Chapter Text
Dick sifted through the CT scan images on the coffee table in front of him. scowled at the blotches that represented his own brain.
“Batman requested the scans. And you already signed a waiver to share those anonymously with the League. Are you still comfortable with that?” Dinah Lance asked, pushing her blonde waves from her face.
“I mean, do I still have a choice?” Dick muttered.
That was his brain. Somehow, he expected it to look more unique. He expected some sort of indicator of what a mess he was. Dick had a rudimentary knowledge of what he was looking at. Tim could probably dissect it and point to all the details he was missing.
If they scanned Jason’s brain and compared notes, would they be able to find the same, insidious memories squatting in their heads? The same initials carved into them.
But Dick’s memory was just a faded, twisted copy of Jason’s, wasn’t it?
“This is your medical information, Dick,” Dinah said kindly. Her therapist voice sounded a lot like a mom-voice. Did she ever use that with Roy, or was she harsher, like Ollie? “As a vigilante, I want to share information that may save lives. You are the only willing participant we have to provide data on this new drug. But as a therapist and a friend, I want to let you know that you have full bodily autonomy in this case. You can choose what information I pass on. Not just to the League, but to Batman.”
Dick put the papers back into the folder and sighed. “Are you here as a therapist?”
“I can’t remove that part of myself from the decision-making process. You were victimized in this situation. It's important that you are given the opportunity to reclaim any amount of control you can. And as a woman, I do find it important to speak up against the League's admitted tendency towards crossing boundaries in the name of justice.”
Dick sighed. “Not just the League. But that’s part of the whole vigilante thing, isn’t it? Cross boundaries. Take control. I know I’ve done those things before.”
Dinah shrugged. “Perhaps. But I have the opportunity to be on your side in this situation. So please, let me.”
He couldn’t say he wasn’t grateful for it. Something about letting the people he’d grown up idolizing dig around his head was absolutely sickening. Even if they didn’t know it was him. Being able to choose, at least, helped.
Even if he already knew what he’d choose. It was what Bruce would want.
“I’m okay with sharing everything that doesn’t risk my identity. And…” He hesitated, studying the folder. “The eval. The psych eval. If it’s not directly having to do with the effect of the drug, I don’t want it out there.”
Dinah nodded. “Would you like to choose the specifics, or would you like a third party to do that? I can read through it, if it’d be easier. Or perhaps a family member?”
“Tim,” Dick said automatically. Knowing Tim, he’d probably read it all already. He may have no respect for privacy himself, but he was pretty good at protecting it for others. He’d tenaciously guarded Jason’s for years. “If he’s willing… Tim can figure out what’s need-to-know.”
“I’m assuming you don’t want to share anything regarding your assault at the hands of Catalina Flores?” Dinah suggested kindly.
Dick winced. “Oh. Yeah. Take that out if you can. Knowing Tim, he’s probably snooped it out somehow. But I’d like to protect my baby brother from some things at least.”
Dinah smiled kindly. “You are also allowed to protect yourself."
Dick nodded, but didn’t comment.
This was very different from the last few times he’d been in therapy. Not that this was therapy. For one, he hadn’t been working with Dinah. The Black Canary. Mother-figure to one of his closest friends and on-again-off-again fling with the Green Arrow. For another, he was dealing with his own trauma on his own dime the last time. No reports were getting back to anyone anywhere. Just him working through shit.
This time, he was trying to make sense of the roughly replicated first-hand memory of his little brother’s brutal murder, which had dug itself into his brain like a tick. And thanks to the growing threat of the brain-washing drug with no given street name, as of yet, he was basically doing this open-door.
Star City was already fighting a rising tide of the stuff. Multiple dealers. Multiple criminal applications. And untraceable enough that no one knew who was under the influence of memory-warping drugs and when.
Superman had picked up the first few waves of the little red pills in Metropolis. A derivation, it seemed. And a few encounters with what they believed to be much closer to the original formula. It was nasty enough that Dick felt lucky he’d only been hit with the copycat shit.
The data Bruce had gathered while Dick was still under the effects of the drug, as well as the account of his recovery, was essential to fighting all of it. The drug was sneaky enough that most people didn't know what was happening until it was too late, so Dick's experience was unfairly important. Tim and some others were working on antidotes to help neutralize the drug's effects while it was in the system. A daunting task because the physical symptoms of the high was one of the few indicators they had for the resulting memory alteration.
As important as the data around the original situation was, Dick’s current role was to help them understand what recovery might look like. The League needed to know If implanted memories could be nutralized or if they would just plant themselves deeper with time. They needed to know what indicators an implanted memory might give off. How it might effect someone over a longer term. How to combat it.
“How have the exercises I’ve given you been helping?” Dinah asked. “Have you noticed any improvement?”
“That’s hard to answer that,” Dick muttered. “I think it's helping, but I think I’m just gaining a whole new litany of trauma.”
Dinah leaned forward. “How so?”
Dick sighed. “Despite my family’s admittedly well-earned reputation, I actually try to be respectful of boundaries. And in this specific case, it's also my boundary. I’m not like Tim or Bruce. I didn’t want to know all the dirty details of my baby brother’s gruesome murder. Never did.”
Dinah had given Dick homework. Whenever he had a flashback, a nightmare, or a recall to the implanted memory, he was supposed to compare it to the actual event and write down how they were different. That, however, meant digging into Bruce’s incredibly detailed account of Jason’s torture and death at Joker’s hands.
“Did you do as I suggested, and talk to Jason?”
Dick grunted and crossed his arms. “Jason and I have barely exchanged two sentences since the whole ordeal. I think I’ve forced him to relive the worst day of his life enough, thank you.”
“I think you would be surprised,” Dinah said softly. “One of the most common factors in unhealed trauma is a sense of helplessness. If Jason were to share details of his death with you in an effort to support you, it may help him reclaim some of those details for himself.”
“That’s not how it happened when I had panic attacks from HIS triggers in front of him. Three times.” Dick grumbled.
“What happened then?”
Dick slouched in the chair. “First time he ran. He does that sometimes. Found an excuse to get out and did it as soon as he had a chance. The last two, he figured out the trigger before I did, got it away from me, and then just sat there with me and waited it out like I somehow had a right to his trauma.”
“Sounds like he was able to work through his feelings quickly and find a way to be there for you.”
Dick shook his head. “He shouldn’t HAVE to be there for me. It’s not like he’s having breakdowns, and it’s HIS crap.”
Dinah shrugged. “You were diagnosed with PTSD after the incident with Blockbuster and Turantula, weren’t you?” she asked.
Dick scowled. “Yeah. Why? What's that have to do with this?”
“I imagine the things that felt pretty overwhelming in the first year are not nearly as triggering anymore.”
Dick paused, taking in the thought. He hadn’t had a flashback during a rainstorm for months. It was a once or twice a year thing now. And a momentary blip in his day rather than something that tanked his whole week. Nightmares happened, but he could make it through most nights without issues. And physical touch hadn’t been a problem since a few months after the fact.
“Unfortunately, things like PTSD and C-PTSD do tend to sneak up on us. Healing isn’t linear and more often than not, it takes intentional engagement and work. But we can find ways to be functional and productive despite that. It sounds like Jason is putting in the work to get there. And because of that, he’s been able to support you as well."
“But I don’t have PTSD, though, right?” Dick said quickly. “I mean, to the implanted memory. I don’t have PTSD to Jason’s trauma.”
Dinah paused to jot down a note before meeting his gaze. “It’s possible you may have lingering trauma from the event itself. What you went through was traumatizing. I wouldn’t be surprised if you had difficulty moving past it. But if you are asking for a diagnosis, I wouldn’t give it. You have many of the symptoms, yes. But after looking at your scans, and seeing the effects of the same drugs in others, I think your reaction is actually a sign that your brain is starting to right itself.”
Dick snorted and instantly forced the incredulous look off his face. Maybe that stupid roofie had implanted some of Jason’s pissy attitude into him, too. I was usually a bit more gracious than this.
“Think of this like your brain’s immune system fighting back. When you hit a trigger, your brain starts to engage a typical trauma response. It wants to protect you. But it's also testing the boundaries of reality. Every time you correct the new belief sets you were indoctrinated with, you are building up your immune system for next time.” She paused, lips pursing, evaluating him. For a second, Dick felt a lot like he did when Cass got her in her sights. “You told me last week about the belief you had that Jason was in pain up until the moment he died. Do you remember that?”
Dick frowned. “Yeah. I had a panic attack when I hit my hip on the kitchen counter.”
“And you asked your younger brother for details from Jason’s file. Didn’t you? What did you find out?”
Tim had been really helpful with Dinah’s homework. Nosey brat that he was, he’d snooped through every detail of Bruce's records about Jason. He knew the answer to most questions Dick could ask, which was helpful because Dick desperately did not want to read through Jason’s autopsy report.
“I found out that Jason’s beating probably lasted a lot longer than I thought it did,” Dick admitted. “Which… sucked. But I also learned that his brain was pretty damaged.” A tear slipped past his defenses. A sneak attack that he hadn’t felt coming.
Yeah, he’d cried a lot when he found out, but that was expected when you learned shit like that about people you loved. “Yeah. The autopsy suggests that Jason could probably still feel a lot of pain at the end. But his brain was so damaged, he didn’t really understand what was happening. He probably forgot it as soon as it happened. So even if he was there for a few hours, he probably just remembered a vague outline of events. He likely experienced it like it was only a few seconds. He was just focused on saving Shiela still.”
Something passed over Dinah’s face, and Dick hesitated. Jason was a pretty complicated topic for the entire superhero community. There had been a lot of debate immediately after it happened. Jason had been a kid. One of the first in the community to die on the job. And definitely the highest profile case. Batman was one of the big three in the League.
Dick couldn’t remember a lot from those days, and he was still viewed as a young buck by most of the community, so he didn’t get involved in the politics. He did know there were several loud opinions voiced.
Uncle Clark was grieving both for Jason and for his friend. Diana and he were holding Bruce back from breaking every rule he’d written, and trying not to let everyone else see how bad it had gotten.
Barry had taken it rough. He was empathic and pretty young himself, and had taken a liking to Jason during their few interactions. If Bruce's guess was correct, Barry had run out to Ethiopia himself, studied the site where it had happened. He probably knew more about what went down than anyone else in the League, even Clark.
And Martian Man Hunter. He had once been a family man himself, and the tragedy had reminded him just how fragile it could all be.
Green Arrow was pretty shaken. Roy had told Dick a little bit. Ollie hadn’t liked Jason. Didn’t like the role he played in Teen Titans, or his influence on the others. He had called him a dirty street kid who'd brought in more baggage than a bunch of young heroes need to sort through. Bruce had hauled off and punched him for saying shit like that once for it. Ollie never said it in front of Jason, though. Or to Dick.
But Roy said reality was a bit more complex. Ollie regretted how things had gone down with Roy and was maybe projecting a little. He saw Jason as a messed-up kid, an example of what might have happened if Roy had not been able to catch himself. He thought Jason should be in a more stable home where he could get help. Not in a battlefield.
Maybe he was right about that.
Oliver apparently blamed himself to some degree for not speaking up about his misgivings. For letting Bruce make the same mistakes, but that much worse.
Even years after Jason’s death, other members of the community would bring it up with Dick. A mumbled ‘I’m sorry about Jason,’ or ‘Did you know the second Robin? Were you close?’
Dick hadn’t really heard much about how the vigilante community reacted to Jason’s return. Maybe the resurrection was hushed up enough, buried in enough higher-profile deaths and resurrections, that he’d just gone unnoticed. Bruce had been intentional about not sharing information on Red Hood.
“I want you to try something new,” Dinah said, interrupting Dick’s musings. “When you have the time this week, I want you to sit down and write everything you can remember about when you first saw Jason after the resurrection.”
“Write?” Dick asked.
“Writing stimulates bilateral movement between the two hemispheres and helps your brain digest better. It doesn’t have to be detailed or good. It’s just for you. Write it down. Read it over. Remember it. Next time you have a reaction to the implanted memory, I want you to pull up that memory and think about how you felt when you first saw his face again. What his voice sounded like. What were your first thoughts when you realized he was alive. Find one detail each time, and focus on it.”
Dick rubbed his chin and realized, again, that he hadn’t shaved. “So, you don’t want me to do the other stuff?”
“Is it helpful to know the details? It sounded like it was perhaps a more negative experience for you.”
Dick considered it a moment. “I think it helped me to separate myself from Jason a little more. But if there’s a better way to do that, I would really like to stop now.”
Dinah’s smile was sad this time. Not in a ‘therapist’ kind of way. It was the look of a parent who had seen too much. “I think it might be good for you to have a reminder that, real or implanted, the memory you have of your brother’s death is in the past. He’s doing well. He’s growing past it. And you can do the same.”