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Was this anxiety pooling in his gut?
He thought it might be.
He stared down at the pharmacy bags in his lap and chewed on his lip. Read the labels for the millionth time as the city flew past his window.
Haloperidol and fluoxetine.
Haldol and Prozac.
An antipsychotic and an antidepressant.
His mouth was dry. This felt so wrong.
… But he’d agreed to it. He was only doing this, only had these, because he’d said okay. Because he agreed that medicating himself might help, at least until he could manage his own symptoms a little better. Until he developed the skills he needed to do this with less or no medication.
The Haldol was probably the more anxiety-inducing of the two, though.
He knew he probably needed the Prozac―lord knew what symptoms he’d noticed and understood were primarily depressive or depression-adjacent. The emptiness, the suicidal thoughts… That seemed like depression to him. But the Haldol was making his skin crawl.
Did he really need an antipsychotic? Were his symptoms worse than he thought?
He hadn’t talked about it with his therapist. He guessed that he probably should have, all things considered―but he trusted her judgement, for the most part. She listened to everything he said and answered all of his questions and explained her reasoning to him when he got concerned. Like when she’d first suggested medication because he couldn’t even tell her the depths of how shitty he felt. When he didn’t have the ability to so much as put into words how he felt because it made him feel and the idea of bursting into tears in front of her made him so wholly uncomfortable he almost left.
… He guessed she probably had her reasons for putting him on an antipsychotic. He just wished he knew what those reasons were.
The car pulled to a stop, and glancing back out the window he saw he’d arrived home.
He gave the cabbie the fare and climbed out with an off-handed thank you.
Clutched his bags to his chest and headed upstairs to his apartment so he could have his little freakout about them in private. X wouldn’t be home yet. He would be out on patrol, which Dick was firmly off-duty from until further notice.
He felt like that should have stung―being taken off duty for getting shot had made him so mad when he was younger that he left the whole city and Bruce’s side out of anger. And now he was off-duty for something that wasn’t even a physical ailment, wasn’t even something that affected how well he could fight because he felt like this all the time… He expected to be angrier.
Maybe he would be later.
Maybe once his system was a little more balanced out he’d be angry. He didn’t know. Maybe by then he just wouldn’t be angry about it at all, like he wasn’t angry about it now. Maybe he’d still understand exactly why Bruce had told him to stay home and not patrol, and why X had backed it up completely.
They were worried about him. They wanted him safe and as far out of harm’s way as they could get him, especially since he wasn’t feeling well.
… To think there was a time that X would have kicked his ass for existing too close to him and Bruce wouldn’t have bothered to show his concern because he just generally sucked at it, and Dick had thought he didn’t give a shit. There was a time neither of them particularly seemed to care about him and he’d both been fine with that and hated it at the same time… To varying degrees. He definitely hated it more coming from Bruce.
That was mostly because he’d cared more about Bruce, back then.
X was just… Some guy. Some wise-cracking idiot who stole the Red X suit out of the vault and wasn’t even enough of a burden on society for Dick to justify chasing him down―not with Slade still around. X was a thief and he didn’t even go out of his way to hurt anyone. Slade was a mass murderer.
There was a difference, you know?
And Dick didn’t care enough about X to bother with chasing him around when, by all means, he just stole enough to thrive on.
… That was a long time ago, wasn’t it? Almost ten years.
And look at all of them now.
He sat his pill bags on one of the little entryway tables and hung up his jacket. Chewed on his lower lip while he tried to make sense of how, of all things, this made him anxious. Didn’t get anxious falling off of a bridge. Didn’t get anxious going to the actual appointments.
Ugh.
This was ridiculous.
He all but stalked into the kitchen, pried open the freezer, and popped an ice cube straight into his mouth. Felt himself calm down pretty much immediately. No use having an anxiety attack over fucking medication. That was just asking for it to end up not working at all or having some horrible side effect.
And who the fuck wanted to deal with either of those? Not him.
… And X wasn’t due back for another two hours, at best. Great.
He curled up on the couch, wrapped a blanket around his shoulders, and buckled down to wait. That was all he could do.
But eventually the door creaked open and X was there. He was there.
“Heya, sugar,” Was the greeting he got in response to his own―which was all but throwing himself into X’s arms before the man could even toe off his shoes. Whoops. But X didn’t seem to care. He just wrapped him up in his arms and kissed the side of his head. “Ya miss me or somethin’?”
Feeling a little petulant, Dick uttered, “Or somethin’,” and X just laughed.
When he could convince himself to let go, he did, and stepped back to let X actually enter the apartment proper. X shot him a grin, and the fact that he was already out of costume didn’t surprise Dick at all. It had been about three hours―he’d bet X had dropped by Wayne Manor before coming back so he could talk to Jason, since those two seemed to be becoming pretty good friends.
That was good.
Dick wasn’t reaching or faking what he thought he was supposed to feel when he said that made him happy.
Jealous, too, sure, because now X wasn’t spending as much time focusing on him and him alone, but mostly just happy, because he knew he didn’t have any reason to be jealous. X wouldn’t cheat on him to save his own life and Jason wouldn’t do that to him either. They were just friends, and that was good. They both needed good friends.
“How was patrol?” He found himself asking, once he and X were in the living room together.
He wasn’t technically supposed to ask. He was supposed to be sort of ignoring all of that and X wasn’t supposed to tell him if he did ask… But those were Bruce’s orders, and he could take Dick out of the field all he wanted but Dick would still ask about it.
And X wouldn’t withhold anything that didn’t need to be withheld.
“Boring as fuck,” X said, true to form, snorting and pulling him down onto the couch with him. Practically into his lap, “I hate patrolling during the day―best case scenario for a good fight is always bank robberies ‘n shit…”
X grumbled for a good fifteen minutes about it, as Dick had expected him to. He was just that sort of guy. He complained if given the chance and if you didn’t shut him up he’d just keep going, usually.
Dick liked that, to be honest.
The longer X bitched, the less he had to talk and the more he could listen to X’s voice.
“Ugh, but whatever.” X said, apparently coming to the end of his rant, “How was your appointment? How are you feeling?”
“It was… Good.” He said, awkwardly, “We, uh… I’m starting medication.”
“Yeah?” X asked, cocking his head in that way Dick knew meant he had his full attention and his curiosity.
“Yeah. Erm. But I’m feeling okay, I guess? Not actively wanting to kill myself and I definitely feel better sitting in your lap then I did when you weren’t here. You’re warm.”
X quirked his lips up a little, but he was still watching him.
Dick could guess the question he wasn’t asking. “... She put me on an antidepressant and an antipsychotic,” He admitted, “I’m supposed to start taking them tonight and call her if they make any symptoms noticeably worse. The usual sort of thing, you know?”
“An antipsychotic?” X quirked a brow.
He didn’t seem bothered by it. Really just kind of confused. Definitely less freaked out than Dick was.
“Yeah.”
“... It makes you nervous.” X pointed out. “You wanna look up what the intended effects of it are with me?”
A little more eagerly than he should have, he again said, “Yeah.”
So X dug out his phone and they looked up what the hell Haldol was supposed to do, and Dick… Felt himself relax. A lot. X was good at that―demystifying the things that made him anxious, helping him make sense of things that sort of freaked him out. He was always thankful for that.
But, yeah. Knowing the intended effects, he could guess why she’d prescribed it to him. Reducing anxiety, reducing suicidal thoughts… Those were things he needed.
Out of curiosity, they looked up the Prozac too.
And, wham-bam, he wasn’t so anxious about taking either of them now.
Still anxious, because the side effects weren’t anything to scoff at and if they didn’t work at all then he was still in a shit situation, but less anxious than he had been.
He snuggled in closer to X and closed his eyes. Honestly, it had been a pretty average therapy session and it wasn’t like he’d gotten up to a whole lot else today since X had been gone on patrol since the ass-crack of dawn and Dick was still adjusting to the idea that he was kind of expected to sit around playing video games all day now… But he was tired. The knowledge he was going to be starting medication just… Took it all out of him.
So he would admit he kind of napped on X for a while.
Only startled awake again when his phone went off on the coffee table and the vibration combined with Bruce’s ringtone made him jerk up and nearly fall off the couch. X muffled a laugh in response, and he shot him a dirty look while he picked up his phone to answer the call.
“‘Sup, B?”
“Dick,” Bruce greeted, with a warmth in his voice that Dick was still getting used to, “How are you feeling?”
That Bruce had called him to ask how he was would have chafed, normally. He could have texted him. He knew that Dick didn’t like to be called if it wasn’t important but… Well. He was starting to see why Bruce considered this important enough to call him about. Not to mention Bruce knew him at least well enough to be able to pick up through his voice if he wasn’t actually okay.
“‘M okay.” He answered, sighing as he sat back down on the couch, “You?”
“I’ve definitely been worse.” Bruce huffed, amused, “You had an appointment today, right?”
“Mhm.” He leaned into X again, “I’m supposed to start meds before bed tonight.”
“Which ones?” Was the first thing Bruce asked, with just a tinge of anxiety in his voice that, admittedly, Dick had been expecting.
If anyone was more anxious about the therapy and the idea of medication than Dick was, it had to be Bruce. But given how many of his enemies had backgrounds in the mental health field, Dick wasn’t surprised. Nor was he thrown off at all.
“Haldol and Prozac,” He answered, levelly, “I already promised the Doc I’d call her if anything felt wonky.”
Bruce hummed. Then, “Good. That’s good.”
“Mhm.” Dick agreed.
… Talking to Bruce was so awkward. It was always awkward. Like, literally always if they started talking about feelings or symptoms or anything like that. That just was… It was so far out of the range of discussion they’d had for the first decade or so that they’d known each other that it was hard to adjust to. Neither of them did the whole “talking about their feelings” thing on a regular basis. It was weird.
“Dick?” Bruce asked, after a brief silence.
“Yeah, B?”
“I know I don’t say it enough, but I’m proud of you. I know that… I know this can’t be easy for you. It’s a rough adjustment. I’m really, really proud of you for doing it even though it can’t possibly be what you want to be doing with your time.”
And, for a second? For a second those words lanced right through everything else. Every nasty thought in his head, every cloud of numbness, every little bit of resentment he had for Bruce. Everything. Everything up to and including his heart and the walls he’d built up around it over the years.
He felt tears in his eyes the moment the lump formed in his throat.
“I―” He cut himself off to try and swallow down the lump, “... Thanks, B, that… That means a lot.”
“Anytime.” Was Bruce’s calm, gentle response, “I’ll talk to you later, okay? Love you, kiddo.”
And that lanced through everything too. He almost choked.
“... Love you too,” He managed, weakly.
Bruce hung up.
Dick tried to blink away the tears while he set his phone aside.
X wrapped an arm around him again and pulled him into his chest. “Don’t hold it in, sugar,” He chided, softly, “Go for it. Nobody but me’s gonna know.”
Usually he’d fight. He’d push all of this down and ignore it. Bottle it like everything else and try to kick it under the metaphorical rug. He’d tell X he was fine and it wasn’t important.
But…
God.
God.
He turned his face into X’s chest, heaved in a shaking breath, and promptly descended into sobbing.
He had a headache and his eyes almost hurt worse than his brain by the time he stopped crying, and he expected to feel empty after releasing all of that, but, actually… He kinda felt… He didn’t know. Good?
Content.
A little gross and headachey, but content.
He blew his nose while X pressed a kiss to his forehead and retreated to the kitchen to work on dinner. Usually that’d be Dick’s job, but… He wasn’t exactly bothered by X taking over tonight. He didn’t think he could manage to actually make anything. He was more likely to burn cereal than produce a proper bowl of it right now.
Sniffing, he scrubbed at his achey eyes with a fresh tissue for a moment. Checked his phone. Swallowed and set an alarm for an hour before he usually went to bed and named it “Meds”.
And after that, he kind of just waited.
X eventually called him into the kitchen and they ate sitting on the counter like heathens, and Dick felt… Good. He smiled and leaned into X’s side, pressed a sloppy kiss to his chin. X laughed. Pressed an equally sloppy kiss to his forehead in return.
His alarm went off while they were eating ice cream, afterwards, and he felt the anxiety flood back in, full force. He swallowed it down and took his meds, like a functioning adult. There wasn’t anything to be scared of. Not to this extent. Any side effects would take several doses to start taking effect and some of them were unavoidable anyway. If he just sat here, too scared to take his meds, there was no way they could ever possibly work.
He tucked into his ice cream a little more eagerly than he should have afterwards to distract himself and trick his body out of fight or flight mode.
X didn’t say anything about it, just ate his own ice cream and then, an hour or so later, dragged him off to bed and let him tuck up into his chest to fall asleep.
A month went by, with two appointments and him taking his meds once a day, right before bed.
Everything was a little weird for the first couple of weeks―after the third or so day his emotions went right out of his control and it scared the shit out of him that he wasn’t able to just reel it all in. He’d called his therapist in tears at about three in the afternoon two days before their next appointment because it scared him so badly to not be able to control or anticipate what he was going to be feeling.
She’d been very calm and gentle with him, and he appreciated it a lot. When he was done going on a hysterical rant about how much it was freaking him out, she calmly explained that a very common side effect of starting medications like these was mood swings, and that they should stop with some time. If they didn’t, of course, she’d see about a different combination of medications.
The next week (ish) he’d started to be able to reel himself in again, and by now he was pretty much in control of his emotions again.
It was just that, like… They were way more intense than he remembered them being.
“That’s common,” His doctor had said, “You’ve been feeling suicidal since you were twelve, right? That’s over a decade of very muted or suppressed emotions. Your medications help to produce the correct chemicals to make you less suicidal, which un-suppresses those emotions, to an extent. So it’s going to feel like there’s ‘more’ than you’re used to, or that you’re reacting more strongly than you feel you should.”
And boy if that hadn’t settled his nerves right down.
And, honestly? He really was starting to feel better.
By now he’d had a chance to spill out most of the traumatic shit in his life, particularly anything he thought might have made him want to kill himself worse, and having his emotions balance out in a new, way more intense way had let him finally address it all in a way that wasn’t… Bad.
By that he mostly meant that he’d cried about it instead of laughing it all off.
This was… Rough to adjust to. He wouldn’t even think of denying that. Of making it out to be less horrible than it was. There were a lot of good things coming from it and it was worth how much it sucked, but it still sucked. He always felt raw and too open and like he was somehow faking the whole “getting better” thing. But he was, wasn’t he?
He was getting better?
… It was starting to feel like it.
Three months in, and he had to call Jason to come talk him down because, for some reason, everything just felt like it was crashing down around him and suddenly none of it really felt worth it.
But the thing was, he was self-aware. He knew that things were better than they had been in years, in terms of his mental health and even his relationships with everyone around him. He knew that getting better (or trying to, at least) was worth the effort.
It just really, really, really didn’t feel like it.
He almost climbed up to the roof and jumped off but instead he balled himself up in bed and cried and called Jason.
Jason, who had shown up in record time and wrapped him up in blankets and his arms and just held him while he cried and said all of the things going through his head because he just couldn’t keep it in his head if someone was around who could listen. Who would listen.
He’d held him and listened and, when he finally descended into wordless sniffling and gasping for breath, he’d done a spectacular job of talking him down. Gave him reasons to keep holding on, reminded him of all the reasons he was trying to get better, told him how proud he was of him for making it this far… Cracked an off-handed joke about how being dead wasn’t all it was cracked up to be. Gave him tissues and told him it was okay to feel like total shit and refused to accept his apologies when he realized he’d just spilled all of the nasty shit in his head to him.
“Nah.” He said, firmly, “No. Shush. It’s fine. You needed to get that out and I’m probably the best one to get it out too.”
Dick couldn’t argue with that.
Jason was… Probably the least likely to take him feeling like this like a personal failure. Jason understood, could make sense of all of it without needing to be told and wouldn’t take it as something he’d done wrong. Sure, some of Dick’s issues stemmed from Bruce adopting Jason, but out of everything the feeling of being replaceable wasn’t at all something Jason himself had given him. It wasn’t Jason’s fault and Jason knew that.
X, Bruce… Well. They’d both done some shit very personally to him that had absolutely directly caused some of what he was feeling. They’d beat the shit out of themselves for it.
He sniffed, hard, and instead thanked Jason for listening.
Jason gave him a crooked grin, and then he gave him a noogie.
“Don’t worry ‘bout it, Big Bird. I gotcha.”
“Hey, sugar,” X greeted, grinning as he stepped into the apartment and kicked his shoes off.
“Hey, baby,” Dick greeted in return, a matching grin lighting up his face, “Come help me with this, will you?”
And X laughed, moving into the living room to help him hang up the tinsel.
“Going all out, huh?” X asked, as he pulled another length of tinsel out of the box of decorations.
“My brothers are coming,” Dick defended, clutching the tinsel to his chest like a string of pearls to further sell the image of him being offended, “I can’t possibly have a Christmas party with my brothers without tinsel, X.”
“And mistletoe.” X snorted, “And a whole tree. And three wreathes. And―”
“I get it.” Dick cut him off, tossing the tinsel in his face with a snort of his own. “You think I’m overdoing it.”
“Completely,” X agreed, grinning again, “And I love it.”
He gave a slightly softer smile at that, “Love you too, babe. Now hang the tinsel.”
This time, it was X who clutched the length to his chest in mock-offense.
Nevertheless, after another spot of laughter between them, he hung the tinsel and Dick resumed decorating the tree. They hummed and sang along to the Christmas songs on the radio while they worked and everything felt… Right.
Everything felt good.
And Dick almost wished he could go back and tell himself, before he ever fell off the bridge almost a year ago, that one day he’d smile more often than he was stone-faced. That he’d actually be pretty close with Jason for… Unsavory reasons that turned into a real bond that didn’t just rely on one of them feeling like shit. That Bruce would tell him that he loved him and he was proud of him on a regular basis. That there would be days he didn’t even think about wanting to kill himself. That sometimes, times like this, everything would just feel perfect and right and killing himself would be so far from his mind that he’d almost forget that he’d ever wanted to.
“Love you,” He told X, as he purposely caught him under the mistletoe.
X grinned and kissed him, “Love you too, D.”
And, sure, y’know what? He didn’t feel like this all the time. He didn’t feel so good and alive even 90% of the time. Even 70% of the time. But sometimes he felt like this, and it was getting more frequent the longer he actually dealt with his emotions instead of pushing them down, the longer he took his medication as directed, the longer he actually tried. He didn’t feel like this all the time, but the times he did were worth it. He didn’t feel like this all the time, but he didn’t want to kill himself all the time, either. Not even 70% of the time. Not even 50% of the time.
It had sucked to get to this point.
But it was worth it. So fucking worth it.
X pulled back, and Dick pulled him into another kiss before he could leave.