Work Text:
“Whee-eee-eee-ou, whee-eee-eee-ou, whee-eee-eee-ou!!!”
“Oy.” One of the men who had jumped him rattled the bars of his makeshift cage. “Shut up y’ little bastard.”
“You shut up, Carl.”
“He’s batshit crazy, Kev. Can we gag ‘im at least?”
“He can scream all he wants; no one’s comin’ for him down here.”
Robin wiggled stubbornly against his restraints. Ropes were lashed around his waist, his wrists, and his feet. The one around his neck tightened every time he moved his legs. Not to mention the rusty piece of fence metal pinning him in place. The darn thing was squeezing him like a blueberry, pressing into his body until his stomach ballooned between the bars and his cheek got sorta numb and his ribs hurt.
The first stupid idiot growled, shaking the bars again before moving on. They were waiting for someone, Robin thought. A buyer, maybe. The buyer that Robin had come down here to find.
This was good, right? Sure, maybe sleuthing beyond the range of Batman’s commlink had been a bad idea. Okay, maybe he also shouldn’t have gone where he was specifically told not to go. Maybe he also could have called for help before getting stripped of all his gear instead of after.
He had no commlink now. Just a very old-fashioned, very stupid, very useless verbal call for help. “Whee-eee-eee-ou!!!”
“If he makes that noise one more time,” someone interrupted.
Robin glanced up at the bit of elevated railway track he could see, watching the rain drip from the metal beams and run down the sides and pool in the glowing orange puddles at the bottom that reflected street lamps. He tried to keep saltwater from adding itself to the dampness soaking his face. He had gotten himself into this mess. He could get himself out of it.
A quiet series of slow clicks filtered back through the darkness. Robin barely managed to keep his breathing even as excited hope zinged through his limbs, worsening his shake. He knew what those clicks meant. Hold your position.
“What was that?” one of the goons snapped.
“A damn animal, ya dimwit; stop bein’ so paranoid.”
“That didn’t sound like no animal I know.”
“Yeah? What d’you know, a dog? Get over here. Th’ boss man is on his way.”
Robin tried to look around without moving his neck against the rope or his squished head against the bars. His heart pattered faster the longer he stayed pinned, but he refused to freak out. The instructions had been clear.
Batman was coming.
Finally, at the end of an agonizing wait, a fancy car pulled up. Robin heard someone getting out. Then… he heard screams.
He grinned evilly, wriggling a little to try to catch some of the action. It was no use--- He was stuck. He listened as four bodies hit concrete. He heard zipties zipping shut after the screaming had cut short. Then he heard an indiscernible growl.
That growl wasn’t a part of their code, but Robin knew it perfectly. I am angry. I am frustrated. I am FURIOUS, and not at you.
Robin went limp, waiting meekly as the weight of the bars disappeared, then, one by one, the pressure of the ropes. When his neck was free, he threw himself forward, wrapping all four limbs around an armored chest.
It was cold, the armor, but the arms that swept a heavy cape around his body were warm.
When Batman’s shoulders had eased--- Body language relaxed now that the bad guys were caught, now that his kid was safe--- Robin peeked up at the stony cowl with a cheeky grin. “Toldju I’d find ‘im.”
Batman squeezed a little tighter, grunting.
This would’ve been a lot easier if he’d had a crowbar.
Robin pressed his back against another box, heart hammering. The thrill of the chase had sent jittery fire through his veins. He was fast, faster than B sometimes, which probably explained why the idiot was taking forever to get here.
Robin double-checked the distress button on his belt, making sure it was still pressed down, then turned on the night vision in his domino. It only took two tries for one of his birdarangs to hit the last warehouse light, shattering it with a high-pitched tinkle.
This would be the perfect time to get a visual on the illegal cargo in the crates. Again… if he had found a crowbar.
Robin dove out of hiding in the following chaos as the lackeys shouted at each other about flashlights, flinging one of his weapons at someone’s shin. The guy went down with a muffled curse, reaching for his knife. For dramatic effect, Robin grabbed his ankles before he could get it, throwing all his weight into dragging the idiot out of sight. The sharp scream sent predatory chills down his spine. He knocked the bastard out cold with two punches, shook his burning fist, and pulled the zipties.
“Marty?” someone stage whispered.
Robin slunk back into the shadows, grinning like the cheshire cat. He waited for another one to wander across his path before jumping out once more. Then, leaving the bodies, he moved around south to regain the element of surprise.
One, two, three more goons went down this way before the rest of them decided to get smart. When Robin jumped out of hiding to grab the sixth, the guy twisted, contorting on his belly to snatch Robin’s wrists from his ankles in an iron grip.
Robin’s world spun as he was yanked to the ground, forehead smacking into pavement. This was about to go very badly.
“Wiseass,” the man spit venomously, limping a little from the birdarang cut as he wrestled Robin to his feet. “Little half-ass punk-ass BITCH---”
Robin wheezed as he was slammed up against a metal support, choking. “Y’r mom has… b’tt’r dirty talk… th’n that.”
The hands around his throat tightened. Faintly, beyond the kicking of feet and the search for pressure points and the throbbing of slow-moving blood in Robin’s head, he heard a skylight open. Desperate, he expelled the last of his breath in loud, short, aggressive bursts of whistling. Male on male aggression; engaged with hostile; help, help, help.
“Wha’ d’ya know,” the bastard growled, meaty fingers tightening. “The little birdy can sing.”
Robin hit his feet as the hands suddenly disappeared, coughing. It took a ringing eternity for his gasps to bring in enough air, and by then, his red night vision revealed more than a few bodies on the ground. The warehouse was completely silent.
A gloved hand rested on his shoulder. “Let me see.”
Robin tilted his neck back, wincing, and grabbed the idiot’s arm for balance as the threat of falling the fuck over became more likely. “Y’ came.”
“Of course.” Gentle fingers prodded his throat for a moment before the white lenses moved up to his face. Impossibly, the mask… and the voice… both softened. “I will always come when you call for me.”
Being chased across the rooftops of Gotham City at the end of a very long patrol, admittedly, was never a very good time. Being chased by a crime lord with possibly meta abilities, a grudge, and also weird family ties fell into the “Worse” category.
Robin was so very tired.
“It’s been four months,” he panted to himself, slipping down a fire escape instead of jumping to the lower roof, because that--- in such a downpour--- would end badly. (He knew this via empirical evidence gathered by watching Nightwing on patrol. Obviously.) “I wasn’t even in your territory. So--- Ugf--- dramatic---”
“Replaaaaacemeeeeeeeeeeeent,” the crime lord called sweetly. The distortion through his modulator made Robin shiver. “Come out come out wherever you aaaaare.”
Robin ran faster, skidding right past a few hiding places in favor of getting as far away from that voice as possible. Logically, he knew that Hood wasn’t out for blood anymore. He just wanted to tease, to put the fear of God in Robin’s veins, because the damn zombie had no life. It was fun to him, the chase.
He wouldn’t do anything if he actually caught Robin. Surely.
“Replaaaaaaaacemeeeeeeeeeent,” the voice repeated, closer this time, echoing and bouncing and spiraling off the brick walls of buildings too high to climb.
Robin swallowed an illogical sob, trying to ignore the jackhammering thunder against his ribs. He risked a jump instead of a grapple, flying, tripping, sliding to a landing that had him catching himself on his recently healed wrist. It stung with phantom pain as he struggled to his feet. He was far too slow; his breath was on fire; the air was sludge and his eyes couldn’t scan the shadows fast enough and the end of the roof presented another jump he wouldn’t make which meant he had to slow---
A frantic yelp escaped him as iron bands wrapped around his ribs, swallowing him whole; his legs flew as he was pulled up, tackled broadside midair and yanked from slow motion and slammed back into reality. He cried out in earnest as spikes of unrelenting terror shot down his spine, kicking for purchase. The danger crushed him against a brick wall, holding him up by his cape, and he couldn’t move, couldn’t escape, couldn’t breathe---
He should have been able to get out of this.
“Cuckoo,” Hood’s voice grated, mocking.
Robin threw his head back against cold brick, trilling. Help, help, HELP ME, over and over and over; he couldn’t stop, he didn’t think twice, he knew Batman was close and he knew he should have handled this himself and he just wanted to be free---
The hands disappeared. Robin dropped to his feet, then his knees, shaking too badly to do more than catch himself before his face could bite concrete. He looked up, expecting a boot to the chin, a bullet, a knife---
Gone. The red helmet was gone.
Robin breathed out, rolling until he was pressed against the building’s chimney. He thought he heard a distant chittering. Help is coming.
He barely had time to register that the sound was distorted through a modulator before a familiar shadow descended from the sky, wrapping around his body like a sprung trap. The stars disappeared. The fear of being jumped was instantly disarmed by the persistent clicking. You’re safe now; I’ve got you; I’m here.
Robin buried himself in the cape’s depths, hiding. He forgot sometimes how big this shadow could be.
She could sense them on her heels.
She slipped into a brightly lighted gas station, swallowing. She could feel the scars just beneath her throat. She steadied herself against a shelf, pretending to look at the food there, at brightly colored bags. Red, she remembered. Red was the color of blood. It was also the color that belonged to some of her favorite people.
Black was also a dangerous color. Black was the color of home now. Home was him.
Home was not very close. She was not on patrol; she did not have the safety of the mask. The confidence that sank into her bones with the swishhhhhhh of a cape on her shoulders did not exist.
She wanted to go home.
Her trembling fingers--- Her fingers NEVER trembled, were not allowed--- drifted toward the black stuffed animal at the end of the shelf. It was a cat with yellow eyes, and when she picked it up, she could no longer see her fingers in its squishy depths. She traced its stitched eyelash. Its face was very kind.
The colors were so like home.
Knowing that they were waiting for her, but unable to prove that they were always there, she pulled out her money along with her phone. She handed the worthless piece of paper to the person behind the counter, exchanging it for the squishy cat thing, and pressed her phone to her ear after two simple taps.
She knew she was interrupting. She knew that he was busy. She knew that she could cost him valuable concentration.
She was scared.
“It’s me,” he answered carefully. She was calling from her civilian phone. He did not know why.
She stood at the huge glass door, staring at the vast expanse of perfect darkness outside of the horrible white light, and tried not to whimper. None of the words she had fought so hard to learn, to earn, came to mind. She had struggled so long for the gift of speech. In her moments of weakness, of terror, it still abandoned her.
She would have punched a hole in the glass if it would not have let the shadows in.
“Are they chasing you again?” he asked quietly.
She nodded emphatically. He did not always believe her. He told her sometimes that they were real, that they did want her back, but sometimes their grasping fingers were figments of her mind. Trauma, he called it, but she did not know how to tell him that they felt so very alive.
It did not matter now. She was scared, she was alone, and she wanted to go home.
“Cass?” he asked her. Not Batgirl or Orphan or Cassandra. Just… Cass.
She opened her mouth to speak, to tell him that she needed his help, but she could not. The only sound that escaped her bruised chest was a soft cheep-cheep-cheep; a noise she had heard the little bats making in the underground. I need you.
“Stay exactly where you are,” he told her. “I’m coming.”
She bravely lifted her chin, ended the call, and stepped out into the darkness. They were waiting for her, but she could not afford to be afraid. She was more than that now. Home was coming.
She tucked the soft squishy under her arm… and walked… and walked… and walked. They grasped at her heels just as before, and she trembled, but she had promised herself long ago that she would not live in fear. She would not hide while she waited for safety. She would FIND safety, FIND home, and bring it TO her.
This was that.
The deep black, blacker than the blackest evil in her wake, stepped out of the next street. “I told you to wait for me.”
She stopped in front of him, holding up her shaking hands, and in them, the squishy. The shadows behind her had fled away. “Home.”
He did not understand her, perhaps. The way the stuffed kitty’s colors matched his uniform or the name she had given to the depths of his cape. She had learned, however, that words meant different things to different people. There was no better fit to her for the meaning of the word home.
She stepped forward, leaving the hungry eyes behind, and allowed home to hug her close.
He did not want the others to know what he was afraid of.
“Aw, what’s the matter?” the Scarecrow whispered, shivered, tumbled down Robin’s spine. A needle slid into his skin with sickening familiarity. “BAT got your tongue?”
Robin snarled fiercely, tugging at his restraints. It was a slow drip; a trap for Batman, Robin as bait. He should not have fallen into it. He would not call for help. He could not expect to be rescued from such a paltry restraint.
NO excuses.
He focused on calming his heartbeat as the maniac cackled in the distance. He had disabled his tracker when he was first grabbed, of course. Batman would not suffer for his mistakes, and struggling now would only further the release of the toxin in his bloodstream.
He had been exposed over and over and over to poisons of varying effects throughout his childhood. His system was strengthened against all but the most toxic of substances. Still, he had yet to adjust to the specified brands of chemical insanity that this cesspool of a city cooked up in her belly, and he had learned long ago not to trifle with that most erratic, most deadly of weapons in his father’s arsenal.
Fear.
“Resisting,” the creature noted as Robin’s breathing stuttered. He ambled off, cocking some sort of modified dart gun. “Fight back if you like. It will only worsen the effects.”
Robin worked away at the ropes, trying to remember every single escape tactic he had ever learned as the shadows bent in the dark belfry around him, distorting, shifting into creatures that he had never truly seen; emotions he did not know how to face, could not stand to ignore, and they hurt--- Somewhere deep down in his chest, he thought, and they should not--- They should not have hurt. The toxin played with the mind, not the body; its effects only became physical when the fear response was triggered to its utmost capacity. They…
They could not see him like this.
He realized somewhere in the interim, between the realization that he could no longer feel his fingers and the numbness of his toes and the pounding of his heartbeat in his ears, that he was unable to breathe. He was going to die. He was going to die here, alone in a tower that Batman no longer patrolled, in a graveyard of Gotham’s poor dead, and he was going to die screaming.
The last thing Father would hear was broken suffering on his only son’s lips.
Shame was not strong enough to keep him from falling back on a call for help that he had never made, that he had barely dared to memorize, that he had sworn not to stoop toward, because--- because it was idiotic, childish that the noise of an animal was what could, in his final damned hour, save him from himself.
He could not stop making it.
Eternity slipped through his trembling fingers before the high-pitched chittering brought a shadow crashing through the rotted wood. Down on the enemy, down on the ropes, down, down, down until there was nothing left but the darkness of a fear that had never touched Robin.
“Baba,” he hoped he did not say, and fire was trailing down his cheeks, but the shadow drew him close--- Held him and hid him and wiped his tears away.
“Son,” the fear that did not belong to him answered. Like it was a promise. Like it was a privilege.
He did not understand it, but he thought… if he held on tightly enough… eventually he would.
It was such a long way down.
He stood on the edge of the tallest building in the city, quiet except for the flutter of his heavy cape in the breeze. The sun was struggling to wake up, to break the deep purple into something lighter, something orange, maybe. He couldn’t see what color it might have been beyond the gray clouds.
It was always gray this high up.
Home, he thought, was very close. He could have gone down to the waiting car, could have crept back into comforting darkness that was his own and fallen asleep and pretended that it was normal to wake up at two in the afternoon. He could have.
He remembered pacing this worn ledge for countless hours during the worst nights in all of existence. He remembered the stone beneath his feet on the evening he had lost his first son’s trust, the morning he had lost his second son’s life, and the day that reality had failed to click back into place. He remembered how it felt to sit up here with bags of Batburger, to hear resounding laughter echo off the walls, the wizzzzzzz of grapples and the pit-patter of ghostly feet and the gentle touches of hallucinations that he should have stopped seeing by now.
Every night on this ledge was different, but it always ended the same. He ached for something else. For a different way to lift the gray, the monotony of required rest, and set his feet on solid ground. To give in, maybe; to tap out. It was such a ceaseless struggle, this wrestling match with the darkness he had made his own. His bones creaked. He was tired, and he thought… eventually… the dust would pour out of him.
It was such a long way down.
He balanced his center of gravity over open air, wondering if he would have to leave his grapple, his cape, and his foam pellets behind in order to tempt fate. They were old friends now. They could have had a night of it. They could have danced that line for hours before his exhausted mortality failed him, but…
He had made someone a promise over cups of steaming tea and delicate china and a weary smile that promised always to accept him home with open arms. So he raised his hand… turned on his com… and began a series of low clicks. Come to me; backup; I need you.
The chatter from the last of the midnight cryptids immediately fell silent. Was that Batman? he could imagine them asking. Batman never calls for help.
They did not deserve to find him resting with fate. So he waited… and he suffered… and he tried to keep the tired dust from crumbling beneath the weight of his creaking limbs.
The first answer caught him so off his guard that he almost didn’t believe it was real. A soft whistle, a twitter of a robin song announcing itself with a blur of blue in the darkness. The shadow landed softly at his side, saw him waver, and rested a hand on his shoulder, pressing the soles of his boots back into concrete.
The second answer was a quiet, gruff, almost cocky whistle; a challenging robin’s call. The red helmet was gone, but the set jaw was the same. A more solid shadow that melted out of the darkness, resting its hand on Batman’s other shoulder. His right side… and his left. His two greatest, and he thought… he would have done anything to give back to them what they had lost. If he tore his ribs apart, cracking sinew and bleeding flesh and whispers of the dead to let the dust trickle out, would he find something worth giving?
They deserved it.
The third robin trill was so quiet he almost missed it. A gentle presence that had pulled him from his deepest darkness, and guilt was a familiar taste on the back of his tongue. He wanted so badly to go back, to start fresh, to try again. He had to stay to mend the wounds he had inflicted there. He had to keep his feet planted. So he watched and waited and tried to hide the drip of saltwater from the end of his nose as his third precious son knelt at his feet, coiled his arms around one leg, and looked down into the darkness below as if daring it to take this worthless replacement of a father from his grasp.
It was possible, he thought, that the dust was gold. They did not deserve to lose anyone else. Perhaps his judgment did not hold up to the quiet entreaty of stay. We are here. We are yours.
Perhaps his worth was not for him to decide.
The fourth greeting, a whispered series of batlike clicks, slipped beneath his cape. Then the fifth, a combination of demanding chitters drifting over the chilly night air until it was joined by a small warm body at his side. These two did not seek to restrain him. They burrowed into his shadow, wrapping their small arms around his waist, and pressed themselves close beneath the place that his wings might have been if he could fly.
He wrapped his arms around their warmth, drawing a deep sigh through the cracks in his bones, and allowed them to weigh him down--- The hand on his right shoulder, companionable, and the one on his left, possessive. The grip around his leg, steady as it had always been, and the vulnerable neediness wound in two sets of arms hugged around his aching lungs.
Over the edge of the city, between towers of glass, the clouds broke into splashes of orange and red and pink.