Chapter Text
Back when Dick and Kori were still talking, she'd come over the night Dick received his letter from BU and they'd celebrated with a late night run for cookies and soda, but that was a long time ago.
Now, Kori isn’t there, Dick is alone, and he thinks, somewhere in his brain that can still pull together something like a thought, that he would be very cold if not for the blanketing feeling of tequila.
It is late, and when it is late and he is drunk he sometimes thinks of Jason. How, one time, Dick trudged outside after a long fight with Bruce and saw him, hanging out in the trees, a bottle of tequila in one hand and a cigarette in the other. A change of clothes in his backpack- so he wouldn’t smell like smoke. Dick hadn’t said anything to him about stopping. Didn't tell Bruce what he'd seen. He wonders, often, if he should’ve.
Then he feels terrible, like he could just cry, so he scrapes Jason out of his mind. Forcefully. He does it like cleaning a grill with the edge of a metal spatula. Like, if he was really doing it, physically, it would make this unbearable, shearing noise.
Bludhaven's cloudy night sky was closer to lilac than black. There was, impossibly, even more light pollution there than in Gotham. More industry maybe. Dick didn’t know why, though maybe he should now that he lived here. He needed to know what made Bludhaven's sky that color. He needed to know what made Bludhaven tick. He had to take it apart like an anthropologist, a mechanic, find his place in all of it, or he'd never feel at home. Otherwise, he would always be thinking of Gotham.
Despite all this extra light, it is still too dark to see. The street lights that light his way to his new apartment were all too far away. He gets the front door open, but then he finds his face in a tangled mess of his palms and elbows.
The umbrella stand and coat rack follow him down to the floor.
"Shoot," Dick mutters, rolling onto his back. "What would they say about me now... The nimble Dick Grayson, felled by a normal set of stairs."
A creak in the floorboard, Dick turns towards it. A door opens, and the stairwell light flicks on. His downstairs neighbor, and owner of the building, peeks out of her room at him.
Dick eeks his tired eyes open until he could see. Dick waves at his neighbor. "Hello."
"Gee," She says, side-eyeing the coat rack. He tries desperately to remember what he knew of her, but his brain felt slippery, like a wet bar of soap.
"You're wasted." She said.
What he knew: well, what she told him last week she was from Hong Kong, a very long time ago, but she was raised Irish and she had this crazy Irish accent. She had bangs. She liked Korean beer. She was... wearing a sweater. It was blue.
"A bit," Dick drawled. "I'm a bit drunk."
"Seems like you had a nice night."
Dick lifts his leg up to look at the spot where he'd knocked his calf on the first step. He grumbles, "I just got accepted into the police academy."
She is wearing checkered pajama pants in cute, pastel colors and they are covered in cat hair. Cute. She looks comfortable.
Dick llikes when girls look comfortable, and when they are funny. She is funny.
"You don't sound happy about it," She frowns.
A white cat peeks around his neighbor's leg. Big blue eyes with lopsided pupils.
"Hiya, kitty," Dick squats into his heels and waves to the cat using his fingers. He coos, "Hello, hello. Oh, I want to pet you."
Dick puts his palms down, so he's on all fours. He crawls a couple feet towards the cat and stops a foot away from his neighbor's door. He motions for the cat to come over. Oh. What was it's name? Snowball? Tofu? He didn't know.
"Come, kitty."
The cat leans towards him to sniff the air, and then darts back inside. The rejection stings deeply. His neighbor snickers at him, though there's no malice in it.
"I was in college, before, you know, taking art history..." Dick told her. "And this was not exactly my second or third choice. I'm not even doing it for the right reasons."
"What’s that even mean?"
Dick collapses to the floor, looking up at the ceiling. "It's like an obligation."
He closes his eyes.
"You can't sleep there."
"But now, I can't move. How strange," Dick whispers and the words feel very slippery, they disappear in an instant. The ceiling he's staring at now, is really just the floor of his apartment. The apartment where he lives alone. He is so alone, and he is drunk, and his body feels like it is rocketing through space.
A sigh. "You get off once, for sleeping in the hall," she says. "Because I'm a gracious landlord, one free pass, but I don't want an alcoholic living here. Definitely not an alcoholic cop.”
"I'm not an alcoholic," Dick says, but he will be a cop, and the shame cuts through his drunken haze. He sits up. "Sorry, I can make it to bed."
To his surprise, she's grinning at him while he stands. She has a good smile, Toothy, even when small. Dick brushes the dust off of himself. He has to catch himself on the wall only twice while he does this.
The neighbor frowns. "Do you need me to help you up the stairs?"
Dick mutters, "I require no pity."
"What?"
"I’m good," he says, much louder this time, and he leans against the wall to help him stay standing. "I'm a very capable- very capable man. I can climb stairs."
"I'm sure. Seein’ the state of you, you'll probably crawl them," she hums. "You sure you don't need help?"
Dick leans heavily against the wall in the narrow stairwell. "I don't want to be a police officer," Dick says. "I hate police officers.”
"Then why the hell would you apply?"
"Willfulness," Dick says.
"It won't be fun," she muses. "You know, you don't seem like a police type- with the little eighties windbreaker and mullet and all."
Dick looks down at himself. He'd bought this windbreaker because it had made him smile. Now he felt like he looked childish.
"Do you like my mullet?" He asks.
"I think it's alright."
Dick says, smiling, "So, you do like my mullet."
"Alright, Glee Club, yeah. I like it."
"I was in glee club," Dick chirps, too loud. "I bet you didn’t know that. For about a week, I wanted to be an actor. I didn't do more just 'cause I didn't have a lot of time outside of, er, School and gymnastics, when I was a kid. My dad was always dragging me places. And…"
He sighs.
"I was going to study art history."
“And now you’re a cop.”
“I will be.”
"No one will like you," she tells him.
"I don't like me."
"Then don't join."
"I'm sorry," Dick says, raising his head off the wall, and wobbling forward through the hall. "I'm really drunk."
"Don't talk then, it's three in the morning and you’re pissed,'' she says, and starts to close her door. "Just go to bed."
Her door shuts with a click. He's left alone with his thoughts once more.
But Dick persists. he gets up the stairs eventually. He wakes up the next morning, hungover, he looks to his left and finds he is on the couch.
From here, he can see a whole pile of boxes he hadn’t yet unpacked.
Yes, he had told himself he was going to unpack them. But it is hard to find the energy now.
It makes him think, back when Dick and Kori were still talking, she'd helped him pack for leaving Gotham, to head off to university.
And it makes him think about how that was a too long a time ago now.
He had packed all these boxes by himself.