Chapter Text
Chapter One: “You have to let go” | Barbed Wire | Bound
Every day, between three o’clock and five o’clock, Dick would take his schoolwork into the unused sitting room at the very front of the Manor. It was the sort of room they would have taken guests to, if they ever had any, and although Alfred kept it spotlessly clean, it had a bereft air to it; a car left to rust in a garage, a piano silently gathering dust, a performer without an audience. A purpose left unfulfilled.
Much of the Manor was that way. Even after living at Wayne Manor for four months, it still struck Dick as absurd that there were only three of them in that great big house, with its endless rooms dedicated to overly specific things that none of them seemed to do.
There was a music room, but he had never seen Alfred or Bruce pick up an instrument, despite his suspicions that they both probably could play something.
There was a games room with several pool tables and a darts board and cupboards full of old board games, the likes of which Dick had never heard of, but even Dick soon tired of trying to play snooker by himself.
The ballroom particularly offended him. Why on earth would any house need its own ballroom, and if you were going to have a house with a ballroom, then you may as well use it. He had been scolded by Alfred for skidding across its marble floor in his stocking feet, and when he had asked if they would have Bruce’s birthday party in there, Alfred had only nudged him back out the door.
Dick didn’t know the word excessive yet, but he recognized its definition when he saw it, and such a grand house was, in his eyes, utterly wasted on three people, especially when two of those people spent their evenings skulking through the city’s poorest places only to come back to such opulence.
The dissonance of that made Dick uncomfortable in a way he couldn’t quite put into words, not that he would have shared the thought even if he could, afraid that his discomfort may be misinterpreted as ingratitude. He was, it felt, always one wrong word away from being as superfluous to his new guardian as his many neglected rooms.
Dick perched in the window seat, scattering his books and worksheets around him to create an illusion of studious diligence, and began his daily vigil. In the last four months, he had scoped out only a fraction of the front-facing rooms, but he had decided that this one had the best view of the winding driveway up from the front gate.
All the better to spot when Bruce’s car arrived home.
He chewed on the end of his pencil, half-listening out for Alfred’s footsteps, his cue to look appropriately absorbed in today’s math problems. Alfred was still trying to find Dick’s level, and he had finished the worksheet so fast that he was a little offended at where Alfred had set the bar, so low on the ground that Dick could step over it. At least that freed him up for when Bruce got home.
Not, Dick thought glumly, that Bruce was likely to give him much more than a perfunctory hello before he hid himself away in his study. He bit harder on the pencil at the thought. Four months in his house, and two months since he had first declared himself Robin and saved Bruce from the infiltration in the cave on Halloween, yet Bruce seemed to only have time for him when they were wearing masks. Once they were simply Bruce and Dick again, masks hung up until the next patrol, all the camaraderie of the night seemed to fall away.
It stung in a way Dick didn’t quite understand.
It was quarter to five before the gates at the end of the drive parted for the sleek black Lamborghini Bruce favoured, and Dick hurried to the vestibule just in time for Bruce to walk through the door, shrugging off his coat.
“Hi Bruce.”
Despite this having become a daily occurrence, Bruce still looked surprised to find Dick waiting in the entryway, or perhaps he still wasn’t used to having someone other than Alfred in the house. He managed an absent little smile.
“Dick, how was your day?”
Dick dogged his steps into the main hall.
“Boring. I could answer the sums Alfred’s giving me in my sleep! Was work okay? You look all tired.”
“It was work.”
He always said that, like it was an answer in itself. Dick had no idea what it was he actually did when he went to the Wayne Enterprises building, or how it was any different than what he did when he holed up in his study for hours on end, but Bruce never offered any more details and Dick wasn’t sure if it was nosy to ask.
“Are we gonna go out tonight?” Dick asked instead, jogging a little to keep up with Bruce’s longer strides. “I finished all my schoolwork, and I’ve been practicing my leg sweeps.”
“Not on Alfred, I hope,” Bruce said, but nothing more, and Dick’s stomach sank.
They were coming to the study door now, and as Bruce opened it, he looked down at Dick with that same absent smile he gave reporters and waiters and everyone else who didn’t really matter.
“Why don’t you go see if Alfred needs any help with dinner? I’ve got some calls I need to make.”
Dick darted forward as Bruce made to shut the door.
“Actually! I, erm, had a little trouble with the last question. I don’t really understand how Alfred explained it. Could you help me with it?”
It wasn’t that Bruce was cold, necessarily, but to a boy who had grown up surrounded by doting, affectionate people, the absence of outright warmth from him was glacial. Dick’s heart thundered as he waited for an answer, a little part of him irritated that so small a request even needed to be questioned.
“I thought you said you could do those sums in your sleep, hm?” Bruce said lightly, but he at least had the good grace to look a little guilty as he gently nudged Dick back from the doorway. Dick stepped back, the worksheet crumpling in his fist. “Sorry, kiddo, I was stuck in meetings all day so there’s a couple of important calls I need to return. If you’re really struggling, I’m sure Alfred could help you. Why don’t you head down and ask him? He won’t mind.”
It was fortunate Dick had experience shamming smiles for the crowd, as he did just that now, feigning indifference as he was gently but adamantly dismissed.
“Sure. Sorry for bothering you.”
“…You weren’t bothering me, Dick. I’m just busy.”
“It’s okay. I’ll see you at dinner.”
Dick was halfway down the hall, shoulders hunched and bottom lip caught between his teeth, when he heard a weary sigh from behind him.
“Wanna try that leg sweep out on me later before we head out?”
Dick instantly lit up, spinning back around to grin at Bruce.
“You’re taking me out with you?”
“For a little while, at least. Alfred’ll have my head if I keep you out ‘til morning, but considering you don’t have to be up for anything special, we can get a couple hours in together. But only if I finish these calls, okay?”
Dick knew a bribe when he heard one, but if it meant he could suit up and spend time with Batman later, then he could bear a few more lonely hours.
They fit together better in the masks than out of them. Never exactly verbose, Batman at least made an effort to keep up a stream of conversation with Robin, having spent the last two months of training instilling in him the importance that they communicate effectively with one another. The drive into Gotham always meant at least fifteen minutes of Batman briefing him on what cases they were looking into, or if there was nothing live at the time, the plan for their patrol route. Unlike Bruce, Batman encouraged questions, and despite his surly countenance, he wasn’t afraid to play along if Dick tried to joke with him.
More than the excitement of protecting people, it was that brief window of time where Batman would speak to Robin that Dick looked forward to the most, well worth the odd punch he didn’t dodge fast enough or the overtired, pinching headaches the following morning.
That didn’t mean Batman couldn’t be just as cold as Bruce, of course, and for all that he would play the straight man for Robin in the privacy of the car, once they were in the field, there was no room for levity or, more importantly, disobedience.
Dick perched on the lip of the warehouse roof, his fingers curling around the cool cement as he watched the shadows of men moving below. The arms shipment had come in as expected, but that wasn’t all that was passing through the docks that night, and Batman had slipped off to the neighbouring dockyard to investigate the chain of cars they had seen driving in through unlocked gates, leaving Robin to watch their original targets. The time to strike was slipping away as they loaded the last of the crates into an idling van, and Dick’s feet were itching to spring forward.
Not without Batman. That instruction had been delivered with a firm hand on his shoulder, which meant Batman really meant it.
“Batman, they’re getting ready to leave,” Dick whispered, index finger pressed to his ear piece. “Are you almost back? We’re gonna lose them!”
There was a fuzzy silence on the other end before Bruce’s voice came though, breathy and almost drowned out entirely by a flurry of gunfire.
“Robin, go wait in the car for me.”
Order given, the connection immediately went silent, and Dick’s heart thundered in his chest as he waited for more, for a chance to hear that background noise again and assure himself that it wasn’t gunfire, that Bruce wasn’t getting shot at alone over there.
Dick touched his ear piece again; “B, are you alright?”
Nothing, not even static.
Down below, the rear doors to the van slammed shut, the men climbing up into the front seats. Dick teetered at the edge of the roof, torn between seeing through the night’s work and doing as he was told. He groaned quietly as the van pulled away, its rear lights growing smaller down the long stretch of road, but he stayed where he was, double tapping his ear piece to switch to the other channel.
“A, I’ve lost contact with Batman. Can you get through to him? I - It sounded like there were guns.”
More silence, but the dull crackle of interference in the connection told Dick the line was live. Distant clicking as Alfred typed at the computer, before, “Bear with me, Robin, I’m accessing the cowl-feed.” More silence, heavier, telling. “…Batman has been outnumbered. It appears he has been hit.” Dick had never heard Alfred sound afraid before, but there was certainly a difference in his voice as he spoke now. “Robin, return to the car. I’m sending a tip-off to the GCPD.”
“What good will that do?!” Dick demanded, pacing the edge of the roof with fistfuls of cape bunched up in his hands. The van had long since vanished from sight, and all his focus was on the distant, dark dockyard where Bruce had disappeared to. Outnumbered, potentially shot, and there had been so many cars heading in that direction. What had Bruce been thinking, engaging when there were so many?! It was the exact thing he told Dick to never, under any circumstances, do. The hypocrisy of it only fanned the flames of Dick’s frustration, and his pacing took him across the roof in the direction Bruce had gone, the complete opposite direction from the Batmobile.
“The sound of sirens will send them running, which will give Batman the opportunity to remove himself from —!”
Alfred’s line cut out.
“Agent A? Are you still there?” Dick switched channels again. “Batman, can you hear me?!”
Perhaps if either of them had answered Dick then, he would have done as he was told and gone back to the car, but if he were being honest with himself, he had already been planning his running leap from the rooftop before Alfred’s line had gone dead. He couldn’t even enjoy the moments of free-fall as he usually did, too consumed with the mental image of Batman at the center of a circle of men, all pointing guns at him.
He was halfway to the other dockyard, sprinting through shadowed alleys between the warehouses, when Alfred’s voice returned.
“Master Ri — Robin, that is not the direction of the car.”
“Did you get through to B?”
“…No. The situation has escalated, and… well, I have alerted the GCPD to a disturbance, but I fear their arrival will not be timely enough to prevent further harm.” Dick didn’t waste breath on answering, crouching at the corner of a building and surveying the open space between him and the chain-link fence ahead. It was topped with barbed wire, stretching as far as he could see in both directions, and there was no convenient hole in the fence to slip through. Only over. “Robin… Batman has been restrained, and it appears to be their intention to throw him into the harbour.”
Dick’s chest clenched, a light-headed fuzziness washing over him. The picture in his head changed from Batman surrounded by guns to Batman sinking into darker and darker waters, bubbles rising from his mouth until they stopped.
“I - I can help,” Dick said, or perhaps it came out as a question, uncertainty thick in his voice. He didn’t realize until Alfred spoke again that he was waiting there, poised at the corner of the building, for permission to move.
“It will be a very narrow window of opportunity,” Alfred began, any trace of that earlier fear absent now, firm in his focus, “You are not to engage the miscreants, Robin. I will guide you to a safe location to hide, and only when they have submerged Batman will you enter the water to sever his bonds. You will then both be free to swim to safety. Is that understood?”
It was reminiscent of a briefing from Batman himself, and Dick wondered how much of Batman’s no-nonsense attitude was cribbed from Bruce’s own experiences. Dick found himself nodding, though Alfred couldn’t see him.
“I don’t have anything to cut with, though. Br - Batman said I can’t have weapons yet.”
“…Batman should be suitably armed, though he will be unable to reach for his tools at the moment. From your current location, head straight until you come to Warehouse Three. We will need to be careful to keep you out of sight from that point on.”
It was all the permission Dick needed to dart forward. As he neared the fence, he reached up to unclip his cape, wrapping one of his hands completely. His momentum fed into his leap, and he sprung up the fence, clambering hand over foot to the top where he used his enshrouded hand to flip himself over the barbed wire. Though he felt the sharp press of its points, the cape was reinforced enough to withstand the pressure, and as he touched down on the other side, there wasn’t a single tear.
He clipped the cape back on and made for the warehouse with the big off-white ‘3’ painted on its side.
Following Alfred’s directions, Dick soon found himself crouching behind a forklift truck, peering from behind its massive wheels at the scene ahead. There were a lot of people milling about the open yard. Not the scruffy, poster-child sort of thugs Dick had spent the earlier part of the night watching, but the sort of people who hid their guns in suit jackets and blended into the crowd when the police went hunting. Besides them, there were other people, and Dick's chest ached at the sight of them; kids, mostly, no one quite as young as Dick, but kids nonetheless. They were being inspected one-by-one by some of the more expensively dressed men, their hair rubbed between forefinger and thumb, their jaws pressed open to expose their teeth, their hands turned over under torchlight.
Like show dogs.
“The police are on their way, Robin,” Alfred gently reminded him, no doubt checking Dick’s lens feed and seeing exactly where he was looking. “No such sales will be going through tonight. We must focus on reaching Batman.”
Dick nodded jerkily, and with difficulty, he tore his eyes away from the line of dull-eyed children awaiting inspection.
At least now he understood why Bruce had broken his own rule and jumped in when so badly outnumbered.
A distance away from the men and the children was a fenced-off area where the boats offloaded. A boat was already growing smaller across the bay, no doubt having completed its inhumane delivery, but though the boat was gone, there was still a gaggle of people at the water’s edge.
At their centre was Batman, ensnared by loops of thick, dock-line rope from his shoulders to his waist, arms pinned behind his back. Dick touched the side of his mask and his lenses zoomed in on Batman’s face. He couldn’t tell if his eyes were open behind the cowl, but his mouth was slack, lips parted.
“He’s out cold?” Dick asked, and though he knew the answer, he very much wanted Alfred to tell him otherwise.
“He took a bad knock to the head. The cowl bore the brunt of it, but the attack damaged the cowl’s in-built security. We didn’t realize until one of those people,” it sounded like a different, fouler word in that tone, “attempted to unmask him, and the emergency shock affected them both.”
Dick zoomed back out and belatedly noticed there was at least one man unconscious to the side of the group.
“Good,” he said, more than a little vindictively. “I’m going in.”
“Wait!” Dick froze, still hidden behind the forklift truck. “Tell me your plan of action.”
“I’m gonna go left and keep to the shadows, back around the side of the warehouse, and climb the fence there where they can’t see me. Then, I’ll wait until the police come and these guys all get scared off so I can untie Batman and hide us until he wakes up.”
There was a contemplative silence on the other end of the line, and Dick waited for a thorough critique, for Alfred to propose problems for Dick to counter as if this were a logic puzzle assigned for homework, but in the end, there was only a resigned sigh, and, “Please be careful, Robin.”
The plan lasted as long as it took Dick to get to a part of the fence where he could climb over unseen. That was when the police sirens approached, sending the group into a panic. Startled by the noise, Dick’s foot slipped on the chain-links as he was halfway over the top, and he thanked whatever gods were watching over him that he had thought to lay his cape over the barbed wire, as that was all that protected him as he lost his balance and tumbled down over the other side. The cape itself wasn’t quite as lucky, one of the barbs embedding in its weave, and as Dick grabbed at the cape to right himself, the wire snapped, plunging alongside Dick and his torn cape.
Dick hit the ground with a muffled yelp, glancing in the direction of the group guarding Batman. They hadn’t seen him yet, but they had heard the sirens, and Dick watched the moment they decided to cut their losses and shoved Batman’s bound, unconscious body over the edge of the dock and into the dark waters below.
“No, no, no!” Dick jumped to his feet and made to move forward, only to be jerked back by his ensnared cape, losing his footing completely. With a frustrated grunt, he unfastened the cape altogether and ran ahead without it, uncaring if the fleeing goons looked back and spotted him diving into the water after Batman. He had barely sunk by the time Dick reached him, but even as he clung to the concrete lip of the dock with one hand and tugged at the tail of the rope binding Bruce, he couldn’t keep Bruce’s head above the water. Beneath the sound of the enclosing police sirens and Dick’s own frantic splashing, he heard a splutter. “B, are you with me?!”
The weight at the end of the rope slackened as Bruce came to, instinctively kicking his legs in the water. With his arms bound, however, treading water was the best he could do, and the weight of the Batsuit was pulling them both down. Dick managed to scrabble up the edge of the dockside, sopping wet and trembling from the cold, and with his feet braced against a bollard, he put his all into pulling at the rope, so thick he could barely get his hands all the way around it.
“Robin —“
Dick couldn’t tell if he heard Bruce’s voice through the comms or out loud, but the sound made his heart soar, uncharacteristically reedy as it was.
“I - I got you, B! Hang on!”
Even as he said that, the sole of his boots slipped against the bollard, too wet to gain purchase, the weight pulling against him too strong. He felt the first burst of pain in his shoulders and couldn’t quite bite back the gasp, white flashing across his vision. The rope just kept slipping, and inch by inch, Bruce sank deeper beneath the surface. For all that he kicked up, the water was splashing over his face, into his mouth, his words a gurgle.
“Let go,” Bruce managed before he disappeared beneath the water again. Dick scrabbled desperately as one of his feet slipped off the bollard altogether, and without its leverage, he staggered forward, dropping to his knees and getting dragged across the concrete towards the dock’s edge. He still pulled as hard as he could, feeling the strain like a taut wire across his back. Bruce’s head broke the surface again, only long enough for him to spit out a mouthful of water and exclaim, “You have to let go, Robin!”
If he let go, Bruce would sink. The ropes were bound so tightly around his torso that Dick had no hope of getting his hands under to free a batarang.
Dick sacrificed some length of the rope to scramble back across the ground, grabbing what he could of it to loop around the bollard. The loose knot wouldn’t hold for long, but he knew he had no hope of pulling Bruce up, no matter how hard he tried. Already, his hands were red raw from the rope, and every twitch of his arms brought a lash of pain all down his back.
Desperately, Dick cast his eyes around, a part of him hoping that one of the fleeing criminals would have dropped something useful. A knife would have been a blessing, but no such luck. There was nothing in their wake but the sound of squealing tires and a line of abandoned and traumatised children. The police cars were trying to block the gates, but several of the black cars had already broken through the barricade.
Nothing, there was nothing! Behind him, Dick couldn’t hear any splashing anymore, and panic seized him like a hand around his throat.
A flash of yellow caught Dick’s eye; his cape fluttered in the wind, still caught on broken link of barbed wire.
Dick barely gave the idea a second’s thought before he was sprinting back towards his cape, gathering the material in both hands and wrapping it around the end of the barbed wire. Like unfurling a cotton reel, Dick ran and pulled the chain of wire with all his strength, throwing himself back as hard as he could to separate the barbed wire from the top of the fence. It sprung off jerkily, resistant to Dick’s yanks, and his cape could not hold up against the strength of his grip.
Barbs broke through the material, biting into the meat of his hands. He barely felt the metal sinking in, so focused on pulling down a long enough chain that it would reach Bruce. He couldn’t even feel the pain in his shoulders anymore, mindless of anything but how many seconds had passed since Bruce had last broken the surface of the water.
Tearing away the cape and clutching the end of the length of barbed wire in his bare, bleeding hands, Dick dove back into the water. Bruce was still fighting the pull of the water, legs kicking and lips pressed shut. Dick pushed aside the fleeting thought that his kicks were getting limper, looping his legs around Bruce’s waist for leverage as he began hacking at the topmost rope with the sharp barbs.
Blood blossomed through the water as he worked, his lungs beginning to burn.
The rope was just so thick! The sharp edge of the metal was fraying it, but slowly, too slowly, Dick’s frantic pace staggered by trying to move through water. Bruce was going to drown, and he was going to watch it happen, utterly useless.
As if sensing his growing distress, Alfred’s voice returned to his ear.
“Keep going, Robin. You’ve almost gotten through it. Just a little more.”
Alfred’s air of calm, however forced, was a balm to Dick’s nerves, and he doubled his efforts even as dark spots began to dance across his vision. He couldn’t feel his hands at all any more, just focused on moving his arms, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. So intent on his task, he didn’t notice when the barbed wire finally bit through the last thread of rope, the other bands wound around Bruce going slack.
Instantly, Bruce’s struggle redoubled, and it was Dick who went limp in the water, legs losing their grip around him. The next thing Dick knew, he was on his back on the dockside, hidden behind a storage crate with Batman crowded over him. He was wheezing too, swaying where he knelt, his cape so drenched that it dripped like rain over Dick.
“B… ‘kay?”
Bruce pressed a hand down over Dick’s mouth just before footsteps ran past their hiding spot. Only when their footsteps receded did his hand fall away, but only so that he could pick Dick up as if he were a baby, hoisting him up against his shoulder before running from the cacophony of the police surveying the scene behind them.
Each stride jostled Dick badly, the missing pain returning with a vengeance. Hanging over Bruce's shoulder, he raised his hands to his face and winced at the state of them, lacerated from fingertip to wrist. Blood oozed so thickly that Dick could smell it, and his stomach roiled, only made worse as Bruce leaped a gap between berths and the damage to Dick’s shoulders made itself known.
Bruce set him down gently when they finally made it back to the car, setting him atop the bonnet and pulling a ribbon of bandages from one of the pouches on his belt, thankfully waterproof. He didn’t say a word as he carefully wrapped Dick’s torn hands, nor when he pressed two tablets against his lips to help with the pain.
It was only when Dick leaned forward, catching Bruce’s wrist between his two bandaged hands, asking again, “Are you okay?” that Bruce looked him in the eye.
Dick didn’t need to see past his cowl to recognise Bruce’s disapproval.
There was a part of him that dared to hope he was wrong, that perhaps Bruce might be grateful that Dick had helped him, might even compliment his resourcefulness in finding a way to cut through the ropes.
That hope died as Bruce said, “I told you to go back to the car.”
And that was it. He rounded the car and slammed the door shut behind him, the engine idling while Dick swallowed his hurt and slipped off the hood, fumbling with the door handle between his bandaged fingers.
Quietly, Alfred said over their direct channel, “You did well, my boy.”
They were the words he was desperate to hear, but from the wrong man.