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One thing Batman didn’t think to teach Tim is that being a hostage is boring. It’s been about a day and a half, if the granola bar and two grocery store sandwiches are anything to go by. The sandwiches are a good reminder that he’s not even conveniently in Gotham.
Not a single chain grocery store has set up shop in Gotham. In fact, Gotham is home to more independently owned and operated stores than any other city in the country. It has nothing to do with a shop local ethos, though; major chain stores simply aren’t willing to bother with the Gotham market. Aside from the cost of insurance and odds of severe property damage, several notable unions have negotiated hazard pay for Gotham assignments. Even online retailers are useless because of the massive shipping upcharges. The risk/reward simply doesn't weigh out favorably.
All this to say that Tim has been in this miserable pit for far too long before he hears the unmistakable sound of gunshots. He listens to them echoing through the hallways above him and prays to a God he’s pretty dubious about that they’re courtesy of one Jason Todd. Hopefully the fighting is not a sign of some schism developing among his captors. Infighting is a very effective way for a prisoner to starve to death. Especially since his unconventional holding cell is easily forgotten.
It’s been twenty long minutes since the initial gunshots — provided that Tim’s timekeeping is still reasonably accurate given his isolation — when the slightest gasp gives Tim the only warning he gets before he becomes a crash mat for his older brother.
Nightwing rolls off of Tim while they both attempt to restore some air to their lungs. “Found you,” he wheezes as soon as he’s able.
For his part, Tim takes a little longer before speaking. He really doesn’t want to know what kind of noise he’d be making otherwise. “‘M just glad you weren’t Jason.” He’s glad for a number of things if he’s being honest. Chief among them is the fact that he wasn’t upright when Dick fell from the ceiling. His broken leg is enough of a nuisance as it is.
“Red Hood,” Tim hears through the receding ringing in his ears. “The floors are booby trapped.” He can’t hear the response, but Nightwing says “Yeah, no, it’s tiger pit style. Magic, I think.”
“Break anything?” Tim asks, once Nightwing has arranged their — very careful — extraction with Red Hood.
“I think I’m good.” Nightwing does the very specific set of movements that mean he’s subtly checking himself for injuries. “How about you?”
Tim shrugs. “‘M fine. Broke a leg on my way down. Maybe a wrist, but it‘s probably a sprain.” He’s been alone with himself long enough that he knows it’s a break. He should probably tell Dick this. He could provide a full injury report, but that feels like overstating his injuries, and that’s just embarrassing. No point at all mentioning the simple scrape and headache. “Not gonna exaggerate,” he finishes his thought out loud.
Nightwing had hissed through his teeth in sympathy, and frowned slightly at the final bit. Tim shrugs again. Injuries are just a part of the job. They’re the worst part of it, if he’s being honest. Being benched is the worst of all, but that’s not really part of the job, just a miserable ordeal that happens when he fucks up. No, it’s the indignity of being injured that gets to him.
“So, what’s the story?” Dick asks as he starts a not-nearly-so-subtle injury check on Tim. “You weren’t scoping this place out without us in the loop, were you, baby bird?”
It’s a reasonable assumption, but Tim pouts. “That’s not fair,” he complains. “I haven’t done that in ages.” He deserves a little recognition for that, he thinks, even though this is, in fact, exactly what had happened. Overall his thoughts are feeling sluggish and somewhat disjointed, which also isn’t fair. He wants to be able to present a cohesive- wait, coherent report. Technically that was supposed to go in an injury report, but it’s almost certainly the incessant boredom finally getting to him. He’ll bring it up once they’re out of here. If it’s relevant.
Dick has caught sight of something and moved to Tim’s back without warning. “Why’s there blood on your shirt, kiddo?” he asks, starting to peel it up without waiting for an answer.
The sharp intake of breath startles Tim badly enough that he jolts, prompting Dick to put a steadying hand on his uninjured shoulder. “Didn’t think it was that bad,” Tim comments. He’s feeling somewhat woozy, but he’s not sure when it started, or if it’s even really true. Maybe it’s just the relief of rescue. Though it’s not really a rescue yet, is it? Dick is still stuck in here with him, so if Jason doesn’t come through, or if he falls down with them-
“Hey, it’s okay,” Dick is saying gently. “It’s okay. You’re okay.”
Considering how okay Dick is insisting things are, Tim is starting to doubt him. “Are you okay?”
“I’m okay, too. And there’s no real signs of infection back here, so I’m just going to slap some gauze over it until we get back to the cave.”
Tim isn’t all that worried about the gash on his shoulder, and he isn’t sure why Dick is. Or why he’s so preoccupied with reassuring Tim. It was just a graze from falling into the pit. “I asked for gauze with the first sandwich,” he says, lest Dick think he’s been irresponsible with his injuries. “No luck.”
Now Dick is peering at Tim’s face. Both his proximity and the idea of grocery store sandwiches are making Tim nauseous. “Can you lift your lenses for me, kiddo?” That’s the second time in the last minute or so that Dick has called him that and it’s maybe kind of rude, but also kind of nice. “Did you hit your head at all?” Dick asks as Tim fumbles with his domino in an attempt to comply.
“No?” Tim is almost certain he managed to avoid a head blow when he fell, and he hasn’t been feeling concussed. He’d know if he was concussed. He’s been here over thirty hours already. He'd know by now.
Dick is shining a bright light in Tim’s eyes, hiding the amount of concern on his own face and making Tim wince in the process. “You think ’m concussed,” Tim accuses, before scrambling to the lidded bucket that his captors have graciously left for him. The turkey sandwich makes an unfortunate encore.
“I’m sorry, baby bird. I’m so sorry,” Dick is saying as he carefully rubs Tim’s back. Inexplicably, he sounds more apologetic than sympathetic. It’s confusing. “J- Hood is almost here, then we can get you home.” Tim nods, grateful for the reminder of their imminent rescue. He still feels miserable, but his stomach contents are no longer rioting for freedom.
Dick has begun studying the pit — the oubliette, Tim corrects himself, stifling a snicker at the word — and his eyes have landed on the case of water bottles in the corner. “Do you think they’ve been drugging you?”
“Nah,” Tim says, “The woozy is new.”
The frown etching itself onto the visible parts of Nightwing’s face is immediately overshadowed by the sound of more gunshots. The moment there’s a pause, he speaks hurriedly into his comm, before raising his voice to bellow “Hood!”
There’s an answering shout above them, then a series of careful footsteps. Tim has a sudden memory of early childhood swim lessons and snickers. “Marco!” he calls, voice cracking a bit in the middle. It must have been loud enough, because there’s an answering shout of “Polo!”. Filtered through Red Hood’s voice modulator it’s funny enough to make Tim laugh properly.
The callback was noticeably closer, though, and Tim lets Nightwing take over the careful directing of Jason’s path towards the edge of the trap. “Stop! Stopstopstop!” Dick shouts when a shadow falls onto the walls above them.
“Well that’s fucking uncanny,” Tim hears, before there’s another shout, and then more gunfire. The volume is enough to make Tim clap his hands over his ears, and a couple bullet casings drop into the oubliette beside them. Dick snags one off the floor with his gloved hand and flings it back up. “Really fucking uncanny,” Hood amends as the casing seems to spring from the stone floor to land by his feet.
Tim lets himself study another casing that landed near him, while Hood and Nightwing sort out the oubliette extraction. Normally he would be able to identify which gun Hood is using just from the casing. At the moment the name eludes him. It probably has numbers at the end.
“Do you have anything stashed down here that you need?” At Tim’s negative, Dick wraps him up securely in one arm and retracts the grapple that Jason must have dropped down to them.
Once they’re on solid ground, Dick carefully lowers Tim to the floor, warning Jason about his broken leg as he does so. “Are there any more traps?” Jason asks, and Tim shrugs.
“Dunno. I only fell in one.” Dick’s still supporting most of Tim’s weight, and as much as his pride wants him to change that, the exhaustion is winning out. His head is so sore, and his eyes are so heavy.
“Out the way we came in, then,” Dick decides, hoisting Tim onto his back, piggyback style. “If we have to fight, I’ll try to drop you gently.”
Tim’s nearly asleep when moregunshots startle him awake. He’s trying to gauge the best way to fall — physics, woah — when the noise ends as abruptly as it started. “Hood!” snaps Nightwing, “I thought you said you were using rubber bullets!”
“Said I brought them. Not that I’d use them the whole time.”
“That was implied.”
“Relax, no one’s dead.”
They make it a few more steps before Jason sighs in a burst of static. “Look, give me the baby bird. I’ll carry him so you can do your ‘nonlethal’ flips and shit.”
Tim is carefully transferred between vigilantes even as Dick snaps “What are the air quotes for?”
Tim is arranged on Jason’s hip like a toddler, and immediately the siren song of sleep starts up again. The undignified carry makes sense — Jason can shoot one-handed where Dick fights with his whole body — and if Tim sleeps through it he can pretend it never happened. He probably could sleep through a firefight right now.
“Just that you could easily kill someone with your fighting style,” Jason responds. “People totally die from broken ribs and concussions-” Hood cuts off abruptly at Dick’s sharp breath.
Ignoring whatever weird tension the two have developed, Tim lets his head droop onto Jason’s shoulder. “This’s so embarrassing,” he mutters, before shutting his eyes against the painful brightness of the hallway.
—
The moment he becomes aware of his own consciousness, Tim feels the regrettably familiar grip of a chill sweat. It’s obvious that someone sees the sudden drain of blood from his face, because there’s a vomit bag under Tim’s mouth the moment he starts to retch.
Tim is in the recovery position. This is very convenient, considering that sitting up to vomit seems very difficult. It is also concerning, because clearly someone has considered it necessary to put him in the recovery position. He tries to wipe his mouth with the hand that isn’t supporting his head, and succeeds only in smearing bile along his armored forearm.
Ah, he’s Robin right now. Red Robin. Oops.
“’M ’kay,” Tim tells the person hovering anxiously beside him. He blinks and the shape resolves.
“You sure about that, baby bird?”
“Hi,” Tim says, since it’s the first thing that comes out of his mouth. “Sorry ‘bout the- the-“ Tim gestures in the vague direction of the bag of puke that Jason is tying shut.
Jason just shrugs off the apology. “It’s okay. You have a good excuse with that nasty concussion.”
“No, no. ‘M sorry.” Tim doesn’t want Jason thinking he’s making excuses. What for, he’s not sure. That doesn’t always matter anyway. Excuses are bad no matter what.
“I don’t like it,” Tim says, and oh, that’s no good either. No one should have to deal with his stupid injuries, and they definitely shouldn’t have to deal with him complaining about them. Clearly his brain to mouth filter is broken. “Filter’s broken,” he says, as if he needed the confirmation.
There’s a tight chuckle from Jason as he turns back from the medical waste bin. “I’ll bet,” he says. “And I bet your emotions are all over the place, too.”
This doesn’t make much sense to Tim, but once it’s pointed out, he realizes that there’s wetness on his face. Why? He’s not sad, or angry or anything. “Sorry,” he says again. Now he’s sad, or dejected maybe? Whatever the feeling is that comes from being an utterly pathetic burden. Jason is stuck taking care of Tim instead of-
Instead of what? Where even are they? Tim studies his surroundings and finds that they are on the Batplane. That makes an amount of sense; Dick and Jason had to come rescue Tim.
“Dick.” The thought falls out of Tim’s mouth as soon as it occurs to him.
“No, I’m Jason. You’re not that concussed are you?”
“No.” Jeez , communication is so hard. “The tiger pit. Dick was there.”
Jason nods, confusion evident.
“Dick’s still in the tiger pit?” It’s just that Dick isn’t here and he was with Tim and then Tim was here but Dick’s not here. Did they trade Dick for Tim? That’s a terrible trade-off. “Take me back! I’ll stay! He can’t- he’s too important!”
Jason is raising placating hands, as if Tim needs to be placated. He’s trying to say something over Tim’s rising frantic concern. Eventually Tim clocks it as “No, no no no! He’s here! He’s in the cockpit.”
Tim shuts up, embarrassed again.
“He’s flying the plane, Timbo.”
Oh. “Why?” It’s got autopilot, right?
“Well, someone’s got to.” Jason says it lightly, but Tim doesn’t trust it. “We’re landing soon, too. It’s not like you were very far away.”
Okay. Okay. Dick is safe, Tim is being an absolute needy mess, but he’s safe, too. So that’s good. He feels some of the adrenaline recede. “Sorry.”
“Stop apologizing,” Jason is starting to lose patience, which is bad. Hopefully deplaning will be enough of a distraction from Tim’s behavior.
“My head hurts.” Why can’t he keep his mouth shut. “Sorry, sorry, I’ll shut up. Ignore me.” Now that he’s noticed, his head is pounding, it’s awful, but probably what he deserves for making Dick fall into an actual tiger pit. Oubliette. What a silly word.
“It’s okay, Tim, really.”
Tim nods, not wanting to make things worse, and grits his teeth against both the pain and the words that are lining up to fall out of his mouth. He isn’t even sure what they are, but they’re not likely to be anything useful. He spends the rest of the flight trying to maintain his silence.
As soon as they land, Tim is swept into the med bay to be looked over by Alfred. Triage demands his head injury be assessed first. When Alfred asks how he hit his head, Tim draws a blank. “I don’t think I did?”
“He did,” and there’s Dick, in Tim’s line of sight for the first time since his extraction. “I landed on him when I fell. I think he struck it on the floor then.”
That sounds… somewhat familiar? Dick’s dramatic entrance, that is. Hitting his head, not so much.
Dick lingers at the peripherals while Alfred goes through a full assessment and imaging. “Bruce is so rich,” Tim mutters as he starts his CAT scan. Tim is rich, but his family’s fortune looks like pocket change when their neighbor has an entire emergency department’s worth of equipment. “Computerized Axial Tomography,” he elaborates to no one in particular. “Or just Computerized Tomography.” The words feel interesting rolling off his tongue. “Very expensive machine.”
It’s also impressive that Alfred and Dick can analyze CT imaging. Tim wonders at how smart everyone he knows is. It’s intimidating.
Dick disappears once Tim is pronounced hemorrhage- and hematoma-free. Tim casts about for him as Alfred helps him adjust to X-ray his leg. (Yay. More imaging.) “Like Batman,” he mutters. “Just, poof! into the night.”
“Is that so, Master Timothy?” Alfred asks, mild amusement in his voice.
“Mmhmm.” Tim can feel his eyelids beginning to defer to gravity. It’s okay for him to sleep now, so that’s cool. “Dick does it too.”
They lapse into silence.
Jason swings by to check on Tim, saying that Dick has taken over post-mission duties for him. That’s fair. It’s just that Dick’s absence feels kind of pointed.
Next up is the scrape down Tim’s shoulder blade. The bandages Dick applied are a bit slap-dash, but that’s fine. It’s something of a miracle that there’s no infection, since Tim never got to tend them while they were fresh. He’s on his side to let Alfred work his magic when he remembers that Jason and Dick had had to chase him down and find him and haul him out of an extremely embarrassing predicament. Jason stops talking when Tim mutters “sorry” again, and he can practically feel the frustration roll off him. Oh no.
“What do you have to be sorry for?”
What a stupid question. “You had to come rescue me, an’ I messed up enough to get caught ’n the first place, and Dick fell down a uh- a-” His brain stutters over the next word, then unhelpfully offers: Axial tomography! Nope. “Topography?” That’s closer. “A hole prison, for the- the big cats- ugh.”
“Tiger pit?” Jason says, just as Alfred supplies “An oubliette?” Tim slumps in relief.
“Yeah, and I made you argue,” Tim continues, looking back at Jason. “I think.” Jason gives a half-shrug, which probably means yes. “And I think Dick hates me now? ‘Cause I wasn’t supposed to be there, and he fell down an tomograph pit ’cause of me. An’ now I’m hurt and you have to do a bunch of stuff and it’s not fair and I’m really sorry. ‘M sorry.”
Everything Tim feels is so much . It’s like the feelings are these big balloons inside him and they’re pushing everything else out, and they’re all going to pop eventually and probably spectacularly. Tim likes his mind organized . He keeps all his stupid mistakes and embarrassments and petty complaints in the bottom drawer of his mental filing cabinet, so that he can actually use the rest of his brain. But right now it’s all out and strewn everywhere and he can’t think . It’s all his fault. There’s so much that’s his fault and he doesn’t have the right to be upset about it, because it’s his fault. He can’t pity himself.
Tim becomes aware that his nose is filling up with snot, and then he notices the tears on his face. Again.
Oh, and there’s Dick. Here because Tim is crying like an infant and he can’t stop. “No no no, babybird,” Dick’s saying. He wraps Tim up in a hug — a bit awkward with the medical cot and arms and bandages. He’s too nice and that just makes Tim cry harder. “Shhh, it’s okay. It’s not your fault. It’s not. You’re okay. You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m the one who landed on top of you.”
This is, technically, true. But technicalities often aren’t in keeping with the core of a matter, which in this case is that Tim messed up, and he’s messed up before, and he’ll probably do it again.
“We all do.” Dick is still talking, now scooching the both of them to fit better on the cot. Alfred has retreated, presumably to wait until Tim’s back is no longer heaving and shuddering against these stupid, mortifying sobs.
“This’s so embarrassing,” Tim admits, and there’s a chuckle from close beside him.
Dick’s arms squeeze briefly. “Emotional dysregulation is one of those super fun concussion symptoms, isn’t it?”
“No it’s not.” Tim’s voice cracks, and he gives up on talking for a bit.
Dick continues holding Tim, which is unfair to him, but Tim doesn't want to let go. He also keeps ignoring Tim’s attempts to free him from the burden. He makes soothing noises and runs his hand over Tim’s hair while Tim cries himself out. Even though Dick is mad at him, he makes a very effective barrier against the world. Tim feels both very exposed and very protected. It’s a disorienting combination.
Eventually Tim runs out of tears, and the exhaustion rears its head again. The runny nose unfortunately remains even as the tear tracks dry. “Did you know,” Tim says, voice sounding strange from the crying jag, “that you get the runny nose because you cry inside your face too?”
“I didn’t,” Dick says. “Is that for real?”
Tim frowns. “I try not to lie to you.”
“I didn’t think you were, kiddo. It’s rhetorical.”
“Oh.” Another embarrassing moment to add to the pile. Dick tightens his hug again, as if trying to argue his case silently.
At Dick’s prompting, Tim explains about lacrimal puncta and canaliculi. He goes on to talk about gustatory rhinitis when Dick somehow seems to be interested in snot of all things. It’s possibly the most big brother thing Tim can think of, and he finds himself smiling again when he says as much to Dick. Dick throws his head back and laughs. “What do you know about farts, then?”
Tim does not take them down a verbal wikipedia spiral about farts, in spite of Dick’s insistence. For one, he’s getting too tired to dredge up information, and for another he never actually bothered with that spiral in the first place. When it becomes apparent that Tim is going to drift off soon, Dick gets up and tucks him in like a child. Tim’s too old to be tucked in, but he doesn’t protest, already feeling the waking world start to fade away.
He falls asleep still feeling the brush of a kiss on his forehead.