requested by JordynAdams1

SO SORRY TO THIS PERSON THIS REQUEST IS SO OLD!!

i wanna explain a little because I feel terrible but basically I've been releasing stuff I wrote ages ago I'm talking stuff I basically finished off back in March because I had my dissertation and exam season. 

I expected to be back on it and writing a lot again but that didn't happen because I've been stressed due to the marking boycott happening as my dissertation which took two whole semesters to complete is left ungraded and might not be graded until after my graduation date. 

I can't find a job in the field I want without all my grades or at least a predicted grade, the field I want to go into has very few opportunities right now thanks to budget cuts and stuff so it's super competitive. 

TLDR: I've been stressed due to a marking boycott and job insecurity which meant I didn't release new stuff

UPDATE: currently fighting with keele to consider regrading my dissertation as I believe I wasn't graded properly with everything taken into account and i also just didn't get any feedback 

UPDATE UPDATE: i got my final grade

this is over 7000 words too so add that to the wait time

TW/CW: blood, suggestions of SA, violence, suggestions of abuse and neglect

https://rapecrisis.org.uk/get-help/want-to-talk/

https://www.thehotline.org/

https://www.rainn.org/about-national-sexual-assault-telephone-hotline

There were a lot of things Jason hated to be reminded of. He hated when people reminded him of the year or so following his resurrection. He hated when people saw him as the angry person he'd become and let that bleed into how he was as Robin. He hated knowing he liked his family but pushed them away in a vain attempt to protect himself from the rejection he'd felt when he saw Joker alive. What he hated most of all was being reminded of the day he died. 

Jason felt the ropes digging at his skin and immediately knew what was to come. He'd had the nightmares enough times and spent forever in the shower washing away the imaginary blood for the feeling of ropes around his wrists to be familiar. He opened his eyes and saw he was looking at his own blood on the ground with a few of his teeth. Joker had already hit him, he'd come back in the middle of the memory if he was right. The villain was laughing at him, he knew that even if the sound was distorted from the pulsing in his head. He'd seen this memory so many times that the terror was numbing rather than adrenaline spiking. He rolled onto his back and looked up at his attacker who was primed for another attack then dragged his eyes across the room to see the bomb. The timer on it flickered between a classic clock and a digital one with red numbers. 

Jason wasn't fourteen anymore. He was an adult. He was an adult who went through hell, who died in that warehouse in the worst pain of his life, and still somehow clawed through six feet of dirt to live a good life. It was a good life. He'd seen the darkest parts of the human psyche and he'd lived. So why was he here? 

It was hard to think between the blows but he forced himself to do it anyway. This wasn't a flashback and not quite a nightmare. The hits felt real but they were hitting the wrong places from where Joker was striking him. A blow to the ribs hit his arms instead. So he thought back to before this memory began. He knew it was a memory so what was he doing in the real world to trigger it?

"Help," Nightwing gritted out. His voice crackled and Jason couldn't see him. They were on the phone- no not the phone. They were on the comm units. Nightwing had told him and the others to stay on the line tonight just in case. He couldn't remember what the case was though. There was a shout of pain, and voices followed asking questions he couldn't remember right but he knew that they were worried. He was worried because Nightwing didn't ask for help unless he was on his last legs and halfway buried in his grave.

The ropes on his wrists loosened a little as he ran through the steps that got him here. There was something wrong about this picture and he wasn't going to ignore it to accept his fate at the hands of Joker.

"All of you? How fun." Who was that? It wasn't their usual villain, he knew their voices well. This villain was more Nightwing's than theirs but he knew of them. He looked across the room and found Nightwing on the floor clutching his head as though it was about to explode. The whites of his lenses were blown wide and a thin trail of red ran from his lips but his jaw was tight. Did he bite his own tongue? Did he lose a tooth in battle? Is he bleeding internally? "You'll make worthy distractions."

Psimon. 

Jason was in a memory. He'd been sent there by Psimon after trying to help Dick who was God knows where. Joker went for another swing but he rolled out of the way and shrugged off the now useless ropes that once pinned his wrists together. Psimon made a mistake choosing the memory he'd spent years working on getting past and he made an even bigger mistake thinking that he could get away with getting inside their heads. Everyone else was probably battling their own memories and although he had faith that they'd find their way out, he knew that he was probably going to be the first to beat their fears.

The ropes fell from his wrists as though they'd never wrapped around them in the first place and Joker's laughter finally faltered. A worried look that was completely foreign on the villain's face overtook his wide smile and Jason never felt better as he dragged himself onto his feet, slowly feeling the wounds heal and the ache edge away. It was still there which made him wonder what exactly was happening to his body whilst he was trapped here. Knowing how most of these hallucinations or mind manipulation situations go, it wasn't good and he needed out. The crowbar in Joker's hand clattered as it hit the floor, falling from his hand as though snatched and discarded. He took steps back like Jason was a bomb about to go off and remained silent seemingly out of fright. 

Jason stooped down to collect the weapon and twisted it idly in his hands. He could beat Joker. It would be fake and ultimately a waste of time but he imagined there'd be some catharsis in killing even a replica of the man. There'd be no consequences either, he could keep going until there was a large puddle of blood and no breathing other than his own filling the room. He could rid himself of this nightmare for a brief moment and cherish the memory of seeing the man who killed him just as beaten and broken as he'd been at fourteen. He wanted to. God did he want to hear the crunch of breaking bones and smell copper in the air. Jason knew he could spend hours of his life inside his mind just beating Joker senselessly until he barely resembled a person anymore. 

But what would be the point of it? It wouldn't bring him back the child that died all those years ago. It wouldn't make all those things he did suddenly okay and the real Joker would still be out there causing chaos. Would seeing a fake Joker dead do anything more than add another dead body to his memory? Did he really want to do exactly what Joker did to him? Surely if he did the same thing, he would only learn just how cruel someone had to be to not only beat someone to death but beat someone who was defenseless to death. Everything that happened was already in the past and this did nothing for the future. He didn't have the time anyway. He needed to get back to reality.

The crowbar hit the floor. 

A yellow door appeared behind Joker. 

Jason stepped around the villain carefully and inspected the new addition to the room. There was nothing special about it. It looked like a regular apartment door only he'd never seen a bright yellow door in a place like Gotham. He circled the door and found nothing behind it. 

"Dream physics then," he mumbled to himself. Hopefully, if dream physics were in place then there would be more dream rules in place. Preferably the ones where you don't actually die if you die in your dream. He circled it again, just to make sure there was definitely nothing there before grabbing the handle. "Here goes nothing," he muttered as he opened the door and stepped through. 

----

Tim couldn't keep running forever. That was stupid both logically and physically. His body would give out at some point or he would run out of hiding spaces then whatever followed him would gain distance and he'd have no energy to fight it off. He didn't even know what he was running from. It could be anything following him and the only thing he knew about it was that it laughed awkwardly. Jilted and cut off in all the wrong places. It was strangled out of it. At first, he thought it was Joker because the laugh was so manic but it wasn't him. It didn't chill him to the bone in the same way. This laugh was from something smaller. Maybe some creature imitated a laugh it heard as it crawled and scurried around looking for a victim or food. Perhaps it was some crazed victim of Joker who was forced to constantly laugh as they stumbled around. There were thousands of other possibilities, all of which were possible in a place like Gotham, and even though he needed to see what he was up against to figure out a plan, the thought of turning around and coming face-to-face with the thing made him sick. It filled him with a deep sense of wrong.

So he kept running and hiding until he felt the need to run again.

Tim wasn't sure where he was. It was a never-ending dark hall with boxes in every other yard, something you'd see in a Halloween Haunted House with plenty of places for scare actors to pop out and grab you. The lights above felt clinical and although they shone a bright yellow, the hallway was bathed in blood red. All colour was washed out with it and it pained him to keep his eyes open whilst they were exposed to the harshness but he couldn't bear to close them in fear whatever chased him somehow got in front of him even though there weren't any other entrances into the long hall.

He ducked behind another box to catch his breath and think of what to do next. Usually, he'd have at least a handful of different options but all his brain could come up with was run and hide. It was terrifying. Losing himself to fear was something he trained himself not to do and yet here he was unable to think of something that would actually be helpful. He buried his head in his hands, hoping that grounding himself would inspire something, but instead, he felt like a scared child fearing what lurked underneath the bed.

Then, something other than red flashed up ahead. His first thought was to run in the direction he'd come from but that would mean facing the thing that chased him. He watched carefully as a bright yellow line raced up the side of the wall before turning 90 degrees and then turning 90 degrees again. A door appeared in the rectangle the line drew and he held his breath anxiously as it creaked open, only to let it go with relief when he saw it was Jason stepping through. He had no idea how the former Robin got here or how the door appeared but he was just happy to see a familiar face. He jumped to his feet and raced over to greet him, stopping just short.

"Savour this because I'm certain it won't happen again but boy am I glad to see you," Tim greeted. 

"Thanks," Jason huffed. "What's with the pale lady get up?"

"Excuse me?"

"You know, the red hallways and the creepy laughing. Like the kid's book? They made a movie about the series. Stories to tell in the dark?" 

"Oh," he replied before pondering where he was. He couldn't remember how he got here but it felt familiar. Not a warm familiarity. It was more of a liminal space feeling where he knew he'd travelled through before but he didn't spend his time there. "I don't know but we need to get going before it catches up." He grabbed the older's hand and resumed running only now feeling a little safer in knowing someone else was there with him. 

"What is it?"

"Huh?"

"The thing chasing you. What is it?"

"Uhm, something?" Tim replied, knowing he sounded as dumb as he felt. "I-I don't know. I just know it can't come close to me and I can't look at it. Just have to keep going." At this, Jason slowed into a light jog and turned around. There was a slight curve in the hallway and from the end of it, he could a shadow being cast on the wall. He narrowed his eyes as he tried to make out any identifiers but was yanked by Tim trying to get him to speed up. "C'mon!"

"Not until you tell me what it is."

"I just said that I didn't know!"

"But you do know. This isn't real. You know what you're running from but you're not letting yourself see it." Tim glared at him. How could this not be real? He felt real, he'd touched Jason and knew that he was physically there. The hallway didn't make much sense though and he couldn't explain how harsh fluorescent lights that should bathe the corridor in a bright yellowish white were instead making it red. He couldn't explain why his brain wasn't thinking properly and was only preoccupied with running. He licked his lips anxiously, his whole body telling him that he needed to get back to sprinting from the threat. "Do you remember Psimon?"

Psimon. 

"Be careful tonight," he mentioned offhandedly. "You've not got any psychic support."

"I'll give you a call if I need help," Dick reassured him with a smile. He knew that he was taking a risk but there was no one else available. If it was going to work then Dick had to strike first and fast. "Stay on the line just in case, alright?"

"Like I wasn't going to anyway."

Nightwing was on the floor. His eyes were so wide that they looked like white holes dug from his skull. He was shaking all over but his lips were red aside from the crimson blood dribbling between them so he wasn't hypothermic. He was in shock. He was trapped in his mind. Psimon was talking, threatening most likely, but all Red Robin could concentrate on was the horrified look on his older brother's face. It contorted and twisted his features in such an incorrect way that it hurt just to look at it. 

"Shit, I'm in a dream, aren't I? No wonder I can't think straight in here," he muttered to himself. "How did you get here?"

"I just came from my nightmare. There are only so many times you can get beaten to death before you realize it's not happening again," Jason replied nonchalantly although the slight shake of his hands gave him away. "A door appeared and here I am. I thought it would wake me up but I'm here."

"We must all be connected from Dick's mind so he didn't need to struggle against our mental blocks. He must be in a rush," Tim theorized. It wouldn't be unheard of but it was certainly lazy. Isolation was more effective when there was no possible way for them to break it without giving in to whatever demands Psimon was going to make. Unless this was more of a distraction rather than the main plan. That must be what he was beginning to do when they answered Dick's distress signal. "We'll have to travel to Dick's mind. He'll be the center of it since he was the first to be trapped here or so I assume." Jason nodded along, agreeing with the theory. "So, how did you get the door to appear?"

"I faced it. The trauma." Of course, they'd been given a trauma to face in the hopes that their own denial of it would keep them trapped here. He took a shaky breath, his heart pounding so hard against his chest that he thought it was going to break through his ribs but he couldn't keep running. If they were trapped here so were Damian and Dick and who knows what Psimon was doing on the outside. He turned to the end of the hall and fought every instinct in him to remain still. 

The laughter grew closer and for just a moment, he thought he would chicken out but then he felt Jason put a supportive hand on his shoulder. A small reminder that this wouldn't hurt him because it wasn't real. He just needed to get through this and he didn't need to think about it afterwards. Seconds that ticked by felt hours long until finally the thing he was running from turned the corner and faced them. 

It was him. In that stupid mini Joker get-up, Harley had put him in before torturing him into some twisted child for her and Joker to raise. Bruce told him that there wouldn't be a trace of Joker in him anymore but that didn't stop him being terrified that one day, it would come out. Maybe in the middle of an investigation, he would turn from the lead detective into the prime subject. Perhaps when he was needed most, his mind would turn and he would be no help. People always told him that they would be fucked if he was a villain. He didn't want to hurt anyone. He didn't want to betray his friends and family after working so hard to be a part of their world. 

Tim sighed to himself and walked over to Joker Jr. He never realized just how small he was when it happened. He could feel the phantom pains of the pinned grin and now that he was close, he could see the tears welling in the boy's eyes. All he did after that night was sob and cling to whoever was willing to show him the kindness he desperately needed. He knelt down in front of the boy and hesitantly opened his arms up for him. Joker Jr. rushed to fill the space and wrapped his arms around him in a tight hug. 

"You're alright," he murmured to the boy. "We'll be okay."

Out of the corner of his eye, he noticed a green door appear. He sighed in relief and let go of Joker Jr. not unkindly. Jason gave him a small nod. One that said this wouldn't be talked about if he didn't want to be. Joker hurt them both when they were far too young so he supposed that Jason would know out of everyone what it was like to be broken by the man. He held onto that thought as he put his hand on the door.

"It'll be Damian next," he said.

"How do you know?"

"Dick's at the center of this thing. You've already come to me so the only person left is him," he explained. "Who knows what Ra's put him through." With that, he opened the door and they stepped through. 

----

Damian hated the cold. You'd think growing up in the mountains would give him some sort of tolerance to the cold and protect his bones from the ache in his lungs when he drew breaths of chill air. He'd hated it for as long as he could remember but he knew the incident that cemented his hatred with a passion. He was five when he was left alone in the mountains with minimal supplies and told to find his way back home. He was five when he broke his arm on the journey and faced his own mortality with a brain that couldn't truly comprehend the idea of falling asleep but never waking up.

So when Damian woke up alone on the side of a mountain with snow so heavy he could barely make out his own hands in front of him and the air so thin that he wasn't sure if he was taking full breaths or hyperventilating he immediately thought of when he was little yet forgot how he actually got out of that mess. He just turned around over and over trying to find something in the endless void of white. The wind bit at his face and he knew he was severely underprepared for this when he saw his hands were ungloved and felt the familiar tightness of his turtleneck. It was like he'd been dumped there suddenly after spending the day in the warm living room of Wayne Manor. 

That couldn't have happened though, could it? Dick wouldn't allow for him to be left somewhere as dangerous as this with no supplies to look after himself at the very least. He doubted the acrobat would allow him to go alone too. Even though the rest of his siblings and his father had a rocky relationship with him, they wouldn't let this happen on principle if not out of care. 

His brain felt just as frozen as his fingers when he tried to remember how he made it home when he was so little but all he could remember was his mother repeatedly telling him that this was a good experience to learn from. She insisted that this would make him stronger as though she was also trying to convince herself that she was in the right to leave him there. Damian had thought she was right too. He was stronger now, wasn't he? He learned to not depend on her or anyone for that matter and he learned that when it came down to it, the only person that could save him was himself. Those were valuable life skills.

Only...did all life lessons have to come with nightmares? 

No, his mother meant well and he was better for it. He had to be. There had to be a lesson learned from it otherwise it was just traumatic and he refused to believe his mother would put him through that. She wasn't great, he knew that, but she cared. 

Out of nowhere, a door appeared. He could see the green piercing through the endless white and his first thought was not how on earth a door had appeared but rather if this was his family coming to take him home to a warmer place. Somewhere safe where he could warm up. Maybe he'd get some of Alfred's coffee or Dick would give up his thickest blanket that was just for him but like everything, it would be shared with Damian for as long as he needed. From the door stepped out Tim and Jason who instantly cringed at the temperature drop. They looked around for a second before spotting him and rushing over, checking his shaking hands for frostbite. 

"You couldn't have trauma on a nice beach or something?" Jason complained although his tone was playful.

"What do you mean?" he asked, his teeth chattering. 

"We're trapped in our traumas," Tim explained. "Jason was with Joker, I was with Joker Jr - don't ask - and you're with...Mr. Freeze?"

"That degenerate doesn't frighten me in the least," he defended. He took great offense to that in fact. No C-list villain could traumatize him. "We must be on the mountain my mother left me on."

"I'm sorry, what? Your mother left you here? When?"

"When I was five. Do I need to find my way home again?" The brothers shared a pitying look, one he knew Dick would never give him. He'd provide an empathetic frown and a hug that meant they didn't have to talk about it yet.  Speaking of the acrobat, he was notably missing from the group. "Where's Grayson?"

"He's at the center of this. We have to get through this trauma first to find him," Tim told him. 

"So do I need to find my way home again?"

"No, you need to face it. I don't really know how though. For us it was people. Something tangible. I don't know what you're supposed to be facing in here," Jason admitted. He looked around in search of any monster or ghoul. Damian found himself absently scanning the landscape for something he knew wasn't there because he didn't fear the mystery boogeymen in the night nor the creatures that prowled Gotham. He was afraid of something abstract. "Any ideas?"

"It's more of a concept," he began softly. He was almost just as scared to bring it up to someone who wasn't Jon or Dick not even Alfred. These were two people whose only trait he had in common was he didn't like them just as much as they didn't like him. Then again, he wouldn't leave them to rot and he doubted they would be here if they didn't care about him. Tim was smart so he would think of other ways to fix their problem that didn't involve impromptu therapy. 

"Look, I get we're not your first choice when it comes to opening up," Tim began, noticing his reluctance to expand on his reply. "But we need to get out of here and as much as we argue, it's better to address this now rather than later." Still, the teen didn't become any more forthcoming.

"If that doesn't convince you then think about Goldie. He's somewhere in the center of all this and he'd been there for a while. Before we got here. He would open up if it meant getting to help you." It didn't surprise him that Jason pulled out the emotional card. He was more attached than he let on whether that be because he was scared of the sting of rejection he was familiar with or because it didn't exactly fit with his image. Either way, it pulled Damian into admitting his fear.

"This mountain is where I was left. My mother thought it would make me independent and I succeeded. I found my way home with a broken arm and for so long I thought she was right to do so," he explained. "She said my grandfather did the same for her."

"So the trauma is being left?" Tim asked, a little too eager.

"No, the trauma is realizing it is trauma," Jason answered. "You need to face that what happened was abuse." The teen shrugged. 

"I don't want what my mother did to me to just be some-some needless exercise. She loves me, I know she does, but Grayson would never do this to me. None of you would either. So that would imply that either she didn't love me or that you don't love me enough to test my limits." He knew what his purpose had once been although now it was different, learning to depend on himself had been valuable. Therefore what happened must be good in the long run, right? So it couldn't be abuse. He shook his head. 

Jason reached out carefully and put a hand on his shoulder comfortingly.

"Sometimes the people that love us do things that people they loved did to them. Most of them know when it happened that it shouldn't be repeated but then they get older. They justify it because it's easier," he explained. "My mum loved me but she wasn't a good mother to me. No amount of love can justify the things she did to me and no matter what she went through makes what I went through better."

"My parents used to leave me alone when they went on business trips and I always felt so responsible. When it happened, I thought it was because I was so mature for my age but I wasn't. There's no such thing. I was a kid with parents who didn't know how to be parents."

"What am I supposed to do then?"

"The first step is seeing it as it is. You were abused. Talia can still love you and be a bad mother to you. She can be a victim of abuse herself and be an abuser too. Generational trauma isn't as easy to break as we hope it is." Damian shook his head. "Damian-"

"No, it can't be that she abused me. I was hurt but I got better. Abuse doesn't contribute to anything positive but this did."

"Did it?" Tim questioned. "Because you're in a place specifically made to represent your trauma." He couldn't argue with that but he could resent the notion. "If it were Dick here, alone on some mountain range in the middle of nowhere with no help, and Bruce put him there, would you think the same? Would you tell him when he came home that it was a learning experience?"

"Of course not." 

"Then why is it different for you?" Again, he couldn't argue that they were wrong. He knew that he wasn't right and the way his stomach swirled when he thought back to his time alone on the mountain, he knew that what happened to him wasn't right either. He held himself, squeezing his arms, and briefly remembered the agony of when one was broken. How he'd called out for his mother and his grandfather to come to save him only to remain alone. Factually, that wasn't right. 

"Do you think she regrets it?" he asked softly. 

In one sense, he hoped she did regret leaving him there. He hoped it kept her up at night just as often as it kept him up. He hoped in the quiet moments she had, her mind would drift to seeing his already tiny figure shrink as she left. He hoped his sunken features, his hypothermic lips and hands, and his unfocused eyes that burned from snow blindness made her terrified to be left alone.

In another, he hoped she didn't. He hoped that she didn't question herself about any of it and was secure that what she did was the right thing to do. If she had no regrets then at least he would know that she did mean well. At least then, she would be a mother that did the wrong thing but didn't know. If she was naive to follow through on something her father wanted of her, if she was loyal to the League of Assassins to a fault, then this wasn't pointless. 

"I don't think it matters what she regrets and what she doesn't. What matters is how you feel and that you didn't deserve it. Nobody does," the eldest of the three began. "We can't address everything right now because we don't have the time and I know this feels massive but Damian, you only have to see what happened as abuse. You don't need to make any judgments about your mum, about your upbringing and nobody will make you promise never to see her again so you won't get hurt." Jason put both his hands on the boy's shoulders and squeezed tightly. "You just need to know what happened to you wasn't ever okay."

"That's all?" Damian asked quietly, his voice almost drowned out in the wind. 

"That's all." He nodded. 

A minute or so later, a bright blue door cut through the thick snow. 

"Is that it?" he asked. The older pair nodded and led the way. "What do we do when we get him to accept the same?"

"We go home, never talk about it again, and then book therapy appointments," Jason replied.

---

A giant web greeted them and had they stepped out any further, they would've been tangled up in it. Snatched up in the webbing were bodies without faces. Their clothes gave no clue as to who they were but familiar splatters of red let the brothers know even if they did have faces, they'd be slack and lifeless with milky eyes. Some of their bodies looked sunken as though drained of their blood, a few were riddled with bullet holes and bruises whilst others were blistered and burned. Whoever they were, there were thousands of them all caught up in the web, and not one of them was Dick from where they were standing. 

There were only three sounds they could hear, one of which was their own breathing which served no other interest than confirming the bodies around them were deceased and that none of them were feeling all too comfortable in this nightmare.

The second was a woman laughing in the distance. It was that flirty laugh the girls at galas did in hopes of getting their next rich husband. One they knew meant trouble and if it was echoing in here then...well they didn't want to think about it even though the answer was clear in such slim pickings. 

The third was Dick's voice echoing softly although the tone was anything but. He repeated no on seemingly endless loops and with each utterance of the word, the urge to find him grew stronger. Dick had been a vigilante since he was nine and had a habit of losing people one way or another so they weren't expecting sunshine and roses but boy was this unnerving. Then again, he was never one to go small when he could go big. 

They carefully ventured into the mass of webs, never straying too close to them for fear of getting stuck and turned into one of the countless bodies surrounding them.

"I knew Goldie had some night terrors but fuck this is straight out of A24," Jason muttered as he stepped past one particularly unfortunate soul whose skin was blistered in a sickening way. Almost like the skin was slipping off to reveal more blisters underneath. It made his skin crawl and he'd gathered the heads of drug dealers in a duffel bag.

"I think A24 directors would kill themselves to get the budget for this," Tim responded. He fought the urge to apologize when he bumped into one of the bodies. They weren't real. Perhaps they once were in the real world or maybe they were just pure imagination. He was hoping for the latter. "Or Scarecrow would. He'd love this."

"There!" Damian shouted, pointing to a figure strung up above them that seemed to be in the center of the madness.

It took a few seconds of focus but once their eyes landed in the right place, they knew it was him immediately even with his head whipping around every which way. He tugged and pulled on his webbed-up limbs which only grew more frantic every time the laughter came. The movement did nothing for him and in fact, seemed to get him even more tangled and stuck. He hadn't noticed them yet but they couldn't blame him. He was scanning his surroundings for someone else entirely, most likely the person who was laughing.

"Dick!" Tim yelled to get his attention. 

"Goldie, down here!" Jason added that he didn't search for the new noise. The nickname seemed to do the trick as he snapped his head downwards. Immediately they were met with panicked eyes and a frustrated expression.

"What're you doing- doesn't matter, get out of here now!" 

"It's okay, none of this is real."

"To hell it is!" He shook his head, his face red with anger. "Will you listen to me for once and go?"

"It isn't real! In what reality would you be strung up like this in a seemingly endless void?" There was a beat of silence. "Gotham is weird but not that weird!" He shook his head vehemently because Gotham really could be that weird. Especially around Halloween. 

"Then how did you get here? What's your last memory before you got here?" Tim asked.

"Will you just go?"

"Answer me that and we'll go," he bargained. There was a long pause. Dick's face screwed up in frustration and he huffed in annoyance. Clearly, all he was focused on was them leaving but he knew they wouldn't without a satisfactory answer. "That's what I thought. You don't remember getting here because here is not a real place. You were fighting Psimon and-"

"Maybe save the explanation for after we cut him down?" Jason suggested. 

"And how exactly do we do that?" Damian looked around before his eyes landed on something shiny. He grinned and snatched a knife from one of the deceased bodies, then looked up at where his brother was wrapped up. "Oh look who found a knife. That's just what we need."

"What I need is a boost. I'm the lightest of us so you should be able to get me close to him," he explained. He wiped the handle of the knife next putting it in his mouth and clenching his teeth tight. He'd need both hands free to grab onto the webbing. He gestured to them and they reluctantly stooped down to give him some footing. In one swift motion, Damian stepped onto their interlocked hands and was thrown high into the air only stopping a foot short of his older brother. 

Although sticky and hard to scale, Damian managed to climb the webbing until he was close enough to saw through it. 

"This place isn't real," he said as he worked. "Whatever scares you about this place can't hurt you."

"You don't know that," Dick responded harshly. 

"I do know that," he stated firmly. "We all worked through our traumas to get here and not one of us is hurt. You won't be hurt either." The blade was sharp enough that he'd already gotten through the wrappings on one leg. "If you feel you may be then we're here."

"You can't be here."

"Well, I am here," he replied matter of factly. He snapped through another layer. "So are they."

"I don't want you here."

"Too bad."

Snap

Snap

Finally free, Dick was all too quick to peel himself from the rest of the webs and jump down despite the height. He was an expert in long drops, tucking to minimize the shock of the fall, and rolling forward until he was on his feet standing straight up. He whistled to Damian and held out his arms knowing the teen would jump into them before setting him down. He knew not to hold him for too long from an incident where his torso was more bruise than skin. It had been funny though seeing Damian's legs kicking out.

"Okay, so where did you come in from? How do we get out of here?" Dick asked, searching for an exit but finding none. 

"The only way out is to face your trauma and accept it," Tim informed him. That obviously wasn't the answer he wanted as he rolled his neck and huffed. 

"Open to any other options," the acrobat said. "Anything else? Something? I'm up for anything as long as the success rate stays at 50%." They weren't all that surprised by his hesitancy. He could talk for hours at a time but never say anything truly important about himself and he had a special talent for diverting questions about his mental well-being back to the person who asked.

"It's the only way. Psimon trapped us here knowing us heroes like our baggage." He shook his head vehemently.

"I can't."

"Hey, we all did it," Jason pointed out in hopes of sounding encouraging but receiving a glare all the same.

"I can't. Not with you here. Not with anyone here. No one knows and I'd like to keep it that way so give me other options." They glanced at one another. There wasn't another option. There were no options other than to accept the trauma you'd been handed. They would've thought that being told this was his only option of getting them all out of there, he would've agreed to go along with it.

"What's going on?" Jason asked.

"Nothing that concerns you."

"But it does concern us because we're all stuck here waiting for you to just deal with it."

"I didn't ask for you to come here."

"You sorta did. You called us when Psimon got out of hand," Tim muttered. It definitely wasn't the right thing to say and he immediately regretted it when Dick flinched. He didn't flinch at words. He'd been called everything under the sun before so he grew a thick skin. Sometimes he would take a step back as though you were going to go for him but even that was reserved for when he was yelled at. "It's not your fault."

"Of course it is!" he snapped. 

Laughter echoed through the void, making him shiver and hunch in on himself protectively. He shied away from them too like he was terrified of one of them getting too close. 

"It's all my fault. All of it. I fucked up so bad and there's no way to make it right anymore," he explained, his eyes blown wide but clearly not in the room with them now. That was some sort of inception, wasn't it? Only Dick could be inside his head whilst being inside their own head already.

"I know how it feels," Jason offered.

"No, you don't know!" he exploded. "You don't know anything I don't tell you. Especially this." 

"Whatever it is, you can tell us."

"You'll think of me differently. I didn't tell you for a reason."

"Then we won't speak of it outside here," Damian bargained. "We'll never bring it up. No matter what it is. Right?" Jason and Tim nodded in agreement. Honestly, they'd agree to pretty much anything just to get out of this place. Dick chewed his bottom lip in thought, his eyes darting from the bodies around them to his family to the empty spaces between them. 

"These are people I've killed. One way or another," he stated. "Some are from the bomb that hit Bludhaven, some are from failed missions, and," he paused and suddenly looked very pale. His lips quirked and for a moment they thought he was going to throw up but he gulped thickly. "The woman laughing. She and I didn't- she-" He was shaking now. "God, I believed in her. I really did."

"Who is she?" Tim asked.

"Catalina. Tarantula. She got confused. I couldn't stop her from killing Blockbuster."

"When you went MIA. You were with her?" he clarified. Dick nodded stiffly. "You were gone for ages. We thought something happened." Again, the acrobat flinched at the phrasing.

"Something did happen," Jason said cautiously. "She did something after, didn't she? It wasn't just that."

"I said no. I told her no." He didn't need to say anymore. They knew what he was going to say and quite frankly, he didn't want to talk about it any further than he had to and if they weren't smart enough to connect the dots then Bruce didn't do a very good job of training them. "She died. After the bomb hit not a direct casualty." He blinked away tears. "I hate her for what happened. I hate her so much. I just feel responsible for her. B said death never gave you closure and he's right."

"You can't make yourself responsible for everything that happened. The bomb that hit Blud, the people who are collateral damage, and a lowlife like her aren't all on you."

"You never intentionally killed anyone."

"That's a lie. I killed Joker. He's around here somewhere or maybe he isn't since he was resuscitated." He shrugged dispassionately. "I let my obsession with Slade drive me away, I focused so much on Catalina, I let anger get the best of me, I-"

"You're a person," Damian interrupted before he could spiral any further. "Todd and I have spilled blood. Drake has caused deaths inadvertently."

"I should be better. I'm meant to be better. That bomb would've never hit Gotham and he would never be on that rooftop!"

"We were never meant to be better Dick," Tim told him. "We were meant to help. Sometimes we fail at that and do the wrong thing. Sometimes we help the wrong people and they take advantage of us." He stepped towards his brother hesitantly, reading for any signs of discomfort, before putting a hand on his arm. "It's not your fault. Not really."

"None of it was your fault," Jason insisted. 

"And none of you will talk about this out there? Not a word of it because you're the only people who know about her." They mimed zipping their lips. 

---

Dick woke with a gasp and sprang to sit up, looking around to recognize his surroundings. He met three pairs of equally confused eyes staring back at him. None of them moved for a long while before he put his finger to his lips, they copied it. Not a word would leave that room.