Work Text:
No one is in immediate danger or severely injured. Need your help in Cave. Soon as safely possible.
Dick blinked blearily down at the message, trying to parse it while half-asleep. Standard “don’t freak out” opening. Then confusing. Bruce is… he and Tim should be in bed by now. It’s 5AM, barring supervillain attack Batman and Robin shouldn’t be up at this hour on a school night. Which means, well, there must have been a supervillain attack. But if they were at the Cave it must be over - why wasn’t Alfred dealing with whatever it was?
Dick rolled out of bed to head for the zetas. By the time he was halfway across Titans Tower he was alert enough to remember - Alfred was visiting the Kents. Question remained what they would need help with urgently that wasn’t a severe injury or immediately dangerous.
When he stepped into the Cave, Bruce was standing halfway between the tubes and the Batmobile, still in his costume. Bruce spoke quietly, voice low, but with an anxious undertone. “Ivy hit Robin with a small amount of an unidentified substance. It doesn’t seem to have done anything life-threatening, but - ” Bruce glanced towards the Batmobile. Dick squinted through the open door, and realized Tim was in there, curled tiny in the sofa-like back seat, head on his knees.
Bruce moved so they were both a bit further away. “I need a blood sample to determine what the substance was and if he needs an antidote or antitoxin. And Tim is…” He sighed. “Tim isn’t fond of needles at the best of times.”
Dick raised his eyebrows. “That’s tricky in our line of work.”
“He normally controls it just fine. He taught himself management techniques years ago. Apparently he even got a pulseox and used it for biofeedback, to teach himself how to consciously lower his heartrate so he could head off panic attacks. But right now…”
Bruce letting his voice trail off this much was unusual. His face was unhappily tight and he looked utterly worn out. “I don’t know if the toxin is increasing his fear to a level past where he can suppress it, if it’s decreasing his self-control and inhibitions so he can’t manage it, or if it didn’t even do anything at all and he’s just too exhausted and miserable. But I tried to get a sample before we came back, and he curled up and started crying.
“Now that we’re back here, I’m going to go ahead and put in an IV cannula, so I only need to stick him once in case more work is necessary, but, well. I can’t risk giving him a sedative when I don’t know what’s in his system, and I can’t wait to see if he’ll be able to settle on his own. So I need you to try to keep him calm, if that’s possible, and - “ Bruce’s face tightened even further. “And keep him still if it isn’t.”
Oh. Well. No wonder Bruce looked miserable.
Poor guy was probably freaking out almost as much as Tim was. Dick would lay even odds that drawing blood from Tim made him feel awful even when everything was going smoothly. Heck, Dick didn’t even have issues with pointy things, and he’d learned very early on that if he winced from a blood draw or IV Bruce would look like he was about to cry. Well. He looked like that to Dick, though probably no one else would have noticed anything.
Dick looked again through the door of the Batmobile. Tim’s skinny twelve year old body was hardly taking up any of the seat, still wrapped in a tight ball. Dick lowered his voice even further than Bruce’s had been. “Does he know you need to, y’know?”
“I’m not sure. I didn’t want to bring it up again while we were in a moving vehicle.”
“Do you think it would be better to tell him what’s going to happen so he can prepare himself, or not so he doesn’t have a chance to get more worked up?”
Bruce looked a bit frantic under the exhaustion under the stoicness. “I don’t know.”
“Okay, well, I’m pretty sure the medbay’s just going to make things worse. Does that sound right?”
Bruce agreed and looked far too relieved to have a question he could clearly answer.
“Can you get stuff ready here then? I’ll start with Tim.”
Dick went around to the other side of the Batmobile. He squatted down, a couple feet away from Tim.
“Hey, Tim.”
Tim didn’t move, but an answer came back muffled through his arms and knees. “Hey Dick.”
“You know what’s going on?”
“I’m at the Cave, and Bruce wants to d-draw… to get a sample.” The ball-of-Tim was shaking a little.
“Yep.” Dick flicked his eyes to Bruce and then back to Tim. “Is he going to be, um. Able to do that?”
Tim curled even tighter and made a sound that might have been a mumbled “I dunno” or might have been a whimper. Dick bit his lip.
“Okay. I’m about to touch you. I don’t have anything sharp.”
He reached a hand to Tim’s arm, wrapped tightly around his knees. Tim’s breathing picked up. Dick rested his hand on Tim for several moments, then gently tugged. “Can you give me your arm, please, Tim?”
Tim shook harder, and Dick thought for a second they were going to have to do this whole thing by force, and he really didn’t want to do that. But then Tim stopped breathing for several seconds, and when he started again his breath was shuddery but measured. (Five seconds in, seven seconds out. Dick knew those breaths.) He loosened his arm and let Dick pull it away from his body.
“Thank you. You’re doing great, Tim.” He was. Bruce must be really proud of this kid. “Bruce is going to hold your hand while I come up to sit next to you. He doesn’t have anything sharp right now either. He’s just going to hold your hand.”
Dick slowly transferred Tim’s trembling hand to Bruce’s careful hold. The way Tim had forced himself calm enough to give them his arm was impressive. Probably stood him in good stead when he got hit by fear toxin. But, unfortunately, the fact that he’d had to do it in the first place meant Dick didn’t want to test their luck on doing this without being ready to hold Tim if necessary.
Dick kept a hand on Tim’s shoulder as he moved around him to settle behind him on the seat, like you’d keep a hand on a horse when walking behind them, so Tim could easily track where he was without startling.
“Alright. I’m gonna move you onto my lap now. You’re good, you can stay curled up.”
He wanted to ask “is it okay if I…?” but the fact was that if Tim said “no,” they would have to do it anyway, and that would be worse. He pulled Tim’s tangled limbs up onto his lap, and wrapped his own arms around them. Up this close he could tell that Tim was crying, no sound, just tears and jerky breath.
Dick took a moment to just hug Tim, the shaking traveling back through his own body. He looked at Bruce, holding Tim’s hand gently but firmly, and, yeah, there was that about-to-cry look he knew was gonna show up sooner or later. It looked mostly like Bruce’s eyes being just a little wider than they should be. But Dick knew it.
He flicked his eyes meaningfully to the equipment at Bruce’s side. Bruce used his free hand to pass Dick a tourniquet, and Dick reached further around Tim to tie it onto Tim’s upper arm. Tim pressed back against Dick’s body like he was trying to get away from his own arm.
Bruce dabbed alcohol onto Tim’s skin and at the first touch of cold Tim tried to yank his hand back. Bruce held it tightly.
“I’m sorry, Tim,” Bruce murmured. “But you’re doing great. It’s okay. I’m going to put in a cannula, so you don’t need to worry about me poking you again, okay?”
Tim made a high-pitched noise of distress, but that was something he’d needed to be told eventually. Being surprised by having something left in his arm wasn’t going to help anything.
Dick took back over reassurances while Bruce worked. “Needle’s only gonna be in for a few seconds, then it’s just nice soft plastic. Way better than a blood draw.” It was, actually. Once it was in a cannula hurt way less than having a needle joggled around while somebody took vials on and off. But Dick had had IVs put in while under fear toxin enough times to know Tim was probably having a hard time seeing it that way at the moment.
Bruce shifted to a firm hold of Tim’s forearm. Tim made a sound in the back of his throat and seemed to sort of writhe under his skin, like his muscles were trying equally hard to pull back and to hold in place. “Thank you for working so hard to make this easy,” Dick said, head resting by Tim’s. “If I were that freaked out, I’d’ve kicked Bruce in the face.”
Bruce’s eyes stayed focused on the needle in his hand, but his mouth twitched. Both of them could confirm that this was, indeed, true, as Dick had, in fact, given Bruce a bloody nose once when Bruce was trying to fix up his knee and Dick wasn’t fully recovered from the effects of… something. He didn’t remember what. He did remember Bruce’s mouth open in surprise as he stared up at Dick from where he’d slumped onto his butt on the floor. And how the effects of whatever it was seemed to wear off immediately as soon as Bruce’s (snuffly) snicker set Dick off laughing.
He maybe shouldn’t have given Tim ideas. He wasn’t in an actual hold, and could easily get an elbow back to Dick’s ribs, or snap his head against Dick’s chin, or a couple dozen other things that would hurt quite a lot. But he was doing what really was an amazing job of keeping himself still.
The needle pierced Tim’s skin and their three-person tangle jolted as Tim yelped and jerked his body against Dick’s. But he didn’t pull on his arm again, and it remained quivering but unprotesting in Bruce’s grasp, the cannula now nestled in his vein.
Bruce and Dick’s reassurances overlapped each other. “There, hard part’s over, you did amazing, you’re doing so well. Almost done - needle’s out, there, just plastic now. It’s weird, I know, it won’t hurt, you’re okay. Just feels weird. Easy. You’re doing great, Tim.”
Bruce finished taping the cannula and reached up to run a hand through Tim’s hair. “You’re doing great, Tim,” he said again, with a tired smile. Tim’s breathing smoothed from forced counted evenness to the naturally slow breath of a child thoroughly worn out as he leaned into Bruce’s hand, and by the time Bruce had filled five vials, he was loose against Dick’s chest.
Dick lifted Tim carefully into Bruce’s arms. As he took the vials to the lab to start the tests running, he could hear Bruce murmuring praise into Tim’s hair while he carried him, legs wrapped around Bruce’s waist, to the medbay’s comfiest bed.