Chapter Text
Tim wakes up.
He turns his head and realizes he's woken up in a cage.
It's not a small cage, rough iron rebar and ancient rusty wire, not quite tall enough for Tim to stand up in if he could stand. The floor is old cement slowly flaking apart, the walls streaked with mold. The windows are papered over with cardboard and old newspapers. The chain holding the cage door closed is the only shiny, new thing he can see.
Something sits on his chest, a numb crackling weight.
Tim drags in a breath that stinks of mildew and old piss and then he screams.
He flies apart. He comes back in pieces.
The pain is—everything.
All-encompassing. The numbness is gone and strobing agony radiates from the hollow of his throat to the soft clutch of his stomach. He's twitching, he can't stop himself, and it hurts worse every time. He holds a sun in his chest, awful flaying hot misery. His arms flop like beached fish against cold concrete, knuckles stinging. He's kicking. He can't stop.
There are hands on him. Warm hands on his shoulders, right at the edge of the burn. A voice in his ear, husking and frantic. The words flow through his skull and out again without touching him.
Dark swallows him.
==
He's in the cage, still. It smells the same. A warm weight rests against his hip. The rest of him is achingly cold. There's pressure around his chest that edges towards pain without quite crossing over, and everywhere else is numb again.
The crackling had been fluid in his lungs. Is fluid in his lungs. It's still there.
"Are you awake?"
Tim opens his eyes. The mask is still stuck on, barely. Tears have dried underneath it, crackling and sore.
The woman staring down at him is barely older than a girl. Tim's age, maybe. She's pale, filthy, and beautiful. Too skinny to be a likely combatant. And not wearing nearly enough for how cold the cage is.
He recognizes her. She'd been there, before. She'd been screaming, that's what had caught Tim's attention. He'd been on his way back from patrol, a case on the docks he'd been checking out for Oracle, not his usual route. But she'd been screaming, these awful jagged shrieks of fear, and he'd responded because of course he had.
It had been dark in that alley, and he'd thought he knew what to expect from the kind of person that went after one of Hood's working girls. Small time crime means small time criminals.
And then something pale and awful had unfolded out of the dark and what he remembers after that is the stink of blood and the woman screaming and cold, numb agony.
"I'm awake," he tries to say, but what comes out is a hoarse grunt.
The woman tries something that she probably thought was a smile. It's more of a grimace.
"Hold on," she says, getting up to her knees and crawling away. Her accent had been all alley Gotham. It's comforting.
When she comes back, knee-walking gingerly, there's water in her cupped hands. Her hands are filthy, and Tim hadn't turned his head to see where the water came from. He hadn't heard a faucet, certainly. He drinks in greedy sips anyway, until the water is gone and he can breathe without feeling like the air is burning him.
He settles back and looks at her. She looks at him.
"Where are we?" he asks. She shakes her head.
"Gotham," she says with heavy irony, like it's an answer. It kind of is. They could be anywhere. "You're a cape, right? Any chance you've got some powers? Gadget hidden somewhere?"
Tim wiggles, just a little. Enough for something awful to move under the blank numbness clouding out the sensation of his upper body. He's bandaged inexpertly, probably the remains of his cape. His belt is gone, his staff and weapons and anything removable. Anything useful, especially since—
He tries to lift an arm, and rethinks that very quickly.
"Do you know who," he begins, and then a door opens somewhere above him and both of their mouths snap shut.
The figure that pauses at the top of the stairs to look at them, head cocked to the side, is slight and pale and utterly nondescript. Bony to the point of androgyny, though the short brown hair has Tim tentatively classifying the person as a he . From a distance his eyes blend oddly with the rest of his face, a pale blue.
If it weren't for how the woman at his hip stiffens, Tim would have called out to him.
He descends in slow movements, the figure watching them. Little steps, hesitant and self-conscious like he's not quite used to being watched. There's something in his hand he's balancing like he doesn't quite know what to do with it.
He reaches the bottom. He's not very tall, Tim realizes when he steps closer, edges through the gloom of the basement. He's built like Tim, slender and whip-muscled. His eyes are cloudy, a pale blue.
"Red Robin, I think," he says, and Tim flinches on principle.
His voice is scratchy, this stranger. Hoarse, wispy with disuse. A voice that hasn't been used in so long it's a surprise to the owner to hear, Tim recognizes that in the timbre.
"Red, to my friends," he says and manages a nearly convincing winning smile. It shivers at the edges. "And you are?"
The man smiles at him.
Tim swears, tries to scramble backwards and gets pulled up short by the flare of agony ripping from his chest.
Blades of bone flash in the dim light. They gleam wetly, lurid, hyperreal, and Tim feels something in his head slipping sideways in defense.
He's met aliens, metas, sentient animals— a vampire . The fangs are secondary, tucked back behind the man's canines. The tips bead with wetness—venom? They seem to get longer as Tim stares, as he fights himself to pull in a breath that won't come. They are getting longer, he isn't seeing things. Retractable fangs. The possible muscular configurations for that to be possible skitter through his thoughts. Venom glands, do they affect sinus capacity? Brain-pan formation?
A fucking vampire .
His hand goes to his chest. The agony sits there under his palm and the insufficient wraps of, yes, his cape. He still hasn't looked at it. Is he missing chunks of flesh, or is he just cut up? Sliced apart by those bone razors?
Enamel. Keratin? He's spiraling. He doesn't remember what teeth are made of.
"Drink this," the vampire says, and extends a cup to him through the bars. A plain paper cup, something for shit gas station coffee.
The woman reaches for it. The man's eyes flick to her. She jerks away, recoiling out of Tim's sight.
Eventually, panting, sweating with pain, he gets himself upright and crawling to the wall of the cage. The vampire just watches him at it, head tilted, unblinking. Tim's seen his fair share of bodies before. What's watching him are a corpse's eyes.
Tim takes the cup. It's lukewarm, and full of thick fluid. Crimson, too dark to be blood. To be human blood.
It smells wrong. Like saline and artificial cherries.
He looks up at the vampire, bewildered. The vampire is smiling, close-mouthed and serene.
"I'm not drinking this," Tim tries and the vampire's lips part in a soft huff of laughter. Fangs flash. They're so fucking big .
"You're too badly hurt to stop me from killing her," he says gently and his gaze flicks up again, past Tim. Behind him, a muffled little noise. "You have nothing to gain from being stubborn, Red Robin."
The threat, unspoken, rings between them. Tim steels himself and sips.
The taste is salt at first, fading nauseatingly into a cough-syrup sweetness that has him heaving, mouth flooding with saliva. The vampire does nothing but watch him as he sips, sips again and stops to gag. The cherry smell turns into a generic fructose flavor that lingers at the back of his tongue when he finishes the dregs and pushes the cup back towards the vampire with shaking hands. His heart is racing, his fingers are cold, and he doesn't know if it's the injuries or what he drank taking effect.
The vampire nods and rises in a graceless predatory lunge that has Tim flinching and walks away up the stairs without looking back. Tim doesn't breathe until the door shuts with a quiet snap , and the woman hesitantly crawls back over to him.
"Sorry," she mutters. She looks like she hasn't quite decided if she is or not.
He shakes his head and settles back to the ground. There's traces of what he drank stuck in his teeth, he tastes it when he probes his molars with his tongue. Cold sweat is gathering at the small of his back and the back of his neck.
"It's not your fault," he croaks. Gracious. He hopes Alfred's proud.
"What do I call you?" she asks, and just enough of Tim's professional pride is left in him to frown at her. She rolls her eyes. "I don't keep track of cape drama. The only one I know is our Hood, and he barely counts."
"Robin," says Tim, because some habits run deep , okay. The girl snorts at him. Her mascara is smudged down her cheeks, her lipstick a deep pink smear across her cheek like the world's most half-hearted Joker cosplay. Her eyes are hard as stones from Gotham River.
"Baby," she says and offers her hand. He takes it. Her nails are broken but he can tell they'd been painted, before.
He opens his mouth to say—something, he doesn't even know what, and coughs. Something in his chest catches and his vision goes white.
When he comes to, Baby is leaning over him and her hands are red and wet, and her expression is white and still. She can't stop looking down at his chest, the place where the dull red glow of agony lives. He can't turn his head to look down, and doesn't know if he wishes he could.
"So," he says. "Baby?" His voice is a wreck, but her gaze flickers back to his and it's a very miniscule but measurable improvement.
"As in, whatever you want me to be, Baby," she says and grins a sickly, watery grin, and he laughs and regrets it.
=
Sleep is hard to get, a headache blooming brilliantly behind his eyes, so he spends a lot of time watching the sliver of sky he can see through the bars and the grimy, broken window. It's Gotham sky, so it's more smog than cloud and more cloud than blue, but he watches it change anyway.
He always did keep awful hours. A night job that doesn't pay, a charade of idle luxury to perpetuate, and research on top of that. The lack of sleep is nothing new, so he doesn't know why darkness keeps encroaching on the edges of his vision.
Baby sleeps against his shoulder. There had been some awkwardness at first, protracted and deeply unpleasant, but his blood is under her fingernails and it's cold in the basement. Not cold like winter, but cold like a basement in an abandoned building close enough to the waterfront to hear water rushing by.
When he plugs his ears just to try for some goddamn quiet, he realizes it's not water. He's hearing—a pulse? Someone's pulse? His own?
He closes his eyes and snatches what might be a few hours.
Baby wakes him up by sitting up, catapulting to wakefulness with a tensing of his core muscles that leaves him hissing. The pain lingers at the edges of him, not quite enough to really put him out but enough that he can't keep his thoughts entirely together. The mess of his chest—Baby had told him it looked bad, real bad, and he hadn't asked any more—has faded to a hot throb. The headache is worse.
"D'you think he'll feed us?" Baby asks, and that's how Tim discovers that she's been giving him water from a puddle.
He looks it over. There's probably some flesh-eating bacteria inside him now, because he doubts the mold on the walls has left the floor miraculously sterile, but he still drinks it when she scoops some up for him. His throat is raw like he's about to come down with pneumonia, again .
The throbbing in his head sharpens at the thought.
She distracts him by scraping a hand over the stubble growing in on her jaw and cheek. Her expression is one he recognizes; hysterical disbelief in herself, a bone-deep confusion at her own priorities, why is this what you're upset about, dipshit? When she catches him looking, the glare she points at him has more lethality than anything he's had leveled at him before, and he's been shot at by a rocket launcher.
"I'm sorry," he says stupidly and she scoffs.
"Sorries don't buy dinner," she says and looks away. Her jaw is set. "You gonna say anything about it?"
Tim weighs and discards several responses.
"No?" he settles on at last and the look she shoots him is only a fraction less hazardous to his health, but then her eyes flicker past him towards the stairs—
Tim whips around.
The vampire is watching them, perched on the third step down from the door, crouched and leaning over to peer under the ceiling beams. The position is awkward, uncomfortable to look at. He blinks once, twice, and the vampire surges to his feet and is gone in a whirl of grey fabric and faded denim.
Snap, goes the door.
The breath that whoops out of Tim's chest is frantic, painful, reigniting the missing parts of his chest. It leaves him panting, and it takes a long while to clear the spots from his vision. Baby holds his arms down and throws a knee over his legs, what they'd tentatively figured out works the best to keep him from thrashing so hard he breaks the scabs again. Tim can't afford to lose more blood.
He needs to eat something, something that isn't… cough syrup. He needs water that isn't a stagnant puddle on the ground. They both do.
"Really though," he says instead of saying any of that, because there's nothing he can do. "Sorry."
She sighs, and shrugs, and he gets the feeling she's more bored with the whole exchange than interested in his apology.
"Anyway," she says meaningfully, and tugs him up against her side with a businesslike motion.
"You try all the walls?" he asks, letting himself be bundled up against her. The pain surges and wanes, but the cold. The cold fades just a little, and he would endure a lot for that. He's asking more as a formality than anything. But, honestly. Stupider things have happened than an insecure cage designed by a vampire. "The wire looks kind of rusty…"
She shrugs, curving so her head tucks between his shoulder and ear. There's just enough of his cape left to pull it around their shoulders.
"Whadaya take me for?" she asks, sleepy hoarseness ruining her sarcasm. "Threw my weight at all the walls and hung from the ceiling for a whole five minutes. It's solid as shit."
"Alright," he mumbles and lets it lapse. He doesn't have it in him to hang from the ceiling without blacking out. His vision had gone interestingly grey when he'd tried to just sit up.
Silence falls between them. Outside, wind scrapes past the building. Inside, water drips slowly down from the ceiling, barely stirring the wet smell of mold. His pulse rushes slowly in his ears, an in-out tide that's gotten to be almost comforting. Above…
He concentrates. There's no sound, not a footstep or a whisper. Either the vampire is utterly still, or gone out for whatever reason, or… and Tim remembers that white shape in the gloom unfolding out at him, wrapping him tight in what he now recognizes to be all four skinny limbs. The pale face peering at them from the basement stair. Perhaps the vampire really is just that quiet.
"What were you doing on the waterfront?" he asks to distract himself.
The question isn't well-considered. He knows it isn't great the second the words hit cold air, it implies a lot of things he hadn't been thinking about when he opened his mouth. He licks his lips once, salt on the tongue, and she shrugs, jostling him.
"Stuff," Baby says. Her cheek scratches against Tim's shoulder, stubble soft like the rest of her is. She's warm and getting warmer. The rest of their little cage has been getting colder and colder. "If you know what I mean."
He's been shaking for a while now, he realizes, intermittent tremors Baby hadn't mentioned. Fine little trembles that work into him from his cold, cold skin down to his bones.
"I get it," he murmurs. His voice is hoarse, scraping its way out of his dry throat. Baby smells like copper, like a summer evening. He turns his head on aching, grinding vertebrae to rest his nose in her hair.
The mess of his ribs and throat have faded to a dull pulse of sensation. It's not pain anymore. Tim doesn't look down at it, he just shuts his eyes and lets Baby's heartbeat thud-thud-thud in his ears.
==
The vampire comes back, hours later. Tim slept a little, and Baby is still sleeping. Tim hadn't woken her.
The man's pale eyes regard them with something very ugly and pleased in their depths. He's holding another paper cup, that awful fucking cup, blank white and foreboding. He crouches at the bars and sets the cup aside.
"Fuck you," Tim says preemptively. The vampire blinks at him, a slow feline expression of satisfaction. His mouth is open, lips parted so white teeth peek out at Tim. The deep, long breaths remind Tim unpleasantly of Croc. The vampire is fucking smelling him.
"If you don't come over here, I'm going eat her and just bring you another," says the vampire. The way he says it is very matter-of-fact. He doesn't even really look at Baby.
Baby wakes up when Tim untangles himself from her. She locks a hand in his for a moment, but when he looks at her she lets him go. The lipstick has worn off of her face except a faint pink halo around her mouth but eyeliner and mascara are still ground deep into the fine folds at the corners of her eyes.
The vampire grabs him by the chin when he's crawled close enough and yanks his mouth open. His grip is iron. Tim gags when a thumb jabs into his mouth, tries to fight that iron grip, but then something blooms across his tongue and he—
The noise he makes is helpless, yanked out of his chest, a baby animal noise.
The vampire laughs at him, huffing air through his nose. He'd taken his hand back. There's dull crimson blood oozing too slowly from the pad of his thumb, and Tim hates himself for how he can't stop himself from licking his lips. His mouth is suddenly flooded with saliva and the ache in his head has centered somehow to his fucking sinuses.
The vampire smiles at him with something horribly sincere in his eyes. His fangs are awful crescents against the dark back of his mouth, white and sharp in the dim light.
"Here," he says in his worn, scratchy voice, and offers Tim the cup. Tim doesn't take it at first. The vampire just stays there, still and unblinking and unbreathing, watching. Tim reaches out eventually and takes it.
The smell of artificial cherry blooms in his sinuses, thick and cloying.
Tim swallows back nausea and looks up at the vampire. When he swallows, it clicks painfully. His veins feel like dull lightning, crawling under desiccated skin.
"Swallow all of it or I'll kill her in front of you, I really will," the vampire says and he's just looking at Tim with the softest, cloudiest blue eyes. "And then give me your hand."
He leaves eventually, the vampire.
It's Tim's forearm that's a mess this time, soft inner elbow carved up and raw when he dares a glance at it. Not so much blood, which isn't surprising, since he probably doesn't have much left to bleed. He's so cold he isn't even shivering. His breath is coming in thin little pants, too quickly. At least the teeth hadn't caught on a tendon, he thinks, and heaves.
It had hurt, he'd screamed, and then he'd—gone away into himself a little, and he'd only really come back when he'd been dropped to the floor. Enough presence of mind to open his eyes to watch the basement door snap shut, but not enough to move until Baby crawled to him and started tugging.
"Jesus," she's saying, over and over. Her eyes are big and red and sore-looking, and she's sobbing for air like it's running out. "Jesus, Robin, Jesus fucking Christ."
"I'm fine," he croaks, and shuts up at the noise she makes in answer. Instead he does his best to help her in shifting him back to their little corner. She wraps herself around him and it's such a relief, how warm she is.
Warm enough the shivers come back.
His arm is numb. So is his chest. The venom must be paralytic. He pulls his sleeve down over the gouges in his arm. They look like little commas, little curving divots where the vampire had broken skin and then ground down.
B isn't coming.
The shaking takes him over, heaving full-body shivers until he realizes his cheeks are wet and the air heaving back and forth in his chest isn't enough. Until Baby's arms are around him and he's breathing the stink of the two of them from the crook of her neck. Sweat and human waste and a heartbeat under the thinnest membrane. She'd been wearing perfume when they'd been taken, he can still smell a hint of the chemical flowers.
The vampire's blood is sickly sweet in his mouth, like fake sugar, and no matter how many times he spits it won't come out from between his teeth.
It doesn't matter how far down his throat he'd stuck his fingers, his stomach spasms and his jaw cramps and he gags—nothing comes up.
Batman isn't coming to get him, not in time. Not Dick, not even awful fucking Damian. Steph, Barb, Cass… Jason.
The last one has him giggling, a mad titter he cuts off as soon as the sound registers. Too familiar. Too easy to sink into. He pushes it away.
Red Hood would come for him, if he knew. Professional pride ran deep in him, and Nosferatu's B-tier cousin on his home turf would probably raise some offense. And no matter how much he whined about it, he's warmed up to the Bats a lot in the past handful of years.
But Jason doesn't know. No one knows.
The pain is pretty much gone. It's numb now, a yawning sensation of nothing he can't bring himself to look at. The burn in his throat is better, the throbbing in his skull.
He's going to die here.
He's going to die here.
Of course he thinks of Jason. How could he not? He thinks about a kid, just a fucking kid, scared and hurting like Tim is now, but all alone.
Less than forty-eight hours. A night and a day and another night. He's lost too much blood to survive, he has no idea how his heart hasn't given out yet. It's probably something to do with the sticky sweet taste still lingering in the pits of his molars.
Still not enough time for anyone to put together wherever they are. Twelve hours at least, for someone to notice he's gone after locking out comms for the night. Or—it's a weekend. Sixteen hours, since Bruce would have needed to do something Bruce-like in public. And a few hours after that before panic set in because Tim had finally ground through the shouting matches to make the point that he's not just emotionally but also legally an adult now, and doesn't need a curfew check in.
And there hadn't been good surveillance at the docks where Tim had been. It's why he'd been there in the first place. Why it's Red Hood territory sort of by default, because it's the kind of place only brute force really worked. Oracle is more of a soothsayer than a miracle-worker, where Tim had been. Reading the future in broken traffic light cameras.
He'd done this to himself.
He's muttering. Baby's thumb lands across his mouth and he feels his lips move against it.
"You alright?" she asks when his mouth finally stops moving. His jaw keeps working without his permission, muscles clenching and flexing involuntarily. His molars are grinding together. He'd worry about breaking a tooth if that mattered even remotely.
"'Course I am," he says.
==
For a while—hours, probably, maybe days, maybe seconds—he drifts.
He's too weak to rest. It's worse than that, the grey haze he stumbles through. Cold except where Baby is pressed to his side, where he's feverish and sweaty. He's plastered to her, knee between hers and her arms around his chest, shameless, hopeless. The pain fades with that dull misery, into the cold and the numbness.
He lets himself drift.
Metal rattles against metal.
He's alone in the cage, and the door is hanging open.
The chain rattles as he crawls over it. Baby isn't with him, isn't in the shadows under the broken window, in the crevice under the stairs. He kneels at the bottom step and looks up, up at the door. Faded white paint, hanging loose on old hinges. Grey light filters through the crack underneath.
He gets his feet under him. The stairs stretch forever but he climbs them, hand over hand, nails in threadbare carpet. The door is open, moves silently on loose hinges, spits him out into a warehouse he knows.
He knows this warehouse.
Somewhere far away a child is screaming. It echoes off catwalks, girders, dirty panel walls. He's running, running, running and the warehouse is like a cave. Laughter echoes off the ceiling, screaming comes from up ahead, and he knows that screaming.
He slams into the door, solid steel, dull and immovable. It doesn't give under his fists, his nails at the cracks, his desperate pleas. There is no way through, and that laughter moves farther off, and the screaming is dying to hysterical sobbing.
"We don't make it out of here," Jason says conversationally, right in his ear, and Tim screams and whirls, and slams his elbow into the bars of the cage.
It rattles, but the sound is dull and distant to the roar of agony in his ears. He's back in the cage. He never left. Baby is talking, exclaiming with what might be shock. He can't make out the words, and he sags into her grip, and the grey swallows him back up again.
He doesn't sleep this time. It stalks the edges of his awareness, dark and laughing, and he pushes it away. It helps to keep his hands twitching, wandering the sharp cracks in the cement, the rough fishnets over Baby's knees.
She wakes him, after an unknown interval.
Her hand is on his shoulder, shaking him and sending a dull lance of pain through his chest. He lifts his head, panting, and follows her gaze.
The vampire watches them from the other side of the cage wall. Tim blinks in muted exhaustion. When he sees Tim is mostly lucid again, the vampire beckons him over.
He goes. Slowly, agonizingly slowly, Baby's hands helping him to his knees with obvious reluctance and then dragging himself hand over aching hand to the bars of the cage. He tries to sit down there, and gets so lightheaded he has to lower himself to lay on the floor.
The vampire watches all of this with grotesquely polite interest.
"What do you want?" Tim asks. His cheek moves against the floor.
A cup is placed by his nose. It looms in his vision, this close to him. It fills up half of the known universe, blank and white and radiating lukewarm against his face. He reaches out and wraps a shaking hand around it for warmth more than anything.
"I'm sure you have questions," the vampire says. His voice, husky and quiet, is sympathetic. Tim hates him, in that moment. Hates him with a sick, cold ferocity that burns itself out at once and leaves him heaving for air against the dusty concrete. He can't seem to get enough of it. Anemia—the result of not having enough blood to get oxygen everywhere it's needed. It's why his fingers feel so cold.
"Yeah," he manages, gritty, and swallows a cough. He can't afford to black out again.
"Drink, and I'll answer anything you'd like."
He drinks. He has no choice. He clenches a hand and presses his knuckles into the concrete, taking long swallows of numb warmth—of course he doesn't have a choice. The vampire will kill Baby. He'll kill Tim. He'll hurt Tim more, more of his teeth ripping through Tim's skin and skating by his tendons with teasing numb pressure.
He finishes, and pushes the cup away. It tips over and rolls into the vampire's hand.
"Very good," the vampire croons. His voice keeps getting lower and quieter. The way he looks at Tim is awful. "I'm sure you must be having a terrible headache as your mouth reforms. That may help."
He reaches between the bars and lays his hand on Tim's where it's resting on the floor. Tim flinches, but doesn't pull it away. He has no choice.
"My mouth?" he asks hollowly, though he knows the answer. Sound vibrates horribly against his palate.
"Your teeth are coming in," the vampire tells him. The soft fondness in his voice has Tim shuddering with disgust. His hand on Tim's is cold, the fingers smooth and dry and horribly cool, a mannequin's hand. The thumb brushing over his knuckles might as well have been carved from bone. "It's almost over, fledgling."
It hurts badly to lift his head, to turn it. His hair catches on the cracked damp cement.
He wants to fall asleep. He wants to curl up with his head in Baby's lap and cry in the sore, dry way he knows from experience is all he can manage when he's this tired. He needs to know what this vampire knows. He needs to plan.
He knew. He knew, he'd known from the first mouthful of artificial cherry. He wants to close his eyes.
"What's almost over?" he asks. His voice croaks from his raw throat and the vampire smiles at him with that same fondness. His teeth flash, his gums dark and receding so they look like blades. Tim blinks at them owlishly. His vision is blurry. His head hurts, a sharp ache and the cloudy sensation of pressure.
He tongues the sore, swollen buds at the roof of his mouth. Nausea ebbs in him. He doesn't have the energy to throw up. There's nothing for him to throw up, anyway.
"Your heart is going to give out soon," the vampire tells him. It's the same tone Tim's heard R&D personnel use discussing parts durability. Mildly regretful, anticipatory. "Don't be scared when it does. I'll be here to help you, to keep you fed."
The way he glances up at Baby, huddled in the furthest corner to the cage, makes the nausea surge. Tim heaves, and gets nothing but a sour mouthful of spit. The vampire coos down at him. It's a sharp little noise, inhuman. His gums are crimson and his cloudy blue eyes are back fixed on Tim, and Tim hates it but it's better than when he'd been looking at Baby.
He wants this vampire out of this basement, he wants that more than he's wanted anything, ever. Away from him. Away from Baby.
"How will I know?" he asks. His breathing is crackly.
The vampire hums. His thumb explores the valleys of Tim's knuckles, back and forth, and then retreats. His expression is meditative.
"If it does not happen tonight, I will ensure it," he says decisively, and stands.
He goes. Tim watches him go blankly, up the stairs and through the door. It snaps closed behind him, and he's alone in the dark basement with Baby.
He laughs. He can't help it.
The laughter rips through his chest, draws his vision in tight until all he can see is the horizon line of broken concrete, flashes like lightning through his skull. His fingertips are numb except a sick tingle.
Baby is there, eventually, some fraction of time later. She holds him down, though he doesn't really know why. He doesn't have enough blood left for what he loses through the bandages to make a difference.
He runs out of air eventually, dropping into convulsive pants. It takes a long time for his vision to come back, to make out Baby's terrified face leaning over him. Her eyes are a rich hazel, he notes with blissful inanity. She really is beautiful.
"I'm dying," Tim croaks.
He can feel it. He can feel it in the cold numbness in his fingers and toes, the awful see-sawing beat of his heart. The panting won't stop and still doesn't seem to be pulling in enough air. His vision is starting to tunnel again and even where it isn't fuzzy and black it's like some veil has been pulled between him and the rest of the world. Everything is blurry and dark.
"No."
Baby's hands on him, hauling him up, hurt. He gasps and sobs and welcomes it, the pain turning the room bright and sharp for a moment. His mouth hurts, suddenly. Too crowded. Aching. He stretches his jaw and Baby pins him to the wall.
She's snarling at him. Her blunt white teeth, the lunatic rims of white around her eyes, the cracked dry skin of her lips, he sees all of it in hallucinatory detail.
"You're Robin," she snarls. "You're fucking Robin , you can't give up, you can't give up on us."
He isn't, he wants to tell her, but all he manages is another gagging heave because he can feel them. He can feel them.
There are needles of bone in his mouth, his tongue pressed to them. Muscles he doesn't understand work achingly in his jaw and the needles— extend .
He doesn't know what that sound is, in the air, not for a long moment. That high, fluttering whine. He doesn't realize it's him until his voice cracks.
That pain is gone. For a moment, one piece of his agony is all gone.
"Yeah, yeah," Baby pants. Crazy-eyed, pale, smeared up with sweat and dirt and Tim's blood. "Yeah that could work, maybe that'll work."
He understands only when her wrist wedges into his mouth, when those bone needles slide across skin and catch and tear. When she's forcing his mouth wider, pressing up into his dangerous teeth.
When Baby's blood hits his tongue.
"Sorry," he sobs, his blunt incisors scraping her skin, his tongue lisping against her pulse. His words are nothing, garbled sounds, unintelligible, he can't stop himself. "Sorry, sorry—"
"Drink," he thinks he hears Baby say.
He doesn't pay attention. He can't. His mouth is full of liquid bliss and he drinks, he drinks, he drinks.
The burn fades. The ache. The cold numbness. Pain washes from him in a river, everything washing away. He is light and powerful and utterly content. He bites down harder, drinking in greedy little swallows—the flow isn't enough, he wants more—
He's hauled backwards by the hair.
It hurts in a faraway sort of way, beyond the glittering veil. He doesn't fight it, sways back and doesn't fight the laughter that bubbles up in him either. It fizzes in him, in his chest, in his tingling fingertips, in the painless lift of his arms above his head. Warm, full, light, bliss—
The slap jerks his head to the side and leaves him ringing.
He is utterly, abjectly blank.
The stillness is blessed. He's nothing for a moment, the pain washed away and leaving an emptiness euphoric in its lack.
No pain. No fear.
No raw thirst.
He stares at Baby. She's clutching her wrist to her chest and glaring at him. The eyeliner clings in greasy crumbs to the folds around her eyes. Her lips are dry and chapped. Her blood perfumes the air with iron, salt, an ozone sting. She stands out lurid and detailed in his vision, a firework against the concrete and rebar behind her.
He feels like an animal.
"I'm sorry," he whispers.
"Shut up, for real," she counters, and goes to him. She doesn't let him backpedal, gets him by the shoulders and hauls him into the corner. He goes, weak, terrified to fight it, and lets himself be tucked down against the wall with her. The same shamelessness, despite how the pain is gone. The warmth is still—so nice.
He's still shaking, he notes, but he thinks this time it might be psychosomatic. Psychological response. Something like that.
"I don't know if there was another way," she says, and after so long knowing Bruce and Dick, he recognizes an apology when it comes in disguise.
He shrugs. He doesn't know either.
"How do you feel?" she asks against his shoulder. He shakes his head, nose moving against her collar bone. He doesn't know how to answer that in a way that doesn't end with him dry heaving. "You're moving better."
And he is. He lifts an arm carefully, up up and above his head. His chest is tight, but the pain doesn't come.
"Yes," he says and lifts his head to meet her gaze.
"I'm not dying here," she tells him. Hazel eyes, brown and green, hard as river stones. "I'm not gonna let you die here either. We need a fucking plan."
==
The floor is cold, and Tim hates it bitterly.
It chills his cheekbone and the flange of his hip bone, where he's curled up awkwardly on the floor. His elbow aches, a faint and persistent annoyance. His knees ache too, and his legs are starting to cramp.
It's nothing, the pain is nothing. It's the cold that bothers him.
He watches Baby through his lashes and keeps his breathing slow and shallow and even.
She's watching the stairs. She's been watching the stairs for nearly two hours, alternating drumming her broken nails against the cement and fussing at the torn hem of her filthy negligee. She keeps flinching at nothing, at the distant roar of a motor, at the rattling cough Tim allows himself every couple of minutes.
Night is falling outside, the sliver of sky fading from the silver of old metal to a stormy grey. The temperature is dropping with it, and he drags another breath in.
He can smell blood. He can smell Baby's blood.
It's different. He's no stranger to blood, the smell and look of it. Even if he had been squeamish, it would have been drummed out of him in those short years as Bruce's Robin. And after, when…
It's all new now, is all. He can smell it so strongly. A perfume to the air, horribly intriguing. He pulls in another breath. Air slips over his tongue and the roof of his mouth and that sensation is new too, silken, pleasurable. His… his fangs are…
He suppresses a shudder, and shifts. Concrete scrapes. Baby watches him.
Unwillingly he forces himself to settle.
Above them, a faint scrape.
His eyes slam closed and in the darkness behind his eyelids he listens.
There are no footsteps above him. There is wind crashing through the buildings outside, water dripping down the basement walls, Baby's breathing. Is his hearing better than it had been before? Can he smell with any more acuity? If he does…
He clenches his fist, grinding his knuckles against the cement floor until it hurts. If his senses are any better, it's not enough.
The basement door opens with a soft creak and Baby flinches. The steps that make their way down the stairs are audible now, slow and hesitant in that way Tim has noticed the vampire seems to move. He wonders, forcing his shoulders to relax, forcing his breathing shallow, if the vampire is walking more heavily so that they'll hear him coming. So that they'll be afraid.
The footsteps pause at the foot of the stairs, and then drag their way to the cage.
Tim feels eyes on him. A hungry gaze. He might be imagining it.
"Fledge," the soft voice comes.
Tim forces himself not to flinch. Not to move at all. The voice comes from closer to the ground than he'd expected. The vampire is crouching to examine him—there comes the soft huff of air. The vampire smells him.
A rustle as the vampire stands. Tim watches Baby through the veil of his lashes.
"You stink of blood," the vampire says softly. He sounds different talking to Baby than he had talking to Tim. Absent, a hint of cool interest. "And fear. Did he try to bite you already?"
There's a hiss of indrawn air, a flicker of movement through Tim's lashes. He keeps his breathing light and even and doesn't tense, doesn't twitch.
"Fuck you," Baby says. She's breathless. "Fuck you, fuck you."
A hum. The rattle of the chain moving. The scrape of metal across cement.
"I thought he'd be precocious," the vampire says, and his voice has dropped. Quieter, softer. Warmer. Fonder.
Closer.
The chain rattles.
"Now," hisses Baby.
He unfurls.
The strip of his uniform is a seam, hemmed in steel thread. Near indestructible. The vampire is leaning over him, hands at his hip and shoulder, and Tim catches a perfect flash of wide, shocked blue eyes. Blue as summer sky. He loops the steel-lined fabric around the vampire's neck and rolls away. Out through the cage door.
He'd calculated again and again. Distance between the bars, the strength of the steel thread, the average range of motion for a human body that isn't Dick Grayson. Durability of iron rebar, his own strength. The strength of the human windpipe, and at what speed and angle a strike would be debilitating versus fatal.
He wraps the strip of cloth and steel around his hands and hauls the vampire back against the bars.
He'd been correct. Bracing a knee against the vampire's back, the makeshift garrote fed between the bars, the vampire can't reach him. He hauls back and the vampire's hands scrabble at his throat, then against the bars, rattling them.
The vampire heaves. Tim braces. His chest pulls.
A handful of seconds, a heartbeat of stalemated equilibrium.
Air coughs from the vampire, a strange and choking kuh kuh kuh of sound. Tim strains against that impossible strength, fighting how the garrote cuts into his hands. Blackness edges into his vision, blackness edged in bloody crimson. He doesn't recognize the sound, the quake of the vampire against the bars of the cage, not for a heaving eternity.
The vampire is laughing.
The red surges, the blackness tightening in. His vision is a pinprick, a blur of the back of the vampire's neck. The vertebrae there, pronounced lumps under stark skin.
Time runs together.
Mad laughter. Tim's chest, tight, heaving. There is a car passing outside, the engine clatters busily, its pistons echoing off the inside of Tim's skull. Inside the car music is playing. Water falls from the ceiling—drop, drop-drop, drop. Baby is panting.
Baby stinks of something sour and delicious. It melts on Tim's tongue.
You stink of blood. And fear.
He braces a foot on the iron rebar. He lifts himself, tension of the garrote around the vampire's neck keeping him suspended. He picks up his other leg, positions the foot appropriately, and slams his heel into the cervical vertebrae at the back of the vampire's neck.
There is a wet snap. Tim loses his balance. He hits the floor in an awkward sprawl.
The vampire slides away from the bars with a slow, sagging, sloppy lack of control. He topples to the side as he does, still with that ragdoll looseness, folding over on himself so that when he hits the ground he faces Tim.
His mouth is slack. His eyes are open. There are little starbursts of red at the corners of his blue, blue eyes. He doesn't blink, and he isn't breathing, and he doesn't move.
He dies.
In that awkward sprawl on the floor, Tim forces himself to breathe. In, and out. In… out again.
The car has passed, clattering engine and faint music fading away. Water drips from the ceiling. Tim's chest is still so tight that he has to sip after air. He stares into those cloudy blue eyes. They're the foggy blue of clouds on a summer day in Bristol. The fringes of dull brown lashes don't move. There is no more laughter.
Baby makes a quiet noise. It isn't quite words.
Tim doesn't move. He can't move, not as Baby crawls out of the cage and stands up, not as she bends over him. Her fingers are cold at his neck, pressing against his pulse. It's pounding very quickly. He only notices that when it rages against Baby's fingers.
"Get up," Baby says, and when Tim still doesn't move, "You've got to get up."
He doesn't have to get up, he wants to say and can't. He hasn't blinked and his eyes are starting to burn.
Baby settles in front of him. It cuts off his view of the vampire, vision taken up by bruised knees and filthy fishnets. He blinks at last and his eyes are wet, and he finally looks up at Baby. She's frowning down at him, ghost-pale, shaky and sweaty.
"Up," she says, takes his hand in hers, and starts hauling.
He gets up. It's easier than he expected, once he starts moving he can keep up the momentum. She gets up with him, hand hovering and watching him like she's scared he'll fall again. His hands hurt and when he looks down at them there are deep red grooves cutting across his palm where the garrote bit into them.
He looks up at Baby.
She's staring back at him. He can't read her expression. It's wide-eyed, whatever it is. He can see white all the way around her iris. The terror smell…
That sour smell is fading.
He leans, tries to look at the corpse. Baby steps to the side to block his gaze, reaches out to take him by the shoulder. It's the wrist he'd bitten. The smell of blood fills his nose.
"Come on," Baby whispers, and they climb out through an abandoned house. They'd been held in its basement. The carpet is moldering, the furniture ruined. The front door hangs loose on its hinges and the yard is pavement cracked through and mazed with weeds.
The sun is just going down, it turns out.
He doesn't catch fire and his skin doesn't begin to burn immediately, which in retrospect is something Tim should have worried about. Instead he just squints at it dully. Even the dull, bloody light of a sullen Gotham sunset stings his eyes. There's a body under his feet.
He turns to the side and vomits. Not much comes up and what does is brilliantly red. He heaves, stares down at it, and feels wetness gathering in his eyes. There's bile in his sinuses, iron-heavy bile that stings.
And then Baby is there, warm arms around his shoulders, a body against him shaking with the cold just like his, and he's being turned around.
"You're coming back to my place," she says fiercely, her accent pure Narrows. "And then I'm going to, to… I'm going to fucking shave."
He must nod or agree or something, because the next thing he's aware of is Baby taking his hand and starting to walk.