DC One Shots (Mainly Dick Grayson)

I've Fallen and I Can't Get Up

Whumptober 2021- day twenty-eight
Hide & Seek
Escape, Flight, hiding

Slade takes Dick on a camping trip, and they play hide and seek.

For Blizzardwing47 the queen of father-son Dick and Slade

The forest was quiet around Dick.

He walked through the underbrush with a careful eye for sticks, leaves, anything that could make noise. Shadows danced over his face, speckles of sunlight breaking through the canopy high above.

He could hear insects and birds, animals all around him, life existing around him.

But that's not what he was looking for.

Footsteps were in the mud. Shallow, and covered over in places. But not covered over well enough- on purpose? Was he supposed to find them? He crouched on the ground as he looked at the tracks, then turned his eye on the bushes around him, trying to find other signs that someone had been through the area. He stood slowly, walking carefully around the tracks so he didn't disturb them. The forest wasn't sparse but there was plenty of visibility between the trees, the understorey leaving plenty of area for people to see a good distance ahead.

He peered around, looking for a shadow, and found nothing. He could feel someone's eyes on him-

Correction. Someone's eye.

Dick stopped walking, relaxing his muscles and straining his ears.

He heard a twig snap.

He pointed, eyes closed, towards the sound and grinned, "found you!"

"That you did," Slade said.

Dick opened his eyes and watched Slade drop from the tree he'd been hiding in.

"My turn to hide?" Dick asked.

Slade rose an eyebrow, and then pulled something from his belt and flicked it out to reveal a bo staff, "not yet."

Dick laughed as he dodged Slade's first few hits, and then pulled his own bo staff out.

Slade only gave him a halfhour head start, so Dick had to find a good hiding place quickly without leaving any tracks. Slade would look for him in the trees, which was annoying because that was his original plan.

He couldn't just pick a direction and run because he'd leave tracks everywhere, he needed to think about this.

He did get up into the trees so he could travel without leaving footprints, but he couldn't stay up there. Luckily for him, he was much smaller and therefore lighter than Slade, so he could get higher up in the canopy. Slade would probably find it harder to find a sign that he'd travelled from one tree to the other if he couldn't even get up to his level without breaking branches.

He swung from one tree to the other, and then froze, backtracking and looking towards the thing he'd seen in his peripheral vision.

The cabin they were staying in was elevated, it was in the middle of a range. Most of this area of the forest was decently level, but he was now looking at a slope downwards towards a small river. The canopy got sparser due to the fact that the trees disappeared to make way for the water, but there were plenty of bushes, lower level small trees.