Work Text:
dick’s only twenty-seven, but he’s done enough, had enough happen to him, that he feels closer to eighty. memories are superimposed upon each other, layer after layer after layer, that the outlines are blurry, colours bleeding into each other. sensations stick out more: the shiver that went down his spine when he heard bones crack and shatter; the way a baseball bat felt against his own bones; the way bruce’s fists felt against his face; even the twice-removed way his body moves, feels, bleeds and fucks without him consciously telling it to.
dick picks up a bomb. he brings it to his eyes and tells it: you have no power over me. he is unassailable, leaping from rooftop to certainty, the world spread beneath him like a safety net, the audience seated on clouds and signal towers. the bomb explodes, and in the hollow where his face used to be, flowers grow, roots digging in, spreading.
dick gets captured. he’s flayed of his skin, then flayed of his identity; bruce collects these strips of his skin, dripping blood and comfort, and hangs them reverently in the batcave. dick’s raw body collects the earth: sand grinds into him and water cakes the mud around him like a third skin. he eventually gets his skin suit back, but now he can’t put it on without screaming.
dick gets shot in the head. the world stops for a year. he isn’t a garden; bruce has no reverence for his skin anymore. his suffering is without purpose; his purpose is without purpose, until even that is rendered a lie. his brain is tossed from palm to palm, matter oozing in between fingers and sticking to surfaces, memories and emotions and personality sticking to the backs of chairs and the undersides of tables like discarded chewing gum.
dick comes back. he doesn’t know that he was gone at all. he finishes the joke he started a year ago, like he’s spent all that time in the non-space between two breaths.
(this is a lie. he’s forgotten the punchline to the joke, but everybody pretends that he said it too quietly for them to hear.)
dick has a hole in his head. dick has a hole in his head. dick has a hole in his head. dick has a hole in his head–
dick can’t remember tim’s last name. he thinks he’s in new york and panics when his suit is blue instead of red. alfred’s loss hits him for the first time several times in a week, folding him to the floor, stealing his breath, driving helpless tears from his eyes. he wakes up shivering one night on a rain-soaked rooftop in bludhaven and feels like the world has ended and he was the locus of the catastrophe that destroyed everything. he chokes on large pills and can’t remember why. he convulses with the remembered immediacy of almost dying a million times, shredded and beaten and suffocated and erased out of existence.
this was your fight to fight, dick, bruce tells him when dick can focus long enough. i couldn’t step in.
dick plugs a finger in the hole in his brain and looks up at the ceiling. skinsuits are fluttering in the drafty air, grey and leathery from how long they’ve been there. a gunshot echoes somewhere, and there’s an answering ache in his head, his shoulder, his thigh.
i know, b, he says. thank you.