Chapter Text
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Chapter 1: Good Day Gone Bad
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It had been a pretty good day. Sun was out, wind nonexistent and they had finished the roof in record time. It was barely past noon and their day was done. Dick had carpooled with Maxwell, so he was cooling his heels waiting for the other man to finish up his phone call, making them the last to leave the site. Then they were off, the chitchat in the car stilted because Maxwell, uncharacteristically, wasn’t into telling one of his bawdy tales. Course maybe he didn’t have the breath for it since he had been chain smoking cigarettes since they hopped in the car for the ride home. In all honestly, Dick didn’t know why the guy had offered him a ride that day when he never had before.
‘You don’t have to be suspicious of everyone,’ Dick chided himself, because he was no longer in the line of work where he had to question every kindness. But it didn’t come naturally to him, ignoring the tightness in his gut at the anomaly.
By the time they had reached their roofing company’s headquarters, the only non-fleet vehicle left in the lot was Dick’s bike. With a hasty thanks to Maxwell, Dick hopped out of the car and climbed onto his bike, was turning the key even as he was about to put on his helmet. But he aborted sliding on the helmet when the bike’s engine didn’t even gurgle out a try to turn over.
‘Come on Kawasaki, don’t let us both down and give my brothers an opening to say BMWs are better,’ Dick entreated his bike as he climbed off and began checking the wiring, pulled the spark plugs and inspected the coils. But almost immediately he had to concede that it was either the starter or the battery. ‘So much for the pretty good day I was having.’
“Something wrong?” Maxwell called out through the open window of his car, having not moved his car since Dick’s departure from it. But then again, Dick noted he was busy lighting yet another cigarette.
“Won’t turn over. I’ll have to hit a parts store. I’ll just call for an Uber,” Dick called back, hand already diving into his back pocket for his cellphone, thinking Alfred would wash his mouth out with soap for even saying the word “Uber”.
“Come on, save your mechanic shtick for another day. I’ll just drive you home,” Maxwell offered, secretly wiping his sweety hand on his pants and willing his hand holding his cigarette to not shake. This is almost done, he chanted in his head.
Dick amicably turned him down. “Nah, I’m good. See ya tomorrow.” Dick had no intentions of letting Maxwell roll up to the Wayne Manor for numerous reasons. #1: No one at his work knew he had ties to the Waynes, WAS a Wayne. #2: Maxwell wasn’t the type of guy Dick wanted to get familiar with, would feel that way even if he didn’t have a home bragging truckloads of antiques, let alone a secret lair. #3: He honestly was full up on the guy’s company, non-communicative as it had been.
“I’m not leaving you stranded. Hop in,” Maxwell waved him over, read Dick’s hesitation and quipped, “Come on, you survived my driving two times today. One more trip won’t kill you,” but then he looked away from Dick, flinched out of the younger man’s line of sight. Had almost convinced himself Carter wouldn’t go to hard on the kid. After all, corpses didn’t repay debts.
Though Dick still wanted to say no, he knew part of working on a crew like his was keeping things cool with all the guys. Like going to the bar with them on his birthday had been a necessary “evil” and this now, taking Maxwell up on his offer, that was one of those times. “’Kay,” he accepted, loping his way to Maxwell’s car, already planning the bogus address he was going to have his co-worker drop him off at. He would find his way home or to a parts store from there. As he reclaimed the passenger seat, Maxwell pulled out of the lot.
“Hey, grab my sunglasses out of the glove compartment,” Maxwell asked, drumming his fingers on the steering wheel. Meanwhile, he was putting the car through its paces, pushing it beyond the speed limit by a good twenty MPH, something he hadn’t done on their trek to and from the job site.
Trying to write it off as an over stimulated nicotine side effect, Dick handed over the sunglasses, didn’t really appreciate Maxwell driving handsfree while he concurrently slid on the glasses and took a drag on his cigarette. ‘Please God, don’t let me get in a car accident, not after my last transportation accident fiasco.’ Because his family would FREAK!
It was after a few miles of silence and Maxwell drawing nearly consecutive puffs on his cigarette and filing the car with more smoke than he was blowing out the slightly down window that Dick quipped, “You need to know where I live or you gonna guess, have us play hot or cold?”
Maxwell looked at him, like he had forgotten he was there in the car with him. He gave an awkward laugh. “Yeah, sure, guess that’d be helpful.”
“Near the Chevy Dealership on Montreal boulevard,” Dick supplied the bogus location with the confidence of a born liar. ‘Which I am,’ Dick grimly reminded himself, before he corrected that assessment. ‘Or more like a made liar, honed to lie without a flicker of conscience.’ It took him a moment lost in his own head space to recognize that Maxwell hadn’t given any indication the directions had registered with him. “You know where I mean?” He was starting to think Maxwell was enjoying something more insidious than cigarettes, had popped a pill out of Dick’s sight because he suddenly seemed stoned. ‘Wouldn’t Dad flip his crap knowing I was in a car with a pill popper at the wheel.’ Not to mention what Alfred, who didn’t sanction any strangers playing chauffeur for Dick, would have to say about a stranger on drugs being his driver.
It was a delayed reaction, Maxwell’s, “Yeah..I ..I know it.”
Watching Maxwell’s hands tighten on the steering wheel, unconsciously nearly crushing his cigarette in the process, Dick’s Bat instincts were screaming at him to bail, right then and there. But he told himself to chill out. So what if Maxwell was acting weird, Maxwell was weird. He had just never spent much time alone with him to know if this was normal weird or more amped version of his weird. Still, Dick wished that he had made up an address much closer to their present location, was thinking of an excuse to vacate the car sooner when Maxwell winged the car left at the last moment onto a side road.
Knowing Gotham, even this new layout of Gotham better than a taxicab driver, (Apparently it was too ingrained a force of habit to know his surroundings, to have an egress mapped out from any location in the city), which meant Dick knew this side road wasn’t a shortcut. Not to the location he’d given Maxwell anyway. Was instead a direct shot toward the part of town his family spent a ridiculous amount of time in …emersed in their caped personas. “Way wrong turn, man. And if it’s not by mistake…” Dick’s tone now as steely as the look he shot to Maxwell, “…if this is for you to buy something to amp up whatever you’re already on, just stop the car and let me out now.”
Dick wasn’t expecting Maxwell to choke out, “I’m in trouble, Dan,” like a guilty confess to a crime. He timed that harbinger announcement with an acceleration of the car’s already too fast speed and his eyes darting nervously between the road ahead of them and his rearview mirror. “I owe, man. Can’t pay. Not by when they want it.”
Dick was about to turn in his seat to track the pursuing car Maxwell seemed to be fleeing from when a dark windowed BMW sedan pulled out of an alley right into their path. Maxwell cursed as he savagely slammed on the breaks. His car slid a few feet on the pavement before it came to a stop inches from the BMW’s driver’s side back door. Dick had braced himself on the dashboard with one hand while the other fell to his seatbelt, not to ensure it was latched but in preparation to unlatch it and get free of the car to face whatever was happening.
Sparing a precious moment to look in the side mirror, Dick saw a truck was now blocking the two lanes behind them. So this collision wasn’t a random near miss. He saw a man getting out of the passenger’s side of the sedan and one from the truck behind them, guns evident in each man’s hand. Unlatching his seatbelt, Dick drew his knife from his boot. (The knife was his one concession to his old Bat habits, and besides, his dad’s gifted knife had come to feel like something of a good luck charm for him.) Even as he wondered what crap Maxwell was into, he turned to his co-worker and commanded, “Don’t get out of the car unless I tell you to!” before he flung open the door, dove out, tucking into a lighting fast two-rotation roll.
Gracefully melting out of the roll onto his feet, he threw the buckle he’d cut from the seatbelt at the closest assailant coming from the BMW, the belt connecting with his head. Without taking the time to see the man go down, Dick turned and threw his knife at the attacker coming from the truck, nailing the gun’s barrel, causing him to lose his grip on the weapon as he cried out in more surprise than pain. But during Dick’s offensive attack, the driver of the truck had hopped out to join the assault.
The truck driver didn’t come for Dick, instead went around the car and yanked Maxell out from the driver’s seat. Ramming his gun barrel under Maxwell’s chin, he called across the roof of the car to Dick, “He dies if you don’t settle the hell down.”
“Let’s talk about a solution we can all live with. Whatever you need from Maxwell…” Dick broke off his negotiations when the thug looked surprised at his suggestion. “Ah…it’s not him you’re after,” he realized too damn late. That made this thing a whole new level of not good. Either they knew he was a Wayne or about his involvement in unspringing the trap someone had laid for Superman, or this was payback for his interference with the gala heist. None of those suppositions were a good thing.
On the upside, they were too unfeathered to be Owls.
Reprioritizing his goals, Dick demanded, “Ok, you got me so let him go.” Guilt searing through his veins that Maxwell had gotten caught in this crapstorm of trouble that was always finding him… until he saw how calm Maxwell was, considering a thug had a gun on him. Dick was getting a bad feeling, ok, a worse feeling. “Or..pay him what you own him so this can be just between us.”
Maxwell’s eyes went wide at Dick’s suggestion. “No no no. I’m not ..this isn’t…” His words were cut off as his head was yanked back viciously by the gumman’s fistful hold on his hair.
Pressing the gun muzzle harder against Maxwell’s chin, eliciting a unfeigned cry of fear from Dick’s co-worker, the gunman’s eyes never veered from their intense hold on Dick. “Maybe you wanna witness him getting what he deserves? Should I get you some payback since you won’t be getting it yourself?”
Though that resounded with ominousness about his own fate, Dick smiled brazenly, retorted, “I prefer to deal out my own retribution, but thanks for the considerate offer.” Already suspected what Maxell probably wasn’t, that there was a good chance they wouldn’t pay Maxwell but instead kill him. After all, none of the thugs were wearing masks and if they were planning on killing Dick, they wouldn’t want anyone to ID them for a murder charge. Which meant Dick had to actually rescue his personal Judas Iscariot from the trap he’d lead Dick right into.
Sometimes being the good guy was bitterly ironic.
Maxwell was finally wising up, beginning to recognize that the gunman’s threat wasn’t theatrical. And it didn’t seem that Carter was in the sedan or the truck. Instead, Carter had outsourced this meetup with Gildroy. And these guys, Maxwell didn’t think they got that he was totally not working against them, was paying off his debt fair and square like Carter asked him to. He didn’t want to get dead because of a miscommunication. “Hey, I did what was asked of me! He’s here, isn’t he?! And he didn’t know it was coming. You have him.”
At Maxwell’s incriminating and seemingly unrepentant acknowledgment of his part in Dick’s betrayal, Dick seemed to contemplate accepting the thug’s offer to exact revenge on his behalf. “But then again, maybe I should reconsider your..…” would never finish that statement because instead he took two running steps toward the car, leapt into the air and did a one handed handstand push off the roof to boost himself over the car. He landed directly behind the gunman even as his fist dropped like a sledgehammer unto the man’s shoulder, dislocating it. The man growled in surprised agony as his shoulder blazed with pain and his arm fell limply to his side, and his fingers spasmed, releasing their grip on the gun. Knowing to press his advantage, Dick drove his foot into the back of the man’s knee. As he started to crumble, Dick plowed his fist into his face, knocking him out.
Grabbing Maxwell’s arm, Dick didn’t land a blow to his betrayer but yanked the man around so he was sheltered behind him. Giving him a hearty shove, he yelled “Run!” in that Nightwing voice of ‘obey me if you want to live’ resonance. He didn’t have to tell Maxwell twice.
Maxwell didn’t give one thought to whether or not Dan was making a safe escape as well. He just tore out of there, his work boots slapping the road as he pelted across the street, heading for an alleyway like he believed it was a designated safe zone from danger…or bullets.
But Dick knew better. That there were no safe zones in a situation like this, only evasion and distance were viable escapes. Meaning the bullet about to spiral down the barrel of the gun of yet another thug who had been in the back of the truck, it would hit its mark if Dick didn’t intervene.
B had drilled into him to know his surroundings, to treat everyone as a threat, even the “victim”, because the Joker liked laying those types of traps. And yeah, today Dick had failed that lesson. Hard. Because Maxwell, he wasn’t the victim here..well, not originally. But now, yeah, his coworker’s head was most definitely on the chopping block.
That led to B’s other teaching, the one that swore everything could be a weapon. Had berated Dick in training when he failed to identify them, from spoons, to chairs, to the watch on his assailant’s hand. Or his own. But Dick rejected that choice in the milliseconds he had to make his counterattack, knew his watch didn’t carry enough weight to throw that distance and effectively shift the shooter’s arm or aim. And unhelpfully, the gun the thug had threatened Maxwell with had somehow gotten kicked under the car, wholly out of reach.
But speaking of the car…Dick began analyzing possible weapons it offered. Leaning over its hood, he reached for the wiper blade, made quick work of opening the latch and soon had the wiper blade in hand.
It was muscle memory, from throwing his escrima stick a million times. The wiper blade left his hand like he was trying to skip a stone across a placid lake, spinning across the expansion between him and the gunman. It nailed the gunman in the face, because nothing was more of a stunner than getting cracked in the nose.
But Dick’s intervention to save Maxwell, it cost him. While his focus was on stopping Maxwell from getting a bullet to the back, a fifth thug had exited the BMW and stealthily come up behind him. By the time Dick sensed his presence, shifted his priorities from protecting Maxwell to protecting himself, the thug was within reaching distance. Dick instinctively ducked, hoping to avoid a blow, but it wasn’t a fist aimed at him.
His every nerve blazed with pain as an electric shock zinged through his body from the contact point of the stun gun baton onto his thigh. He stumbled back even as his leg crumbled under him for a moment, compromised by the higher voltage than commercially off the rack stun weapon. Using the car to help support him, he hobbled back another step, faced this new threat.
This man wasn’t like the others, was dressed in an expensive suit, not jeans and hoodies like the others but it wasn’t just his wardrobe that told Dick he was higher up on the food chain. It was his skill to stealthily come up behind him, the matter-of-fact way he wielded the baton, like meting out pain was rote for him but he also didn’t want to ruffle his clothing doing it. Then there was the confident smirk he wore. “You’re enjoying this, way too much in my book,” Dick snarked, flexing his leg, trying to get it back up to fighting condition, or at least standing condition.
The dark-haired man’s smirk broadened into a boasting smile, showed white capped teeth. “I’m proud of my work ethic. Got it from my dad.”
“He a lowlife thug too,” Dick taunted, wanted to rattle this man, punch a hole in his confidence. ‘So I can punch a hole in his face.’
Instead of instigating anger, the suited man shrugged. “More like a wife and kid beater but he did it with heart, you know. Gave it his all. Every. Single. Day.”
Dick refused to feel sympathy for the man, knew it was how you reacted, to that type of traumatic childhood and the situation he himself was now in, that defined you. Made you either the good guy or the bad one. Opening his mouth to make a comeback, his leg buckled under him, had him sliding down to the ground and the thug’s eyes gleaming in victory.
But this thug didn’t know Dick had learned to combat electric shocks, to work through them. Had taken to heart B’s rigid mindset that, if you carried a weapon, be prepared for it to be used against you. That included the batwings, the smoke and knockout gas that emanated from their bombs, their armor, their vehicles, sometimes their own strength and certainly their code to save lives and not take them. And Dick had added his escrima sticks to that list. Had shocked the living daylights out of himself time and time again, teaching himself how to endure the pain, learning how much his body could take, how to shake it off, how to fight with only half his body’s muscles functioning.
It felt almost like a Brer Rabbit moment, please don’t use an electric stun baton on me.
He only did the cocky smirk inside, offered only a performance of fear for his opponent to feast on. As he did, he didn’t retreat as expected but dove forward, low, tackling the well-dressed thug around the knees and well below his stun baton’s target zone. Dick’s momentum sent them both slamming to the ground, Dick using a right cross to the man’s jaw to reciprocate stun for stun, while his other hand grabbed the stun baton’s handle, pinning the weapon to the ground. Because yeah, he could mitigate a few shocks but it wasn’t fun and all the training in the world couldn’t force his muscles to merrily shake off their nerves being on fire.
Of course, his attacker didn’t go by the rules of fair play, used his free hand to ram his fist into Dick’s leg that was still fiercely aching from the shock it had gotten. Dick bit back a cry of pain, but knew he couldn’t roll away, not before taking away the baton. Rationally knew that he couldn’t detangle himself without receiving another shock. Even as the man landed another blow to his leg, Dick delivered a punishing punch to his attacker’s gut and snapped his elbow into his jaw. But this guy was holding onto the baton for dear life….or until backup arrived.
His instincts weren’t as honed as they once were, had been dulled by his time without a mask, only gave him a millisecond warning. He tried to make the most of it, shot his working leg back, felt it catch the sneaky approaching thug in the chest, sending him careening backward onto the pavement. But it was a distraction, not so the man pinned under him could up his attack but so a new player could intervene.
He was standing at Dick’s head, his suit even more expensive than the man who was pinned under Dick, but he had the air of someone in charge. Dick expected verbal threats, an impersonal gun to be pointed at his head, for the man who had traces of Filipino lineage in his features to not lower himself to brawling in the street. Because of his miscalculation, Dick started way too late to raise his arm to block the blow, thought it would be a punch to the face, a club to his skull. Wasn’t expecting for the man’s casual stance to alter into the fluidity of a martial artist.
The leader’s fists, faster than the eyes could trace, arced through the air as if he were shadow boxing, were building up momentum even as he dropped into a crouch. Unleashed the punch, not to Dick’s face as predicted but to his back, like a car impacting with vertebrae.
An uncontrollable cry of pain tore from Dick along with the last breath of air he seemed to have. His mind was screaming ‘Retreat! Move! Roll! Get out of his zone!’ but his body wasn’t taking his messages, even his fingers had let their hold on the stun gun slip free. Which was probably why he had the fun pleasure of the business end of the stun gun rammed into this side, electrifying all the nerves there and racing to so many other parts of his body he nearly bit his tongue.
He rolled off the man, or did the man push him off himself? Either way, Dick was lying face up on the road, planning his next move. Well, he was planning. His body was vetoing the idea of ever moving again. Felt insulted as the main leader crouched down beside him, as if he considered him no threat. To prove him wrong, Dick went to do a surprise attack, kick him in the head but the man, without breaking eye contact with Dick, caught his ankle, halting his attack and delivered his own, an open palmed blow to Dick’s chest…that hurt like a mother, like his ribs were cracking under it, stole his ability to draw in a breath.
Dick predicted this was the time for the evil monologuing to start, the ‘how great am I for catching you’ but the man met his eyes, almost with admiration and said nothing. But than actions spoke louder than words as he gave a nod, not to Dick but to his stun baton carrying member. Who, with a happy smile, slammed the handle end of the weapon across Dick’s skull.
Blazing pain made hanging onto consciousness hard and ill advisable, but Dick was a stubborn one. Fought that losing battle long enough to hear the leader order, “Get the kid’s phone. Chances are, Red Hood will take his call.” Panic bloomed through Dick’s heart, giving him the incentive to try and get up, to get away, desperate to not be used against his brother in whatever this was. But raising his head, even that minuscule bit, was too much. Had him tumbling into darkness.
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