So I’ve been thinking abt Dick being Deathstroke’s apprentice again, but this time let’s switch things up a wee bit
You have Dick who’s 13, and instead of nabbing him while he’s Robin, Deathstroke kidnaps him from school. When he’s Dick Grayson. And he manages to make it so no one sees a thing, one minute Dick is there, the next he’s gone. Bruce expects a ransom call, and the longer it goes without one, the more freaked out he gets.
No one ever sends a ransom. No one ever sends anything. Dick Grayson vanished seemingly in the blink of an eye, and it rips Bruce apart.
Meanwhile, Deathstroke has some sort of blackmail on Dick. Maybe he says he has bombs in Mount Justice, or in Gotham Academy, or he has something about Batman and Robin’s identities, and so if Dick ever tries to leave, Slade will hurt everyone but him. And Dick feels like he has to stay, to protect them.
He hopes and wishes and prays that someone will come save him, but no one ever does. No one ever realizes that the boy behind the Renegade mask is the boy who used to be Robin.
Any time Dick even entertains the idea of leaving, Slade knows. He makes remarks about how if Dick leaves, it’s fine, he’ll just find another apprentice. And then Dick becomes terrified at the thought of this happening to another kid, of someone else being put through the torture that Deathstroke calls training. He can’t leave now. He can’t let that happen to someone else.
It’s three years of torture under the guise of apprenticeship. Deathstroke’s favorite form of punishment is a sensory deprivation room, and it damn near drives Dick mad.
Maybe Deathstroke also manages to get his hands on a modified super soldier serum. It allows Dick to continue aging and growing, but he becomes enhanced similarly to Deathstroke. That also almost kills him. He spent three weeks writhing in a hospital bed when he wasn’t straight up comatose. And as soon as he was better, Deathstroke upped the training regimen.
Then one day, after three years, Deathstroke and Renegade are out when Deathstroke almost breaks the new Robin’s wings. Dick is frozen at first, feeling sick at seeing another boy wearing his colors, his costume, his name, but he snaps out of it when he sees Deathstroke dangling the boy by his arm.
He doesn’t even think. He shoots Deathstroke’s arm, right in the elbow, to make him drop the kid. Then shoots him in the thigh, then puts him out of commission, if even for just a moment. And while all this happens, while Deathstroke is shouting at him, he barely hears himself saying, “I won’t let you kill another Robin!”
His voice is desperate and broken, even with the voice modulator from his mask. Deathstroke is down for a moment, and Dick is quick to turn back to the bot and hold his arms tight.
“You need to leave, Robin,” Dick says quickly. “You need to get far far away from here. Now.”
The boy is stuttering, trying to ask why Renegade would save him, but Dick just shakes his head.
“I need you to tell Batman something for me. You owe me now, right?” The boy nods. “So tell Batman something for me, and we’re even, okay?”
“Yeah, okay,” the boy says quickly.
“Tell him: Deathstroke stole my gym clothes. Can you tell him that?”
“Deathstroke. Stole. My gym clothes.” Dick repeats it slowly, shaking the boy a bit. “Can you tell that to Batman? Word for word?”
The boy nods, but he still looks confused, “Yeah, yeah, I can tell him!”
“You need to fly, Robin,” Dick tells him, his voice breaking. “Don’t fall.”
He pushes the boy towards the exit, and Deathstroke has come back to and is shouting threats at Renegade. They’re loud and graphic and vulgar, and Dick knows he’s going to get tortured and dumped in a sensory deprivation room for this, but he refuses to let Deathstroke do what he did to him to any other kid.
When Jason gets back and tells Bruce what happened, that Deathstroke almost captured him, that Renegade saved him, Bruce is stumped. He doesn’t understand why the apprentice would turn on the master. And then Jason relays the message, and Bruce almost breaks down.
He goes crazy. He runs to the board he has full of files on where Dick may have gone, where he may have been taken. Because that was a code. “So and so took my gym clothes.” He’d been kidnapped from school. It was a code they had in case he was taken from school and he was allowed to call him but wasn’t allowed to outright say who.
This whole time he’d been thinking someone kidnapped him because he was Dick Grayson, ward of Bruce Wayne. He didn’t think to connect Robin. And now his son has been right in front of his face this whole time, and Bruce never saw it, no one ever saw him. He’s fought his own son.
He’s able to get the entire Justice League involved in the rescue mission. Dick going missing had hit them all deeply, they all felt like they’d failed him. Now, they felt it even more so. Several of them have fought Renegade directly, and none of them recognized him. He must’ve thought they’d abandoned him.
They raid Deathstroke’s bunker base and restrain him, only to find Dick passed out in a dark room with no windows, no lights, no noise. His fingers are bloody and ripped from trying to dig into the walls and the floor, his knees and legs are scraped, and he’d clearly been beaten before being thrown inside. Who knows how long he’s been in there.
Bruce cradles him so gently, he can’t believe he’s actually holding his son again, that he isn’t dead. He brings him to the Watchtower to heal, and then others insist on him being questioned. He’s been with Deathstroke so long, who knows how loyal he is to the mercenary? Bruce wants to throttle all of them, but instead he has to sit and listen as his son chokes out the reasons why he never left, the way he felt like it would be his fault if Slade ever did this to another kid. How he felt like he had to stay, to protect them. Even though he didn’t know who it would even be.
And Bruce feels his heart breaking all over again as he holds his son, telling him that it’s not his fault, but that everything would be okay now. That he was there to protect him now, and he’s so so sorry he couldn’t protect him before.
2087
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