Chapter Text
Dick is a dead thing; Dick is roadkill. He wakes up splattered on the Kents’ nice rainbow quilts, intestines everywhere, open wounds sutured hastily, stitches crooked but holding. There is something in him scrubbed anew, scoured raw like lye soap on skin. Someone has polished him until he bled. He is made pure.
Roadkill is alone on the pull-out. His eyes are sore in that hot, red way when you’ve cried yourself to sleep, and the sun, far higher in the sky than he expects, burns when he looks. It dribbles down the cabinets, warms his feet and the cold empty spot where Tim had curled up to him; one hand creeps forward from the carcass to spread fingers in the depression his body left.
By Sunday, he’s memorized the rhythm of the Kent house. He tracks the time even while half-asleep. At five a.m., Mr. Kent rises with a grand symphony of hacks and coughs, and the news comes on low, murmur of Kansan accents forecasting new horrors of Midwestern weather. At six, Clark puts on a pot of coffee, and the warm smell spilling through the hall rouses Mrs. Kent and the clop-drag of her house shoes. At seven, the Kents retreat to their rooms to dress for the day. At eight, Mrs. Kent has lassoed both Mr. Kents into attending church; if he thinks too much about how Clark fits into the whole Adam-Eve, mortal sin continuum, his head hurts, so he doesn’t. It’s as much routine as Mass. The squeaky screen door announces their departure. He and Tim, current missing person, have the run of the house.
He sits up. His face is stiff with salt. The digital clock says 9:35. He aches, his body carrion entire, and if he doesn’t get some food in him soon he might seriously consider the merits of roadside scavenging.
Tim left breadcrumbs: a cast-off sock here, a dirty shirt there, a path to the hall bathroom, short dark hair caught in comb teeth, a wet hand towel. Dick can’t look at himself in the mirror, at the swollen eyes, the messy hair, the new skin over flayed muscle, where he scabs over in spectacular swathes.
In the living room, Tim has taken up a post in the armchair, back to the hall, Dick’s shitty Dell teetering on his knees, life support ethernet drip snaking across the carpet and burrowed by the bookcase. A cold bowl of Malt-O-Meal sits on the coffee table. He runs his knuckle over bared teeth, automatic.
R/batsightings drags past. Most text is too small to read, but Dick can make out titles: [first-person encounter, Rant] When is the GCPD going to do anything about this? $25,000 dental bill and [second-person encounter] Friend saw Big Bat hit with shotgun in Bowery, 120th and Molina, 03:05 5/27 CONFIRMED and [General] When does the sighting spreadsheet get updated? Re: Robin Disappearance and [Rant] How has this monster not killed someone yet? and [Rant] How has this idiot not died yet? and [Photos] Bat fight left a mess, NSFW. The photo preview on that particular post is blurred out. Tim clicks it anyway, and a dark shot of a parking lot (the Wawa on 120th, Dick recognizes the billboard advertising vodka on the residential building to the left) lit only by streetlights crystallizes; the orange glow catches the wet gloss on the pavement, which Dick at first thinks is rain, then the light and dark coalesce, and Dick knows it’s blood. Lots of blood, too much to be a good sign.
The caption, colorfully expressed by u/bower-power84, spills down into the white void: At the bowery wawa 120 and staten, didn’t get any pictures of the fight ongoing, shots fired. live up in PR so i see the bat a lot but this is fucking insane. anyone live up north? Am i crazy for being freaked?
U/mushroomoo333 says, with 52 upvotes, jesus this is why i don’t go past 99th, followed by a surge of comments deleted by moderators. A moderator pipes up, “#5: Refrain from speculation. This is r/batsightings, not r/battheory.” U/lobstermike asks, Holy shit, is that all his? and u/bower-power84 answers, wouldn’t be surprised if it was. saw someone say he got popped with a shotgun on Molina. A deleted user adds, I don’t remember this much post fight fallout even five years ago. U/whollywholehole replies, bat wasn’t around five years ago, deleted user fires back, LOL you live down in the city don’t you?, u/whollywholehole answers, Transplant, the deleted user says, yeah i bet, someone else calls the deleted user a goddamn Metropolitan, then several deleted comments follow, and a moderator locks the thread, tying it up with a neat, passive-aggressive bow: “#8: Refrain from threats of death, mutilation, doxxing, drugging, psychic attacks, hiring of hitmen, ‘siccing’ of rogues, and general verbally abusive tomfoolery.” Let’s have a little decorum, okay?
While he read, Dick crept closer. Tim’s knuckle has picked up the pace, a frantic back-and-forth across his teeth. Dick steps on the wrong part of the floor. It groans under him. Tim jumps a foot in the air. The Dell flies off his lap, spills onto the carpet, and smacks shut with a solid thwack. Tim whips around in the chair.
His hair’s flat on one side. Pillow creases line his cheek. He looks up at Dick with the embarrassment of one caught with their hand in the cookie jar, not scrolling virulent comment threads on blurry night photos evidencing Bruce’s carelessness. Perhaps carelessness isn’t the right caliber of word— if Nightwing came across that much blood on a case, he’d stop looking for a victim and start looking for a body.
“Good morning,” Dick says, or he would have said if his throat hadn’t given up the ghost not even partway through the transition between plosive and vowel. This results in a weird, animal groan devolving into coughs. To protest his previous abuse, his words have gone on strike. Tim wiggles his toes where they’re suspended over the Kents’ green 80s shag. His socks have Scotty dogs today. He scoots forward in the armchair and his herd of puppies make landfall on the Dell’s upturned ass.
“Mrs. Kent told me to tell you that Mr. Kent said you can eat anything in the refrigerator and the coffee is in the cabinet above the drip machine and the sugar is in the cow canister by the stove,” Tim reports, with the graveness of a duty. Dick clears his throat to get his vocal cords in order.
Before Dick can make another attempt at a greeting, a metal song, more noise than melody, shrieks from the den, tinny. Tim bounces up, coiling tight, then tumbles onto the carpet like a slinky set loose down a set of stairs, falls rear over feet down the hall, and the den door slams shut behind him. Tim’s voice comes after, breathless, muffled through the oak. Dick collapses in the hollow Tim’s butt left on the armchair.
And of course Dick picks up the computer. Of course he opens it and sticks his nose in Tim’s business.
r/batsightings has four Bat Watchers online. It’s got 243 members, 5.7k weekly visitors, ten moderators, and a list of rules so long the subsections have subsections. The pinned post is a link to an exhaustive spreadsheet of Gotham vigilante sightings by name, date, time, and neighborhood. It’s a security risk, to be sure, but Dick’s a little impressed. He sorts by age and links to ancient Gotham Globe articles pop up, Dick in knobbly-kneed prepubescent glory plastered across gritty film prints, features blurred by distance and mid-aughts ultrazoom quality. He sorts by popular, and the top post of all time is a failed AMA by a guy claiming to be Nightwing, of all people, and the second-to-top comment is Tim’s — u/robinalongg89 — calling him a series of words he didn’t think Tim was capable of saying. A glance at Tim’s profile shows this comment and one Python troubleshooting question from six months ago are Tim’s only contributions to the digital sphere.
In recent posts, dating back to late April, Dick has to agree with that rant post from a stranger (not of murder, he is guilty of many ills — obsession, self-destruction, brusqueness — but never murder): how has he not killed himself yet? Gunshots, broken bones, not his alone, lone operations on criminal supercells, drug lab explosions, brutality, terror, shadow: the Bat is not quite the Bat as of late but an avenging god wrapped in leather. Absence of a Robin has not gone unnoticed. The information age has its upsides, but the partial urban legend status Dick and Babs enjoyed is no longer feasible. Everybody’s got a doorbell camera, a recording device in their pocket, and an online network of every single Gothamite at their disposal in the internet’s living room. Skating by on plausible deniability was a luxury of heroes ten years Dick’s senior; that no one has put together the murder of Jason Todd-Wayne and the disappearance of Robin is nothing short of a miracle and a testament to Lucius, Alfred, and Bruce’s unrelenting perfectionism and, on Bruce’s part, paranoia.
The spreadsheet has not been updated with any confirmed sightings of the big Bat since early — or perhaps late? — on May 27. When Bruce got hit with buckshot. Nomex, Kevlar, and carbon fiber in Lucius Fox’s capable hands can do wondrous things, but Bruce is still a human man bound by physics and biology.
“How’d that slug taste?” Dick mutters to himself, pure venom, and just as soon as it comes out of his mouth he slaps the computer shut, because he clearly needs to get some caffeine in him before he does something ill-advised, like turning his phone on to check he hasn’t gotten a death notification from Alfred, or sending an impassioned text. He could hit himself.
Tim comes out of the den with a pep in his step half an hour later while Dick is drowning his sour mood and sourer mouth in a brew three parts sugar by volume.
“Mom and dad?” Dick croaks. Tim, on his tip-toes jamming his cold Malt-O-Meal in the microwave, chirps, “Mm-hm!”
The microwave hums between them. Tim bounces back and forth on his feet. He doesn’t tamp down his grin. He inflates, like a balloon, then finally pops: “They’re coming home for my birthday!”
Dick schools his face and his tone. “In July?”
“Yeah! They’ve got the return tickets and everything!” Tim says. Beep-beep, cheers the microwave. Tim burns his hands taking the bowl out and manages it on a second try, chicken-patterned tea towel wrapped around the hot parts. Tim bends over it to dig in. He crooks a heel against his knee like a flamingo. For balance, Dick presumes. Timmerism catalogued.
“That’s great, Timmy,” Dick says. Tim shifts oddly, then glances up at Dick with a surveying glint in his eye. He frowns, whole face crinkling with it.
“Are you okay?” Tim says.
“What? I’m fine, seriously,” Dick says, wrong-footed. Tim cranes his neck to look into Dick’s mug.
“What’s that?” Tim asks, through a full mouth. Dick grimaces and chucks him under the chin. Tim swallows, then asks again.
“It’s the coffee you told me about, you’re not going to like it, so don’t ask,” Dick says.
“Who says?” Tim asks.
“Me says,” Dick answers.
“I’ve never had coffee before,” Tim says. “How do you know? Maybe it’s my favorite thing ever.”
Dick raises an eyebrow, takes a sip, then gestures toward the cabinet of dishware. Tim picks a mug with Tweety Bird on it, from Mr. Kent’s vast and mind-boggling collection of novelty cups. Dick pours him a full serving from the coffee pot, then sits back and waits while Tim samples.
Tim makes an odd movement, like he’s stifled a gag. His left eye twitches. He gives Dick a shaky thumbs-up. Dick snorts into his own mug.
“You’re gonna finish that whole thing, right?” Dick says. Tim glances at him how Dick imagines Caesar looked to Brutus, and back to the mud in his cup. “We don’t waste food in this house, Timster.”
Tim is saved from low-budget torture (coffeeboarding?) by the crunch of gravel announcing the Kents’ return. As soon as Dick turns, there’s a sploosh from the sink drain.
The Kents enter through the front door, in a plume of noise and Kansas heat. The second Mrs. Kent sees Dick, she snags him by the arm.
“I’ve got to go pick up some things at the farm supply store, and I need somebody strong,” she says, apropos of nothing. “Do you want to come help?”
‘Want to’ is a ‘must’ disguised for politeness, so Dick agrees, though not without sparing a confused glance in the direction of the resident super-strong alien. Clark shrugs, mouth opening and closing like a fish, just as confused as Dick is.
The silence in the Kents’ farm truck is thick enough to cut. The air conditioner blasts, the radio murmurs, Dick shifts, and Mrs. Kent drums on the steering wheel. Then, while taking a turn, Mrs. Kent breaks the quiet with a gentle, “Clark says you’ve been having a hard time of it lately.”
Ah, that explains it. Dick’s been taken prisoner, not hired. Shania Twain wails from the radio. Dick isn’t feeling alright tonight. Dick might just let it all hang out.
“Anyone would, but at your age, I get why it’d be so… fraught,” Mrs. Kent says. She chooses her words carefully. “What feels like a life-ruining fight right now might seem less serious in a few years, especially with a parent during a… very emotional time.”
Mrs. Kent continues, “Teenagers are the same, no matter what galaxy they’re from. I know because I was one once, believe it or not, so when I say —”
Dick makes stunned eye contact with her through the reflection in the windshield.
“He’s not — he’s my — I’m not his — um,” Dick manages. She thinks he’s a normal adolescent having a normal fight with his normal dad while grieving a normal brother, which is wrong on all eight counts to an almost hilarious degree. It leaves Dick without rejoinder. “I’m not a teenager.”
“You aren’t?” Mrs. Kent says.
“I’m twenty, I’m grown,” Dick says.
Mrs. Kent laughs at him, truly laughs. It’s a petulant protest. The difference between nineteen and twenty is no difference at all, and they both know it. He still feels it, though, the chasm between calling yourself something-teen and twenty-something. He was supposed to be an adult by now, and he still feels like that angry ten-year-old stuck in places he doesn’t want to be missing people he’ll never see again, but he also feels like maybe he was never really a kid, not in any way that matters, and like he hasn’t been a kid for much longer than the law has deemed him as such. “Well, people aren’t really grown until they’re forty, and even that I’m not too sure about,” she says.
“Still,” she continues. “Sometimes what we need is love, even if we’re upset with the person we need it from.”
If there’s anything Dick’s sure about right now, it’s that Bruce is in no place to give anything resembling comfort, nor would he be very good at it, nor would Dick even want it. Bruce thinks the grieving process includes dressing up in a costume and beating criminals (and well, that’s check and check on Dick’s part), as well as locking up all his pain deep down inside until it builds up so much pressure it explodes and the shrapnel hits whoever’s unlucky enough to be nearby. Sometimes that’s Dick. Sometimes it's not. Right now, it’s the Bat.
Dick bites his cheek so hard it bleeds. He nods and lets Mrs. Kent think she’s made a positive difference in Dick’s emotional state. She’s earned that much.
The ride back from the store is quiet except for the choir of cheeping from the tote in Dick’s lap. Little yellow cottonballs dart around in the sawdust filling the bottom. He sticks his finger over the edge, and one chick nips him, just enough to sting. Dick laughs and Mrs. Kent sends an unsubtle, warm glance his way.
Dick has nightmares that night — real, true-blue nightmares — and wakes up to Tim twisted around him like kudzu strangles entire houses. He smells himself, stale fear-sweat and chicken bedding and failing deodorant, but Tim’s tangled tight anyway, cheek squished in Dick’s shirt, black hair falling over his face like some low-budget horror monster, and Dick in his half-asleep state combs it off Tim’s face, staring up at the popcorn ceiling and the Florida-shaped water stains.
Tim is probably an only child. He’s made no mention of other siblings. Dick wants to ask. He must not share much personal space with other children, if his sleeping habits are anything to go by — the Drakes are well-off enough to afford multiple months in Europe, so why not the kind of fancy boarding school that has private rooms?
Tim’s hair shines blue in the spare moonlight from the window.
Tim’s hair shines pink in the spare sunlight from the window.
Dick hasn’t moved an inch in his sleep and his neck lets him know just how much it hates that. Mrs. Kent is awake — her house shoes go clop-drag down the carpet — and the morning has made the trek up the horizon into the sky proper. Clark talks on the phone in the kitchen, judging by the sing-song of his voice.
Dick tugs a sleepy duckling behind him into the kitchen for breakfast. Clark waves his cell at Dick, sporting a megawatt grin, and announces, “Somebody’s waiting for you at the autoshop.”
Tim yawns into his cereal. Dick sags into the chair beside him, suddenly relieved of a burden he hadn’t realized was weighing on him so much; then, the weight resettles: he has no money. He has his half of six months’ rent, gas money, utility bills, and, in totality, no emergency fund.
Clark scoffs when he says as much during the ride into town, after everyone is fed, caffeinated, scrubbed, and hugged goodbye. Mrs. and Mr. Kent wave from the front porch until Dick can’t see them in the rearview, his cheek still sore from where Mrs. Kent pinched and pulled and commanded him to visit again, sometime soon with Tim in tow, God help you the simmering threat underneath. Dick has looked death in the face more times than he could count and it wasn’t quite as scary as Martha Kent without an outlet for her hospitality.
It’s too early for Tim. He drowses against Dick’s shoulder, sandwiched upright between him and Clark, shifter against his leg. As the clock creeps forward, a low cloud cover gathers heavy in the west, toward Wichita. Clark, while conducting a flawless parallel park in a truck, glances at the threat of rain in the distance and prophesies, “It’ll catch you by noon.”
“Kent, how the hell are ya!” choruses the same four mechanics from the same four spots, as bright-eyed and bushy-tailed as it’s possible for a person to be before nine a.m. Dick tries to pull out his checkbook from his backpack, and is soundly rejected in the form of an elbow to the side. It’s like being elbowed by a bus.
In the minutes it takes Dick to recover, Clark pays and Dick’s junker rolls into the customer lot. Tim crouches by the mechanics while they chat with Clark about every rusted screw and corroded spark plug, tilting his head back and forth to get a glimpse of the brand-new shocks in the undercarriage.
The mechanics leave them and head inside in a neat single-file. Dick says, the minute the bell jingles behind the last mechanic, “Clark, I can’t let you —”
Clark interrupts. “Dick, get him back to Gotham in one piece and we’ll call it even, okay?”
“That had to have been, like, two grand —”
“Fine,” Clark says, stubborn as the bull in his parents’ back field and twice as polite, “Get yourself back to New York in one piece too and then we’ll call it even.”
He draws himself up straight, mild-mannered reporter rolling off him, crossing his arms and setting his jaw. He raises an eyebrow and dares Dick to argue again. Dick splutters. Tim pokes his head up over the truck bed, eyes darting between them.
A battle of wills. Superman to Nightwing, Clark to Dick. He surrenders.
“Okay,” Dick says, cowed. Clark’s face splits with a grin, and two hands, like twin boulders, land on either shoulder and grip him like an overlarge doll. Dick almost stumbles if not for the weight pinning him.
“There we go,” Clark says.
“Thank you,” Dick says, for the truck, for the lodging, for the food, for the kindness, for the name, for Superman.
“Always,” Clark says. Dick knows he means it.
Then it’s Tim’s turn to feel like Raggedy Andy, and the man he’d watched slice through the skies, a pillar of light, of hope, who’d joined his father in the mental cadre of men he hoped he’d become one day as a little boy, tells a seventh-grader, “Don’t let him do anything stupid.”
Dick squawks, Tim laughs, and Clark waves them off to Wichita in the last shaft of sunlight they’ll see all morning.
Rain comes at noon exactly in the blank spot on the map west of Hays. Last bathroom for a long time! warns a billboard. Then, fields. Flat fields. Blue and green don’t crash into each other here. They moreso smear together, the blue-going-black bowl of the sky, the heat mirage on the horizon, infant cornfields turned neon from water. This section of freeway is where Dick learns (“Brandy!” Tim says, “You know, Brandy, you’re a fine girl?”) Brandy gets the shake of death above 70 and (“How old are you, again?” Dick asks) they’re relegated to the right lane and (“It’s a good name and a good song,” Tim argues) Gotham has sent ambassadors to the middle-nothing of America, apparently, because everyone is going at least 95 (“If I’m naming her Brandy, it’s after pop and R&B icon Brandy Norwood,” Dick says) and cranes to look at them like they’re driving 20 under (“Who’s that? Is she from the 1900s?” Tim says, and Dick says, “Jesus Christ.”) Dick itches to drive normally. Rain pounds.
“I’m messing with you,” Tim says, when the rain peters off into a piss. “I know who Brandy is.”
“You’re damn right,” Dick says. Tim snickers and Dick beans him in the face with a granola bar. Brandy swerves. An SUV with ski gear strapped to the roof lays on its horn. The driver, a bald man with wrap-around sunglasses, flips him off, and a woman in a sleep mask in the passenger seat lifts one half to peek at them. Dick waves and the SUV peels around them.
The demographics of license plates have shifted westward since Arkansas. Colorado, this one says.
Dick, bereft of any other conversation ideas and more than a little spooked by the endless flat on all sides, asks Tim, “What are your parents up to?”
“Oh, you know,” Tim says, “Business stuff.”
Dick waits for elaboration that doesn’t come. “Enlightening.”
“Drake Industries is an American publicly-traded corporation headquartered in Gotham City, New Jersey that distributes pharmaceuticals and provides medical supplies and health information technology,” Tim recites. “But I don’t know, uh, everything. Half the time they’re in meetings and half the time they’re on dig sites.”
“...like, archaeology?” Dick asks. There’s a mathematically improbable stick figure family on the rear window of the sedan in front of them. Either this is a blended family, or somebody’s wearing a hole in their mattress. “What does that have to do with medical supplies?”
“It doesn’t,” Tim says. Dick waits. He catches Tim’s eye and Tim sighs.
“It’s their hobby,” Tim says.
‘Amateur archaeologist’ seems the kind of euphemism to show up in an arrest report for Catwoman. Dick, instead of insulting Tim’s parents to his face, says, “That feels illegal.”
“It is,” Tim says, and conversation on the topic dies there.
Colorful Colorado welcomes them with a renewed deluge. Rain downpours like it had in the Ozarks but with no shield from the wind it buffets them across the freeway, water coming down in curtains and blocking Dick’s vision 20 feet out. Lakes spawn in the asphalt. Black and green blur into one gray mass. Dick checks that Tim’s buckled no less than five times, and by the fifth, Tim grabs his wrist and says, “Dick, I’m fine.”
The Rocky Mountains peek through stormclouds. The Appalachians and Ozarks call themselves mountains and Dick is inclined to believe it, but seeing these fangs, the looming silhouette of sheer earth and rock tall enough to rival the heights of human construction, Dick understands why people thought gods lived in mountains. They sprout from almost nothing where humans lost the courage to build into their steep faces. The Flatirons shine, stabbing into the blackening sky against emerald pines, ski runs deep in the range thawing in dry Colorado summer heat, forests revived with the kind of rain that’s backing up the freeway all the way through Boulder. It’s taillights for miles.
Tim, for his part, frowns at the traveler’s map he’s unfolded on his lap. Tuck Everlasting sits abandoned between them. Dick taps a nervous rhythm on the wheel. It’s only static through the radio. Tim puts a Gordon Lightfoot cassette up to the radio’s mouth and slides it in. It fills the silence under the hammering storm.
Past the town center, traffic thins and foothills close in. It’s only four in the afternoon, but the rain falls so heavy it’s getting dim out. The roadside ditches flood with dirty water. Pavement goes slick.
The moment Dick relaxes and settles in for a slow, rainy drive or an early check-in at a motel, he sees headlights on the wrong side of the road.
He shouts, wordless. Tim looks up.
The car hydroplanes — SUV, white, newer — spins once, twice, headlights then tailights, red and yellow blaring through the rain, barrels past Tim and Dick, hits a guard rail, rolls over into the median ditch, and flips onto its side.
Dick’s instincts win. He’s pulled onto the roadside with his hazards flashing and jumping into the rain before he recognizes he’s done it. Tim shouts after him but Dick ignores him and lands feet-first in dirty ditch water halfway up his shins. The warm summer rain soaks him through in seconds. Water creeps up the dark fabric of his jeans. Mini currents in the ditch course around his legs.
Water pools on the right side of the SUV, creeping, soaking the passenger seat. The windshield is shattered, along with the front windows, but the back windshield and windows are covered in spiderwebbing cracks. A woman with long, dark hair and a green hoodie sits stunned in the driver’s seat, eyes unfocused. She’s not bleeding, but when Dick calls, “Ma’am?” she doesn’t react.
Dick fishes his phone out of his back pocket and turns it on. He climbs up on the driver’s side door to get out of the water. He ignores the incessant buzzing in his hand as a week of notifications pours in, and flicks the flashlight on. He shines it in her eyes. Her pupils react normally and she winces and puts a hand up to shield her face.
“You’re okay,” he says, once her breathing starts to pick up. He squeezes her shoulder to ground her. “Hey, look, you’re fine. Everything’s gonna be okay.”
Dick’s checking her for fractures and internal injuries best he can when she says her name is Camila, still dazed. Rain drips off the open car door and trickles into the cabin. She turns her head without trouble to look at him. The 911 operator on the phone can barely hear over the shrieking rain and rolling thunder.
“Oh,” Camila breathes, looking out her shattered windshield. She gropes for her car keys. Double vision, Dick thinks. Whiplash, probably.
Smoke is pouring out of her hood.
New plan. Dick shoves his phone, still on the line with 911, in his back pocket. He braces his hands under her armpits.
“Can you stand up?” he asks. Camila nods. She unlocks her seatbelt. Rain pours down Dick’s back. Rainwater wets her hair and makes it stringy.
“Wait,” she says. Her nails dig into his arm. “My. My.”
Splashing comes up behind him. A freckled, sunburned hand tries the back door handle. The crash warped the frame and the door doesn’t budge. Tim yanks his sweatshirt off, wraps it around his elbow, and puts it through the glass. Camila makes a little dismayed noise, but lets Dick pull her bodily through the remains of her driver’s side window.
Tim levers himself into the cabin. It’s only now, with the back window shattered, over the ringing in his ears, the storm, the thunder, Dick realizes the shrieking isn’t the car alarm but a baby’s cry. He’s getting rusty.
Tim pokes up out of the hole bearing a carseat and a red-faced, squalling infant. He points at the back window.
“‘Baby on board,’” he relays. Dick gives him a nod.
Together, Dick and Tim trudge up the median to the roadside, soaking wet, Camila half-cradled in Dick’s arms, Tim bracing the carseat on his hip, tugging the sunshade down to keep rain off the baby. Behind them, something inside the SUV groans.
Another driver with hazards on beckons them closer. They have their hatchback open to cover from the rain, and Dick, Tim, and Camila duck under its shelter. Camila and her baby sit and wait for the ambulance the 911 operator promised. Dick steps away (protected by an umbrella provided by the other driver, ladybug-themed) to update the operator.
Tim sits with Camila and her baby. Dick can’t hear what he says, but Camila gives him a half-smile and a nod, and Tim shifts forward to let the baby hold his finger. The baby hiccups.
In the ditch, something in the SUV goes whump, and black smoke pours out, heavier than previous. A flicker of red blazes under the crumpled line of the hood.
The engine catches fire. The heat hits Dick’s face, even this far back.
“Sir?” the operator says.
“Um,” Dick says. “Automobile fire. Send an engine too.”
Camila watches her car burn with a dull sort of acceptance in her eye. The flames flicker. Traffic rubbernecks to watch. Dick sits down next to her on the fender. She glances at him, then back at her fireball-formerly-SUV.
“Do you have someone to pick you up once the EMTs are done checking you out?” he says, low. The baby giggles. Tim’s making funny faces.
“Yes, my husband,” Camila drones. She cups her forehead in her hand. Her eyes get big. Her chin trembles. “Oh, god.”
Dick senses the post-incident panic coming on. He redirects.
“What’s your baby’s name?” he says. The redirection works. Camila’s train of thought visibly stutters over the question, then latches on. She smiles, soft and subtle but there.
“Marisol,” she says. “After her great-grandmother.”
“How old is she?” Dick says, before Camila has the chance to think about anything else.
Dick interrogates Camila the L&D nurse, Camila the newlywed, Camila the mom-of-four-months, Camila the lifelong snowboarder until an ambulance pulls up, sirens screaming, lights flashing, and paramedics pour out of the back. Before they pull her and Marisol away, though, Camila turns to him and asks, “Are you a firefighter, or something?”
Dick smiles. “Or something.”
Camila writes him off as a weird but kind stranger and disappears into the depths of the ambulance. Tim, next to him, snorts loudly and tries to cover it up with a cough.
“Or something,” he echoes, in a silly voice, and Dick shoves him over.
After cops question them and the hatchback owner in the pouring rain and Dick and Tim are heading back to Brandy, hazards still flashing, Dick says, “See? Night job.”
Tim nods sagely, soaked to the bone, hair dripping, sunburn turning to a faint gold cast and a riot of freckles, and replies, “I could eat my arm.”
“That makes two of us,” Dick says.
They drip all over the welcome mats of a Cuban diner with a spectacular view of the foothills and between the two of them clear a serving of ropa vieja, maduros, and beans meant to feed a family of four. It’s silent except for chewing. Tim takes a to-go cup of horchata as big as his head.
When Dick goes to pay, he finds two hundred-dollar bills folded to look like collared shirts. He sighs and digs for the bills Mr. Kent didn’t secret into his wallet.
Storms stop by the evening. It gets dark, quick — the canine crags of the Rockies cut through the sunset, scarlet and sinking, and it throws a last-ditch effort at light across low-slung clouds, splattering them and the Rockies’ grasping talons spectacular rainbow colors. It’s the kind of view Dick thinks he should be enjoying at some scenic outlook, not while wiping down his truck’s bed in the parking lot of a strip mall. Tim perches on the roof, DSLR at the ready, and takes enough pictures to wallpaper the truck’s entire cabin.
Dick offers the truck cab again. Tim refuses outright. He layers up to sleep in the bed with Dick. His shivers still wake him at midnight. Groggy, Dick shakes him, and when Tim cracks an eye, waves him closer. Tim wiggles into the warm space Dick offers, and Dick tucks the Kent-lent blanket cocoon around them both.
His breath clouds in front of him that morning. Under the blankets, it’s warm, but the Rockies haven’t gotten the memo that it’s almost June, and dew settles on the tops of roofs and glitters in the grass. Fog obscures the mountain peaks.
Dick guards the door to the shower in a deserted truckstop outside of town while Tim hums the theme song to a cartoon he’s never seen over the rush of shower water. Crouched on the greasy tile, steam pouring under the door, Dick scrolls through the hundreds of text messages, dozen missed calls, and four voicemails that have populated in the intervening days. Kory’s sent him pictures of stray cats she’s come across on her walks every morning without fail. Then, on the day he called her from the ranger station, she sent him a heart emoji and asked no more questions.
The Titans Tower group chat is in shambles. Dick’s absence is a gaping hole in the conversation. I’m locked out and where’s the extra punching bags and has anyone heard from Dick? and I’m locked out again and I called him and robbery on Washington, who can take point? and what the fuck, who keeps locking me out it isn’t funny and it’s a little funny and I’m going to kill you.
Donna sent him a very kind, long message he cannot read without his vision blurring. Wally has kept his inbox well-stocked with memes and weird ads he sees on the train. Silence from Roy since March. A gentle check-in from Victor. Kory called him four times. Donna called him thrice. Wally and Alfred called him twice. Jason called him once.
Kory, through the slight static of distance: “Where are you? Are you still on the turnpike? Call me back, Dick.”
Donna, shouting over rock music in the background: “Kory’s worried, are you alive? Answer me. This is a threat.”
Alfred, terse: “Master Dick, please notify me when you receive this message.”
Jason’s came through at four a.m. Gotham time. Dick’s thumb hovers, then moves, and Dick turns his phone off. Tim comes out of the bathroom in a cloud of steam.
They get maybe twenty minutes into the mountains before Tim has to pee. Again. He pulls off near an outlook so Tim can hide in the verdure. The outlook is a short trek out of the dirt parking lot to a knobbly cliffside. Old boulders collapse around scrubby pines. It’s early on a weekday, and the only people nearby are a jogger and a elderly birdwatcher, binoculars in hand. Dick perches, not unlike a bird, where the log fence ends and an intrepid hiker’s balance becomes their own responsibility. He slips, and it’s over. He kicks his feet in the open air above the point of no return.
Aftermath of storms still linger in the overcast sky. Dick sees for miles deep into the Rockies, where snow clings stubborn to peaks. Cloud shadows drift across the rippling horizon.
Rocks clatter down the slope and off the cliff into the void below. Tim’s voice comes from behind, nervous: “Oops!”
Dick turns and Tim’s sprawled across the mounds of rock tumbling down to Dick’s roost. He clutches his camera to his chest and his body to as horizontal a surface he can manage.
“Careful,” Dick warns, too late to be of any good. He leans back and gives Tim his hand to clutch, his knuckles blanched, and Tim picks his cautious way to the cliff’s edge.
Tim settles in next to him. He hums that same song, a little off-key, and brings the black eye of his camera to his face. It frames the wide span of mountains, Boulder tiny in its vision.
Dick’s phone buzzes one more time. He fishes it out of his pocket — carefully — and it’s a news alert. Bruce Wayne is on ‘vacation’ in Bali. Not dead, then, and the relief that comes is familiar.
The unopened message notification in his voicemail bores a hole in his eye. Next to him, Tim shifts, and half-crawls up the cliff to get a better vantage point.
He brings the phone up and presses play.
Dick looks out over the magnificent sprawling range, billion-year-old evidence of continents colliding, and he listens to Jason’s voice in his ear. The message is one minute long. It ends. It wasn’t as horrible as Dick thought it would be. Tim’s camera clicks. He flicks through his photos on the screen, grins down at the mountains in miniature.
Across the mountains, the desert, the coast, the planet’s grandest ocean kisses California. Behind him, half a continent of people are yawning awake, eating breakfast, driving to work, living their mundane everyday with no idea that a thousand miles away Dick Grayson sits on a cliff’s edge listening to a boy none of them ever met. Without Jason Todd, the world still turns on a crooked axis. Summer will wane. Winter will wax. Years will pass. It’s almost a comfort that against millennia this loss is minute, and he joins every person that has lived and will ever live. Death and its ripples are the most human thing of all. What scorches now will heal over and its scars will ache and fade, but not disappear.
Dick puts his phone in his pocket.
Tim turns back to him. His smile fades. “Are you okay?”
Dick wipes his cheek and reassures him with a matching grin, a little watery. “I’m gonna be alright, Timmy. Show me your pictures.”
Tim bites his cheek and frowns, but he still climbs down and nestles close to Dick on the cliff. His camera strap dangles above the forest a deadly drop below. Tim doesn’t pry. He leans on Dick and puts his weight on a shoulder that can bear it.
I-70 takes them through the Rockies. Peter, Paul and Mary lulls them through where the mountains’ colors fade and the brown desert creeps in to say hello. The truck and the day’s wheels turn. It is hot in Utah. Dick’s truck doesn’t so much as air condition as it air wheezes. Wind roars through their open windows. Tim’s feet pin down their belongings in the passenger footwell. On the map, Salt Lake City grows ever closer in tandem with dinnertime. Dick and Tim feast on the last of their campfire essentials.
The endless white expanse of the Bonneville Salt Flats go silver in the half-dark. It’s almost dreamlike, bleached bone-pale and flawless like summer snow, mountains encircling. The temperature drops; desert cold has sharper teeth than either Dick or Tim are used to, and they shell out for a motel room cozied up to the salt flats and its surrounding ridges, guarding Wendover from the wind coming off the desert. Dick kills more than a few roaches and sleeps on top of the covers that night.
June tip-toes in. Desert towns pass in flashes and blinks. America past the Rockies has the advantage of space, and never is that more clear in Utah and Nevada’s vast arid swathes, the next bit of green on Tim’s traveler’s map a clean demarcation where the Sierra Nevada’s rain shadow ends — California.
Tim regales him with middle-school drama and half-remembered plots for R-rated movies he’d snuck into with his friends and been kicked out of.
“We should go see it, I think it’s still in that theater,” Tim says, over his peanut butter cracker sandwich, kicking his feet, watching Dick fiddle with the gas pump. He brushes crumbs off his lap and wipes his hands on jeans. “It was good. I mean, I only saw half of it, but the half I saw was good.”
“You want to go back to the theater you’re banned from to watch a movie you’ve already seen?” Dick asks. The price on the meter makes him wince. When he’d told the cashier to put eight on pump two she’d given him quite the look, and that has to explain why.
“I only saw half, are you listening to me?” Tim says. “Wait, banned? Do you think I’m banned? They didn’t say that. Am I?”
“Don’t worry, I’ll wear a big coat and you can hide underneath it,” Dick says.
“That’s stupid. I’ve been back there twice, is that illegal?” Tim says. Dick laughs at him. Tim kicks him in the hip for laughing. “I’m serious!”
“So am I. Actually, do you think if I fold you up, you can fit in a backpack?” Dick says. Tim rears back both his legs, levels a donkey kick at Dick that he dodges without much effort, and the momentum pushes him off the truck bed to the ground. Dick helps him up, but only after he laughs at him more.
Outside Reno, Nevada, Tim digs a cassette tape out of the shoebox and makes an odd little noise.
“What’s up?” Dick asks, distantly. He guns past a tractor trailer going five under the limit. Dick’s truck protests, with feeling, and he pats the dash to encourage her.
“This is the last one,” Tim says. He shifts the cassette tapes around, clack-clack-clack. He counts them under his breath one more time. “We’ve listened to all of them.”
“Who is it?” Dick says.
Tim holds it up. Bob Dylan, The Times They Are A-Changin’. Somebody old drove Dick’s truck before he did. Tim feeds the cassette tape in. Fuzzy guitar strums through the speakers.
The moment they cross the line of stalwart stone soldiers shielding Reno from California, the trees explode around, proud, tall, and green, and someone in a Subaru cuts them off to get around a school bus, blaring the horn.
Tim, Gothamite, crosses his arms, kicks his feet up on the dash, and grumbles, “Frickin’ jerkoff.”
And then Dick laughs, not just because he’s never heard that word come out of Tim’s mouth, but because with his nasty sneakers on the dash, crossed arms, foul mouth, and obstinate scowl, Dick is suddenly, perfectly, viciously reminded of Jason. It’s not the gentle wash of grief he’s grown used to, memories of his mother’s voice and his father’s calluses dulled by time, but something more akin to bending the wrong way and popping all his stitches at once.
He and Jason had been really only hung out once without the barrier of masks between them — too many barbs in the thicket between him and Bruce, too many missed opportunities between him and Jason — and that was the ski trip in the Adirondacks when Jay was fourteen. He’d been all single-word answers and awkward silences until that first run down the slopes. He shrieked when he started sliding, then picked up too much speed for Dick to catch him, and finally braked by slamming full-force into the fence at the bottom of the greens. Jason had been fine, save for a bruise or two, but he’d gazed up at Dick with a giant grin on his face and freckled cheeks bright red with cold, cradled in neon orange safety netting, and he’d panted, “Can I go again?”
Tim asks, “What’s funny? What’d I say?”
“Nothing,” Dick huffs. “Nothing, you just crack me up.”
Mountains rear up, fall away, and spit them out in Sacramento. Freeway winds through the valley and up into the Bay. Then, finally, whizzing by late-afternoon traffic, the hills part, and the Pacific Ocean glistens in the sun where the Bay’s maw opens wide. Tim laughs and leans out the window, seatbelt straining, waits for a Civic full of college girls to pass by, and captures the ghost of the Golden Gate, blued by distance, twin obelisks carving into the summer sky. The Bay Bridge carries them across the water. Sailboats slide through choppy green waves.
San Francisco opens to him and Tim. Cable cars trek up the steep hills. Wind-blown buckeye and explosive rhododendron line streets of houses painted wildflower colors. The Pacific’s waves grow ever closer, glittering through gaps in houses, the salt-and-sea smell strong in the cab, Dick’s hair frizzing more and more with every minute. Tim’s leg bounces.
Dick parks off the Great Highway. He and Tim hike up the hill.
Ocean Beach spreads its white-sand arms wide. The ocean spills up to meet them. Sea foam laces the dunes. Saltwater wets the beach. Frilly clouds streak into the horizon where the sky turns into forever, gleaming and beautiful. Tim kicks his shoes off in the sand. His Goku socks go with them. He gives Dick a grin, freckled cheeks warmed gold, and says, “Race you!”
Dick laughs and takes off, still in his Converse, sand dancing around him, and runs to meet the Pacific’s tide. The water’s cool when he wades in. The shock’s enough to distract. He only registers that Tim’s taken a running start at him the second before impact, and Tim bowls him over, bellowing a war cry, and the water rushes up, Dick splashes down, and all sound cuts except the crash of waves on the beach.
Dick jolts up, gasping. His hair drips in his eyes. Tim clocks Dick’s expression and turns to run, but Dick’s leg whips out and hooks his ankle and drops him deadweight into the tide. He wrestles Tim under the water and holds him there.
Tim claws at Dick’s arms, desperately, wriggling, limbs flailing. His leg jerks. His knee nails Dick in the balls.
Dick falls over, wheezes, gags. Tim slips out and makes a break for it while Dick is indisposed. A wave crashes into him and he rolls over onto the ground. Tim makes it halfway up the beach before Dick takes him in a running tackle. Tim goes face-first into the sand. Dick pins him down and sits on his back.
Sand sticks to their wet faces and wet legs and wet clothes. A group of bikini-clad girls Dick’s age laid out on the beach watch the fracas over paperbacks and fashionable sunglasses. When they catch Dick looking, their eyes disappear posthaste behind their reading material.
“Are you done?” Dick asks. Tim makes a muffled assenting noise into the sand. Dick rolls off him. Tim resurfaces.
“Can you show me how to do that?” Tim asks, once they’ve caught their breath.
“What, getting kicked in the nuts? Sure, hold still,” Dick says. Tim shrieks and rolls away toward an escape route, but Dick snags him by the foot and holds him. “I’m joking, I’m joking, stop, stop.”
Tim, still wild-eyed, still dripping, says, “I meant the foot thing.”
Dick sighs and reclines in the sand. His hair’s already drying on his forehead. The sun sinks lower, true evening now. “Sure, why not?”
Tim’s face cracks open and he smiles. He huffs, then giggles, then dissolves into belly-clutching, breathless laughter. His whole face scrunches with it.
“Now what’s funny?” Dick asks.
“I dunno,” Tim says. He cards his feet through the sand, like a half a snow angel. “I didn’t think we’d get here this fast.”
“I know what you mean,” Dick says.
Tim splutters and paws at the wet hair stuck to his face, eyes, and mouth. Dick reaches out and helps him.
And it’s on that beach, sand in places sand should not be, wet and cold, sore from hours of sitting, that Dick knows Tim’s attached to him for good. The road their impetus, Gotham their genesis.
Dick can be a good big brother now. Please, just let him try.
Hey, Dick. It’s Jason. I know you gave me your phone number a while ago, and I haven’t really used it since, but, um, I wanted some advice. Sorry for my first call just being me asking for shit — asking for stuff, but, yanno, not really sure who else I could ask. I figured you’d be able to be impartial. Dunno. Night job’s being a clusterfuck again, you know how it is. Sorry, not clusterfuck. Frustrating. Uh, tips and tricks of the trade? Dunno when you’ll listen to this. Don’t feel like you have to call me back if you don’t wanna. I’m just talking out of my ass right now. I mean butt. Sorry. I’ll just… call me back later. Or just ignore this. Bye, I guess.