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Dick once heard that crises, creative crises, are often the origins of artistic breakthroughs. Like, maybe you’ve been painting landscapes all your life, and one day you get really disillusioned and think to yourself, this’ll never work! I can’t paint landscapes for the life of me and I’m an idiot for ever thinking I could! So then you paint a portrait instead, because it’s clearly time for a change, and some New York Times art critic decides it’s the most spectacular portrait ever painted. Some art collector offers you four hundred million dollars for it, and there you go: the landscape letdown instigated the portrait prosperity.
That, at least, is the train of thought Dick has embarked on, this particular night. It’s very optimistic and everything, the idea that a crisis is an opportunity in disguise, but it brings up a question: is Dick actually having a crisis?
He thinks about it for a few moments, staring blankly at the wall until he zones out and it starts to change colors, and decides, no. This is not a crisis. He thinks that at the very least he’d know for sure if it was one. Dick can’t fathom how a crisis could be anything other than immediately apparent. A stealth crisis? A ninja crisis?
Dick’s not here to be overdramatic or anything, and he hates to overreact, so he’s trying his best not to. It’s just that he’s been having kind of a difficult time, lately.
It’s been a month and a couple of weeks since he last saw Jason. He remembers that night, the last night they saw each other, with crystal clarity--like a 4K photograph or maybe a drawing with distinct black lineart. If Dick leans back, closes his eyes and lets the sounds around him fade into that familiar staticky murmur, he can rewatch that night like a scene from a movie.
Jason’s apartment: like an episode of HGTV in its perfect cleanliness. Whenever Dick walks in, he likes to scoff at how neurotically clean it is. Then he’ll try to do something to change it. Like throwing his jacket over the arm of a chair or kicking his shoes off so they clutter the entryway. He's just adding a little bit of himself to Jason’s space, making it feel more like home, and then loving the way his heart aches over how Jason rolls his eyes and rushes to clean whatever it is up with fond exasperation.
That one specific time--that night almost two months ago--it wasn’t just Dick’s jacket. It was his jacket and his shoes. And then his shirt. And then his pants, and socks, and everything .
For once, Jason’s own clothing joined the clutter and for once, Jason hadn’t rushed to pick it all up. For once, Jason’s attention had been focused entirely on Dick. Not the apartment and its brand new mess. Not the overgrown maze of anger he liked to lose himself in whenever he felt he was letting Dick too close. Not the past, not the future, and not the present, because time didn’t even feel real anymore. Just--Dick. Just Dick, and this incredible thing he and Jason had together.
The ceiling swims back into focus and Dick remembers that he’s not actually with Jason right now. The calendar says July, not June. The apartment he sits in is the site of a natural disaster, not a model home magazine cover photo. He is one hundred percent alone.
And all of a sudden as Dick takes his surroundings in, he experiences a sharp moment of realization that cuts through the blurry haze of his lazy night. Dick realizes why Jason hates mess so much. It all feels so overwhelming--it feels like nothing will ever be clean or organized again. Like it’ll all build up until one day Dick drowns in the clutter.
He’s gotta get out of here.
Dick finds his boots and Jason’s old jacket and puts them both on. Otherwise, he wears the same clothes he’s been wearing for a day or two. Sweatpants and a very old T-shirt from a road trip years and years ago.
He doesn’t lock the apartment behind him. It’s not like he doesn’t value safety or anything. Dick loves safety. He’s pretty sure he just forgets to, and by the time he remembers, he’s already walked down all the stairs to the ground floor, and going back up just sounds like a waste of time.
It’s not that Dick doesn’t have plenty of time--not like he’s got anything scheduled for one in the morning tonight. Maybe it’s less about the time and more about the energy.
Dick decides to walk. He’s been stuck inside the past few days, so maybe if he gets his steps in tonight, it’ll even out.
He hasn’t even gone very far when he’s thinking about suicide again, because that’s a topic he’s been pondering lately. Not actively thinking about it, like, in the concerning way. But like--as an abstract topic. Like, how suicide is a thing that happens. It’s a thing that happens for all sorts of different reasons. It’s a thing that happens when someone’s having a crisis that they can’t overcome.
But, Dick thinks, that’s the thing. How do you even define a crisis? There can’t just be one definition for it. They’re diverse, he thinks. They can be the sort of crisis that comes to mind when you say the word, like a house fire or a heart attack, and then there can be the stealthy kind, like crises of the emotional or midlife variety.
How do you even know when you’re having one?
Jason always knows, but he’s also incredibly indiscriminate when it comes to declaring a crisis. Dick forgets to go grocery shopping? His fridge is completely empty, and he’s gonna starve to death or die of scurvy! Jason’s next door neighbors play their music too loudly? No one in the entire apartment complex will ever have a restful night again! Things like that.
Jason’s passion has always been so intense. There is nothing at all that he doesn’t care about. He’s never been on the fence about anything in his entire life.
He would know if Dick was having a crisis. But Dick hasn’t seen him in what feels like a lot longer than two months. So it’s hard to know what Jason would think about all this.
Maybe Dick can attribute the weeks gone by to his lapse of memory--he’d forgotten how far Jason’s apartment is from his own. But he walks for what feels like hours--for what might actually be hours, and damn, his legs are really starting to hurt. He’s thankful when they start to go numb.
Maybe, Dick thinks, he should have driven. But that feels like a lot less of a statement. Walking all the way across town to someone’s apartment isn’t just a really exhausting journey--it’s a declaration. It’s a physical demonstration of just how badly he needs this--how badly he needs Jason right now.
Bold statements and meaningful gestures aside, Dick makes it to Jason’s neighborhood eventually. It looks just the same as it always has, and Dick tells himself that shouldn't be surprising, because, again: it’s only been two months. It’s still run down and gritty and full of unhoused people, sleeping on top of benches or beneath them. Against walls and under ripped tents.
Jason’s apartment is on the first floor because one of the most frequent subjects of his intense ire is elevators--there is nothing, nothing at all except Walmart and decaf coffee, that Jason hates more than elevators.
Why don’t you take the stairs? Dick had once suggested.
Because nobody’s got the damn time for that.
So, Dick goes into the apartment complex, finds Jason’s door, and tries to open it. It’s locked, but that’s not shocking, because Jason cares a great deal more about proper home security than Dick does, apparently. Jason cares a lot about everything.
When the door doesn’t give, Dick knocks, and then shoves his hands into his pockets to wait.
It’s several minutes before the door opens--he has to knock twice more.
“What the fuck are you doing here, dude? It’s, like, three a.m.”
Dick stares at the man behind the door. Words and thoughts abandon him, and he can do nothing but stare at the stranger in Jason’s apartment.
“Well?”
“I. Someone I know lives here.”
“Yeah, no,” says the guy. “I moved in last week.”
Dick still can’t figure out what to say. He stares around the guy, at the apartment behind the open door, and his mind goes entirely blank when nothing is the way he remembers it at all.
Jason’s old TV and brand new couch are gone. His crammed-full bookshelves. His slightly scuffed coffee table, his coat hangers, the little rack by the door he stored his shoes on.
Instead there’s just boxes, and IKEA furniture, and--and the place is a whole cluttered mess, just like Dick’s own place.
“Uh,” says the man, looking at Dick like he’s gone completely crazy. “So, anything I can do for you? Or…”
But Dick still can’t find words.
It’s not July anymore. It’s June again. The sofa in the corner of the apartment isn’t a new one from IKEA, it’s the cushy leather one Jason had splurged on last year because he thinks that there is no greater indignity having to relax on an uncomfortable sofa. He and Jason are lying atop it, Dick pressed so close to Jason’s chest that he can hear his heartbeat, and it’s three in the morning. He thinks Jason is asleep, but Dick isn’t yet.
“Dude? You good?”
“Sorry,” Dick says, and begins to hurry away, head down.
Is this a crisis yet? he asks the Jason in his memory. Am I overreacting?
But Jason is asleep and Dick isn’t yet. Nobody can answer the question but himself. He needs to go home.
It’s a long walk home, Dick’s legs are numb, and all of a sudden there is nothing he wants to do less than walk all the way back to his stupid empty apartment and all of the aching loneliness it’s home to. At least here, out in the world, there are people around him. Even at three in the morning.
So he does a thing that Jason would have hated, and that he’d have made fun of Jason for hating. He steps into the apartment building’s elevator and presses the button for the highest floor.
As it ascends, the little red number above the door changes from one to two to three and beyond. Dick thinks again about suicide, but not like, as a possibility for himself. As, like, a clinical, scientific examination.
It must take a lot of courage to kill yourself, he thinks. You’ve gotta commit. Dick has always had trouble with commitment, but Jason was different--when he decided he wanted something, he gave his whole heart to it.
Maybe Dick should be taking more inspiration from Jason. He should be cleaner, and more passionate, and more decisive. He should stop wavering around with commitment. He should just--
Anyways, the elevator dings, and he’s on the top floor. Dick steps out only when the door impatiently begins to close again.
The hallway he emerges into is deadly quiet and dimly lit by a couple of flickering fluorescent ceiling fixtures. Each step Dick takes sounds at the same time thunderous in the quiet and muffled by the carpet. They’re nothing alike at all, other than the fact that they’re both hallways, but this corridor reminds him of the one from The Shining. Madness and ghosts and isolation. All work and no play.
The roof access door, once Dick reaches it, is apparently not for public use. Usually, Dick would read the sign, and obey. But Jason wouldn’t have, if he’d been here. He’d have laughed and opened the door up and walked right on through no matter what the sign said.
So that’s what Dick decides to do. He tries the door’s handle, and it opens, and Dick steps through and ascends a long staircase. Finally, he comes to another door, and when he opens that, cool air surges through and surrounds him.
On the roof, everything is silent but Dick’s own footsteps and the quiet bustle of the city below him. Cars honking, people yelling. Gotham’s usual serene ambiance.
What happened to Jason, Dick thinks. Maybe what happened to Jason was just bad luck.
Jason always thought there was no such thing as bad luck--he said everything happened for a reason. He didn’t mean it in a religious sort of way, like that God was up there pulling the strings so that everything would play out in the exact way he wanted it to. Jason meant it as in, everything happened as the direct result of something else, which also happened as the result of something else, and so on. An abstract concept like luck had nothing to do with anything at all.
Dick usually agrees that bad luck isn’t real, but for a different reason. He read a kids book once, where a bunch of terrible things happened to all the different people in the story. One guy, the one that sticks out in his memory, had broken his leg falling off a horse. And he was like, oh no, this is terrible luck, my leg is injured and I’ll never ride a horse again! But then there was a war, and the only reason the guy wasn’t drafted was because his leg was too broken. So the book’s argument was that the bad luck had actually ended up being good.
But breaking your leg might qualify as a crisis, and killing yourself does for sure, and Dick thinks that a crisis is definitely a step up from bad luck, in terms of overall badness.
There that topic is again. Suicide. Dick thinks of it this time not as an actual, pressing issue, but like an old friend he runs into on the street and promises to meet up with for lunch. It’s not actually going to happen. Dick’s not going to reach out and suggest a time and place, and it’s not like they’re going to run off and have lunch right that instant.
But, then again, what if you run into an old friend on the street and say you should totally hang out for lunch, and then the friend actually follows through and calls you the next day with an invitation? You’re not just going to tell the friend no. You’re gonna go have some damn lunch.
Suicide is like that friend.
But anyways.
Gotham is messy, just like Dick’s apartment. You can’t see the stars because of all the smog and light pollution. There’s traffic, even at three a.m., and overflowing trash cans, and litter. Even the rooftop Dick stands on is actually kind of gross. There are cigarette butts and shards of broken glass, and stains of what’s probably liquor.
Jason would have hated it. He could never stand for anything unclean. He could never stand for anything that wasn’t the way he wanted it.
But Dick always thought that when Jason encountered a problem like this, he tried to fix it. He spent so long cleaning his apartment. He spent so long cleaning up himself--cleaning up his act. Becoming the person Dick wanted so badly to be close to, all the time, every day and night.
Giving up, Dick would have once thought, wasn’t within Jason’s repertoire.
Anyways. Jason would hate this whole thing, this whole entire crisis, and Dick would have made fun of him for hating it.
Dick once heard that crises, creative crises, are often the origin of artistic breakthroughs.
If he decides to consider this, this whole situation, a crisis, then he knows what his breakthrough is going to be.
He thinks about suicide again. His oldest friend is calling him for lunch.