Work Text:
It is before Chemo ever bombs Blüdhaven that Dick first wonders what exploding feels like.
───
Looking down from above, the cityscape of dotted lights is patterned like the sides of the dice unceasing to roll through its underbelly. It's impossible to withdraw.
So overhead, unseen a shooting star steps off a plane, green glow mistaken for a UFO. It doesn't burn up in the atmosphere like the meteor shower mere weeks before, but plummets down towards the ‘Haven city, and people don't blink because on every street, signs glow glitter pink and neon orange to blind the late night crowd and early commuters like high beam headlights.
Then all at once, in a synchronized sleep, everyone blinks when half of their home is engulfed in neon green, a crescent carved out of their midnight moon city as Chemo leaves a crater that astronomers would surely have warned of had it really been an asteroid. And by the time people open their eyes, the remains of the city of lights has gone dark.
The black harbour rushes in to douse the invisible flames as the dying scream and mourners wail into the backs of their closed eyelids, only to choke on the glowing green that blankets the surviving city, because radiation holds no bars for the blind, and Chemo not for the living-dead of the Harbour of Blüd.
And across the black channel, separating sin from sin, the living-dead holds a gun to the head of the man-monster akin to the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, as he condemns its maker for letting its course go unaltered and bringing Hell bubbling up from the cracks in the earth—the same Hell that now seeks to flood a blinded city-turned-sixth great lake.
And as a population has been halved, that single boy-turned-man wishes further for the evening of the score, and his eyes reflect Hell’s green glow of grief.
The comet brings condemnation.
But Dick Grayson knew he was always destined for grief. He just didn’t know it would take on the colour green.
───
“Jason’s alive,” Bruce says, like Dick hasn’t just lost his own life.
Alive, he says, like somehow Dick’s loss has driven Bruce into mania instead.
Like the words Dick would have given anything to hear three years ago now prove comparable to the 100,000 lives blinked out and the thousands more choking down their last toxic breaths.
“Come home. I need your help,” Bruce says, like Dick’s home isn’t in the middle of a lethal lake, like there aren’t Green Lanterns and Superman swooping in to help when Dick just about got himself killed by going home, like crime units from Metropolis aren’t entering the city in hazmat suits to distribute aid, like refugee camps aren’t popping up along the 55 highway when 24 hours haven’t even passed, like the president isn’t on the news using this green wave of grief to condemn metahumans.
Home, Bruce says, as Donna and Wally and even Roy, who Dick hasn’t exchanged a nice word with in two years, extend their homes to him after confirming he’s alive.
Jason’s alive.
───
Dick’s mind screams at him to go back out there.
Donna’s voice tries to penetrate a soundproof skull with the insistence that something broke needs time to decompose.
She then chides him for putting words in her mouth. “You’re not broken. You’re sick, and you can heal from this.”
She tucks a heavier comforter around him where he’s spent the last week on her couch. She has a spare room. This is closer to the toilet.
“Sitting around won’t make me better.” He can hardly walk to the kitchen.
“Your lymph nodes are still swollen, and you’re still covered in burns. You’re not going anywhere.” Her tone is final. It’s hard to believe she doesn’t mean to condemn him.
He puts his weight on the balls of his feet and pushes himself further back into the cushions, pushing and pushing into the seams, like if he tries hard enough, they might swallow him whole. “I’m deteriorating.”
Donna’s eyes say she doesn’t entirely disagree.
Her cool palm rests on his unbandaged cheek. “Dick, you know I love you, right? So many people love you, and I know you love them too, but you can’t–” Her voice cracks, and Dick’s eyes shutter shut. “You went back in twice, right up to where Superman was containing Chemo’s core. That–” Her breath stutters. “Dick, you knew what it was made of, knew it should have killed you.”
Forty-four thousand tons of toxic gasses, radiation, and acids given sentience. He’d helped the police redirect the evacuees away from the destroyed bridge, watched maybe four dozen more die as those forty-four tons collapsed under Superman’s fist, searched fourteen buildings and of his remaining friends, only managed to find Sophia, Amy, and her family alive. It should’ve killed him.
Donna sighs, fingers parting from his face. “I'm here, Dick. Okay? I’m here.”
The ache in his hands steadily grows into sharp stings as the radiation burns blister and rub against their bandages. The pain killers are wearing off. He doesn’t move from his plush prison.
───
Dick stares at the outline of the living-dead, back-lit by dock lights along Gotham River, and beyond to the southwest is the half-blinked out crescent shape of a whaling city turned mass media mourning site.
Jason draws his focus with a shot to the shoulder and a trigger flash that blinds Dick in such a familiar way that it makes him dizzy—or maybe that’s the future blood loss—as he sneers in an unfamiliar voice, “Good to see you’re still alive, asshole.”
And it’s nothing like the reluctant love a little brother used to give, and Dick can’t reconcile his memory with the teenager-man turning away with a blood red bat on his chest and wearing the name of the sick green man who condemned him with an explosion. The boy he knew died in yellow red green with hope in his robin-breast chest, and the man stalking away from him now wears the colour like it stands for the blood he spills instead of the new life of Spring, and Dick already tried to taint the name on his mother’s tongue with Zucco’s head, so why must Jason try to smear the green guts of the Joker over its letters too?
Red disappears from his vision, and if Dick squints real hard over the channel, he can spot the yellow lights of construction by the highway barricades as the residents of Coast City help erect a mourning monument for the lost lives of the Blüdhaven Chemo explosion.
All Robin seems good for now is grief.
───
Gothamites still wear their gas masks in the streets like they’re expecting an oncoming Joker or Scarecrow attack even after hearing the news of how far Chemo’s radiation spread on the wind.
“Those poor people,” some say.
“Now they get to see what we deal with every other week,” others spit.
Dick’s still pissing blood and puking green. He leaves for New York. The neon signs and high rises and too bright headlights remind him of home.
───
“Jason’s killing people,” Bruce says over the phone.
He hasn’t stopped killing people, Dick’s scarred shoulder shouts.
I got another call that an acquaintance died of radiation poisoning this morning. I didn’t even recognize their name, but I was on their emergency contact list, his swollen lymph nodes sob.
“What do you think I can do about it?” Dick asks.
───
Dick moves back to Gotham. Tim is still mourning Stephanie Brown’s death.
Dick stares at a picture of the two of them on Tim’s wall and for the first time realizes her eyes were blue.
She died in red yellow and green, wearing a name that just keeps getting more gory with each person that tries to plaster it to their chest with spilt blood and envy.
He only stays long enough to unpack his new apartment and watch Tim pull himself together while Bruce rips himself apart, then he zetas west to Keystone City.
Even after they’re inside his home, Wally doesn’t let him go, clutching Dick close like another blink will come back to take any survivors it missed. He sits Dick down at a kitchen stool while Linda hands him coffee in a Superman mug, squeezing his hands once, twice, before leaving to make up the spare room where they’ve just moved two cribs. She’s pregnant. Twins.
For a horrifying moment, he wonders if Wally will want him as the godfather. The thought of Wally leaving him too and having to raise his children sends week-old tears spilling over, and he comes apart in jagged jigsaw pieces all over Wally’s kitchen floor.
Wally’s suits went from yellow to red, and it’s only in the morning when he can bring himself to look in Wally’s green eyes that he gets the courage to ask.
“We put a lot of thought into it, and we just live such unpredictable lives, so– Iris agreed to be their godmother.”
Wally pretends not to notice his relief as Dick wonders how Iris would survive losing her pseudo-son after her husband already died to that suit in the same shade of red.
───
When Dick returns shortly after Wally’s birthday, feeling lighter than he has in months after listening to him and his wife argue the pros and cons of hyphenating their children’s last name, the manor has a significant lack of dog toys, and there’s a headstone in the snowed over clover patch that reads: Ace, Beloved Hound and Hero.
He sits until his scarred hands are numb and pants have soaked through, wondering what he did to make his family think he didn’t want to be called about loss.
He drags wet socks and pant legs through the halls to Tim’s room, because while he hadn’t known Ace nearly as long as Dick, grief could still pile up.
Water gathers in a plip-plip puddle as Dick stands still dripping in his little brother’s doorway, hands shaking from more than the cold.
Tim is more bandage than boy.
Because Jason beat half the blood from his body.
A week ago.
When he finally closes the door to his apartment, all the pieces Wally and Linda’s caring hands reassembled break apart and scatter all over his own kitchen tile.
He stares up at the popcorn ceiling with his face pressed to wet laminate, listening to the plip-plip of his tap as he wonders who would call them if it was Dick’s gravestone being erected, or if it would be another live broadcast of city-exploding caliber that caused countless calls and super speed check-ins.
───
“My brother’s dead.”
Donna sucks in a harsh breath over the phone. “Gods– I thought he was recovering?”
“No, not– Tim’s fine. He’s– better. But Jason’s not really back, and I can’t tell if I’m grieving his death again or– or– Can I grieve someone for coming back?”
“Oh, Dick.”
“I think I’m losing my mind, Donna.”
───
April showers break into Gotham that year a month early in the form of a four-day storm that cuts the power to his block three separate times.
Every cracker and sip of water never fails to find its way into the toilet bowl now permanently stained with stomach acid. His torn throat croaks when he swallows.
Maybe you’ll die of dehydration before the storm breaks, says the flushing drain over the sound of the newscaster making jokes that at least no one will go thirsty by avoiding Gotham tap water.
Would Chemo have killed Desmond had you not let Catalina pull the trigger? asks the dripping tap after he washes his hands for the sixth time that hour.
You know you wouldn’t have lived long enough to find out, say his bleeding callouses and the cracks in his knuckles.
All that grief for 42 lives lost. Over 100,000 were going to die anyway, he tells his reflection as he stuffs twitching fingers under his armpits.
───
Dick leaves Gotham for the first time in three months when Tim is closer to full recovery. His room in the New York Tower is dusty, but Vic helps him clean. He doesn’t comment on Dick’s fifteen lost pounds.
───
Dick makes the drive to Gotham on April 27th in the pocket of time when the sun hasn’t risen and only the earliest commuters join him on the highway. Each passing car doesn’t bother turning off its highbeams, and each flashbang of light brings with it a flashback of green.
Only when the lights of the bridge come into view and the lamps overhead pass by in a flashing rhythm, like the rain of gunshots in a dark alley, does Dick remember he’s traveling to an empty grave. A twice a year tradition has been cut short after only three rotations.
He makes the trip anyway.
There are flashing eyes staring at him from between the trees. Dick wipes the dirt from his pants before it’s even six-thirty in the morning and decides to visit the memorial site outside Blüdhaven instead. At least then he’s mourning the actual dead.
───
Garfield’s chatter slows but doesn’t lose enthusiasm as he looks past Dick’s shoulder towards the Tower’s entry hall, so Dick turns his head, a greeting on his tongue, only for his nerves to send jolts like escrima through his limbs, locking up as his tongue seems to swell and his teeth fall out.
Bright glowing green the colour of grief shapes into the crescents of Kori’s eyes.
Her steps hesitate and crescent smile slips the slightest bit when their illuminated focus settles on Dick. And new shame washes over him with the same damnation as the crater lake in that crescent city because he hasn’t thought about Mirage in a year, and hasn’t reacted this way to Kori’s unexpected appearance since they talked it all through. But as her sadness permeates the rest of their conversation, Dick knows that’s what she thinks triggered his hesitance as she brings up old memories that confirm her identity, even as all Dick sees is not the fire of her hair but the flames rising from a green mushroom cloud.
Dick moves back to Gotham.
───
Heavy boots land behind him on a rooftop, and Dick half expects a flare of light and pain at the sight of Jason’s red helmet.
The modulation only serves to remind Dick he doesn’t remember what Jason’s voice sounds like. “Stop visiting my grave.”
I don't mean to. It's a habit. I still miss you. What right do you have to tell me how to grieve? All of it, probably. “Okay.”
“That’s it?” Jason asks, like his words weren’t an order, a command, like he wasn’t sure that only he had the final say.
“What did you expect me to say?”
Jason doesn’t answer. He turns around and grapples away.
Dick buys the ingredients for chili at one in the morning. It’s not ready until three.
He eats four chili dogs on his kitchen floor before his stomach attempts to eject them back up.
He lets his jigsaw pieces crumble and disperse and water slip from his face onto perfect square tiles.
By the time the sun rises, the floor is dry and the trash holds the rest of the pot.
───
There’s an e-mail in his inbox from [email protected] with ‘Blüdhaven Project’ in the subject line. Oracle’s server deletes it before he can unfreeze his fingers with even the thought to move.
───
At the three-month mark of radio silence on everything regarding the Red Hood (and coincidentally Roy and Kori), Jason is in his apartment.
“Was in town,” he says with a shrug from Dick’s couch.
Dick’s frozen in his doorway, certain time has stopped, certain it’s wrong, been messed up, half-intent to call Wally and ask what speedster fucked with the universe today.
It’s the first time Dick’s seen his oldest younger brother without a mask or helmet since he was his only sibling at all. He doesn’t sound like the voicemails. And–
Dick is certain Jason’s eyes used to be clear blue.
Vaguely, he remembers learning from his high school art class that red is opposite to green on the colour wheel, complimentary yet with the most contrast. The teacher had them stare at a red image for so long that when the screen switched to white, they all started seeing green ghosts. So he supposes it makes sense that when the helmet’s been removed from the equation after so long, Jason’s eyes seem tinted green.
Or so he tells himself, because– if he thinks too much of that sickly coloured pit, the same toxic-upon-this-earth shade as the lead encased stone Bruce keeps, the invasive species that are his poisonous thoughts will draw him right back to the last place he wants to be.
Jason is on his couch in a zip up jacket and casual pants like he’s fourteen and they’re forty miles southeast where both those ghosts are now wasted in water instead of half-strangers in Coventry.
This is the man who almost killed Dick’s brother. Who maybe killed the other.
Green-tinged eyes can hardly meet his own.
“Fuck this.” Jason heaves himself up with hands on knees, and Dick can’t feel his feet nor tongue.
A build like Bruce’s shoves past his shoulder, and the door shuts with a slam.
Dick wonders what it takes to kill a little brother.
───
Damian’s eyes are an emerald sheen almost bright enough to rival the fire of his favourite Star. And it’s those eyes he sees that first night after Bruce dies, like a premonition he was too blind to see, highbeams turned on like the bright shot of Jason’s gun. Blood took my father away from me, the burnt nerves of his twitching fingers shriek, and he makes himself sick with the thought, yet he’s still shocked when his bile doesn’t come up green.
───
Another boy in red yellow green, and Dick can hardly blame Alfred for the action in his grief.
He questions when greed and envy became Robin’s most prominent colours.
“How can you even entertain the idea of letting him be Robin?” Tim cries.
Dick rubs his thumbs over tired eyes. “Maybe some direction is what he needs.”
“You can’t be serious.” Tim gapes. Dick doesn’t answer, and Tim’s expression is seared into the backs of his eyelids like fallen star green. “Screw this! Screw you.”
When Tim leaves, Dick can’t help but think one action has sentenced both his brothers to die.
───
“You’re not the Bat,” Jim Gordon says, hand on his holster, and Dick wonders when his eyes drifted so far from Barbara’s unique shade of green, now more like the reseda of Alfred’s favourite tea in the too bright light of the signal beam.
“I am now.”
Reseda leaves widen. “Nightwing,” he breathes.
Dick closes his eyes and doesn’t confirm, because he knows the next question, and it’s one he can’t bring himself to answer.
───
“Bruce is alive,” Tim says, like Dick’s gone back in time.
Alive, he says, like their combined grief has grabbed Tim by the ankles to drag him into obsession.
Like the words won’t break Dick into 100,000 irreparable pieces from which not even the World’s Last Finest would know where to begin in piecing him back together again.
“I need your help,” Tim says, like he isn’t asking the impossible, like their father’s city and son aren’t already resting on Dick’s starving shoulders, like Dick is living under a crescent moon and in acid-infested waters.
Like he’s his father’s son.
“Bruce’s dead.”
And Dick then learns what it takes to kill a little brother.
───
A year and four months after Dick traded one grief for another, the quarantine walls around Blüdhaven are taken down like a stadium unveiling, showing off the perfect, inverted dome of sloshing, salty toxic waste. In its place: a seven foot fence of metal poles and spaced out horizontal planks, every third panel nailed with a no swimming sign, separating liquid crater from persisting city.
Nightwing hasn’t been seen in months. Some think the radiation finally caught up to him. But most of the Haven cries coward.
The Bat has been seen almost every night. Some think nothing’s changed. But most of Gotham knows Batman, too, hasn’t been seen in months. They do not blame Nightwing. They no longer call him backstabber.
───
“Grayson, you must get up.”
“Master Damian, come. Let him be.”
“But it is three hours past noon and he has yet to move! His pitiful state is disgraceful.”
“The date weighs heavily on his mind. It’d be best to let him rest.”
“Tt.”
───
Some days Damian looks so much like his mother, it makes Dick want to scream.
Some days he looks so much like Bruce, Dick can’t bear to look above his collar bone.
He’s still making himself sick.
Some days he imagines the green.
───
Blüdhaven is to his back, but Dick can still see the reflection of the lit monument in the red of Jason's helmet, blinding him for a half-second as this living-dead ghost turns towards him.
“Oh, stop posturing,” Jason sneers. “We all know you're only wearing his skin.”
“Hood–”
Jason waves him off. “Don't get your panties in a twist. I'll be back in the Alley and out of sight in no time after I take care of this guy.”
Dick wonders what ‘take care of’ means this time. He readjusts his cape, too heavy of a weight.
“What? Too good to speak to me? Can't bring yourself to want me around now that you're wearing the cowl? Who am I kidding? You couldn’t before either. You can’t even fucking look at me.”
Jason can’t even see his eyes behind the white lenses of the cowl. He’s no less determined to condemn Dick anyway.
“I want you around,” Dick lies. I want you to stop killing people, but he knows he won’t do that. I want you to be someone Damian can look up to and model, but he knows that won’t happen yet. I want you to meet your sister, but Cass is still hiding in Hong Kong, and he has a feeling they'd tear each other apart. I want you and Tim to stop flinching when the other’s name is said, but that’s a wound that will take so much more than time to heal.
“And I’m just supposed to take your word for that?” Jason scoffs.
“I can’t tell you what to believe, but I’m here if you need me.” Truth, hopefully. “Oracle too. No questions asked.”
“No questions, huh? What a load of bullshit.”
Dick wonders how many more times he’ll have to watch, immovable, as the colour red disappears from his vision and down into the bowels of Gotham, eyes straining like staring hard enough will keep the colours from switching, will prevent green afterimages from manifesting in his brother’s place and behind his eyelids.
But he does see Red Hood more and more around patrol, and Babs gives him updates on any injuries Jason sustains. Did Bruce have a way to confirm Dick’s condition all those times he ran away? It’s moments like these the weight’s more than a cowl and cape.
───
Every night that Robin joins Batman on rooftops is another thousand seconds Dick's heart is at risk of stopping, a permanent fixture in his throat, a constant chest-aching 160 beats per minute at rest.
Every night that Robin stays home and Batman faces the night alone, his aorta convinces itself he's sleeping, dropping 100 beats so that the blood flows sluggish through each limb, his low-oxygen brain a matching slow.
His senses soon catch on, conserving the sudden deficit of energy with false calculations.
Every roof is one story closer to the ground, and every wider gap a shorter distance to jump. His mind plays catch-up to his body as he only aims his grapple after his nerves have forced his feet to leap. The next gas attack has him giving both his masks to someone else. Every extra thug and knife and gun just another excuse to throw himself in because he has armour when the innocent do not, even as his black and blue ribs remind him a new suit does not make him immune to physics’ discipline.
Every night his body begins to resemble more his mind.
One of these nights, his mind is going to leave his body behind.
───
Dick stares out the window at the green traffic light, only turning back when Donna grabs his hands as it turns to yellow-red.
“You can’t keep going on like this Dick.”
“What other way is there?”
“Put down the cowl.”
“Then someone else’ll pick it up. I can’t have that.”
Her palms are a cool balm and eyes the clearest Amazon blue. “I worry about you.”
“I know.”
“Have you visited Wally?”
“Not yet.”
“You should.”
“I know.”
Wally regains his uncle but loses his children. What a cruel world they live in.
“And Jason?”
“What about him?
“He’s still in Gotham, isn’t he? Has he reached out at all?”
“You mean after he impersonated Batman and went around shooting people?” Yes, and it’s getting better, but right now Dick feels bitter.
Donna just stares. Clear Amazon blue.
Dick sighs, shoulders curling into his chest. He drops his head to where Donna cradles his hands between them.
“Every time I see him–” His voice cracks. He shudders out a breath. “I feel like I’m grieving his death all over again on top of everything else. How am I supposed to dig up a spot I already learned to walk around?”
Donna squeezes. “You don’t.”
“Then what am I supposed to do?”
One of her hands draws away to cup his face. She tilts his head up until he meets her eyes. “You have the biggest heart I know. What's wrong with learning to love someone new?”
───
Jason’s scarred face still looks like a stranger’s. But he works with the bats like reluctant friends.
“I hate it when you look at me like that.”
“Like what?”
“Like I’ve just died again.”
Am I not allowed to mourn you? I still lost you. Getting you back doesn’t mean I never grieved you. Doesn’t mean I’m not still grieving that loss everyday.
“Sorry.”
“For fuck’s sake, don’t– Ahg, screw you.”
───
Some days, Damian feels like an almost-son. It feels like a betrayal, sneaking up from under his skin, when Damian gives that little hint of a smile, when his eyes blow wide at a gifted acrylic set, when presented with a familiar recipe where Alfred doesn’t pinch on the seasoning. He’s ashamed just as much as he aches for the title just out of reach, but some days it’s hard to remember whether he’s raising a brother or a son or a partner, as they’re both still mourning their dual father. But Bruce didn’t stop mourning his parents even as he raised someone else’s son. Dick doesn’t want to be Bruce, but he finds more of him in the mirror everyday.
The yawning gap between him and Damian is only one year less than him and Bruce. Maybe that’s why he doesn’t ever want to let Damian go. Maybe that’s why he toes each line of brother and son and partner.
Maybe that’s why the cowl is eating him whole.
───
Gotham glows a steady midnight orange, finally feeling familiar from atop its brick parapets.
Robin by his side keeps his head clearer. Red Hood checking in both over comms and in person keeps his cape lighter. Babs finally setting aside any lingering animosity from spider-shaped vigilantes keeps his heart stronger. Alfred’s steady support even through his own old grief keeps everything together. He finally feels like he’s wearing down new paths rather than old headstones.
(Some days when he counts his fingers in place of people, he forgets to include Jason, belatedly.
There was a time, only a few years ago, when he forgot to exclude him, remembering all too late and feeling the weight just as heavily as this cape. This feels infinitely better.)
Dick feels better.
───
Bruce is alive.
Alive, he thinks, as if it wasn't everything Dick wanted almost seven months ago.
As if 100,000 minutes three times over haven't passed and Dick is back to kitchen tile pieces as every relationship he has managed to build up undergoes a swift death. (As if 1 makes up for well over 100,000.)
He thinks he can feel his lymph nodes swell, blood in his bladder, can taste the acid in the air.
Jason falls off the radar. Tim keeps skirting his perimeter spitting traitor. Damian needs to get to know his father.
Bruce looks at him like Dick killed all three of his own brothers.
───
Nightwing is back.
Gotham knows Batman is back too.
There's a newscaster covering the anti-Nightwing graffiti that has been resurging over the water boundary fence. With the amount of coverage, it’s hard to believe it’s only been there for five months. Some of it symbols. Most of it legible.
Danger:
Radioactive Water
and
Do Not Play, Swim, or Fish
and
Traitor
Coward
Murderer
over blue wings.
The news feed censors Batman’s Bitch but not Gotham Trash, FuckWing but not Vigilante Killer or Terrorist.
He knows—should know—that this isn’t the majority, just the loud minority, but then the video cuts to another reporter taking interviews with people on the street. The deli behind her had Dick's lunch order memorized when he still wore a badge before Blockbuster got him fired with a never ending trail of bodies.
“He only came here when it was convenient for him,” a man says. “Can't cure a town of gambling addicts, so he ran off to New York or Gotham whenever he got his pride hurt. Tried to sell himself off as some kind of Superman figure for Haven, but it's people like him drawing bombs here!” His voice rises, gestures growing, and the reporter takes a step back. “He got us bombed then had the real Superman save us! He's nothing but a cowardly ***!”
A stout woman wearing three jackets with her thin hair a mess from sleeping in the streets chucks a rock at him. The camera shakes as the reporter and cameraman duck too. The woman shouts censored profanities, defending Nightwing. The man starts towards her with a red face, then the footage flicks back to the wide-eyed newscaster at their desk.
Dick’s power cuts out, and he stares at his half-translucent ghost-reflection in the black screen.
When he hears the muffled, high-pitched voices of kids cartoons filtering through the wall, he knows it’s only his unit and not the whole apartment. He glances at the concealed camera beside the dirt pot with no plant, and wonders if Barbara knows that he knows about it.
───
‘Nightwing’s Alive,’ the out-of-state headline says, front page bold as if it’s news.
Alive, it says, as if Chemo had really done him in.
As if over 100,000 and counting should have had his name among them.
As if he hadn't left the ‘Haven for Gotham and New York for those twelve months, still bleeding black and blue before the cape and cowl buried him too.
Front page bold and in the font of the obituaries, as if they're mourning the living too. Because 100,000 wasn't enough. The living-dead have to take from them too.
Dick didn't think that name included him.
But he guesses that's why it's news.
He was killed over the span of twenty-two months, each jigsaw piece of him fracturing and breaking off like flaking skin cells. He always thought it would be something quick. A stab to the gut. A gun to the head. A line snap pavement splat. Not the two year systematic decline of his biological make-up.
The article doesn't say how he died.
Because the dozens of live broadcasts of the aftermath of a city exploding needs no new coverage.
The names of over 100,000 and the unnaccounted have all been released. Dick found the name of the man who made him his emergency contact and found he still had pieces to lose.
It’s his own life that brought the end to him and the other 100,000, so it's his life that haunts the mourning instead of all the death.
Dick changes his costume to red.
───
There's a ghost in Dick's apartment. He thought he exorcised them all with the radiation poisoning he surely must emit—breathes like incense.
“The kitchen floor can't be comfortable. When’d you last clean it?”
Probably on that late night-early morning when Dick kept shoving chili dogs down his throat until he made himself sick, the proof of his illness leaking down his cheeks to clear-stain the tiles. “When did you get back in town?”
Jason slides down the cupboards to sit beside him. “Who says I ever left?”
“Roy.”
“You don't talk to Roy.”
“Donna does.”
Jason huffs.
Dick wonders if Jason misses the colour of his own eyes.
I missed you, he almost says. For three years, he missed him, and seeing him again didn’t make it stop. He misses the Jason of fifteen, and somehow, even as he stares at him, he misses the Jason of twenty. Three times over he’s learned how to reaccept the dead, boxing and burying a life born of blood and killed by recovery. He hardly knows if he’s grieving the Jason in front of him or the space his living has replaced.
“Blüd looks like it's doing alright for itself.”
Dick hums.
“You thinking of moving back?”
“Why do you think I'd want to go back?”
“Because you don't want to be near Bruce.”
How would you know when you've been avoiding the American continents?
“And because it's hard to believe you'd abandon it.”
The Haveners don't agree with you.
“You always liked having your own city.”
Every time I leave, people die. I leave Gotham for New York and Joker gasses a school; leave for the ‘Haven and Harvey flips a coin for every year I tormented him, killing thirty people; I leave the atmosphere and Joker kills you; I leave my apartment and Blockbuster turns it to rubble; I leave Blüdhaven and a bomb is dropped. I left for Keystone, and you almost killed Tim.
They die anyway. Whether he leaves or not, everyone he knows is just afterimage ghosts of past years plastered on a projector screen.
“What did blowing up feel like?” he asks.
Jason's jaw clicks.
He exorcises people because afterimages are easier to live with.
“It felt like fucking dying, asshole.” Jason gets up and leaves.
Dick feels like he's exploding.