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Afternoon light dyes the study in shades of sepia. It brings to mind the paintings that adorn the wall just opposite: time captured in decaying amber, rendered immobile and immaculate through the stroking of a brush. Were it not for the dust motes that sail through sunbeams, for the scrawl of pen to paper, this moment too would seem caught somewhere out of causality. Perfect, picturesque.
Dick lingers in the threshold just beyond this bubble of time. He knows what he has to do — what tranquility will be lost in the process, how many agonizing nights he's suffered through his indecision for it — but faced with the first step, he can't help but hesitate. It's not fear. ( Let it never be said to be fear. ) It's taking the leap without the safety net below, and he's nine years out of practice. What happens if he falls goes without saying.
Slade has no doubt already noticed his presence in the doorway, but his notating doesn't so much as stutter from beyond the antique desk, nor does his single eye lift to meet his company. Use your words, kid, comes his admonishment, audible only in Dick's own ears.
The first step into freefall: “I've got a proposition for you.”
“Do you?”
That hand does not still; that eye does not raise. Dick thrums with nervous energy, and every ounce of effort that hasn’t gone to cultivating a perfectly neutral expression works to halt the bouncing of his left knee.
“You’re the only person I can ask for this,” he says, and isn’t afraid to let loose a sliver of his apprehension. It does the trick where words alone can’t. Slade hones in on vulnerability like blood in the water, and there are few better appeals than to Slade’s unique ability in any one task. When the pen falls and eye contact is made, Dick knows he’s got him where he wants him.
“Alright.” His partner in flight, hand outstretched to catch him before the crash. “Then let’s hear it, little bird.”
Nine years ago sees Dick at Haly’s Circus, at the same big top scene that replays in the worst of his dreams: the lights, the cheering, the shock-horror, the screams. He thinks there might have been a man there that day with a name he’d only recognize later ( Wayne, Wayne, an orphan like him ), one who’d comforted him in the immediate aftermath, who’d promised to take him in if he’d had nowhere else to go. It’d been the police who’d taken him away at the end of it all, and he never saw the stranger, much less the rest of his family with Haly’s, again.
Eight years sees him in the care of Bartholomew Wycliffe. Dick won’t pretend to know Wycliffe’s motivations for taking in a freshly orphaned circus child, and trusting him on any one of his many stated reasons is a mistake Dick hasn’t made for a long, long while. Intent hardly matters in the end, anyway. The result is what concerns him, illustrated in a systematic destruction of everything that makes Dick who he is. ( At least, who he understood himself to be. ) From a lonely boy in an empty manor to the many lessons taught at the cutting edge of paddle and belt, he spends the years he should have dedicated to growing into himself and overcoming the loss of his parents learning instead to play the part of Wycliffe’s particular image of an upstanding son. An ever-changing goalpost, and one he wouldn’t have bothered with, if there’d been much of a choice.
It would have been about that many — eight — when the first of the ‘tutors’ came and went. Wycliffe has the money, but not the compassion needed to rear a child, and what he lacks in the latter he must have supposed he could buy with the former. Remembering the revolving door of men and women who thought they could get the better of an unruly child is one of few memories of Dick’s time in the manor that can bring a smile to his face. There was the incident with the chandelier in the foyer that he swore had nearly put him out of house and home, a memory so devilishly delightful that only knowing what would immediately follow could dampen it.
Then came Slade, and his little rebellions dried up.
Not for lack of trying, mind. Even now, there’s a part of Dick that can’t help the fight, even in the face of all reason; the miserable marriage of self-preservation and -sabotage. It’s just that it didn’t do him any good, the way it had with the ‘tutors’ who came before. No amount of petulance or scheming could stand between Slade Wilson and his paycheck. The very worst Dick ever managed was nearly getting himself killed, then the redoubled efforts of a man who wouldn’t stand to see his charge turned into a cadaver for the morgue.
Dick isn’t prepared to face what a loss in their battle of wills will cost him in the long run. It’d taken him longer than he’s proud to admit to recognize that that’s what their early life together amounted to — one ego baring its teeth at another — but as soon as total victory no longer seemed an option, he’d been forced to consider a different approach than outright defiance.
Slade has always been a professional, at least so long as Dick has known him. He follows the letter of his contract as law, and tolerates nothing that would challenge it. As for the spirit , well, it largely depends. What is the infraction? What particular mood has struck the man today? Seven years ago, six, five, or four would find Dick swallowing his tongue, putting on a face, and learning the hard way what answers got him the desired result: anything short of his unconditional surrender.
But that was years ago. ( Three, two, one. ) Dick understands the man in the sepia study now better than he sometimes understands himself, and part of that is knowing just how mutual the feeling runs.
Slade isn’t his ally in this long battle of attrition — but he doesn’t necessarily need to be Dick’s enemy, either.
It’s all a matter of asking the right questions and getting the right answers.
For this to work, the idea can’t have come from Dick.
Never mind that Slade ‘tamed’ him some time back. In Wycliffe’s eyes, Richard Grayson will always be the wild child plucked from squalor, and any calm obedience only serves to usher in the coming storm. If the idea comes from Dick, Wycliffe will see it for the escape it is and crush it underfoot.
Slade, on the other hand, can do no wrong in the eyes of his employer, a reputation earned through years of blood, sweat, and inhuman levels of patience. If the idea comes from Slade , it’s at least worth considering. The timing of it all works to their advantage, as well; if Wycliffe wants a way to keep his ward legally under thumb after Dick’s upcoming eighteenth birthday, using the ‘tutor’ as a surrogate is a solution gift wrapped and tossed in his lap.
Dick has wondered about Slade’s stake in all this. Been painstakingly aware of it, really, given that everything hinges on Slade’s cooperation, his supposed responsibility for the whole charade. Dick knows he was married once, but nothing about it beyond the context of its termination, and not if the man ever pictured himself wedding again. ( Pictured himself wedding his much younger charge. Don’t think about it like that. ) There are probably a thousand other things he could do with his life that’d be preferable to the long emancipation of the thorn in his side of the last seven years —
( But Slade had told him once, in a shocking display of a real shred of remorse, that he thought Dick’s potential was wasted in a place like this. Smothered, not stoked. He’d wondered then, as he sometimes does now, what Slade was seeing when he’d looked at him in that moment. What it could have been that made him seem as though he was mourning the still living. )
— and anyway, what Slade likes best out of Dick is to be kept on his toes, which is well enough. Graysons are born entertainers.
He doesn’t hear about it one way or another for several days, which is more than enough time to cultivate a whole house of anxieties in the suburbs of his mind. Slade could just as easily be biding his time for the right moment as he could be dawdling just to see Dick squirm, and in either case, there’s not a damn thing he can do about it. This is why he doesn’t like to bet his fate on the whims of others. Desperate times and the measures they demand.
In the face of his overwhelming nerves, there’s only one thing for it: exercise, and a great deal of it.
The gym is rudimentary ( and no amount of begging or bartering could convince Wycliffe to install a trapeze ), but it serves its purpose well enough. Despite it not having been set up for his benefit, Dick may as well have set up here as his second bedroom for all the long nights spent venting his frustrations on bars and bags. Night’s a ways off yet now, but he runs drills the same way he would at the midnight hour, pushing and pushing his body to the point of fatigue and beyond. If his muscles aren’t burning, he can still hear himself think. Stretch, run, leap; anything not to think.
The first pass of his eyes over Slade’s frame in the doorway he mistakes for the sweat dripping off his brow. He doesn’t make the same mistake twice.
“Congratulations on your nuptials,” Slade says. His arms are folded over one another across his chest, face perfectly impassive — as though he’s informing Dick of anything other than their engagement.
Dick straightens from a crouch on the mats. The exercise is over, but his heart, beating past the threshold of his throat, hasn't gotten the message.
“It worked?” he asks, breathless, fearful to believe. “He actually agreed to it?”
“More than that.” And — ah, the racing of his heart can’t be entirely from exertion — what kind of horror could Slade mean by that? He envisions a hundred stipulations, a thousand pretty vengeances, but Slade only says, “He couldn’t agree to get rid of you fast enough. You really did a number on his health, kid.”
“Yeah, well, monkey see, monkey do.”
Wycliffe agreed. Just like that, and he has his ticket out of here. It will be a slow ride, certainly, but a sure one, and — he should feel grateful for that, shouldn’t he? Relieved? Dick stares at his fingers and can’t figure out why they haven’t stopped trembling.
He nearly forgets he’s not alone in his trepidation when Slade speaks up again.
“You sure you want to go through with this?”
Those fingers curl into a loose fist, steady if only for the moment. Dick supposes this is Slade’s own way of showing sympathy, but it’s hard to feel grateful for scraps after years of watching the feast. “Not like I’ve got a choice in the matter anymore,” spoken more bitterly than he’d intended. What will it matter now if he gets cold feet? The proposition’s been made, the terms agreed to.
“I could have a sudden change of heart,” says Slade, and the corner of his mouth beneath the eyepatch curls into a half-grin. “Realize you’re not worth all the effort and call it off. I still get to keep my job either way.”
Teasing or not, the words burn . Dick seethes with the heat of every rebellious urge he’s had to put aside all these years, hotter than the sun.
“If you bail on me now, Slade, I’ll make the rest of your job a living hell.”
It earns him one sharp bark of laughter. “There it is. That’s the fire I like to see.”
A huff escapes him, and Dick pointedly turns his attention away. His anger isn’t something for the man to marvel over, a captive bird to watch tweet in its cage, but he can’t very well make Slade stop . Right now, all he thinks he can manage is getting into a fresh pair of clothes and starting to make peace with the idea of his ‘tutor’ becoming his ‘fiance’. Anything past that is an ordeal for the future.
Towel. Step one is he needs a towel. For a few fumbling moments, he struggles to remember where he’d left one — if he’d even remembered to bring one in the first place — before something white juts out in his periphery, and he turns to see Slade holding one out in offering. “Figured this is where I’d find you,” he explains, which is hardly an explanation at all, and drops it into Dick’s waiting hand.
Huh. His company grumbles something about dinner before disappearing out of the doorway, and Dick is left to towel off in an uncomfortably thick silence. Embarrassingly, it’s not the first time that he’s wondered what sort of husband Slade might make. ( Those thoughts were par for the course when hatching his plan, of course, but they existed long before, born from a time when a curious child asked his new live-in help what was meant by the ring on his finger. ) ‘Doting’ can’t be the word for it, yet the image seems set on planting roots in his mind now. The observant lover, anticipating his partner’s needs. Or is that wishful thinking?
Dick catches up with Slade on the way to the dining hall.
“I’m not taking your last name,” he says without preamble. He means to brook no challenge, and expects the other to respect his resolution if nothing else — but that’s not what happens.
“The window for negotiation is closed, little bird. If you had demands, you should have made them known before you sent me to do your dirty work.”
Dick’s temper had cooled in their brief parting, but he feels it come back with a vengeance. Worse, though, is what comes with: panic, hard fought to push down, what he should have been freed from as soon as Wycliffe gave them his blessing. There is no leverage he can use now that the decision has been made, he realizes as fear turns his body to ice. He can threaten to make these coming months miserable for Slade, but how far had that gotten him in the early days? How could he believe that Slade would respect his wishes beyond anything put down in contract?
Refusing to even leave Dick his own name. How can he expect to ask from him the right to travel? To swing the trapeze? To his own autonomy after a decade without?
Slade must see him blanching and take some twisted form of pity, for a large hand settles on his shoulder, and Dick only flinches away minutely. “Relax.”
As if being told ever helped him calm down.
The sigh that follows is long suffering, and while Slade’s command does little to smooth his quickened breathing, the squeeze of that hand is traitorously grounding. “I can’t make you any promises. Like it or not, we’re past that. But if you have something you want, I’ll see what I can do.” And that’s… not nothing. Even if only a placation, the assurance is better than Dick would have dared hoped for. “Just focus on making it to the day for now. Everything else can come after.”
One day at a time, until he can finally be free from this. Put that way, Dick realizes it’s nothing he can’t manage, because it’s all he’s been doing since he was nine years old and placed in the care of a man who sought out children to mold instead of raise.
Three months is infinitesimal compared to nine years — and everything else, yes, can come after.