This was inspired by Nightwing #7: Saiko's Last Act, from the DC 52 reboot. I'll spare the details to avoid spoilers because I'm absolutely in love with where the plot is going, but the line in particular that inspired this was a thought box that read: "The kind of sand you'd find in the catacombs that a lot of Gotham- including this stadium- is built on". I'm not sure if that really makes it a canon fact, but after watching As Above, So Below, I've been craving a Dick and the catacombs fic for a while, so bear with me.
There are catacombs beneath Gotham City.
They aren't at quite the level of the ones in Paris, but they were there all the same, a carefully woven network just beneath the sewer lines.
Once, they had been a big tourist extraction, but a collapse in 1982 that resulted in the deaths of at least fifty people closed them off from the public for good. The entrances were thought to be sealed and the threat of arrest loomed over anyone who tried to enter them, and eventually people lost interest. The catacombs became a dirty little secret to the Gothamites.
Dick wasn't sure how he had found out about them. They weren't drawn into any of the public maps, and no brochure advertised them anymore. They were more legend and tabloid gossip than anything nowadays. He suspected Bruce or Alfred had mentioned it once out of passing, or maybe he had caught it on the news after a construction worker had fallen down into them.
More so, though, Dick wasn't sure why he went down into them.
He told himself it was because it was claimed to have been sealed off, effectively serving as a challenge to him. There was also the added thrill of going against the law, and the natural curiosity that came with new places. In the back of his mind, it was because he now felt at home among the dead. He spent enough time in cemeteries and graveyards nowadays to be considered a citizen, and he thought seeing the dead lined up against the walls in some kind of union would be more of a comfort than the horror most claimed it to be.
Whether or not there was a reason, he couldn't place. He just knew that he went down there.
All things considered, he wasn't dumb about it. He picked the padlock and carefully slid the chains back from entrance, and when he closed the door behind him, he eased it shut as to avoid any unnecessarily loud noises or big motions. Once inside, he slipped his breather between his lips so the sands wouldn't suffocate him, and he fitted his mask over his eyes for their night vision so he wouldn't have to struggle with a flashlight. He even bothered to bring the specially made stealth boots from his Robin costume to insure minimal disruption.
The first thing he was aware of was the silence. It was stronger than anything he had known, allowing him to be aware of everything from the obvious puffs his breather gave him to the discrete pulse in his throat. It allowed him to hear the scuttling of rats far off in the distance, and the water drips somewhere else, but it was almost therapeutic. He was already considering future trips for when he was stressed.
It also helped that the walls weren't entirely bones like he had imagined. The entrance had stone walls and it stayed that way for a good portion of his navigation until it branched off into what looked like bed bunks, only heaped to the top with mismatched bones. Father on, he came upon the walls, but they weren't as frightening as he had imagined. The empty sockets from the skulls didn't seem to be following him anywhere,more so staring at each other than anything else.
The first corridor he came to was a dead end, composed on the sides of walls of bones where the skulls were stacked to form lopsided crosses, The back to the dead end was stone and heavily covered in outdated graffiti. Names and symbols and obscenities covered the stone flat and he very nearly laughed at the crudeness of it. Before turning around, he took a picture on his phone, finding himself apologizing to the walls of bones for the sudden flash of light. While it was incriminating to his visit, he knew it would get a laugh out of a few friends, and he pocketed his phone again in a good spirit.
It was in this good spirit that he continued to roam through the catacombs, studying the abandoned structure and making friends with the lost souls that he was sure lingered around.
He was tracing out another corridor when he heard a low groan. It lasted only a second, and before he could even look up to figure out what the sound was, the ceiling collapsed on him.
In movies, the collapses could be fairly well anticipated. A few rock particles would fall down first, and then the heroes would look up to see a deep fissure opening above them. This hero had only gotten a brief sound before everything had fallen.
The pain was all at once, and then in sharp pulses that corresponded to the rumblings of the tunnels around him as they caved in, too.
By nothing short of a miracle, he had kept his consciousness by managing to get lodged in a small gap between the fallen rocks, a position that reminded him of nothing faster than a coffin. His jacket sleeve was pinned and he couldn't move his right arm, and he could feel every individual gash the edges of the rocks had made on him, but he was alive.
He made a note to thank the lost souls he had befriended who had surely just saved his life before using his free arm to free his phone from his pocket and work it up his body towards his face. He had maybe a foot of wiggle room above him, but everything else was firmly boxed in, strengthening the coffin-like feeling.
Turning his phone on, amazed that it hadn't shattered considering the pounding pain in his thigh, he saw to no surprise that he didn't have any signal. It didn't worry him. Wayne Tech had anticipated situations like this, although not in the catacombs, and had made an app that could call for emergency help without needing any kind of signal. He wasn't sure of the science entirely at the moment, but with the pounding in his temples, he was lucky to be sure of anything.
The app had a button for police help, the fire department, an ambulance, or all three. He was pressing the last button like his life depended on it, mostly because it did. A large check mark went over the screen when the message had gone through, and he took that time to take his mask off and tuck his phone back into his pocket.
To keep himself from panicking, he meditated to some degree, and just focused on the breather.
He wasn't sure how long it took for him to be rescued, but it had at least been enough for him to fall asleep against his better judgment, waking up only as the rock was lifted from above him and searchlights shot full strength into his eyes. It was a team of firefighters that eventually pulled him out of the rubble and escorted him back to the surface once he proved he was capable of walking himself out.
On the surface, paramedics were ready with an ambulance and made quick work of patching him up in the back of the truck, trading out his breather for a professional Bag Valve Mask with plenty of gratitude. None of his wounds were deep enough for stitches, and all of the rock and dirt that had gotten into the wounds was very easily washed out, so he insisted that he didn't need to go to the hospital.
"Would you like me to get a hold of Mr. Wayne?" one of the paramedics offered after they had identified Dick.
Dick shook his head, lifting the Bag Valve Mask from his lips weakly.
"Don't bother," he said, maybe a little sourly. "He's in Zeurig or something. I'll be alright."
When they insisted that they needed to call someone, he thought, and then he gave them a number from his phone. They made contact while he focused on breathing, and told him that the person on the phone was on their way.
Wally showed up after the ambulance left. Firetrucks were still lined up along the rubble and firefighters, along with helpful Samaritans, were still working to clear the rubble. The most of the damage was cleared off, but the accident was still very much evident, and now reporters were coming on scene to figure out what was happening.
He found Dick sitting on the ledge of a billboard that towered over the situation, and made quick work of joining him. His friend was sitting with his back flat to the advertisement behind him, patched up pretty thickly, the white of his bandages already starting to stain red. Wally sat down beside him, curling one knee towards himself and resting his arms on top of it. He regarded his friend and then he followed his gaze down out over the situation with a shake of his head and a breathy laugh.
"That was really dumb," the redhead said, and he managed a glance at the patchwork acrobat. "Crazy dumb."
Dick watched the people below work to erase the damage and gave a slow exhale, thankful for his friend's presence.
He had found out soon after his rescue that the collapse hadn't been his fault, like he had assumed. A construction worker had been drilling where he shouldn't have been, and the strain had been too much for the catacombs to bear. Dick was too busy being relieved that it wasn't his own fault to be angry at the man and quickly dismissed any charges that he could've pressed against him once the worker apologized. Maybe he should've waited until he talked to Bruce, but he wasn't thinking about that right now.
"My father used to say that every show had a 'turning point'," Dick said suddenly, and Wally pulled his eyes away from the scene, "a single moment that would define the direction of the night. A moment that, depending on what happened, would make or break the show." [1]
Dick gave a slow sigh and drew his knees in towards his chest, working carefully to avoid any unnecessary pain. He couldn't hear his father's voice saying it anymore, but he could still faintly see his colors moving around in the memory, and it brought a small smile to his lips. It only grew as Wally scooted closer and put an arm around him. He leaned back into the affection and closed his eyes, tilting his head up towards the sky, towards his father.
"Life works the same way. Filled with turning points and crossroads. Filled with moments that will destroy you... or define you," he murmured.
'And I guess this defines me,' he thought to himself.
The two sat there for a time and Dick appreciated his freedom from the consuming silence. He embraced the light, and the noise, and the living company. The catacombs had been an experience, but it was more therapeutic to be here, he realized. He lowered his head with that idea and looked over at his best friend with a smile that Wally gave back.
"Since you're still hanging on, I guess this one defines you, then," Wally mused, and Dick nodded. "Yeah, I guess it does. I can tell you what it says about you, too: it says that you're still really dumb, buddy."
Dick couldn't help but laugh.
[1] The entire turning point speech is taken right out of Saiko's Last Act.
-F.J. III