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When Ric is aware enough to remember, it’s quiet and dark, and it’s hard to breathe.
Ric’s woken up in plenty of weird places after blackouts: at bars and strangers’ homes, in the backs of cars and roadside ditches. He’s found that he’s able to function even when he’s not quite all there—able to complete cab rides, or follow the other Nightwings, or generally just avoid being killed—despite not remembering a single moment of what he did or why later. Bea worries about this all the time; distantly, Ric knows that he should be worried, too, but it just takes too much effort to muster up that emotion, and it’s far easier to fall back on apathy when you jump off buildings for sport every day.
Now, though—
He’s lying on his front, rock pressing on him from all directions, giving him almost no space to move. His arms are caught at his sides, knuckles scraping against stone with every shallow breath. Judging from how dizzy he feels and the blood rushing to his head, he’s caught head-first in some sort of sloped tunnel, though he has no idea what in fuck’s name he could’ve been doing to get himself stuck here.
It’s so fucking hard to breathe—
He licks his dry lips, tries to focus. He can hear, very distantly, what sounds like waves against the shoreline, which means he’s probably close to the harbour. That piece of information doesn’t spark any recognition in his (useless goddamn little) brain, however. Maybe he was captured and disposed of by a particularly sadistic thug with a vendetta. Maybe he had a seizure. Maybe he was on a mission with the other Nightwings and all of it happened at once. In any case, he has to hope that somebody’s nearby.
Ric opens his mouth to yell, but his voice scrapes through his dry throat and comes out hoarse and weak. He swallows, tries again: “Hey! HEY!” He wriggles, trying to remember the names of the other Nightwings, keeps tripping over their colours—Red, Blue, Gold—and the half-wary, half-admiring looks they give him in the hazy afterglow of a fight, the way it makes him feel both satisfied and desperately alone. “Please, I’m—I’m STUCK! Can anyone hear—”
There’s no answer.
Dust rains down on him, enters his eyes, sticks in his throat. He coughs, his chest burning as rock closes around his ribcage like a vise. The darkness is suddenly a living, suffocating thing, reaching inside him to steal his breath and twist his gut. He’s seized by the very real, very terrifying idea that this is it—he is finally, utterly alone, doomed to suffocate to death in this tomb, both forgetting and forgotten. His heart pounds at the thought; his head throbs in concert, and he can taste metal.
(he wants to fly, run, move, breathe, just—god—just live—)
He thinks he feels insects crawling over him, imagines them creeping into his helpless eyes, nose and mouth, making a living tomb out of him. Imagines himself rotting piecemeal—neither Ric nor Dick at the very end but a putrid scrap of flesh waiting to be reclaimed by the earth. His breaths become even shallower, and nausea rolls in his gut—god, he can’t vomit in here, he’ll fucking choke—
The sound of the sea disappears under his panicky, sobbing breaths and the roar of blood in his ears. For a long, seemingly interminable moment, he thinks his pounding heart is going to explode out of his chest, before he finally loses consciousness.
-
Ric wakes gradually to Bea’s voice, the touch of her cool hands in his hair tracing his scar. You’re an idiot, she tells him, sighing but so very fond. I know you can take care of yourself better than this.
Maybe he can’t. Maybe he’s fooling himself every time he wakes up and thinks he’s doing fine all on his own when there are days where even the thought of dressing himself is overwhelming. He’s shit at taking his meds on time; his memory exercises are stuffed in a soggy plastic bag in the back of his cab. It’s just difficult to care about being better or feeling better when every single iota of your energy is spent trying to convince the world of your right to fucking exist.
“I’m sorry,” he whispers. His lips crack around the words.
Bea disappears, and the darkness swallows him whole again.
-
He spends the next several hours fading in and out of consciousness. Every time he wakes up, it’s with a fresh wave of panic as he realises where he is all over again, struggling and yelling, only to earn more abrasions and dig fresh bruises into his skin. There’s a sharp, relentless pain at the nape of his neck that feels like somebody’s slowly drilling a metal rod into his spine; the rest of his body feels stiff and strangely… detached.
Bea comes and goes; he’s stopped responding to her. He hears others sometimes—the redhead who wouldn’t stop visiting him, the butler, sometimes even the billionaire who insisted he was his son. Somehow that last voice makes him want to cry, ignites a strange, flickering longing somewhere in his chest, but the feeling doesn’t last very long.
He’s so thirsty—
Sometimes his fingertips feel wet and cold, like his hands are just within reach of a source of water, but he can’t move his arms to get them to his mouth. That’s when he does cry.
-
Ric closes his eyes. He opens his eyes. He tries to remember there’s a difference.
-
Aeons pass before he feels a sharp pain right behind his ear, and hears a crackle, then a voice: “Ric? Ric, you there? Are you okay?”
Her name’s right there. He grabs at it before it can flit away. “Babs,” he says soundlessly.
“We’re coming to get you, all right? You just have to wait for us, okay?”
Relief would wash through him, except he thinks that that part of him has already rotted away. “Please,” he whispers.
“Hang in there,” Babs says. “Wait.”
Ric waits.