Series: Redwing Universe
Title: Shaken Faith
Author: Yami no Kaiba
Beta: Katarik
Fandom: Animated Teen Titans
Rating: R
Pairing: Redwing [AU Nightwing]/Slade

Summary: Being in Arkham is never a soothing experience for Redwing.
Disclaimers: Katarik owns Redwing and the situations in which he is involved, save for those times in which he's somewhere Cosmicastaway or Yami no Kaiba put him. Tyler is owned by Cosmicastaway/Greysnyper, and is her version of Red X. However, the characters from which these characters sprang are not Katarik's and her accomplices-in-writings' and they receive no pecuniary benefits from this work.
Note 1: Based on Katarik's AU drabble where heroes become villains, and villains become heroes. Follows immediately after In Darkest Night and In Mercury Morning.
Note 2: The story in which Tyler is introduced into this Universe hasn't been finished at the time this part is posted.

*---*---*---*---*

"Go away."

"Come now, Mr. Grayson. This inactivity of yours is childish."

"I *said* go away."

"Mr. Gray--"

He kicks the book off of the bolted-down table at the foot of his bed without looking. "Go. Away."

The prim doctor huffs and mutters, but obeys, heels clicking down the hallway.

He shifts on his bed, curling his legs closer to his chest.

It's not like he could flip the pages anyhow with the straitjacket on.

*---*---*---*---*

"Your parents died in front of you, I hear."

He hates it when they bring up his parents. He hates it so much. What right do these people have, to talk about his parents?

"Do you want to talk about it?"

When he doesn't say anything, the stranger sighs heavily, and flips through the file. He can tell the psychiatrist is getting both annoyed and bored. Redwing has kept silent since the orderlies had dragged him into this room three hours ago. "Is there anything you want to talk about? Maybe about that superhero you're always fighting? The one named Slade?"

I don't love you.

He narrows his eyes against the prick of tears, and grabs onto the most inane thing he can. "Your necklace is pretty."

The way the stranger's eyes light up and how the person leans in is almost nauseating. "Yes? Why do you think it's pretty?"

"Because it would be so easy to take it in my hands, cross the ends, and strangle you with it."

The speed with which he's dragged back to his cell and his solitude is almost heart warming.

*---*---*---*---*

The only time they take the straitjacket off is when he's in the cafeteria. The orderlies sit him down first, strapping his ankles to the chair's legs before they take the jacket off.

They still remember the time when he'd first arrived, and had rammed the end of his fork up the nose of a fellow inmate that had been pushing him around; which had been a few seconds before he had snapped the man's neck. They remember how it had taken twelve orderlies to hold his small, slim form down so that a doctor could inject sedatives into his arm.

They keep him apart from the others, at his own little table in the corner. They constantly watch his hands, fearing he'll do a repeat of that attempt.

They never give him lax guards. Lax doctors, yes. But never lax guards.

A tray and a glass of water is set before him. He ignores the food in favor of the water--he hasn't eaten anything since he got here four days ago. It's making the doctors worry, but he doesn't care. He's just not hungry anymore-- and downs the lukewarm beverage.

He can ignore the food, he can be placed apart, but he can never ignore the whispers around him. Especially when he hears the name of his God.

"Isn't that the guy that that Gotham vigilante Slade is always taking down?"

"What? Where?"

"See that guy over there, the one with all the security? That's that psycho assassin, man. The one the League brought in the other day. The one that went and made Edge City look like a war-zone all on his own a few days ago."

"You say you love me? I say you're *nothing*, Redwing. *Nothing* to me. And I'm going to *prove* it."

They may have strapped his legs to the chair, but they hadn't taken away the plastic silverware on the table.

The orderlies don't move fast enough to stop him from taking the knife and hacking off a chunk of his hair.

*---*---*---*---*

They've sedated him again, and they had tried to take his hair away. But he'd snarled at them, eyes narrowed, and kept his hand closed no matter how hard they had tried to open his fist. In the end, they had to give up that fight in order to get the straitjacket back on him.

They probably won't give him silverware anymore. But that's okay. He isn't hungry anyway.

*---*---*---*---*

They've put him on a new schedule of drugs. Drugs with long, foreign names that don't mean anything to him.

He smiles and rocks in the corner of his cell, humming "Hush Little Baby" to himself. Relishes the twinge in his bound and healing ribs at every rock--

"You don't *deserve* pain, Redwing. Not after all *this*."

He stops rocking, stops humming, buries his head in his knees, and starts to cry.

*---*---*---*---*

"Was there a particular reason for your actions in the cafeteria yesterday, Mr. Grayson, or was it just a whim?"

Of course they're trying to pry into his meanings. They want to be the one to stand up and say, "Look! *I* figured out the inner workings of the most talked-about killer of the decade!"

They don't know *anything*. "May I have an envelope? With a red pen?"

The shocked look he gets is almost amusing. "I... Of course." The stranger makes a hand motion at the blacked-out one-way mirror, and it doesn't take long for an orderly to come into the room with the requested items, for the burly guard to unbuckle the jacket.

He scribbles down the newest address he's memorized, and reaches into his pocket, sensitive fingertips barely touching the lock of his hair--

"Do you think I *enjoy* getting envelopes filled with hair in my mail?"

He hesitates. He'd thought his God had loved him. What if he was wrong about this, too? What if Slade *didn't* enjoy the little presents he sent him?

"I don't love you, Redwing. You make me *sick*."

He doesn't know anything anymore.

His God doesn't love him, and he's going to hell, never going to see his parents again--

--he could *feel* them, the skeletal hands on his limbs and in his hair, gripping *hard* and pulling him, pulling him *down*,--

There's a flash of gold in his eyes and he's so confused, that he reaches for it--

There's a scream, and then movement everywhere, and he's up and dancing, dodging, and *punching* at the hands reaching for him, the wrong, wrong hands--

*---*---*---*---*

He's older now, and it had taken twenty-two orderlies to hold him down so that the doctors could sedate him again. After the drugs had taken effect, it had only taken two of the staff to drag him back to his cell.

He's still got the envelope, and they still haven't retrieved the jacket. Smiling and humming, he reads the name on the envelope, traces the arches with a finger, and giggles when he gets a paper cut from the edge, being fascinated with the bright red color it makes on the white of the envelope. Brighter than the ink, and he almost wants to lick it--

When he bends to do so, his black hair swings into his vision, and he remembers what the envelope was for. Takes the lock of his hair out and folds it into the envelope before licking it closed.

When the orderlies come back with his jacket, he's running his bleeding fingertips over the back wall of his cell, making pretty patterns that he coos at.

He mewls when they touch him roughly, pushing his arms into the sleeves and cinching the buckles tight.

And then he's left alone, and they take his mail with them. But that's okay. He *likes* being alone, because he can make up stories for the pictures on the wall and no one will interrupt him and say that that smear there doesn't look like a crushed butterfly at all...

*---*---*---*---*

His medication schedule has been changed again. There's only a single hour when he's *not* under the influence of something, and that precious hour when he knows he's in his right mind--is he really ever? He's in a mental institution for a *reason* after all--is during the psychiatry appointments.

He hates it when they prod at him. When they ask inane questions, expecting him to just spill his heart out to them.

He doesn't *talk* to strangers. Momma always told him not to. Slade is God, and God is never a stranger. Batman, Cardinal, and Jaybird, they'd *known* things about him before he even met them. And Tyler, he'd known Tyler before he had even met the boy. Watched the boy, deciding whether or not he'd have to kill the blond for taking Slade away from him, only to come to the conclusion that Slade didn't *like* Tyler, which was the boy's only saving grace.

Only *those* people would he ever talk to. Not these smiling, *fake* people, that want to get into his head so they can write a book and be successful.

He hates this place. Hates these people. Wants nothing else but to have his daggers in his hands and to gut everyone here--

"You think I *enjoy* hearing you've killed someone?"

He's not sure what to think or what to believe in anymore.

*---*---*---*---*

His stomach stopped making noises on the sixth day.

It wasn't because he started eating again. He's still not hungry, even though the doctors are getting a bit frantic at his supposed food strike.

Sitting in front of the tray of finger-food and water, he finds that he does actually miss his silverware.

It would have been so much easier to stab the eyes out of the whisperers if he had his fork and knife. As it is, though, the tray, its contents, and the plastic cup are still all viable weapons.

When he finishes his water, he makes his move.

*---*---*---*---*

It takes twenty orderlies this time. He has a brief respite to mentally tag it to the lack of food before the sedatives start taking effect.

After that, he's grinning and babbling about bats and birds, and how they dance together in a dark-lit sky, always just *that* close from being struck down by the various hunters.

No one listens.

No one makes the connection.

*---*---*---*---*

He spends the seventh day in monitored solitary confinement.

Or, at least, it would have been monitored if he hadn't flipped off the walls and kicked in the cameras.

*---*---*---*---*

When an orderly comes in to drag him out, he's shaking like a leaf on the wind.

It's only then that they realize one of the doctors assigned to him had had a sister in Edge City. That the doctor has been injecting crystal meth into his system as a substitute for regular, non-addictive sedatives.

The director of Arkham has fired the doctor, but the damage is already done. They order all of his medication to be stalled until after he gets through the withdrawal.

*---*---*---*---*

He's *starving*. His stomach is in knots, and breakfast is hours away--

"Redwing."

--*shudders* and curls up more. They'd *promised* the delusions would go away. They'd *promised* he wouldn't hear Slade's voice anymore.

He doesn't want--no, that's not right. He's afraid to look up. Because he's afraid that he really *is* crazy, like all the people here say he is, and it *wasn't* the meth in his system that made him see, feel, and remember things.

"Redwing."

There it is again. He jerks in his jacket, wishing he could get his hands over his ears and block it out. If he blocks it out, and doesn't hear it, maybe he won't be crazy after all--

Hands on his shoulders, and he's hyperventilating as well as shaking now. He doesn't *want* anyone holding him, not anymore, because he can't tell if they're the wrong hands or not--

"*Dick*, look at me."

It's... his name. *No one* calls him Dick, except Tim. It's always Mr. Grayson, or Redwing.

And he... looks up. And his chest hurts when he sees him. Sees his God, here in Hell, *touching* him again.

He blinks the sweat out of his eyes, not really believing it.

"I don't love you, Redwing."

He laughs sickly and looks away. He must be as crazy as everyone thinks he is. Slade wouldn't be here. His God wouldn't dive into Hell for him. Not anymore. Maybe once before, but not anymore.

"I heard about what happened, Dick. I... I didn't know. I'm sorry, I didn't know about the doctor's sister, or I wouldn't have-"

"You're not real."

"What?"

He laughs that same sick laugh again, watching the butterfly smear on the wall. "You're not Slade. Slade wouldn't come here. Not for me, not anymore. You're not my God."

"I was never a God, Redwing," he can hear anger in the apparition's voice. Why did this delusion have to be so real when it was so fake?

He shuffles away from the thing's grip, so that his back is firmly against the wall. "Go away."

Curls up again and starts rocking, humming his mother's song. He likes the way it sounds, even though his throat is parched and he misses every fourth hum.

An aggravated sigh cuts through the tones, and he's frustrated enough to look up again. Becomes slightly agitated--the thing's still there. "Are you a demon?"

The thing looks even more frustrated then he feels. "What? No!"

"If you aren't God, then you must be a demon. Like Batman. Are you Batman?"

The thing--demon?--gives him an exasperated look. "You're crazy, kid."

He shrugs, as well as one can in a straitjacket while shaking. "So they say. Will you kill me?"

That blue eye softens. "I'm not going to kill you, Redwing. Though you try my patience more often than not, I'm not a killer."

"Pity. I want to die. There's no point living if God doesn't love you."

There's a flutter of breath from the thing. Concern? He can't really tell. "Odd. I heard God loved everyone, even those who knowingly turn away from him. Something along the idea of redemption?"

He thinks about what the thing--Batman?--said. It... makes sense. His God's wrath and temper are frightful things to behold. But he *always* loves his faithful, as much as the ones that weren't.

Was this... all a test? A test of his love? To see if what he said he had for his God was true?

His laughter is tense and nervous, and trails off into sobs of joy. He feels guilty and ashamed, for thinking that his God's words could have meant anything else. For doubting the love his God had for him.

He has his God and his God has him. And that's *all* that matters. All that *ever* mattered, and why had he been so stupid as to think differently?

"Redwing," the thing says in exasperation. Who knows, maybe it really *is* Slade, and not some demon?

He shakes his head, and sniffs back his tears and... is that food he smells? It smells wonderful and nauseating at the same time.

Peeking through the fall of his hair, he can see the distantly detached expression on the thing's face, as it holds a pair of chopsticks in its hand, an open carton of Chinese take-out in its other. "I heard you stopped eating. Are you feeling up for some sweet-and-sour pork?"

He stares. Sweet-and-sour pork. His *favorite*. It really is his God. Slade is here in Hell. For *him*. Suddenly dying doesn't seem so inviting anymore.

Even if he does throw up the first two mouthfuls.

--Fin.