Chapter Text
Bad patrols are not horribly uncommon. There are always things that go wrong, discoveries in the process of a case that make you sick to your stomach.
People you can’t save.
It’s not like it’s a new experience. Which is why Dick isn’t totally sure why this one is getting to him so badly.
Or, he probably is, he’d just rather not examine it too closely.
He knows he will be ok. He’ll weather the next few weeks of poor sleep and awful nightmares, tremors in his hands and probably a panic attack or five, but it will fade again, eventually.
It’s just the meantime he has to get through. Just tonight, when the literal dead weight of a teenage girl is still pressed into his arms, when he can still feel the way her limp form had landed in his catch, throwing him off balance and spiraling, sending them spinning on the line, crashing into the building and bunting across reinforced glass and concrete supports.
Normally, when someone falls, they flail, trying to orient themselves, their muscles tense. They’re stiff when you catch them, unless they’re unconscious. But even then, it’s not like… not like this.
Blood soaking his arms, grip slick and unstable, brain matter leaking on his uniform—
He shakes his head, pacing back and forth in his living room, hands shaking, breathing too fast. He knows he’s about two seconds from diving deep into a panic attack and he needs to calm the fuck down. He needs—he needs this to not have happened. He just—she was only a teenager.
Just a kid, gun to her head on the edge of the terrace at the Columbia building downtown, forty-two floors up. The police were everywhere, flashing blue lights played on the backs of his eyelids when he blinked.
A megaphone down below screeching barely understandable English, trying to talk her down.
She’d been crying, waving the gun around like she wanted to get shot. Which—Dick swallows, dragging hands through his hair and pulling hard at the roots. His skin feels too tight, like he’s vacuum sealed inside his body.
He was too slow. He knew it was taking too long to start with, finding the right vantage point to swing from so he could grab her and land somewhere safely. He was too slow but—it wasn’t… it wasn’t his fault. He knows it wasn’t his fault but—
Leaping, he swung at speeds he never normally risked, knowing the impact might hurt her but that it would be worth it.
And then she looked up and their eyes met from a distance. There had been a long weightless moment when he thought maybe—maybe it would be enough. But in an instant her expression shuttered, something desperate shifting to something determined as her hand came up, arm crooked inward as steel flashed in the strobing lights below.
He remembers screaming, doesn’t remember what he said, if it was words at all, a flinch jolting through his body when the shot rang out, almost losing his grip on his grapple and plummeting down with her.
But he didn’t fall. Instead, he caught her just as she started to.
Dick goes to the sink, braces his arms against the counter and breathes heavily through his mouth.
Yeah, panic attack it is.
*
Dick has lost people before, of course he has. They all have. It’s always hard, always haunting. But he can’t remember one like this.
He’s showered twice, once in the suit and once out, both times still in the middle of the same panic attack. It takes over an hour just to get his breathing under control and he just—can’t stop thinking about—about being pushed to that point. Of being at that point when you can’t handle things anymore, when you just want it all to be over and—
And he keeps seeing Bruce, after Jason’s death, and Tim, after Bruce’s, Cass in the wake of losing Stephanie, and Jason after coming back from his own death. The risks, and the mania, not being able to stop for even a moment because if you do then everything will come crashing down around you and—Dick takes a deep, slow breath, tucked into the corner of his couch.
The TV is turned up, probably too loud for the time of night but sometimes it helps him stay in the moment. His hair is wet, and it drips uncomfortably down the back of his shirt when he tips his head back to take a sip of the chamomile tea Alfred brought him the last time he visited.
Bruce had wanted to die back then, Dick knows. It wasn’t hard to tell. He hadn’t been in a good place either, not where he could do anything to help. So it fell to Tim, this little kid who’s life Dick sometimes thinks they ruined.
He rubs his face, blinking away the thought. Tries to watch a commercial for Tide pods with any kind of comprehension while his heel jumps against the floor. It feels like he should go back out. Get back on patrol, go burn off the adrenaline still surging through his veins but every hard won shred of his mental health tells him it’s a terrible, terrible idea.
It’s why he went home right after the girl. He isn’t safe to be out there. For himself, sure, but for anyone else either. His hits would land too hard, his holds too tight, he would move too fast. People would get hurt and Dick would definitely be one of them. He’d be distracted, miss something obvious, probably get shot.
A stinging heat in his palms reminds him to loosen his grip before he shatters the mug in is hands.
Tim had almost died.
The shrapnel of a thought spikes through his consciousness and leaves him clenching his teeth so hard he can hear them creaking in his jaw. Abruptly, he leans forward and sets his tea on the coffee table.
Tim would have died. If Dick hadn’t caught him. He’d been half limp too, but much heavier than the girl. Dick had asked Tim “How did you know I would catch you?” because he couldn’t form words around the dark oil-slick fear of a different thought process all together. But Dick always doubted, always worried that the truth was much, much less kind than some mawkish idea about the infallibility of Batman.
Tim hadn’t even tried to save himself, like he was just too exhausted to keep fighting and that—
God, he needs to stop thinking about this.
Tim is fine now. And Bruce is fine now. And so are Cass and Jason and all the rest of his now extended family. This is just a traumatic moment playing havoc on his brain.
They’re probably still on their own patrols, or just getting in, writing up case notes or wrapping bruised ribs—they’re fine.
He saw Bruce just the day before, and Tim and Cass a few before that. They were all normal, nothing strange, nothing felt off. They were good.
Dick hasn’t heard from Jason in a while, but it’s not abnormal for him to drop off the radar for short stints. It’s fine. And he knows earlier that week Jason did surface for a bust on a case he was handling. Except… he disappeared again right after without word to anyone but Bruce, who had helped him on the bust.
Sometimes Jason’s moods can change so quickly. He has a lot of triggers, and some are severe. And that case involved kids and that’s hard for all of them but especially Jason, and what if there was fear gas, or Joker venom or any of the hundreds of Ivy’s toxins that can screw with your head? Bruce hadn’t mentioned anything but that wouldn’t be strange either, because Bruce fails to mention important things all the time and because Jason hates it when people talk about him when he isn’t there.
Jason told him once that he’d felt like a ghost that whole first year back in Gotham. Like he wasn’t really there, like he couldn’t die because he was already—gone.
The air feels sharp in his lungs, filaments of microscopic glass sinking deeper with every breath. He has to stop doing this. Stop spiraling.
“I am in my apartment, in Bludhaven, and tonight was awful, but I am ok.”
It always makes him feel like he’s losing it to talk to himself when he’s like this, but once upon a time a therapist told him it could help with grounding.
“Everyone else is fine, and no one is having a mental crisis but me right now. And I will not get a call that someone has killed themselves in the morning—Jesus Christ.“
Tongue crushed in his teeth, Dick hinges forward until his head is tucked between his knees. His phone is sitting on the coffee table in front of him and he knows he should call someone. Getting through these things on his own is always the preference but, it isn’t like the others wouldn’t understand, they all have their things, their low moments. And what if—
“No, God, brain shut up.” His voice echoes oddly under the coffee table and he pauses, breathing deeply once, twice, and then sits up in a rush, grabbing for his phone with suddenly clumsy hands.
“You’ve got to get a hold of yourself, Grayson. You’re going to freak someone out.”
His grip is too tight, the edges digging into his palms. He should call. That would be the smart, functional thing to do.
There’s Wally, or Roy, or any of the Titans. But they aren’t… they’ll talk him through it, they’ll tell him that things are fine, that he has no reason to worry about anyone but they won’t really know that. They don’t really know his family, they don’t understand the things that they’ve been through. Wally doesn’t even like Bruce, and anything he might say to Roy will make it back to Jason even if he doesn’t give any details. He’s always trying to give hints that are too glaringly obvious in a family of detectives.
There is also, he’s fairly certain, a six pack in his fridge. Which. Will only be enough to get him truly drunk if he manages to down them all in under an hour and it would wear off before the night’s over and then he’d probably feel even worse.
And that’s a terrible idea anyway. He shouldn’t drink. That is not on the list of functional ways to deal with your feelings.
But as he considers just jogging down to the bodega on the corner for a bottle of vodka, he figures it’s better than trying to patrol. Maybe it isn’t as functional as reaching out for help but it’s a lot less likely to lead to injury or death as long as he’s careful about it.
At least he wouldn’t hurt anyone but himself.
“Uuuugggh,” he groans, scrubbing a hand through his hair hard enough to sting.
What if he gets drunk and then something happens? What if someone needs him and he’s too out of it to be able to help?
Dick screws his eyes shut, gripping his phone in both hands and leaning down to press it into his forehead, letting it dig into his skin until it hurts, breathing through his mouth. He might throw up. This is ridiculous. He is being ridiculous, he should not be this messed up by this, it’s not even the first time he’s handled a suicide in the last six months but it—
Something about the weight in his arms won’t leave.
He pulls the phone away, stares at the screen as it lights up, and unlocks it with the swipe of a thumb.
Spit sours in his mouth as he swallows. Dick opens his contacts. What if he doesn’t call and someone needs him?
Tears burn at the backs of his eyes as he tries to pull up a reasonable, logical thought from the debris littered battlefield in his head. It would be good, functional even, to call someone when he feels like this. It could actually save their life if they are having serious thoughts of suicide - which they aren’t—they aren’t. He has absolutely no reason to suspect that anyone he cares about is feeling like that right now, and he will totally freak them out if he calls them sounding like this.
But, as much as his logical mind is convinced that nothing’s going on, he also knows there’s always a chance. It’s not like anyone realizes he’s having a crisis right now.
Dick should—he’ll call. He’ll call someone. It doesn’t have to be a big deal, he just needs to be careful about who and how he does it. Bruce is the obvious choice over one of his younger siblings but—but Bruce will probably figure out something’s wrong right away, and he can’t think of a casual reason to call that won’t be a dead giveaway. Bruce is probably still out on his own patrol and he’s probably with Damian, and if he thinks something is off with Dick he’ll end it early and Damian will get upset and Bruce won’t lie to him about it because that won’t even occur to him. Instead he’ll say something like,“it’s confidential,” and then Damian will get offended at being left out and follow Bruce all the way to his fucking apartment and—he doesn’t want anyone to see him like this but he might actually rather die than let it be Damian.
There’s Tim, but he would be almost as hard to fool as Bruce. He asks more questions, a lot more questions, and Dick isn’t feeling very confident in his ability to think on his feet at the moment and Tim—Tim really will freak out if he thinks something is wrong with him. He’ll get anxious and worried and Dick isn’t even in Gotham and the weather’s terrible; he doesn’t want Tim trying to come over here in this. His driving would be reckless and it’s Dick’s job to worry about him anyway, not the other way around.
Cass is… terrible on the phone and will either barely say two words before she hangs up without saying goodbye or she’ll try to get him on a video chat and that—would be a horrible idea right now, he doesn’t even want to know what he looks like.
Jason—… He’s the least likely to ask questions, and the least likely to notice anything is off. He’s also the least likely to pick up, especially since he’s been laying so low the last week. But if he does catch him, worst case scenario he’ll say something like “you’re being weird” and hang up.
Dick mentally runs through the list of organized crime cases he knows about in Gotham and Bludhaven. He tries to think of an excuse, some measly connection he can call and ask about a suspect on. Nearly everything that happens in Gotham comes through Bludhaven and vise versa, he can come up with something, surely.
The most relevant case he can think of is the one Jason just made the bust on with Bruce; a burgeoning child trafficking ring. The raid was a success, and all that’s left now is to hit the stragglers before they scatter back into whatever dark holes they crawled out of.
He pulls up their text messages, he’s sent Jason three in the last five days, all unresponded to. They’re not important, just little things he sends when they occur to him, so he doesn’t forget and because he wants Jason to know he thinks about him when he’s not around. Jason used to ignore him completely, but that had stopped over a year ago, now. He might not always respond the same day but he’s been consistent about getting back to him the last few months. Even if it’s just a thumbs up he’ll send something within forty-eight hours.
But it’s normal for him to go quiet sometimes. Except… is it, really, anymore?
And then he thinks about how things were a year ago, when Jason wouldn’t respond to him, thinks about that ultimatum, being prepared to let Bruce kill him. Carrying guns like a dare. Like… Like the girl, waving one around like she hoped someone would take the decision out of her hands.
The call is ringing through before Dick even realizes he's hit the button.
He sniffs roughly, clearing his throat in a rush, taking deep breaths through his nose, he lets them out slowly through his mouth. He expects it to take a few rings if he gets an answer at all—but by some miracle he picks up after the second tone.
“Wing, what’s up?”
“Hey,” Dick says, the vice around his throat easing just enough at the sound of Jason’s voice that he won’t sound like he’s having trouble breathing. Jason sounds normal, in a decent mood even. “You in for the night or are you still on patrol?”
“Still out, why?”
Dick hears traffic noise in the background, lending truth to Jason’s answer, not that he would assume a lie but—he needs the reassurance right now.
“Oh, I was just gonna ask for some info on the trafficking case if you’re not in the middle of something important.”
Jason grunts, his voice going deeper, mood immediately souring. “Why? You got reason to think it’s spread up there? To Bludhaven?”
“No, no, nothing like that,” he shakes his head, wiping sweaty palms on his pant legs. The last thing he wants is to make Jason think he’s missed something on this case.
“Ok… then what did you need?”
Dick scrambles for a moment. Why does he need the information now, if it isn’t related to something in Blud? “Oh just, Tim was telling me yesterday that he recognized the name of… of one of the enforcers you took in, he thought it might be related to an older case of mine.”
“Ok…”
Dick winces, it’s not his best lie but he doesn’t think it sounds that outlandish. “I just figured, if it is, maybe some of his old associates might be involved too. I could get you their names, if you wanted.” This is more convincing but not necessarily a great path to go down, since it’s bullshit. It’ll be easy enough to cover with Jason and just claim they were wrong after all, but if Jason asks Tim about it that could complicate things.
Tomorrow, when his brain no longer feels like a congealed bowl of oatmeal that’s been left out overnight, he’ll come up with a believable explanation to give Tim, just in case.
“…I mean, while I’d appreciate that, the info is all in the case file… Which you know, because it always is, and also because I sent everyone a bulletin about it the day after the bust and you still have your freaking read receipts on.”
Dick stills, whole body slowing as the gears in his head grind together out of sync. The memory slots into place with a dull thud and his stomach twists. What is wrong with him? He’s—he’s a much better liar than this, he never forgets details like that.
It isn’t even a detail, it’s basically the entire thing.
“Y-yeah, I remember.” Dick leans heavily on his thighs, elbows digging in painfully as he scrubs at his face. “I think—the file was corrupted, couldn’t get it to open.” He can hear the strain in his own voice beginning to pick up and clenches his jaw shut. This isn’t going to end well if he doesn’t get his act together.
“The file was corrupted….” Jason mumbles, words flat with skepticism. There’s a dull thud in the background, like Jason landing on the ground from a height. His voice jumps just enough for Dick to know he’s moving when he says, “But you called me instead of just redownloading it.”
Suspicion is clearly growing in his voice and Dick bites his lip, foot bouncing against the floor. Jason is always like this, he knows that. If he senses any kind of deceit he grows immediately wary and distrustful. Dick should be—is—a better liar than this.
“Why are you actually calling me?” The question lacks any inflection at all, which is probably good, really. It means Dick is still in neutral territory if he can find a way to recover this. He knows how to talk to Jason he just needs to relax. Clearly he can’t go back to pretending he had questions about the case so—he looks up at the tv, still on, still turned up high enough he wonders if Jason can hear it on the other line.
“Ok, you got me.” He tries for ease, some mild chagrin. “I just got in early and I’m still keyed up from patrol. I won’t sleep for a little while and I Just thought I’d pester you if you weren’t busy. I was bored.” By the end he feels relatively sure of himself, voice growing more solid with each word.
It sounded good. Believable. Something Dick would actually do, and doesn’t involve any important details he could have gotten wrong or forgotten. All he really needs is for Jason to stay on the phone. If he can just… just talk to him for a little while he knows he’ll calm down. He just wants to hear Jason sound normal and annoyed, complaining about his latest henchman. Jason can lie well in certain ways but he’s terrible at acting like everything is fine when it’s not and Dick can gauge his mood better than anyone else if he just has a little time to feel him out.
Jason is quiet then, no more background shuffling or any noise at all. Dick’s confidence in his lie begins to wane as the silence stretches. He swallows, wondering if Jason’s stepped inside somewhere, ducked into an abandoned building maybe.
“…Jay?” He finally asks, pulling the phone away to glance at the screen, as if maybe he’d somehow missed being hung up on in the distraction of coming up with a believable story.
“Yeah, I don’t buy it,” Jason snaps, voice suddenly annoyed. “This is about the case isn’t it? Did you talk to B? This his idea?”
Dick blinks at the growing anger in Jason’s tone, confused and trying to dig through his shattered brain to find what he must be forgetting here. Did he miss something? Were they fighting again? Should he know that?
“I—what are you talking about?” He finally asks, unable to come up with any recent memory that could hint at such a thing. Something must have happened on the raid because they’ve been getting along well lately as far as Dick knows. His stomach twists sharply at the clear implication that they aren’t, now.
But of course, his voice came out thin and he waited a beat too long to respond and that’s all Jason needs to decide he’s faking it.
“Oh perfect, now he’s got Golden Boy checking up on me. You all think I’m incompetent don’t you? I know what I’m fucking doing, and I don’t need you or anybody else to question my ability to—”
Jason can be difficult to talk to sometimes, like navigating a minefield on a bad day, but Dick is usually good at the recovery. Or at least - knowing when to end the conversation and try again another day. Now, he feels paralyzed. Jason’s voice turns to a dull ringing somewhere between “this is none of your fucking business” and “You always do this—“ His breathing begins to pick up speed, the calm mask he’d worked so hard to cobble together crumbling like sandstone, cracking apart at his jawline. He gnashes his teeth, throat going narrow and sharp at Jason’s barrage of accusations.
He can’t—he can’t handle this right now. He should try to talk Jason down, calm the storm enough to find out what’s actually going on because even as muddled as he is right now Dick knows Jason doesn’t attack out of nowhere like this. There’s something there that he was already upset about, something with Bruce.
But, hard as he tries to slow his heart rate and get his breathing under control, it all continues to rattle apart under the onslaught of Jason’s scorn. he can’t talk him down, or convince him that any of what he’s saying is untrue because he doesn’t even know what he’s talking about and now Dick’s eyes are starting to burn and his breathing goes thready and uneven and he doesn’t—he doesn’t know what to do.
Abruptly, Jason stops, breath heaving on the other line and barely cutting through the ringing in Dick’s ears. He has no manageable response. Somehow he’s fucked this up even more than he could have ever anticipated and made everything worse than it already was and now Jason is mad at him and all he can do is sit there trying not to cry.
“Well?” Jason spits through the receiver when Dick doesn’t respond. Waiting for his censure, apparently, some condemnation that Dick can’t even comprehend right now.
Fuck, he needs to get off the phone. His hands are shaking, eyes clenched shut, and in the middle of it all he feels a tiny drip on the back of the fist clenched between his knees. Frozen, he moves like a machine to uncurl his fingers and press a stiff hand over his mouth, trying to steady his breathing before he says anything. He thinks maybe he should just hang up—but then Jason will think he’s right, about whatever this is and he’ll think Dick is angry and—This is exactly the problem, isn’t it? Jason is always so convinced that everyone is judging him around every corner that he can’t ask for help when he needs it—
“…Dick?” Jason snaps, a hint of confusion seeping through the acid. Dick has been quiet too long, and the barely suppressed ocean of turmoil churning in the pit of his stomach is rapidly rising, pushing through the cracks too fast, with too much pressure—he is about to lose it and Jason—he can’t put this on Jason, he can’t—he can’t deal with this.
“Forget it,” he chokes out, a very clear hitch in his voice even pressed through the fingers still jammed over his mouth. He hits end call before Jason can respond and in a surge of utter frustration—at himself, the situation, at Jason—Dick launches the phone away from his ear and across the room with enough force to lodge itself in his stupid television. The screen flickers, colors flashing over the display in horizontal streaks as he leans forward and presses both hands over his face and looses a strangled scream into his palms.
The painful, tight feeling in his lungs is back with a vengeance; it feels like concrete blocks are stacked on his chest. Jason is always so—Dick wants to be angry. Furious that Jason still always jumps to assuming Dick is judging him, always thinking the worst of him, that Dick doesn’t think he’s good enough, that he still resents him for the stuff that he did to Tim, that none of them will ever really forgive him for his first year back in Gotham no matter how much time has passed and everything else that has happened since then. Because it has taken years off his life just trying to—to get Jason to see how much they all care about him. He would and has dropped everything for Jason when he needed it.
He wants to be angry that none of it has somehow been good enough for Jason after everything they’ve been through together except—
Except that Dick knows that the real reason Jason suspects all of those things is because it’s how he feels about himself.
And that’s so much worse. Dick knows what it’s like when something lodges itself in your brain and won’t let go and he doesn’t know—has never known—how to help with this. And it’s the whole—it’s the whole thing. It’s all of this—Jason is struggling with something or he wouldn’t have gotten so pissed off and now all Dick has done is made himself vaguely aware of that in the midst of already spiraling about this exact thing. And god, he knows it doesn’t mean anything. Jason has always been volatile, never lost the reflex to snap at anyone who gets too close when he feels vulnerable. It doesn’t mean anything. He knows it doesn’t mean anything.
But fuck.
Dick rocks himself forward on the couch, feeling like he’s losing his mind. He needs to calm down. He needs to breathe, and stop catastrophizing and be reasonable. Fingers dig into his scalp, nails just barely pinching the skin before he finally drops his hands, swiping away tears and snot with a harsh sniff when he looks up and stares at his phone, still lodged in the middle of the television.
He’ll probably feel embarrassed and ashamed about this tomorrow but right now he can’t bring himself to care. The speakers are still working, still droning out commercials and whatever show is on now; he doesn’t know, some kind of reality tv. Home decorating? As he watches, the rainbow lines striped across the display are slowly smudged with black, ink like blotches spreading out from the hole in the center.
What does he do now? Phone calls are clearly off the table. He can’t even even let himself think about the fact that he definitely sounded like he was crying when he hung up and what that will eventually mean. Dick has no idea what Jason will do with that. Hopefully pretend it never happened, if he’s lucky.
Dick really hopes he’s lucky. He also really wants to get drunk. That’s all he can think suddenly. He doesn’t want to feel like this. He has to stop remembering when Jason died, when he’d found out months later, just living his life like normal having no idea that Jason was already gone. When Bruce was so self destructive and Dick was so hurt that he—he’d given up and left. Left Bruce to destroy himself because—because he couldn’t save him.
But then… but then Tim.
And Cass… before Dick even really knew her—Babs was—was so worried she was gonna get herself killed, that it was what she wanted. That she hadn’t had anything to live for but the fight.
Pushed by some unseen force his body is suddenly up, shins knocking into the coffee table before he can manage to step around it. Frenetic energy still pulsing through his limbs like jerking electric shocks.
He can’t call someone else, he’s not going to be able to get himself together again and—everyone has too much going on in their own lives to deal with this. It’s not actually a crisis, Dick is just—having a moment. A fucking terrible moment but a moment that will pass.
God, he hopes it will pass.
He rubs at the center of his chest, still aching with tension, like the weight of the sun is concentrated to a point at the center of his sternum. Starting a breathing exercise is reflex at that point, running through it as he paces the living room. He’s already done this three times over the course of the night but sometimes it actually helps, so he keeps going. He concentrates on the count, on grounding, feeling his breath as it fills his lungs and letting it out slowly, controlled, not thinking about anything but his physical body and slowing his heart rate.
There’s no telling how long it takes, but at some point Dick stops feeling like Killer Croc is sitting on his chest, and he stops crying, breaths coming smooth and slow.
Ok. He’s ok. He can handle this. Maybe it will involve doing yoga the entire night to avoid falling asleep to torturous nightmares, but it’s ok. He knows that he’s overreacting, he also knows that you can’t always reason with your emotions but you can sometimes. And Dick has never been a quitter.
It’s ok, everyone is ok. And if they weren’t, they would reach out to him. Even Bruce—he’d made Bruce promise to talk to someone, if it got bad again. He hadn’t agreed that it would be Dick but—he’d said he’d talk to Clark. Dick believed him when he said it, and he still does.
If Dick just makes sure that he’s available, he can believe that someone will call him if they need him. He could even… he could send a text to everyone, just something casual but some kind of reminder that he’s thinking of them.
Yes, yeah, that would help. Nodding to himself, Dick finally approaches the tv to extract his phone, grimacing at the scrape of glass and the microscopic shards that are surely sprinkling across the top of his tv cabinet. The upper right corner of the phone screen is crushed, spiderwebbing across the surface. Dick sighs as he grabs a tissue from the box on the coffee table and swipes it carefully over the broken display. He’ll have to replace it soon but he’s lived with broken screens before.
Except that when he tries to unlock it, nothing happens.
He tries again, still nothing. A third time. He holds the button down in case somehow it got turned off in the violence of the collision. Then presses the side buttons simultaneously to try to trigger a restart, but he holds them down for a full count of sixty and nothing happens. Forcing himself to walk calmly to the wall where his charger is plugged in, he connects his phone and tries all of the buttons again. Nothing.
The tips of his fingers start to feel fuzzy as he stands there, staring at the blank screen. His broken, distorted face reflects back at him and pins and needles prickle across his skin. A buzzing starts in the base of skull and the room swims; it takes a moment to realize that he’s holding his breath.
Sucking in a deep, shuddering lung full of air, Dick unplugs the phone, tosses it uselessly to the floor, grabs his wallet and keys off the kitchen counter, shoves his feet into a pair of sneakers and rushes out the door.
It’s absolutely freezing and he shivers in nothing but a t-shirt and sweats, shirt damp around the collar. What little warmth is left in his body is leached away when he steps out from behind the windbreak of his building and it blasts through his still wet hair. But the bodega on the corner is close and the bell above the door welcomes him into dry air and harsh fluorescent lighting. It’s oddly busy for nearly two in the morning but it’s still easy to locate a cheap bottle of vodka. To stand in line and ignore the wet squelching of his toes in soaked through sneakers and avoid the eyes of the cashier who won’t look at him anyway.
He tried functional. It’s clearly time for a different approach.