Robin had just enough wherewithal to blast 'Two strangers!' over the link before he staggered. It was that or snap at the assassin again, and warning his team was more important.
No stranger to psychic attacks -- thanks, M'gann -- he managed to stay on his feet, even as he dreaded the headache later.
He wanted to warn the others but the brain blast was too loud, flooding his mind with images. A child's unwavering trust in his parents, older brothers, a happy, idyllic, well-off family, a visceral trigger that echoed in his own memories and made his eyes behind the mask burn--but it shifted, brutally fast, into the kind of screaming terror only possible to someone too young to understand.
And all of that child's trust shattered, in an instant, under an unpaid ransom, and that stung him in the heart, too, because he couldn't imagine it, couldn't believe it possible, and he felt horribly guilty from the security that both his biological father and his foster father would have moved heaven and hell--
And there was hell, right there. The boy was rescued, and that Dick identified with, that Dick felt deep in his bones, watching, experiencing, his rescuer bring him to safety, away from the rest of the world, and show him how to--
His stomach twisted, deeply uncomfortable, as he saw arrows and darts piercing flesh behind his eyelids. The assassin was young, but gifted, skilled, and he knew what that was like, how that felt, that horrible mix of gratitude and hero-worship and a desire not to let someone down after they'd done so much for you, but Bruce never taught me to kill, Bruce would never ask me to kill, Bruce knows what murder is, better than anyone, and the assassin's rescuer -- Persia -- didn't stop there. He brought other boys in, but the assassin was the first, the one they looked to, the most experienced.
The last year or so accelerated by in a whirlwind. He saw his two unforeseen variables, saw the assassin going up against them, up against some kind of cult of immortality, saw the father who wasn't a father at all, saw him lose his sister right as he found her and his rescuer die in the same manner he'd ordered others to. They stopped the cult but didn't defeat them, and here they were.
Dick's face was damp. He swore he was sweating underneath his mask.
no subject
No stranger to psychic attacks -- thanks, M'gann -- he managed to stay on his feet, even as he dreaded the headache later.
He wanted to warn the others but the brain blast was too loud, flooding his mind with images. A child's unwavering trust in his parents, older brothers, a happy, idyllic, well-off family, a visceral trigger that echoed in his own memories and made his eyes behind the mask burn--but it shifted, brutally fast, into the kind of screaming terror only possible to someone too young to understand.
And all of that child's trust shattered, in an instant, under an unpaid ransom, and that stung him in the heart, too, because he couldn't imagine it, couldn't believe it possible, and he felt horribly guilty from the security that both his biological father and his foster father would have moved heaven and hell--
And there was hell, right there. The boy was rescued, and that Dick identified with, that Dick felt deep in his bones, watching, experiencing, his rescuer bring him to safety, away from the rest of the world, and show him how to--
His stomach twisted, deeply uncomfortable, as he saw arrows and darts piercing flesh behind his eyelids. The assassin was young, but gifted, skilled, and he knew what that was like, how that felt, that horrible mix of gratitude and hero-worship and a desire not to let someone down after they'd done so much for you, but Bruce never taught me to kill, Bruce would never ask me to kill, Bruce knows what murder is, better than anyone, and the assassin's rescuer -- Persia -- didn't stop there. He brought other boys in, but the assassin was the first, the one they looked to, the most experienced.
The last year or so accelerated by in a whirlwind. He saw his two unforeseen variables, saw the assassin going up against them, up against some kind of cult of immortality, saw the father who wasn't a father at all, saw him lose his sister right as he found her and his rescuer die in the same manner he'd ordered others to. They stopped the cult but didn't defeat them, and here they were.
Dick's face was damp. He swore he was sweating underneath his mask.