Work Text:
“Hello, Dick. Dick? Are you there?”
Bruce’s voice is oddly distant. It crackles through the quiet hum of Dick’s phone, and Dick lets it sit by his face, laying on the mattress right next to his head. Picking it up, sitting against the headboard, leaving the room is a little too much.
“Yeah,” Dick says, waiting and waiting and waiting. “Yeah, hi.”
“Hi.” There’s background noise on the other line. Casual far-away voices that Dick can’t make out. Paper rustling. Coffee machine. Bruce is at work. Confused, he asks, “What’s going on?”
And…
Dick doesn’t know. In the freezer, there’s a tub of cookie dough ice cream he can’t make himself let go of, and underneath the sink, there’s cornflakes drowned in drain cleaner that he hasn’t stopped thinking about since he threw them out three days ago. Somewhere in this apartment he’d vomited apple sauce and vodka, and the sad remains of it is something he keeps coming back too. Like he’s proud of it. This feels like a very Not Okay thing to do, and the fact that a part of him is euphoric about it right now is scaring him.
His stomach hurts. He likes it.
“Nothing? I just. I don’t know,” Dick says, thinking about the food in his apartment until it hurts. It’s so stupid, the way he can make it all make sense when it doesn’t. It’s insanity, and here Dick is, calling Bruce to… to what? To fix it? To tell Dick to take some painkillers and eat? Tell him to clean up the vomit? This feels like a mistake. “Sorry, I didn’t meant to—”
“No, it’s okay,” Bruce says quickly. The line is still, further away. And there it is – his concern is intoxicating and quietly unbearable all at the same time. Dick doesn’t know what to do with it. “Stay on the line. Are you okay?”
Dick blinks. The wall is a very interesting thing to look at. He remembers Bruce asked him a question. He makes himself respond. “Um, no?”
“Okay. Where are you right now?”
Dick is lying in his bed, surrounded by weeks-old laundry, by old stains on the bedding, and vomit on his shirt that he hasn’t had the thought to change in four days. Instead of choosing to be a human being that can pick himself up from this mess, functioning the way it should and cook the noodles he left behind on the kitchen counter, he is choosing to lie here and rot until it all decays.
When he thinks about it like that, it sounds bad. He tries to amend the quiet faltering of his voice, telling Bruce, “No, I’m not like – I'm okay, I just...”
“Tell me,” Bruce says, like it’s easy.
Dick looks at the phone and he can’t get the word out. Words like, Hey. Um. I'm a little scared. I can't stop, and there’s this sick-feeling here, holding my hand and smiling like it doesn’t have anywhere else to be. I’m too enough. Every thought, every mouthful. I don't want to die, but I wouldn't be upset if all my bones atrophied so long as I were the one to let them. Does that make me suicidal? How are you, though?
Instead, he says, “I can't eat.”
Perhaps it’s an oversimplification, but the patheticism of it all is starting to suffocate him. It's 4:30 in the afternoon and Dick hasn’t left his bedroom. He’s condemned himself to his bed, unable to get up and walk into the rest of his apartment because –
Because if he gets up, he’ll find himself in the kitchen. He's terrified to do anything other than lie here like a dead thing already because if he moves, he’ll be hungry and if he’s hungry, he’ll break. He needs to go on patrol, he needs to talk to someone real, he needs to do all the things he wanted to do before it started to get like this; but if he gets up, he’ll go to the kitchen and Dick won’t fucking stop. It’ll ruin everything.
Bruce doesn’t speak for a moment. Dick can almost picture it: the dumb look on his face, the horrible unsureness in his eyes that consumes Bruce when the pieces aren’t falling the way they should. Bruce, the man with every contingency for the end of the world, doesn’t know what to do with this any more than Dick does.
“You can’t eat?” he repeats, lamely.
“Um. Yeah,” Dick says back, the words sticking to his mouth like the apple sauce he’d contaminated with vodka to stop himself from eating it and a strange sort of almost-sickness. The shame of having to say it – of choosing to say it to Bruce of all people – is a whole new different kind of awfulness. “It’s just a thing. When I’m alone for a while, it happens sometimes. It’s happening now. And I just. I wanted to tell you. I want you to – I don't know, I'm sorry.”
He can’t unhear the voice in his head that’s screaming, you wanted this. You did this to yourself.
And it’s a sickness, perhaps. Some strange infection inside of him, because there it is, basking against all his organs that will never be small enough. Everything about him is too fucking much. He takes up more space and time and place than he should, and that condemns him something that of someone else’s. There's too much of Dick Grayson within this awfully vast existence, and he should not be here if he cannot ruin himself differently, purposely.
He wants this emptiness so awfully that it makes him think he should die from the pitifulness instead. Carcinogen patheticism, or something like that. And maybe it is painful, but it’s an ache he chose to feel. The pain is a constant liminal state in between his rib cage, stomach, pelvis, skin, penis. It begs itself to be known, and it’s all his all his all his.
“Okay,” Bruce says to him. His voice breaks through the void like just another thing that doesn’t belong in this apartment. He must be worried. Dick can hear it in his voice. It’s not usual for Dick to relish in his self-condemned catatonia, but everything is unwritten here. In this bed, he isn’t anything at all. The wall on the far end of this bedroom knows this too. Bruce says, “It’s okay. Did something happen?”
Maybe, but it doesn’t matter. The not-eating wasn’t something he’d wanted to do, but it was his choice just to… stop. After Cat did what she did, everything just felt so bloodied. He hadn’t ended up with a single wound from that night, and yet he was drowning in scars all the same. It didn’t make sense – and so, he’d made wounds that did. Ribs through skin, bones all angles, hunger pains. Sure, she may have taken what she’d wanted, but Dick chose to undo his body in condemning it his own. He would rather starve in proving to himself that it’s his than lose the choice not to at all.
“I just couldn’t stand myself,” Dick says simply.
“Are you at your apartment?” Bruce asks.
“Yeah.”
“I’ll come get you,” he says. Rustling of keys, voices in the hallway, elevator ding. Bruce is leaving quickly. “Stay on the line, okay?”
“It’s not like that,” Dick tries, only a little less empty. “I'm just telling you because – I don't want this.”
“I know. I know, chum. This isn’t your fault.”
“I feel stupid,” Dick says, the sound catching against his throat is something awful. Glass in his mouth, bile laced within the empty space of his stomach. The words fall within the in-betweens of a quiet breath and not-crying-but-almost. It’s all so pathetic that Dick feels like screaming. He's surprised at how angry he feels. He cannot touch his body without wanting to take something away.
And what a fucking privilege it is to hate his body. Eat or don’t eat, why should it matter anymore if he dies of his own autonomy? Is his free will insanity when it is narcissism? If an eating disorder is the worst thing to ever happen to him, then he is sicker than he thought. How dare you, he thinks. How dare you have a repulsive need to be more than what you are with less of a body to be had. Let your misguided attempt at reclaiming yourself be the death of you; wouldn’t that be so perfect.
He tells Bruce, “I don’t need you telling me I can eat.”
Bruce doesn’t answer that specific statement. Instead, his breath hitches, voice thin. “I'm glad you told me,” he says. The phone distorts as it connects to the car’s audio. “I’ll be there soon.”
Dick doesn’t have an answer. He wants to hang up the phone now, but he can’t make his body move. He settles for what’s easiest, a simple, “Okay.”
There’s nothing from the other line. Neither of them know what to do with themselves.
Dick waits.
“Dick.”
Gently, Bruce brushes his fingers alongside Dick cheek. Bruce’s eyes don’t leave him for a moment, searching, flickering over Dick’s face. His hands tighten around Dick’s cheek. It forces Dick to look up at him when Bruce says carefully, “Can you sit up for me?”
Dick didn’t hear him let himself in. His cell is still connecting the call; neither of them had hung up.
Dick lets his eyes drift away from the wall to look back at Bruce’s. They stare at each other for eons, and the nostalgia infects the room like a disease. This is some kind of desperate game that will have them both lose terribly, and after all these years, Dick doesn’t know what he’s playing for.
“Mmph,” Dick replies gracefully, perhaps losing.
Bruce isn’t interested in humouring staring contests. He stands up from his crouched position by the head of Dick’s bed, and urges Dick to sit up, too. He wraps a hand around Dick’s much-too-thin arm, and pulls him upright.
Dick lets him do it. As soon as he’s sitting, the room flickers. His vision fuzzes around the edges, and he’s so lightheaded, he feels nauseous. Bruce catches him before he falls too far off the bed. “I’ve got you. You’re okay.”
“Sorry. I’m dizzy, I think.”
Bruce is kneeling, level. His grasp is an almost painful ache against Dick’s shoulder. His other hand wraps all the way around Dick’s bicep, and Dick wonders if it hurts Bruce just as much. Bruce swallows, tries, “If I… If I make you something small, will you try to eat it? I’ll eat with you.”
Dick huffs. It is funny, despite how awful it is, that they ended up here. “You can’t make shit,” he says.
Bruce says back, “If it’s bad, I’ll try again.”
Dick swallows. “Okay.”
Bruce is almost carrying him. He wraps his arm around Dick’s waist, and they walk together. Dick’s feet catch against the carpet, refusing to cross the threshold, holding back. It’s maddening, how this one fucking room in his apartment seems to have become so pathetically terrifying. The mundanity of it hurts something worse than the rooftop; so terrible a thing that he’d rather stay stuck there in the rain than here with the food.
Bruce doesn’t say anything about the smell of vomit, of vodka in the trash, of rotting half-chewed food in the sink. He simply guides Dick into sitting at the counter, and Dick crosses his arms over it and rests his chin on his forearms like a child.
He watches Bruce flitter around, trying to find a mug, work Dick’s stove, scrape crystalised honey from a jar. Bruce places a Green Lantern mug in front of Dick’s face like an offering.
Dick stares at the tea. “You oversteeped it.”
“Are you saying that because you don’t want to drink it?”
“No, I’m saying that because you oversteeped it.”
Bruce puts down two plates between them, butter and honey on a single slice of toast for each of them and that’s it.
That’s it.
“Try the toast, please.”
Through sticky lashes and git in his eyes, Dick can see the way Bruce is looking at him. It’s all warmth, all unrelenting gentleness. For a shadow like him, it doesn’t make sense. He can’t see it the way Dick does.
“I am trying,” Dick says because—
Because that’s all he’s been doing. He was fixing this by recovering the thing she decided was hers, but then the sickness came anyway, unreventing. It’s inside his bones, screaming of: I hate you worse now so try harder. Try to undo it, try to be empty, no one can touch you if there’s nothing to touch. But what a terrible thing to want to do to himself, no? So call someone, tell Bruce to come get you, tell him to make the food you so desperately want to eat because you’re starving—
And then stare at it. Refuse. Vomit. Remember. You want the choice to let your body eat itself alive more than you want to be loved at all.
Everything is circles and circle and circles, and he can’t fucking win.
A small noise. Bruce’s voice. “Dick,” he calls, gentle.
“Mm?”
“Why are you crying?”
His voice breaks when he tries to talk again. “I really want to eat the toast.”
“I’m trying to understand. Talk to me.”
“I am,” Dick says again, quiet – urgent. “Something happened and my body’s not mine. Not eating helps.”
Bruce doesn’t say anything for a moment, but the question is there, inevitable. “What happened?”
All Dick knows of himself is this: everything he is made from is built from the things and people and ruins he had been before, and maybe when she lay on top of him and fucked him into the concrete and whispered all the wrong words, she made him this, too. Interchanging her insanities along with her spit. He doesn’t feel anything, and that’s bad. It’s so bad, it’s not human, you are not human, you do not get to feel nothing when you starve yourself into a different kind of submission. But against everything, Dick does.
It was working until it stopped.
“I fucked up,” Dick says quietly, looking at the sad toast. “I froze. I couldn’t move. And I didn’t stop her. I told her not to touch me, but I let it all happen anyway.”
Something crosses Bruce’s face. Something awful, something bad, something that doesn’t stop hurting and hurting and hurting all the way down into Dick’s bones. Bruce’s voice is strange when he speaks. Quietly, he says, “You were raped.”
It’s easy, as if it’s the worst thing Bruce’s ever had to say and that doesn’t even matter to him. He’s an anomaly here, the only person who’s broken enough to stay by him, standing in this hysterically awful liminal cluster fuck of Dick’s kitchen with all the food he hasn’t eaten.
It’s not fair. It’s not a question. Bruce says the words like he knows.
“No,” Dick says, desperate maybe. “That’s not what happened.”
“If that’s not what happened,” Bruce says carefully, “why are you so desperate to take control of your own body that you’re willing to kill yourself for it?”
“That’s not what I'm doing.”
“Then eat,” Bruce says. It’s all so rational, so unrelentingly sane. Dick has never once seen Bruce beg in the entire time he’s known him, but perhaps now, that’s changed.
Dick is so hungry for Bruce’s approval that he will die for it. It all makes sense in his head; why he has to refuse refuse refuse. Everything he does is as if to say look how fucking strong I am. Look how loudly I can scream ‘no’. Look how skinny I am when I tell myself I want to be. Bruce, please – look how desperately I am fighting to make up for the time I didn’t.
“Don’t make me,” Dick says, as if there isn’t really anyway other way to say it.
“I’m not – I’m not making you do anything,” Bruce says. “I promise. I want you to eat because I want you to be better. I don’t… understand it, but I’m trying.”
Bruce will never see it the way Dick does, and Dick can’t make his brain think otherwise; but despite that, they’re both here. Dick will not pick up the toast nor drink the tea, but he is sitting in his kitchen. Bruce doesn’t have a contingency for this and cannot do anything but watch.
But he is watching.
“I’m trying, too,” Dick says. “I called you.”
“I know,” Bruce tells him, tells himself. “You did.”
Bruce continues to stare.
And as he does, Dick reaches out, wrapping his hands around the mug. It’s warm.