Chapter Text
It's 3 am on a Saturday morning and Dick is tired. It isn't normal exhaustion either. It's that bone-deep, end-of-the-week, distinctly Friday kind of tired, and, on top of that, Dick had forgotten to eat dinner after getting home that night from his ever-increasing case load at the station.
Later, if someone were to ask him why, and if he were to answer them honestly, that'd probably be the first reason.
Because when Dick gets home, when he pulls his body through his narrow window and into his shitty apartment, trying not to think about how Batman has never in his life had to squeeze his shoulders through a foot-wide window to tumble into a decrepit studio at the end of his patrol, he really can't do much of anything at all. He collapses on the couch and just sits there, mask on, boots on, comms off. The silence in his apartment has been deafening ever since he learned to tune out the sounds of the traffic outside.
He hadn't even gotten to run a full patrol. He'd been shot in a stupid skirmish while trying to do recon work down by the docks. There was a new smuggling ring in town— one of Dick's least favorite kinds of cases to work on given their whack-a-mole nature —and what he'd thought was an small, newly established smuggling warehouse turned out to be a full-fledged black market hub that he somehow hadn't noticed.
He'd been distracted, going into the fight. Dick was taught by the best, and so he knows that you should never go into a fight you didn't set the terms of, and that, if you already have, you should keep your head in the game. But it was really hard to think about how, judging from the infrastructure of the place, this ring had been operating out of the warehouse for months before he'd even estimated they first set up in Bludhaven.
How much of that uptick in overdose deaths in Gotham this month, he'd wondered, was his fault? Had it only been drugs they'd smuggled out of the port? Had there been human trafficking he'd missed? Had there been people, trapped in that very warehouse, curled up in fear and awake all night, wondering when Nightwing was going to save them?
Maybe, if asked, that would even be the second reason why everything went down the way it did that night.
This is all to say that Dick had taken the bullet to his calf thinking about very altruistic, heroic things. He hadn't taken the bullet for anyone, per say, but it had been in service of the public. Or so he'd thought wryly, as he'd zip tied the final goons and one of them managed to get a wild punch in at the open wound, causing him to kick the guy in the face with a slightly unprofessional level of force.
It was a through-and-through, and seemed to have missed all major blood vessels. A lucky shot, and a luckier hit.
But Dick had been forced to end his night early anyways, apply some hemostatic powder and a bandage and grapple back to his base of operations/studio apartment covered in dirty dishes with a hidden arms vault.
Now, trying to shrink into the space between his couch cushions, the pain in his calf has only intensified, and he's forced to remember that Bruce will actually kill him if he dies by leaving a gunshot wound unattended for hours. He pushes himself off the couch, causing pain to shoot up his leg. It's always benign injuries that hurt the most. Something about wounds being non-life-threatening really kicks the body's pain response into overdrive, as if it knows that this is the kind of pain Dick can actually do something about.
After a bad patrol, when he's rushed back to the cave's med bay half unconscious, Dick doesn't remember feeling anything besides faintly uncomfortable. He's always thought of it as being half-dead in a way. How much of being human is tied up in the experience of feeling pain? How alive are you really when your body has given up trying to save you? Dick's never been a particularly spiritual person, but whenever he used to wake up from surgery, pain worming its way past a wall of morphine and forming a constant background sensation, he'd always had the peculiar thought that the rest of his soul had been restored to him. That in those moments, numb, barely awake, being loaded onto a stretcher, he'd only really had half of it.
Dick doesn't remember when he woke up and that half hadn't returned, but when he lets himself think about why he takes the long route home on patrols, why he feels almost triumphant when it ends in a hole through his calf or a wrenched shoulder, he thinks that must've been what happened. He hasn't always felt this way.
He stumbles into the bathroom and crash lands on the toilet lid, where he peels off his Nightwing suit and props his leg up on the bathtub to apply some haphazard stitches and a ton of disinfectant. It's relaxing, to have something to do that isn't sitting on the couch staring vacantly into space. He should've done this when he got home. It isn't so bad, the sting of the disinfectant.
When he's done, the his calf still hurts like a bitch and looks worse, so he stands up to rummage through his medicine cabinet for gauze to cover the stitches and maybe some painkillers. He finds the gauze front and center where it usually is, but as he grabs it his fingers brush up against the old pill bottle at the back of the cabinet. Though he doesn't know it yet, this will be the catalyst for the rest of the events of tonight.
The opiates Doc Thompkins had given him had sat mostly untouched up until now. He understands that the kinds of wounds he gets on a weekly basis aren't easily managed by popping a couple aspirin, but he tries to avoid using the stronger stuff anyways, when he can.
He doesn't like to remember Roy for the ways that he'd struggled, especially when there were so many better things to remember him for, but he'd be lying if he said it hadn't made a strong impression on him when he'd first heard the real reason Roy wasn't living with Ollie anymore.
So the pill bottle stayed on the shelf just then. He doesn't have work tomorrow, so he doesn't need to shower, or brush his teeth, or attend to the small cuts on his face from when he'd crashed through the warehouse window. Instead he just kicks his costume into a slightly smaller pile on the bathroom floor, security protocols be damned, changes into flannel pajama pants and a Gotham Knights T-shirt, and peels off his mask, leaving the tacky glue residue around his eyes in place.
He wanders back into the living room and turns the TV on, crashing back onto the couch. He's not quite sure what he's watching. Some stupid dramedy about rich people behaving poorly. Eventually he turns the TV off, because he sees enough of that in his daily life— and, speak of the devil, his phone buzzes from the other end of the couch. Dick had programmed it to make a slightly different sound for all of his most frequent contacts, which is why he knows before he picks up the phone that it's Bruce.
He doesn't want to check the message, but on the off chance that it's work related, he does anyways, staring at the phone for a long second before snatching it up off the cushion like it's capable of scrambling away.
Status update? the text reads.
It's pretty typical for Bruce to reach out like this post-patrol whenever Dick needs to pop on the main comms to update everyone in Gotham about a relevant investigation in Bludhaven. Tonight it had been some basic facts on the smuggling ring's evident shipments over the harbor to Gotham.
Bruce had even bothered to include a question mark this time, and two words instead of the usual one. He must've felt bad about the not-fight the two of them had gotten into last week about whether or not Dick had the right to invite Damian on Bludhaven patrol without consulting Bruce first. Like he and Damian hadn't patrolled for more than a whole year when Bruce was gone. Like Damian wasn't as safe with Dick as he was with Bruce. Like Dick was a family friend, a convenient babysitter, not Damian's once-upon-a-time almost father.
But Damian hadn't thought that of him, Dick's sure. It was a private thought, one that he'd soothe himself with when he stood in the doorway to Damian's room after tough patrols, watching the boy's chest rise and fall in his sleep. He'd adopt Damian someday, and the terrible all-consuming maelstrom of love he felt for the last remaining Wayne would finally find a place. He'd do a better job than Bruce had. When he adopted Dami, if Damian wanted that, he'd sneak it into every conversation. This is Damian, my son, he'd have said to everyone they met. It'd get ridiculous. This is Damian, my son. Also, he'd like a double batburger and fries please. Damian would laugh, and know he was wanted.
But Damian is his kind of brother now. As related to Dick as Dick is to Bruce, which is to say: it's complicated.
Status update? stares up at Dick from the glowing screen, the only light in the room since he'd turned the TV off. Dick puts the phone down on the coffee table, turning it over. He leans back against the couch again, zoning out for a bit. He's been doing that more and more often now. He'd like to say it was restful. It would be nice if he lost time then drifted into sleep, or if the benefits translated into something similar, but the only upside of time blurring together was less of it spent thinking about things he didn't want to think about.
Dick can never quite sleep anymore. He's always had trouble with it, but it hadn't been this bad, in his memory. He's not too worried though. Insomnia is common enough in his line of work, in both his lines of work actually. It's reassuring to know that everything he's felt lately has an identifiable cause. He'd been meaning to speak to Doc Thompkins about a sleep aid of some sort. It's probably unrealistic— Dick couldn't have anything that might make him drowsy for either of his jobs —but it never hurt to ask.
For now, however, Dick has to wait out the night, so he goes to his fridge and pulls out one of his prepped dinners. He doesn't cook often anymore, in part because he only has a fraction of his counter space left to work on ever since he'd started letting the dishes pile up, but supermarkets sell a lot of pre-made elements nowadays, so Dick can just portion them into Tupperware every Sunday.
He has a reputation for enjoying sugary cereals and extra-large Hawaiian pizzas, but the depressing truth of the vigilante gig is that upkeeping the kind of energy and physique needed to spend four to five nights a week (or more) getting the shit beaten out of you and grappling from roof to roof required concerted effort. The sheer amount of protein and calories every meal needs to have to maintain even Dick's more lithe figure had made mealtimes a bit of a chore since he moved out of the manor and started cooking for himself.
Dick tries to enjoy the unseasoned cold salmon as he chews it mechanically, standing by the kitchen island, Tupperware in hand. He normally tries a bit harder than this to make his dinners edible, but he'd been unmotivated earlier this week and had kind of just thrown everything in the proper containers upon getting back from the grocery store. He probably could've mustered up the energy to find and juice a lemon on this crap though.
He eats most of his food before calling it quits and finding a place to stack the mostly empty container on his cluttered countertop. He's started just buying more containers when he runs out of clean ones instead of doing the dishes. He thinks maybe his apartment would look like a hoarder's house at this point, if he owned a significant amount of stuff outside of the kitchen. He'll clean everything up this weekend. Then he can invite Damian over and the kid will stop pestering him about why they always have to hang out at the manor.
His calf is still killing him, his body impolitely disregarding the fact that there isn't really anything else left to do to attend to the wound. On his way back to the couch, Dick grabs a beer from his fridge. Beer, overnight oats, and unseasoned fish. It's a truly inspiring selection.
The couch is no more comfortable than it had been the last time he'd sat on it. The sky isn't even lightening yet. Just how much patrol time has he lost? And all because he'd let some unskilled thug get the better of him in a moment of distraction. Dick has been training for nearly two decades and now he'll be off patrol for the next couple days because of some shithead who probably started the job last month.
He takes a sip of his beer and tries smiling at the empty apartment. It's an exercise supposed to cause some sort of positive feedback loop between his facial muscles and his brain, but he thinks he just looks psychotic and he ends up wondering if it's something the Joker does in his free time in Arkham, which really doesn't help his mood.
Dick isn't sure when it had gotten this bad. He's always had problems. That night with Tony Zucco that Bruce and him had talked about once and never again. The fighting all through high school, the books thrown at the wall and the glasses shattered on the kitchen floor, all of it getting worse and worse until Dick called it quits and moved in with the Titans. Going out and getting blackout drunk or high or both in clubs every night he wasn't working during that ill-fated semester in college.
No one had been too worried. Dick like people, liked parties, and was good at pretending to be more sober than he was. He'd never gotten attached to a particular substance, just liked feeling different for a short while. He'd told people that he wanted to experience life like a normal person for once, to not be held to the standard of Robin after getting out from under Bruce's thumb. And then there'd been that awful month with Catalina, the one he never really found the right words to talk about or think about. He'd wanted Bruce to notice something had changed but he hadn't want him to know what, yet he'd been unnerved when he had. Dick hadn't even noticed really, how careless he'd been on patrol until Bruce had said those words, back turned and cowl on, because he never had quite figured out how to look someone in the eyes when he needed to.
You have no right to expect me to excuse you for losing sight of the value of yours
So he knows he's never coped like a normal person. But he knows he also used to do things post-patrol other than drink and make faces at a blank wall and think about how he got here.
Thinking. That would be reason three. Just a little bit too much time with him and his thoughts, which had been all Dick had ever needed to do stupid, reckless things.
Like most big decisions Dick had made in his life, he doesn't think about what he's doing until he's in the bathroom dry swallowing one of the pills from that old pill bottle. He knows it's bad practice to take them with alcohol, especially since he doesn't remember the exact dosage and doesn't bother to read the label. But Dick's been patrolling since he was nine years old. He's seen less healthy people than him do far worse, and wake up in the morning with a bad hangover and another regret to tack on to a long list of them. He'll be fine.
The thing Dick isn't able to explain to himself now, and won't be able to explain to anyone else later, is why he takes the bottle with him back to the living room, where he reclines on the couch and waits for the meds to kick in. And thinks some more.
They're nice, the opiates. They take the edge off the pain of the hole in his calf a lot more effectively than aspirin or Tylenol, for one. He's not planning on making it a habit— it must've been nice at first for Roy too. But then Roy used again, and again. The problem was, he never thought he'd have to use tomorrow. Every night, tomorrow was going to be better. Tomorrow he wouldn't need it anymore, and so tomorrow he would quit.
Self-delusion is a powerful drug. Tomorrow will be better. Tomorrow he'd be better. Tomorrow he won't stare at a wall after patrol, ignoring a text from Bruce and nursing a beer. Tomorrow Bruce will call him instead, say something nice, and say it the right way for once, with the right words and neither of them will have to tamp down the urge to start a fight. Tomorrow he'll sleep through the whole night, and wake up in the morning without feeling tired like this.
Tomorrow, on patrol, no one will try and kill their spouse or rob and old man or hurt a child. Tomorrow the smuggling ring will pick up and leave town, and the Gotham rogues will stay in their cells at Arkham and decide that they finally want to go on a journey of self-improvement. Tomorrow, everything Dick has seen and everything he has done won't weigh so heavily on him. Tomorrow people will want him and love him for more than what he can do for them, for more than work or sex or always knowing what to say. Tomorrow Dick won't be Damian's sometimes father, or Bruce's sometimes son. Tomorrow he won't run face first into all the ways he's inadequate, wholly incapable of saving Bludhaven and barely capable of getting out of bed.
Tomorrow the world won't kill him slowly.
Tomorrow, he might finally run out of tomorrows.
Tomorrow, Dick won't remember taking the whole bottle of pills, but he'll remember the faint relief he feels now, realizing he has.
The apartment is still and quiet. The city hums its distant, indifferent, lullaby outside of his window. The empty bottle is on its side next to Dick, and Dick is slumped up against the couch, head tilted back and eyes half closed. His limbs feel far away and difficult to reach, like every signal he sends them needs more time to be processed than normal, but any sort of panic he might've felt about that went out the window a bottle of beer and multiple handfuls of painkillers ago.
Dick knows he should call someone. Percocet is a pretty potent drug, mixed with alcohol even more so. The signs of an overdose have been drilled into him thoroughly over the years, from Bruce's instruction to the many BPD trainings on the subject, and Dick usually carries Narcan with him on patrol for a reason. He's all out of it tonight though, a fact and he'll tell himself later had slipped his mind.
He knows all the signs, and all of them circle listlessly in his head. Pale, clammy skin. Check. Slowing heartbeat. Check. Irregular breathing. Check. Soon, his hands and lips would start turning blue and then he'll be unconscious and unable to call anyone. There are too many things to explain to EMTs— the gunshot wound was bad enough, but damning when paired with the Nightwing suit lying in a crumpled pile in the bathroom. But if he calls Babs, she'll call the EMTs and have someone from Gotham get there in time to move the suit. And it's not like they'll have reason to go digging through his apartment while he goes into cardiac arrest on his living room floor, cause plainly in sight.
But Dick's not sure, for a second, if calling is worth it. Bruce knows he knows the appropriate dose of Percocet, or at least that he knows the definitely inappropriate dose. Babs too. And the thing is, he's still tired. Really tired. Too tired to wake up tomorrow and spend the next couple months convincing everyone he's fine until they forget he ever wasn't.
Maybe he's too tired to wake up tomorrow period. And so what? Plenty of people die young. He's lived through enough crap to fill multiple people's lifetimes. He's had his time in the sun, and he'd had more than his time in the shadows.
Damian— that'd be the catch. Dami will be angry, upset, betrayed even. He'll never believe Dick did it, hell, Dick's not sure, even now, that he's done anything either. It feels more like he's connecting the dots post-possession or mind control (and what he'd trade to not know what that feels like) then suffering the consequences of something he chose to do.
Yet even if Damian doesn't believe him, he'll be upset. But the kid's strong, and resilient too. He remembers watching Damian slowly move on from Bruce's death, one foot in front of the other as he rebuilt his life and his conception of himself. He'd thought highly of Bruce, idolized him even, and in the early days Dick hadn't been sure Dami would ever fill the jagged hole Bruce had left, find a way to live with Bruce's legacy but not his presence.
It was hard for Damian, but if he had to do it again, he could. It might even be easier this time. It strains their relationship, Bruce and Damian's, having him around. Dick will fit into Dami's life better as a bittersweet memory than a bitter older brother.
But then another thought surfaces, unbidden and stubborn. Titus. The lumbering Great Dane that follows Damian everywhere. When Damian would cry, really cry, the kind that made his whole chest shake, the kind he didn't want anyone to know he did ever, Titus would alternate leaning his whole body against his face and licking at his eyes, and refuse to leave, hiding the boy's tears until they stopped.
Dick remembers the first time he saw Dami cry like that, walking in on him accidentally. He hadn't asked what it was about. They hadn't known each other well enough then. The dog seemed to have things in control anyways. But it had hurt so badly, seeing his little brother so desperate, clinging to that dog.
He'd been acting his age for once, something that was usually encouraging to Dick. And it was good, it really was, that Damian was getting his emotions out. But it had still hurt like hell in a way Dick couldn't quite describe, a phantom pain in his chest where he thought Damian must be hurting. He hadn't felt that exact way for another person before. He'd wished Bruce was back then, so he could ask him how he'd survived this, loving another person this much. Back when Bruce was dead, it was easier to pretend like he knew for sure that Bruce had experienced love for Dick like Dick experienced love for Damian.
If Dick dies right now, and he's somehow just now realizing he could, Damian will cry like that. He will get up, because he never stays down for long, but first he'll bury his face in Titus's side, and Bruce will feel that phantom pain in his chest combined with whatever complicated something he feels for Dick. And Alfie—
Dick reaches for the phone, movements slow and uncoordinated. His fingers bump into the edge of the coffee table, then the phone. He manages to pull it kind of towards him. Thankfully, his phone has a safety feature meant for moments like this. Tim designed it for all of them, because it's bad to call your boss when you're bleeding out and address them as 'Batman' or 'Oracle'. Dick holds down the volume button until his phone starts to dial Babs.
She picks up immediately, probably just wrapping up her work in the clock tower for the night. She's been living mostly nocturnally recently, as several cases in Gotham started requiring more overtime.
"Dick. Hey. What's up?"
Her voice is casual, but already colored with a touch of concern. It's not unusual for Dick to call after patrol. They stopped being weird about being exes a while ago, and Dick's always counted Barbara as a close friend, regardless of their relationship status. But it's unusual to be able to get a word in edgewise before he starts monologuing. Dick tries to start fights on his own terms, and he tries to start conversations on his own terms too. He's always taken more after Bruce than he'd like to admit.
He tries to smile. People can hear the face you're making over the phone. His face doesn't cooperate, not all the way, or maybe he just can't feel it well anymore.
"Babs" he says, slowly. The main defense against slurring your words is slowing them down. That all goes out the window when he tries to form his next sentence "Yeah, yeah, jus— jus' want'ed t'hear your voice" he forgets what he was on the phone to say exactly. The thoughts in his head feel complete the moment he thinks them, but nebulous the next second, and completely nonexistent by the time he tries to push them into words using his too heavy tongue.
"Dick. Can you tell me where you are?"
Her voice is overly calm now. It's her emergency operator voice. That's was a bad sign— every time she has to do that, he gets yelled at later about calling too late or taking stupid risks on patrol. And Dick knows what this looked like, the pill bottle inches away from his face— and when did he get on the ground? —and the beer bottle not much farther. This is bad. Very bad. He just thought he'd have more time before he upset her.
"I think I-" his words are all coming out as one word and he can't stop it. He thinks he hears her breath hitch on the other end of the line. "I took t' much of— but th'suit's in th'bathroom" he's not making sense.
"OK. So you're in your apartment?" Dick tries to answer but can't quite form a word. It's embarrassing. The last time Dick called someone slurring his words like this and babbled on the phone to another human being, he'd at least had the excuse of being 22. Barbara keeps talking, but it's all starting to drone together even as her voice increases in urgency.
"Dick. Listen to me. I need you to focus on my voice. Can you do that for me?" A pause, the sound of her fingers flying across keys in the background. "You told me you took too much of something. What are we talking about?" She pauses, types a bit more, looking something up. "The painkillers Thompkins prescribed? The ones you keep for emergencies?"
"Th' bathroom" he mumbled "th' suit, can't— th' cops, can't explain th' suit to th—"
"Okay, okay, don't worry about the suit" she says, voice steady and pitched a little too high, as if trying to console a small child. "Someone's on their way. You just stay on the line with me, okay? Keep talking. Tell me what you see"
He tries to laugh, but it turns into a shallow, wet cough. Someone. Yeah right. Bruce. He'd hang up on her right now if he thought he could move his hand the right way. Or if he cared. He's finding it a little hard to mind, actually. He'll probably be unconscious by the time Bruce gets here anyways, and if everyone was right about the bedside vigils and the pacing outside the cave med bay and the furtive hand holding, Bruce always gives more of a shit about him when he's not awake to see it.
"Ceiling" he said "I see…yeah, ceiling" his eyelids were heavy "Babs, I dunno if…if I can…"
He hears her voice responding, but not really. For the first time in a long time, Dick feels OK. Maybe he was too late, but it wouldn't be too bad to go out this way. He'd called, so everyone will know he hadn't meant it. It would be the perfect accident. He'd felt sick a moment ago and he still does, but impossibly light too, like the half of the soul left in his body is floating away too, like he's leaving with it this time.
He thinks he can still hear the comforting rumble of the cars outside and Bab's voice over the phone as he sinks into unconsciousness. Her tone is hard to place, and the world swims and spins until he's uncomfortably dizzy. He doesn't remember quite when, but eventually the darkness in his apartment grows enough that he can slip away into it, and finally disappearing into something like sleep.