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In his defense, Dick had been a bit too preoccupied with his current stab wound to pay attention to his bike’s gas tank. Bleeding out tends to dull the mind, and he doesn’t even register that his bike is running on empty until it shudders to a stop beneath him.
“No, no, no,” Dick begs, as though his pleas will magically breathe life back into the very dead motorbike beneath him.
He is barely weeks into being Nightwing, still unsteady in a new suit that makes him pause every time he sees his reflection. He knows he’s better than this, but years of working alongside Batman has made him sloppy. If he’d been out as Robin, Bruce would have been the one to do one last pass over their equipment before heading out into the Gotham night. Bruce would have caught something like this, wouldn’t have failed to notice such a glaring mistake until it was too late.
Dick doesn’t even recognize this part of Bludhaven. He’s still building a map of the city in his head, and in his current state, he must have taken a wrong turn.
He swings a leg over his bike and stands, pointedly ignoring the steady drip of blood leaking from his side. The wound is nowhere near a vital organ, and it would have been an easy thing for him to take care of once back in his apartment, but his medkit may as well be on the other side of the planet. Dick is completely stranded in a city he barely knows with no backup, no plan, and not a gas station in sight.
Grappling home is out of the question. He can’t afford to lose the bike, and if he leaves it here, it will most certainly be stolen come morning. Gotham would have known better than to lay a hand on Batman and Robin’s gear, but Bludhaven hasn’t yet learned to respect her protector’s toys.
Dick knows he’s damn near lost his mind when he wonders if pushing the bike back to his apartment is an option.
This is the first time he’s used the thing in weeks; he prefers swinging through the air above Bludhaven’s rooftops, free as a bird with no bat looming over his shoulder. But he’d been stretched thin tonight, with a major drug shipment landing on one end of the city and a corrupt police officer leaking information on the other. There hadn’t been enough time to stop both without a faster mode of transport.
The ground is damp beneath him as Dick sits down next to the bike. He allows himself thirty seconds to panic, to wish that he was back in Gotham with the Batmobile only a call away, before he tries to make a plan.
“Can’t grapple home,” he whispers to himself as he pulls up a map of the city. “I’d lose the bike. That’s the last resort. Can’t push the bike home before bleeding out. The nearest gas station is closed…Fuck.”
There’s a basic medkit in his bike. It won’t do much, but it’ll maybe keep him from dying long enough to make it until sunrise, when the gas station a half mile down the road will finally open. Dick’s only got a twenty in cash, but it’ll be enough to get him home.
He strips out of his gloves and sanitizes his hands, even though he knows it's a lost cause at this point. No amount of hand sanitizer is going to fight off the grime and grit of Bludhaven’s harbor, but the scent reminds him of Alfred.
Not for the first time, Dick wishes he could go back. Not to how things were when he left, but to how they were before, when he was still small enough to hide under Batman’s cloak, still young enough to beg Alfred for hot chocolate after a night out on patrol, still loved enough not to question his place in the home he’s now lost.
If things were still how they were, Dick wouldn’t hesitate to push the panic button on his suit. Bruce would come running, Alfred would stitch him up with gentle hands, and he would fall asleep under a mountain of blankets.
But that was before. Now, he has no one to come and save him, no hands except his own, and a single blanket that, no matter how many times he curls up beneath it, still doesn’t smell like home.
The sting of antiseptic brings him back to himself, and Dick begins the careful process of wiping the wound clean and packing it as best he can. He’s trapped his flashlight between his teeth, and his stomach turns as he inspects the wound under the light. Blood has always made him squeamish. Broken bones, dislocated joints, and deep bruises have never bothered him; he was thirteen the first time he pushed his own kneecap back into place, but blood never fails to make his mouth go sour.
By the time he’s finished, he’s so dizzy that he almost vomits. Dick brings his legs to his chest and buries his head in his knees. He can’t let himself fall asleep, not when he’s as vulnerable as he is, so turns his attention to the steady pain in his side. He focuses on the twinge in his knee, the tightness in his chest, the dull aches and throbs from blows he had been unable to block. Old bruises and forgotten injuries make themselves known, and Dick screws his eyes shut.
God, he wants Bruce.
It would be so easy to call. And, despite everything that has happened between them, Dick knows he would come.
But with Bruce’s presence would come a lecture, would come questions about his capabilities, his new identity, his insistence that he was finally ready to do this on his own.
You should have double-checked your tank. You should have packed a better medkit. You shouldn’t have let some goon with a pocket knife get so close. You should have been better, Robin.
Dick would rather bleed out on this filthy sidewalk than look Bruce in the eye and ask for his help.
The Bruce from before would have been kind, would have smoothed back his rain-soaked hair and told him that things would be better next time. The Bruce from before would have already been here, pressing gentle hands against Dick’s side as he helped Dick into the Batmobile. The Bruce from before would have never let him leave alone in the first place.
But the Bruce from before no longer exists. Neither does the Dick from before. They’ve been replaced by older, sharper, stranger versions of themselves, and Dick wonders if they will ever be able to find their way back to who they were.
It would be so easy to call.
Instead, Dick huddles close to his bike, pushes his rain-soaked hair out of his eyes with his own bloodstained hands, and waits for sunrise.