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The watery stems of the marigolds squish under the force of Jason’s fingers. He’s taken them out of the crinkly paper and plastic wrappings, and now their confined life blood slips from their veins and slides over his knuckles or puddles in the dips between his fingers. The wind bites harder where the liquid touches his skin, and transparent green teardrops drip onto the meager snow that has managed to stick to the ground, patches between headstones and in front of the graves people don’t walk to anymore.
No one has walked the path to these three plots since the snow fell and melted and fell again and has only stayed for one night.
To his left, there are two slightly sunken rectangles where grass has grown over the span of nineteen years. The headstones are two stubby slabs embedded into the ground, only names and dates engraved into them.
In front of him, a pile of dirt. Tiny green blades prick out from uneven soil where they’ve only just sprouted from their seeds. Winter will kill them before they’ve risen an inch.
To his right are more grassy patches with old stones erected tall at their heads, messages written below in love and money.
Apparently, one of the first things eight-year-old Dick asked Bruce to use his money for was to reserve a plot beside his parents. Bruce probably didn’t think he’d see the grave get filled before he was buried six feet under himself.
Jason’s knuckles have transformed from stinging to numb from plant blood and wind, and he thinks of bells as the distant church marks the hour.
It was a stupid comment, said in jest, but Jason really meant it. He said, for whichever of them died next, he’d make sure a string ran down to their coffin, attached to a bell. Except then Jason was held captive in the time it took Damian to be killed, buried, and dug up from his own grave by his grandfather, and Jason never had the chance to find out if it had truly been just a comment and not a promise.
Neither is there a bell beside this headstone, more ornate than his parents’. Dick Grayson’s body is not in his custom made casket.
His body is dead and cold and missing. His body is in whichever ocean or pit or cave the Crime Syndicate stuck him in after they were done making a spectacle of his sacrifice, of Lex Luthor’s heroism, taken out from under Batman’s fingertips.
There is a shrine-like grave memorializing Nightwing in the cemetery in Coventry, and another in Blüdhaven. His identity is out knowledge, a decades’ long secret now consumed by the public, but if they have searched for Dick Grayson’s real grave, they looked at the newest plots. They did not look for an empty pile of dirt in Burnley Cemetery that should have been filled by someone else’s coffin almost two decades ago.
This is an empty plot of dirt. There is a casket, but there is no body.
Jason closes his eyes.
He thinks he hears scratching, hears banging, hears dirt-muffled shouting.
There is no body.
The echo of the church bell still rings in his ears.
Jason tries to loosen his hold around the flower stems, but the wind has frozen his hand around them.
He brought yellow marigolds because when they’d held the funeral, there were wilted yellow blossoms scattered around Mary Grayson’s headstone. Jason picked one up and brought it to a florist, asking for a name.
Now, he’s holding onto a plain bouquet of marigolds so tight it’s like he’s afraid they’ll die once they slip from his grasp—will become nothing but wilted blossoms almost undistinguishable from any other flower.
What if Dick wasn’t the one to leave the marigolds? When would he have had time to? His funeral was a week to the day after his death, a week after his identity had been broadcasted as a live feed across the country, five days after Jason and Tim and Cass and Babs and Steph and Alfred watched the footage from Bruce, of Luthor shoving a pill down Dick’s throat, of Bruce tearing Luthor off and beating him like how Jason once imagined Bruce might’ve beaten the Joker, before Bizarro seemed to break the still recording, if no longer live, camera.
How could the flowers still have been there, wilted and slightly scattered as they were, after a full week? Jason should’ve asked the florist how old they seemed– no, that’s stupid. They were not a flower coroner. Jason is just going to have to believe. Who else left in Gotham City would leave flowers on Mary Grayson’s grave?
Jason still hasn’t let go of the bouquet.
Maybe he should have gotten a vase. Do people still bother to do that in public graveyards? He can’t see any around, but he's in an older part of the cemetery—older comparatively. Just nineteen years. It seems like not many people leave flowers for the two-decades-deceased. Except Richard Grayson. If he really was the one to have put them there a week before Jason picked one up—over a week before because they were all dealing with the Crime Syndicate’s havoc, unless he had somehow put aside the time from fighting alternate world crime to put flowers on his mother’s grave. Was there some kind of anniversary recently? Is this something Jason should have known?
Are Dick’s favourite flowers something he should have known?
He wonders if he should ask around, see if he might have told someone else.
Maybe Barbara might know. She’s locked away in the Clocktower with Cass and Steph. Maybe Tim might. He’s locked away in the Tower in San Francisco. Kori or Donna or Wally might.
Damian would have.
Damian asked after Jason’s favourite flower once. Jason didn’t have an answer, so the kid made him look through three different flower catalogues until he picked one just to make the kid give up. Damian never showed him the painting officially, but Jason saw it, once. There might be one like that of Dick somewhere in his mausoleum-studio. Jason doesn’t know if he has the heart to enter two tombs today.
Yellow marigolds are the coward’s way out.
Jason breathes, and he imagines he hears an echoing exhale below the dirt.
He wants to grab a shovel. He wants to drop to his knees and plunge his fingers into infant grass and soil. He wants to leave the flowers in a vase so they last longer. He wants to toss them atop the seed and snow-patched mound and let the wind scatter them so no one knows he’s been here.
Nightwing has always been the heart and hope of the American caped community, second maybe only to Superman. That’s what the Crime Syndicate was after. Strike down a fundamental pillar and watch the rest crumble. It didn’t happen. The Crime Syndicate didn’t win. Yet Dick still died. His death offered them no advantage in the end. His death only cemented what he already was—a martyr.
If there was a reason, a meaningful answer, would it make him any happier? Any more content? Is there a world where, after putting so much work into reconciliation, after getting attached all over again, Dick’s death wouldn’t affect him? Where Dick following Damian down into the metaphorical dirt wouldn’t feel like Jason’s chest is being compressed until his lungs and veins burst, spilling his life blood out from between his rib bones?
Another shaky breath. His fingers open in incremental amounts, just as the wind dies, and crushed stems and heavy blossoms fall in a heap by his feet. There is no poetic lift of a breeze to disperse them over the dirt like the decomposed leaves and petals over his mother’s skeleton. They lie limp in the puddle of green slush they dripped their life into.
He thinks he should be better at this, having a brother die a second time, but Damian has not prepared him for Dick. If only this was Dick’s second time around, if only this was like learning from a mistake and knowing how to navigate it the second time, if only this was Dick’s second death, Jason might know how to prepare himself for it, would know, maybe, what to expect. Maybe, if he digs up the casket right now, there would be that chance for a second time around.
But there is no body in the ground.
There will be no second chance, not this time.
Damian did not prepare him for Dick. Dick will not prepare him for whoever’s next. Selfishly, Jason kind of hopes it’s him.
What would Dick have done, if he had to repeat Jason’s second death? If he would have gotten that second time around, were there mistakes for him to learn from? But he had to go and take the dive first.
Jason doesn’t fix the flowers. He trusts the wind will scatter them, or let them wilt into yellow, indiscernible blossoms.