Chapter Text
Upon his return to consciousness, the first thing Dick is aware of is the whirring noises coming from somewhere to his left.
The whirring noises increase in volume until Dick feels a rush of air blow across his face before the noises fade. He tries to shift his head to the side and crack his eyelids open to identify the source of the sound, but promptly recoils. It’s too bright. The bulbs buzzing above his head are ear-splitting. He cries out at the sharp line of pain that shoots through his already pounding head and promptly retches against the rough concrete he’s sprawled out against, then partially blacks out for another minute.
Dick spits blood onto the ground and slowly comes back to full consciousness. As he wipes the dust from his face, smeared into a slick mess by the sweat on his brow, he decides that this is the absolute worst way to wake up.
“Uuuuuuugh.”
Metropolis is a lot rougher than he remembered it being.
[THIRTEEN MONTHS AGO]
The League honored Wally in the same way all fallen superheroes are honored: with a pedestal and a hologram in the memorial garden.
The memorial garden - the place where heroes are able to mourn their fallen comrades long after their bodies are sent back to their families to be buried as a civilian, too. Dick insisted on being alone the first time he visited the hallowed grounds after Wally’s death. Of course his teammates had offered to go with him – M’Gann, Kaldur, even the younger kids. But he was trying to be strong for his team when everyone else was falling apart and he needed time to just… do a little falling apart of his own. Without the eyes of his teammates watching.
He turned the corner through the forest into the clearing and saw the hologram of his best friend, the love of his life, the man who was always able to bring back the humanity inside him when he was in a dark place, and he collapsed. Twenty feet away from the hologram, he went boneless onto the ground. He left a trail of tears across the grass while he crawled, hands and knees, to the base of the memorial.
He pulled himself up to the smooth metal pedestal that his best friend’s glowing image stood upon. “I am so sorry,” he sobbed over and over, until he wasn’t even sure what he was apologizing for. For dragging Artemis back into this life, maybe. For almost getting her killed, over and over again, and for not even regretting putting her in danger. For becoming so much like the man he never wanted to be that he ended up pushing away his best friend. For failing to locate the twenty-first chrysalis that Wally ended up giving his life to shut down. For not being able to stop it from killing him once Dick had arrived on the scene in the Bioship. For… for…
For being such a coward that he hadn’t even been able to admit his feelings for Wally, even to himself, until Wally was already gone.
He developed a habit, a month after Wally’s disappearance, of sneaking into Barry and Iris’s house. He would go into Wally’s room and throw himself onto the bed, sobbing into the comforter, huffing in the familiar scent of Wally. Pheromone-laced musk, latex, and something sweet. It was comforting as much as it was agonizing. He did this in the middle of the night when he knew neither Barry nor Iris would notice his presence. They wouldn’t want him here, he thought. It was his fault Wally was gone.
Over the course of his frequent visits, he memorized everything inside Wally’s room. Eighty-three cents in change was in the pocket of the dirty jeans thrown haphazardly onto the worn hardwood floor. A copy of Crime and Punishment, no doubt a school assignment, was dog-eared to page ninety-one. Piles of comics were scattered across his floor, some half-read, some still bagged and boarded. One day when he snuck in, he looked through the comics to find out how far Wally had gotten through each storyline. Wondering what Wally had died without knowing.
Dick soaked up everything he could about Wally, memorized it all, as if learning these new little snippets of him would keep him alive just a little bit longer. At the end of every visit, he ended up curled up on the hardwood floor, shaking hands clutching his increasingly greasy hair from lack of proper care, face pressed into his knees, sobbing, wishing desperately that things were different.
He ended up leaving the team. He decided to do it the right way – he shaved his face (for the first time in weeks), and put on his Nightwing costume. He went to the Watchtower and sought out Kaldur, all the while rehearsing the conversation in his head, unsure of how to even make the words come out right. Wondering how to make him understand.
He stumbled over a few different phrases until he found a few to string together that made some sort of sense. “I need a break, Kaldur. You, me, Wally, we… We founded this team. Without him…”
He didn’t even bother mentioning that Wally hadn’t been on the team for over a year, and Kaldur didn’t bother to comment on it. Dick’s reasoning was a half-truth and Kaldur knew it, but he seemed to understand - at least to some degree - because he acquiesced to his departure without too much of a fight. Dick just gave him a grateful smile, hoping it conveyed everything he wanted to say, and walked away.
Before he left the Watchtower though, he paused in the doorway to examine the team gathered inside. They were so young. So full of life, so eager to prove themselves. They hadn’t known Wally; not really. They had heard stories about him, told with reminiscent smiles by the oldest members of the team, but they hadn’t worked with him the way the others had. They hadn’t witnessed the things he had, either.
They would, though. Someday they would give their lives for their cause, or else watch someone they loved give theirs. They were all so prepared, at any moment, to forfeit their lives for their cause that they had never paused to think about what misery they’d leave in their wake when they did.
“Business as usual,” he said with a bitter smile.
As much as he knew quitting the team would give him a necessary break, it gave him an unnecessary amount of free time. He'd never really had free time, so he was at a loss as to how to handle it. He still patrolled Gotham with the rest of the Bats and there was never a shortage of baddies to take out, but even that was limited to nighttime hours. The days were long and full of time to himself – time to himself that left him dangerously alone with his thoughts.
During the first few weeks after quitting the team, he took to wandering around the manor. Walking calmed him – at least he felt like he had a destination, somewhere to go – and he didn’t feel like going out in public, so the manor and the gardens were his main options. He would half-expect to hear the thunderous sound of a speedster dashing up the stairs to burst into his room, as Wally had frequently done in his youth. Hell, he had done it less than a month before he disappeared. Every time he heard a loud noise, he couldn’t help but allow a little bit of hope glimmer inside his chest as he turned towards the door. But he was always left alone, and with a hollow heart.
It had always been clear to everyone around him that Wally was his everything, even when they were young. Wally was his first real friend, the first person he revealed his identity to, the first person he ran to when things went wrong. Everyone knew Wally meant a lot to him. They just didn’t know exactly how much. Hell - Dick himself hadn't, up until his death.
Dick had been forced to watch as he disappeared, dissolved into nothing. He saw it with his own two eyes. But he still couldn’t let him go. He could never let him go. Wally was a habit that had been ingrained within him. He couldn't stop himself from holding on.
The speedster had frequently been up in the middle of the night (too much energy for one body, he used to say), so he had a habit of texting Dick silly things at odd hours. Even two months after Wally's death, when he woke up in the middle of the night and forgot for a blissful moment that Wally was gone, he would check his phone to see if Wally had texted him. And whenever Dick heard something funny or when something crazy happened on patrol, he couldn’t stop himself before he thought I should tell Wally about this later, and then he would catch himself and heart would drop into a bucket of ice.
He was gone. He was really gone.
…No.
He refused to let himself believe it. He needed to resist it, the terrible dark thoughts creeping up on him. If he didn’t resist it, if he just let himself fall into the abyss….
Well. He didn’t know what would happen, then.
One night, on patrol, he grappled across an alleyway and swung down to the roof top, his padded boots nearly soundless as he stuck the landing flawlessly. Another habit - he couldn't not move his body the right way while grappling around town any more than he could stop himself from missing Wally. He paused to get his bearings and realized that he was on the roof of the old pizza joint that he and Wally would frequent in their youth.
Dick fell to his knees before he even knew what was happening, and began to sob as despair overtook him. Every place, every thought, somehow led back to Wally.
Rain streamed through his hair, clumped with sweat and tousled from swinging around Gotham’s underbelly. His once-pristine Nightwing suit was faded and tattered. The comm piece in his ear had died almost two hours ago.
The escrima sticks slipped from his grip and clattered against the concrete roof beneath his feet. The metal tips had rusted over, and the rain probably wasn’t helping. He hadn’t had to use them recently, so he had no idea if they even administered electricity properly anymore - he hadn't had cause to use them. He hadn’t fought a villain in two weeks. He had a sneaking suspicion that Bruce and Tim were intentionally keeping him away from the action while out on patrol.
He didn’t care anymore. At this point, he was only patrolling to have something to do. Somewhere to go. His head pounded, his vision blurred, his body was cold. He sank to his knees and pounded his fists into the cold, wet cement. The only reason he knew he was crying was because the drops of water streaming down his face had gotten warmer and the salt stung his raw cheeks.
His muscles ached. He was so weary. He used to be able to deal with this. He had a rock. He had a lightning rod to direct his energy, his emotions, his pain.
Sometimes he got pissed at Wally for disappearing - for leaving such a hole in his soul when he walked out of his life. He punched walls. He broke a wrist and two fingers. He wrapped them up and cried into his medical kit, feeling guilty for being angry at the one thing he couldn’t live without. It wasn’t Wally’s fault, he kept telling himself. He knew what would happen as he ran after the other two Flashes – he was a physics genius, he had to have known – but he had also known that there was no alternative. It was him, or literally everyone else on the planet.
He had saved the entire world, but in doing so, Dick had lost his.
He had always been easily seduced by darkness. It was part of being a Bat. All of their hero identities were born from trauma. They all had dark spots inside of them, and it’s all too easy for him to fall face-first into those dark spots when he doesn’t have a source of light. And Dick’s source of light was always Wally.
So it was during that time that Dick had started raiding Bruce’s liquor cabinet. At first he would have a beer or two to help himself fall asleep and to stave off the horrific dreams of watching Wally die in increasingly abstract ways, then when it stopped working, he moved on to the harder stuff. A shot of bourbon or scotch before bed. A double shot of vodka after patrol. Pretty soon, he graduated to drinking straight out of the bottle, and he popped the seal earlier and earlier in the day with every passing week.
Bruce noticed, of course. He tried to talk to Dick about it, but Dick wouldn’t hear of it. It felt nice to feel tipsy. It made him feel warm in his chest, which was a nice contrast to the coldness inside his heart that he had felt ever since the moment he had stepped out of the bioship and watched the love of his life disappear.
Soon, he was drinking first thing in the morning and all throughout the day. He tried to have a sense of humor about it – he quipped to Tim, “You can’t drink all day if you don’t start in the morning!”, but he got the feeling that nobody else in his family thought it was funny. They didn’t, based on their expressions and the increasingly frequent interventions they tried to have for him. They sat him down, one by one, asking him to stop drinking, talking about “unhealthy coping mechanisms”, referring him to some psychiatrist or another, playing on his sense of guilt – “Wally wouldn’t want this”; “You need to be there for the team”; blah, blah, blah. He had placated them at first, pretending to listen to them and nodding along at all the right parts, but he lost interest in it after a while and began brushing them off in increasingly ill-mannered ways.
And then late one evening, when Dick was sucking the last few drops from a bottle of scotch, Artemis called him.
Figures. It just figures that when he was drunk off his ass, the very last person in the entire multiverse he wanted to speak to had called him.
...Then again, he’s drunk off his ass a lot of the time nowadays. If anyone calls him, odds are he’s going to be drunk when they do it. But he had been drinking scotch, and scotch makes him an angry drunk. She would have had better luck if she had called Dick after he had drank tequila, but Artemis of all people was probably the last lucky woman Dick had ever met.
But nonetheless, she kept trying her luck.
“Dick…?”
She sounded hesitant to talk to him at first – worried that he was in a fragile state, probably. The slur in his voice probably gave him away. She sounded pretty stable herself, which made him taste bile. Dick hadn’t even been dating Wally, and he was the one falling apart after his death? Did she even know what she had just lost? Shouldn’t Artemis be broken, at least a little?
He decided, fuck it, and said that exact thing to her. “You sound way too fuckin’ calm. Shouldn’t you be in mourning?” He took a deep breath, rage bubbling to the surface, before it all spilled over. “I mean, seriously! Why the FUCK aren’t you falling apart?”
Surprisingly, she didn’t react. He wanted her to react, but she didn’t, damn her. She just sighed, like she knew he was doing it to get a rise out of her (which he was), and then she spoke with an infuriatingly calm cadence.
“He wouldn’t want you to spiral downward like this. He was always so loving. Hell, when Wally... was about to disappear… he asked Barry to pass on words of love to me. And to his parents. He was full of love, Dick. He was always so full of love. He loved you too. He wouldn’t want this.”
Even though he knew that she was only trying to help, having it thrown in his face that Wally hadn’t even left him a final message, whereas he had left Artemis one? It only made him feel worse. He snapped. “Who the fuck are you to tell me what my best friend would want? Don’t you think I know? I’ve loved him longer than you’ve even known him!”
He hung up and hurled the empty bottle of scotch at the wall, watching it shatter, and then just stared as the remnants of scotch dripped down the white paint to the broken glass below.