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"Are you gonna watch to the bitter end or are you ready to get out of here?"
He was ready to get out.
He trailed after Kory back to the van, where Gar, Rachel, and Angela were already piled into the back seats. Kory went straight to the driver's side door and where there was normally a small, silent power struggle over who got to drive, Dick went to the passenger side without comment or complaint. His training might allow him to shove aside the immediate effects of psychotropic drugs and power through a fight, but pushing like that always had a price. No one could do it forever, no matter how determined they were. He collapsed into the seat, leaned his head back against the headrest, closed his eyes, and let the crash take him.
You are stronger than anyone I've ever met. Now we have to get out of here.
He could feel the strap across his forehead, holding him immobile, his neck stiff with lack of movement, or maybe with the strain from fighting. He'd fought… he had fought, hadn't he? How had he gotten here? Surely he hadn't just let them strap him to a chair, threat to Gar and Rachel notwithstanding.
He replayed it in his head. The tunnels, the gun at Gar's head, realizing that even with Kory and all of her power at his side there was nothing they could do, not at that exact moment. The armed and armored guards had approached, and then… then he was in the chair, covered in sweat, muscles bunched and aching, no way out.
They must have dragged Kory from him. Even if Dick had somehow lost his mind and passively gone to whatever fate they intended for him, she wouldn't do the same. As soon as they were out of danger of the gas pipes in the tunnels, she would have done something, even if it was reckless. But then again, if they'd been able to get him here with apparent ease, they might have handled her just as easily.
Easily. Was it easy? A fight, drugs, what? Dick jerked at the restraints—
And sat forward in the van with a gasp.
"We're here," Kory said. Dick glanced in the rearview mirror. Rachel was looking at him with wide, worried eyes. Gar's eyes were fixed firmly out the window. Angela was looking at her knees.
Dick took a steadying breath and looked around. They were in the Chicago safehouse's parking garage.
"This place is compromised," he said. His voice was steel scraping on flint.
"And don't you want to know how?" Kory asked.
He did.
"Stay in the car," he told Rachel and Gar and Angela. They should find a new safehouse, a motel, somewhere anonymous to pause and recover and process, or at least somewhere to leave the kids (and Angela, impossibly alive but faintly trembling, clung to and clinging and a mystery they couldn't possibly trust, not yet, but here they were.) before hunting for answers in a place they knew to be unsafe, where their enemies knew to look for them.
He eyed Kory, debating whether she'd consent to stay down here and watch over them. She answered the question before he asked it.
"You're the detective," she said. "I'll play bodyguard."
The elevator let him up, his biometrics reinstated using Jason's credentials when the two of them had first arrived. Bruce was going to burn this safehouse anyway, if Dick knew him at all.
He exited cautiously, expecting to find some evidence that the place had been ransacked, that Dr. Adamson had burst his way out of the shower using some hitherto unrevealed demonic strength, or that a SWAT team of shadowy operatives had tossed the place for personal belongings, for leverage.
Dick was intimately familiar with Bruce's security measures and there was no way anyone had gotten in or out without leaving some trace of themselves, even if it was just a use log on the elevator. Yet that was exactly what it looked like; the safehouse was pristine, or as pristine as it could be when ninety percent of your walls were glass and two teenagers had been living there for a few days.
The case was sitting on the table, its red security light staring steadily at him.
Dick blinked at it, approaching slowly, irresistibly drawn in by its gravity.
He'd taken the case with him. He knew he had. How else could the suit have been there at the facility to burn? Was this one Jason's? Had he come back? Dick turned quickly, expecting to see a snarky nineteen-year-old in a red hoodie—
—with a bo staff, venting his rage in the Cave, channeling his anger into his own flesh where it belonged—
The handle fit his hand the way the trapeze bar once had. It was his case, and it was here, and it could not be here. He had brought the case on the mission. The suit had been in the case. The suit, which he had not removed from its bullet-proof, blast-proof, tamper-proof, black-box indestructible, unhackable case, was now a wrecked mess in the dirt of an abandoned facility currently smoldering in the middle of nowhere. And the case... was here.
Dick’s thumb drifted to the print reader, but before he could press it he jerked his hand back like he’d touched a hot stove. Stupid. Opening a mysterious package that had turned up in the middle of a compromised safehouse? He pressed a hand to his head. He should have sent Kory up. He was still hungover from whatever they'd given him at the facility, and this wasn't even a known toxin, like Ivy's pheromones or Scarecrow's gas, where he knew what to expect and what it took to beat it. He was compromised and he should get out of here.
He left the case and crept into the bathroom, edging the door open slowly and using the mirrors to check the room before entering. It was empty. The shower held no trace that anyone had ever been held hostage and interrogated there.
Interrogated. That was a nice word for it. A good, professional word. A word that belonged to a detective, and not to a vigilante.
There was nothing here for him. Dick went back to the elevator, eyeing the case once more as he passed it. He remembered the feel of the mask in his hand right before he'd tossed it into the fire but then he also remembered seeing himself reflected in a puddle dressed as Robin and that wasn't exactly the kind of thing that healthy, well-adjusted, un-drugged people experienced.
"Nothing," he told the others when he got back down to the garage. "No evidence anyone was ever there except for us."
Kory frowned and Gar continued to stare out the window and Rachel gave him that deep, examining look like she was trying to find a lie, and Angela said, "They do that."
"Kory, let's get out of here," Dick said.
"Yeah," Kory agreed. "Where to?"
"Just drive."
Kory shrugged and started the car and they pulled out into a gray Chicago day.
"Rachel," Dick said. "How did you get us out?"
Her expression closed off, her shoulders hunching inward, her grip on her mother's hand tightening. "I told you—"
"No, I know. I mean after that. You just… found us? It was a big facility."
"Dr. Adamson had a computer. I looked everyone up."
"And no one stopped you?" Dick asked.
"I didn't let them see me."
A teenager with no training and showy, frequently uncontrollable powers had snuck around a facility crawling with the operatives of a mysterious and well-funded organization that seemed to know everything about them and she hadn't gotten caught. Okay.
"There were guards when we got Gar," Angela put in suddenly, like she'd only just thought of it.
"Guards?" Dick asked. "Or—"
"A scientist. One," Gar said. "Just one."
"Gar," Rachel said, but nothing else. Gar pressed his forehead against the window. Lake Michigan winked at them from between buildings as Kory guided them north.
"And then you came and got me," Dick said.
He was being watched. Had been watched. There had been plenty of people around to hold him down, to document… or had that been part of the hallucination? Either way, by the time Rachel had gotten to Dick's cell, surely some kind of alarm would have been raised. This organization had been prepared for them, had had a cell that could handle Kory's power, had known all about Dick and how to control him. They'd have to be extremely stupid not to go straight to his cell and Kory's to intercept Rachel, and they had proved several times that they were not stupid.
Understaffed, perhaps. Though, there had been plenty of shadowy figures watching Kory as she was operated on. Maybe they limited security in favor of maintaining secretiveness.
Or maybe they wanted him and Kory and Gar and Rachel to escape. And maybe they wanted Angela with them.
Whatever they wanted, it didn't matter. They'd burned right along with Robin. Dick had made the call and turned Kory loose on them, denouncing Robin and what Robin had made of him in the same breath that he embraced it and sliced right through the Gordian knot that was the organization. No more scientists who knew their secrets, no more threat to Rachel, just flames burning him a nice, clean slate.
"Pull over," Dick gasped.
"What, here?" Kory said. They were driving through a vaguely run-down neighborhood. There was a grocery store, a strip mall, a nail salon, but also a small Latvian folk art museum, a Head Start facility, and a park with new equipment. Not a wealthy area, but not poor either. The kind of place where residents took notice of what was happening.
Kory looked at his face, shrugged, and slowed, pulling down a side street. Dick shoved out of the van before it stopped moving, stumbled into the alley behind the strip mall, and vomited down the side of a dumpster.
It didn't make any sense.
Robin, for him, had come to represent violence, rage, and pain, and he'd made his final rejection of it with an act of violence, rage, and pain. He'd killed a building full of people, and if that wasn't enough, he'd destroyed evidence, leads that might have told him who those people were, what the organization wanted, whether there were other branches, who they worked for – Rachel's mysterious father.
That hadn't been Robin, that was just him. Was this what he was without Robin?
"Dick, stop." Kory had parked and come up behind him. She sounded impatient. "This is pointless. Don't enough people beat you up without you doing it to yourself, too?"
"It's just the drugs. I'm fine."
"Wow," Kory said.
Dick straightened, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand, then grimaced and wiped the back of his hand on his coat. Kory's ever-so-slightly-raised eyebrows, crossed arms, and canted hip were distinctly unimpressed. "What?" Dick said.
"It's just that I thought Rachel's lie-detector ability was a superpower but actually I think it's more likely that you're superhumanly bad at lying."
Dick glanced back at the van where Rachel and Gar weren't making any effort to hide their staring.
"Okay, fine," Dick said. "Doesn't this all seem a little off to you, though?"
"You mean the asylum full of mad scientists torturing us, or are we talking about the fact that seventy-five percent of us have superpowers, and you were raised by something called a Batman that, despite the name, Gar assures me is even more impressive than being able to transform into a tiger?" Kory asked.
"They were ready for Gar and Rachel. It was a trap. They were ready for us. And they just let us walk out of there?"
"There wasn't any just about it," Kory growled. "We fought our way out of that, Dick, and then we blew them up so they can never do that to anyone else, ever."
"They knew. We should never have been able to get out of there."
"They underestimated us."
"Like we underestimated Dr. Adamson? How did he get out of the safehouse? How did they get their hands on my suit? How am I even upright after the amount of drugs they poured into my system? And you!"
Kory's arms were uncrossed now, hanging loosely at her sides. A ready position. Dick realized he was ranting. "What about me, Dick?" Kory asked, her voice even.
Dick closed his eyes and rallied his reserves, slowing his words. "They were ready for you. They know about your powers, how they work. That means there's a file on you somewhere. How are you okay with burning all of that down when the only thing you've wanted since the day we met is to figure out who you are?"
"We got out of there, Dick. What's done is done, it's useless to—"
—deny who you really are—
"This isn't who I am," Dick murmured, again.
"Okay, can you have your identity crisis in the car while we drive? We have to get out—"
"—of here, and we can't do that without you. You promised! You promised you'd never leave me. You promised."
Rachel swam into focus above him, purples and blacks and pale, pale eyes.
"Yeah," Dick croaked out. "I guess I did."
They hauled him up, Gar supporting him on one side, exited the padded cell (just walked out, no guards, this isn't—) and went to save Kory and get out of there. One more time.