Dolly Mixtures Musebox

It was actually several weeks after the news broke that Dick's prediction came true, at least in part. Batman definitely was lurking in Steve's apartment waiting for him to come home, but he wasn't so much standing in a corner as pacing backwards and forwards in the living room with an impatient scowl on his face.

Dick spends a lot of his life in a lot of very secure locations, the window for anybody wanting to cause him any sort of trouble was pretty narrow, and even in those narrow windows, who was going to bother him? Dick Grayson wasn't even on the radar of the kind of people Nightwing caused problems for, and he didn't exactly have enough of a routine for run-of-the-mill villains to catch him out.

Captain America, on the other hand, had plenty of enemies who were very much not run-of-the-mill, and they were low down and dirty enough to go to some pretty extreme lengths for their revenge - like paying off one of Dick's work colleagues to tell them where he'd be.

An after-work trip to a bar for a bunch of cops is the last place you'd expect a kidnapping attempt to go down, but all it took was a little careful engineering, a solo trip to the bathroom and a sharp baton to the temple that a half-drunk Dick wasn't quite quick enough to react to, Nightwing or no Nightwing.

So when Dick next woke up, he came to several realisations.

One, these guys definitely did not know what they had.

Two, his communicator and one or two other gadgets he kept secreted about his person were still exactly where he thought they'd be, because his kidnappers also did not search very thoroughly.

Three, number one was slightly negated by the fact that they definitely knew who might be coming for what they had, because he was pretty heavily trussed up and definitely well guarded.

and

Four, while the distress beacon in his communicator was hopefully still functional, the stabs of shattered plastic located by his questing fingers suggested that the communicator itself was most definitely damaged.

In short, he was in a very bad position - but not nearly as bad a position as his kidnappers were going to be in, that he knew for certain.

The second Steve entered the apartment, he would be swooped upon almost immediately by a very large, angry vigilante, and one single growled sentence.

"They've taken Dick."

It is very, very difficult to sneak around in a house containing a man with super hearing. Translation; It was impossible to sneak around in a house containing a man with superhearing, as Dick had discovered repeatedly on increasingly ingenious cookie-stealing kitchen missions. There really was no way to do it without Clark catching you.

It is, however, much easier to do said sneaking when the house didn't contain aforementioned owner of super hearing, which is why Dick would engage in his little extra-curricular activities only on days when Clark was away on 'business trips', preferably ones that took him far away from Metropolis.

Today was one of those days, or it had been one of those days, until he'd caught a glimpse of Superman in the sky over the city.

"Oh crap. Wow, that's my curfew, I better get home." he quipped to the mugger he'd just interrupted "Hate to leave it like this but it really is past my bedtime."

Throwing jokes about his youth always put the bad guys on the back foot, it robbed them of their material. It also gave him the precious few seconds of confusion that he needed to swing himself up onto the fire escape and climb up to the roof. He wished he could have done more, but it was at least one woman who was heading home with her purse tonight thanks to him. Now he just had to worry about getting home before Clark. Ha, like that was going to happen.

He tried to figure out what he was going to do as he ran across the rooftops. If he could change quick enough after he was inevitably caught sneaking in, he could maybe claim he'd been at a party or something equally innocuous. If only he'd brought a change of clothes out with him... nothing for it, he'd have to just take his chances.

Reaching the house, he slipped in through the bedroom window as silently as he could manage, immediately shedding his costume and shoving it under the bed as quickly as possible. Now he just had to pray he'd gotten away with it.