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the broken, the beaten, and the damned
Kory’s so very, very tired. She doesn’t ever remember depleting her powers quite this much (doesn’t remember much of anything at all): she feels hollow, her insides scraped clean and raw. If she loses focus for even a minute, she can feel a phantom tube still down her throat, the sharp agony of getting sliced open, the visceral, icy non-pain of a blade sinking into her abdomen, and, more than anything, the suffocating, inchoate terror of being unable to do anything about it, even scream—
All she really wants right now is a stiff drink and a warm bed, and maybe a panic room to release the galaxy of hurt that’s swirling inside her. The need hits her so acutely that her arms shake with it. Only the knowledge that she is realistically the one person out of the four of them who is in any condition to take them to safety keeps her focus on the road, her hands wrapped securely around the steering wheel.
Rachel, Angela and Gar are in the backseat. Rachel’s long fallen asleep, utterly exhausted, curled into her mother’s side. Angela sits ramrod straight, one hand clutching her daughter’s shoulder, flinching and grimacing at every small sound. Kory catches her eyes watching her in the rearview mirror often, wide and vigilant in her gaunt face. Gar’s by the window, knees up to his chest, staring unseeingly into the night. His face is smeared with dried, flaking blood, but it’s the emptiness in his eyes that scares Kory the most; it’s like he never made it out of that dank, horrible place.
As for Dick—
He’s sitting in the passenger seat with his arms around his chest, sweating profusely, shaking even harder than Kory. Every now and then he bites his lip hard enough to draw blood, shuddering convulsively. They don’t know what kind of drugs were pumped into him back there—a hallucinogenic was Angela’s best guess, but Dick insisted he was dreaming more than he was hallucinating—but regardless, he’s coming down from them now, hard.
Kory’s gotten a lot better at things like remembering to eat and drink water these days—being responsible for Rachel and Gar certainly helped—but helping Dick through withdrawal is so, so damn far outside of her comfort zone that it isn’t even funny.
“Put that bat down, Dent,” Dick slurs, about thirty miles away from the compound.
Kory frowns and looks at him. “Dick?”
Dick’s staring intently at something on the windshield. “You know,” he tells it conversationally, “you’re going to die for this.” A beat, then two, and he actually flinches, kicking up a leg and smacking the dashboard. Angela startles in the backseat with a cry.
Well, fuck. If he wasn’t hallucinating before, he’s certainly doing it now.
Cursing under her breath, Kory takes one hand off the wheel to grip his arm. “Dick,” she says. “Whatever you’re seeing isn’t real, okay? Come on, pull it together. We’re all kinda hanging by a thread here.”
He flinches again. He tightens his grip around his chest and tucks his head, bracing against some invisible blow. “Kory,” he grits out.
“Yeah, I’m here, Dick. All of us, right here.”
“Don’t suppose you and Bruce have ever met?”
“No.” She isn’t sure what he’s getting at, but if it means he’s actually talking to her and not some random phantom in his mind, she’s willing to go along with it. “Why, do you see him here?”
“Yeah.” He lets out a wheezy chuckle. “He’s making paninis.”
“Not a terrible hallucination, as hallucinations go.”
“Yeah, well, he’s also calling me an incompetent disappointment and skimping on the cheese, so there’s that.”
“Okay.” Kory looks at him again; he’s staring at his feet now, sweat dripping from his hair to land on his shoes. “You’re not, you know,” she adds, maybe a second too late. “Whatever he’s saying. You’re… you’re annoying, but pretty okay, I think.”
Dick’s lips twist into a parody of a smile. “That so?”
“Yeah, and fuck them for making you think otherwise.” She tightens her grip on the steering wheel, leather squeaking beneath her fingers. A knife point is teasing her skin again, waiting to sink in; waiting to splay her out like an animal carcass, ready to be dissected and studied. “Fuck them all for what they did to us,” she says, with feeling.
For a moment, Dick doesn’t answer; then he’s banging on the door and yelling for her to stop. Startled, Kory brings the van to a screeching, unsteady halt to the side of the road. Rachel snaps awake, and even Gar seems to rouse enough out of his stupor to ask, “What’s wrong?”
Dick wrenches the door open and stumbles out. He staggers a few steps towards the woods before… crumpling, falling to his hands and knees and retching his guts out.
“Is Dick going to be okay?” Rachel asks guilelessly.
“I don’t know,” Kory says.
-
By the time Dick piles into the passenger seat, he’s soaked through with sweat, and even worse, stinking to high heaven. Over the next hour, Kory plies him with bottles of water and Gatorade, and he keeps throwing up, but she figures that as long as he’s retaining some fluid, she’ll keep giving him more. She uses the frequent breaks to pass around biscuits and protein bars that she’d hoarded in the minivan from their Chicago sanctuary—Dick’s idea of sustenance so far had been ‘nearest pizza place’ and Kory’d figured the generously-stocked pantry in their safehouse might be the last time in a while they’d have access to, you know, actual food.
Rachel and Angela nibble dutifully at their protein bars while Gar looks sick at the very idea of eating. Kory doesn’t push.
When they stop for the fifth time so that Dick can vomit what little water he’d managed to drink, Kory’s had enough. They aren’t going to make it to Chicago at this rate. She’s got three traumatised people in the backseat, one in the front who looks like he’s going to die from dehydration if she isn’t paying attention, and she’s so tired she’s starting to see double. She’s going to stop at the next motel she finds, and that’s that.
At the news, Dick pulls himself to his full height and glares at her—pretty impressive for a man who’d spent the better part of the last hour on the verge of collapse. “We need to get to Chicago,” he says. His face is bloodless and speckled with vomit, lips dry and cracking bloody, but Kory can believe this man is every inch the man who beat more than a dozen guards senseless while drugged and tasered.
She doesn’t budge. “No,” she says. “I don’t know how the hell Adamson slipped out of that place, but that location is compromised, Dick. It’s now a safehouse only in name.”
He stares her down for another full minute before looking away. “Fine.” He tips his head back against the seat’s headrest, swallowing painfully, and Kory tries to feel good about her victory.
-
She gets two rooms at the nearest motel. Rachel and her mother are in one of them; Rachel is reluctant to leave Dick at first, but he is currently a sweating pile of quivering flesh on the bed and Kory’s pretty sure there isn’t much an anxious thirteen year old can do just right now, even with mysterious demonic powers. She then tries to get Gar to come with them, but he’s settled on the floor next to the door, knees drawn up, and only shakes his head when Rachel calls him.
It’s weirdly painful to see Rachel so distraught. “They’ll be better in the morning,” Kory offers. “We will all be.”
Rachel doesn’t believe her, but leaves, much to Kory’s relief. She turns from the door to see Dick out of bed and in an unsteady crouch in front of Gar.
“You did what you had to do,” Dick’s saying.
“I know what you’re going to say next,” Gar mutters into his kneecaps. “Doesn’t change anything. Doesn’t change that I, um.” He swallows. “Killed somebody. Tore him to pieces. With my teeth!”
“No,” Dick says. “Nothing can change that. You’re going to have to live with that forever, and nothing you do will change that, either.”
Gar looks at him sharply, and Kory feels the first stirrings of unease. “Dick—”
“What you can do,” Dick goes on, “is make sure it counts. So that next time—”
“Next time?” Gar gives a hollow laugh. “I’m not even sure I want there to be a next time.”
Dick closes his eyes for a moment and sighs. When he opens them, his expression is hard, flinty. Uncompromising. “What did you think was going to happen, Gar, when you joined us?” he asks. “Did you think we were going on a joyride? A family road trip, maybe?”
“No!” Gar’s eyes widen. “I—”
“You saw the psycho killers that came after us. You saw what they wanted in Rachel, what Rachel can do. You’ve even fought with us! You made a choice, Gar, just like you made a choice to take Rachel to the compound without telling us.”
“Why are you—”
“And now like the rest of us, you’re going to have to live with the consequences of that choice.”
Kory’s had enough of this nonsense. “Dick, just shut up,” she snaps, reaching to haul him to his feet and away from Gar, but the kid has her beat.
“Fuck you, Dick,” Gar snarls, pushing him away. Dick staggers and lands flat on his ass. Gar leaves the room, slamming the door behind him, and Kory thinks she hears a muffled sob before his footsteps fade away.
Dick gets to his feet and stares at the floor.
Almost a full minute of silence passes before Kory can’t take it anymore. “What the fuck, Dick?” she growls. “What did you think you were going to accomplish by talking to him like that?” He doesn’t respond, and for the first time in a long time since they met, Kory wants to punch him in the face. “Where did you learn that, the Batman school of how to talk to traumatised kids?”
That hurt—Dick flinches visibly. “I’m going to go clean up,” he says finally. He hobbles into the bathroom and closes the door behind him.
There’s things that Kory should be doing now. She should be cleaning up herself—she still smells of smoke and blood and antiseptic, and if she sat down to think what any of those smells mean, she would start screaming and never stop. She should be checking on Rachel and Angela, should be tracking down Gar and trying to talk to him, should be on alert for any cultish assholes that might’ve followed them, should check on the idiot in the bathroom to make sure he doesn’t keel over from withdrawal and drown himself in the bathtub, she should—
She could—walk away. She’s done it before: walked away from wreckage both literal and human to try and find answers on her own. Somehow, finding Rachel, then Dick, and Gar—it became more than just finding purpose; it felt like somebody had scrubbed clean a part of the opaque divide between who she is and who she is supposed to be. It felt natural. She must’ve been a part of a close community, maybe even a family, in her previous life.
So here she is, bereft, angry, exhausted, still shaking from phantom pain, and… she is loath to leave.
Kory busies herself for a while, unpacking food and the first aid kit. Ten minutes have gone by when she realises that she still hasn’t heard the sound of running water from the bathroom. Or any sound at all, for that matter. Heart in her throat, she pushes open the unlocked bathroom door.
Dick’s sitting on the toilet lid, naked, head in his hands. He doesn’t seem aware of cuts oozing blood down his bare back, or of Kory herself.
She closes the door and leaves him be.
-
Kory wakes up to find that Dick’s not only gotten up before her, but also bathed and dressed and is pulling his boots on as she blinks at the ceiling.
“Hey,” he says. “We oughta leave here as quickly as possible—the farther we get from that compound the better. I’ll wake Gar and Rachel while you get ready; we can pick up coffee and breakfast on the road.”
Kory braces herself on her elbows and squints at him. He appears… normal, unfazed, like all he did last night was have dinner in front of the TV and catch eight hours instead of being captured, drugged and tortured. She can still feel the weight of last night hanging off her bones and here’s Dick, talking about breakfast.
She definitely wants to punch him again. Instead, she asks, “So… you’re doing okay?”
“I’m fine.” He makes a show of lacing up his boots. “I got dosed heavily, but those psychotropics had pretty short half-lives. I just had to wait until they washed out of my system.” He shrugs, then finally looks up at her. “You?”
“Oh, you know,” Kory says, sliding out of bed and moving to stand in front of him, using every inch of her height. “I was tied up and sliced into like a lab rat, blew up a building, drove you across the county, and watched you nearly die from dehydration. No big deal. A-OK.”
He sighs. “What do you want me to say, Kory?”
“The truth would be good.”
“There’s no point in dwelling on what happened there, Kory. We need to keep moving—”
“Gar might’ve let you get away with it last night, but don’t try that on me. This… this ‘bury your past and forge ahead’ bullshit. We’re here to help each other figure out who we are, and running from—”
“I’m the guy who okayed a massacre,” Dick cuts in, voice low and cold. “I’m the guy who’s made it a habit to murder by proxy. I’m the guy who used to think he was Robin. Robin never belonged to me—I made my mother’s nickname into a legacy that only Batman can pass along.”
“Those assholes in the compound deserved to—”
“I’m not the person you think I am, Kory. I’m certainly not the person you guys need me to be. For some time there, I almost thought I was, but—” He shakes his head. “I have a lot of crap to unlearn. A lot of answers to search for. And you guys deserve someone better.” He laughs. “That honest enough for you?”
She can’t shake the feeling that right at that moment, they’re at a precipice. She stands at the very edge, moth-eaten with anxiety. “You’re part of a team, Dick, and we figure this shit out together.”
He gets up and gives her a strange look. For an interminable minute, she thinks he’s going to walk out the door and disappear altogether; it isn’t as though they can’t function without him, but to have him leave would mean that their tormentors won. It would leave the last few weeks and every moment she looked around her and felt a warm, fledgling sense of belonging meaningless.
It would mean—
“Maybe,” Dick says at last, and stays in the room. It’s a cold comfort.