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When the breakdown finally arrives, it’s nothing like Dick once pictured it would be: a spectacular implosion, buildings collapsing on themselves and raining debris until there’s nothing left but a flaming pile of rubble. The weight that he’s been collecting (for too long) just seems too big for the letting go to be anything short of a disaster. Instead, it starts slow, without him even noticing. It erodes him with the unceasing regularity of the tide, instead of cracking him right through the centre.
It starts with the end, the night after Deathstroke is defeated and the Titans, both old and new, are gathered at the tower. The gigantic rooms are about as small as Dick has ever seen them, filled with people and music and laughter and chatter. Superman and Green Lantern-themed party decorations hang from the ceiling, (“literally all that was available last minute,” Gar had told him earlier that day, like somehow over the last year he’d gotten better at lying to Dick. Hah.) glittering in the lights, and there are pictures everywhere—trophies of their biggest triumphs, and snapshots of smaller, more intimate moments that Dick has no memory of ever posing for or taking.
Dick walks through the party, beer in hand, feeling strangely light-headed. The music sounds muffled, and he hears snippets of conversations as though they are coming from very far away. He smiles vaguely at Gar talking animatedly to Rachel and Rose, flits, ghost-like, between Jason and Dawn throwing down for an impromptu sparring session, and gestures with his beer at Donna across the room, hoping that’s answer enough for the curious look that she’s giving him.
Joey catches his eye from where he’s sitting with Kory and Conner. You okay? he signs. You look unwell.
“I’m okay,” Dick says loudly—maybe a little too loudly, because he can barely make out anything over the roaring in his ears—and keeps walking, determined not to be a buzzkill (this once, Rachel had said, crossing her arms over her chest but with a playful twinkle in her eye).
Somehow, he finds himself sitting at the kitchen table, watching Hank determinedly mix something in a giant bowl.
“You’d think he’d know the difference between walnuts and peanuts,” Hank’s saying. “I mean, just on principle. The kid’s got a smartphone and every fancy gadget money can buy and he doesn’t think to text me oh hey hank, you weren’t really planning to bake a cake with peanuts, were ya? Because that would be ridiculous, oh no, not him—”
“You do a mean Jason impression,” Dick says. “Gotta save that for the actual party.” Now that he can actually hear himself speak, he winces—he sounds scratchy and hoarse, like he hasn’t spoken in a while (he hasn’t spoken in a while).
Hank stops mixing to stare at him. A beat passes before he sets the bowl down and walks around the table to sit next to him. “You feeling all right, man?”
Dick sighs. This is exactly what he wanted to avoid. Usually when he gets like this—wobbly, sad, there but not quite—he discreetly escapes to his room and punches and cries and screams into pillows, stares at the ceiling and the walls, listens to loud music or makes notches on his desk with his bare fingernails, anything to quell the desperate, seething mass of feeling inside of him. It almost always works.
“Just tired,” he says. It’s not even a lie.
Hank nods, then throws an arm around Dick’s shoulders, pulling Dick towards him. “Yeah right,” he says, “like you’re going to weasel out of the party with that excuse. Roy still hasn’t forgiven you for skipping his birthday to go to wilderness survival training in the Amazon, and that was a hell of an excuse.”
“You say that like I had a choice,” Dick mutters.
“You coming back and lecturing us on camping styles and insisting that we stock up on twenty different kinds of insect repellent? Definitely a choice.”
Dick remembers Hank dragging him away then just like this, reminding him none-too-gently to get his goddamn head out of his ass once in a while. He opens his mouth to laugh, but to his horror, hears a sob escape instead.
Hank freezes. “Dick?”
God-fucking-damnit. He really, really can’t do this here, not in front of all these people. He wriggles out of Hank’s hold and staggers in the general direction of his room, his vision swimming. The music stops, there’s a litany of concerned voices and numerous hands reaching out to stop him, and Dick squeezes his eyes shut and keeps moving because if he doesn’t—
if he doesn’t he can’t—
“Dick please,” Rachel says, and her voice cuts through everything like it always does, like it did when she saved him from Trigon (when she saved them all). “Dick, what’s wrong?”
He’s in his bedroom with Kory, Gar and Rachel, trembling like he’s going to fall apart with the force of the ticking time bomb inside of him. He wants to reassure her, but he can’t find the words or his voice, and so he looks to Kory, pleading.
Please, he tries to say. Not with them here.
Thankfully, she seems to get the message, and ushers them out of the room. Within seconds, she’s back in the room, her arms around him. She’s warm enough to be right at the cusp of uncomfortable, her skin glowing faintly in the dark room. Dick leans into her touch even as she says, “It’s okay. It’s just us now, Dick.”
And Dick… crumples.
He cries—loud, keening sobs that are barely muffled by her shirt. Every time he thinks he’s just about spent, a fresh wave of sorrow washes over him, and he starts all over again. He doesn’t understand where this is coming from—why this sadness is pulling him along in its current and washing him up on shore feeling empty and bereft—when everything is over, fixed, saved. He only knows the feeling of a festering wound being sliced open, spilling pus and infection until the blood runs red. He only knows what it means when something blows open, spitting smoke into the air as fire burns everything clean.
There’s so goddamn much to burn through.
He realises that at some point he stopped crying and started talking. He’s not making much sense, not even to himself, but the words pour out of him like a messy afterbirth anyway. At one point all he can say is it’s been so cold for so long and he doesn’t know if that means all the nights training in the Batcave past the point of collapse, or if it means trying so goddamned hard to keep himself together while everyone fell apart around him because he’s the leader, this was his idea, or if it means living with the guilt of Joey and Slade and Zucco and Bruce festering inside him, trying not to let it spill out of him even if all he wanted to do sometimes was tear at his hair and scream—
“I understand,” Kory says, the only words she’s said the entire time that he’s been falling apart. “But it won’t be cold forever.”
He collapses against her, utterly spent. She threads her fingers through his hair, singing something both indistinct and ethereal—Tamaranean, he guesses.
“I’m sorry,” he says, his voice like smoking wreckage. “I shouldn’t have—put all of this on you. It’s not fair.”
“Maybe not,” Kory says lightly. “Perhaps you will return the favour one day.”
“I want to,” he says, and there’s a longing there, a wistful belief that he will ever be strong enough to do for others what Kory is doing for him.
“You will,” she says, and continues to sing. He falls asleep to the sound of her voice.