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They end up at the same hideout. A cheap motel that is about the least safe place around, but also so absurdly bad as a hideout that it might just end up being good. Surely no one is looking for Nightwing at a place like this, not even with the local gangs combing the city for him. They must be looking in all the places a halfway decent safehouse would be located. No one expects Nightwing to be hiding in plain sight.
Or Deathstroke. Dick still has no idea why Slade ends up at the same motel, or why he looks like he’s fully intending to stay.
The way he surveils the parking lot Dick gets the impression he’s also hiding. From who, though? It’s probably bad news for the general populace when Deathstroke is running from someone.
And apparently choosing to do it with Dick. So it’s bad news for Dick, mostly.
“Is there a reason you’re here?” Dick asks, curt, because the shoulder that got the worst of the damage is a constant low thrum of burning pain. Trying to wrap the wounds is proving to be exactly as annoying as he expected. More, actually, since he now has to do it with an audience. “Here in this room I rented. For me. My room, in fact.”
“Are you thinking about throwing me out, Grayson?” Slade asks, genuinely curious like he’s interested in finding out how Dick thinks he might accomplish it. Well, at least Dick can still amuse the villain in the room, even if breaking up a gang with a weapon hoarding problem didn’t work out.
The whole thing feels halfway like a fever dream, with Slade just showing back up in Dick’s life like nothing’s wrong. Like they’re acquaintances or even friends, not people that have tried to kill each other more than once. Like no one in the room has committed mass murder. Dick only wishes he knew how Slade manages to sweep past all the past badness like it was never there. Probably by not giving a damn about any of the terrible shit he does.
But the nonchalance makes Dick question reality. Maybe he’s having really weird extended hallucinations. Fumes from the explosion. He really wishes it was fume-induced delusions and not the real Slade.
“Depends on how long you’re planning to stay.” Really, the answer should be ‘yes’. But Dick is in no shape to physically remove him, and Slade did kind of save him from a fiery death, even if only coincidentally while making his own escape from the explosion, so it would be rude to turn him out just an hour later. Dick will wait another two, maybe. Unless Slade starts—
“Depends on how soon the Bat will swoop in to save you. Or will it be Superman again? Do they fight over whose turn it is?”
That. Unless Slade starts something like that.
He should know better than to bring up Superman saving Dick, knowing what Dick had to be saved from when Superman had to get involved. But Slade’s also the last person to care about not bringing up the wrong thing. Anyway, it’s not like anyone could just forget all the things Slade has done, if he kept his mouth shut and didn’t remind people.
“They draw straws,” Dick says, with a smile that feels more like a grimace. But the bloody mess he’s trying to bandage is a good enough excuse for it.
Like hell is he letting Slade drag him into whatever this is supposed to be. There’s no point in hoping it escapes Slade how angry Dick suddenly feels, especially when that’s exactly what Slade wanted. The infuriating smirk on Slade’s face is more than enough to know Slade saw that land.
But Dick can refuse to engage. There is nothing he wants less than to talk about Bruce right now, except maybe to have Bruce really show up in person. While Dick is maskless, shirtless and sharing a motel room with Deathstroke. It might be hilarious, if the idea wasn’t so viscerally horrifying. That he’s sitting on the only bed in the room just makes it more hilari-fying. The clerk at the front desk definitely made assumptions. Bruce would know better, but surely there would be a whole second and a half before he compiled all the evidence where his mind would entertain the possibility.
The bandages slip, again, and Dick curses. He could just give up and go to sleep. It’s not so bad that he’ll bleed out by the morning. And the place is shady enough that some suspicious bloodstains on the sheets won’t shock anyone. Dick will probably get ten different infections, but that’s just life.
Then again, there’s no way he’s sleeping tonight, not with people out for his blood and worse, Slade in his room and showing no sign of planning to leave. Might as well occupy himself with something. Distract himself from the way Slade is unhurriedly taking his armor, previously badly hidden by a simple oversized hoodie, off piece by piece. Definitely not planning to leave, then.
It’s almost obscene, watching Slade voluntarily make himself more vulnerable in his presence. Sure, Dick isn’t really a threat to him tonight, not unless he really does call someone else down here to help. And if Slade knows him well enough to make that jab, he knows Dick well enough to know he won’t make that call, not when it’s only his own life at risk.
When the bandage he’s trying to tighten unravels, again, for the third time in as many minutes, Dick does give up, just for a moment.
He falls face first onto the bed and screams into the bedding, and imagines beating up everyone that had a hand in the events that led to him almost getting blown up and then having to share a room with Slade. Slade, who is the cause of good two thirds of Dick’s current stress.
Quietly. Dick screams quietly. The blankets muffle the sound enough, anyway.
He bets Slade has a safehouse in the city, too. And since Dick isn’t in the best shape he’s ever been, he couldn’t have tailed Slade to it. So the only reason Slade isn’t in that safehouse right now is that he wants to aggravate Dick while he can't retaliate or do anything about it.
Dick wishes he could focus more on the legitimately horrifying crimes Slade has committed instead of the way he keeps criminally annoying Dick with his presence. One of those is important and the other a personal inconvenience. But fuck, Slade’s every action always feels very personal to Dick. There was never a chance he could have stayed objective with Slade involved.
Something cool spills on Dick’s shoulder, like a shock of ice instantly numbing his wounds. He twitches and stays still. He recognizes the scent of the fancy cooling antiseptic cream.
The only person in the room with him is Slade, so it must mean—
Calloused fingers spread the puddle of cream across his skin slowly, almost carefully. Dick breathes through it. Through the way his muscles lock up so tightly they ache. Through the fight or flight instinct that’s working in overdrive at having a, no, the highest level threat at his unguarded back. And through the overwhelming urge to shiver at the cold touch slowly mapping his shoulderblade, his upper arm. The back of his neck.
The cold is unbearable. It must be, because there’s no other reason Dick would shiver at the sensation.
Slade doesn’t seem to be in any rush, but he does eventually stop. He wraps clean bandages around the arm and the shoulder expertly, moving Dick this way and that as easily as a doll to do it.
It feels like repeatedly getting concussed.
“Who are you?” Dick demands in a thick voice, face still half smushed against the musty bedding. “This will not stop me from throwing you out, just so we’re clear.”
Slade chuckles far too warmly, and the strange sound of it feels like alcohol. “I’d like to see you try.” And it doesn’t sound like a threat, not really. Dick is pretty sure Slade means it—he would love to see that.
It’s possible Dick has miscalculated. He should have found a way to send Slade away the moment he stepped over the threshold.
For a moment he considers the chance it might actually be someone else. A shapeshifter or someone disguised by magic or some alien technology. There’s no way anyone could replicate the way Slade moves, though, and definitely no way to replicate the way every cell in Dick’s body bristles in annoyance at his presence.
A loud noise in a nearby room, followed by muffled shouting knocks them both out of the unnaturally still moment.
Dick gets up and finds clothes to sleep in that only moderately smell of smoke in his emergency bag. At least he still has that. It would suck even more, if he had to not-sleep in his bloody, slightly exploded costume.
Slade makes no other comments about Batman or Dick’s inability to deal with things on his own, but the stale air in the room still feels tense between them. Not helped at all by the tiny smirk perpetually stuck on Slade’s face.
While changing and cleaning up in the bathroom, Dick texts Rose to ask if she knows what the fuck Slade is involved in now, but doesn’t get a clear answer, just a string of angryface emojis and a picture of a knife.
So that’s not helping him narrow down what or who Slade might be hiding from by laying low in Dick’s motel room.
Slade doesn’t even bother being inconspicuous about the once-over he gives Dick, when he comes out of the tiny bathroom in his not-sleep clothes. Dick feels phantom touches over his back and shoulder.
This is the worst distraction technique in the history of distraction techniques, and somehow it’s still working. It takes Dick far too long to remember to check out what else has happened nearby in the past day.
“You blew up the docks,” he says flatly, too tired to be properly incredulous. Of course Slade did that. Why would he even need to hide from someone, if he hadn’t done extensive damage to someone or something? Demolishing a mostly derelict dock is probably the least awful thing he could have done.
Slade doesn’t bother denying, just smirks more annoyingly and keeps typing something on his own tablet.
“Weren’t you in town to do just that, Grayson? Don’t be a hypocrite now.”
“I wasn’t going to blow anything up!” Not much, anyway. The explosion that he almost got caught in was definitely not Dick’s doing.
“Your loss,” Slade says with a careless shrug.
“The main weapons stockpile wasn’t even there!” Dick knows, because up until Slade started to, apparently, blow up parts of the city, his mission was going swimmingly. Half-swimmingly. Kind of.
“Mhm,” Slade hums noncommittally.
“Slade. What did you blow up?” Dick grits out. If Slade wasn’t aiming for the weapons, what was he there for? Predictably, Slade doesn’t answer.
Dick throws his hands up, exasperated and done with everything, and then mutters a curse when the motion pulls uncomfortably at his injured shoulder.
He slumps down on the bed, back against the uncomfortable headboard. Slade might be here to do something bad, something worse than blowing up an empty dock. And Dick is right here, and yet a million miles from finding out what Slade is planning.
It makes Dick suddenly feel more tired than he thought he was. It’s all feeling like a game he doesn’t know the rules of, and reminds him uncomfortably of feeling too young and very out of his depth. Not an unfamiliar state of things, by any means. Now that he thinks about it, he’s almost always felt that way when dealing with Slade, even when he did his best to pretend he had everything under control.
He thought he’d outgrown it, but here Slade is, always ready and delighted to prove him wrong.
The exhaustion isn’t helping. It’s making Dick feel unsteady, some strange in-between state between dizzy and floaty. He rubs his eyes to push the feeling away.
At least with Slade here, if the people out for his blood find him tonight, he might have backup. Very dubious backup, but better than no backup. Slade could be working a job for them, but then he’d have no reason to hang around so long before handing Dick over. Unless he just likes getting his kicks from messing with Dick’s mind. Maybe he’s waiting for Dick to let his guard down, as if there’s any lower for that guard to drop. Goddamn.
Sometimes Dick really hates that Slade’s brain is such a snake pit that every suspicion that would be paranoia when dealing with anyone else, is just a reasonable thing to expect from Slade. He might do any number of things so fucked up no one sane even considers them possible. Or he might carefully take care of an enemy’s injured shoulder. Maybe it’s the coin-toss nature of trying to predict Slade that’s stressing Dick out the most.
“You’re not going to sleep?” Dick asks when Slade stays seated on the one rickety chair in the room and shows no signs he’s about to move.
“Oh, I’d love to,” Slade drawls, finally looking at him and not the screen of the tablet. “But you might need to save your strength for getting out of town.”
Dick is so tired it takes him a second or three, but he rolls his eyes hard when he gets it. “Isn’t that why you’re here, to be a bodyguard for me?”
Slade raises his eyebrow and stares at Dick, looking almost surprised. Impressed by the audacity maybe?
“Well,” Slade says and puts down the tablet. “Let us negotiate the price.” The last couple of words are warm breaths against Dick’s face, with Slade leaning so close he’s bracing himself with a hand against the wall.
“I thought me not kicking you out was it,” Dick says with another eyeroll, this one more forced than the first. Slade is so close his scent is making Dick dizzy, even if it’s the same scent of smoke and explosions that covers both of them. Dick’s head isn’t clear enough to play this game. It's an insult to injury that Slade is using Dick’s own games against him, too.
Slade laughs, and lets it go, retreating and taking his scent and his radiating warmth with him, probably recognizing that Dick isn’t going to be any fun to poke tonight, with how exhausted he feels. He does sit down next to Dick on the bed and picks up the tablet again, screen angled perfectly to be unreadable to Dick.
It’s going to be a long uncomfortable night.
Dick has to fight against the way his eyelids feel heavy every time he blinks. He considers coffee, and then laughs quietly at himself. He has Slade’s presence to simulate that effect. Keeps him more alert than any stimulant could.
Except between one blink and the next he’s suddenly warm. He tries to figure out what’s changed, and realizes he’s a lot more horizontal than just a moment ago. He keeps his eyes closed. There are fingers running through his hair idly. It’s the same musty blankets, and everything smells like smoke, except now Dick is curled up against what he’s pretty sure is Slade’s side.
From the way Dick’s body feels, it must have been hours, hours that he’s spent asleep right next to Slade. It shouldn’t have happened. But Dick lies there, feeling like a cat being petted, and decides not to move. Sometimes one must recognize things can’t possibly get any worse. And so there’s no reason not to enjoy the warmth just a bit longer.
Dick keeps his eyes closed.
The fingers in his hair tighten. “So,” Slade says, as he pulls on Dick’s hair just hard enough to sting a little. “About that price of protection.” Figures that he noticed the moment Dick woke up.
It should be worrying. Somehow the reality of the situation still hasn’t managed to catch up with him, not even after a few hours of sleep. So instead of fighting it, Dick stays down, pressed up against Slade’s metahuman warmth.
“Hmm, I don’t know, Slade. What do you want?” Maybe if he makes Slade spell it out, he’ll give up trying to outplay Dick at his own game. Or maybe Dick is too dazed by Slade’s scent enveloping him and the entire bed to tell what game Slade is playing.
“Depends on how long you’re planning to stay,” Slade turns Dick’s words back at him. The slightly mocking tone riles Dick up less than usual. He’s too comfortable to get as annoyed as he normally would.
When Dick stays silent too long, Slade pulls on his hair again, tugs it too lightly to hurt much, so it ends up making Dick feel a different kind of way. Still, he stays where he is. Maybe valiantly resists grinding against Slade’s thigh, but no one needs to know that.
“I’ve got nowhere to be,” Dick chokes out, doing a very bad job of keeping his voice sound normal. He has so many places to be. Anywhere in the damn world that’s not here with Slade.
“Good,” Slade says, and lets go of Dick’s hair. For a moment Dick thinks this is it, the end of whatever mindgame Slade was trying to play, and definitely didn’t win. Then Slade moves, rolls them until Dick is on his back, Slade above and all around him, radiating heat and the scent of smoke like a fire.
If Dick is going to lose anyway, he might as well go all out. Burn before he gets burnt. So he pulls Slade down even closer and drags him into a kiss before Slade can do it.
That way it feels like they’ll both win.