and not for any kind of contract.
While he’s putting his phone away, he notices his escrima on the fire escape, two flights down, where it ended up last night. The other one’s probably under his bed, where it rolled after Slade tried to leave the first time, and Dick tased him and rode him right there on the bedroom floor.
Dick watches Slade as he goes up the fire escape, probably about to travel across the rooftops again.
“You still owe me,” he calls out before Slade disappears from view completely. Slade pauses only for a second, and then he’s gone. But he doesn’t disagree.
So there’s a good chance he’ll come back and stalk Dick some more to find another minor trouble he can solve and pass it off as repayment. Or maybe next time he’ll just show up at Dick’s apartment directly.
Maybe one day Dick will even figure out where the fuck they stand.