#no beta we die like the engineers answering to bruce wayne

[wordsablaze]

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day thirteen, where it's just dick's luck to be caught up in an exploding building...

A/N: i’m running on coffee, don’t question the logistics. whumptober prompt: burns

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The building was not supposed to go up in flames.

Very few buildings are, really, but this one is particularly unequipped to handle being set on fire and unfortunately, such things usually only become apparent after spontaneous demonstrations. And because life is just going so well for him, Dick manages to get himself a front row seat.

The spontaneous demonstration in question takes place at the office of a professional lip reader that Dick had set up a meeting with. One of the men on their watch list had decided to rob a gas station and the camera that’d caught him obviously had no audio, but it’s not like he could just give up on the lead so here he is.

“If you could just take a seat in the waiting room,” the receptionist tells him when he arrives, already gesturing to her right and apparently starting to do something else before she’s even finished talking.

“Uh, sure,” Dick agrees, quietly groaning to himself when the waiting room looks more like a wonky box than an actual waiting room, though that’s perhaps just the billionaire’s ward in him showing.

Regardless, he takes a seat and pulls out his phone, opening one of their family group chats and scrolling through just to see if he’s missed anything important while it’s been muted over the past few days. Last time he muted the chat, he’d missed the announcement of a prank war and the other three had teamed up in his absence, resulting in him finding glitter everywhere for the next month or so.

“Richard Grayson? You can come through now.”

Dick pockets his phone and stands up but before he can take even half a step, the entire building shakes. Windows shatter. Alarms go off. Screams echo from all sides. And the little box of a waiting room he’s in straight up collapses.

He’s hit with both a wave of heat and part of the ceiling before he can blink.

He thinks he hears himself cry out but he’s not sure if he just imagines that because his ears are ringing and his head is pounding and his arm is throbbing and his legs are aching and he can’t tell what’s happening.

Closing his eyes, he tries his best to remember what Bruce had taught him about calming down. Think, think, think, he orders himself. He does nothing but breathe for as long as it takes for the ringing to quieten. It’s immediately replaced by the sound of broken alarm systems and frantic yelling but even that is preferable to silent obliviousness.

Something exploded, he concludes, something exploded right above the room he’s in.

Mercifully, none of his limbs feel numb, which means he somehow hasn’t damaged any of his limbs beyond repair. The entire left side of his body does feel like it’s melting but he doesn’t dwell on that because he can’t do anything about burns at the moment so there’s no point worrying about them.

He can breathe fine, which is really the most important thing. There’s blood in his mouth but he’s almost certain it’s just from biting his tongue rather than due to any internal bleeding so he spits it out and finally moves on from checking over himself to figuring out what he’s meant to do next.

There’s a large slab of ceiling resting awkwardly over his legs but his left arm refuses to move and he’s not strong enough to push it off with only his right one so he sighs and lets his head fall backwards, onto miscellaneous rubble that he honestly just doesn’t care to identify.

The ringing in his ears returns.

He groans.

The ringing stops.

And starts up again.

Wait.

Wait.

Dick takes a moment to rid himself of nausea and reaches around blindly with his right arm until he finds his phone. Bless Wayne Enterprises and its stupidly indestructible technology.

“Hello?” he mumbles as he presses the answer button without even checking who it is. His vision is a little blurry so that probably wouldn’t have helped anyway.

“Oh, thank god, you’re alright. Where are you?”

“Tim?” Dick asks, too busy being thankful that the ringing hadn’t just been in his ears to realise he’s been asked a question.

“Yes, obviously. Please tell me you’re not in the building that was just bombed?”

“I’m not in the building that was just bombed,” Dick parrots without thinking, but the debris layered on top of him abruptly moves and he can’t stop himself from groaning. “Okay so that might be a lie, actually.”

“Are you hurt?” Damian demands.

“Not too badly, I don’t think,” Dick replies, deciding that lying to Damian to reassure him is really not worth the later consequences. “My legs are currently buried under what used to be a ceiling, though.”

There’s a pause, a muffled conversation, and then a soft clicking sound. “Bruce is already on his way, don’t close your eyes until he gets there.”

“But I need to blink,” Dick argues just for the sake of it.

“No, you need to keep talking. You’re slurring your words and might have a concussion,” Damian says firmly.

Oh.

Well, that would explain why the inside of his head feels like it’s burning just as much as his skin. He hadn’t noticed he was slurring, which is a little worrying, but at least now he has a goal: don’t fall asleep.

“Richard?”

“Still here. I’m alright, Dami, I promise,” Dick replies, hoping he’s actually as coherent as he thinks he is. Judging by the way Tim starts talking to someone else in the background, he’s probably not. Oops.

“You had better not be lying, you owe me a day out.”

Dick laughs at Damian’s tone, which turns out to be a bad idea because the debris shifts above him again and he gets only a split second to regret his life choices before blinding pain shoots all the way across his left leg, something or the other scraping his burns as it falls. This time, as his vision whites out into nothing, he has no doubt that he screams.

Tears so warm they feel like they’re practically burning his skin are slipping down his face by the time he manages to gain enough awareness to hear Tim and Damian frantically calling his name. Or at least he assumes it’s his name, the pain is too loud for him to distinguish any actual words anymore.

He’d let go of the phone at some point and he doesn't have enough energy to try and find it again, especially not when a single wrong move might prove to be fatal. He could attempt to be louder than his pain so they can hear him even if he's not talking into the microphone but his throat hurts - probably from screaming - so it’s not a very promising option.

Hoping the others won't be mad at him for disobeying their orders, he stops trying so hard to follow them and lets himself slide under the pain.

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fun fact: i was imagining dick's 'stupidly indestructible' wayne enterprises phone as a nokia brick, just makes things a little funnier :p

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