Prompts

coughing up blood | “You’re safe now.” | “Take me instead.”

Chapter 21: famous last words

There are voices. 

“…so Sinestro flies up to Black Adam and does something so he can talk again—”

“He realigned his jaw.”

“And Black Adam calls down his lightning, boom—point blank shot to the chest. And Mazahs doesn’t even blink.”

“That’s such a stupid fuckin’ name.”

“So now Black Adam’s in trouble. And we already know Sinestro can’t stand up to this guy…”

Somewhere close. Speaking softly. Do they know he’s here? 

“…drives Luthor into the ground. I thought that was it for him.”

“It would be better than he deserved…”

There’s a bed. Underneath him. A firm mattress. Stiff cotton sheets. And—on top of him—a blanket. Soft fleece. 

There’s something in his arm. 

Dick twitches before he can stop himself. There’s no heart monitor, thank God, but he hears his heart beat faster all the same. There’s a needle in his arm. There’s an IV. Again. Again. 

He takes a deep breath through his nose. He tries to keep it slow. The voices are close, but not right next to him. He might have a few seconds before they can reach him—before they can stop him. 

And then what? 

He doesn’t know where he is. He doesn’t know how he got here. He doesn’t know who’s talking in the other room. If he moves—they’ll catch him. They’ll catch him and they’ll tie him down and they’ll drug him or they’ll give him incompatible blood just to watch him struggle—

He grabs the IV. He pulls it out. He sits up, and then he has to stop as the room swings around him. His head throbs. 

A grey room. Bare, unfinished walls. Cabinets in the corner. A curtain over the doorway. And a bed. 

No. No. No. 

He slides off the bed onto his feet and grabs for balance and knocks the IV stand over. It rings against the stone floor. He’s naked. No, no, no— He grabs the blanket to his front and then there are people in the doorway people all stronger than him and they—

They’re familiar. He knows them. 

“Dick,” Jason says. He holds his hands out. They’ve fought before, Dick knows, has the scars if he ever somehow forgets, but right now Jason’s hands are empty. 

And Roy is with him. And Kory. 

“Kory,” Dick says. 

Something shutters in Jason’s expression, but he moves sideways. Kory glows bright in the doorway. “Yeah,” Jason says. “Kory’s here. We’re all here. No one’s gonna hurt you. Alright? You’re safe now.”

Roy moves through the doorway—closer to Dick, but that’s alright. It’s Roy. 

“You wanna sit down?” he says. 

Dick does. The walls are still spinning an elliptical path through space. His feet feel numb. He steps toward the bed, bumps his knees against it, and then he falls. 

Roy is there to catch him. 

“Easy,” he says, and Dick shudders. Roy’s hands roam over his shoulders his arms his back and it hurts—

But Roy is helping him. Roy helps him into bed and pulls the blanket up over him, so it’s alright. 

“You pulled your IV out,” Jason says. Something in his voice makes Dick’s heart slam into his throat. 

“No,” he says, before he knows what he’s doing. 

Then he stops. He lies still. He shouldn’t have said that. He’s not in any shape to be contradicting Jason. They’ve been on better terms lately, they’ve learned how to talk to each other, but Jason is stubborn and aggressive and now Dick is challenging him only he didn’t mean to he swears—

“Okay,” Jason says. He—he’s further away. On the other side of the curtain. His hands are still empty. “It’s okay—whatever happened, it’s fine.” 

“Dick,” Kory says—Kory, with her voice like fire, warm and wild and burning and alive. “Do you want us to put the intravenous line back?”

He doesn’t want to answer. Jason is still watching him—and Roy—but Kory is there. Kory is the one asking. Kory doesn’t want to hurt him. She never has. 

“No,” he says. 

Kory nods. “Then we will not,” she says.

Dick could cry from relief. 

“There you go,” Roy says. “Just relax, buddy. No more excitement. You need to rest.”

Jason ventures inside the curtain. “Dick,” he says. “Do you remember what happened?”

Roy throws up his hands. “What did I just say?”

Dick tries. He casts his mind back—before the blanket, the bed, the unfinished room. He searches for some thread of memory in the grey and black. There was metal—a metal grate under his feet, metal pipes on the walls—wires—and a hand over his mouth. 

“Luthor,” he says. “I…” I died. 

He doesn’t know if that part is real. He doesn’t want to ask. 

“Yeah,” Jason says. He tilts his head. He’s not wearing a mask. Dick can see his face, all of it, the faded freckles, the little scar over his nose. And his eyes. “You remember what happened to that bitch owl?”

A laugh ripples through his lungs like rigor mortis. He does remember, when he tries—a deafening gunshot and ringing in his ears and the inside of Owlman’s mouth splattered across the floor. 

“He’s dead.” 

Jason smiles. It’s a tiny motion, just the corner of his mouth twitching back. He smiles like Bruce. 

Like Owlman. 

“That’s right,” he says, and he sounds nothing like either of them. “I killed him. And I’ll kill anybody else who tries to hurt you. Got it?”

Dick closes his eyes. He can sense Roy by the side of the bed. Kory hovers nearby, radiating warmth. His body must read them as safe, because he can feel himself fading, sinking back down into the dark. Roy is right. He needs to rest. 

“No killing,” he says. Jason lets out a sharp, bitter laugh, and Dick doesn’t have time to be afraid before he’s gone.

⁂

Original Author's Note

shoutout to my bestie hoebiwan who first called Owlman "that bitch owl" when I started this fic, I think about it literally every day