DC One Shots (Mainly Dick Grayson)

I've Killed Very Many Fathers, You'll Have to be More Specific

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.