Whumptober 2021- day seventeen
Field care 101
'Please don't move', haemorrhage, dread

Nightwing is kidnapped by an enemy of Deathstroke because they've noticed the two teaming up a few times- enough times to think they must at least be friends. However, unfortunately, they're a bit more than that, so they basically just signed their death warrant.

title from the absolutely iconic line Darth Vader gave to Luke in one of the comics. It is rivalled only by 'you're surrounded!' 'All I am surrounded by is fear. and dead men'.
maybe I should make fics of Slade inspired by Vader lmao.

Slade's blood runs cold when he answers the phone.

It's 6:30 on a Tuesday night, he's in the apartment he shares with Dick. Except Dick hasn't been home since the night before, when he left for patrol.

And yeah, he trusts Dick and knows that Dick can take care of himself. But there was no note, no message, no phone call, and if Dick was going to drop off the radar for a day he'd give Slade a heads up. Especially because Dick knows that Slade has been dealing with some particularly difficult assassins trying to take him out as of late, and he doesn't need the stress of worrying about Dick's well being on top of that.

(you need to be less protective; Dick would say, I'll be fine. I'm always fine. I'm not leaving you any time soon, Slade)

He'd been trying to get a hold of Dick all day, and after that failed he went out and tracked his patrol route through Bludhaven. Nothing was amiss.

And now his phone rings, the number not in his contacts list, and he picks it up with a short and harsh, "talk."

"Slade."

It's Dick's voice, and it's pained and strained and crackling over the line, partially because of the connection and partially because it sounds close to breaking.

"Dick?" the name hisses out of him without conscious thought, and it's only afterwards that he considers if Dick is still in costume. He can't find it in himself to care about the possibility that he's dropped his name, anyone around is going to die painfully at the end of his sword once he gets there. It all catches up quickly, the dots connecting. Dick's been injured. Kidnapped? It's likely. "where are you?"

There's a heavy breath on the other end of the line, and Dick says, "The coordinates are being sent to this number now."

Slade's grip on the phone is tight, "Who has you?"

"Slade it's-"

The words are cut off and the phone fills with the sound of movement, air rushing past the audio input, and in the background, Slade hears a slap, and Dick's voice in a high-pitched pained sound, and someone barks, "read off the script."

"they're giving you five hours. Come alone."

"Tell them to let me talk to their boss," Slade hissed, "I want to give me threats directly to them."

There are sounds in the background that Slade can't decipher, then, "I think that's a no."

"Hold tight," Slade said, "and start writing your hero monologue about letting people live because I'm putting a bullet through every head except yours once I'm there."

Slade expects a how romantic, or perhaps a this is why you need anger management therapy, he gets nothing, just the beep of the call ending, and it hikes his already high level of rage up another 100%.

He scowls when the coordinates pop up on the screen, and he gets to work.

There's one plus side to this whole thing: they're only hurting Dick as much as they need to in order to make the point.

Like, sure, he's in a great amount of pain, but he could be in greater amounts of pain. Easily. Before they'd called Slade and made Dick do the talking, he could tell that this wasn't about him because they weren't actually torturing him, they were just roughing him up. Not a little, a lot, but it could be a lot more.

They'd thrown him in a cell at first, so Dick had attempted an escape. After that, they tied him down on his stomach and used a wooden cane to beat his feet till they bled and he was screaming into the cement. Escape was a bit difficult after that.

He still tried though. Not only because he wanted to escape for obvious reasons, but also because there wasn't anything else to do. It wasn't common to provide magazines for your captive.

The second attempt was met with similar treatment, except this time they moved to his back, cracking a belt across his skin till even thinking of moving made Dick scream.

They left him in the cell to pull himself back together. At least they left this mask on, so they couldn't see his red eyes. The tears had escaped the glue of the mask long ago, and it felt a little loose, but it was still on. He shivered in the cold cell, left with only the bottom half of his suit and his mask, and tried to regain his ability to think past ow.

The phone call happened while he was tied to a chair, the wood scraping against his sensitive still bleeding back.

Now, he stares at them all, testing the knots tying him to the chair.

"So," he says, "I hope you guys have your wills sorted."

The slap is entirely expected, and he thanks his lucky stars that he doesn't bite his tongue when it happens. He can feel a heaviness in his head from an oncoming concussion, and he blinks back spots in his vision.

"boss said that if he reckons he's such a Houdini escapist type, we should make sure he can't move enough to escape," says a voice, and the person who just slapped him grins down at him.

Dick swallows down the dread creeping up his stomach. He can't manage the usual unaffected façade that he likes to go for, so he falls back on calm. He relaxes his muscles as he breathes. Slade is coming for him, he's going to be okay, no matter how bad this gets he's going to be okay.

He trusts Slade.

There are sounds in the background, metal scraping and people talking, but Dick knows he'll just feel worse if he bothers to listen.

He snaps back to reality when someone grabs his chair, and they haul him towards another part of the building. Dick is at least glad that's it's not a warehouse, the cliché might have killed him. it looks like it's an abandoned apartment building, just this side of decrepit. Windows are missing and the wooden flooring creaks with every step. Some of it is torn up revealing the cement beneath.

They drag him by the chair over to where even the cement has started falling apart, and Dick stares. Someone has grabbed the steel mesh that once held the cement together and pulled it from the ground and stripped away the connecting pieces till it's just a lone rusted pole of around an inch thick, sharpened at the end and standing about a metre tall.

They drag him right up to it and then tip the chair forwards. Dick scrambles, fighting at the knots as they hold him so his throat hangs about a handsbreadth above the pointed tip.

"wait, wait-"

"quit moving," they say, "or I'll drop you."

Dick stills, staring down. He can't even see the pointed end anymore, it's out of his line of sight. His heart beats against his chest so hard he feels it in his ears.

Someone else grabs a rope and ties it around Dick's chest, then they pull it taught and tie the other end to something out of Dick's line of sight. Then the person holding him lets him go, and Dick winces, all too aware of the fact that his life is in the hands of one rope. There's a bit of slack, so he jerks, and he's not sure if it's his mind playing tricks or not but he swears he feels it brush against his skin before he can pull his neck as far away as possible.

Someone plucks the rope; it bounces and Dick feels nausea rise. The knot keeping the rope around his chest gives, just a little, enough for Dick to feel the rope pulling tight around him and slipping. He holds still, every muscle tense, and prays that the knot will hold until Slade gets to him. the chair creaks, the two legs it stands on slide ever so slightly.

He can see the door now, he couldn't before but in this new part of the room, he has a clear view of it.

He starts counting the seconds. He has five hours.

He trusts Slade. He's going to be okay.

Slade is true to his word. When he arrives at the building there are two people standing outside the door, and he aims and fires before they have a chance to do anything about it.

He kicks the door down, and someone is standing in the middle of what once may have been a foyer. When Slade aims his gun at them they smile and say, "you don't even want an introduction?"

"no," Slade says, but before he fires they fling a projectile and it lodges in his barrel.

"well you're getting one," they hiss, "and then I'm putting you in a grave, just like you did my father."

Slade scowls, and he slides his sword from its sheath, "all this for a dead dad? How original."

"You don't even know who I am," they say, their lip curled in disgust.

"I've killed a lot of people, and the next one will be you," Slade says.

They're armed as well, and they wrench their blade from its sheath with no respect for it, they look like a tantruming child.

"My father was your friend-"

"I don't have those."

"then why come all this way for some spandex hero?" they smirk as if they've just won a game of wits, "You killed my father, so I'm going to kill him in front of you and-"

"I don't know if you've been in a fight before," Slade says, "but usually there's a lot less talking than this."

"William Walsh," they snap at him, "was my father and you-"

"Oh," Slade says, and he can see it now that the kid has said the name. they do look a lot like Walsh, "well isn't that a surprise. I didn't realise he had a kid; he seemed a bit busy being a terrorist."

"he was not-"

Slade launches on the offensive as the kid argues. It's kind of a shame. William Walsh was a considerable adversary and Slade had revelled in killing him. the man had kidnapped his son and been the cause of Joey's destroyed vocal cords, after all, so he'd taken his time to tear Walsh apart.

And it seemed his kid hadn't learned the lesson he taught his father, because he'd made the same mistake.

He gets the kid on the ground too quickly to really enjoy it. he stabs his swords through his stomach with enough force to lodge the blade into the ground and the kid shrieks.

"If I left you here you'd bleed out in a few hours," Slade says, as he heads for the staircase, "but I'll be back, don't worry, and then I'll decide what to do with you."

"don't walk away from me!"

"already doing it," he calls over his shoulder, "you wanna stop me you're gonna have to pull that sword out yourself."

The kid yells profanities and screams in both rage and pain as Slade makes his way up to the second floor. There are guards milling around the landing and the empty doorways reveal rooms with more people. Slade sinks into a fighting stance as they look at him, and he revels in the sounds their heads make when he slams them into the walls.

A few fall from bullet wounds, but he doesn't like how quick it is, how unpersonal. These people hurt Dick, kidnapped him and beat him and who knows what else.

he tears one person's stomach open with a dagger; he slams his booted foot into one person's throat s hard they collapse, coughing blood onto the ground and choking on it; he throws someone onto a windowsill and then brings the window down on their neck so hard it cracks. Bones break and shatter, red splatters itself on his suit as he carves his way through the men in the building.

He turns eventually to find only one left and they run.

He follows them up several flights of stairs until they burst through a door and into a large room, and Slade is caught off guard by what he sees.

Dick is strapped to a chair, one frayed rope holding him on an angle. There's a steel rod from the ground pointed straight at his throat, and when Dick meets Slade's eye he exhales with his whole body.

The chair slips ever so slightly, and Dick stares wide-eyed towards the steel rod below him.

"Yeah, that's right," says the man Slade followed into the room, "if your little friend twitches he's likely to drop right onto that-"

"Shut up," Slade snaps, stalking towards them.

They scramble backwards, reaching for a knife, and Slade pulls his gun just as they turn to throw the blade.

The bullet fires as they let it go, and it scatters across the ground. They collapse on the creaking wood panels, screaming as they press at the blood gushing from their chest, but the sound is wet and pained and growing every weaker as their lungs give out now that there's a hole in them.

Slade sighs in relief, kicking the knife away as he pulls his mask off and walks towards Dick.

Slade grabs the chair and pulls it back onto all four legs, and Dick looks up at him with an expression that can only be explained as relief.

Slade spies the tear tracks and he removes his gloves so he can cup Dick's face, "did you doubt me?"

"Absolutely not," Dick says, then laughs lightly, "okay, maybe a little."

Slade presses a kiss to his forehead and then starts undoing the ropes.

"how many?" Dick asks.

Slade looks up at him, "you think I bothered to count?"

Dick swallows and looks away.

"There deaths aren't on your conscience."

"except they are."

Slade undoes another knot and the ropes fall. He cradles Dick's head in one hand and tilts it up so he can kiss him deeply.

"They asked for it when they hurt you."

"Slade..."

"Let me take you home, we'll patch you up," Slade says, "and I can make you forget about all this for a while, and then tomorrow you can lecture me and we can go over your martyr complex again until you remember that you're not responsible for everyone's actions, okay?"

Dick drops his head against Slade, exhaling deeply, and says, "okay."

Slade bends down and wraps his arms around Dick so he can lift him up bridal style, and Dick yelps at the contact. Slade stares at the red marks and the bruises and the blood, and he feels the rage begin to boil again.

"Slade," Dick sighs, "let's just go home."

Slade swallows it down and forces the rage temperature down to a simmer, and then he shifts his grip on Dick so that he's not pressing his wounds when he holds him.

"Oh," he stops as he remembers the person he left skewered downstairs, "I might have to take care of something first."

"Slade I draw the line at torture," Dick says, and Slade would be affronted by his automatic assumption if it wasn't mildly amusing that he knew him so well.

"So I should leave him with a sword through his guts?"

"Slade!"