Dick Grayson one shots

Take me instead

Whumptober day 11: seeing double

"Take me instead."

That's how it started, Dick stepping between Jason and Tim and the man holding onto Damian, his eyes trained on the gun in the man's hand.

The angular man regarded Dick for a long moment. "I suppose you'll do," he said finally, keeping his voice low.

Dick's shoulders slumped slightly in relief.

The man held a gun pressed firmly to Damian's head. "You're going to follow me out of the store without making a fuss, and the rest of you are going to stay here. I'll make a call with my own ransom demands, but if I so much as suspect that you've contacted the police I won't hesitate to dispose of him," he said, gesturing toward Dick with his head.

They each nodded, Dick stepping closer to the man. Everything suddenly seemed to be happening so quickly. The sound of a gunshot going off, Damian falling to the floor, and the warm metal of the gun's barrel being pressed into Dick's spine.

"Unless you fancy being permanently paralyzed I suggest you walk," The man hissed into Dick's ear, pressing him toward the door of the convenience store.

Dick walked forward, too scared to so much as look back at the people rushing toward and away from his brothers.

There was a car waiting in the parking lot, its engine already running.

Dick was shoved into the back seat, the door shut and locked behind him.

"You seem like the kind of person who cares about people's lives," the man said from the front seat, speaking into a sort of microphone that projected his words past the glass looking barrier between the front and the back of the car. "I'll make you a deal. You take those pills and I won't hit any of these people with my car."

Dick glanced out of the heavily tinted window, noting the number of panicked people rushing from the store and to their cars.

Dick grabbed the bottle with shaking hands. He checked inside, stomach clenching as he saw a handful of pills, what surely was more than double the maximum dose of whatever he was being given. "There's a lot in here still," he said, sending a pleading look toward the man.

"And? You don't have to take them. I'll gladly send some of these idiot Gothamites to their graves," the man said, voice disturbingly nonchalant.

Dick dumped the pills into his shaking hand, bringing them up to his mouth. He panicked, thinking of any way to avoid swallowing them. Nothing was coming to his mind. There was no way he could fake swallowing so many pills.

The man started pulling out of the space his car was parked in, a man tugging his crying child behind him directly in the path of the car.

That was all the motivation Dick needed to swallow the pills, glad for just a moment that he'd learned how to swallow pills without water early on in his Robin career.

The man stopped the car just in time, nodding when Dick had shown that he had in fact swallowed all the pills. "Good," he said.

—

Dick started to feel the effects of the pills what he guessed was about thirty minutes after taking them. All the built up tension gradually left his muscles, a drowsiness settling on his consciousness. His head lulled as the man drove him further and further away.

He wondered if anyone would ever find him. Surely Bruce was more focused on Damian than on finding him. Sure, the man claimed to want a ransom, but people lie all the time.

Dick realized suddenly that they'd stopped. He tried to move, to lift his arm and reach for the door handle. His body seemed to have other ideas however.