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“I’d love to help, but I’m a little tied up right now.”
“Robin.”
“My enemies showed real restraint with this one.”
“Robin.”
“It all happened so fast. It was a bit of a chain reaction.”
“Robin.”
Ah, there it was. That special exasperated note in Batman’s voice, a sort of forest green with gold flecks, rippled like wrinkled sheets rather than the usual silk in a deep blue usually only found in oceans right before daylight gives in.
If B was awake enough to despair at Robin’s awful puns, then his concussion couldn’t have been too severe. Green and gold-flecks were a hell of an improvement over silence, which had no colour at all. Mind you, they were both hanging by their wrists by a multitude of wrapped chains with yet more weights dangling from even more chains at their feet in the middle of a meatpacking warehouse in the Narrows. Anything was an improvement.
“Just practicing my puns, B.” Robin hummed idly, careful not to kick his feet. Careful not to move at all. Careful to keep his breathing measured, to not make this shitty rack they’d devised even worse. “For when Dickwing swings in for the big rescue.” He tried not to sound as sour as he felt about that. Bad enough that a bunch of no-name no-rogue goons got the drop on them with sleeping gas and left them here while the auction for who got to kill them went on. Robin would rather jump into one of the mincing machines over yonder than suffer to be rescued by his mortal enemy, the Former-Robin-Current-Nightwing-All-Dickhead.
“Language,” Batman grunted. “And code names. Report.”
Jason sighed. “My shoulders and wrists feel puke yellow. Like ugh, I want to get the colour off me now.” He could feel it slowly seeping everywhere. It felt revolting. He experimentally flexed his fingers, feeling tremors of puke yellow soften to a kind of off-white beige. “My fingers are numb,” he complained.
“Hn,” Batman grunted. He didn’t ask for clarification for Robin’s weird-ass pain-measurement scale, a fact which would forever endear the Bat to the boy. It was nice describing what he honestly felt and not having people look at him funny. He hadn’t had that very much and the people who hadn’t thought he was a freak sure hadn’t had good intentions towards him when they found out. “Picks, equipment?” Batman asked.
“No dice, B,” Robin sighed. “The fuckers stripped my gauntlets and probably my belt.”
“Language,” Batman huffed. “Hold out a bit longer, sport, I’m going get my spares.”
“Spares? From where?”
“Under the cap of my false tooth.”
Silence. And then, “Okay, so when do I get fitted with cool spy teeth?”
“If I have a say, never,” Batman told him dryly. “Otherwise, when you get your adult teeth punched out of your jawbone. Definitely not an experience I recommend seeking out.”
“Right, right,” Robin nodded like that wasn’t going to be a foregone conclusion at some point. He grimaced as the puke yellow cringey, slimy feeling worked its way down his spine and hips. He knew, intellectually, that he was in agony but his brain wasn’t wired to process it. His brain wasn’t wired to process a lot of things like normal people did. Synaesthesia was fucking weird.
“Hey, B?” he asked quietly when the glass-clear silence got too much. “Sorry about missing the gas canisters.”
“Hn,” the grunt was a slightly slurred maroon. Right, Batman’s tongue was too busy for speaking. Robin subsided, left with his pulsating sense of failure and the vile pukey colours. Maybe B would manage to get his super-spy teeth-canister picks out and somehow unpick the locks before Nightwing showed up with that look he always got around him, like he was unworthy of even having the title of Robin.
As if he didn’t already know that after all the shit he’d been through. Stuff that even Batman didn’t know. Stuff that only she knew.
Robin was so caught up in ruminating about both his failures and likely incoming humiliation that when an unfamiliar face in a half-cowl without the bat ears dropped upside down in front of his face, he merely blinked.
Then he screamed in surprise. “What the actual fuck?”
The figure, still hanging upside down, jerked back in surprise. “Whoops. I dropped down a little bit too far. Um… sorry about that.” It said sheepishly.
“Who are you?” Batman growled in a voice so blue it was almost black. That was Batman at his purest.
“Uh… my name’s, uh… Spar-Spar-Sparrow,” the kid stuttered out. “And I uh-uh-uh… you know what? That’s not important right now. Hold on,” the figure shimmied gracelessly back up the bright orange rope they dangled from. “I’d have been down sooner, but it took a while to rig the line.”
“Rig the… are you climbing a fucking extension cord?” Robin asked in disbelief.
“Language.”
“B, it’s a fucking extension cord!” Robin insisted. “It’s a six-year-old hanging on to an extension cord with loops tied in it!”
“I’m not six!” came a huffy little voice from above them, all concise reds and yellow sparks, overlayed with the sizzling blue of a voice modifier. The whole rig jostled as the tiny interloper went to town on the loops of chain and big freaking padlocks.
“Bullshit! You’re the size and weight of a dried pea!”
“Sparrow,” Batman growled, all purples of suppressed emotion. “You shouldn’t be here. You need to leave. The people who did this aren’t going to spare you because you are a child. This is not a game.”
“Okaaay, so what you’re saying here is that you’d rather me leave you here to die rather than, I don’t know, releasing the lock I just picked and setting you free and then leaving?”
Silence. And then a grumbled, “Fine.”
Batman dropped like a stone, cape billowing out dramatically as he landed with a roll. He glared up at their little helper. “Release Robin. Then you will leave.”
“No problem!” Sparrow chirped. “I’m not combat. I’m medical.” Two packets dropped down at Batman’s feet. “Ice packs for your shoulders.”
Batman and Robin both swivelled to stare at each other.
Robin broke first. “You’re fucking what now?”
“Medical,” Sparrow said calmly. “Like, I’m your paramedic service. Strictly non-combat. I wouldn’t have interfered, but the auction was wrapping up and it looked like you could use a hand.”
“Seriously?” Robin craned his head this way and that, but their relative positions meant he could only catch glimpses of Sparrow, who was dressed in some kind of armour, mostly black and browns. “Why the fuck would you think we needed a kid-medic following us around?” He hissed through his teeth as the jostling on the line made whole new gardens of puke yellow sear his bones.
“Can’t imagine,” Sparrow retorted with what Robin considered an impudent level of sarcasm.
“Hurry,” Batman snapped. There were noises coming from the end of the warehouse, near the workers entry door.
“Okay, we are ready to… uh oh!” The exclamation was due to the fact that a loop of chain had loosened from the knot above. The loop had dropped down and found its way under Robin’s chin as the locks gave way. Robin felt his neck stretching and air supply cut off as he dropped with the grey-blue jangle of unforgiving steel.
Sparrow grabbed at him one-handed. Robin felt the kid’s joint give way even before the green-blue groan sliced the air overhead. Robin was not a lightweight, but the kid definitely was. However, Sparrow, small or not, managed to find a reserve of adrenaline-powered strength. Robin was hauled up just enough to wriggle out of the chain noose before Sparrow had to let him drop.
There wasn’t time to check on the kid because Robin’s feet barely hit concrete before the doors opened and shouts of surprise mingled with automatics going off.
Having a pitched fight in a warehouse while desperately trying to unwrap chains from around your wrists and ankles as your shoulders screamed in puke yellow agony? Fun times, folks.
But Batman and Robin had a lot of pent up emotions at this point and the guys that hung them up were such excellent therapy tools to deal with it. The fight was brutal but short.
“Go!” Batman barked at him as the last of the fore guard went down. “I’ll take care of the rest.”
Robin nodded, rolling his shoulders before taking off to check on the kid… Sparrow. Their would-be paramedic, for fucks sake.
He knew, peripherally, that the kid had shimmied back up the extension cord when the bullets started flying. Batman and Robin were successfully distracting enough that the bad guys had probably not noticed Sparrow. Still, the kid was hurt and, if Jason was pegging the voice and size right, younger than Jason’s lofty fifteen.
“Hey, kid!” Jason yelled when he finally managed to lose the sounds of the fight. “Sparrow! Where’d you fly off to?” His keen eyes traced the rafters as he made his way to the derelict dock station at the other end of the warehouse, listening for any hint, looking for any colour that would reveal the kid’s location.
Not many people could hide from Robin when he was tracking them.
There! Ahead, out in the yard, there was a starburst of white. Some kind of weird whine, followed by the orange-and-blue strike of metal on stone. A grapple gun? No, there was no telltale pale green hiss of an unwinding line, or the sharp umber chink of a hook finding purchase. A weapon?
“Hey, kid, I just wanna talk!”
“No, you don’t!” came Sparrow’s reply from the top of one of the enclosing walls— a fifteen feet sheer slab of concrete— so Robin was mystified about how Sparrow managed it. Someone had turned on the warehouse lights, including the truck yard’s floodlights. Robin couldn’t see a damn thing up there and he didn’t have his grapple. “You want to take me home and tell my parents on me.”
Well, yeah. Kind of. “Come on, man. It’s not fucking safe to go running around as a vigilante. Or even after vigilantes! This is Gotham! You’re gonna get yourself fucking killed!”
“You haven’t so far!” was sassed back at him.
“I was damn well trained, you incorrigible midget! And I’m also older than you! Now get down here! I know your shoulder’s busted! Someone needs to look at it!”
“I’ll be fine,” the voice bit out, the colours fuzzy and spiked on the edges which meant real pain. “I told you, I’m not combat. I’m medical. Here!” A couple more ice packs dropped into the warehouse yard along with, of all things, a small vial of ibuprofen. “Remember to take one to reduce the swelling and get it scanned. See you around!”
White-blue bursts of metallic-sounding footprints disappeared into the distance as Sparrow flew the coop.
“I better not, you little shit, or I’ll kick your ass!” Robin shouted after him for all the good it would do.
Then he resignedly packed his shoulders with the soothing ice, the slimy yellow finally diluting out. He went back to report to Batman that he lost a fucking wounded little kid. He couldn’t imagine B would be pleased.
What the fuck even was his life, anyway?