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Dick dies and Tim forgets how to breathe.
Click.
Picture this: A funeral.
Richie Grayson, the newspapers read, A Drunken Car Crash.
They take turns pulling on the Nightwing costume, travelling to Blüdhaven. Click. A joke, a quip. Click. Electricity sparking, escrima sticks, electric blue and dazzling.
Tim goes home at night to sob it off. Click, on his couch, his phone is ringing, relentless buzzing noises. The group chat, Cassie’s relentless DMs.
Click, Tim’s in the Batcave, watching Bruce. The shutter lens snap again, grayscale.
Batman needs a Robin —
Bruce needs Dick.
—Click—
Tim needs Dick.
The fact of the matter is, Dick is gone. The details don’t matter. Everything kind of falls apart. The consequences of this is devastating, in both the wider community and in Tim’s immediate circle.
Everyone is in mourning.
The reach Dick had in life and death is kind of shocking. Troia, and Wonder Woman and Superman - all the major figures, all the young heroes. Nighting, said with some level of reverency, exacerbated in death.
Tim should - should do damage control.
Tim finds himself on his couch again, the lights aren’t switched on. He should reach out to Steph. Maybe, maybe. Cass is out every night now. He’d never understood the relationship she has with Dick, but, but.
Tim should go on a vacation.
The Lazarus pit, ruled out. Dick made him - made him promise. They’d discussed this, once. Tim can’t bear to keep the promise, can’t bear to break the promise. No bringing Dick back. What’s done is done is done is —
There’s someone sobbing.
It’s Tim’s turn to wear Nightwing’s colours again. They can’t afford to slip up, not even when the world has crumbled down. Tim’s on the rooftop again, fingers sliding over the grapple as he stares at Dick’s beloved city.
He swings down when he hears a shot. A little girl, a few men. Grayscale. White and grey and blue, blue, blue, the only colour he can see now. The little girl sobs as Tim forces a smile and comfort.
“Mr Nightwing, sir,” she says timidly. Tim almost flinches back at the address.
He smiles instead.
“Yes?”
Hesitantly, oh so cautiously, she offers him an object. He takes it, turns it around in his hands mutely.
It’s a Nightwing figurine. Shitty quality, all things considered. The paint is chipping off.
“I hug this to help me sleep better at night,” she says shyly. Then she turns red, and chokes out a goodbye. Tim doesn’t even offer to walk her home, he just stares mutely, an idea blooming in the back of his mind.
He researches first. Hours and hours and hours. He can’t bear to fuck this up, not this, not when everything else is fucked six ways over. He begins by buying the materials, splurging without looking at price tags.
Only the best for him.
He sculpts the prototype first, polymer clay and matching the sockets. He makes the plaster molds and prints out pictures of Dick, his smile, his hair. His nose has been broken too many times, forever crooked.
Soft firing the raw porcelain to remove the seams and other imperfections, because Dick is perfect, shining and flawed and unreachable from the pedestal he’s placed on.
The Boy Wonder
Watch me, Tim!
—Click—
Tim had known him in the way only a little brother could. First in awe, in a deep, profound awe for someone untouchable and immortalised as what could be equated to as the Sun in his memory.
That’s what Dick was.
The Sun.
The last time he’d seen Dick: the smile on his face, confident and fake and shining. Him, stepping backwards, a reassurance Tim had already forgotten the sounds of.
He sands the rough areas and nearly cries when some come out deformed from the kiln. He continues through the tears. It’s fine, he has extra parts.
Glaze for the eyes and layer upon layer to bring the colour back. Hair and skin and lips. Dick was so colourful, he remembered. He fires each layer in the kiln, china paint layered and the doll looks more and more alive and -
Tim couldn’t breathe —
He strings the doll up with elastics and steel springs and hooks, leather lining for the joints and he ignores his friends’ messages in order to work tirelessly on Dick’s features, the eyebrows and eyes, the eyelids.
Life sized and achingly realistic; when he’s done he takes a step back.
Warmth on his cheeks. The colour is back, he thinks, and not just the bright sizzling blue.
Tim can’t bear it, can’t look at the fucking false mimicry - how could he have thought this would fix anything? But it does, it does, and he lays it gently into his bed at night and hooks up wiring to stimulate heartbeat, a pillow for comfort and unforgiving porcelain against his flesh.
In his dreams, a circus, a laugh, black hair brushing his cheek as he smiles for a photo.
Click, goes the camera. He remembers Dick, red and green and yellow. The Flying Graysons! No net, no safety, no -
The reports read the time and date and reason of Dick’s death. A fall. Tim couldn’t comprehend it. It seemed ludicrous. Dick Grayson? Death from gravity of all things?
Later he sat in his room and sat his way through a panic attack.
It was, he concluded, the only way he could imagine Dick dying.
Tim takes all of Dick’s clothes that he can scavenge and dresses the doll up. In the night, he cries into Dick’s shoulder, hot tears and he can almost, almost feel Dick’s huff of laughter, warm breath, black hair tickling his skin.
That’s my brother, he thinks to himself. He can’t be dead.
And in his dreams at night, they morph from the circus to Dick’s lovely painted face, unblinking but warm beneath his fingers, porcelain giving way to flesh. The seams are still there, visible and an ever glaring reminder of his falsity.
In his dreams at night, Dick smiles for the camera and mouths to Tim something - maybe a reassurance, a promise, maybe. He leans forward, eager for more, for his brother, for -
Then he wakes up, cheek cold and eyes puffy.
Tim should get his shit together.
Picture this: Your brother is dead and your world falls apart. The lump in your chest stops beating and your lungs stop inhaling. You’re a corpse, so you think. Your brother died from a fall so you string him up by the joints, porcelain under your warm-alive flesh, hardened and painted over in lovely china paint.
Your brother’s eyes, lovely and blue are painted painstakingly over the course of the day. His magnum opus.
Picture this: Your brother is dead, so now you must have him in any way you can.
Cassie lets herself in.
“Tim,” she says calmly. “Tim, what is this?”
Tim looks at her, then to what she’s looking at.
“What?” he snaps defensively. “I can’t pick up hobbies now?”
Cassie stares at him, her eyes sky-blue and hair like spun gold, cropped short to her head.
“Tim,” she repeats, a little helpless, like all the super strength in the world can’t stop the waver in her voice. “You can’t do this. Okay?” Something breaks, a little.
No one will get him. No one had, except for Dick. Dick, who’d play-fought with him and offered him coffee on stakeouts, who called him his brother and took him out train surfing.
Tim looks away from Cassie to Dick’s electric-blue and warm skin, lying still on the bed. Like this, Tim can pretend he’s sleeping.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he says.
His dreams again, next to Dick. Dick brushes his hair away from his face, affectionate and open in a way he never really was before. Tim, he says gently, alive and well and Tim kind of wants to cry again.
Tim, you have to let me go.
Tim wakes up. His hand rests on Dick’s chest, rising with each breath.
Interventions from everyone. Donna comes. She’s Dick’s best friend, his soulmate, his other half. A camera hangs from her neck.
She smiles at him, something haggard on her face. There is something missing from her. “Hey, Tim,” she says, and sits down on the bed where she strokes Dick’s hair lovingly, gently. Something aches in Tim, watching her watch Dick silently. Mournful.
“Cassie’s worried about you.”
“Did she complain to you?”
With a shock, something bitter, atleast she can complain to you, that he banishes immediately, ashamed. She blinks at him like she can tell anyways.
Donna is dark hair and confidence and snapshots of time. Dick loved Donna. That counted for something. He doesn’t understand how she’s functioning when she, for all rights and purposes, should be shattered under the grief of losing Dick. He doesn’t understand why she’s here. They were never close before.
But he remembers now, that Dick lost Donna once. They’d been apart before. Maybe this hurt was killing her, like it killed Dick.
She was just better at hiding it. Consummate performer, like Dick was. Tim suddenly can’t bear to look at Donna Troy anymore.
Donna tells him something he doesn’t quite hear. Tim tells her to get out. When she doesn’t, Tim explodes into fiery rage. Glasses shattered, carefully away from Dick’s body in the bed.
Can’t you see he’s resting? He thinks, and doesn’t say.
Dick in his dreams, on a rooftop. Let go, let go, let go.
Bluescale.
Tim is out in Dick’s clothes again, his suit, his weapons. Let go, in his mind, a litany. Something not quite right. There is fear everywhere, the Bat is dark and more violent than ever before. Something is wrong, wrong, wrong, the civillians feel it, the criminals on the street knows it.
Then, behind him, clunking and oiled joints. He turns around to Dick’s painted-on electric-blue unblinking eyes and smile. His nose is crooked.
Let go, Timbo. He says, and smiles, and it’s all Tim has ever wanted.
“Dick?” he says, voice wavering something terrible. He doesn’t notice the grapple dropping from his hands, doesn’t notice the slow steps Dick takes forward to rest his hands on his shoulder.
His hands are warm.
A huff of laughter, black hair brushing over his face, tickling.
Let go, Tim.
Click. Tim falls back.