Chapter 5: The Ultimatum
Consciousness returned to Dick in a slow, sickening wave. First was the smell: antiseptic, ozone, the clean, cold scent of the Cave. Then the feel: cold, polished metal under his knees and palms. He was on all fours on a medical table, the posture instinctive and vulnerable. His head swam, thick with sedatives and the fading echoes of applause.
He blinked, trying to clear the fog. Harsh, red auxiliary lighting glinted off sleek medical pods and the glass fronts of cabinets stocked with precision tools. He knew this place. It was the med-bay, his sanctuary after a hundred broken bones and contusions. It felt alien now.
A low, mechanical hum vibrated through the table. He turned his head, stiff and slow.
Behind him, positioned with surgical exactness, stood a large, institutional enema machine. It was a bland, beige contraption with a clear plastic reservoir, currently empty, and a long, fat hose ending in a slick, black-rubber nozzle. It hovered just inches from his exposed entrance.
Confusion, thick and cloying, gave way to a jolt of pure, undiluted fear. He scrambled to push himself up, to get away from the thing, but his wrists and ankles were held fast by padded but unforgiving restraints anchored to the table.
“Bruce?” His voice was a dry croak. He strained against the bonds. “Bruce, what… what is this?”
A shadow detached itself from the deeper gloom near the main computer bank. Bruce walked into the low red light. He wasn’t Batman. He wore simple black tactical trousers and a grey tank top, his arms crossed over his chest. His expression was empty. It was the void that had looked back at him from the observation glass.
“You’re home,” Bruce said. His voice was flat, informative. “The conditioning must continue. It’s for your own good.”
“Conditioning?” Dick yanked at the restraints, the metal clasps rattling. “Bruce, stop it! Untie me! This isn’t funny!”
“It’s not meant to be.” Bruce stepped closer. He didn’t look at Dick’s face. His eyes catalogued the situation: the machine, the posture, the panic. “Your previous identity is a liability. To me. To the mission. To yourself. It must be excised.”
Dick let out a shaky, disbelieving laugh. “My identity? You’ve lost your mind! Let me go right now!”
Bruce uncrossed his arms. He moved to a console beside the table, his fingers tapping a sequence. A holographic screen flickered to life in the air beside them. “You are operating under outdated programming. I’m going to correct it. You have a choice.”
“I don’t want a choice from you! Not like this!”
“Choice one,” Bruce continued, as if Dick hadn’t spoken. “You become mine. My bottom. You obey every command. You accept daily use. You fulfill the function you were perfected for. You live here, protected, serving a purpose.”
Dick stared, his mouth agape. The words were so clinical, so insane. “Bruce… please…”
“Choice two.” Bruce turned from the console to look at him finally. The emptiness in his eyes was absolute. “I throw you onto the streets of the Bowery. As you are. With the imprinting Marsh instilled. You’ll be a male prostitute within an hour. You’ll be used by anyone with five dollars until you die in an alley, bleeding out from something trivial. That is your reality now.”
The ultimatum hung in the ozone-tinged air. It was no choice at all. It was a verdict.
“No,” Dick whispered, shaking his head violently. “No, I’m not… I’m Robin. I’m your partner. You’re sick, Bruce, he did something to you…”
“Proof of concept,” Bruce stated. He didn’t raise his voice. He unfastened his trousers.
Dick flinched, turning his head away. “Don’t.”
Bruce took himself in hand. He was already half-hard. “Look at it.”
“No!”
“Look.” The command was iron.
Trembling, Dick looked. He saw the thick, familiar flesh. And to his horror, he felt a traitorous, aching throb in his own groin. A flush of heat climbed his neck. The smooth metal plate pressed cold and unyielding against his stirring flesh, confining it, which only made the sensation more desperate.
Bruce saw it. He saw the subtle shift in Dick’s hips, the helpless press against the restraint. “Exhibit A,” he said, his voice chillingly calm. He pointed at Dick’s midsection. “Your body knows its trigger. It responds to the sight of a dominant cock. That is a faggot’s response.”
“It’s not—it’s a stress reaction!” Dick cried, tears of shame burning his eyes.
Bruce tapped the console. The holographic screen lit up with footage. It was from the observation chamber. A high-angle shot. There was Bruce, a monstrous figure in the tactical suit, holding a naked, pliant Dick in his lap. Dick’s head was lolling back on Bruce’s shoulder, his mouth open in a silent cry as Bruce’s hand worked between his legs. The image was crystal clear, humiliatingly intimate.
“Exhibit B,” Bruce intoned. “Documented behavioral compliance. Receptive submission.”
Dick writhed, trying to escape the image. “You made me! You tortured me!”
Bruce swiped the air. The footage changed. This was a close-up, graphic and obscene. It was the moment Bruce had taken him against the glass. The shot was focused, clinical, on the point of joining. The stretch. The penetration. The slick, forced entry.
“Exhibit C,” Bruce’s voice cut through Dick’s gagging sob. “Definitive proof of function. You were anally penetrated. You climaxed from it. Your protest is a cognitive dissonance. The evidence is irrefutable. You are a faggot.”
“I’M NOT!” Dick screamed, the sound tearing his throat raw. He thrashed against the restraints with all his acrobat’s strength. The table shook. “I’m not, I’m not, I’m NOT!”
The emptiness in Bruce’s eyes finally ignited. It didn’t fill with anger, but with a terrible, focused purpose. “Verbal denial necessitates physical correction.”
He moved away from the console. From a lower drawer of the med-table, he pulled out a plain, heavy leather belt. He folded it in half, the buckle clinking softly.
Dick froze, panting. “What are you doing?”
Bruce didn’t answer. He positioned himself to the side. He swung the belt.
The crack was explosive in the quiet cave. A line of pure, white-hot fire bloomed across Dick’s right buttock. He jerked forward with a shocked yelp.
“Admit it,” Bruce said.
“Go to hell!”
Crack. The belt landed an inch below the first strike. Dick cried out.
“You are a faggot. Say it.”
“No!”
Crack. Crack. Crack.
Bruce laid the blows in a steady, rhythmic pattern, methodically covering the exposed skin. He didn’t swing wildly; each stroke was precise, controlled, designed to maximize pain without breaking the skin. The sound was a brutal percussion of leather on flesh, punctuated by Dick’s increasingly ragged cries.
“Your body arches for cock! You moaned for it! You begged for it! ADMIT WHAT YOU ARE!”
“Stop! Please, Bruce, STOP!”
Crack!
The pain was unbearable. It stripped him bare, layer by layer, burning through defiance, through pride, through identity. It was all he was. A beating. A burning. His world narrowed to the next impact, the searing memory of the last.
“I’ll break you if I have to!” Bruce roared, the flat affect gone, replaced by something raw and terrifyingly familiar—the Batman’s relentless drive, twisted and aimed at him. “You will say the words! You are a faggot! SAY IT!”
Sobs racked Dick’s body. He was choking, drooling onto the cold metal table. The pain in his ass was a solid, throbbing mass. His bowels, shocked and spasming from the assault, tightened uncontrollably.
“I… I…”
CRACK.
A final, devastating blow landed dead center.
Dick’s body convulsed. A low, guttural groan escaped him as he lost control entirely. A hot, loose rush flooded out of him, spattering against his thighs, the table, the floor beneath. The smell, acidic and deeply humiliating, filled the space between them.
He went limp, broken by the sheer animal shame of it. He lay there, soiled and sobbing, the fight utterly gone.
Bruce dropped the belt. It landed with a soft thud on the padded floor. He walked to a refrigeration unit, opened it, and removed a small, lidded stainless steel bowl. He carried it back to the table.
He placed the bowl in Dick’s line of sight and removed the lid. Inside was a pool of viscous, pearl-white fluid. Bruce’s own scent, musky and intimate, rose from it.
Dick blinked through his tears, confused, exhausted beyond thought.
Bruce’s hand tangled in his sweat-drenched hair. Without ceremony, he shoved Dick’s head down toward the bowl.
“No! NO!” Dick shrieked, understanding dawning. He tried to resist, but his neck was weak, his spirit shattered.
His face plunged into the cool, slimy liquid. It filled his nostrils, coated his lips, his eyelids. He gagged, thrashing weakly as Bruce held him under.
After a five-count, Bruce pulled him up. Dick gasped, sputtering, strings of cum clinging to his nose and cheeks. “Admit it. You are a faggot.”
“I… I can’t…” Dick choked.
Down again. Deeper this time. He inhaled a fine, revolting bubble through his nose. It burned. He couldn’t breathe. His lungs screamed.
Bruce pulled him up. “Say it.”
“Plea—”
Down. Held. The world was white and suffocating. The taste was in the back of his throat, slick and rotten.
Up. Gasping, vomiting a little clear bile that mixed with the mess on his face.
“You are a faggot.”
A final, feeble shake of his head.
Bruce dunked him a fourth time, holding him under until Dick’s body spasmed in true panic, his hands clawing uselessly at the air. When he was pulled up, he was just a vessel for raw, terrified need: the need for air, for the torment to end.
“WHAT ARE YOU?” Bruce bellowed, his voice echoing off the cavern walls.
The word burst from Dick’s lips on a spray of fluid and despair. “A FAGGOT! I’M A FAGGOT!”
Bruce released his hair. Dick slumped, retching, wiping frantically at his face with his restrained wrists, smearing the substance further.
Bruce waited, his breathing slightly elevated, the only sign of exertion. He picked up a clean surgical towel from a stack and wiped his hand. “And what does a faggot do?”
Dick wept, brokenly. He didn’t understand.
“What is your function?” Bruce pressed, his voice dropping back to that terrifying calm. “You crave cock. You service it. What are you?”
The answer was the next logical step in the descent. The final, ugly truth. Dick whispered it to the metal table. “A whore.”
“Louder.”
“I’m a man whore.” The admission was hollow, absolute.
Bruce nodded. He disposed of the towel. He picked up the black-rubber nozzle of the enema machine, lubricating it from a squeezebottle with a quiet, squelching sound.
He pressed it against Dick’s sore, trembling entrance.
Dick didn’t protest. He just trembled.
i don’t know what “The ultimatum remains,” Bruce said, his thumb resting on the machine’s activation switch. “Mine, or the streets. Choose.”
Dick closed his eyes. The last image behind his lids wasn’t the Cave, or the Batsignal, or his parents on the trapeze. It was the smooth, featureless metal plate Marsh had locked onto him. His new face. His new truth.
A final, silent tear cut through the mess on his cheek. He had no self left to bargain with.
“You,” he whispered.
Bruce’s thumb depressed the switch. The machine emitted a low, steady groan. A wave of cold, saline solution forced its way in with a relentless, impersonal pressure.
Dick gasped, his back arching involuntarily against the flood. It was a deep, internal chill, a violation that was clinical and complete. The solution kept coming, gallon after cold gallon, until his stomach distended, tight and aching against the metal table. Bruce watched the reservoir drain, his expression unmoved.
He released the switch. The inflow stopped. “Hold it.”
A tremor ran through Dick’s entire frame. The pressure was immense, a cool, heavy ocean inside him that demanded release. He clenched, his muscles shaking with the effort, tears of strain mixing with the lingering mess on his face.
Bruce’s hand returned to his hair. He guided Dick’s head back toward the steel bowl on the table.
“Clean it.”
Dick resisted for a second, a final ghost of reflex. Bruce pushed, his grip unyielding. Dick’s nose and mouth submerged once more in the viscous pool. This time, he didn’t fight. He opened his mouth. He let his tongue move through the fluid, lapping at it, swallowing what he could. The taste was rancid and intimate.
Bruce pulled him up. “Again. Get it all.”
Down. Dick’s tongue scraped the cold steel bottom, gathering strings of semen. Up, gasping. Down a third time, until the bowl was smeared clean, his face glistening with the proof of his obedience.
“Good,” Bruce said. It wasn’t praise. It was a quality assessment.
He reached for the table’s restraints. The clasps hissed open, releasing Dick’s raw wrists and ankles. Dick slumped forward, unable to stand, his body trembling from cold and shock. Bruce caught him under the arms, hauling him upright like a sack of grain.
“Now, the rest.”
He half-dragged, half-carried Dick to a deep industrial sink in the corner. He bent him over it, chest against the cold porcelain, and removed the nozzle. What followed was a loud, humiliating purge. Dick sobbed through the entire process, his body expelling the saline in violent, uncontrollable waves that left him hollowed out and weak.
Bruce rinsed him with the spray hose, the water tepid and impersonal. He dried him with rough towels that scraped his sensitized skin.
From a black duffel bag stamped with a faded WayneTech logo, Bruce removed new items. Not tactical gear. A scrap of vibrantly pink lace, a thong. A matching bra with small, padded cups.
Dick stared, comprehension slow. “No.”
“You’re mine,” Bruce said, his voice devoid of debate. “I dress you.”
He knelt. He guided Dick’s shaky feet through the leg holes of the thong and pulled the flimsy lace up his thighs, settling it against his skin. The pink was a violent shock against his pallor. The metal chastity plate beneath was a hard, unyielding silhouette under the thin fabric.
Bruce stood. He slipped the bra straps over Dick’s shoulders, his fingers deft at clasping it behind his back. He adjusted the cups, his touch impersonal, settling them against Dick’s pectorals. The padding gave a faint, mocking suggestion of curves.
He turned Dick to face a polished metal panel on a medical cabinet. The reflection showed a shattered young man in a ridiculous, garish lingerie set, his face streaked with exhaustion, his eyes dead.
“See?” Bruce murmured behind him, his hands on Dick’s bare shoulders. “This is what you are now. This is the truth.”
His hands slid down Dick’s arms, then back up, trailing over the lace. One hand closed in Dick’s hair again, fisting tightly at the crown. The other unfastened his own trousers.
Dick saw it all in the reflection. He saw Bruce’s purposeful expression. He saw his own passive, broken face. He saw the pink straps. He felt the sharp pull on his scalp as Bruce guided him backward, aligning their bodies.
There was no preparation, no lubricant beyond what remained from the enema’s aftermath. Bruce pushed forward, entering him in one sustained, sinking thrust that punched the air from Dick’s lungs.
A ragged sound, part pain, part something else entirely, echoed in the sink.
Bruce began to move, a slow, deep, and brutal rhythm. His left hand remained fisted in Dick’s hair, pulling with each inward drive, arching Dick’s back, controlling the angle and the depth. The sharp tug on his scalp was a counterpoint to the deep, burning stretch below, each sensation anchoring him to the violation.
“This is your function,” Bruce growled, his breath hot against Dick’s ear, his reflection’s eyes locked on Dick’s in the metal. His thrusts picked up pace, becoming harder, more punitive. The pink lace of the bra strap quivered with each impact. “You take it. You wear what I give you. You serve.”
Dick’s hands, hanging limp at his sides, slowly clenched into fists. He watched, transfixed by the reflection—the monster he knew, and the doll he had become, joined in this awful pantomime. The pain was bright and clarifying. The pull on his hair was a direct line to the last of his nerve endings, a focal point that somehow grounded him in the unraveling.
Bruce’s movements became erratic, his controlled facade cracking under a wave of raw, consuming urgency. He drove into Dick with a final, series of deep, grinding thrusts, his grip on Dick’s hair turning vicious, holding him perfectly still as he emptied himself with a harsh, shuddering groan.
He held there, buried deep, for a long moment, his forehead damp against Dick’s shoulder. Then, slowly, he withdrew. He released Dick’s hair. Dick slumped forward against the sink cabinet, his reflection blurring.
Without a word, Bruce fastened his trousers. He looked at Dick’s spent form, draped in pink lace, for a long, silent moment. Then he turned and walked away, his footsteps fading into the hum of the Cave, leaving Dick alone with the stranger in the metal.