Chapter Text
Barbara wraps Janet in a sheet, and she thinks even that is more respect than she deserves.
It’s a bit of a spectacle, done in the fire pit like some sort of sick funeral. Barbara camps out with a first aid kit and a fire extinguisher, props her chin on her knees, and watches Janet burn.
She doesn’t live in black and white, she never has. Not the way Bruce does, not the way he’s teaching Jason to. For her, the world has been rendered in shades of gray since she stepped foot in Gotham.
This, she thinks, is a pretty dark shade.
Burning Janet doesn’t smell like cooking flesh. God, but Barbara knows what that would smell like. She has a frame of reference. She’s worked fires, bombings, arsons. There’s nothing quite like it, the gamey, leathery scent that just lingers, even hours after, pervasive and clinging.
But Janet doesn’t smell like that. She doesn’t even burn like that. The sheet goes up in flames, covered in a thin gel. Barbara thinks it’s napalm, or chemically similar. One of the many, many restricted substances in the cave that Batman’s labeled combustible.
The lenses of the cowl protect her eyes from the sudden, bright light, they don’t do as much for the heat. It’s a relatively controlled burn, though it singes the concrete and the stone around them, but even from a few yards away Barbara can feel the waves of energy rolling off the fire, warming her face and prickling the hair on the back of her neck.
And it smells mossy. Like clover and stones. Like bones decaying into calcium and collagen deposits. It smells like grave soil.
Barbara covers her mouth with a hand, forces herself to watch, to listen to the whistle and hiss of the fire. Ash floats into her hair and settles over her shoulders. She shudders, and brushes it off, only for more to descend on her, and for what little that shows of her skin to get streaked in charcoal smudges.
Her leg is bleeding sluggishly, her uniform is ripped in odd places from the fight. The adhesives holding her cowl to the contours of her face have loosened with sweat and jostling. She doesn’t feel like Batgirl anymore. She feels a bit like a teenager dressed up in an ill-fitting costume.
The bandages she applies to her wounds are sloppy, half-hearted. Most of her attention stays on Janet, on Janet’s corpse, just to make sure it doesn’t rise again.
It takes half an hour for the body to burn into nothing. Much, much less time than it should. Barbara watches it play out in stages. First, the flesh chars and peels away, blackened, and then the meatless, bloodless interior cremates into ashes. For all the weight, for all the endless expanse held within the void of Janet Drake, she is, in physicality, nothing.
The unfairness of it all rankles. Barbara’s spent the past few hours, Gotham has spent the last two weeks, living in fear of a monster that disappears in a matter of minutes. It’s almost like Janet was never there in the first place.
And when the napalm has burnt itself out, and Barbara goes poking through the ashes, all she finds is that silver fork, melted down into a puddle.
He rides in the back of a car that drives itself.
The novelty of it is lost on Tim, lost to the hazy, distant sensation of the upholstery that clings to his skin, hot and sticky. Lost to the feeling of Robin’s palms pressing into his neck, keeping his blood inside his body.
Tim lays with his head in the vigilante’s lap, gloved hands around his throat, and wishes he could be even a little afraid of that.
“I’m not going home anymore, am I?” He says, whispers, mouthing the words, putting the barest of efforts into making them audible. Robin hears him anyway.
“It’s better this way.” His cape is draped over Tim’s chest and stomach, knees digging into his back. His suit is dirty, streaked with mud and grass stains, and Tim is also dirty. Sweaty. Bloody and tainted. The car is well-lit, bright, the way everything has been since he met Robin. The console glows, an array of controls and buttons, looking closer to science fiction than real-world tech. Instead of normal belts, each seat is equipped with harness straps. The windows are thick and tinted. “Safer.”
“I don’t wanna be safe,” Tim admits, because nothing his parents have ever done to him has compared to the terror and uncertainty tonight has managed to inspire. “I want my mom.”
Robin's breath hitches at that, and his face tips down to stare at Tim. The whites of his domino mask narrow and whirr, moving asynchronously to the furrow of his eyebrows, eerily out of sync. Coupled with the ashen pallor and Robin’s angular features, it makes him look inhuman.
“I know, Tim.” He says, “I’m sorry.”
Tim thinks, selfishly, that it’s not enough.
He knows it the moment they make it into Gotham Proper, because the car slows considerably. He’s not sure what time it is anymore, but it doesn’t matter. Traffic never dies in this city.
He’s never been to a hospital. Never even seen a doctor. He vaguely remembers asking his parents for a doctor’s note so he could try out for soccer once. He remembers being pulled into his mother’s arms and getting told he was too weak and small for such athletic inclinations. And didn’t he want to be at home with them? Sports and extracurriculars would take up so much of his time, it’s bad enough that he spends all day at school, didn’t he miss them?
He only knows hospitals from TV and books, and they always sounded so overwhelming. Loud and painful, and a little frightening.
So he’s reasonably leary when the Batmobile jerks to a stop, and Robin makes as if to get up.
Tim grabs the vigilante’s wrists, forcing them still where they’re wrapped around his throat.
“We’re here,” Robin says, stilted, fingers twitching.
They stare at each other, frozen like that, Tim gazing up at him darkly, and Robin trying to parse the pensive lines of his face. Then, as if reading his mind, he says, “We’re gonna get out, and it’s gonna be bright. They put lights in the ambulance bay, so no one gets hurt. Then we’re gonna go through the back door, and the intake nurse will help me put you on a stretcher. I’ll stay with you until then.”
“And then you’ll leave.”
“I can’t stay here, Tim.”
Tim lets go of him abruptly, and goes limp and unhelpful in his lap.
Robin doesn’t mind. Or, if he does, he’s too guilty to show it, wiggling his arms under Tim’s back and knees, kicking open the car door and sliding out gracefully, only just barely grunting at his weight.
Robin was right. The ambulance bay is bright. Not loud though, even though the rest of the city is. There are three ambulances lined up, medics and drivers flitting back and forth between their rigs and the hospital. They don’t even blink at the presence of the Batmobile.
They do, however, pause at the sight of Robin carrying a bleeding child, no Batman in sight.
“Dawson!” One of the EMTs shouts, dropping a tub of cleaning wipes and rushing over. “Get over here!”
Robin hitches him up higher. Almost paradoxically, his shoulders relax, strides growing longer and more confident. His face smoothes out into something cool and unaffected.
Tim buries his face in the vigilante’s shoulder, makes it that much harder for Robin to hold pressure on his neck, fingers slipping slickly in warm blood.
“Timothy Drake,” Robin says, stepping up beside the medics, ignoring them when they try to take Tim away. “He’s been shocky for a while. Hasn’t stopped bleeding since I found him.”
“What… is that a dog bite?” A hand reaches for him, and Tim flinches away, squeezes his eyes shut. The paramedic doesn’t stop, their probing fingers taking his pulse, nitrile gloves cold against Tim’s warm skin. “We need to get him on a stretcher. Robin, let me—”
Another medic, Dawson probably, keys in the code to the doors, fluttering uncertainly in the background. Tim hardly notices him, shying away from the sudden assault of bright lights and noise coming from the ER.
“Then go get a stretcher,” Robin says, testily. “I’ve got him.”
The medic relents surprisingly quickly, but he sticks closely, guiding Robin and Tim through the twisting hallways and to the nurse’s desk. Tim’s hands are shaking, and for the umpteenth time, he covers his ears with them, wincing at the sound of crying.
It’s a baby, a few doors away. A woman, clutching her stomach, curled on her side in a bed right in the middle of the hallway. A man, wheezing through a tube shoved down his throat.
And, like a blanket of white noise over it all, is the hum and buzz of machinery, whirring, and clicking, and beeping incessantly. A voice over the intercom, calling codes and requesting doctors.
Tim is abruptly grateful his parents never took him to the hospital. He thinks he’d rather suffer quietly in his room than endure much more of this.
Robin navigates the overwhelming, chaotic landscape with the ease of familiarity, stepping around patients and doctors like he isn’t a fraction of their size.
The intake nurse is unphased by the sight of them, nor is she particularly moved by the blood dripping onto the pristine floors.
It moves fast from there. Tim had held out hope that it’d take the medic a while to find a stretcher, or for the nurse to decide what to do with him, but they work with a precision that’s almost dizzying. Within seconds, several nurses and doctors have converged on him, and Robin is hefting him onto uncomfortably stiff sheets, pulling away from Tim.
Tim doesn’t open his eyes. He can’t. There are hands on him, on all of him. Touching him, cutting off his clothes and attaching things to his skin. His head is tilted to the side, like he’s a particularly fragile doll, and a cold cloth is pressed to the jagged, irritated wound on his neck.
Tim balls his hands into fists, toes curling, and screams.
The nurses hold him down, and they’re not gentle about either, much stronger and bigger than Tim. He thrashes to no avail, only managing to dislodge the hands near his head, a fresh well of blood staining the sheets.
One voice rises over the crescendo of panicked shouting, familiar, and closer than Tim was expecting.
“Back up,” Robin snarls, right over Tim’s head. His eyes snap open. “Back the fuck up.”
Robin looks angry, almost as angry as he’d looked at Tim’s mom. He isn’t looking at Tim, and his eyes aren’t even visible, but Tim can feel the force of his glare anyway. Like a tangible thing.
“Tim,” He says, chin tilting down. “Tim, you need to stop. They will sedate you if they think they have to. Don’t give them a reason.”
“Don’t leave me,” Tim begs, blinking tears out of his eyes, cringing at the feeling of them running down the sides of his face. “Please don’t leave me.”
Robin stares at him, keeps staring at him, lips pursed so hard they’re going white. He moves from Tim’s head to his side, picks up his hand. “Doc,” He says. “Can you do this with an audience?”
A woman steps up, a little closer, tall and severe. There’s a lanyard around her neck, boasting her title of MD. “If you can keep him calm, we’ll make do.”
Robin stays, and this time, Tim doesn’t fight the hands that hold him down. Not even when they slide a needle into his arms and neck, not even when they prop a bag of blood above his head, and he has to watch it descend down a tube and into his veins.
“Don’t look at them,” Robin says, still standing, still holding onto his hand, when they start stitching up his neck. He grabs hold of Tim’s chin, to make him be still. “Look at me, okay?”
“I don’t want the blood,” Tim says, even though they’d asked him not to talk. This feels important, insurmountably so. He’s never been on the other end of this, receiving blood instead of giving it. He doesn’t think he likes it.
Robin shushes him, nudges the IV stand until it’s out of Tim’s immediate sightline. Which doesn’t do much, because he can still feel it in his arm.
He stays quiet, though, leaning into Robin’s hand. The vigilante is swaying, almost imperceptibly. Tim thinks someone should check on that.
“Robin,” One of the nurses says, an indeterminable time later, when the stitches are done but the blood bag is not. The cuff around Tim’s arm has squeezed him three times already, and each time is progressively worse, his arm stinging and going numb. “The police are here.”
His grip on Tim’s hand tightens, and then loosens, and Tim knows deep down that this is it. No amount of pleading could get the other boy to stay any longer.
Robin knows it too, because he says, “They’re gonna take really good care of you, Timmy.”
“Robin—”
“Don’t.” He heaves a breath, face downturned, no longer meeting Tim’s gaze. “Be brave for me one more time, kid.”
“I don’t wanna,” Tim says, but it doesn’t matter, because Robin ignores him. Drops his hand and steps away, and before he can even say anything, the nurse is stepping forward. She takes his place, runs a hand through his hair. She smells like cherries and sweat, a little like tears, and her skin is much softer than Robin’s thick gloves.
Tim arches away from her touch, craning his neck to get a final look at the vigilante as he walks away. His cape billows behind him, head held tall.
Barbara sits behind him, on the stairwell in the foyer, her knees digging into his back.
She hasn’t recovered, Jason thinks, and neither has he. It’s been a day, almost, but neither have slept. She’s pale, eyes red-rimmed, like she’s been crying. Jason’s aware that he looks just as bad, if not worse. His ears still pop every time he swallows, and he’s getting nose bleeds every so often. Like his body is still trying to adjust to whatever the hell he just put it through. He’s got a persisting headache, the sort that sends spots dancing across his vision.
He’s cold, all the time now.
Barbara tenses behind him, when the sound of a car trundling down the driveway finally becomes audible. Her hands clench into fists, teeth gritted, and she stares down the door like she’s waiting for a Drake to come through it, and not Bruce.
“He won’t be mad,” Jason whispers, even though he’s not sure that’s true.
“Don’t worry about it, Jason.” She says, voice low and deceptively calm. She’d already told Bruce. A full mission report, typed up into the computer logs and recited from memory over a tense phone call. Jason pretended to be asleep for most of it.
“You had no choice.”
“I did.” She holds him, then, the way she’s been doing since the incident. A lot more touchy-feely than Jason usually gets from her. They both must be missing Dick.
Her arms fold over his shoulders, her chin resting in his hair. He feels small like that. “I did have a choice, and I made it. And I don’t regret that, Jason. I won’t ever regret it.”
That’s a lie. Even if she isn’t sorry about killing the Drakes, it’s written all over her face how much she’s dreading Bruce’s reaction.
They listen, illuminated by the warm, liquid light of the chandelier overhead, as a car door slams shut, and quick, urgent footsteps scale the porch. The door handle twists, thick, heavy oak flung open without aplomb.
For the first time in almost two weeks, Jason meets the gaze of his father.
Bruce looks horrible. His eyes are bloodshot, dark circles carving hollows into his gaunt face, like he hasn’t slept for a while. His hair is standing on end, ruffled and uncombed, physical evidence of anxious hands being run through it over and over. There are odd stains on his day-old clothes, and the edges of a nicotine patch in the crook of his elbow. Like he got the urge to smoke again, and just barely managed to resist.
Jason’s lip wobbles. Just a little.
“Jason," He breathes dropping his bag in the doorway, as if he couldn’t be bothered to care about the contents when faced with his son. His children. He crosses the room in seconds, scales the stairs faster than Jason can wiggle out of Barbara’s arms and get to his feet. Bruce wraps him in a hug so tight it threatens to break his already bruised ribs. Squeezes the air out of him, makes him ache in a really, really good way.
Jason fists Bruce’s shirt in both hands, buries himself into his father and doesn’t think he’ll ever be ready to let go. His teeth are chattering again, but this is the warmest he’s been in days, deep down to his core.
“You’re okay,” Bruce says, a prayer and an immutable fact all at once. Like Jason has no choice but to be fine, because Bruce wills it. “You’re going to be okay.”
And Barbara, damningly, moves away from them. Inches backward, just enough that it catches Bruce’s attention, his sharp red-rimmed eyes zeroing in on her. She freezes, and Jason does too. Despite himself, despite how good it feels to have his dad back. He opens his mouth, hotly, willing to defend her. To demand that Bruce be fair with her.
As it turns out, he needn’t have bothered.
Bruce reaches out for Barbara, ignores the way she flinches away from him, and drags her into their hug. His voice is ragged, desperately relieved. He says, “Thank you,” the words spoken into her hair, so close to her ear and so quiet that Jason thinks he probably wasn’t meant to hear them.
Barbara relaxes all at once into the embrace, rests her head on Bruce’s shoulder and hugs him back. “I’m sorry,” She says, a little choked. Wholly unrepentant.
“Hush,” Bruce says chidingly. He squeezes her that much tighter. “You protected him. You kept him safe. Thank you.”
The pediatric ward of Gotham Memorial is nicer than the ER, Tim thinks. Slower, and quieter. There’s a lot more laughter.
The nurses have stickers in their pockets, and the doctor gives him a teddy bear the first time they meet. The lights are dimmer, the beeping of the heart monitor isn’t so overwhelming. There’s a mural of Winnie the Pooh on the wall, and a box of legos under his bed. And, if he asks very politely, sometimes they let him have a tablet, and he can play subway surfers until he gets a headache.
Tim’s favorite part, though, is the absolutely massive window that overlooks half of Gotham city.
That first night, when his stomach is twisting from the antibiotics and his fever spikes high enough that he can’t think, he draws a chair up to it and opens the curtains. Sleeps with his cheek pressed against the glass, the imprint of the city lights dancing behind his eyelids. He dreams that Robin visits him, swinging on a wire, Batgirl flying in the distance.
He doesn’t hear anything about his parents. He doesn’t ask.
The doctor sits him down on the second day, kneels next to Tim’s bed so they’re at something approaching eye-level, and explains in small words what they’ve been doing to him since he arrived. Pressors, for the shock. Pain meds, stitches, and blood, for his neck. Antibiotics and intravenous fluids for a nasty case of food poisoning. And then he asks Tim strange questions about his diet, and if he has trouble eating, and how old is he, actually, because Tim, you should not be so malnourished.
The nurses whisper about his parents when they think he can’t hear them, and the name Drake is passed around the hospital like an omen. It fills him with an icky sense of shame.
On the third day, Tim manages to keep down a full bowl of oatmeal, and to celebrate, the nurses give him a popsicle. The kind that’s really only dyed sugar water. Tim savors it.
No one tells him what’s going to happen once he’s not sick anymore. The police and social workers tread water around him, like a single blunt word could shatter him into a million pieces. Tim ignores them mostly, lets himself live in the moment and tune out everything else around him. He’s blissfully content, to languish in bed all day, and ignore his problems.
He’s doing just that, laying on his side, staring at the wall and absently petting the bear he got, when Nurse Havannah knocks on his door.
“Tim,” She says, stepping in tentatively. Tim ignores the way her stare settles on him, ignores her completely. Havannah is nice, doesn’t mind when he gets quiet and absent. Doesn’t try to pull him out of it, just takes advantage of it to change his bandages and check his IV. “Tim, sweetie. You have a visitor.”
He resists the urge to groan. He doesn’t like getting visitors. Visitors means questions, means they're thinking of moving him, or placing him, or feeding him. Tim doesn’t like getting fed. He doesn’t like the nutritionist, or the GI doctor, or the tight, thin-lipped smiles they offer him.
“I’m tired,” He says, petulantly, like he really is a baby.
“He volunteers here, sometimes,” Havannah goes on, like he didn’t say anything at all. “And reads stories to the younger kids. I told him you might want some company.”
“I don’t.”
She sighs. “C’mon, Tim. Be nice. Say hi.”
Only then does the presence of another person register. Tim rolls over, shaking his head a little, unsure how he didn’t hear them before.
There’s a boy standing in the doorway, a book tucked under one arm, his blue eyes narrowed in amusement. He’s tall and lean, with a wickedly familiar grin.
Tim wonders, vaguely, where he’s seen that face before.
“Tim,” Havannah says, primly. Tim’s eyes never leave the older boy’s, struck silent by the pale robin-egg irises. “This is Jason Todd.”