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Dick quit smoking when he was twenty except that he still did sometimes. Sometimes he and Babs or he and Roy on a rooftop or out back of a bar shared a cigarette and were more wrung-out-exhausted than angry for a moment. Jason would actually kill him if he knew, which was why it was a rare occurrence saved for those occasions when there was no saving the day. When there was no saving anything. When everything was dead and buried.
It felt like one of those days and Dick was sick and tired of anger, sick and tired of responsibility, sick and tired of grief. Sick and tired of bearing it all on his creaking back like a marble statue of Atlas. It felt like one of those days and he was itching for a cigarette and there was absolutely no getting one and he just had to deal. He just had to be angry and responsible and grieving in equal measure, a good older brother, an example in growing old with grace. His siblings had no other.
Yes, Batman was dead again. This time, it seemed to be permanent. The seas parted and a shockingly lucid Red Robin in a mech suit quietly took up the mantle. The gossip columns whispered that Brucie Wayne had spent the last eleven months holed up on a private island with some model, not earth-bound, dirt-bound, death-stricken. His boys still smiled in pictures and the Wayne Industries board carried on with a fondly-exasperated shake of the head that said “what can you do?”
Now it was one of those pains that lived permanently under Dick’s ribs. His life had fallen into a rhythm again. It had taken him longer to do cleanup after an attack at the Bludhaven docks that morning than he had expected and he had stumbled home with the sun already hoisted in the sky and he had rolled out of bed in the afternoon on only three hours of sleep, thanking heaven that it was his day off. He’d felt like a reanimated corpse feeling his way through the dark apartment (blackout curtains drawn) to flip on the light in the little kitchen and start the coffee maker. When he turned around, he’d nearly jumped out of his skin.
Damian sat on the floor next to his couch, staring into space, silent as the grave. When Dick startled at the sight of him, he did not make a snide remark about Dick’s attention to detail. About Dick getting old and losing his touch. About how he needed to invest more time in training. He didn’t say anything at all.
“Dames? Are you okay?” said Dick.
Damian’s neck swiveled slowly and when he looked at Dick it was as if he had to force his eyes to focus.
Damian wasn’t well. It wasn’t like he’d ever really been well, but there had been such a long stretch that looked like improvement. Such a long time when he’d been better.
“Are you okay?” Dick said again. “What are you doing here?”
Damian didn’t say anything for a stretch. The coffee maker huffed and puffed and wheezed. Dick watched his little brother stare at it.
“Don’t let me hold you up,” Damian said finally.
He gestured toward the coffee maker.
“You want some?” said Dick.
Damian didn’t make a snide remark about caffeine dependence. He didn’t say anything about addiction compromising the temple of the body. He didn’t make a crack about self-discipline.
“Tt,” he said.
“S’at a no?”
Damian’s eyes unfocused again.
“I don’t want anything,” he said “Just need somewhere…”
Dick and his coffee cup migrated into the living room. He tried to be casual. He tried to be hospitable. He shoved open the blackout curtains with his free hand.
Damian ducked away from the late-afternoon sunlight. Dick could see him now; he was wearing his black kevlar bodysuit and a pair of gym shorts. His motorcycle helmet sat on the coffee table. There was blood on the collar of his shirt, blood down the back of his neck, blood crusted in his short hair. Of course, blood on Dick’s couch cushion. Of course.
“Dude, you’re so concussed,” said Dick.
He crouched next to Damian, between the couch and the coffee table. He put his coffee cup down on the pile of mail that had been accumulating unobserved for at least a week. Damian bent his neck without having to be told and something familiar and cold slithered down Dick’s spine.
He felt like Damian was ten again, fresh from the League of Assassins and traumatized in ways he wasn’t equipped to recognize, even though his brother was sitting before him all of an adult, all of a medical school student. He hadn’t really understood what Bruce always swore about them being his kids no matter how old they got until Damian.
“Definitely not concussed,” said Damian. “Not a big deal.”
“How long have you been here?”
Damian shrugged. Dick prodded around Damian’s bloody curls until Damian disinclined his head again.
“Were you here when I got home?”
Damian shrugged like a lie. Dick caught a picture in his head of his disoriented little brother crawling between the blackout curtains before sunrise, faith beating in his chest instead of a heart. He caught a picture of Damian tugging the window shut again, harnessing the leverage of his weight on the sash when his strength wavered, and straightening the curtains back into their perfect lines. In his mind’s eye he watched him pull the helmet off, flinch away from the suddenness of the cold air on his open wound, and stumble into the coffee table on his way to the floor. He watched Damian breathe in like belief and breathe out like reassurance. He watched Damian turn his head slowly toward the sounds of himself crashing through his bedroom window, crashing through a thirty-second shower, crashing into bed. In his mind’s eye he watched his little brother wait on him.
“I’m not here because I’m in need of medical attention, Richard. I’m perfectly capable of taking care of myself. I don’t want anything. I just need time to think.”
Dick forced himself to laugh like he could when he was 29.
“I don’t think you’re gonna be doing a whole lot of thinking on this TBI,” he said.
That earned him a look, and the ember way behind Damian’s eyes was a relief, at least. The fault line on the back of his head was oozing like a natural spring.
“Dude, I’m serious,” he made himself laugh again, “you need stitches.”
Damian rolled his eyes.
“It didn’t feel that bad,” he said. “I can go, if you want. I’ll go ask—”
He started moving his arms like he was going to leverage himself off the floor.
“Don’t be an idiot, Dames. Let me go get my med kit. Just stay there. In the meantime, tell me what you’re here for, if it wasn’t my legendary stitches skills.”
Dick had gotten pretty good at overlooking the blood on his hands. He didn’t watch the pink water roll around the sink when he washed his hands before he started digging in his medicine cabinet. There was so much every day and he never ever got clean.
A whole half of his brain urged him to grab his keys and walk straight out of his apartment into the civilian air where he wasn’t responsible for anything. Dick Grayson-Wayne, eldest heir to playboy philanthropist Brucie Wayne who was off somewhere playing in the surf on a private island, did not have a little brother bleeding out on his living room floor. He could step out for a casual coffee or a casual cigarette or a casual reinvention of his whole life. No one needed him. Like he told the cameras, his brothers were grown now. He could lean back and be nothing but a rich boy. That was all.
He couldn’t even scrape together any guilt for these feelings. He took a stack of gray Wayne Basics towels from under the sink and the stitches kit and turned on every other light in the apartment on the way back to his brother.
“I gotta be honest, you were kinda mumbling, and I didn’t hear any of that. What did you say?”
He knelt on the carpet and Damian turned his back without being told. His fingers twitched at the hem of his shirt.
“I’m so tired,” he said.
Dick numbed the area around the gash on the back of Damian's head and didn’t say, “I concur.”
“I’m just so sick of... I just... I’m starting to have a hard time.”
Understatement of the century. Dick may not have been home in a couple months, but he read the reports. He was still their older brother.
Tim wrote with medical accuracy about Damian’s recklessness, his imprecision, his silence. Last month he got shot during a robbery and didn’t say anything on comms. He didn’t tell anyone until they were back in the cave and he brought Tim a needle and thread and tweezers and said, “Do you happen to have a moment, Timothy?”
Tim was holding it together better than he had ever held himself together in any other situation like this, but that didn’t mean he could hold Damian together, too. Obviously Tim’s momentum wasn’t going to last, but Dick was too exhausted to try and stop the wave before it crashed. Damian was clearly in need of something it had always been Dick’s responsibility to provide, and Dick couldn’t expect Tim to pick up that slack on top of all the rest.
“I just... It’s like nothing matters anymore. I’m doing my coursework and it’s going fine but not well. And I don’t care. I got a C on a test last week. A low C. A 73%. And I can’t even find anger. I can’t try any harder. I’m not trying right now.”
Dick left bloody fingerprints on his coffee cup.
“Do you have to try?”
He tugged on the thread a little too hard and Damian jerked his head, but didn’t comment.
“I’m not going to be a very good doctor if—”
“Do you have to be a doctor, like, right now?”
“Well I’m definitely not going to be. Not at this rate.”
“Does that stress you out?”
“Well, Father—”
Dick snipped his thread and cut a new length.
“I didn’t say anything about Dad. Do you need to be a doctor immediately? Or can you take some time off?”
“The sooner I can be out there helping people the better.”
Dick laughed and he was trying for that same friendly, rounded sound he’d been able to do when he was younger but he missed it. The shape of the sound may not have been sharp, but it definitely had corners.
“Yeah, cause you’ve never helped anyone ever before, and it’s an emergency that you get out there.”
“I’m doing my best,” said Damian.
Dick soaked up some blood with a gauze pad.
“That wasn’t true. I don’t remember the last time I did my best — my true best — at anything.”
He said something else, but it was strangled and choked like last words.
“What was that?”
Damian repeated it in a murmur he knew Dick wouldn’t be able to hear. He knew Dick had hearing loss — all of them did. He knew he had to talk like a normal person.
“Dames.”
“I said that grandfather would kill me if he heard me talking like this.”
Dick’s heart sank and his shoulders followed suit.
“Dames,” he said again.
“He would kill me, un-metaphorically. But even he’s not here to threaten anymore. Richard, I’m tired.”
It was Ra’s who had finally killed Batman. The checks and balances had fallen into disrepair. They’d stopped Ra’s eventually, but they’d lost their father, and they weren’t getting him back.
“Tim’s mission reports have been kind of concerning, recently.”
“Of course they have. He writes everything like a LinkedIn post. The other Wayne board guys have boiled his brain into a corporation.”
It was hardly true, but Dick snorted anyway.
“That’s not what I mean. What if you hang it up for a little while?”
It was the dumbest proposal he’d ever floated, and he’d been engaged three separate times in relationships that never did work themselves out.
“Hang what up?”
“Everything?”
“Is euthanasia what you’re prescribing, Richard, because that hardly seems—”
Dick laughed and he wished nonsensically that Bruce was there with them. He could hear his dad’s laugh rattling around in his head at that. Sometimes he swore his tinnitus was just an audio recording of Bruce’s terrible humming.
“No, Damian, I’m saying you should take, like, a gap year from everything. Why is it always doom and gloom with you, kid?” that was a rhetorical question, he knew why. “It just sounds like you really need a break. To reevaluate.”
Damian didn’t snap at Dick not to call him a kid. He didn’t dismiss Dick outright. The living room fell silent other than the tweezers and needle.
“I don't know how to do that,” he said eventually.
No, of course he didn’t. He’d never been taught. Dick had spent years getting over that, every drink laced with an abrupt hit of guilt. There was no world in which he could have known about Damian, found him sooner, taken him from the League sooner, but he still carried the idea of that world around.
During his brief stint in therapy, right after Bruce had climbed out of that other grave and took custody of his son again, he and the therapist had gone over this a lot. She had gently coached him not to remember all the things Damian hadn’t learned as a child, but all the things Dick had been able to teach him in his tenure as father-figure. That was what he was supposed to remember when that lost-time guilt reached for him like hands. That was what he’d had to learn to lean on.
“How about we figure it out together?” said Dick, tying off the final stitch.