Chapter Text
Realistically, Bruce knows that taking each of his children under his wing saved their lives.
He knows that, without properly training him and allowing him to become Robin, Dick would have gone after Zucco with only his gymnastics abilities and the fire of a vengeful nine year old. Bruce knows for a fact that Dick would have been killed.
He knows that Jason would have been left for dead on the streets of Crime Alley, forced to fend for himself and fight the monsters that hide behind well-tailored suits with needles in their pockets. Training him as Robin taught him safer ways to protect himself. Even then, Bruce got him killed anyway.
Tim was just as stubborn as Dick was, and would have created a vigilante persona to fight crime on his own even without Bruce taking him in. Bruce trained him, kept him alive fed when his parents couldn’t be bothered, and gave him a home.
There’s nothing more to be said about Cassandra, and the life Bruce took her from. That speaks for itself.
He taught Damian how to fight for good, how to distinguish between right and wrong. He gave his son a home (after some bumps in the road). He kept him safe and gave him a family, with Dick’s help, because Damian would have lived the rest of his life as an emotionless soldier rather than as a kid.
Bruce knows that, while he allowed these kids to become his sidekicks because he didn’t want to feel so alone (which, in hindsight, was not the right choice, but the selfish one), he also is desperately wrangling a bunch of bloodthirsty little hooligans, all with some sort of homicidal tendencies.
So he knows taking his kids in was the correct decision, in the end, but every time one of them is taken from him, he rethinks every choice he has ever made.
And whenever it’s Dick, he questions why he ever kept the cowl after he took the boy in.
Dick’s been missing for three days when they finally track him down to an abandoned warehouse on the lower west side of Gotham. Warehouses have no good memories with Bruce or his family, and knowing Dick is inside one makes something crawl around inside of him. He can only imagine Jason is feeling the same.
Black Bat and Red Hood handle the guards standing watch outside while Red Robin disables the security cameras and alarm system.
Once Red Robin gives them the green light, Bruce and Robin swing in through a ceiling fixture and take out the Mad Hatter’s goons in their immediate vicinity. When the area is clear, Black Bat, Red Hood, and Red Robin sweep in through the front entrance, and the five of them hurry through the warehouse in search of Dick and the Hatter.
The warehouse is unsurprisingly big. Hatter likes having space to build his contraptions, and he never cared about being discreet. There are tens of hallways, and even more doors.
Red Hood must notice it, too, because from over the comms, he groans. “Oh, this is gonna be a long night.”
They split up and take each room one by one. Some rooms are completely empty. Others are filled with boxes, most of which are guarded by goons. Bruce takes them out easily enough, knocking them out and cuffing them up in the corners for the police to find whenever they arrive.
There’s still no sign of Dick.
Bruce can hear the team calling out for him as they race down the hallways. Hatter isn’t exactly one for murder (not compared to other criminals like the Joker), but Bruce won’t put it past him to take out a member of the Bat Team.
Bruce turns a dark corner down another hallway, then freezes. There’s a large set of double doors at the end of the hall, with a single, ominous flickering light shining down the middle of the doors from its spot on the ceiling.
There are also two goons standing guard on either side of the doors. They spot Bruce just a second too late, and Bruce embeds two batarangs into their hands. They drop their weapons with pained yowls, giving Bruce the opportunity to sprint over. A few correctly-placed punches to their heads, and the two goons are out.
Bruce steps over their slumped bodies, tilting his ear to the doors to see if he can hear anything behind them. There’s a faint whirring sound and shuffling feet, but otherwise it’s quiet.
“I think I found it,” he says into the comms. “Sixth hallway from the entrance, third hall that branches off.”
He wants to run inside. He wants to slam through the doors, put his fist in the Hatter’s face, and whisk Dick back to safety. The longer he waits, the more likely Dick is to be hurt. But he can’t run in without backup or an escape plan, which means he has to wait for the others.
They don’t make him wait long. Damian, only a hallway beside him, is at his side in a matter of moments, katana drawn and at the ready. Black Bat is next, dropping down from somewhere in the ceiling, and flanks Bruce’s free side.
Red Robin comes next, a few minutes later, running down the long hallway with his bo staff already drawn and electrified. Red Hood rounds the corner seconds after. His guns are holstered, but there’s a dagger in his hand that’s dripping blood all over his gloves and leaving a trail behind him on the floor.
He doesn’t have time to scold Red Hood. Doesn’t even consider it, honestly. As soon as the entire team is present, Bruce spins around and kicks the doors open with two hard thrusts.
The first thing he sees, far away along the wall on the other side of the room, is a giant, floor-to-ceiling machine. It almost looks like one of those sets of really old computers from the fifties.
He doesn’t have time to examine anything else, because rapid gunfire goes off upon their entrance. Bruce grabs Robin and throws his cape around them both, shielding them from the gunfire as the others duck out of the way.
Red Hood pulls his guns out. It only takes five good shots to silence the first wave of armed guards. Bruce peeks at the ground. Rubber bullets.
With the immediate coast clear, they run off again, heading in opposite directions as more guards swarm the massive room.
Bruce finds the Mad Hatter in only a few glances. Hatter’s already halfway across the room and running towards the exit. Bruce goes after him, but gets intercepted by a handful of armed guards. Black Bat swoops in to help. It only takes a handful of seconds to take down the guards, but it’s enough time for the Hatter to escape through the exit.
Bruce and Black Bat make to go after him when he hears someone, very distressed, yell out, “Nightwing!”
Bruce’s heart plummets right into his feet.
He spins around, just in time to see Robin racing across the room towards a figure lying on a metal table, a large dome of metal covering his head.
Dick.
Bruce jerks towards him at the same time that Red Hood moves towards the door. He can’t see Jason’s face under the hood, but his shoulders are heaving with angry breaths, and the hand not clutching his gun is balled into a fist.
Without preamble, Bruce nods towards the door and says, “Take Red Robin and Black Bat with you.”
Without another word, Jason, Cass, and Tim sprint out of the warehouse. Bruce wants to go with them, wants to beat the Mad Hatter’s face in until blood seeps out from under his stupid top hat, but he doesn’t. He goes to Dick instead.
Damian is standing at his side, checking Dick’s wrist for a pulse. He nods at Bruce, confirming that Dick’s heart is still beating, then goes to pull the metal cover away from Dick.
“No, don’t!” Bruce shouts, dragging Damian’s hands away.
Damian glares up at his father. “Why not?” he snips. “We need to get this off of him.”
But Bruce shakes his head as he examines the machine that the metal cover is attached to by a series of brightly-colored wires. He remembers the machine, and how it trapped him in his dreams. The machine the Hatter used on him years ago was much smaller, but still just as dangerous.
“You can’t,” he explains. “This is the Hatter’s dream machine. The cover is affecting what Nightwing is dreaming about. We need to figure out if pulling him out abruptly could hurt him.”
Bruce eyes the machine. Now that the immediate threat of danger is gone, he can take his time looking at it. It’s bigger than the original one, by quite a lot, which means that Hatter made modifications to it. The question is figuring out what those modifications are, and what they do.
“Sweep the room and make sure it’s clear,” Bruce orders. “Check for cameras and bugs, too.”
Damian hesitates, looking back down at Dick, before nodding obediently and running off. Bruce turns to the screen a few feet away from the table Dick is lying on. It’s connected to a long metal stand. When Bruce flips open the panel on the front, he can see the tangle of wires that lead from the screen to the machine behind him.
At least that’s somewhat similar to the original machine. Closing the panel, he takes a look at the screen. It’s broken up into four sections. The upper left is displaying Dick’s brain waves. Bruce doesn’t know much about EEGs, but from the few that he’s seen, Dick’s brain seems to be okay.
The lower left corner is a black screen, but this one has a sticky note attached to it. It’s a jumble of equations and the words Brain Camera? written in chicken scratch. Bruce isn’t entirely sure what he’s looking at, but the numbers are a mix of chemical equations and mechanical ones.
Brain camera. Hatter was trying to convert Dick’s brain waves into pictures. He was trying to spy on Dick’s dreams.
The upper and lower right screens are also black; neither have sticky notes on them. Curious, Bruce reopens the panel in the metal stand. He rustles around in the wires before he finds a bright green one attached to the lower right screen. He follows it with his fingers, down the panel and out of the hole at the bottom.
It leads back to the machine, obviously, but not to the giant wall of computers. Instead, it rounds behind the table Dick is lying on, and ends at the base of another metal cover lying on top of a second, otherwise empty table.
Fuck. There’s two.
Well, that explains why the machine is so much bigger.
Analyzing the cover, he notices there’s a thick, black tube attached to the back of it. Once again following it with his finger, the tube leads to where it is attached to the cover over Dick’s head.
The big picture slams into him like a bulldozer.
Last time Bruce fought the Hatter, that’s exactly what he swore he’d do before getting locked back up in Arkham. He said he’d escape, and build a machine where he could enter Batman’s mind and find his true identity.
Bruce had thought it was impossible, at the time. But that’s what the second cover must be for. It’s attached to Dick, so whoever is hooked up to it can enter Dick’s dreams. The Mad Hatter figured out how to mind-hop after all.
That explains the black screens, too. The one with the green wire is to track the other person’s brain waves that the cover picks up. The other screen and the one with the sticky note must be to convert the waves to pictures, if Hatter had been able to accomplish that. It doesn’t look like he was able to, thankfully.
He’s not sure what Dick has been dreaming of, but whatever it is, Bruce is sure it would have revealed Dick’s identity, if not all of theirs.
He looks back down at the floor where some of the wires are, and something catches in the corner of his eye. There’s thin plastic crushed into a ball beside one of the legs of the table. Carefully, he picks it up and unfurls it to examine it.
It’s an empty drip bag, but rather than the label saying it’s a regular IV bag, it instead has the words bupropion hydrochloride. A dopamine and serotonin enhancer. Bruce knows, because he used to take this in pill form when his parents were first murdered, as an antidepressant.
His thumb catches on something. A second empty drip bag attached to the first. When Bruce peels it away, the label reads levetiracetam. A seizure suppressant, to counteract the side effects of too much bupropion hydrochloride.
So that’s what Hatter’s been giving Dick. If these are being administered to Dick through the metal cover, Hatter must have managed to put them in an aerosolized form, which decreases its concentration and makes it less likely for Dick to overdose, but still keeps him under, as a sedative.
He’s sure there’s other aspects to it that Bruce is missing, seeing as he’s not a chemist or an anesthesiologist, but he gets the picture.
He wonders if the Scarecrow had anything to do with Hatter’s sudden knowledge of mixing chemicals and medications. But that’s a question for another time.
Bruce looks back at the screens, trying to figure out the next course of action. If he assumes that this machine works similarly to the original one, then it functions primarily by raising the amount of dopamine in the person’s system to induce good dreams.
It’s enough dopamine that the person is only able to picture the happiest dreams. The levels are so high it’s impossible to experience nightmares or fear.
That much bupropion hydrochloride pumping through the body is dangerous, so Bruce needs to get Dick out of there as soon as possible. The problem is, the cover over Dick’s head is what’s giving him the dopamine. Removing it instantly ends the flow, which comes with its own risks.
If Bruce has learned anything from working with Scarecrow’s fear toxin, it’s that large, abrupt changes in hormone flow can damage the brain and bodily functions beyond repair. It’s why the fear toxin is so deadly.
The primary cause of death from the fear toxin is cardiac arrest, but there have been plenty of cases where the minds of the victims were lost, and they were brain dead before they went into cardiac arrest. Those cases were usually seen with victims who received concentrated doses, because the rise in hormones was instant. The brain couldn’t handle it.
Adrenaline is much different than dopamine, but Bruce isn’t going to risk anything like that happening to Dick. Not when they can be more methodical. So removing the cover is out of the question.
Damian returns, sheathing his katana, and doesn’t spare Bruce a glance as he settles back at Dick’s side. “Area is clear,” he informs, then finally looks over at Bruce. “Well?”
Bruce wishes he had better news for the boy. “We can’t take off the cover,” he explains. “If you remove it by force, it will rip him out of the dream and could kill him.”
Damian’s face twists in anger. “So how do we wake him up?” he questions. “I assume turning off the machine will also be too abrupt.”
Bruce nods. He opens his mouth to start trying to bounce theories off of him, but before he can speak, the door to the exit slams open, and the rest of the team stalk inside.
“He got away,” Jason growls, storming over to them. Wordlessly, Red Robin and Black Bat follow. “Should we canvas the surrounding areas?”
Bruce shakes his head. “No,” he answers. “Nightwing is stuck in a dream-state caused by the Hatter’s machine. I’m going to need some help getting him back.”
Tim pinches his eyebrows together as he shrinks his bo staff and slides it into his utility belt. “Can’t you just turn it off?”
There is no off-button on the machine, but even damaging it enough to break is a threat to Dick’s life.
“Turning it off or destroying the machine runs too much of a risk of either killing him or causing him to lose his sanity,” Bruce explains. “Our best bet is for him to come out of the dream on his own.”
“How’s he going to do that?” Jason asks. “You got stuck in one of these, right? How’d you come out of it?”
Bruce frowns at the memory. He’d been so happy for the first few days in the dream, until reality had hit him in the face. “I realized it was a fake world and threw myself off a building,” he replies bluntly.
Jason blinks, then looks down at Dick. “Well, Big Bird probably won’t be doing that, especially in his perfect world,” he remarks. “What’s Option B? Zapping him awake? ‘Cause the replacement has that electric bo staff and I have been dying to finally use it on—”
“Hood.”
Tim steps forward, an arm outreached. “Hold on,” he starts. “You realized the dream world you were in was fake. That means Nightwing can, too.”
“What if he doesn’t?” Damian inquires. “If we sit here doing nothing, expecting Nightwing to notice he is in a dream world, and he never does, we do nothing but waste valuable time.”
Bruce makes a gruff noise, but concedes that Damian has a point. He gazes around the room, trying to find anything that might help, and his eyes fall on the second table, with another metal cover on top, already hooked up to the machine.
A lightbulb goes off in Bruce’s head.
“Damian is right,” he agrees. “So we will have to convince him ourselves.”
Cass frowns down at Dick’s still form. “How?” she asks quietly.
Bruce points to the second table. “We’ll just have to go into Dick’s dream and wake him up from the inside.”
For a beat, there is silence.
“Are you actually insane?” Tim exclaims, bewildered. “You want us to invade Nightwing’s mind, using the same machine that could kill him? You realize that means it could kill whoever goes in, right?”
“Loathe to admit it, but Red Robin is correct,” Damian agrees. “That does not seem smart.”
Cass nods solemnly. “Invasion of privacy.”
Jason appears indifferent. “I’m down,” he announces, shrugging one shoulder.
Bruce isn’t too fond of the idea either, but: “It’s the only thing I can think of,” he tells them. “If any of you have better ideas, say them now, because it seems like this is our only option.”
He can tell his kids are trying to come up with alternatives, but the growing frustration on their faces as minutes pass only serves to prove Bruce’s point.
“We’re wasting time thinking about this,” he grunts. “I’m doing it.”
Tim and Damian immediately strike up arguments against him being the one to go, and Cassandra very firmly says, “No,” which warms Bruce’s heart a bit, but does nothing to change his mind. If this is the only option, then so be it.
“This is dangerous, and I won’t have any of you involved until I know it’s safe,” he tells them, dropping his voice down an octave, not quite the Batman voice, but his I-Mean-Business voice. His Dad Voice.
This, of course, only serves to worry Tim even more. Boy, is Bruce glad Alfred isn’t here. He’d have a hernia.
He spends the next few minutes running through the way the machine works with the others, so that they can monitor both him and Dick while they’re under. As he speaks, Damian looks appalled; Cassandra’s face is calm as ever, and Tim looks seconds away from having a panic attack.
Jason appears uncaring on the outside, but he’s taken off his hood. Even though he’s got a domino mask on underneath to protect his identity, it says something that Jason is concerned enough to want to see everything without any obstruction that might come from his helmet.
“You’ll administer a sedative to knock me out,” he orders. “Each one of you still has an emergency stick on you?”
The four of them pat around their suits. One by one, each of them nods.
“Good,” says Bruce. “Then there’s one more thing you should know.” All four of them give him their undivided attention. Bruce can’t remember the last time that happened.
“Nightwing has been under for three days, by the amount of dopamine in his system. That’s why he’s stuck. I won’t have nearly the amount in my system, which means I’m liable to wake up if my adrenaline gets too high.”
Cass’s face pinches. Bruce is quick to try to mend it. “That’s okay, because I’m waking up on my own,” he assures. “But it will still be a lot more dopamine at once than I’m used to.”
“And what will cause problems,” Tim deduces.
Bruce nods. “If I wake up before I can get Dick out, it won’t be safe for me to go back under for a while. Too much exposure can be dangerous, especially since I will be entering Dicks dream world rather than my own.”
It’s Jason who catches on to what he’s saying. “So one of us will have to go under if you can’t wake him up.”
Again, Bruce nods. “Yes,” he confirms. “Let’s hope it doesn’t come to that, but just in case, I want you to be prepared.”
The four of them look various shades of resigned, but they agree nonetheless. But Bruce won’t make them go under if they don’t want to. He’ll go back if need be, however many times it takes, if it means getting Dick back and protecting the others. Even if he loses his sanity in the process.
“Alright then,” he says. “Red Robin, you’re monitoring the screens. Black Bat and Hood, keep an eye out for intruders. Robin, contact Agent A and let him know what’s going on.”
There’s a series of confirming grunts. Bruce waits until he hears all four before making his way over to the second table.
He’s glad he hadn’t called the police to collect the goons, or else this would be ten times harder.
To his surprise, Jason follows him. He stands silently at the edge of the table as Bruce raises the metal cover and climbs on. As soon as the cover lifts off the table, it powers on with a high-pitched whirr. He lays back and reaches up to pull the cover, but he stops about halfway down. Jason is still watching him.
Bruce says nothing, just stares right back. After an uncomfortable few seconds, Jason shrugs one shoulder. “Someone’s gotta watch you while you’re playing dream hopscotch.”
Over Jason’s shoulder and across the room, Bruce sees Tim mouth “dream hopscotch” in utter confusion.
“Red Robin is monitoring my vitals,” he reminds Jason. From the screens, Tim holds up a thumbs-up as the lower right screen comes online.
Jason frowns, annoyed. “The replacement’s arms are twigs,” he replies, glancing around the warehouse. “They’ll snap if he tries to give you CPR.”
“That’s so not true!” Tim hollers, offended.
CPR. The warehouse. Oh.
Emotion lodges thick in Bruce’s throat. He wants to say something. He wants to tell Jason that this won’t end up like Ethiopia. He wants to say that he’s going to be fine, that Dick is going to be fine, but Jason won’t believe him until he sees the proof.
Bruce has never been good and reassuring words or gentle comfort, anyway. He leaves that to Alfred and Dick.
So instead, all he manages to say is, “See you soon.”
With that, Bruce pulls the cover all the way down. It’s a dome, so there’s plenty of space inside for him to breathe without feeling like he’s suffocating. It reminds him of those domes at the hairdresser, that one time he took Cass to get her hair done, the way there are holes on the inside that light up as the cover starts pushing out the dopamine.
“Here comes the sedative,” he hears Jason say, before his gauntlet is removed and he feels a needle pinch into the skin of his arm.
It starts working almost instantly. Bruce can feel it flood through his veins, making his arms and fingers tingle. In only seconds, his head starts to swim.
He can do this. He can get Dick back without having to make any of the others go through this. He and Dick may have had problems in the past, but Dick trusts him. Dick knows him.
How hard can this be?