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The screams ricocheted off the walls like they were actual, physical objects. They seemed to come from everywhere. Nightwing couldn’t work out a direction to go in this stupid maze to save anyone.
Or even himself.
“Batman, respond,” Nightwing thumbed his comm. “I’m in Scarecrow’s damn maze. There’s goons a-plenty and he’s rigged some kind of acoustic system. I don’t know where the fuck he’s keeping Flamebird!”
It wasn’t just the twisty, turny passageways of the old hospital that gave him trouble. Crane, the asshole, had set up monitors as well. On the screen, in grainy black and white, he could see Cass, his Cass, convulsing periodically as she was electroshocked. Every time she was inflicted, a wrenching scream came through the audio. It bounced and echoed; it came from everywhere.
It was meant to be psychological torment for him too. And it was working.
“Stand by,” Batman’s voice came through, grim and determined. “I’m sending you a tracking expert. He’ll find her. I’ll be there soon, Nightwing," Batman’s voice softened ever so slightly. “I just have to complete the fabrication for this strain of Fear.”
Nightwing didn’t need Batman anymore. He knew this. Still, despite their still rocky relationship, Nightwing couldn’t help but be reassured by those words.
Nightwing still wasn’t sure how Scarecrow had even managed to nab Flamebird. She hadn’t been on patrol; they’d been helping with clean-up after an explosion at the Gotham Experience Exhibition Centre.
That’s when it clicked. The detective in him pieced the evidence together-- the explosion was staged. Of course, Nightwing thought bitterly, Crane liked his victims already pumped full of adrenaline, vulnerable to the full experience that his Fear Toxin could unleash. It had all been a set-up to get as many victims as possible. Flamebird must have been grabbed during the chaos.
He should have kept Flamebird nearby as he scoured the blast site for clues. But she’d wanted to go off and try to get some witness statements, and Nightwing had been so inordinately pleased at her willingness to do a job she normally found difficult that he hadn’t seen the harm in letting her roam the hastily constructed triage tent.
He disabled fourteen more Fear Toxin traps, half a dozen goons - who were clearly out of their minds on something - and had been forced to listen to five more screams before he lost patience. “Batman,” he snapped, looking vainly through the dirt-crusted windows of the abandoned hospital to see if they’d arrived yet. “Where the hell are you? Where is this tracking expert? ETA?”
“How about right now," came a gravelly growl that he didn’t expect.
There was a shadow outside the window. Nightwing ducked.
Robin crashed through the window, cape in full flare as he slammed into two goons trying to creep up on Nightwing’s six. He dispatched them both with brutal blows before turning to face Nightwing.
“What are you doing here?” Nightwing asked. “Is Batman…?”
“On his way,” Robin snapped tersely, going to the nearest monitor and watched, hands and teeth clenched tightly.
When he just stood there, Nightwing burst out. “What are you doing? We have to keep moving!”
“Waiting for the sound, dipshit,” Robin snapped back. “I can’t track it if I can’t hear it.”
“Wait, you’re the-” Another scream rang through the air.
Robin shivered all over, his muscles coiling like springs. His eyes were darting this way and that, as if they were tracking movement. “Fuck,” he cursed.
“What?” Nightwing blinked.
Robin ignored him. “B, be advised I got a possible locale. When you get here, head for the north-east quadrant,” Robin looked at the screen. “Probably the basement, going by the video. Come on,” Robin told Nightwing, before taking off running.
Nightwing gaped at Robin’s rapidly vanishing back before shaking himself and sprinting after him. He tried his best to not to look at the monitors as they flashed by, forcing his burning anger into a white-hot lens of focus.
I’m coming, Cass.
They didn’t stop moving, not even for random goons. They punched on the fly, not pausing or even waiting for them to fall. The kid - Nightwing still couldn’t bring himself to call him Robin in his head - was a brutal fighter. A straight line combat pragmatist — point A tearing through to point B to get to point C. His fighting style had no flare, no swagger for all that B kept saying he was a theater kid. He was, Nightwing admitted, a hell of a lot faster than he looked and his blows were crisp and efficient - not an iota of energy wasted.
It was galling, in its own way. The Robin persona that Nightwing had held so dear was there to dazzle and charm, both fierce and joyful. This… iteration was sapped of charisma. Nightwing knew it was petty to be bothered by things like that. But he couldn’t help it. He still felt the sting of having something precious to him, the last legacy of his family, summarily annexed and given to someone else without his permission.
He might have been willing to give the kid a chance, but the first time Nightwing brought Cass to the cave, the kid had tried to throw a punch at her. She blocked it -- of course she blocked it -- but Nightwing had been appalled that the Robin name was being sullied by such a violent bully.
He also didn’t like that Cass seemed to like him so much. It wasn’t jealousy; it was just, Cass had come from a violent background. The full extent of which was still unknown to Nightwing, though he’d seen more than enough scars. He hated the thought that she might have been conditioned to like people who were violent towards her. He was new to this whole foster thing, but that just seemed like the worst possible thing to encourage in any child, especially a young girl.
Another scream tore him from his rumination. God, it came from everywhere .
The kid shuddered all over again, head swinging this way and that as the echoes started to crescendo.
“Well,” Nightwing demanded.
“Wait,” the kid held up a gloved hand. “I need another one for triangulation.”
“What?” Nightwing recoiled in shock. “What the fuck… Flamebird is being tortured. And you want to just stand here and watch?”
Predictably, that set the kid’s hair trigger temper off. “Look asshole, I don’t lecture you on how to pull of your weird-ass contortions or fucking quadruple flips. Don’t lecture me on how to synesthetically map a space via a sound-colour sensory neurodivergence.”
Nightwing blinked. “You have synesthesia?”
Another scream ripped out. Nightwing flinched, feeling it down his spine.
“Shhhh!” Robin hissed at him. He tilted his head, eyes tracking.
Then he took off without a word, forcing Nightwing to pound after him. “Seriously,” Nightwing said as they ran through the demented scream factory. “That’s how you track? The sounds are colour trails to you? I didn’t know that.”
The kid stopped so fast that Nightwing skidded trying to avoid plowing into him. He held up a finger. “First of all, I’m not tracking the sound, you dumbass. Crane’s crazy, but he’s not fucking stupid. They’re in a soundproof chamber and he’s piping the audio in here to keep you running around like a headless chicken. I’m tracking where the sound isn’t. Second of all,” Robin got right up in Nightwing’s face. “Why the fuck would you know anything about me? Your policy has either been to criticize or flat out ignore me, depending on your level of pissiness with B. You, gettin’ curious about your white-trash replacement? Don’t make me fucking laugh. Now can you please shut the fuck up and let me do this. I get that you hate me, but I can’t fix your mess with you jabbering in my ears all the time.”
Then the kid turned and stalked away, leaving Nightwing gaping behind him.
The kid thought he hated him?
Granted, Nightwing admitted to himself as he followed, they hadn’t gotten off to the best start and his civilian life was busy with work and Cass, so they didn’t get to interact much. Nightwing had always been of the opinion that Jason Todd hated him. The same way he hated all authority figures in some vague, undirected teenage way. Every overture Nightwing had tentatively made, despite his mixed feelings about the whole Robin thing, had been met with anger or disdain. In the end, Nightwing had given up. He was B’s new project, not Dick’s. It wasn’t Dick’s responsibility to turn him into a functioning member of society and get him past whatever huge chips on his shoulder he was carrying around.
It had never occurred to Nightwing that the kid had thought the hatred was on Dick’s side of the equation. Sure, he’d snapped at the kid for taking a swing at Cass, but he hadn’t been nasty, he’d just been calling him out on his bad behaviour.
Troubled by that revelation, Nightwing shoved his emotions into a lockbox deep in his brain to be perused later. Right now, he followed the kid.
Six turns, two sets of staircases and about a dozen glaze-eyed goons later, they were rappelling down a disused elevator down into the basement.
“This way,” Robin growled, heading off in what seemed to be a random direction.
“How do you know?” Nightwing asked. They were past the Scarecrow’s shitty psychological torture-maze now; there wasn’t any sound for the kid to track. There weren’t any more visuals either. Nightwing couldn’t decide if that was a good thing or a bad thing.
The kid made an impatient noise in the back of his throat. “Because,” he said with exaggerated patience. “This place has a sub basement and it’s down past three feet of concrete which seems to me like it would make the basement soundproof. Which is where Scarecrow is keeping them. QED.”
Nightwing tried not to bristle at the kid’s tone. “What the hell do you know that?” he demanded.
“Because Nightwing,” the kid sneered at the name. “Unlike your Romani ass, I’m from around here. Before they shut this place down for good, it used to be where all the poor people came to die. It’s where my mom died. When they took me down to ID her body, guess where I went? Are we done yet, or do you want to use up the other eighteen questions before we go rescue them?”
The question was so cold that Nightwing closed his mouth.
“No? Good. Then get your fucking head in the game. That, or fucking leave.” The kid turned away, muttering to himself as he did so, almost-but-not-quite under his breath enough to be heard. “Fucking hell, this asshole spends days and nights perfecting the art of looking down his tanned-ass nose at me, fine, but I expected him to be more of a professional where it actually counted.”
The criticism stung all the worse because the kid was right. He was wasting time. Ca- Flamebird needed him. “Fine,” he said quietly. “You have the lead.”
It was meant to be an unspoken olive branch, but the kid just scoffed like Nightwing’s offer was meaningless before moving quickly away, not bothering to check if Nightwing was keeping up.
Suddenly they were through a door, down some narrow steps… and there was another scream. This was a real one, not flattened by recording or speakers. This was the real deal.
The kid shuddered like someone was raking talons down his bones, shoulders taut. Nightwing tried to gauge the odd reaction; it was almost like pain, but it could have been fear. But fear would be an odd one for this kid, since even Nightwing had to admit he was brazenly fearless in the field.
Not frightened, Nightwing realised. Angry. He was controlling it but it was there, seething, just below the surface. Sure, Nightwing tapped into anger to get the job done -- he definitely had a temper— but his driving forces were also the adulation of a well executed move, the desire for justice, the need to protect.
This kid was just churning out carefully dammed and controlled anger to spin his turbines. What Nightwing had mistaken for the prickly snappishness of your typical selfish teenaged male was actually real rage, burning endlessly.
It became apparent just how much force it gave the kid when he exploded out the door of the basement, mowing down three goons in a blink before taking on the rogue himself.
“You’re interrupting the experiment,” Scarecrow snapped as he swung his scythe. “This is a very interesting study into psychological empathy!”
Nightwing nearly swallowed his tongue from where he was knocking out the other random goons the kid had missed on his initial blitz. The kid didn’t duck around the scythe or back away from the swing - he just blocked it with a gauntleted arm. The blade sank in deep, but the kid didn’t grimace or hesitate, he just twisted around, dragging the villain with him and landing a magnificent, thundering haymaker on Crane as the masked man stumbled around trying to correct.
Scarecrow hit the floor, stunned, his scythe wrenched out of his hands. “You… don’t fear pain,” Scarecrow slurred. “How… interesting…” and then he crumpled like a dropped jacket when Robin swung the scythe, blunt end first, at his head.
The fear gas grenade that Scarecrow had been fumbling out of his jacket was punted harmlessly across the floor by another swing.
No quips, no puns. Point A, through point B, to point C.
“Nightwing, come in,” Batman’s voice in his ear almost made Nightwing jump. “I’m en-route but I sent the antidote via drone to your location. Drone ETA is two minutes. I’ll be there in less than seven. Status?”
“Scarecrow is… emphatically down ,” Nightwing reported slowly. “Flamebird is… holy plot twist!” Nightwing blinked as he actually took in the corner he’d been avoiding looking at so he didn’t get distracted. “B, there’s another kid here! Um… he’s wearing a mask, it’s… sorta like a cowl, I guess?”
“Sparrow,” Batman sighed.
“Who now?”
The kid was ignoring Nightwing. He’d put Scarecrow’s scythe to good use, slicing cleanly through the wires that were attached to electrodes that had, formerly, been zapping Flamebird. She was still strapped down. Even as Nightwing hurried forward, she arced up on the bed, mouth open in a silent scream.
The cowled kid started screaming. It was almost like Flamebird’s voice was coming out of someone else’s mouth.
“Fuck!” Robin left Flamebird strapped down and hurried past her. “Hold on, Sparrow, I got ya.”
The cowled kid - Sparrow, apparently - wasn’t strapped down to a bed. He was strapped into a chair and some kind of restraint rig had been fitted around his head to keep his gaze facing Flamebird’s bed, forced to watch it.
“It’s okay, kiddo.” All the rage Nightwing had seen when the kid had taken down Scarecrow was gone from him now; or, if not gone, sufficiently banked to mere ashes. There was nothing in his manner except concern for Sparrow, nothing but gentleness in his movements as he worked to get the incredibly small and young child out of his restraints.
Flamebird gave another silent scream.
The kid gave another real one. There were still heart monitors going amongst all the equipment they’d been hooked up to. Even as they watched, their heart rates spiked in tandem.
“Didn’t get dosed,” Sparrow managed to croaked as Robin straight up started ripping belts away. “It’s not me, it’s her. I’m reacting to her. Just… get me away from her, and I’ll be okay. Don’t unstrap her!” Sparrow cried as Nightwing moved to do just that to Flamebird. “Don’t! She’s telling you not to!”
“What?” Nightwing asked, bewildered.
“Look at her hands, moron,” Robin snorted. “She’s tapping in code. It was all over the videos. Didn’t you notice that?”
Nightwing looked at Flamebird’s hands and was astonished to realise that the others were right. Flamebird’s hands were tapping rapidly on the sheets. N-O-R-E-L-E-A-S-E-N-O-R-E-L-E-A-S-E. A hand code, just like Nightwing had practiced with her for hours, a way for her to get past her communication issues on the field. Nightwing had been so out of his mind with worry for her, he hadn’t even noticed it.
Robin had though. Much as it galled Nightwing to admit it, the kid was well trained. He clearly knew what he was doing.
“You let her out, she’ll attack you,” the kid said grimly. “She won't be able to help it.”
Nightwing wanted to protest that he knew that , thank you. He knew Cass. He knew what her flight and fight response was like; how hair-trigger sensitive it was, even without a dose of pure Fear running through her veins.
He didn’t, though. In this instance, he had to admit the kid had been on the ball where Nightwing had fumbled. While Robin freed Sparrow, Nightwing opted to stay near to Flamebird, gripping her forearm tightly, murmuring reassurances, hoping that some of them reached her through her frantic panic. Fear gas was no fucking fun.
He did take note that once Sparrow was released, Robin simply picked him up and carried him out of the basement, cradling him tightly against the R on his chest, leaving Nightwing to his solitary vigil.
He came back five minutes later. He was Sparrow-less, but had a familiar looking canister in his hands, which he tossed to Nightwing. “Drone showed up,” was his terse explanation.
Nightwing all but ripped open the canister and grabbed the syringe inside. He peeled back one of Flamebird’s sleeves to find a vein and dosed her with the antidote. The heart monitor still showed frantic activity for a minute, but B’s concoction was fast-acting. She stopped squirming and trembling against her bonds, and the high spikes on the monitor calmed to something a little more normal, slowed to a beat far more regular than before.
Flamebird slowly relaxed. It was hard to tell under her gold mask, but Nightwing was pretty sure her eyes were closed now.
Robin stayed the entire time, watching the monitors and Flamebird like a hawk. Once they were both assured Flamebird was out of immediate danger, his shoulders relaxed and his arms loosed from around his chest.
He’d been genuinely worried about Flamebird, Nightwing realised. He wanted to make sure she was okay.
He suddenly felt a prickly sense of shame for writing off the kid as nothing but a bully. He hadn’t jumped to the conclusion based on much evidence, which at the very least was sloppy detective work. It had never occurred to him until seeing the kid in action, up close and personal, that there might be a reason B had picked him for Robin. Good reasons, reasons that went beyond needing a fighter or as part of their endless snipe-fest of a feud.
“Hey,” Nightwing tried gamely. “What happened to Sparrow?”
“Sent him home,” the kid grunted back, not looking up from the monitors.
“Really?” Nightwing gaped. “Why? The kid might need a doctor, or something!” The words came out more accusatory than he meant them.
The kid’s shoulders tightened, the anger bubbling back to the surface. “I checked him. He was fine,” he snapped. “He was right; once he was away from Flamebird his heart rate slowed right down and he had no other injuries. I know this because I asked, and that kid is the world’s shittiest liar.”
“Yeah, okay, but who is he?” Nightwing persisted. “He’s just a little kid!”
The kid’s lips thinned. “Ask B,” he said, turning away abruptly. “It’s not my job to keep you up to date on the Gotham vigilante scene. After all,” he added sarcastically. “I’m just a violent, immature hothead who shouldn’t be allowed in the field.”
Nightwing winced to hear his own words echoed back at him. “Look, kid, I… I don’t hate you, okay? I had some problems with your attitude and I didn’t like how you treated Flamebird at first, but I never hated you. I guess,” Nightwing admitted sheepishly. “We kinda got off on the wrong foot. I was mad at B for giving my mantle, but that had noth-”
The kid turned on him so fast that Nightwing almost dropped into a defensive stance. The banked anger was now fully aflame again and burning bright.
The kid’s voice, however, was deadly calm. “First of all,” he held up a finger. “I didn’t take your mantle. I took a mantle. I didn’t even know who the fuck you were. Second of all, B didn’t give me this mantle just to piss you off, you fucking greedy only child! He gave it to me because he was fucking desperate. He had a traumatized kid on his hands who was so fucking scarred and broken from the fucking conga line of abuse that made up his entire fucking life that all he wanted to do was fucking die.”
Nightwing’s mouth dropped open.
“It must be nice, you know,” the kid added bitterly. “Two loving parents, guaranteed shelter, no wondering where your next meal is coming from. Oh sure, you lost ‘em, poor little you, but at least you get to keep their memories sacred. Plus, I don’t know if you noticed, Dick Wonder, but you kinda went from that paradise to more of the same in, like, a fucking week. I never had that. I had a mom who was only there for me when she hadn’t shot herself up with whatever this week’s special was, and a drunk ass violently abusive fuckhead who gave me my first broken bone when I was fucking four and fucking sold my ass to some other fuckers when I was eight. For booze money! I only got away from them when I was eleven, and guess what? There was no fucking medal or parade waiting for me when I did! What I got was fighting with other hobos for the rights to scrounge rotten food out of a dumpster, if I was lucky.
“Then I found my mom again. She’d kicked my asshole dad to the curb and cleaned herself up when she lost me. She’d posted flyers and everything. She became a fucking lost child advocate, took herself to school, and got herself a nice place and a job. So it all worked out for little ol’ me, right? Wrong!” The kid’s voice was brittle with false cheer. “Cancer done took her from me too. I only found out she was even lookin’ for me two fucking weeks after she died. This’ll make you laugh, Nightdick, because I actually found out about it by reading old newspapers I was using as fucking blankets that winter. I found out my mom had become the mom I always dreamed of having and that she was dead in a four-inch article. Nice, huh?
“By the time Batman found me, I was more than ready to die. And why not?” the kid’s voice was laced with heavy sadness. “As far as I knew, everyone who ever loved me was dead. Who would care if I went too? I didn’t have the spine for a blade or a bullet, but they couldn’t make me eat, could they? All I had to do was wait. That’s when B gave me Robin. He told me I could do something about all the shit that had happened, that he needed me. I mean, fuck, it was probably all a sick joke, but if I was gonna die anyway it might at well be an interesting death.
“He wouldn’t stop fucking talking about you, you know,” the kid added, bitterness climbing higher. “Old Robin this, former-Robin that. He made it sound like you were sixty-feet tall and fucking glowed. I really wanted to live up to that because Robin… Robin was like magic,” there was a wavering crack in his voice. “It was magic for me. It made me feel like I was actually meant for something, other than being a punching bag. It meant I could be fucking good . No one had ever believed that I’d make good before. Sure as shit no one ever told me so. You wanna know what’s really funny? I wanted to meet you so bad. I had a fucking notebook full of questions, I didn’t know if I was doing the whole Robin thing right and I figured the OG Robin would know. I actually thought you’d help me,” the kid scoffed. “What a fucking joke.”
Nightwing was frozen, throat too tight for words.
“You were just another fucking asshole snob, who only sees another mess that he needs to step around so he doesn’t mess up his shoes. I was fucking trying, okay? I was really fucking trying to be a good Robin, not that you’ll ever see it,” the kid turned his back. “Thanks for the support, Robin,” was his bitter parting shot.
Then he marched out without so much as a backward glance at Nightwing, who stood there speechless, one hand outstretched.
He slumped and turned back to the sleeping Flamebird. “Wow. I managed to completely fuck that one up, didn’t I, babydoll?” He sighed.