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Wally’s phone ringing is what wakes him up. The light from its screen permeates the three o’clock stillness with the Backstreet Boys singing backup. Groaning, Wally reaches out and fumbles along the nightstand until his fingers close around his cell phone. He lifts it to his ear, eyes still closed. “...Y’ello?”
“Wally,” Dick’s voice comes in through the speaker. It’s more a gasp than anything, as if hearing Wally’s voice gave him oxygen after suffocating. “I...were you sleeping?”
It takes Wally a moment to formulate a cohesive sentence. “Um...yeah? It’s the middle of the night.”
“Right. Sorry.” There’s something off in Dick’s voice. Wally sits up.
“Where are you?”
“On your front porch.”
“What the fuck?” Suddenly awake, Wally pushes off the blanket and gets out of bed. “Hang on. I’ll be there in a you-know-what.” He hangs up, channeling just a bit of speed force to find a pair of pants and tug them on.
“What’s wrong?” Artemis asks groggily. Her head is still on the pillow but her eyes are open, focused on Wally.
“Dick’s at the front door. I don’t know why yet.”
“Is he okay?” She starts to get up, but Wally stops her with a kiss on the cheek.
“I’m sure he’s fine. Go back to sleep. I’ll wake you up if we need you, okay?” Artemis has already lost enough sleep tonight working on her history paper. Begrudgingly, she lets those magic words lull her back to sleep.
Wally doesn’t know what to expect when he opens the front door, but it isn’t Dick in civvies with his arms around himself like he just escaped a cold front. His hair is wet, plastered against his forehead. Wally recognizes his clothes: one of the many outfit stashes Dick keeps in safe houses all around Gotham and Blüdhaven. He looks like a mess.
“Hey, Walls.” The corner of Dick’s mouth lifts, but it’s too sad to be a smile. More like a grimace.
“How long have you been standing out here?”
“A while.”
“Jesus.” Wally lets Dick inside. As soon as the door is closed he pulls Dick in for a hug because even if Dick doesn’t need it right now, Wally fucking does. He and Dick haven’t seen each other in weeks, and now he shows up on Wally’s doorstep like a kitten someone abandoned on the freeway? Dick sinks into the embrace, holding Wally tight and burying his face in his shoulder. He’s shaking.
Wally pulls back to look at him. “What happened? What do you need?”
“Uh.” Dick looks like he hasn’t slept properly in weeks. “Coffee. I need coffee.”
“You got it.” Wally sits Dick down at the kitchen table, keeping a hand on his arm. He’s sure that if he moves too far away, Dick will crumble into pieces. Maybe he’s in shock? Wally makes them both coffee and sits down, pouring an avalanche of sugar into his. Dick stares into his own mug without touching it, as if coffee is an abstract concept that doesn’t quite compute.
Wally searches his face. “You’re not on anything, are you?”
Dick shakes his head.
“Are you hurt?”
This time Dick hesitates before shaking his head again. Is it possible for someone to become a ghost and still have a physical body? For their soul to linger a foot above them, just out of reach whilst their body stumbles around on autopilot?
“Dick.” He waits until Dick meets his eyes. “Talk to me. What the hell happened to you tonight?”
“I killed Blockbuster.”
“You...are you joking?” Now that he’s looking for it, Wally can see dried blood peeking out from Dick’s shirt collar. A spot on his hairline. Dried under his fingernails.
Dick keeps his gaze fixed on the table. “It was...I didn’t want her to. I told her we don’t kill, but he—he said he wouldn’t stop until everyone was dead. Everyone. So I stepped aside and let her do it. I let her pull the trigger, and—”
“Wait, wait, wait,” Wally says. “Back up. Who the hell are you talking about?”
Dick takes a deep breath and tells Wally the whole story. He tells him about Catalina Flores—the new Tarantula—wincing as he forces out the words. He tells him about Blockbuster going after Dick’s heart by targeting the circus, by killing everyone in Dick’s apartment building, by electing to slaughter everyone Dick cares about. Then their fight came to a standstill. Catalina aimed. Dick let her fire. Blockbuster died.
“That’s not your fault,” Wally says after Dick finishes. “Anyone in your place would have done the same thing.”
“But I’m not supposed to be like anyone else. It’s my job to be better. And I let a man die.”
“Tarantula pulled the trigger. It was her choice.”
“I made a choice too. I chose to be selfish. I chose the lives of the people I love over his.” Dick looks up at Wally. His eyes are bloodshot. “And you know what? I don’t even regret him being gone. I’m glad he’s dead, because now I don’t have to lose anything else.” He drops his head into his hands. “I’m a monster. I deserved everything that happened to me.”
Wally’s stomach churns. He may be two years older, but Dick has always been the grown-up in his eyes. Wally has always looked up to Dick as a pillar of strength. That pillar is crumbling now. Dick is falling apart before his eyes and Wally almost wants to look away, to pretend it’s not happening.
Then Dick lifts his head and Wally’s eyebrows furrow at what he sees. He and Dick have known each other long enough that Wally can read Dick’s face like a poem. He knows every line, every feature, the meaning behind every twitch. The Blockbuster debacle isn’t all that’s hurting him. Wally can feel it.
“What else?”
“I told you everything.”
“No, you didn’t. There’s something you’re leaving out.”
Dick grips his mug so tightly that his hands tremble, sloshing around the liquid inside.
Wally leans forward. “Dick. Whatever it is, you can tell me.”
“Catalina and I...we had sex after.”
“That’s it?”
Dick says nothing.
“Because you know I won’t think less of you if something else happened, right? Whatever it is you’re holding back, it’s okay.” And Dick is holding back. Wally knows it as certainly as he knows that his hair is red. He also knows that this is the way Dick works. He needs Wally to drag the truth out of him, because otherwise it’ll sit there and fester like a rotting wound.
Wally was telling the truth about everything being okay, regardless of whatever Dick did. There’s nothing Dick could ever do that would dim Wally’s image of him. Even if he assassinated a world leader and needed help running away to Canada, Wally would be right behind him with a passport and some fake mustaches. If Dick said he got bored of the hero gig and decided to become the Light’s new enforcer, Wally’s first question would be if this means he’ll still have time for bowling night on Thursdays.
There isn’t a single thing Dick could do that wouldn’t be okay in Wally’s eyes.
“You can tell me.”
Dick averts his eyes. “After she...after she did it. There was blood everywhere, on the ground and on my hands, and I was...I don’t know what happened. The world got fuzzy. I couldn’t breathe, so I went up to the roof and I guess she followed me.”
He pauses. Wally nods for him to go on. Dick closes his eyes.
“It was fuzzy,” he repeats. “I was...dissociating, or something. She climbed on top of me and started pulling down my suit and I—I know I told her to stop. I wanted her to stop.”
Bile climbs up Wally’s throat. His hands tighten on the edge of the table so hard they nearly splinter the wood. He’s pretty sure his grip is the only thing that’s keeping him from standing up and running until he finds this Catalina Flores and plunges a vibrating hand right through her chest.
“I told her not to touch me,” Dick says, “but she wouldn’t listen. It was like I couldn’t move. She just kept telling me that it was okay and not to fight it and...we had sex. That’s it.”
Dick looks up, eyes shiny and so, so nervous. It reminds Wally of the first time he told Dick that his dad was hitting him, back when he was fourteen and hiding bruises under his sweatshirts. At the time, he was terrified of how Dick would react. Would he think Wally was lying? Would he be angry at Wally for keeping it a secret for so long? What if he thought Wally was just overreacting?
Of course, his anxiety was pointless in the end. This is Dick Grayson we’re talking about. Immediately after the truth was out, Dick hugged Wally like it was his only job in the world. He let him cry into his shoulder and told him that everything would be all right, he promised it.
Now Dick is here, at Wally’s apartment, searching for the very same support Wally needed all those years ago.
Wally swallows hard. “Holy shit. Dick, I…”
“It’s fine,” Dick says quickly. He scrubs his wet eyes with his sleeve. “She didn’t, like, hurt me or anything. It was just sex.”
“But you didn’t want it.” That’s, like, the textbook definition of sexual assault.
Dick shrugs, tense as a rod. “I like sex.”
“Dude, you’re a cop. You know how consent works. You weren’t in your right mind, you told her no, you did everything you were supposed to. And she took advantage of you anyway.” Dick already knows all of this. Wally knows he does. “Liking sex with other people doesn’t justify what she did. You’ve worked more than enough rape cases just like this one before to know—”
Dick jolts at the word. “It wasn’t rape.”
“Dick.”
“It wasn’t. She didn’t fucking—she didn’t corner me in an alley or something. I had every opportunity to stop her and I didn’t.”
“You tried. You told her not to touch you, but she did it anyway. That’s rape, dude.”
Dick looks like he wants to argue more, but instead he clenches his jaw. He leans forward, eyes burning through Wally’s. “You can’t tell anyone.”
“I won’t.”
“Promise?”
“I won’t breathe a word of this to anyone, I swear.”
Only then does Dick seem to relax, letting out a breath. He sits back. “Good. Don’t.”
“You know there’s nothing to be ashamed of, right? No one is going to think any less of you.”
Not that Wally’s words will do a damn thing to change Dick’s mindset. He knows Dick too well by now. Dick’s foremost worry is that if other people find out about the assault, they’ll write him off completely.
That Dick Grayson, what a dog.
He’s just exaggerating.
He probably wanted it to happen.
He can’t get raped, he’s a guy. And a superhero to boot.
The worst part is that Wally can’t guarantee others won’t be thinking those very words, should Dick decide to come clean about the ordeal. The world is terrible and people can be awful. They both know it. Besides, what can Dick do if he does decide to speak up about the rape? It took place in uniform after the murder of a supervillain. Dick can’t report that kind of thing to the authorities. He’s stuck.
“We don’t speak of this after tonight,” Dick says. “Never.”
“Do you mean Blockbuster or the rape?”
Dick’s mouth twists like he ate something bad. “The assault.”
“Shouldn’t you, I don’t know, talk to someone about this? If not me, then maybe Bruce or Dinah.”
“No. It’s fine. I’m fine. We can just pretend it never happened.”
Wally’s eyes soften. “But it did happen.”
“I have more important things to worry about. So do you.”
Wally can’t believe what he’s hearing. If the situations were reversed, Dick would be saying the same exact things Wally is saying. Why does he feel like the rules don’t apply now, solely because it’s himself?
“Why did you even come here?” Wally asks. “Why not go to the cave or to the manor or anywhere else? Don’t you think that deep down, you want to talk about this?”
“I don’t know why. I was—I was freaked out and upset and you were the first person I thought of.” Dick runs a tired hand through his hair. At least the shaking has stopped. “Look, I’m sorry I woke you. I can catch a zeta back to Blüd and you can forget about all of this.”
“I don’t care that you woke me up, dummy. I just want to make sure you’re okay.” He pauses. “Are you?”
Dick shakes his head. “I’ve been through way worse than this before, Wally. I can handle it. I just want tonight to be over.”
Translation? I can’t handle this now. Maybe later, but definitely not now. Not when I’m barely hanging on as it is.
“At least stay here for the night,” Wally offers. “The couch is all yours. And you look like you could use a shower.”
For a second he’s terrified that Dick will say no and walk out the door, but eventually he nods. “Okay. Thanks.” Dick stands, but he hesitates. “Um. Could you—”
Wally is over there in less than a second, wrapping Dick up in the hug he’s been holding back since Dick began his story. Dick clutches him just as tightly as before, but now there’s comfort where there used to be desperation. Wally is his pillar now.
“It’s gonna be okay,” Wally tells him. “Everything’s going to be okay.”