Chapter Text
Dick fell into greedy, desperate sleep huddled in the dubious shelter of a damaged warehouse.
He floated slowly towards wakefulness, just aware enough to scold himself for not snapping awake, the way he knew he should. He drifted in that half-aware space for a long time, never quite toppling over into true consciousness, just aware that he ought to.
But he was so comfortable. He was warm, and his skin felt clean and soft, and there was just a hint of morning light tempting his eyes open. Each of these sensations was precious, a tiny thing not to be squandered. He even yawned as finally woke, and it was like a rubber band pulling until it snapped. Dick was moving in a heartbeat, throwing himself feet-first out of bed, already braced to attack.
Except instead of rolling over directly onto cracked linoleum flooring, Dick’s feet hit air, and he tumbled over the side of a bed. Only by sheer luck and innate balance did he manage to catch himself on low-pile carpet, and his body was already moving to tuck himself against the corner for cover before his brain caught up.
Dick didn’t know where he was. His heart was thundering in his chest. This wasn’t the threadbare nest he’d shared with his husband for the past month. Individually, the pieces of his surroundings all made sense - a tangled bed, a pair of cheap matched nightstands, a single window in a plaster wall with patched-over cracks, an alarm clock blinking innocuously down at him - but together, they were a mystery.
When was the last time he’d seen a bed?
The sun was shining through the single curtained window, and it was much too bright. Dick already knew he was alone in the room, since he couldn’t hear breathing, but he peeked his head up over the mattress just in case. Caution never hurt, and lack of it often killed.
There were two doors in the room that Dick could see, set on perpendicular walls in the same corner. One was cracked open, and the other closed. He couldn’t see a lock on either, but that didn’t mean much. Dick rose into a crouch and crept over to the window, back to the wall. He felt heavy, more sluggish than he remembered, and his pulse still hadn’t evened out, but it would have to wait. As long as he was functioning well enough to figure out what the hell was going on, everything else could take a back seat.
When no one appeared through either door to kill him or torture him or whatever they were planning to do, Dick slid a hand under the curtain and lifted it just enough to see outside.
For a moment, Dick’s brain stalled out. The only thing outside the window was a cramped alleyway, and a rickety fire escape to match. From this angle, he could see a sliver of street and the preoccupied pedestrians who hurried past on it. When he looked up, he could see a hint of familiar skyline. Dick stared, open-mouthed, trying to fit the pieces together in a configuration he knew wasn’t going to work.
Dick knew this alley. The fire escape, the dumpster below, the tower rising across the street - he couldn’t place them, because they weren’t clues. They were ambient features, so familiar that they blended into the background. The sun, even smog-filtered as it was, still glinted stubbornly off the window glass.
Everything clicked together all at once - the window, the room, all of it. Dick’s hand fell limply to his side as he stared in bafflement at his Bludhaven apartment.
This was an exact replica, down to the water-stain on one corner of the ceiling and the scattered protein bar wrappers on the right-hand nightstand. Dick had brought that alarm clock with him from the manor, because it had a gradual volume-increase setting that made hard mornings easier.
Now that he was looking, Dick could even identify some of the clothes piled together in a vague acknowledgment of where the hamper ought to be. There was a book cracked open on the dresser that Dick had never finished. The phone he’d used in the brief period between getting his own apartment and Blockbuster blowing up the building was charging on one corner of the mattress.
Dick clenched his fists to keep still. He had to think, had to figure out what the fuck was going on here. He couldn’t afford to throw himself onto the spring-snapped mattress and starfish in the luxury of a real bed, no matter how tempting. He had to figure this out, had to get back to where Damian and Slade were likely searching for him. They were all Dick had left anymore, the one thing left worth living for, and Dick would be damned if something happened to them while they were out trying to find him.
As if the reminder shifted Dick into another gear, he immediately started running through options while he automatically started casing the apartment.
Hallucinogenic drugs? Possible, but unlikely. The world around him was too meticulous, too stable.
Some sort of magical illusion? Slightly more likely. It would explain the level of personal detail. It had been a long time since Dick had dealt with magic, but he was pretty sure he remembered the trick of it.
Dick sank down onto the corner of the bed, groaning in pleasure at the rumpled give of it. God he’d missed beds. He sat cross-legged and closed his eyes, not shutting out the sensations of this familiar-strange room, but embracing them. The kick-hum of the ancient heater buzzed away in his ears. The stale scent of unwashed clothes overwhelmed any other smell. The lazily circulating air against his skin was kept off by a soft, clean t-shirt and sleep shorts. Dick let himself sink into it, let the relief of being comfortable rise up and buoy him. He drifted on the surface of his awareness, testing the current, finding the rhythm of his own body.
Then he dived, slipping silently through the waters of his own mind, deeper and dark. It was no easy thing, to know your own self, to see your perceptions and biases well enough to sort you out from everything else. But Dick had never had the luxury of illusions.
His despair and relief and and exhaustion were raw and overwhelming, with no protection, no distance to keep him from his self. Dick shuddered through deep sobs and clenched hands and dived deeper.
It felt like an eternity, in the way that timeless things always do, before Dick was able to eliminate the possibility that his mind was being tampered with. He surfaced sore and drenched with sweat, hovering dangerously close to drop.
Dick caught it just in time. His thoughts were turning syrupy-slow, the fine tremors increasing. His breath was speeding up to match his traitorous heart, and if he could look in a mirror, he knew he’d see his pupils dilating. He hadn’t dropped in almost a decade - since he and Slade had settled into their relationship. But he was dropping now, and he had a very narrow window to do something before he hyperventilated himself into unconsciousness.
Without Slade there, his options were limited. If he could get somewhere safe, at least he could ride out the drop, but there was no telling how long it would take, and it was potentially dangerous. Alternatively, if he took a big enough hit, inflicted enough pain in a single moment, sometimes that would override the drop just through sheer adrenaline. Neither choice was ideal when he still didn’t know where he was or why. His gaze flicked over to the window, then back to the door, then landed on the side table, where a small bottle sat, half-open.
He probably should’ve checked the label first, but Dick was too far gone for that. He dropped the phone and nearly fumbled the bottle, shaking out one tiny pink pill. He tossed it back and swallowed it dry, and then tucked himself in between the narrow spot between the bed and the wall to ride it out.
Stop-Drop was horrid, and Dick had forgotten how much he hated it. He tumbled further into confused anxiety, convinced that he’d missed the chance to stop the drop before it began. He didn’t know how many minutes had passed before he felt a sudden flush wash over him, and then he was sweating. Dick grimaced. His joints ached, and his head was pounding. He had thought from time to time that perhaps his memory of the side–effects had been exaggerated over many years of shortage.
No, Stop-Drop was just as awful as he remembered.
Dick had to force himself to his feet, but he consoled himself with the fact that he could. Even the mood swings and the prickly feeling and the bone-deep aches were a small price to pay in comparison to near-catatonia for god-knew how long. Dick could wash off the worst of the initial sweat in cold water, and then he’d even be able to pass for fine.
Dick half-expected to open the bathroom door and find a void behind it, or a hell-dimension, or something of that sort. Instead, it was exactly as he remembered it, dingy green tile and all. Dick pulled a face at how gross it looked, now that he was out of his bachelor-pad era. At least he didn’t need hot water. He ignored everything except a reasonably clean towel as he scrubbed himself off under the trickle of water from the showerhead. He was so relieved to get the feeling of the Stop-Drop off his skin that he was rinsing off by the time he noticed anything odd.
Dick knew that he’d lost weight in the past years. It wasn’t ideal, but food was scarce, and Damian was still growing. So Dick had slowly become little beyond lean muscle and ropy scar tissue, and he’d adapted to it. He didn’t have the stamina of his youth, but he was wily, and determined, and much more deadly, so it balanced out.
Except that he wasn’t any more.
Dick was gently swiping the washcloth over his bad shoulder when he realized that the skin under his fingers was smooth. He craned his neck to look, reaching for the mess of scar tissue that spread over half his back.
There was nothing there. And now that Dick had noticed it, he realized that his shoulder didn’t even ache, beyond the general pain of the Stop-Drop. He froze with freezing water dripping from his hair, and numbly started to tally all of the ways his body wasn’t what he expected.
His top-surgery scars were comfortingly familiar, but that was pretty much the only thing. Not only was Dick missing a myriad of injuries - he had all of his toes, for one thing - there were more subtle, stranger differences. His skin was smoother, not just on his hands, but also on his arms, and legs, and chest. His arms and legs were just a little shorter than he expected. His shoulders weren’t quite as broad as he remembered, though he’d never been a particularly large-framed man.
And he was softer. The shape of his stomach and hips, the bones of his knees and elbows and ribs, everything was just a little round. There was give under the skin when he poked his finger into one hip that meant fat under the skin. Dick had vague memories of a time when that would have panicked him, but it wasn’t panic that made his breath catch.
It was relief. Dick had to slap his hand over his mouth to keep the sound in, to fight back the tears that threatened to overflow. He didn’t have time for this. He couldn’t afford to appreciate this suddenly healthy body, because when the illusion shattered, he would be back to scrambling for every meal. The reminder that he still needed to find a way to break free was the lifeline that brought Dick back to himself. He remembered to set his breaths until his body was still again, and shut off the water. He toweled himself off, and then examined himself clinically in the mirror.
He saw a reflection that was so young it was nearly painful. Had he ever really looked like such a baby? Is this what Bruce had seen, when he looked at Dick and insisted that every mission was too dangerous? Dick felt a pang of sympathy for him. He wouldn’t want a kid this young fighting the Joker either.
God, was this what Slade had seen? Dick teased his husband about rubbing the cradle fairly often, but he resolved to double the frequency. Because he looked like a child, and that had never once given Slade a moment’s pause, nevermind the fact that Dick was technically an adult. Even Damian carried more years on his shoulders than this bright-eyed reflection.
Dick let out his breath in a noisy breath. Whatever was happening, it was real, and he was going to have to deal with it as a twenty-year-old. As inconvenient as it was, he couldn’t bring himself to be annoyed.
***
Dick’s first order of business was food. The rest of the apartment, whatever it might be, was pretty much precisely how he’d left it, which meant that the fridge and cupboards were sparsely stocked. This might be a temporary illusion, but he was damned well going to appreciate real food while he had it. There was a time that leftover pizza and canned soup wouldn’t have qualified as food, but now? Now Dick ate it happily, and savored every bite. His body still ached from the Stop-Drop, and his stomach protested, but he ignored it. Stop-Drop made everything feel horrific, but he still needed to eat. He even washed the dishes when he was done, just for the feeling of hot water running over his hands. Dick considered his approach as he dried and replaced the dishes.
Wherever he was, whatever had happened, it was real - for a given value of reality. He’d encountered other dimensions before, realities that ran parallel to his own, but that had been more Wally’s thing than Dick’s. Dick had seen how haunted Wally got, sometimes between what for him was one blink and the next. Once Dick had experienced a rift in space-time himself, he’d understood. What was just moments for Dick was sometimes a whole lifetime for Wally.
God, Dick really hoped he wasn’t in another reality.
Wally had told Dick once, in a cracked and halting voice, that the worst dimensions were the ones where people were still alive. Where his loved ones had survived, and Wally had to face the ache of losing them all over again.
Dick swallowed hard as he realized for the first time what he was about to do. His allies had always been his greatest asset, and he couldn’t afford to ignore that. But could he bear it? What would he do, if he saw his family again, saw them and heard them and hugged them right against his chest, and had to leave them behind again?
Dick realized he was crying again, still shaky from the Stop-Drop. The urge to cut it off, the instinct that this was dangerous, loomed huge in his mind. But ultimately, the ratty couch was softer than his fear was potent. The sun was setting, and Dick was warm and full and tired. So for the first time in a long time, he simply let himself cry.
***
It was full dark before the tears petered out. Dick scrubbed his face with his hands, stretched his weirdly-flexible spine, and set to work.
Whatever happened, someone had done it on purpose. If he was, in fact, in an alternate dimension or timeline, the two major suspects were theoretical science or big magic. From there, compiling a list of possible culprits and allies was easy. The most challenging part was trying to remember who had survived, who Dick could reach out to now that he wouldn’t be able to in even just a year’s time.
Funnily enough, following up with the magical options was going to be easier than the physics ones. Dick had several skilled magic users willing to do him a favor. On the other hand, while Wally would be able to follow through on a few leads, but Dick was going to have to pull some serious strings to follow up on the rest. Mad scientists tended to do a better job of keeping their secrets than mad mages.
Dick’s phone blinked innocently, its charging indicator light a friendly green. There was no guarantee he’d even be able to unlock it. If it was another reality - would that Dick have picked the same passcode? Would it be similar enough to guess? This would have been before Bruce had figured out how to sort out the issues with fingerprint security, so thankfully Dick didn’t have to consider whether he shared the same genetic makeup as an alternate reality version of himself.
Dick thumbed in a code, and the phone opened obligingly.
He was struck with a strange sense of deja-vu. He remembered setting this selfie of him and Babs as his background. They’d still been dating, the first time around, when they took it, and Dick had wanted the reminder after their first breakup. He wanted to remind himself that they’d been happy together. He’d loved Babs first, and he wasn’t ever going to stop, and that made everything that happened after worth it.
Dick had studied this picture long enough, memorized every pixel of it, so well that he could still summon the image in his minds’ eye, long after phones had stopped working.
It felt wrong, how easy it was to just open his phone and send out a handful of messages. Dick had no way of knowing if they actually went anywhere, or if he just believed that he was sending messages - but the phone felt strange in his hands, the ease of pre-Audit communication felt like walking down a staircase and expecting one more step, only to find that you’d already reached the bottom.
His first three messages were carefully neutral, feeling out the possibility that someone might be able to help him with some magical problems. He wouldn’t expect an answer right away, unless he was extraordinarily lucky - vigilante life just didn’t leave a lot of time for answering texts, even encrypted ones. It would take as long as it would take for someone with the appropriate expertise to get back to him. In the meantime,
The next two messages were trickier. For one thing, Dick didn’t have numbers saved in his phone that would go directly to Slade or to Damian - he hadn’t even known yet that Damian existed during this time of his life. His encounters with Slade were never pre-planned - at least not by Dick. So he had no direct way of reaching them.
But if Dick needed someone to delve into dangerous, deeply unethical scientific experiments on the nature of space-time, there was no one better than Slade.
Dick fiddled with the phone until he remembered how to play music from it. He spared a few minutes to scroll through the songs he had saved, shocked and pleased at how many of them he could listen to again. He’d forgotten so many of them.
Maybe after this was all over, he’d remember a few of them a little better.
Then, with his entire music library on shuffle, Dick dug out his laptop and hacked into it. His skills were a little rusty - he was more used to alien tech now than anything Earth-based - but it came back quickly enough. After that, it was just a matter of research.
The only advantage Dick had in this arena was information about the future. He’d never had a reason to learn to navigate the shadowy corners of the world wide web that men like Slade frequented, at least not with the ease of a native. Still, his hacking habits, no matter how rusty, came from future years much more protected against cyber crime. As it turned out, finding Slade wasn’t hard now that he knew where to look. He could follow his husband’s virtual tracks through even the muddiest back-end web connections. He knew exactly what contracts Slade would watch, which he would take, which he would be offended by - Dick could even pick his husband’s words out of a few anonymous forums and private conversations. Finding Slade was easy.
Not using any of the codes they’d developed over the years was much harder. Dick stared down at a contract offer that Slade had accepted with a curt acknowledgement almost a month ago, and chewed his lip.
They had codes that even an alternate reality-version of Slade would probably recognize, since the earliest versions of their own secret language had been built on the foundations of the secrets they’d already carried. Dick could unlock any of Slade’s safehouses from anywhere in the world, as long as this dimension or timeline or whatever was close enough to his world. Slade could speak on Dick’s behalf for any of the friends or allies that Dick had gathered throughout the years, as long as they still shared the same memories.
Except that Dick had no way of knowing whether this Slade was the same, or some other darker version of himself, from some other darker world. If Dick didn’t play his hand exactly right, Slade could be a dangerous, unpredictable player. During Dick’s early years as Nightwing, Slade had still been kicking Dick’s ass more often than anything. Dick knew now that Slade had never intended to kill him, except during that first brutal fight with HIVE, but he hadn’t known that when it was happening. And even if this version of Slade shared that same reluctance, he could still make Dick’s life a living hell - maybe even just to fuck with Dick. Dick couldn’t afford that kind of mess right now. If there was anyone who could fuck him right up and throw a wrench in all of his plans, it was Slade “Be My Apprentice” Wilson.
“Fuck,” Dick muttered. He had to stop for a moment to press the heels of his hands against his eyes. He selfishly wanted Slade at his side, and he just couldn’t take any unnecessary risks. Until he knew what was going on, he would have to play the oblivious, twenty-year-old vigilante, and try to enlist Deathstroke’s help the old fashioned way.
And then maybe he could to the bottom of this whole fucking catastrophe.