Happy Belated Birthday, Coldfiredragon
Title: Patterns Without Reason
Author: bastet_in_april
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Dick/Slade
Word Count: 563
Summary: Dick knows he won’t find what he needs here. He keeps looking, anyway.
Notes: Birthday fic for coldfiredragon. I’m sorry that it’s late! I was going for dark, but mostly wound up with melancholy. Oops?
Dim light shines faintly into the room through the spaces between the slats of the blinds. Dick stirs, staring out at the shadowy shapes of the spare furnishings in the dark room, uncertain what woke him. If it was a nightmare, it had already fled beyond his remembering, and failed to disturb the man asleep next to him. Slade’s warm bulk presses against him, almost suffocating, but even if Dick hadn’t needed that, had been able to bring himself to roll away, he would not have been able to. Slade’s heavy hand rests possessively on Dick’s chest, squarely over his heart, an unneeded reminder.
It had started raining at some point during the night, and Dick could hear the fat drops settling on the window glass. He couldn’t see them through the mostly-closed blinds in the gloom, even with the distant illumination of a streetlight somewhere below, but he imagined tracing their patterns on the windowpane with his fingertips like he had once traced the pattern of puckered, still-healing scars on Roy’s chest, trying to search out some meaning where there was none, looking for some hidden message that would somehow make things understandable to him. But they were only scars, and there was no more reason or meaning in them than in the wet paths the clinging raindrops drew on the windows. There would never be any words to be read there, no matter how long and hard Dick stared.
Dick felt divorced from his body almost all the time now. It was a sensation that should have been utterly alien to him. He remembered the stairwell and watching Blockbuster’s head come apart, feeling the shock roll over him like muffling, icy fog, and then on the roof, feeling as though he were watching from a distance as Catalina pressed him down, possessing Dick’s body, as Dick, held somewhere away from it by his inability to absorb the destruction of everything he had believed, was no more able to stop it than he had been able to stop the bullet, after he chose to step away. The sense of disconnection had lessened, but hadn’t gone away, in the time since. The times Dick feels the most a part of his own body, at least connected to himself and his life, if not in control of either, as much as thinking too deeply about his life and the person he has allowed himself to become makes sickness and guilt knot up his insides, are when Slade’s hands rest heavy on Dick’s shoulders, and Dick can lean up to meet him, kissing hungrily.
He is hungry, as if the blank space is growing inside of him is a void he can fill up with whatever Slade is willing to give him. It works for as long as Slade’s hands or eyes are on him, and no longer. In the silence afterward, when Dick has time to think again, he swears he can feel the ground shifting uneasily under his feet, all the pieces of his life unraveling again, the spaces where people should have been in his life, where Nightwing should have been in his life, are unfilled and abandoned, home to ghosts and regret. Looking to Slade to fix what is broken in Dick’s life is like trying to find a reason in raindrops on a windowpane. There aren’t any answers there.
Author: bastet_in_april
Rating: PG-13
Characters: Dick/Slade
Word Count: 563
Summary: Dick knows he won’t find what he needs here. He keeps looking, anyway.
Notes: Birthday fic for coldfiredragon. I’m sorry that it’s late! I was going for dark, but mostly wound up with melancholy. Oops?
Dim light shines faintly into the room through the spaces between the slats of the blinds. Dick stirs, staring out at the shadowy shapes of the spare furnishings in the dark room, uncertain what woke him. If it was a nightmare, it had already fled beyond his remembering, and failed to disturb the man asleep next to him. Slade’s warm bulk presses against him, almost suffocating, but even if Dick hadn’t needed that, had been able to bring himself to roll away, he would not have been able to. Slade’s heavy hand rests possessively on Dick’s chest, squarely over his heart, an unneeded reminder.
It had started raining at some point during the night, and Dick could hear the fat drops settling on the window glass. He couldn’t see them through the mostly-closed blinds in the gloom, even with the distant illumination of a streetlight somewhere below, but he imagined tracing their patterns on the windowpane with his fingertips like he had once traced the pattern of puckered, still-healing scars on Roy’s chest, trying to search out some meaning where there was none, looking for some hidden message that would somehow make things understandable to him. But they were only scars, and there was no more reason or meaning in them than in the wet paths the clinging raindrops drew on the windows. There would never be any words to be read there, no matter how long and hard Dick stared.
Dick felt divorced from his body almost all the time now. It was a sensation that should have been utterly alien to him. He remembered the stairwell and watching Blockbuster’s head come apart, feeling the shock roll over him like muffling, icy fog, and then on the roof, feeling as though he were watching from a distance as Catalina pressed him down, possessing Dick’s body, as Dick, held somewhere away from it by his inability to absorb the destruction of everything he had believed, was no more able to stop it than he had been able to stop the bullet, after he chose to step away. The sense of disconnection had lessened, but hadn’t gone away, in the time since. The times Dick feels the most a part of his own body, at least connected to himself and his life, if not in control of either, as much as thinking too deeply about his life and the person he has allowed himself to become makes sickness and guilt knot up his insides, are when Slade’s hands rest heavy on Dick’s shoulders, and Dick can lean up to meet him, kissing hungrily.
He is hungry, as if the blank space is growing inside of him is a void he can fill up with whatever Slade is willing to give him. It works for as long as Slade’s hands or eyes are on him, and no longer. In the silence afterward, when Dick has time to think again, he swears he can feel the ground shifting uneasily under his feet, all the pieces of his life unraveling again, the spaces where people should have been in his life, where Nightwing should have been in his life, are unfilled and abandoned, home to ghosts and regret. Looking to Slade to fix what is broken in Dick’s life is like trying to find a reason in raindrops on a windowpane. There aren’t any answers there.