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His window is unlocked when she gets there.
The apartment building is cracked on the outside, wedged into one of the concrete corridors on the border of Gotham’s East End, swallowed by shadows and spattered with lightless windows. It’s one of the season’s few clear nights; the ground is still damp from the last few weeks, reminders of the spell of rain—not a record for the city, but close—dripping off eavestroughs, collecting in the potholes and echoing against the brick walls like gunshots. The sound of her boots scraping against the loose gravel in the alleyway is drowned by the creak of the fire escape beneath her weight, years of moisture and rust giving way with a loud groan—but not too loud, as a fire escape subject to years of moisture and rust might be. Should be, if someone hasn’t been going in and out through the window already.
It’s far too easy for her to nudge her fingers beneath the chipped wood of the window pane and pull upwards. To slip her leg through the opening and then the other, and then her shoulders, pausing with her head ducked halfway in.
Dick’s living room is dark, even darker than expected for a shitty one-bed-one-bath at the heart of a drab city like Gotham. The moonlight that, for once, is flourishing in the cloudless sky—although still mostly blocked by the adjacent apartment buildings that are all taller than his by far—spills a cold glow where it can onto the floor boards, all scratches and stains where the wood peeks out beneath the chevron rug one of them, probably Conner, had gotten him for the housewarming party all those months ago, now clearly battered and well-worn beneath the coffee table.
It’s a rose-tinted memory, a faded vignette of easier times, of being able to show up without a formal invite. Dick hadn’t even gotten the spare keys cut, much less thought about amending files to include his new permanent address. Or that’s what he claimed, at least.
Of course, it had been Jason who’d let it slip to their friends that Dick had moved into a new apartment. That evening, they were on the steps leading up to his front door; Dick had answered in a wife beater and sweatpants with a sizable spaghetti sauce stain on the front, looking, to his credit, only marginally puzzled.
The apartment was a tight fit with them all, filled with much more life then, a comfortable buzz compounded by every pair of shoes left by the door and a warm orange haze cast over it all. Passed around were bags of hastily bought yet thoughtful items for the new place; the faux-gold monkey figurine that M’gann had brought was a gift extended from Garfield. He’d held it between two fingers, his pointer and his thumb, and set it atop its temporary home — balancing precariously on a pile of linens that were yet to be put away. Then there was the chevron rug, scratchy and an absolute eyesore and laid down as a permanent fixture in the living room before Dick had time to protest.
Dick had probably been on his second month of rent at that point, and there were still more boxes than furniture; an untouched box of what would be an IKEA bookshelf made for a passable dining table for the takeout Thai brought from their go-to place in Happy Harbour, pillows on the floor for seating. Conner had taken to leaning against the windowsill when Jason wouldn’t stop poking him with the ends of his chopsticks; Dick had shot his brother a look from across their makeshift table and muttered something about manners, and Jason, with a piece of chicken stolen from her own dish halfway to his mouth, retaliated by calling his new rug ugly. Conner had sulked even harder, then.
Now, with one foot hanging into the room and the other out, Conner’s grumbling would be a welcome lullaby.
She got the news this morning. She should’ve guessed earlier; she knew something was wrong, the way Dick’s face fell when he answered that alert before they got back on the bioship that day. She can still feel the sand in her boots, can hear the tree leaves humming in the breeze. Can still feel the dread in her bones when he left her, left all of them there, unwavering and cold.
He didn’t tell them, then. If she was in Dick’s shoes, she probably wouldn’t have either. It’d be one of those things that she’d keep close to her chest, hoping that if she kept it bottled up for long enough it wouldn’t be true.
But it was. She couldn’t blame him for that, she couldn’t. So, she got the news this morning and came here the first chance she got.
Her boots are coming apart where the toe meets the sole, and they mouse soundlessly along the age-worn hardwood, a heavy quiet. They bristle the leaves of a fern next to the window, sucking the last dregs of moisture from its bone-dry soil. And the rest of the apartment, draped in shadow, is just as still— a faraway memory from the bustle of uninvited but not unwelcome guests and pad thai over unmade furniture.
There’s a coat hanger by the door, sturdy and reliable and shrouding a small pile of shoes, each pair kicked off haphazardly and swept against the baseboard in a way that reminds her of after school visits at the manor, back when Dick advanced to be in the same math class as her, and later, after Jason came, when she started coming over just for the hell of it. She’d toe off her boots, leave them by the door as neat as she could like her mother would have her head if she didn’t, and pretend not to know that Alfred would straighten them out anyway after they went up the stairs. She wasn’t all that surprised, with the way Dick peeled his off by the heel and swept them to the wall with the grace of a gasoline fire.
Jason though, he had this steadfast resolve to do exactly the opposite. His shoes came off outside, canvas sneakers sopping wet straight through because he refused to wear boots, even when it snowed. He’d pick them up, shake them off and place them primly by the door, laces tucked in. At first, she thought it was because of the mansion and the burden it held, that if he left even his shoes a mess the universe would suddenly correct itself and the mistake it made with him and they would dump him back out on the street without a second thought.
Then, when she hung back one day and saw the way Alfred adjusted her shoes, then Dick’s, and then pretended that Jason’s had already been fixed, she understood that it was probably because putting his shoes where he wanted and finding them where he left them was the first real, tangible opportunity Jason had to take control of his own life.
In Dick’s apartment, under the sturdy coat rack, there’s a pair of red vans, stained with old rain water, set neatly in the corner, untouched.
Her figure casts a tall shadow on the wall as she moves past. Perched on a shitty cabinet console is an old TV screen, currently out of commission she knows, and beside it is a bookshelf, inhabited by more picture frames than books and embellished with whatever else Dick’s managed to gather in the short few months he’s had the place—gold monkey included. There’s a school textbook laid open on the kitchen island where it bleeds into the living room; freshman biology, flipped open to somewhere in the middle, untouched.
She hovers a timid hand over the glossy page, the pads of her fingers floating along a space between the paragraph lines. There’s handwriting in the margins—red pen, scrawled, monomers and polymers and nucleotides. If she’d flip the page she’d see marked up diagrams of double helix structures, brilliant colours and printed labels faded away with use.
Jason had been having trouble with DNA and genetics; he asked her on a Friday, when her classes for the day were done by noon and the rest of it was spent at the only place she’s ever really called home. He snuck out to the mountain early, because it’d been around that time at the start when the school felt more like a prison, and dropped the question like it was something secret in between the idle sparring reps they were doing to kill time. You’d know about cell proteins, right, ‘cause you’re a bio major, he said, spent and laid back against the mat. And ‘cause she’d know how Mrs. Paulsen at GA was dead set on flunking out her freshmen students, and ‘cause Dick had nearly flunked out of that class himself, and ‘cause he’d be damned before he asked Bruce.
The whole ordeal would be something that’d stick with her, she knew. It wasn’t because of what it became, huddled in the lounge on Friday afternoons snorting water up her nose at a joke Jason made and occasionally circling an answer on the practice questions he had, or finding the kid asleep on her living room couch when she got home from her late afternoon classes, or how checking in on Jason would become just as common during her visits to Gotham as spending time with her mother.
It was because it was the first time he spoke to her as Jason. It’d been at the start.
There’s a sound from down the hall. She steps back from the kitchen counter, feet light; it’s coming from the bedroom door. It’s the smallest of noises, almost inaudible amidst the rest of the silence in the apartment, a soft clink of… glass? It nearly blends in with the quiet—but not nearly unheard, not to her. Crusher made sure of that when she was three.
She approaches, slow. Places a hand on the face of the door, nudges it open just slightly further in forewarning before stepping through.
The bedroom is empty, deceptive, and, unlike the rest of the apartment, looks like an explosion had gone off a train had rolled through it. The window on the far wall is drowning the room like a flashlight at a crime scene: empty picture hooks tape off the site and clothes litter the floor like blood stains. There’s a dresser next to the door that has several drawers left ajar, its surface top canvassed by dust, mismatched books and a myriad of crumpled papers, and the night tables on either side of the bed bear the weight of dirty dishes and unopened prescription bottles like footsteps in muddied snow. Somehow though, with the quiet air and baron walls, it feels lonelier than it did on the other side of the door.
In the center of the room is a vacant bed. Its sheets are strewn to its sides, like it’s been playing spectator to countless nights of restless sleep, or perhaps none at all. But just there, just over the far edge of the mattress, peeking up above the rumpled duvet—
Her footsteps are heavy, deliberate, as she rounds the footboard, approaching the head of dark hair leaning against the side of the bed.
Dick is sitting on the floor, head collapsed back against the edge of the mattress, legs out front and buckled at the knees. He has on an undershirt and mesh shorts, the same ones he’s had since sophomore gym class. There’s a jumble of shards next to his thigh, remnants of a glass cup if the shape is anything to go by, and in his lap is his right hand, the upturned palm disfigured by dried blood and a large red gash down the middle. If she gasps at the sight (she doesn’t think she does, but she might have), he doesn’t seem to notice; his eyes are glossy and affixed to the window, or out of it.
She falters a second, maybe two, before retracing her steps, hanging a left before the bedroom door and into the ensuite. She feels around for the light, and with a couple of blinks to adjust to the fluorescent glare she drops to a kneel, pulls open the cabinet beneath the sink and goes for the white first aid kit she knows is slotted between the half-empty bottle of shaving cream and spare toilet rolls.
By the time she returns, Dick hasn’t moved, and neither have his eyes.
Even as she kneels next to him, gently taking his injured hand by the wrist; she lifts it to examine the wound, and he lets her.
His eyes are grey in this light, against the window.
Most of the blood has already dried and the wound has since shut, but she still makes meticulous work of wiping away the red stains and wrapping the offending area in gauze. It helps her, at least for the moment, to ignore the streaks of dried tears on her friend’s cheeks and the dark circles around his eyes.
Some of the blood has gotten on his shirt; the scarlet red freckles the polyester like debris.
By the time she’s done, there’s damp spots on her jacket and her hands feel stiff. She leans back and tilts her head down, takes a moment to tuck a wandering strand of hair behind her ear.
“You’re lucky. You won’t be needing stitches this time.” Her voice is hoarse, like an ocean of crashing waves that hasn’t been sailed in years, and the joke plunges into the water, sinking below the surface.
Somewhere, sometime else, she’s said that before. She’s wrapping his abdomen with the last strip of gauze from her utility belt and thinking that she’ll need to stock up again when they get back home. There are trees all around them, tall and temperate and shielding, speckles of desert sand blowing off the leaves and adding to the collection in their hair. He’s got a black eye and a cut down his cheek and he’s smiling when he replies, “You should see the other guy.”
“I did,” she says, “I was there.”
Dick scoffs, a delightful sound, “Killjoy.” Behind him, somewhere, his communicator blinks to life.
It’s different, now. This time when she says it, her throat feels raw and her bones wary, and Gotham is clear as night and Dick’s still looking out the window like it’s where he’ll find the answer to where all that cruel joy went.
Not knowing what to do with her hands anymore, she moves on to the glass shards, scooping up the remains on the floor.
And when Dick finally speaks, it’s like his voice has been scraped of all that was definitively before. “Do you ever…” he begins, raspy. His cheeks are trenches in the centre of a battlefield, his stare is glass. “Do you ever think about it? About what it was like before?”
“No,” she says after a moment, because it’s mostly true. “No, I don’t.”
Dick’s still not looking at her so she can’t really tell, but she feels like he doesn’t believe her.
What he does do is shift his leg, knee bumping lightly against her hand where she’s going for the big glass piece closest to him. His hand, freshly wrapped, wavers in the empty air.
“When I was in the circus,” he whispers, “my family lived out of one of the cars on the train.” He says it like a memory well-served, one that he’s reluctant to reopen. He licks at his cracked lips. “Everyone did. It was nice. Quaint. We’d set up these… these fairy lights inside. Made it feel way bigger than it was.
“There were these big metal connectors that ran between each of the train cars. I hated winters, because at night, when the temperatures went below freezing, the connectors would be so frozen over that they’d scrape against each other when the wind blew too hard. It made these huge, pounding noises, all hours of the night. It was dumb… I used to spend my nights leaping from a trapeze. I don’t know why those damn sounds scared me so much.”
He’s never told her about the train; he’s barely told her about the circus. The most she knows is that he was in one, and that he did the trapeze and his parents did too and that they fell from one when they died. Everything else he likes to keep close to his chest—understandably. The most she’d ever heard had been secondhand stories from Jason.
This one is new. Dick’s biting his lip; a new line is forming between his brows, with something resembling a self-loathing sneer threatening his lips. “I’d be crying to myself in our train car and I’d sneak into my parents’ bunk, squeeze into that little space between them and pull the blanket over my head, ‘til they woke up enough to put their arms over me.
“But there were nights that my parents weren’t there. Out late meeting with Uncle Haly, or having a shindig with the other acts. I don’t know. They weren’t really partiers, not with me around, but sometimes they just wouldn’t be back in time before the wind started going.
“So I’d be sitting in our car, alone, huddled up in my bunk. And even though I knew it was just the frozen connectors, they were so… loud. I’d never been so scared. It— It felt like the world was ending.”
If she looks close enough, she can almost see the clear skies and moonlight shadows reflected in his eyes and pretend that they’re stage lights, nameless faces and tears once shed, since forgotten.
“And then one of those nights, my cousin John came into our car. Found me underneath my blanket, shaking like a baby. I’d probably woken him up with how hard I was wailing. I kind of expected him to make fun of me— I mean, what kind of seven year old gets scared by train noises?” He laughs something caught between a whisper, a cough and a sob. “But instead… he just got into the bed right next to me, tucked me underneath his chin. Just sat there with me beneath the blanket. And he said, ‘Don’t worry, Dickie. Nothing can ever get you while I’m here.’”
He says it like his mouth is moving on his own, and she gets the distinct feeling that this is the first she’s heard of this because it’s the first he’s ever told it.
“And for the first time,” he whispers, “it felt like everything was going to be okay, because John was there to protect me.”
By the time he’s finished, all the glass pieces are gone and she’s sat back on her heels to steal a real, full look at him; there’s a fresh line of tears bleeding down his cheeks. The sight reminds her of the lump in her throat, and how one wrong breath will have it clawing its way out of her chest.
Dick blinks, away, finally, from the sky, and another heavy droplet marks its way down his cheek. “How did I let this happen, Artemis?” he rasps. He’s staring at the broken glass, the small pile she’s made and the traces of scarlet red blood on their edges, but she has a feeling he’s not talking about the cut.
“It wasn’t your fault,” she tells him, shifting on her heels. “You weren’t there. You couldn’t have—”
“Exactly. I’m his brother—” His voice cracks, and he swallows it down like a handful of gravel or a broken promise. “Was,” he whispers.
Was. That shouldn’t hurt as much as it does. Distantly, somewhere in her head, a communicator blinks, red, red, red.
“I should have been there,” he whispers.
They were in Bialya when it happened. She remembers it like this: A mission with the Team, Queen Bee is making a move for Qurac again, they need to send a small squad in for recon. In the bioship on the way there, Wally and Garth place bets on whether they’ll be back before the 24-hour mark; the mission ended up lasting a whole week. If she really tries, she can still hear Wally’s grumbling stomach in their minds, can see Zee by the fire, her head tipped sleepily onto M’gann’s shoulder as they met their fourth midnight in the desert, talking drowsily about midterms and the trip M’gann is taking come reading break to visit Garfield. A blink, and Garth is fast asleep, arms arched and tucked behind his head, and Dick is rolling his communicator between his fingers, turned off but not discarded; radio silence in Bialya, but he’s ready nonetheless, in case, in the oddest chance, an emergency magically spurs it awake.
She remembers telling him, around a yawn, to put his comm away and get some sleep, because he won’t be able to do much of anything anyway in an emergency from this far away—especially if it has anything to do with Jason’s biology quiz next week. She remembers the way he rolls his eyes, then slips his comm into his back pocket and doesn't reach for it again.
On the seventh day it ended as all their covert missions do, with a few explosions, a few broken ribs and no real concrete evidence. She still has a scar from her temple to her ear, and probably will for a while. Her utility belt was lighter; she’d used the last of her gauze on Dick’s abdomen.
They had their comms off until they were outside Bialyan borders. By then, it was too late.
It was a warehouse explosion, she’d find out later, and that Jason had died their second day in.
Her mouth is dry; it tastes of sand, iron, and unspoken words. “Dick…”
Dick grimaces, teeth glinting as he gasps a watery breath, hard enough to bruise. ”I should have fucking been there,” he sobs.
It’s like heavy rain in a clear night sky, and it makes her think of desert sand and shoes by the door and a lonely warehouse far, far away. It makes her think of pad thai and how Jason would steal some from hers because he knew she could never finish one on her own. It makes her think of great big eyes she’ll never see again, of a little brother she’ll never have.
Artemis wipes at her eyes and then cups her hand at the base of Dick’s neck, firm and there. “Then I should have been, too.”
Whether it’s the grip she has on him, or her words, it’s then that Dick finally looks at her—and really looks. His eyes are red and lined with tears and the wear in them looks far too much like they’ve been through this before, just one too many times.
Sometimes, it’s easy to forget how young he is, just seventeen. It’s far too young, she decides, for a world this cruel.
With her hand at the back of his neck she pulls him in. He goes without resistance, hands clutching at her back and body wracking with silent sobs. She thinks she can feel his tears through the leather of her jacket; she drops her cheek to the top of his head with tears of her own, holding him as tight as she can as though it’ll make the emptiness in her heart feel less heavy.
“I used to wish it was me that died,” he hiccups, muffled in the material of her coat, “not my parents. Not John. And I– I got over that as I got older, but when Bruce found Jay—” His voice cracks around the sound of his brother’s name on his tongue. “When Bruce took him in, I finally understood. I had to be there for him, like John was for me.”
His voice is gravel, like it’s both the first time he’s used it and the last he’ll ever speak.
“I had that. And I failed.”
Artemis closes her eyes with a breath, opens her mouth and thinks, So did I. She can feel the way Dick hugs her tighter and buries his nose further into her jacket in a way that says, We both did.
It doesn’t need to be said. Jason was her brother, too.
“His birthday’s next week.” Dick says it into her shoulder like a faraway memory, a regret bubbled back to the surface. And then, with a bit more waver, “He didn’t even— he would’ve been fifteen.”
It’s far too young for a world this cruel.
So they cling together like that, in the blue moonlight and the clear skies and the too-grey walls, and they breathe.