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It was getting harder to breathe. Like, Robin was sure he was dragging in every square inch of air he could get, but for some reason the Air app was no longer compatible with WindowsLung. He felt like a stone was pressing down on him. It was a green stone, muddy and molten, flowing through him.
The arrow fletching wobbled as he tried to draw breath. Stupid fucking wannabe one-shot archer, he cursed, mostly to keep his blood up and his panic down. The asshole was, despite all pretensions to Elvish ancestry (like, he seriously thought that. He called himself Neldorion. Robin could not wait to tell him what that name translated to in Sindarin), he was actually the world’s fucking worst shot. Robin has personally worked with archers, he knew how good real pros are.
Figures the moron’s one good shot - made, Robin was sure, completely by accident - had managed to slip through a joint in his chest plate. Agent A was right; he was outgrowing the armour if the expansion joints were that stretched.
But right this second that didn’t matter. Robin was on his back out in front of the old Majesty Theatre, slowly choking to death. He’d hit his emergency beacon, but Mister Fuckwithion was still lurking around the area, whining about how his targets wouldn’t stay nicely still. B was probably en route, but this would be a rough one.
“Holy shit!” Orange stacco beats of booted footfalls co-mingled with a sort of silvery voice of alarm. “Holy shit, is that a fucking arrow?”
Robin rolled his eyes under his eyelids. If he’d had the breath, he'd have fired a warning no shit, Sherlock across the bow of the newcomer. Instead he just opened his eyes, and blinked. “Who th’ fuck are you supposed to be?”
Full face mask. Purple hood and cape. Holy shit, they had another fucking cape on the Gotham scene. “I’m… uh, Spoiler,” she replied.
She’s new, Jason surmised. No voice modulators which was a bad choice if you wanted to keep your alter ego a secret. The armour had a kind of shoddiness to it that spoke of a strictly limited budget. Robin was pretty sure that cape had been a blanket at some point. All stuff a newbie without the Wayne billions could reasonably throw together with grit and a sewing machine.
Plus, she was freaking out over the arrow. You got pretty hardened to gore and severe trauma in this business, but only when you had some experience under your belt.
Robin tried to focus. His hand had crept to his utility belt to yank out a pressure bandage. “Spo-” he coughed, which was all green rivers of sludge pouring through his chest. “Spoi...ler, pl… please…” he coughed again.
She grabbed the bandage. “Get the arrow out, got it!”
“Wai-!”
Spoiler grabbed the arrow and yanked.
The air literally turned turquoise blue as Robin shrieked.
Then the world whited out for a while.
*
The world was a rainbow of diluted pastels. A peach, scarlet and cotton white delight. The colours swirled and gelled around him.
He felt weird though, like he was in the middle of a marathon and he hadn’t hit his second wind quite yet.
“... the hell would you pull it out?”
His chest was ugly, yellows, green, blue, blacks, spreading like spilled ink.
“I’m sorry! I’m sorry! It was just sticking out there all gross-like and I thought it was mostly in the armour and I…”
“Stop panicking and help me sit him up!”
The world tilted crazily. Blue flowed out of Jason’s mouth as he moaned wetly, the yellow-green-blue what actual fuck was it darkened and spiked, before diluting at he took a breath.
It was wet, foamy and tasted like copper, but he was breathing. So that’s what colour asphyxiation was, he thought idly. He’d have to add it to his colour book when he got home.
“Holy fuck,” Robin rasped weakly as the colours swirled inside his chest. “That feels… so… wrong,” he wheezed.
“Hold on, Robin. You, whatever your name is, stay behind him and keep him propped upright.” Sparrow was glaring, his voice maroon-blue and geometric with anger. It receded to the more vivid red as his professionalism took over. He hauled out his all-knowing all-doing field phone and quickly accessed an app that Batman had finally caved enough to give him. “Batman, it’s Sparrow. Robin is down, repeat, Robin is down. Majesty Theatre, Fourth and Rowe Street, the one near the rail interchange. I’ve got a hemopneumothorax, left lung, via object penetration trauma… no, not a bullet. An arrow. Crossbow, by the look.”
Robin eyed the dart had been his chest’s new bosom buddy, now laying bloodstained on the ground. Holy shit, that was a crossbow bolt. That elfhole motherfucker was using a fucking crossbow? “Auta miqula orqu,” he mumbled.
“Antolle ulua sulrim,” Sparrow said back dryly. “But I’d prefer it not to be pouring into your chest cavity… what? No, Robin’s just insulting the shooter in Quenya.... Robin,” Sparrow turned to him. “Batman says to not do that.”
Robin just wheezed. The wave of ugly colours had receded but the tide was coming back in.
“Is this normal for you people?!” Spoiler’s mouth was gaping. “Like, is this normal vigilante stuff?”
“Sorta…” Robin choked out.
Sparrow was still talking on the phone. “I need to get his chest armour off... yes… yes, I see it… hang on,” Sparrow began working on the hidden locking mechanisms.
“Can’t you just unstrap it? I can see the buckles from here,” Spoiler asked.
“Booby… trapped…” Robin wheezed out, green surging up again as he tried not to cough and failed. “ZZZZZZapptt… sizzle.”
“Seriously?! You need to have that, too?”
“You really are new to this, aren’t you?” Sparrow said dryly as the plate began to loosen.
“Yes, I’m fucking new!” Spoiler snapped, frazzled. “I don’t have an MD or a suit that explodes or a working knowledge of a fictional language just so I can insult the crazy guy who just fucking shot at me and holy shit, that’s a lot of blood!”
“Sucking chest wounds. It’s all there on the tin.” Sparrow began applying pressure bandages to soak up some of the mess. He reached for his medical backpack, and jolted forward as a blue thwip-thwack sounded. An ochre grunt starburst in front of Robin.
When Sparrow twisted around, a short arrow could be seen sticking out of his backpack.
“Holy fuck!” Spoiler yelled.
“Ssshhit,” Robin choked out. He tried to get his scattered brain in order, tried to heave himself up, get them to cover. His bones felt like limp noodles.
“It’s okay!” Sparrow said hastily, crouching down and trying to shield Robin with his body. “My field bag is armoured. It didn’t go through.”
“Cov… cover,” Robin coughed. “Now!”
“Grab his legs,” Spoiler said suddenly. “I’ve got this end. Let’s get inside the theatre.”
“”The doors are locked.” Sparrow pointed out even as he grabbed Robin’s legs.
“No they aren’t,” Spoiler replied tersely.
She proved right. They were able to half-carry, half-drag a groaning Robin into the old theatre and sit him up on one of the chairs in the back rows, wheezing. Spoiler ran off to bar the doors, Sparrow updated Batman over the phone.
“We are still under fire, repeat, we are under fire. We’ve taken cover inside the building. Robin’s condition is deteriorating, he won’t make it unless I intervene. Yes… yes, okay.”
“Intervene? How, exactly?” Spoiler said as she hurried back. “Unless you’re actually a dwarf, you can’t possibly be a doctor.”
“Right now, I’m all he’s got,” Sparrow snapped. “And so are you. Look,” his voice softened a little bit as Spoiler wrung her hands. “I know this isn’t exactly what you thought you were signing up for when you put on the mask. But you did sign up to help people, right… uh?”
“I’m Spoiler. And, sort of, I guess.” Spoiler mumbled. “I was mostly in it because I wanted to catch this one guy…”
“Cluemaster.”
Spoiler’s head whipped up. Robin opened his eyes a crack.
“How the hell did you know that?!”
Sparrow shrugged. “You knew the door was open, so you must have been snooping around in here before you found Robin. And that up there on the stage looks a lot like one of Cluemaster’s gameshow gimmick clues.” There were, indeed, three doors set up on the stage, Monty Hall style. “Besides, I see you sometimes, out and about. Usually on the same nights Cluemaster is flagged on the rogue alert system. It’s not exactly Double Jeopardy to figure it out, is it?”
Huh, Robin thought as he tried to breathe past the expanding boulder on his chest, his breaths turning whiter and spikier. Sparrow has a little detective in him too.
“Right, well, tonight you’re more than just the spoiler of one man’s plans. You can do more than that. You can help people. He needs your help, okay? So, just, get my pack off and let’s see what we can do.”
“I have no idea what I’m doing here,” Spoiler admitted while she unhooked the impaled bag from Sparrow shoulders.
“I do,” Sparrow said briskly. “Take off your gloves, I’ll get the equipment ready and then I’ll give you a quick and dirty intro into thoracic structures. Robin, you still with me?”
Robin wheezed and nodded.
“Good. You’re going great.” Sparrow whipped out a smile for him. Then he was busy unrolling his perforated bag and tearing out all manner of tubes, wires, needle canisters and sterile wipes.
“Uh, what are you OW!” Spoiler jerked her hand back from where Sparrow had just jabbed her with something. “What was that for?”
Sparrow inserted the needle into what looked like a special needle holster, which he could clip to a jack port on his phone. “Typing and crossmatching. I need to know your blood type.”
“Why?” Spoiler asked slowly, looking even more freaked out.
“Because we have two problems here,” Sparrow replied. “One, there’s both blood and air being sucked into the pleural cavity of Robin’s chest. The pleural cavity is a lubricating layer so your lung tissues can slide more easily when the expand and contract. If anything except the fluid that’s supposed to be in the cavity gets into the cavity that is, as a doctor would say, really freaking bad. When you yanked out that arrow, you made what was likely a small wound in the cavity into a big damn hole. Which is a problem, because now both air and blood are running into that hole and filling up the cavity, which is causing pressure to build in the chest cavity, which is in turn pressing on his lung. Which means his lung can’t expand. The more goes in, the less the lung can expand, the more the lung collapses like a deflating balloon. Which is, you know, kinda bad. Breathing is kind of thing we need to be able to do.”
While he had been in lecture mode, Sparrow had removed Robin's chest plate, sliced through the layers of body suit and laid a deceptively small wound in Robin’s chest bare.
There was a lot of blood on the body suit and his skin.
“Oh,” Spoiler croaked.
“It’s okay,” Sparrow said calmly. “We can fix all of this. Or, we can help him long enough for actual medical help to arrive. First things first,” Sparrow clipped an pulse oximeter onto Robin’s finder, wrapped a bicep in a pressure cuff and stuck what looked like a bunch of stickers with little antennas onto his chest. They were all jacked into his phone, which seemed to be made from nothing but ports. He dropped the phone onto Robin’s lap and then yanked loose a strapped-in pony tank of oxygen from his bag, complete with a cannula and mask. “I have to rig up a pump and a chest tube. Get this on him.”
“Okay, yeah.” Spoiler grabbed it. “I can do that.”
“Robin, hang in there, you’re doing great,” Sparrow told the choking sidekick.
Robin nodded. His lips were turning blue. His face was too pale.
The phone beeped. Sparrow glanced at it. “Congratulations, you’re A+ type,” he said, looking at the screen. “So’s he. You can donate blood.”
“Will,” Spoiler licked her lips under her full face mask. “Will we need to do that?” She fitted the face mask and tucked the tiny tank in next to her where she sat, cranking the valve.
“Yes, I believe so,” Sparrow replied bluntly. “Pressure is sixty over forty-five. That’s low; he’s lost a lot of blood volume.”
Spoiler looked like it was on the tip of her tongue to ask where all the blood went, because it wasn’t like he was leaving trails on it, but then Sparrow plunged an alarmingly large, thick needle into Robin's chest at about his clavicles and the girl flinched.
Robin seized and choked, and suddenly sucked in a huge, wet breath of air. Then another.
“He’s breathing!” Spoiler was gleeful with relief. “He’s breathing!”
“I decompressed the pleural cavity,” Sparrow nodded. “Essentially, I let the air out of the cavity so his lung wasn’t being squeezed by it anymore and could re-inflate. Robin, you still us?”
Robin managed a feeble nod, sucking in more air. He was still struggling though.
“We’re not through yet,” Sparrow warned Spoiler. “We still have to drain the cavity with a chest tube. Here, keep an eye on this for me,” He handed her the phone, it’s screen divided into quadrants showing numbers. “Pressure, ox-sat, heart rate. They’re not likely to go up but you need to let me know if they drop, okay? When I say ‘obs’ - observations - read the numbers off the screen. Don’t worry,” Sparrow accurately read Spoiler’s panicky look even with the mask on. “Batman is en route. We just have to keep him going until he gets here. Fifteen minutes, maximum. We’ve got this, okay?”
“Okay. I’ll take your word for it,” Spoiler nodded. “Sorry I’m freaking out, it’s just that I didn’t really expect… this. I’m not sure I can do this,” she added frantically. “I mean,” she eyed all the terrifying medical stuff being laid out. “This is really not my thing.”
Sparrow got busy ripping out an alarming looking hooked tube attached to a tiny little bellows pump with a trailing end with a rolled up clear back on the end, like a blood bag. “You came out here to help people. That’s always more complicated up close than most people really think about,” Sparrow said offhandedly as he swabbed Robin lax arm and strapped a tourniquet around his bicep.
“I didn’t,” Spoiler blurted. “I mean… I don’t object to helping people or anything but… um, I just came out here to stop him.”
“Cluemaster?” Sparrow prodded Robin’s elbow while he watched her blearily.
Robin tilted his head towards Spoiler, a look of deep puzzlement on his face. “ D… Lister…? ”
Spoiler bridled. “Hey! Cluemaster is plenty dangerous if you leave him to carry out whatever his idiotic plan is this time! Why shouldn’t somebody step up?”
“The real question there is,” Sparrow said absently, taping down a catheter into Robin’s arm. “Why does Spoiler need to be the one to do it?” He flushed the catheter valve with a saline syringe.
The question was so unexpectedly piercing that Spoiler hesitated. “It… it doesn’t matter,” she rallied after a telling pause. “Someone has to.”
“Well right now, someone has to help Robin.” Sparrow raised an eyebrow at her. “He needs blood. I can give him mine as well, but I really need to focus on the chest tube. Cluemaster’s probably still in the area. Do you want to go and find him, or will you stay and help me here? It’s up to you.”
“Don’t be stupid,” Spoiler huffed. “Of course I’ll help. I never said I wouldn’t! Plus, it is kinda my fault,” she added sheepishly. “I shouldn’t have just yanked the arrow out.”
“That’s the difference between being a vigilante and being a revenge-bot,” Sparrow told her, grabbing her wrist to swab her arm. “It’s about more than just you. But thank you for staying. I couldn’t have gotten Robin away from that stupid sniper if you hadn’t helped me. You’re a lot more than just a Spoiler. And this? This might absolutely be your thing. It could be, with a little time and training.”
Spoiler was a little bit calmer about the situation after that. She acquiesced to getting a catheter in her radial artery and dutifully read numbers off the screen as Sparrow attached various equipment to other equipment and gave himself a catheter too, just for a backup. She also helpfully perched up on the back of her seat as directed, so that when Sparrow hooked the transfusion tube up, gravity assisted the blood flow into Robin.
“Okay, chest tube time,” Sparrow said, getting the hooked tube and pump attachment settled between Spoilers feet on the chair. Just in time, because Robin’s breathing was starting to get laboured again.
It was the careful, meticulous work of a moment to get the big chest tube into Robin’s chest through his wound, inches further than it looked like it could or should go. Sparrow turned the pump on, and they were treated to the the squick inducing sight of clotted, ugly blood and fluids being gently sucked out of him by the pump and into the empty blood bag. “So, uh…” Spoiler looked away from the gore, cringing. “Where did you learn this shit, anyway? I mean, call me ageist if you want, but where the heck did a ten year old get a medical degree?”
“I’m not ten,” Sparrow’s cool professionalism deflated slightly with this huffy denial. “And I just… like, I’ve been around a lot of doctors. My whole life, really. I just kinda picked up a bunch of stuff.”
“Dude, my mom’s a nurse,” Spoiler snorted. “I’ve been around her my whole life and I don’t know what half this stuff is even called.” She waved her spare arm over Sparrow's medical pack. “I sure wouldn’t be able to pull off what you just pulled off.”
“It’s duh-different for me,” Sparrow admitted quietly. “I was practically raised in a lab.”
Robin’s head twitched towards him, showing he was still aware, still listening. His eyebrow mode was set to suspicious.
“Not like that,” Sparrow added hastily. “Not like, mad Gotham scientist lab. My parents are in the medical field and they used to drag me with them to work a lot. My daycare was basically a bunch of medical researchers. I just listened and read a lot. I’d help with research. I absorbed a lot of medical knowhow, mostly by accident.”
“And, what?” Spoiler asked, watching Robin’s vitals, looking slightly calmer about the whole thing. “You decide to just put on a mask because of that?”
“Sort of?” was Sparrow’s somewhat cagey answer. “I can’t really… I’m not very good at punching people. I can. Like, I know how and stuff but I just… I’m not very good at actually doing it unless I have to. But I wanted to help,” Sparrow shrugged. “And there’s plenty of masks out there punching people, but there’s not many masks out there putting ice on knuckles. I figured there was a… a niche.”
“So you’re a vigilante paramedic?”
“Yeah,” Sparrow smiled. “I guess.”
“Idiot,” Robin wheezed out from behind the mask. His face was getting less blue.
“You’re welcome,” Sparrow retorted. “If you don’t like it I can take my oxygen tanks and chest decompression kit and go home.”
Robin snorted.
“Hey. A little gratitude might not go amiss, buddy.” Spoiler poked his forehead. “He did just save your life.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Sparrow assured her. “It’s kind of a running gag between us. And stay awake, you stupid bird on a spit,” Sparrow admonished him. “Batman should be here soon.”
“Right, the big cheese.” Spoiler grimaced. “I don’t suppose there’s any chance you’d let me mosey on out of here before the Big Bat gets here? I’m not sure he’ll be very happy with me and that asshole is scary.”
“Um… okay?” Sparrow blinked. “You’ve probably given your limit of blood by now. Let me just get that catheter out…” In a trice, Sparrow had clipped the line, unscrewed the filter, had the catheter out of her arm and a sticky circle bandage over the pin prick. The only pause in the proceeding was when Sparrow looked over his medical pack and cursed. “Damn it!”
“What? What?”
“It’s worse than I thought.” Sparrow held up a mess. “That… that idiot elvish moron took out my juice box!” Sure enough the crossbow bolt had perforated the container and the victim had bled out from it’s wound.
Spoiler burst into giggles even as Robin huffed through the mask. “You… you carry a juice box?” Spoiler snickered. “An actual juice box? It’s like you’re on a school field trip!”
“Stop laughing, there’s juice all over everything in here!” Sparrow lamented. “And I’ll have you know it was meant to be for you,” he added to Spoiler. “To replenish your fluids. Just… drink some water as soon as you can, okay? And have a good meal. Lots of protein.”
“You’re the doctor,” Spoiler agreed, still tickled.
“He… isn’t …” Robin rasped.
“Stop talking,” they both told him in stereo.
“Yeah,” Spoiler added, rising to leave. “I should probably…”
There was a bang. It came from the stage end of the theatre hall.
They all looked at each other.
“Is that Batman?” Spoiler asked.
“No, ” Robin wheezed. “You wouldn’t… hear him… coming. The footsteps… sound wrong. Not B.”
They looked at each other.
“Cluemaster?” Sparrow whispered.
“No way,” Spoiler hissed back. “My… Cluemaster is a giant coward. He probably rabbited the minute he knew there was someone else in the area.”
“Spoiler,” Sparrow said slowly. “You knew the doors were unlocked when we came in here. Because you picked them, right? They were locked when you got here and then you picked them?”
“Um, I did that, yeah.”
“So…” Sparrow continued with rising panic. “How did the Cluemaster get out of the theatre if the door you came through was locked?”
Spoiler gasped. “The back door! Shit! He probably left it open, too.”
They turned towards the noises, which were steadily sounding from behind the stage. When Neldorian the would-be elf got out of the stage, they would be sitting ducks.
“Sparrow…” Robin breathed. He was finding that a bit easier now. “Get your pack…”
“I’m not leaving you here!” Sparrow hissed at him.
“Yeah, I know,” he croaked. “You’re a stubborn… little shit. Let’s… put on… a show…”
When Neldorion finally, cautiously walked onto the stage, he wrinkled his nose at Cluemaster’s weird setup but otherwise ignored it. He didn’t cut the most intimidating figure, to be honest. He was average height and build but clearly wasn’t in training, judging by his soft gut. He’s done his best to grow out his hair but it was more stringy than flowing and the clearly fake elf ears did not help his case.
There was something wrong about his eyes that indicated he might not notice the sheer pitiable picture he presented. He was clearly invested in the fantasy.
His crossbow hand was steady enough though, so there might be a modicum of sanity there somewhere. He would probably have carried the air of menace better, though, if he hadn’t leapt down off the stage, pointing it like one of those guys in an eighties cop show.
“ Yrch. Im tur nari? Nasi? What’s the damn word?” he muttered, frowning.
There was a crumpled heap at the end of the aisle. He approached cautiously. The figure was curled in a ball, an arrow stuck out of its back. Yes, this was the orc he’d shot on the steps, the one that had come to the other orc’s aid. Something deep in his mind waved a flag; it wasn’t a very big orc. Were there orcs this small? He prodded it with a toe, but his shot had been true. It didn’t move.
A wheezing rasp made him spin around. There, on the floor, was the orc he’d shot first, blood spattered and gasping for air.
“ At vedui! ” he exclaimed, raising his weapon. This one, with the glowing eyes, was the one he was hunting. “ Nin coth . Na bel, Yr- !”
“Your ear’s hanging off,” Robin cut him off, unimpressed.
“What?” Neldorion felt them. “No they’re not!”
Then he shrieked as Sparrow kicked him square in the butt. Those power-braces he wore were pretty powerful, so it definitely left a mark.
As the D-Lister villain staggered forward Spoiler rose up from the aisle behind them where she’d been crouching on tenterhooks and jumped on his back, yelling furiously “Try shooting at me now, you shitty cosplayer!”
Overbalanced as he was, Neldorion was powerless to do anything but stagger forwards in a fall. His windmilling arms made it easy for Spoiler to grab his crossbow arm and wrench it up, managing to ruthlessly dislocate his trigger finger to keep him from firing.
The hapless Neldorion landed on his knees right in front of Robin, who was pale, in pain, and thoroughly done with this whole ordeal. “Actually learn proper Elvish,” he wheezed. “And pick a better fucking name next time, you Son Of A Beech!”
Robin drove his fist into Neldorion’s gormless face. The guy had a glass jaw. He dropped like stone.
For a moment, they all stared at each other in breathless silence.
“Holy shit!” Spoiler said as she hauled herself off their sniper’s limp body. “We did it!” She clapped her hands.
One was holding the crossbow.
It fired.
The bolt ricocheted off an armrest and spun madly.
“ARGH!” Sparrow bellowed as it connected. “What… what did you do that for?” he demanded incredulously as Robin took one look at where it landed and started to choke with laughter.
“Shit, sorry!” Spoiler dropped the crossbow in shock, darting forward. “Let me just…”
“No wait…. ARRRRGH!”
*
When Batman finally rushed onto the scene, he paused.
There was his Robin, hooked up to more tubes than seemed remotely comforting. He seemed to be choking, which led to a frisson of panic before Batman realised he was laughing wheezily.
There was Sparrow, perched gingerly on the headrest of a theatre seat, apparently transfusing blood into Robin.
He was, apparently, also giving the scolding of a lifetime to an unknown figure who was sitting atop what could only be the sniper to restrain him. The unknown looked sulky and embarrassed, her arms crossed over her purple chest. Batman was treated to the tail end of a lecture that included an admonition to never, ever, ever, EVER start pulling arrows out of bodies willy-nilly.
Even if it was lodged in someone’s ass.