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It is surprisingly fucking difficult to find someone that will take advantage of him in Gotham. In Gotham. Maybe it’s that he’s Dick Grayson, and people figure they don’t want to catch an assault charge from the Wayne legal team. But honestly, Dick hasn’t been in the news as himself since he was a preteen; maybe a little blurb in the Gazette when he graduated high school. In addition, he hasn’t shaved in a couple days, he’s wearing his tightest clothes, and his hair is long overdue for a cut, hanging messy in his eyes, so he doesn’t exactly look very much like Dick Grayson either. Even so, he’s been up and down the party block in Bristol, and all he’s gotten is girls with worried eyes, asking if he wants a granola bar to soak up the alcohol, and guys offering to call him a cab.
Dick doesn’t want a fucking snack, and he certainly doesn’t want to go home. Wherever that is. He’s staying at a Quality Inn uptown that’s particularly unremarkable, in hopes that he’ll be able to slip under Bruce’s radar. He snorts to himself as he pushes his way out of the club. Like that’s ever happened. Still. He doesn’t want to be at the manor, with Tim all big-eyed and worried and Damian eyeing him suspiciously. And Blüdhaven still doesn’t—might never—feel safe. What he wants is for someone, literally anyone, to smile at him, flirt a little, slip an arm around his waist, ask if he wants to go home with them. He’s just gonna start begging soon.
Frigid air greets him as he stumbles outside. It’s supposed to be spring, but Gotham doesn’t start warming up in earnest until June, usually. Dick squeezes his eyes shut. Think.
Maybe he’s just in the wrong part of the city. If he wants morally questionable fun, he needs to go downtown. The Alley. Something in him cringes at the thought of seeing Jason, but he doubts they’ll run into each other. After all, Dick is traveling in a straight line toward his own destruction, and it’s a remarkably narrow path.
The Alley smells like car exhaust and tobacco and fast food. Dick hands a stack of bills he didn’t count to the driver, stepping out of the cab and retucking his hair behind his ears. He spots three drug deals, what looks like a car-jacking in progress, and several guys who he’d bet money are gang-affiliated before he even makes it into the club. No. He’s not here to do that. He doesn’t want to. He needs another drink.
Two hours later he’s on his back in the Quality Inn, knees bracketing a guy whose name he’s already forgotten. (No he hasn’t. It’s filed away in the place in his mind that Bruce created, chiseled into him with a deft hand. The bottomless basin that drinks in information, that never blinks, that catalogs and organizes and predicts. But wouldn’t it be nice if he could forget something like that? Wouldn’t it be nice if he could ever, ever, stop being Robin?)
He throws his head back in the way he knows makes his neck look pretty, inviting, and sure enough the guy (Joshua, an older bear, had an IPA in his hand when Dick approached him, jovial, nice in a passive way, not morally scrupulous enough to balk at Dick’s obvious drunkenness) leans down and begins sucking a hickey into the skin there. They don’t talk besides the usual, thank god. Dick would give just about anything to maybe never have another conversation in his life. Talking is for real people. Dick is just a shadow.
Between the truly astonishing amount of tequila he’s consumed and the raw physical sensation of being handled and kissed and fucked, Dick can almost, almost let go. He can almost turn off that part of his brain that’s buzzing, the lurking memories, the extra-awareness trained into him. He’s close. He cracks his eyes open and sees the yellowish neon light emanating in a nauseous glow from the window. And Joshua says to him, “So pretty, you’re desperate for it,” in neither a statement nor a question. And Dick slips away.
It’s peaceful. He’d forgotten true peace. His body takes over, responding in all the right ways, he’s sure, he hopes, but he stops being present for it. It’s the opposite of what happened on the roof. (It’s easier if he thinks of it like that. What happened on the roof. It could be anything.) The opposite of the hyperawareness, the sensations that he couldn’t stop feeling, cataloging, organizing. He couldn’t make himself blink. The rain fell into his eyes and that part of him, that cursed cavern, kept on looking.
But now, he indulges in one long, slow, blink. There’s motion and vague pleasure, noise, blurry things his eyes see without telling his brain about them. It’s wonderful. He opens his mouth to make a noise, something grateful, maybe a prayer, and he doesn’t know what comes out. He isn’t there for it.
Then Joshua is standing up and there’s cum all over him, in him, and his back aches, and the glow is gone from his window. If it was ever there. He thinks he sleeps, he thinks Joshua leaves, he thinks—but he doesn’t think, not really. And when he wakes up, his memory is pleasantly simple. Like something trapped in resin, all texture removed, smoothed out. Able to be seen, not felt. Something in him, something he hasn’t felt since he was nineteen and tried coke for the first time, stirs. Takes a breath. Opens its wide and jagged maw, and it tells Dick, More.
•
He even sleeps with women. See? It’s all normal. What happened on the roof didn’t break him. Didn’t even hurt him, not really. Not a scratch. He’s pouring resin all over it, and soon it’ll be too thick to even see through anymore.
There is the fact that he has to be high on something and drunk on something else and he always, always has to be on top, though. There is that.
But that’s all fine. He kills his brain with a joint outside or a line inside and then he kills his body with shots, shots, a cocktail, a beer. And then he’s on his way to freedom. And he finds someone who looks at him with interest or desire or curiosity and then he goes over and lets them touch, and then he subtly demonstrates his flexibility, lets his mouth hang open half a second too long after taking a shot, letting them see the wetness, the redness of his lips and tongue. And then they stumble out together, into a cab or around the corner or wherever, and Dick gets to go away.
He’s not sure if he has an end goal, which is probably bad. At first it was to prove that everything was okay and what happened on the roof, the hazy days of travel and confused vigilantism that followed was all… nothing. Not anything. Because if he can have sex like a regular person then that means he’s okay. And if he’s okay then he’s still Dick Grayson. But now it’s just… what he does. How he occupies his time. Because the Nightwing suit is still sitting in his locker in the cave, torn and rain-soaked. Because he’s not going back to Blüdhaven. Because he’s not going back to the Manor. Because he’s maybe not going anywhere, ever again. Maybe his life is over. Hey, he caught the bad guy and saved the day, didn’t he? Well, no, he didn’t. The vigilante he’d been mentoring killed the bad guy. And the day blew up. But it probably could’ve been worse. Point is, all his cases are closed, and he doesn’t have a job because it blew up and he doesn’t have a home because it blew up and he doesn’t have a brother because he blew up. No, that happened before. Jason’s back now. Right.
Bruce told him to take a break. So maybe that’s what he’s doing. He’s taking a break. He’s blinking, long and slow.
•
It takes Jason three whole weeks to find him. Or maybe he found him right away and has just been ignoring his sporadic presence in the Alley.
Dick doesn’t immediately register that the pounding in his head and the pounding on the door of his hotel room are in fact two separate phenomena, but then the guy next to him (Troy, finance bro he’d found at one of the campus bars around GCU) rumbles “The fuck is that?” and swats at him, so Dick rolls away and promptly falls off the bed. This serves to wake him up the rest of the way, and he stumbles in the direction of the noise. He leaves the security chain in place and cracks open the door, preparing to tell the hotel employee that he’d be down to pay for his room again in an hour, but it’s his brother’s scowling face that greets him.
“Jesus, Jason,” Dick hisses, and slams the door shut again. He braces his palms against it, breathing hard, trying to think through the haze. Luckily Jason doesn’t start banging again. Clothes might be a good place to start. He grabs pants and shirt and a hat off the ground, all of which may or may not be his, and then unlocks the door, slipping out into the hall.
Jason is leaning against the opposite wall, arms crossed, looking very unimpressed. He’s in civvies of course, and Dick blinks hard, trying to re-engage some of the brain functions that have been largely offline for the last month. Stuff like “How to talk to members of your family,” and “How to act sort of normal,” and “How to exist outside of your hotel room during the day.” Nothing important.
“What do you need, Jay?” There. That’s normal. Jason must need something—information for one of his cases, or a resource from the Titans, or the Hulu password. Or something. Dick briefly wonders why he didn’t just text or call, but then remembers the phone he hasn’t charged in… oh, eight days, give or take.
Jason doesn’t respond, just looks at him. The longer Dick is awake and sober, the more aware he becomes of the ripping hangover he has and the rancid state of his mouth. (He remembers the last time he brushed his teeth. He really really does. Promise.) He quickly loses patience for whatever Jason’s game is. “What?” he snaps, and this at least seems to activate Jason in some way. His scowl deepens, but he stands up straight and takes a step toward him.
“You look like shit. You haven’t answered any calls in weeks. Tim says you withdraw a thousand in cash from your account every week and then disappear off the grid again. Then I start seeing you around the Alley, in a different bar or club every night. The fuck, Dick? If you’re undercover you have to fucking tell someone. Besides, I thought you were supposed to be on a break.”
Dick opens his mouth, and then just kind of lets his jaw hang there. He tries to organize, catalog, predict, and only sort of manages it. He feels a cold sweat break out across his forehead, and he’s getting twinges of pain all over his body, a cruel acupuncture. The comedown is hitting him hard. Fuck. Okay. Tim’s hacking into his bank account—whatever, nothing new. Jason thinks he’s on an undercover mission. And someone probably sent him to check on Dick.
“Alfred?” Dick guesses, taking a stab in the dark while he tries to figure out how to process literally any of this.
Jason scoffs derisively. “Yeah, weeks ago, Dick. No one could fucking find you. Your trackers are dead. At this point there’s a fucking search party on.”
Huh. Interesting. Troy, of course, picks this moment to open the door (rumpled clothes on, luckily, mostly Dick’s clothes, unluckily) and peer out into the hall. Dick turns around, prepared to usher him back inside, but then he sees the lump of Troy’s wallet in his pocket. He’s leaving.
“Hey,” he murmurs to Dick, giving Jason a sideways glance. “It was fun, but don’t uh… tell anyone about this, yeah?”
Dick just smooths his expression into a bland smile and says mildly, “Sure.”
Troy nods, troubled, giving Jason one last glance before stalking away down the hall.
Jason slowly, slowly turns back to face Dick. He’s having the sort of intense emotion that makes his face cold and flat. Dick knows from experience. “You’re not. Undercover. Are you.”
Dick leans against the door again and sighs deeply. “I’m—on a break. Like you said. Happy? Proof of life?” He gestures to himself vaguely.
Jason raises an incredulous eyebrow. “You calling this proof of life? Sure I’ll just run back to the cave and tell everyone, ‘Oh sure I saw Dick, he’s holed up in a hotel downtown with no gear, no phone, partying like he’s in high school again. And he looked like he was about to fucking keel over.’ No one’s gonna be happy about that.” Especially not me goes unsaid.
Dick stops himself from rolling his eyes. “So lie, then. Whatever. I’ll charge my phone. We good?” He turns to let himself back into the room, only to realize he left his keycard inside. Fucking fantastic. Jason grabs his arm a second later, anyway.
“No, we’re not fucking good, Dick. What the fuck is wrong with you?” Dick hears the underlying meaning—what’s wrong, how can I help, why are you making me feel powerless, I miss you—but he shuts it out.
“Nothing,” he replies, turning again to face Jason. He makes his expression just as bland as when he spoke to Troy. “Nothing’s wrong, Jay. I’m fine. I’m procrastinating on fixing my suit, don’t feel like hanging at the Manor until I find a new apartment in Blüd. I’m fine.” Give Dick a fucking award for how normal he just made his life sound, honestly. But Jason stumbles back, face twisting, like Dick had screamed at him.
“You’re—you—” he starts, then clenches his fists and swallows hard. “B fixed your damn suit. As soon as you brought it in. Made you a new one, too. Upgraded the fuck out of it, you’ll probably hate it. I get—listen, I of all people get not wanting to be at the Manor, but there’s Tim and Damian. They miss you. I’ve heard.” Jason’s eyes slide to the right, avoiding the emotion, deflecting, obfuscating so he can’t be caught by his own vulnerability. Dick hears it anyway. I miss you, miss you. Why won’t you come home? What’s going on that you can’t tell me? It’s the expression Jason would get when he first came to the Manor, wanting so desperately to be Dick’s best friend, to know everything about his unimaginably cool teenage life.
The past is easy. They’ve already done it. “I’ll see them later,” Dick says, and pushes off the door, quickly losing Jason in the twisting halls and slipping into the alcove with the elevators and ice machine until he hears Jason’s footsteps pass, and then retreat.
•
Jason must have been keeping track of him all along, because the next time Dick goes out, the Red Hood is on him like a tick. Dick sees flashes of the helmet in his periphery, tries to lose him, eventually gives up and ducks into one of his usual haunts. If Jason wants to see some stranger’s tongue down his throat that bad, he’s welcome to the sight. Dick figures that, after bearing witness to the shuddering frame of what’s left of Dick’s life up close and personal, Jason’ll let him be, at least for the night, too disgusted to keep looking. Dick certainly is.
He has no doubt that Hood is watching from somewhere—a window or a camera—but the lull of the music and a few drinks quickly let Dick relax. Jason and Bruce and Nightwing and the roof all seem to get further and further away, as he dances, as he talks, as he drinks. A girl asks him if he’d like a bump, and Dick follows a her into the cramped bathroom, where he discovers that she has not just any cocaine, but in fact pure fucking snow.
“Jesus, where’d you get this shit? It’s good,” Dick says, sniffing down the remnants. She grins, rhinestones glittering on her face.
“That Hood guy only lets the pure shit in, you know? Some people rag on him, but—damn, if you can afford it, the highs are better than they ever were.”
Dick has a very confused moment where he simultaneously feels the coke hit and his mood drop at the mention of Jason. It feels like the two hemispheres of his brain turn around to look at each other and say, Huh?
“Right, yeah Hood,” he murmurs, blinking at the edge of the sink where the girl is tapping out another bump. “I should, uh,” he manages, before abruptly escaping the bathroom.
The comparative darkness of the main club leaves him standing blind for a second, swaying, until a warm arm wraps around his waist. Dick has the nonsensical thought that it’s Jason, come to haul him out, but then—“Hey there, Dickie.”
Oh. It’s Kyle, from three nights ago. He wears a lot of cologne, which Dick would be able to smell if his sinuses weren’t still burning vaguely. “Uh, hey,” he mutters, eyes darting around the club, suddenly paranoid for no particular reason. Is Jason here? Would he have changed into civvies just to follow him in? There’s no way.
“There you are!” The girl from the bathroom. Dick wants to get out of here. He needs to find someplace to ride out the peak of this high, someplace safe. His stomach churns as an image of Wayne Manor flashes in his mind. He wants to go home—but, no, no he doesn’t. Right? He wants to be anywhere but there. “You’re really cute, you know,” she says, and Dick blinks at her, and he wasn’t really paying attention before, in the bathroom, but the more he looks at her the more she kind of looks like—“You wanna get out of here?”
Dick’s heart is thundering in his chest, upset that Dick has taken yet more stimulants, and his hands are starting to shake. He wants to say—“Yes,” he breathes. He wants her. He—he wants her to do it to him again. No. He squeezes his eyes shut, shaking his head. He doesn’t want that! What the fuck is wrong with him? Even the thought of it—rain in his eyes, cement against his back, scraping through his battered suit, a dead kind of warmth, her voice, her voice, her—is making him want to throw up.
All of him is shaking now, but—no, not shaking, he’s shivering. When did they get outside? His hand is being clutched tight. He still feels wired from the coke; the streetlamp directly overhead seems blaringly bright.
“Hey, you wanna get the fuck away from him?” Catalina—no—the girl, she flinches at the harsh, mechanized voice. Red Hood is standing in front of them.
“Wh-what the fuck?” she says, voice shaking. Glint of metal—Dick flinches hard. Catalina holds the gun with hard determination. Step aside, she says. Just step aside, Dick. I’ll do it. He knows what comes next.
So if I’d said “Stop,” we would have heard it. Heard and processed it along with the gunshot, simultaneously. “Don’t do it, Tarantula, stop!” Bang. Stop. Bang.
“Not in the mood to talk,” Hood says, and Dick’s hand is cold when she lets go, hurrying back towards the club. Dick doesn’t do anything. He just stands there. Was he really going to—? But what if it was going to be different this time? He’s misremembering it. If he could just recreate it—think it through, maybe he’d find that—that it wasn’t—
“Dick,” and Dick just reacts, body operating on reflex, still hyperalert even while his brain was offline. Hood stumbles back, because Dick pushed him, hard. “The fuck?!” he shouts, shocked. Dick crosses his arms and holds them tight, so he won’t hurt anyone else. Too late for that, querido, no?
Booted footsteps closing with him. Dick just shakes his head. Is it raining? He doesn’t think it is. His face feels wet, though. A hand roughly grips his chin and he dully meets his brother’s eyes. He must have taken off the helmet at some point.
“Are you fucking high right now?” Jason’s voice is all outrage, and lurking beneath, fear. And Dick feels awful, hangover awful, headache-high awful. He wants to die. He wants to scream. He wants to fall to his knees and beg for forgiveness. He wants to curl up on the dirty ground and never ever get up again.
“N-no,” he says, ‘cause he’s a coward.
Jason looks at him for a long, long moment. “Well. Your nose is running and your pupils are dilated. And you’re sweating like a pig. So let’s start there.”
•
Jason manages not to freak out all the way to the safehouse. Well. Not to freak out externally. Internally, he’s gone past freaking out and is now freaking up or perhaps diagonally.
He picks the one closest to them—he doesn’t trust either of them on the bike at this point—and Dick follows him like a ghost. If it weren’t for his harsh breathing, Jason wouldn’t be sure he was there. Jason forcibly keeps his hands still as he finds the right key and opens the door, letting Dick in ahead of him.
They stand awkwardly in the entry for a moment before Jason points to the couch and says, “Sit.” Dick obeys, silently.
In the kitchen, Jason lets it in, just a little. Just for a moment. The panic, the tremor, the rising horror in his throat that makes him think of dirty needles and lighters and spoons—he’s not her, he tells himself. It’s not the same. He knows that Dick’s been drinking—heavily—and he even knows that Dick has indulged in a substance or two in the past, during and after his short-lived college experience.
He remembers one of Dick and Bruce’s worst fights; a Sunday morning, a gossip rag on the kitchen table with one of those just-outside-the-club pictures of Dick on the cover, disheveled, grinning, arm around a girl, and if you looked close enough—white powder, just a smudge, clinging around his nostril. Barely there, but in combination with how the camera flash washed him out, the manic expression, and the headline—Wayne’s Ward Wasted!!! Spiralling Out of Control?!—it all added up. They screamed at each other for an hour and a half, Jason allegedly waiting in his room but in actuality listening at the top of the stairs, and then Dick said that awful thing, “Well maybe I’ll overdose next time and you won’t have to deal with me anymore!” There wasn’t even the usual Richard John Grayson in response; Bruce must’ve been too taken aback to yell, which would’ve impressed Jason if it weren’t so disturbing.
The front door slammed after Dick. Bruce found Jason having a panic attack in his room a few minutes later. He hadn’t been able to keep it in, those words still pounding in his head—maybe I’ll overdose, maybe I’ll overdose—and Jason had insisted that “He can’t die like that, he can’t he can’t he can’t,” and Bruce just held him and reassured, “He’s not going to, Jason. He’s got us looking out for him.”
The splatter-hiss of water boiling over brings him back to the present. He pours two mugs on autopilot, but carefully considers his teabags and settles on chamomile. Caffeine is the last thing Dick’s system needs right now.
Dick is right where Jason left him, eerily still on the couch. Jason sets the mugs down on the small coffee table, and sits on the other end of the couch.
“So,” he says, and can’t think of how to continue. After a moment, Dick twitches and takes up his tea, but doesn’t drink it. Jason watches him, and realizes with a start that he’s wearing the same shirt as he was in that tabloid picture, all those years ago. Just some mesh and leather thing he must’ve gotten from Pacsun as a teenager. Paired with his sickly pallor and smudged eyeliner, it’s too familiar. Jason looks away and drinks his tea.
“I think,” Dick says, hands bloodless and white around the mug, “I think there’s something wrong with me, Jay.”
Jason comes to attention immediately. “What? Do you feel sick? Like you’re gonna pass out?” He looks for the telltale signs—coke overdoses can be so fickle, not to mention fentanyl could’ve found its way into whatever Dick had taken, despite Jason’s best efforts in the Alley. But he looks the same—pale, but not sweating anymore, and he seems relatively alert, if distant.
“Not like that,” he says, voice hoarse. “I mean like. In my head.”
“Oh.” Jason feels his shoulders drop minutely. “Well, I’d say you might’ve been dropped as a baby, but I got a feeling those Flying Graysons’ hand-eye coordination was pretty stellar.” Dick smiles vaguely. Jason will take his wins where he can.
“You know what happened?” He turns to look at Jason, and his eyes are wide, pupils still unnaturally dilated, yawning abyss. “In Blüd.”
Jason shrugs and takes another sip to stall. “Glanced at the report. I know B wasn’t happy with it.”
“The report,” Dick laughs weakly. “I don’t even remember what I wrote.” He finally drinks some of his tea, though he doesn’t seem to taste it. “I still blame myself more than her. Isn’t that stupid?”
Jason blinks. “For killing the guy?” Dick flinches at the bluntness, and Jason clears his throat. “I mean—look, you know where I stand on the killing question. But I get how that—how it must have been. Hard. For you.” He probably doesn’t, not really, but if he adds up all the components in his head, and Dick’s wide, empty eyes—yeah. He can use his imagination. “But—Dick, you have to know. That could’ve ended a million different ways. Yeah, maybe he’d be in prison, but maybe he’d have gotten away. Or maybe something else would’ve taken him out. Or maybe you’d be the one dead.” He swallows down nausea at the thought. “Point is, it ended. It’s over. I know what it’s like to have those ‘If only I had done this or that’ thoughts, and they’ll drive you crazy if you let them.”
“I kind of wish it had been me,” Dick says contemplatively. “I don’t know if I can be Nightwing anymore.” He sets down his mug.
Jason manually unclenches his jaw. “Well, that’s no big deal. Name change, costume redesign. Done it before, right?” He’s coping hard. He doesn’t want to be having this conversation, but there’s no other choice. Only way out is through.
Dick just shakes his head. “I don’t know why I’m so… sure I guess I didn’t… want it to happen, but it was… fine.” Jason gets the distinct feeling that Dick’s mind has gone somewhere that he can’t follow.
Still, he asks, “You mean Blockbuster?” Dick twitches again at the name, but shakes his head.
“It was after everything. She—I went up to the roof. Threw up,” he laughs shakily. “I wasn’t—I couldn’t think. I was exhausted. I just laid down. I guess she followed me. She was… I knew she had—a crush. Or something. I knew how she looked at me. I didn’t think about it too hard.” He’s worrying the edge of his mesh shirt between his fingers. “I don’t know how much I was actually teaching her about vigilantism. I think it was mostly nice to just… not be alone. But maybe I should’ve discouraged her. I don’t know.”
Jason feels something cold and dark curl in his chest. “Dick. What happened on the roof.”
Dick outright laughs at that—it’s painful. He’s sort of crying. “That’s the million dollar question.” He picks up his tea again and chugs the rest of it, then pushes the mug away and scrubs his hands over his face. The numb state he’s been in since Jason found him is abruptly giving way to what Jason guesses is a coke comedown—he’s jittery, a little manic. “What happened on the roof.” Like he’s giving a presentation. “She—it was raining.” He pauses. “We had sex. I guess.” All in a rush.
Jason feels a seam in the fabric of the couch give way where he’s clutching at it. His own tea is by his feet, cold and forgotten. “Sex,” he repeats, like it’s an alien concept. He doesn’t want to put these pieces together. But it looms before him, a dark ghost. What happened on the roof.
“Sure,” Dick agrees easily. But he’s kind of—stalled. Like he’s stuck on this concept, this thought, this idea. Jason feels the same way.
He takes a deep breath and carefully controls his tone, keeping it casual. “And you. Wanted that to happen.”
Dick’s eyes narrow, like he’s examining the memory itself. He scrubs his face again. Shrugs. “I…” He’s quiet for a long moment, and the next time he speaks, he’s half-sobbing. “I’m pretty sure I said no?” He’s squeezing his hands together, digging his nails in. Jason instinctively scoots closer, but doesn’t touch him. “I can’t remember? You know,” he says suddenly, “B says there are two distinct neural pathways that run from auditory brain tissue to the same frontal-lobe paths that the visual system uses to distinguish what something is from where it is.” Jason worries for a moment that Dick’s high isn’t as worn-off as he thought it was before he continues, “And like, visual information, music, speech, environmental noise, it’s all processed in parallel. Different parts of the brain, but in parallel. So you don’t lose any of it… If you remember what was going on in a scene of a movie, you also remember what song was playing. So, I think,” he catches his breath a little, “I think if I had said… something. Anything. I would remember it? I remember everything else.” He curls in on himself, as if over an open wound. “The rain. The shape of the cloud right above me. Her—the way she—” Jason moves as fast as his body allows to grab the trashcan from beside the couch and shove it under Dick’s face, just in time for him to dry heave into it. Nothing but the tea comes up, and Jason wants to know when the last time he fucking ate something was, but Dick keeps talking. “I just can’t remember what I did? Did I say something? Do you think I said something? Do you think I said no?”
Jason puts his hand over his chest, where his heart is pounding; he’s nauseous, he’s cold, he’s in despair, he feels the Pit waking up in the back of his head. “Dickie,” he manages, “I…” But he just puts his hand on Dick’s and waits for him to shakily set the trashcan down.
“I’m sorry,” he says, a little more steadily. “I’m so sorry Jay. This is, like, all of your triggers. I’m being awful. I should leave.” Jason tightens his grip.
“Dick,” he says, angry, “you’re my brother.” It surprises him, that that’s what comes out of his mouth. But it seems like nothing else matters as much as that, in the moment. Dick looks at him, crying again, or maybe he never stopped.
“Yeah?” he asks weakly, and they’re hugging before Jason can even process who leaned forward first.
“Fuck,” he says. “Fuck, Dickie. You don’t have to be sorry. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t know. I should’ve—I should’ve—”
“It’s okay, little wing,” Dick murmurs. And they stay like that, for long minutes.
When they finally part, they’re both wiping at their eyes. Jason coughs a little.
“Alright.” He blinks at the coffee table, trying to think, organize. “Alright. You’re staying here tonight. Do you need anything?”
Dick winces. “All my stuff is at the hotel.”
Jason nods. “I have spare stuff here that should get you through the night. We’ll go get everything tomorrow.”
•
The comedown leaves Dick feeling sick and depressed in the morning. Not that he expected anything else.
Dick leans against the doorframe of his hotel room, arm wrapped around his roiling stomach, while Jason picks his way over empty bottles, cans of half-drunk, rotting beer perched precariously on every flat surface, ounce bags turned inside out so Dick could gum the coke residue. Dick recognizes the empty, panging space where shame or embarrassment should perhaps be, but as it is he just stares, feeling nothing much at all.
Jason methodically picks his clothes off the floor, expertly avoiding the ones crusted with cum or alcohol. He, miraculously, finds Dick’s wallet, fully intact, the dead phone, the charger, which had been kicked under the bed, and his original duffel bag, with some supplies still in it, never unpacked. He moves with a kind of intuition that can’t be chalked up to training, and Dick thinks, not for the first time, that Jason has spent far too long taking care of people he shouldn’t have had to. “You wanna get the bathroom?” Jason asks, and Dick stiffly uncurls to walk over.
He looks worse than he’d thought in the mirror, pale and waxy, hair greasy and lank. He presses his fingers into the circles under his eyes, dragging down the lid to see the burst capillaries. He’s a mess. Obviously. It’s satisfying, in an abstract sort of way, that his outside matches his inside.
He gathers his toiletries; the abused stub of eyeliner rolling around on the counter, the near-empty bottle of cologne he used instead of showering before going out some nights, toothbrush, toothpaste, comb. That’s it. There’s some random floss and a dented bottle of water that someone or other left when he brought them here. Used condoms in the trash. Here is the sum of Dick Grayson’s pathetic existence. He dumps it all back into the duffle it came from.
“Ready?” Jason says, once the bags are zipped and Dick’s phone is blinking to life in his hand.
There are four separate apps with 99+ message alerts. He swallows, and his thumb wobbles over the screen. He locks his phone, leaving it on silent and tucking it into his back pocket. Maybe he’ll just get a new one. New phone, new apartment, new life. Whatever. Might as well get a new identity while he’s at it. Babs could whip something up. Tokyo sounds amazing right now.
“Dick.” Jason is looking at him, calculating, like he’s deciding whether or not he needs to catch Dick if he falls over.
“Yeah,” Dick says. “Let’s go.”
•
Jason leaves him to his own devices for a few hours while he goes out grocery shopping and Red-Hooding. Probably not in that order. Regardless, Dick is alone, in the dark, rotting on his little brother’s couch when Roy calls.
He startles at the feel of his phone vibrating in his back pocket; he hasn’t touched the thing in so long he forgot what it felt like. The dings and pings and rings that usually follow him everywhere—Dick, we need you, Dick where are you, Nightwing, status?—were absent. He can’t decide if he likes their return or not.
He picks up without looking at the screen; he’ll have to start somewhere with the updates and the apologies and the reassurances, and if he has a chance to think about it too hard he really will throw his phone in Gotham Harbor and book a flight to Tokyo.
“Yeah,” he says into the receiver. There’s a brief fumbling on the other end. Dick frowns and pulls the phone away to look at the caller ID. “Roy?”
“Shit—Dick, hi,” Roy says. “I was just gonna leave you another voicemail, I didn’t know you… were… back,” he finishes awkwardly.
“Did someone tell you I was on a mission or something?”
“No, nothing like that, I just knew… look, your family’s been freaked out, but not, like, in total panic mode, so I figured you were alive but ignoring them for whatever reason.”
“You know me so well,” Dick says, trying to fall into their rapport, failing. His voice is coming out too toneless.
“Yeah,” Roy says, and there’s a brief silence. “You good, man?”
Dick chokes on a platitude. Here it is, the first explanation he has to give. No words feel adequate. No words feel accurate. “No,” he settles on.
“Figured. I can be there tomorrow.” Here’s Roy Harper, loyal to a fault, efficient and serious.
“You don’t need to. I’m not dying. Be with Lian,” Dick assures.
“I don’t know if you know this, man, but I’m with Lian literally all the time. I just chaperoned her class on a field trip and she was sick of me by the time we got home. I can take a couple days. She and Dinah are planning on a horseback riding lesson, anyway.”
“I’m not asking you to,” Dick says.
Roy sighs, the air crackling over the speaker. “I know. I also know it would take another alien invasion for you to ask. I’m coming.”
“Roy I—” Dick’s heart is picking up in his chest as he thinks of his reflection in the mirror of the hotel bathroom. He hadn’t just looked bad, he’d looked… strung out. Unmistakably. “There’s—there’s something else you should know.”
A breath of silence, which is the sound of Roy steeling himself. “Yeah.”
“I’m. I’ve been—” he struggles. Using doesn’t feel right, feels like he’s co-opting the language, and Snorting my body weight in blow seems too flippant. Dick doesn’t—he abuses substances, yeah, he can admit that, but he’s not an addict. He knows the difference, had to learn it, memorize it, when confronted with a seventeen-year-old Roy Harper overdosing in front of him. Coke is a bad habit for Dick, but he puts it down every time without fuss. Even now, he wouldn’t say he’s craving, pushing a full twenty-four hours post-use. It’s a privilege, he knows, and he doesn’t know how to tell Roy all of these things without triggering him or rubbing his face in that privilege.
“It’s alright,” comes Roy’s steady voice. “Whatever it is. I’m in a good place, Dick. Don’t worry about me.” Like a fucking mind reader. Like Dick’s best friend.
“Coke,” Dick manages, “Again. And drinking, a lot. But—I’m okay. I’m stopping, I have stopped. I just. Wanted to warn you.” He fits his thumbnail into between his front teeth and chews on it a little.
Roy blows out a long breath over the line. “Alright. Thanks for telling me. Are you doing okay with it? The stopping, I mean.”
“Yeah,” Dick breathes, relieved for no reason. “Yeah it’s not—it’s just, um. A symptom, I think. Of something else.”
“Ain’t it always,” Roy mutters. “You wanna talk about it?”
Dick leaves him hanging for more than a minute as he thinks about that. The impulse rises in him without warning, and he’s too tired to stop it. “I was raped,” he says, and is sort of surprised and amused by how rock-solid his voice sounds. He’s just trying it out. Letting the statement sit on his tongue, to see if it feels true. It does. It doesn’t. “Or something. I don’t know.” Here are the nerves, the cracks; his voice is shaking like it had when he talked to Jason last night. “Whatever,” he bites, suddenly irritated with himself. “The point is I just. My life fucking sucks right now. You know a supervillain blew up my fucking apartment building?” His eyes are stinging. Fuck him. Fuck this. “And I guess I haven’t been. Coping. Whatever.”
Dick squeezes his eyes shut against the tears, which slide sideways down his face anyway, because he never gets what he wants. Roy is just breathing steadily into the phone. Dick tries to focus on it, take comfort in the sound of someone he knows, someone safe being in this moment with him.
After a long, imprecise time, Roy says, “Hey. I love you, you know?”
Dick sniffles hard. “I know.”
“I’m sorry that happened. It’s—it’s shit. It’s fucking bullshit and it’s not fair, and I wish I could fix it. Or take it away. This is all obvious but I gotta say it anyway. It wasn’t your fault. It shouldn’t have happened. Any of it. But it did, because shit happens beyond our control and it sucks every damn time. But I’m really glad you made it to right now, Dick. I want you to know I mean it when I say I’m actually damn ecstatic that you’re safe and talking to me right now. It just made my month, and I’m serious. I’m coming to see you because I want to see you, not ‘cause I feel bad or you necessarily need me or whatever.” There’s a pause. “Okay, I think that’s everything.”
Dick snorts a little, running a finger over a popped seam in the couch cushion under him. “I liked it. It was very thorough.”
“They are thinking about naming me the most thorough man in Star City, you know.”
Dick huffs a laugh, real, for the first time in a while. “Thanks Roy, I—thanks.”
“See you in thirty-six hours, Rob. And tell Jason I’m using that really nice safehouse he’s got uptown. It’s going to waste.”
“I’ll tell him,” Dick says, smile sticking to the corners of his mouth.
“See you soon.”
Dick listens to the call end, and after a moment, opens his eyes into the quiet dark of the apartment. Then he gets up, and turns on a lamp. He’s sick of the dark.
When Jason gets home, he puts the Kardashians on the TV and lets Dick “help” make dinner, which mainly means doing the dishes Jason hands to him as he does the actual cooking. He tells Dick about how one of his lackeys is marrying his second cousin, and another one is allergic to apples, of all things.
There’s an incident where Jason sets an empty pot down on a burner too hard and Dick briefly gets stuck in a loop of Stop, Bang, Stop, Bang again, but Jason puts an ice cube in his hand and he snaps out of it.
By the time they sit down to eat, Dick feels… alright. A little on edge, still, but okay. Roy will be here tomorrow, and in the meantime he’s having dinner with his little brother, and he doesn’t want to slip away. He doesn’t want to blink, and miss hours or days or weeks. He wants to stay here. He, hesitantly, curiously, wants to see what happens in the next moment of his life. And the one after that. And maybe even the one after that.