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afterimage ghosts

“Jason’s alive,” Bruce says, like Dick hasn’t just lost his own life. Alive, he says, like somehow Dick’s loss has driven Bruce into mania instead. Like the words Dick would have given anything to hear three years ago now prove comparable to the 100,000 lives blinked out and the thousands more choking down their last toxic breaths. “Come home.” — Sometimes, grief is mourning someone who's come back to life, mourning the space they take up now, and the life reconstructed in their absence that you’re now forced to leave behind. And sometimes, it is mourning half a city at the same time.

For @badthingshappenbingo: Grief/Mourning

Fandoms: Nightwing (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU Rating: Teen Words: 5.8k, 1/1 Relationships: Dick Grayson & Jason Todd, Dick Grayson & Bruce Wayne, Blüdhaven (DCU) & Dick Grayson, Dick Grayson & Teen Titans, Batfamily Members & Dick Grayson Characters: Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Bruce Wayne, Donna Troy, Wally West, Tim Drake (DCU), Damian Wayne, Teen Titans (DCU) Additional Tags: Grief/Mourning, Angst, Dick Grayson-centric, Dick Grayson Whump, Dick Grayson Needs a Hug, Hurt Dick Grayson, Dick Grayson is Nightwing, Dick Grayson is Batman, Dead Bruce Wayne, Resurrected Jason Todd, Jason Todd is Red Hood, Self-Sacrificing Dick Grayson, Blüdhaven (DCU), Chemo Destroys Blüdhaven (DCU), Post-Chemo Destroying Blüdhaven (DCU), Radiation Sickness, Character Study, Relationship Study, Passive Suicidal Ideation, Bad Things Happen Bingo

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

Dick makes the drive from New York to Gotham on April 27th in the pocket of time when the sun hasn’t risen and only the earliest commuters join him on the highway. Each passing car doesn’t bother turning off its highbeams, and each flashbang of light brings with it a flashback of green.

Only when the lights of the bridge come into view and the lamps overhead pass by in a flashing rhythm, like the rain of gunshots in a dark alley, does Dick remember he’s traveling to an empty grave. A twice a year tradition has been cut short after only three rotations.

He makes the trip anyway.

There are flashing eyes staring at him from between the trees. Dick wipes the dirt from his pants before it’s even six-thirty in the morning and decides to visit the memorial site outside Blüdhaven instead. At least then he’s mourning the actual dead.

Only two weeks pass before he's moving back to Gotham.

───

Heavy boots land behind him on a rooftop, and Dick half expects a flare of light and pain at the sight of Jason’s red helmet.

The modulation only serves to remind Dick he doesn’t remember what Jason’s voice sounds like. “Stop visiting my grave.”

I don't mean to. It's a habit. I still miss you. What right do you have to tell me how to grieve? All of it, probably. “Okay.”

“That’s it?” Jason asks, like his words weren’t an order, a command, like he wasn’t sure that only he had the final say.

“What did you expect me to say?”

Jason doesn’t answer. He turns around and grapples away.

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

#dick grayson #jason todd #nightwing #red hood #batman #dc #bludhaven #blüdhaven #dc chemo #fic #forgetmesunflower fic #my fic #afterimage ghosts

Grief burns green.

A shooting star steps off a plane, its green glow mistaken for a UFO. It doesn't burn up in the atmosphere like the meteor shower mere weeks before, but plummets down towards a city of lights, and people don't blink because on every street, signs glow glitter pink and neon orange to blind the late night and early commuters like high beam headlights.

Then everyone blinks when half of their home is engulfed in neon orange, a crescent carved out of their moon city as Chemo leaves a crater that astronomers would surely have warned of had it really been an asteroid. And by the time people open their eyes, the remains of the city of lights has gone dark.

The black harbour rushes in to douse the invisible flames as the dying scream and mourners wail into the backs of their closed eyelids, only to choke on the glowing green that blankets the surviving city because radiation holds no bars for the blind, and Chemo not for the living-dead of the Harbour of Blood.

And across the black channel the living-dead holds a gun to the head of the meteor that killed the dinosaurs, as he condemns its maker for letting its course go unaltered and bringing Hell bubbling up from the cracks in the earth as it now seeks to flood a blinded city-turned-sixth great lake.

And as a population has been halved, a single boy-turned-man wishes further for the evening of the score, and his eyes reflect the green glow of grief.

The comet brings condemnation.

But Dick Grayson knew he was always destined for grief. He just didn’t know it would take on the colour green.