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When Dick shows up at his door, car keys dangling off his forefinger, Jason just goes along with it. He’s afraid of who his brother will tell if he turns him away.
The drive from New Jersey to California is long—43 hours, Dick tells him, as they coast on the freeway out of Gotham. Gradually, the trees grow taller and wilder. Traffic loosens. Dick has an old, paper atlas tossed on the dashboard, colors faded from years of tanning beneath summer sun. Some of the sunlight reaches Jason’s legs, warming him through his jeans.
“I can drive if you get tired,” Jason says. It’s meant to be a challenge. To see if Dick still trusts him after what he’s learned.
“Sure thing,” Dick says, smiling. Jason studies his brother for a bit, looking for tension in the mouth, or strain in the eyes. Dick either doesn’t notice or pretends not to. Likely the latter. His eyes remain ahead on the road.
They stop for lunch after three hours, now out of Jersey and somewhere in Pennsylvania. Dick lets Jason pick, and Jason settles for a burger place conjoined with a gas station. Inside, the air is chilly and smells of salt and grease. The tiles are shiny and sticky. Dick orders first, then looks at Jason pointedly when it’s his turn. Jason orders a cheeseburger.
Jason picks a table while Dick waits for their order. When Dick returns, he’s got an extra soda with him, which he sets in front of Jason.
“On the house, they said,” Dick says, shrugging. Jason’s not sure whether that’s true — he wouldn’t put it past his brother to lie about buying a soda—but there’s a phone number and a smiley face scrawled on the receipt, which Dick tucks into his pocket, so Jason snorts and gives his brother a pass.
He picks his sandwich apart slowly. He can tell Dick’s watching, even though his brother is busy scrolling through his phone. He takes the pickles out first. Then the tomatoes. The lettuce. At this point, Dick’s already halfway through his own burger, which he ordered along with some fries. When Jason’s done, his sandwich is reduced to cheese, meat, and a singular sesame bun. He chews thoroughly, the food heavy on his tongue. When he swallows, he pictures the food falling a long, dark distance before clanging against the bottom of an empty, metal stomach.
They don’t leave until Jason finishes. Dick holds up the soda as they throw out the trash, shaking it and giving Jason a pout. “You didn’t drink any,” Dick says.
“Wasn’t thirsty.”
“But I got orange. Your favorite.”
The look Dick gives him is childish, but fragile. Like Jason could kill him with a single no.
Jason sighs and takes the soda. He decides he’ll let it sit in the car, where it will inevitably heat, flatten, and be thrown in a dumpster when Dick’s back is turned.
They drive all day and stop in Ohio. The town is small, engine oil and manure traceable with each gust of wind. Jason feels overdressed by simply being in jeans. Dick doesn't seem bothered. He strides easily into the motel lobby in his dark, ripped skinny jeans and thin cotton shirt. The wind, wilder without having to funnel through traffic and skyscrapers, rustles through Dick’s hair, shifting his always untamed locks into a different state of disarray. Jason pauses at the open trunk of their car, struck by the solidity of his brother and wondering what it must feel like to exist so wholly.
Their room has two queen beds. Dick immediately throws himself onto the one nearest to the door. Jason moves to the second bed, even though he knows the huffing of the air conditioner will keep him up at night. Dick has a thing for sleeping close to doors. More than the rest of them do.
He unpacks, pulling out softer clothes and his tooth brush while Dick turns on the TV, surfs through a few channels, then sneaks past Jason to fling open the curtains. Past the parking lot and a field of wild grass, the sun sinks into the horizon, surrounded by a halo of bruised red. A smile lights up his brother’s face, making him appear young to the point of looking like a stranger, and Jason thinks to himself that, at least in these few seconds, his brother isn’t weighed down by him, isn’t thinking about what he now knows.
*
Even though yesterday Jason said he could drive, he doesn’t speak up when Dick slips into the driver’s seat as Jason lugs his last duffle bag into Dick’s trunk. He didn’t sleep much last night, kept awake by all the noise: the air conditioner, the TV next door, cars rolling past, footsteps, his brother’s breathing.
They enter Indiana today, and aren’t set to stop until the border of Illinois and Missouri. The day is just as alarmingly bright as the previous was. They play a game to pass the time.
“Cauliflower,” Dick says.
“Daikon,” Jason continues.
“Eggplant.”
“Fennel.”
“Garbanzo.”
Jason pauses. “That’s a legume,” he says. Dick frowns a little.
“And a legume is a vegetable.”
“Legumes are seeds. Fruits have seeds.”
“Some vegetables do too,” Dick says. “Take cucumbers.”
“Cucumbers are a fruit.”
A pause.
“No,” Dick breathes, sounding legitimately shocked—not the fake, exaggerated shock he puts on for Damian sometimes to humor the boy. “If cucumbers are a fruit, then explain pickles!”
Jason realizes he’s smiling when he begins to talk again and feels the stretch of his lips.
“Well, technically pickles are a fruit—although, since they’re preserved, they’re really closer to a jam.”
“No, no no,” Dick whines, and Jason breaks out laughing. The sensation almost overwhelms him—all that air and pressure in his chest, choking out in brief gasps. It’s near violent. Violent and chaotic. He feels alive.
But he’s not.
“Hey,” Dick says, coming down from his own laughter. He reaches an hand over, finding Jason’s forearm and shaking it. “It’s your turn. We’re now on H.”
Jason’s arm feels limp in Dick’s grasp. A stringless marionette. Dick turns to look at him now, eyes mapping over his face before darting back to the road. He says nothing, but his hand gives Jason’s arm a squeeze. Jason senses the warmth of a palm, the shifting of pressure, but it all seems far away. He imagines neurons in his body firing, mechanoreceptors set on delivering a message to his brain so he can feel, only for the signal to stop short when the webs of dendrites and axons thin and atrophy. A dead end. Electricity and chemicals fizzling out in the darkness.
He doesn’t even bother to tug his hand out of Dick’s grip. Eventually, Dick pulls away, both hands back on the steering wheel.
They stop at a few more rest stops. At one of them, there’s a statue of Superman, and Dick rushes down to take a picture. He pulls Jason in next to him, handing his phone off to a stranger, much to Jason’s embarrassment. Then Dick leads him to the vending machines, asking him what he wants.
“I’m not a kid,” Jason says, taking out his own wallet even though Dick already has two dollars set out. Dick doesn’t say anything to that, and in the end, Jason picks out a bag of M&Ms. It’s only once they’re in his hands that he realizes he doesn’t know what to do with them.
Only the living eat.
“I’ll drive,” Jason says, handing the bag off to Dick.
“Fine,” Dick says.
Jason drives until dark. Dick points out strange billboards and waterparks hidden in the trees. “Ooh, Rock City,” Dick says, pressed against the window. “Do you think they just have rocks there?”
Neither of them open the M&Ms. They sit in the cupholder, shaking gently with the car. Jason imagines his brother finding them one day, perhaps a few weeks after their trip, or years even down the line. He imagines Dick opening them to find the colors all melted together, the candies reshaped. Heat, Jason thinks, is relentless. Melting and burning down things you always thought to be whole. It amazes Jason still how the human flesh can melt, proving that, all along, humans are made of nothing stronger than birthday candles.
“What are you thinking about,” Dick asks, studying him.
“Nothing,” Jason says.
At some point, Dick falls asleep. The sky is dark then, Dick’s skin saturated in blue. When Jason looks at his own forearms, he’s startled by their blueness as well. Blue, like drowned, bloated bodies. Blue, like asphyxiated victims. Blue, like a chilled corpse.
Jason swerves the car.
Dick startles awake with a yelp, eyes wild. A car rushes past them, honking. For a second, they just breathe.
“What happened?” Dick finally asks. Jason clenches his jaw, then unclenches. Clench. Unclench. Dick’s breaths even out. He’s still staring at him. “You good to drive?” Dick asks carefully.
“I’m fine,” Jason says. “There was something on the road.”
Dick doesn’t fall back asleep after that. Soon, it gets dark enough that the only light inside the car comes from Dick’s dashboard. For a few mile markers, Dick is quiet, humming to himself a little now and then, a jumble of notes too nonsensical to be real music.
“Did you see anything,” Dick begins innocently enough, “when you died?”
Jason stiffens.
“When I died, I don’t think I saw anything,” Dick continues. He sounds far away. Dreamy. In the grainy darkness, Dick could be an illusion. “My mom and dad always told me there would be something after. They weren’t sure what, but they knew there was something. I thought, when I died, I would finally see them there, wherever that was, but I think I just went nowhere. I couldn’t even think. And—” Dick pulls a leg in close to his chest, chin resting on a kneecap “—it’s kind of nice, in a way, that there’s an end. A real end. No more of anything. Just nothing, finally.”
Dick doesn’t say anything after that. Jason isn’t sure how to respond. They don’t talk like this, usually. Most of their energy is spent making fun of each other. Talking things that don’t matter. It unsettles him everytime Dick starts going on like this; it makes Jason realize his brother has had a life too, one with moments that Jason will never know about, with depth in suffering, happiness, and sadness Jason will never fully unravel. It’s easier to think of his brother as simple than to realize he will never fully understand his brother.
“I saw nothing,” Jason says truthfully. He wishes for the next morning, when it will be light again, and Dick will be back to his usual self. The night that hangs over them right now seems never ending.
“And what about right now?” Dick asks. “What do you feel right now?”
Jason senses his left leg tingling, close to falling asleep. There’s an itch on the back of his neck. He’s suddenly aware of his heart, and it thuds uncomfortably in his chest. All of it is far away, like the sensations belong to someone else and he’s merely recording the data. It feels like every second passes without him noticing. It feels like words just come out of his mouth, and he’s as much an audience to his own voice as Dick is. It feels like nothing really touches him. Things just happen around him.
“Just thirty more minutes,” Dick says, his face now lit up by his phone. “I can drive tomorrow.”
*
“Let’s go to California,” was the first thing Dick said when he showed up at Jason’s door.
“Why,” Jason asked, and Dick’s face dropped a little.
“Remember? You always wanted to.”
That was a long time ago. Before Jason died. He got the idea when Dick took him to the New Jersey beach one day while Bruce was gone. Back then, they only hung out when Bruce was gone.
The drive took three hours. The car was quiet, Jason remembers, but the quiet wasn’t weird. This was before Tim, before Cass, Damian, and everyone else, when just Dick’s presence beside him seemed overwhelming. Jason, born a single child, assumed that was how it would always be. In the unlikely event his parents gave him a brother or sister, Jason would become the oldest anyway.
It still surprises Jason now and then that none of that turned out to be true. Suddenly, in his early teens, Jason had a brother—an older brother, who really wasn’t that much older than him, and in any other circumstance, would’ve felt to Jason like a peer. But the word brother is powerful, capable of setting the trajectory of a relationship before the relationship even exists. The word, defined by centuries of use, shaped them into who they are. Sometimes, Jason thinks that if Bruce had simply introduced them to each other as friends, that’s all they would’ve become. Friends. Close friends, possibly, who get along better than they do now. Jason guesses that that’s the difference between friendship and brotherhood—friendship occurs naturally. Arises when two people get along. One’s expectations for a friend don’t come until later, when the relationship is strong. Brotherhood, on the other hand, is almost always forced upon, and the expectations come immediately. Perhaps that’s why they fought so much: Jason expected Dick to be the older brother he always saw in movies and read in books, and Dick expected something likewise in Jason. When they disappointed each other, it felt unforgivable.
“Put on sunblock,” Dick said when they turned into the sandy parking lot. Jason scowled, but did so. They kept their windows rolled down as they cruised for a spot in the parking lot, as per beach rules. Jason, excited at the prospect of going to the beach, having never been before, was suddenly intimidated. The beach was loud. Colorful. The ocean, he realized, watching a wave crash against the shore, was not gentle.
On the beach, Dick planted an umbrella and spread out a towel. He looked at Jason like he expected him to go running off into the water.
“Go on,” Dick said, sounding unsure all of a sudden. “Check out the water.”
So Jason did, stepping along the wet shore of the water and watching his footprints sink into the sand. It didn’t take long for Dick to attract a group of guys and girls, who flirt and offer him drinks beneath the shade of the umbrella. Jason scowled at that, kicking up sand with his foot. The sun pressed hot into his back, scorching despite the sunblock, and Jason suddenly wanted to go home.
Dick looked up in surprise when Jason marched back to their beach towel. He warily avoided the glances of the people with Dick, who looked and dressed nothing like the people Jason usually talked to.
“What’s wrong, Jay?” Dick asked, setting a beer down into the sand.
“I want to go home,” Jason said. Dick gave the others a glance before getting up onto his knees, moving to where Jason stood at the edge of the towel.
“We just got here, Jay. We drove three hours,” Dick said. Jason crossed his arms, wishing the other people would stop staring at him. This was his beach towel. Only he and Dick were supposed to be there.
“It’s no fun here,” Jason said. “It’s too hot.”
Dick looked at him, studying for a bit, before breaking out into a smile and standing.
“That’s cause you haven’t gone into the water,” Dick said, steering him towards the ocean. The people behind them called out to Dick, but Dick waved them off with a smile and a promise to return.
When they got near the water, Jason slowed down. The ocean was loud. Roaring. The water, tall and untamed, was powerful enough to generate crests whiter than the sand.
“Come on,” Dick said, far enough ahead that he was able to fall back into the ocean, going under for a moment before resurfacing with wet hair. Idly, Jason thought to himself that he’d never seen Dick with drenched hair. Jason edged further into the water, his feet sinking into the sand. The water came up to his ankles, his shins, his knees, tugging back and forth on his legs. He swayed. Dick squinted at him, eyelashes matted in salt water. “You know how to swim, right?”
“Yeah,” Jason said loudly, so as to be heard over the waves. He crossed his arms. “Just not in the ocean.”
Dick swam back closer until he was kneeling in the sand in front of Jason.
“Come on,” Dick said, grabbing Jason by the wrists and tugging him forward. Dick’s palms were coarse with sand. “You’ll be fine.”
“Of course I’ll be fine,” Jason said. He took a step. Then another. And another.
At some point, the ground beneath his feet disappeared, and it became just ocean. The water was choppy, oscillating from Jason’s chest to his chin. Faintly, he thought he heard Dick laugh, but the ocean was so loud. When a wave suddenly came over his head, Jason spluttered, panicking for a blind, breathless moment.
“Woah,” Dick said, and arms came around his shoulders. Jason grasped blindly for those arms, and only once stabilized did he wipe the water off his face. “I got you.” In the loudness of the ocean, Dick’s words sounded like a secret.
After that, Dick took him farther out into the water. The people beneath their umbrella shrank until Jason wasn’t sure it was even their umbrella. All he could hear was crashing waves. Dick kept a hand clamped around his wrist until Jason finally felt like he understood the rhythm of the waves and how to ride with the force of it.
So he made Dick let go. And without a tether, his body was carried with the ocean, which washed him forward, then backward, and forward, then backward. The sun, between tall crests that drenched Jason’s hair, baked it into straw, warming his shoulders and nose.
When Jason thinks about it now, he thinks about how real everything felt. How solid. The ocean acknowledging his existence by pulling him back and forth. The sun attacking him like she attacks all living matter on earth. How loud it was, ringing and filling his ears.
“When can we go again?” Jason had asked when evening arrived, and they packed up for the drive home. Dick laughed at that, and Jason was too happy to care.
“You need to go to California,” Dick said. “The beaches there are even better.”
Jason wasn’t sure how beaches could be different, or better for that matter, but the thought invigorated him.
“Will you take me?” Jason asked. He hoped his voice didn’t sound too hopeful.
“Of course,” Dick said. “Just give me the word.”
*
On the third day, they drive through Missouri. They pass through the Ozarks, where the land is hilly and the forests are dense. Dick drives first.
“We could stop somewhere,” Dick says, glancing over at Jason. “I mean, that’s… interesting.”
They pass a billboard for a steamboat museum. Jason snorts. He can tell Dick is growing antsy from the long hours in the car.
They don’t talk about yesterday, that conversation in the dark all but bleached out by the sun. They talk about new things, like Cass’s recent pottery obsession, the long standing pizzeria on Sixth that is finally closing down, or how the trees outside are so different from Gotham trees, which are nothing more than spindly twigs sprouting out of cracks in the concrete.
“Imagine being born here,” Jason says as they pass by a yard of rentable carnival supplies. Dick shrugs, and Jason suddenly remembers that Dick wasn’t born in Gotham. In fact, Dick always told him he didn’t know where he was born.
At a rest stop, they agree to switch drivers. When Jason exists the bathroom, he finds Dick standing before a wall of missing children posters, many of the photos grainy and sunbaked. When Dick spots him, he pulls away easily, and they continue on their way.
They’re on a long stretch of highway when Jason feels his left arm go numb. It starts with a tingling at his fingertips, then travels up to his shoulder. Dick has passed out in the passenger’s seat, head knocking against the window gently whenever they cross a bump.
Billboards start showing up incessantly for the steamboat museum. When the exit arrives, Jason takes the turn. His entire left arm is leaden then. When Jason tries to move it, nothing happens.
The museum is small, sitting at the end of a gravel driveway. Two other businesses stand adjacent to it: a wood paneled ‘fudge emporium’ and a liquor store. It isn’t until Jason parks that Dick comes to. His eyes immediately light up.
“Yes, this is going to be great, just you watch.”
Jason doesn’t use his left arm as he gets out of the car. He follows Dick inside the museum, where the air is still and smells of old fabric. The eldery woman behind the desk smiles at them when they enter, and Jason feels self-conscious, sure that the woman is trying to puzzle them out.
There is no one else in the museum. Jason follows Dick’s pace, attention too occupied by the leadenness of his arm to read any of the plaques. Dick is transfixed until the last quarter of the museum, when he loses his patience and hurries to the exit. They stop next door and pick out a slab of peanut butter fudge, which the cashier wraps in wax paper and bundles up in a purple box.
They’re back in the car and seated, Jason in the driver’s seat, Dick in passenger, when Jason finally says, “I can’t feel my arm.”
Dick looks confused for a moment, then stares at him with big eyes.
“Which arm?” he asks.
“Left,” Jason grunts. For a second, he thinks Dick is stumped, but then Dick reaches over and grabs his arm by the wrist. It hangs limply in Dick’s grasp. Dick’s thumb works along Jason’s forearm, as though he’s merely massaging a hand that had fallen asleep. Jason searches for a zap of energy to flow through his arm, signaling the return of his control. But nothing. Dick sets his arm back down.
“I’ll drive,” Dick says.
They drive for three hours straight. Whenever Dick asks if he wants to take a break, Jason shakes his head no. He just wants to get to whatever motel they’re staying at tonight and get this over with. In the dense air of the Midwest, crowded by trees and tall grass, California feels imaginary.
Just as the sun’s beginning to descend from its peak, Jason looses his patience.
“Why are we here,” Jason says. Dick glances over at him. Jason hates how wary Dick looks.
“Come on, Jay,” Dick says.
“Truly,” Jason says, “what do you think this will accomplish?”
Dick opens his mouth, lips trembling around an unshapen vowel. He closes it.
“You think a trip will make this all better?” Jason says, and hears a bit of thickness creep into his voice. He hates that sound.
“I’m trying,” Dick says, sounding tired. Jason feels anger prick in his chest and up his throat.
“Why are you trying now? Why are you always trying when it’s too late?”
Dick doesn’t say anything to that. Instead, he bites down on his bottom lip. They pass a tar colored barn, the roof caved in.
“It’s hard being the oldest,” Dick finally says. Jason registers the words slowly, and when he does, he shouts.
“That’s what you have to say? You’re going to blame it on birth order?”
“No, Jason, I just mean—”
“Let me guess, now you’re going to twist around your words.”
“Jason,” Dick says, aggrieved. Before Dick can say anything else, Jason turns on the radio. A song blasts through Dick’s ancient speakers, the singer’s voice congested by static. Jason leaves it on, and Dick turns back to the road with a defeated sigh.
At the motel, Dick buys a pizza for dinner. Jason refuses to eat, claiming he’d rather take a nap. Dick nags at him, pulling on his ankle, his wrist, asking him to let him see his arm. Jason rolls over, feigning sleep, and Dick eventually turns out the light.
He hears Dick putter around the room, the noise gradually fading away. He feels his body grow heavy, as if petrifying. The numbness in his arm creeps up along his shoulder blades, down his chest, up his throat. This is what it felt like, Jason thinks, as the numbness settles in his eyelids, securing them shut.
*
He didn’t suspect it until three years out of the pit. It began with his days passing by with a blink and escalating arguments he wasn’t even aware he’d begun until he was in the middle of one.
It feels like watching a movie. A month can take place over an hour. Important things happen, but he doesn’t really care. It can’t affect him. Nothing affects him.
He’s even surprised when a knife cuts into his arm on patrol. Pain spikes through his shoulder, yes, but it’s distant pain. Someone else’s pain. What really captures him is the blood pouring down his sleeve. Red, hot, real.
He eats less and less. He knows he shouldn’t, he needs the energy, but the pangs of hunger don’t really hit him either. The hunger… it doesn’t feel like it used to. Jason feels no fear, no desperation. He lets himself feel hungry, amused even when the pain is sharp enough to almost seem real.
The only thing that bothers him is the texturelessness. Everything suddenly smooth. Like he’s reflecting on a memory rather than actually living the moment. Minor details gloss over. He just drifts and drifts, never touching the ground.
*
They drive through Oklahoma and part of Texas. The trees shrink and spread apart until they are merely shrubs. Grass fades into orange soil. The sky grows big.
Dick drives. Jason remains silent. He doesn’t tell Dick that one of his legs feel numb too, and that his left arm hasn’t changed. He stares out the window, watching cattle farms pass by, interspersed by fields of wind mills.
“When Bruce took you in,” Dick finally says a few hours in, sounding awkward, “he didn’t tell me anything. It was… really sudden. I don’t know why he didn’t tell me.”
Jason listens, but he doesn’t reply. He doesn’t want to give Dick that gratification. Dick goes on.
“I was already having problems with Bruce, and it was hard for me to, you know, not think of you as another one of his ways to get rid of me.”
Jason remembers. He remembers all the shouting, how it would freeze him in the spot. He remembers thrown objects: books, vases—occasionally, a knife. There would be a silence after that, all of them too surprised by the entrance of an actual weapon.
“He always talked well about you. How you were training. How you were doing in school. He gave you—he gave you Robin. It was—I just—I know I should’ve been nicer to you, but…”
Jason remembers the bruise Bruce once left on Dick’s face, a mess of purple and blue beneath an eye. Dick had tried using foundation to cover it up, but it still didn’t look right, his eye and cheek too swollen. Jason swore to himself then that he’d do better than Dick in every way. Bruce would never be disappointed in him then. Bruce would never hit him.
Dick clears his throat.
“We’re going to get lunch, and you’re going to eat,” he says. Jason looks out the window.
Some of the memories from before are hard to come by. The ones of Bruce and Dick arguing most of all. It happened so often, it all just seemed to blur into a generalized statement in Jason’s mind: Bruce and Dick argued. The end. Other than that, Jason can’t seem to pick out a particular detail, never quite sure what any of the fights were about.
Occasionally, though, a memory will hit him:
Bruce pushing Dick into the shelves in the cave, knocking all the equipment over. Bruce dragging Jason upstairs to let Dick clean up on his own.
Dick angrily tearing down the riggings to his own trapeze, laughing coldly when Bruce held the shredded ropes in his hands, the slightest tremble in his jaw.
Bruce forcing Dick out of the house after Dick came over to play video games with Jason. Dick banging loudly on the back door, demanding Bruce to let him in, even after Bruce stormed off to his study, leaving Jason in the living room to listen as Dick’s screaming grew hysteric. (He never opened the door. Only listened. He didn’t want to be kicked out too.)
The time Dick hit him. They were arguing over something. Another something Jason can’t remember. Then, out of the blue, Dick’s knuckles collided with Jason’s jaw. He backed up, startled, jaw throbbing both warm and cold. When he looked up, Dick’s eyes were wide, just as surprised as he was. Dick opened his mouth, an apology ready on his lips, but then Jason punched back. And they fought, tumbling to the floor, feeling none of the pain and only the blind fury.
But still, Jason thinks, Dick should have been better. Because if Dick had just been a little more forgiving, accepting Bruce’s criticisms with more grace, they could’ve been happy. Jason wouldn’t have snuck off to find his mother, thinking he could find kindness in her. He wouldn’t have been beaten to death, wouldn’t have become intimate with the splintering of bone, the lesion of muscle, and wouldn’t be here now, in whatever sort of hell that precedes a complete death.
As soon as they get to the hotel, Jason falls asleep. Dick shuts off the lights, leaving only the TV on. Jason hears him scarfing down the takeout they ordered, which Jason left uneaten.
He’s not sure how much later it is when something latches onto his shoulder, snapping him out of sleep. The sudden shift in consciousness hurts, shock shooting up his spine, and he whips around, lunging out at whatever that has grabbed him.
There’s a yelp. A crashing of furniture. A body hits the floor. TV light casts a moving shadow on the wall. Then he feels his own back hit something hard—a doorway. Jason snarls.
The pit, when it takes over, doesn’t strip him of his senses. He’s aware of everything, as always, but the distance between himself and what he feels grows wider. He drifts until he’s floating high above, not even in this world anymore. Not even alive, but dead, as he should be. Dead, and watching the body he left behind move with disinterest.
His body grabs Dick by the collar of his shirt, throwing him onto a bed. His body closes its hands over Dick’s throat, watching blankly as Dick’s mouth opens in a gasp. His body presses its knees into Dick’s legs, making Dick’s struggle worthless.
Then Dick lets out a pained gasp, tears budding in the corners of his eyes, and Jason falls back into his physical body. Dick is suddenly right in front of him. His grip doesn’t let go, but Jason feels it now: Dick’s throat like bird bones beneath his thumbs. Dick’s fingernails cutting desperately into his forearms. The hot, firey anger in his chest. He feels. He feels.
And yet, for a moment, he doesn’t let go. He’s in control now. He can hold on, or he can let go. He can kill or save. Only the living can kill or save.
He lets go.
Dick rolls over, sucking in a rattling breath. His coughs shake the mattress. Jason sits back onto his knees, his hands trembling. When Dick turns back to look at him, his face flashing blue, pink, white from the TV light, Jason leans away.
“No, Jay,” Dick says, reaching an arm out to close around his wrist. Dick tugs him forward.
They fall back onto the bed, breaths heavy. He feels Dick raise up his left arm. He pulls slightly against the grip.
“Look, Jay,” Dick says, his voice broken and raspy. “You’re moving.”
*
They drive through New Mexico and Arizona. Having only packed t-shirts, Dick wears a ring of bruises around his throat. At the rest stops and gas stations, people stare. Jason watches Dick walk past them easily, paying them no mind.
What little grass that remained in Texas is gone. The land that passes by them outside their window is entirely red. A few hours in, and striped mesas rise from the soil, taller than any structure around. They stand silently. Commanding yet protective. Jason stares, awed by their foreignness.
They stop only for the Petrified Forest, which Dick claims is a lifelong destination of his. The visitor’s center is barren. The parking lot quiet. Dick grabs a map, and they walk.
They walk along mesas. They cross vast stretches of nothing. Blue sky meets yellow earth in a dreamy, thin line. The petrified trees are not whole, like Jason expected, but cross-sectioned into cylindrical chunks, as though the tree broke into pieces as it fell. Each piece reveals amber and honey rings. History, for anyone who cares to interpret it.
They say nothing but stare. Jason’s heart beats steadily in his chest. His lungs fill fully. He tastes the desert on his tongue. He closes his eyes.
It was three weeks ago that Dick found him staring blankly down at a knife in his own stomach. Jason had just wrapped up a drug bust, the knife wound his only injury. For weeks, he felt indifferent about injuries. That night, Jason decided to just let things unfold naturally. If he was already dead, as Jason suspected, having died then and there in the warehouse, then a simple knife couldn’t kill him. He couldn’t be killed. Only the living can die.
Beneath the hot glare of the sun, Jason can’t ignore the sting of pain on his cheeks. Pain that sinks into his skin, but doesn’t penetrate bone. He grits his teeth. He wants the pain to spear in deep, to cripple him, because nothing since the warehouse—the last place Jason knew for certain he was alive—has hurt like the crowbar. Nothing has felt as painful, as real. So the thought comes repeatedly and unbidden: you are dead. You died, and you are still dead.
Jason opens his eyes. He touches his cheeks. His fingers cool the inflamed skin. Dick squints up at him, his ring of bruises as bright as fingerpaint in the sun.
Only the living can kill.
“I should’ve brought sunscreen,” Dick says.
*
After Dick took out the knife and stitched closed his wound, he had led Jason back to his safehouse, where Dick poured milk and microwaved cookies he bought from the store.
“We don’t have to talk,” Dick said, setting the cookies and milk onto the coffee table in front of the couch. Normally, Jason would take up that offer. He didn’t care for Dick knowing his secrets. But this suspicion, the one he hoped to test by letting the knife bleed him dry, needed to be confirmed.
“I think I am dead,” Jason said. Dick’s head shot up.
“What?”
It would be funny if Jason could actually taste the milk on his tongue.
“I died,” Jason said. Dick’s eyebrows furrowed. “I died in that warehouse, and I’m still dead.”
“Jason,” Dick said slowly. “What are you talking about?”
And Jason just stared at him. He didn’t know how to articulate the distance he felt between everything and himself. Even if he knew, would Dick understand? Would he understand the texturelessness of things, and how his body no longer needed food? How his limbs weren’t supposed to move?
“I’m dead,” Jason said again, voice begging Dick to just understand. “I died, Dick. I’m not real. I’m not here.”
Dick’s eyes were big. He looked afraid.
“But you’re right here,” Dick said. “You came back.”
*
The next day, they finish the last leg of Arizona and enter California. Palm trees rise from the earth, and Jason can’t believe their abundance.
“Four hours, and we’ll reach the hotel,” Dick says in the morning. “That will be… around one? We’ll even have time to go to the beach.”
Dick drives, and Jason sleeps. The walking from the day before left him tired. He likes the fatigue in his muscles.
When Dick next wakes him, they’re in the city. They get lunch from a burger joint and eat on top of the fresh laundry in their hotel room. Jason removes the pickles. The lettuce. He leaves in the tomato and the second bun.
Afterwards, they lounge around and watch TV. Dick insists they shouldn’t swim right after eating. An hour passes, and two-thirty arrives. Dick packs a bag with towels, an umbrella, and water.
The drive to the beach isn’t long, compared to what they’ve already traversed. The beach is decently crowded. Dick rolls down the windows in the parking lot. Jason listens to the distant screams, all happy and joyful.
He switches to flip flops and follows Dick out onto the sand. Even standing six foot two, he feels suddenly stranded. People mill about, all strangers. The ocean moves and roars. It stretches out endlessly. Blue sky meeting blue water.
“See?” Dick says. “I told you. It’s better here.”
He follows as Dick picks a spot and rolls out the towel. Jason stakes the umbrella into the sand, then stands there, unsure what to do. Even now, years later, Jason still isn’t sure what it is that people should do on a beach. Just standing there, Jason feels too still. When he moves, he feels out of place. Dick drops his beach bag onto the towel.
“Come on,” Dick says. “Let’s go.”
And Jason follows Dick out to the water. The sand grows damp beneath his feet. He leaves footprints that last until the next tide.
Dick falls into the water, laughing, and Jason watches from a few yards away, feeling the familiar tug of the water on his legs.
“Come on,” Dick shouts, already drenched, and Jason steps in further.
The water soaks into his swim trunks. They travel over his legs. His knees bend, hitting the sand, when the weight of the water becomes too much. A receding wave crashes against his back. The hair at the base of his neck soaks wet. The water trickles down his chest, cold and smooth.
Only the living can feel, Jason thinks. He closes his eyes and feels a pressure in his throat.
“You’re okay,” Dick says, and he’s suddenly there, right in front of Jason. Jason threads his fingers into the sand, feeling the grains run over his knuckles like a creature. The air tastes salty. The sun presses against his back. “You’re right here, Jay. I got you.”
He feels Dick’s palms cup his cheeks. Sand scrapes against the sunburnt skin. The ocean roars. When Jason looks up, his brother is looking right back, his eyes its own kind of blue. Something surges in Jason’s chest, warm and powerful. It doesn’t go away.
“You’re alive, Jay,” Dick says, hands anchoring them together. “You’re alive.”