Chapter Text
1. Tim
Tim’s 17 years old and he knows it’s a terrible teenage cliche but his favourite nights of the week are undoubtedly the ones when everyone comes in from patrol and goes straight up to bed. No extra time to work on unfinished cases, no all-nighters because it’s basically morning anyway, just in at around 4am and straight upstairs to their respective rooms. This isn’t because Tim intends to sleep himself, far from it. It’s because everybody sleeping means there is no one around when temporarily disables the manors perimeter security via his personal laptop and calls out his window to Kon so they can spend a few hours together without one of his brothers constantly breathing down both of their necks.
Tonight was just like any one of those nights, expect everyone is staying at the manor tonight on account of it being Dick ‘I’m friends with literally everybody’ Grayson’s birthday tomorrow. So scattered through their various bedrooms by the -practically unheard of- early time of 3am was: Dick, Jason, guilt tripped into spending the night and attending lunch tomorrow by Alfred, Cass, Damian, Duke, Bruce, Alfred and of course Tim who was currently in an oversized superboy T-shirt and boxer briefs, looking out of his open window waiting for Kon to show up. It’s not until 5 minutes after he initially called that his phone dings with an overly apologetic string of messages from his boyfriend explaining how Jon and Clark had roped him into joining in on movie night and he currently had his pint-sized little brother sprawled out over his legs and in a sugar coma leaving him utterly dead to the world. Tim felt himself visibly deflate but made sure to send a quick text back and he smiled when he received a heart in response. Not particularly feeling like sleeping, Tim quickly reinstated the perimeter security systems and opened up some unfinished WE work so that he could at least turn his inability to sleep into productivity.
Unfortunately, it was only a few minutes later than Tim caught himself blankly staring into the brightness of the screen uncomprehendingly and he blinked sharply to try and clear the haze from his eyes. Coffee. Coffee was what he needed. Running a hand through his hair, still only half dry from the post-patrol shower he’d taken, Tim stood up from his desk and made his way towards the door, wincing at the loud creek one of the floorboards let out when he stepped down onto it. The last thing he wanted right now was to accidentally wake the goblin next door and just cause himself further grief. Pushing open his bedroom door, he stifled a yawn but then almost choked on it when he felt the cold press of what was unmistakably a gun muzzle pushed up against his temple.
‘Do anything at all kid and the first person to set foot in this hallway dies. So make a sound, I dare you.’
Tim’s initial thought was that this was just Jason playing some insane joke but the whisper of the voice sounded too old and the angle of the gun barrel suggested the person holding it was too short to be his older brother. Not daring to take his eyes off of the wall ahead of him, Tim raised his palms in a hesitant show of cooperation. He let some of his unease show in a visible tremble that spread into his hands because until he figured out if this guy knew about his other identity he was just Timothy Drake-Wayne, rich kid from birth to present who definitely didn’t know five different ways how to strip the gun off of this guy in about half a second flat.
‘There you go kid, now be a good boy and put your hands behind your back and let my friend here put his cuffs on you.’
Tim fought to ignore the way the man’s words made his skin crawl and tried to focus on what information he could gather from his surroundings as he moved to comply. The guys voice was being kept low which implied at least some of the people in the rooms around them were still sleeping and they couldn’t afford to have Tim make any louder noises that might risk waking someone up. The guy who emerged from the shadows to Tim’s right was so big that, even though he could only see him out of the corner of his eye, Tim was shocked that he hadn’t noticed him sooner. It took all of his focus to go against his instincts and just let the guy cuff him without a fight. It was only after the cuffs were in place that Tim began to question himself, these weren’t regular handcuffs. They were the heavy duty kind used in places like Arkham, noticeably heavier for sure but more importantly damn near impossible to pick without the right tools. Tools that were still down in the cave and in the pocket of his favourite jacket back in his room. Shit.
‘This is the one the boss told us to use to make sure the street kid doesn’t act up right?’
It was the big guy who had spoken and the one with the gun sighed with clear frustration in response, ‘Yes, this is him. Were you even listening when we went over everything for the hundredth time literally half an hour ago?’
Okay so, the guy with the gun might be smaller but Tim was fairly certain that if he did have to fight his way out of this he was the one he had to worry about the most. The entire time since Tim had come out of his room the gun hadn’t wavered, shaken or hit him. That was what concerned him the most, with his experience of kidnappings the jumpy ones might be unpredictable but the steady ones were always the most experienced, and therefore most likely to go through with their threats.
Keeping his mouth shut, Tim followed the direction of the hand on his shoulder as it turned him round, the gun moving to press into the back of his head instead, and a sharp nudge sent him stumbling down the hallway. For the first time ever he cursed just how thick the carpeting in Wayne manor was, the man ahead of him’s booted feet didn’t make a sound so there was really no hope of him being able to use his bare ones to attempt to send out the alert.
They’d walked him past both Cass’ and Duke’s doors before the eerie stillness of the manor was interrupted by Dick’s door being swung open and Tim froze in place as he was forced to watch his older brother get swung out and pushed face first into the floor, a gun against his temple in an instant. Dick was in only his superman pyjama pants and a pair of handcuffs that looked similar to how Tim’s felt but in addition he was sporting a strip of duct tape over his mouth and red rimmed and bruising left eye. What freaked Tim out the most was that the entire sequence of events had taken place in near silence, iterating further just how much these guys seemed to know exactly what it was they were doing and how to pull it off. Like the guy in front of him, the man with his hand splayed over the back of Dick’s head was wearing a black ski mask and a simple black suit with a white shirt. Tim tried not to think about where the spots of blood that speckled the new guy’s shirt had come from instead he focused on what he could see of Dick. Dismally, he could only see that enough of the fear in Dick’s eyes was fake that he had to be putting on the same rich kid act that Tim was before gunman behind him was shoving him hard on the shoulder, not giving him a choice about moving on past Dick and further down the dim corridor.
Upon reaching the stairs, Tim was surprised when, instead of being urged down towards the family living areas, the men urged him upwards to the next floor. Having noticed his hesitation gunman chuckled darkly,
‘Don’t you worry your little head, you’ll get to be with your whole airhead family in a minute. Well probably, we’ve got a use for you first so just keep quiet and maybe see if you can squeeze out a few tears? That would definitely help with the show.’
Tim definitely was not going to cry but telling the man in the position to shoot him that didn’t really seem like the smartest plan so instead he opted to keep quiet and played the good hostage until he could figure out what exactly they were after. Their little parade stopped outside the room that Tim was pretty sure Jason had chosen to occupy. There were another two armed men already waiting outside and big guy who’d come up with Tim had also produced his own handgun at some point.
It was the guy Tim was slowly figuring out to be pretty high up the power ladder that spoke up first, ‘you got him dosed?’
The guy standing closest to Jason’s door nodded with a sharp jerk, ‘yep put it through his open window 10 minutes back, guy should be able to wake up but definitely won’t be able to take us out.’ The guy smirked and Tim’s stomach flipped a little at the obvious dark amusement, ‘I’ll honestly be surprised if he can even walk straight but I guess it’s not going to hurt to have a little insurance against getting shot. You sure we can’t dirty the kid up a bit first to make it more effective?’
‘I’m sure a gun to his little brother’s head is going to be incentive enough,’ the voice snapped through the air, louder than before, not that that was surprising if they really had drugged Jason like they’d said, ‘now quit delaying and get on with it. We’re due downstairs in 7 minutes.
Suddenly, Tim found himself strangely glad that this guy hadn’t been the one to bring him upstairs because he had a feeling he wouldn’t currently be in the same pretty much okay condition he was if that were the case. He’d pick the cool professional that wouldn’t hesitate to shoot him over the guy who gets kicks out of other people’s pain any day. Wow, what point had his life come to when he could genuinely compare the quality of different types of kidnappers and always be speaking from personal experience.
Gunman finally made his way around the side of Tim and into his line of sight, though he kept a hand on the connecting part of the handcuffs and the gun-trained right on his forehead. Tim hadn’t been planning to try and run right now anyway, not when he had no idea just how many other intruders there currently were in the house, but he figured that the visual of the gun was definitely being fairly effective as extra motivation to stay put.
‘So this is how the next 6 minutes is going to go kid. You don’t talk, move, shout, run or so much as fidget. You do exactly as I say when I say it no matter what happens with your brother in there. If both of you behave then we will have you down and with your family in no time at all and then we can work towards getting this thing put into all of our pasts.’
Tim closed his eyes for a brief moment and nodded.
‘Verbal confirmation please kid.’
Yeah, this guy was definitely a professional. ‘Got it. I don’t do anything you don’t tell me.’
‘Good boy,’ the man’s gaze was hard as granite as he moved back around Tim so he could see both him and the others. With some kind of signal given from outside of Tim’s line of sight the three barrelled through Jason’s door, clearly no longer concerned about being quiet, and Tim found himself being pushed harshly in after them.