I have nothing to say. I'm just excited for people's reactions to this chapter.
This is a very short one, unfortunately, but I couldn't choose how to split my chapters. I didn't want to add this one to the last chapter or the next one because it was just such a great cut-off point.
Now, without further ado, please enjoy. c:
Surgery? Surgery. But Dick wasn't hurt.
At least, not physically. His brain hurt plenty. Did that count as physical?
They were going to fix his brain.
They had said it. Dick didn't know when they had said it, but they had said it. Or did they? Maybe he was dreaming. Maybe they weren't real. Maybe none of it was real.
The light was real enough. They kept shining it into his eyes. It hurt. His vision was scrambled afterwards, blurry and swimming and there were little dots, constantly, every time he got up. It felt like his brain was being squeezed, squeezed, and he was thirsty, so thirsty, but the water tasted strange.
Swim, swim, hurt, hurt. He might as well not try to get up.
They were going to fix his brain.
They had said it. With the shining light and that frown etched deep into the corners of their mouths, and that woman especially, with a little dot pressing into her cheek, making a funny bump, but Dick had forgotten the word for it. And there was a syringe, and then it was black, and when he awoke, there was so much more swimming and so much more thirst and with each new thirst, the water tasted even stranger.
They were going to fix his brain.
They had said it. He had scrambled away. Dick didn't want his brain fixed. The pressure was painful, it hurt, and the thirst was hard, and he felt hot, hot, all the time, until he felt cold, cold, but that was only when he wasn't hot. But at least he could feel his brain, and that was real. The pain was real. If something could give him pain, then that meant it was real, right? And sometimes, he had to pinch himself real hard because he had to make sure his arms were real, too.
He could no longer pinch himself when they wrapped his arms all up in his shirt, so he had to hit the wall with his head instead, until the pain was no longer squeezing but it was also throbbing and he tasted iron in his mouth and felt the red in his eyes. The red was stinging, and sometimes they took the strange water they gave and threw it into his face to wash out the red, watching it stream to stain his shirt which was then pink around the neck, but Dick didn't want that strange water in his eyes. The red was his own, and he could trust it, but he couldn't trust the water. The water was poisoning his eyes. That was why he saw things. The water was poisoning his eyes and making him see things that nobody else saw.
The water was giving him strange abilities, too. Sometimes, the things he saw told him to get away from them, they would hurt him, they were hurting him, everything was hurting him, and then those things told him to get away and save Barbara, they were hurting her too, so Dick had the ability to know these things and see these things but Barbara didn't. Barbara wasn't safe.
Barbara had put him in that place. She had thought that Dick wasn't safe. But Dick knew better.
They were going to fix his brain.
Soon, they had said. And they stopped pouring water into his eyes. They left him for longer periods of time and Dick couldn't keep track anymore of how many pills had been shoved down his throat and choked and gurgled.
They were going to fix his brain.
And maybe then, Dick would stop getting his eyes poisoned, and he would be able to keep Barbara safe.
They were going to fix his brain. Soon.
Things really started rolling after the reveal of Miss. Frances' apparent insanity.
The room was bathed in silence, filled only with the Joker's hysteric cackling that Wally didn't think he'd ever be able to extract from his memory. "This night just keeps getting funnier," Joker said with a yellow toothed grin. Bruce lunged forward for Harley, but she leaped out of the way at the same time that Joker sprung from the floor with a remote in his hand.
Wally was really tired of explosions. A quick scan of the room showed no bombs, however, and Barry seemed a bit skeptical, too, standing with his hands on his hips and a furrow in his brow.
"Nuh-uh-uh," Joker advised with a pouty shake of his head. Harley waved her finger. "Not so fast, Batsy. See this remote here?" he brandished it grandly. "Oh relax, you personally don't need to worry about it at all! It won't blow anything up. Pinky promise." He looked a little disappointed at that, but went on: "No, you won't have to, but little ketchup and mustard over there might."
Barry's eyebrows rose. "How are you going to hurt me from in here without a bomb or a gun?"
The Joker winked. "Like this," he declared, and pressed the button.
Nothing happened. At first. Then Barry gave a startled yelp and a little stumble, and when both Wally and Bruce examined him, they saw that there was a square plank on the floor beneath him separated like a secret door from the rest of the ship, covering the borders of the cage. Except it was apparently no secret door, because one side of it was rising above the rest of the planks while the other side began dipping below. It was tilting, and Barry had nothing to hold onto to maintain his balance while it did.
"Now, you've got a choice: Either get me and Harley, or save your saucy little friend." The Joker laughed when Bruce sprung forward and grabbed him by the upper arm. "Oh, no, you can't cheat," the crazy man chided as he ripped open his jacket and stuck out his tongue. Timers, sticks of dynamite, and everything classic for a grand explosion were haphazardly taped there and onto his stomach. Honestly, the whole stock looked a bit 90's, but it would have still been able to do a fair amount of damage.
Also, the Joker didn't look so chubby anymore, Wally noted. He looked more like how Dick had described.
"To get me, you have to stop the timer, Batsy!" Joker scolded. "And by taking the time to stop this jacket from blowing me up, up, and away, you run out of time to save the cheetah lad."
The thing was, Barry wasn't going to get blown up. He wasn't going to get poisoned, or stabbed, or gunned down. But he was going to lose his balance and fall, and when he did, he would fall right through the bars of the laser-formed cage as the entire cage tilted onto its side.
Hyper-healing didn't work when all of his body parts were disconnected.
Bruce looked like he was actually considering, and that split second of thought flitting across his face made Wally angrier than anything that had happened so far. But while the man was mission-oriented, he wasn't stupid, so he turned to Barry as the Joker cackled.
Barry was stumbling. Bruce quickly reached into his belt and pulled out a rope, carefully tossing it through the bars of the cage after tying it to a chandelier hook on the ceiling, and Barry wasted no time in grabbing hold. Bruce began frantically searching around for something to stop the tilting, but he found nothing, and as Wally watched, the man paused to stare at the floor before making a quick decision. He sprang towards the far corner, where a hammer sat innocuously. Harley gave out a sound of protest but was ignored when Bruce lifted it up and began hacking away at the floorboards surrounding the tilting wood.
And Wally did nothing.
It wasn't that he could do anything, per say, but he still felt like he should have tried. Instead, he walked into the cage and hovered behind Barry, as if he could catch him in case he fell, resenting the fact that something so life threatening for his uncle was so effortless in solving for himself.
Knowing that it was still useless to stand there, in no way would Wally be able to catch him, Wally eventually walked around so that he stood in front of Barry. Barry wasn't looking at him (read: through him). The speedster was panicked, and panting hard, and Wally could still see, watching his eyes, the way Barry mentally chanted words of encouragement. Barry used to do that out loud with Wally when his eyes got panicked and twitchy and pained, but Bruce was something else. Bruce didn't appreciate optimistic chanting. So Barry squeezed his eyes shut and started mouthing something that Wally couldn't read, clutching the rope so hard that he was no doubt getting burned.
And the Joker was still cackling.
Wally hated clowns.
He didn't watch, but he did hear the round window on the side of the ship get flung open, and figured that Bruce had broken the flimsy stairs while thundering down them earlier. It was just background noise, like wind or the swish of grass, to the sound of the wooden floor giving way beneath Bruce's (well, apparently Miss. Frances) hammer, and the sound of Barry's yelps as his body was almost tilted horizontally with his sole savior being the rope. Then, the hammer dropped, and Bruce was tearing up the boards like a madman, and then he was beneath the boards and Wally could hear the clank of machinery and hear him bump the wood in his struggle to turn something off, but Wally was still staring at Barry.
Barry looked terrified, and the man was so focused on looking behind him, at his potential oncoming doom, that he didn't bother to check the rope. Wally did.
"The rope!" he shouted, but he could get no other words out. He reached out desperately to grab hold of the rope, but his hands went through. Because, as Barry tilted, he dragged the rope with him, slowly, until the loop of rope hanging onto the hook in the ceiling was balanced on the very end of the hook. Wally's chest squeezed, his throat felt like it was buzzing silently, and he couldn't swallow because it hurt. He wanted to cry, but he was too scared, and he wanted to scream, but no one would have heard him, and he wanted to help, but he couldn't even help himself.
Then, as if Barry could somehow have heard him, the man glanced up.
The rope slipped off.
And he fell.