Work Text:
“Robin, tell them we found Batman.”
“But—”
“Robin, now.”
Damian glared, but darted out of the hole with a quick glance over his shoulder.
Dick started to pull Jason away. He resisted, but Dick wasn’t injured and adept at wrangling vigilantes larger than himself. He crowded Jason, pushed him back, kept him slightly off-balance so he had no choice.
“Help us clear this hole,” an EMT ordered.
“You have to help him,” Jason insisted. “I gave him CPR. He’s fine now.”
Was Bruce still breathing? It had to be the dark armor that hid the movement of his chest.
“Is that the Red Hood?” another EMT whispered loudly.
“He’s injured,” Dick reported. “Batman has been pinned down and seems in critical condition. Hood is stable for now.” To Jason, he said, “You need to calm down. Help me clear the rubble. The EMTs are going to do all they can.”
Jason didn’t help with the rubble. Dick’s hands left his shoulders and he swayed as if on a rocking boat.
Dick cleared the rubble, slowly widening the hole, until four EMTs tumbled in one by one and swarmed Bruce’s body.
“Critical blood loss—”
“—blood pressure sixty over twenty and dropping—”
“Where’s the oxygen mask?”
“—could be crushed beneath—”
“Can we even move the concrete?”
“He has type AB+ blood,” said Dick over his shoulder. “I’m a universal donor. Hood’s type A. I think he needs a transfusion, too.”
“Okay, we need you over here, then,” said one. She looked no-nonsense. “Can you remove the arm of your suit?”
Dick abruptly looked extremely uncomfortable. Jason knew he had issues about undressing in front of strangers after the shitshow the Gotham media put him through growing up.
“I can do it,” Jason said hoarsely.
“Hood—”
“I’m fine,” he said harshly.
“Nightwing, go to the ambulance,” an EMT with gray streaked through his dark hair said. “Hood will need sugar and fluids. Tell the drivers the situation and they’ll give you what you need.”
Jason hated needles. Really, truly hated them. With a shaking hand, he rolled up the sleeve of his jacket until it revealed the crook of his elbow. He gulped and turned his face away when the EMT approached and flinched at the tiny pinch when the point slipped in.
At least the gray-streaked EMT found his vein quickly. Once, when Jason had to give blood to check his thyroid levels, the nurse couldn’t find his vein right away and spent several seconds wiggling it around in his arm. It was one of the worst things that had ever happened to him. Bruce had held his other hand the whole time and carried a hysterically crying Jason to the car.
Jason had completely forgotten that day. They had curled up on the couch in the den and watched Pride and Prejudice while eating ice cream sundaes that completely spoiled their appetite for dinner.
“Please,” he said as the needle stole blood from his veins. “He’s my dad. He has to be okay.”
The woman that kept reporting Bruce’s health stats loomed up and said, “Batman is the Red Hood’s dad?” and her partner shushed her.
“Cribbing or slabbing?” the shushing partner asked.
“We need to cut him out first,” replied Gray.
No-nonsense lady said, “I think we need our air bags.”
Jason wobbled as the world spun.
“Okay, I think that’s enough,” said Gray.
“No,” Jason protested. “I can give more.”
Then he collapsed.
Before Jason hit the ground, a set of hands looped under his armpits. “Whoa, there,” said Dick’s voice. “Hood, come on over here.” He dragged Jason to the far end of the hole, because when he tried to drag Jason out Jason almost bit his arm. “Jesus Christ!” he yelped. “I have your sugar, you idiot.” He shoved a pouch of orange juice under Jason’s nose. “Drink it.”
“Hey, we’re ready to go.” Someone crouched and cut off the faint moonlight that trickled through the hole in the debris. “What’s the holdup?”
“That hole still needs to be bigger,” the no-nonsense woman said. “The stretcher can’t get down. And we need bolt cutters.”
“Why?”
“Rebar went straight through his thigh when a chunk of concrete landed on him. We can’t lift it before detaching him.” She added, “Whoever packed his wound did it just in time. He lost a lot of blood.” Dick gave Jason’s shoulder an affectionate pat.
“I’ll grab ‘em.” The medic ran off.
“Get the air bags, too!” No-nonsense yelled at his back.
“He can’t lose the muscle in his legs,” Jason said. “You have to get him out soon.”
The shushing partner looked pained. “Look, kid, I don’t want to get your hopes up.”
“Lauren!” hissed the woman monitoring Bruce’s vitals.
“What!” Lauren snapped back. “We have to be realistic, Anna.”
“That’s the Red Hood,” Anna gritted out. “Don’t you know what he does to people that piss him off?”
A new head poked into the hole, shaggy with too-long hair. The Replacement’s annoying voice said, “Hey, guys, how’s it going?” He sounded way too chipper.
“Red Robin.” Nightwing sprang to his feet, but it was too late. Replacement had already seen how still Bruce was on the ground. How dark and thick the blood Bruce lost was. How he lay half-buried beneath concrete.
A sneer curled Red Robin’s lips. The white lenses of his mask narrowed as he glared at Jason, who glared right back. “You did this, didn’t you?”
Jason struggled to sit up, already reaching for his guns.
“Red Robin!”
Both Jason and Replacement stilled, blinking. Dick didn’t utilize his Batman voice often.
“This isn’t anyone’s fault,” said Dick.
“I got the airbags!” puffed the medic behind Replacement. He passed them down to Dick. “And the bolt cutters.”
Gray struggled with the bolt cutters long enough that Jason began to worry that the rebar was too thick to cut through. With a sharp jerk, the blades finally clipped through the steel, and the concrete shifted.
Bruce let out a grunt—his first response yet.
Jason shot to his feet and yelled, “You’re hurting him!” The concrete was crushing him more now!
Gray shot a cursory look at Dick. “Calm him down or get him out of here.”
“Hood—”
Jason ducked away from Dick’s hand when it tried to smooth away the curls that hung over his forehead. “Yeah, I fuckin’ heard him.”
It only took a moment for the EMTs to situate the empty bags and hook them up to their generator. The generator burst to life with a thunderous hum, and the bags swelled with the first pumps of air that filled them.
It took an agonizing thirty seconds, but the bags steadily swelled, and the first creak was deafening.
Stone ground over stone.
Millimeter by millimeter, more and more of Batman’s suit was revealed, and it looked even worse than Jason had thought. The once-spotless armor was scuffed and dented so deeply it didn’t seem possible that anyone fit into the warped material. Kevlar had ripped to expose skin smeared with blood and dirt. Batman’s knee bent at the wrong angle.
He looked wrong. He looked like a doll dropped carelessly on the ground.
He looked broken.
“I’m not getting a pulse anymore,” said Anna.
“No,” Jason choked out and stumbled forward on one good leg. “That’s not right. He has to be fine.”
“Hood,” said Dick sharply, “I’m getting you out of here.”
“No!” Jason screamed. “Don’t you dare, he’s fine! You can’t leave him down here! Stop—” Jason grunted, trying to push Dick’s hands away from his shoulders. “No, you can’t!” They couldn’t leave Bruce buried underground. Jason remembered the panic of waking up to pitch blackness, of wondering if he had gone blind. And Bruce couldn’t climb out the way Jason had; he was pinned down and unconscious and he’d died.
Jason had brought him back, but he’d died.
“We can’t leave him!” Jason yelled. “Don’t you dare—”
A flashlight’s beam swept across the room and highlighted Dick’s wet cheeks. “Hood,” he said, and his voice hitched on a little choke. “Don’t make this any harder than it has to be.”
Red Robin dropped into the hole soundlessly and padded over to the huddle of EMTs. He swallowed, for a moment speechless. Then a second mask slid over his face. He straightened his spine and said, “Where are your defibrillators?”
“Kid—”
“Don’t,” he cut them off sharply. “Get him out of there.”
The four EMTs startled; the air bags had filled enough to extract Bruce from under the concrete. The medic outside passed the gurney through the hole and, instructed by Red Robin, the EMTs shifted Bruce onto it. Spewing medical jargon as fast as they could at each other, they maneuvered him out of the hole with a fair amount of grunting—Bruce was not, after all, a light man—and Jason realized that he was now left behind in the hole.
Dick sensed his incoming panic and helped him out before Jason could really get going. “I’ll call the Batmobile,” he said. “We’ll follow behind. Don’t think I haven’t forgotten that you need medical attention, too.”
Jason remembered stepping into the Batmobile, but he didn’t remember the trip to the hospital. He didn’t remember changing out of his suit and into soft hospital gift shop—wasn’t that strange—sweats, or the thirteen hours Bruce spent in surgery.
He was vaguely aware of Dick, Replacement, and Robin drifting in and out of the waiting room, but Jason felt rooted to the spot. At some point a nurse came by to give him another pouch of juice and someone set his leg in a brace at some point, but he might have been asleep.
“Mr. Hood?”
Jason jolted back to alertness.
A disheveled doctor wearing scrubs checked his clipboard. “You’re waiting for the Batman, is that correct?”
Jason cleared his throat. “Yeah.”
“He’s out of surgery,” the doctor said. “It was very touch and go for a while, and his recovery will take months, but he’s stable now.”
All the tension sagged out of Jason’s body. “Take me to him,” he demanded.
“That’s not protocol.”
Jason noticed with some surprise that he still had all his weapons. So he drew his favorite gun and leveled it in the face of the doctor. To his credit, he didn’t flinch. His eyes didn’t even twitch.
“Fine,” said the doctor. “Follow me.”
Skin crawling, Jason followed him through sterile hospital hallways and into the secure ward. The doctor had to scan his key card to get through, and he walked Jason to a single-occupancy room.
“He’ll sleep for a while,” he warned. “Be careful about his broken ribs and shattered collarbone. Most of the muscles in his thigh were shredded and he lost a lot of blood. His leg—”
Jason opened the door and shut it behind him, cutting the doctor off as he spoke. He really didn’t care.
Bruce had never looked smaller. Out of respect, Jason supposed, his cowl remained, but every other part of his suit had been stripped away. On the bed, hospital scrubs couldn’t hide the bulky edges of bandages that wrapped around almost every one of his limbs. He was white as a sheet and way too many machines were hooked up to his body and beeped, but at least they beeped. At least he was still alive.
Jason made it two steps before he realized that his leg hurt, like, a lot, and collapsed into the chair at Bruce’s bedside.
“B?” he whispered.
No response. It was stupid to hope for one, of course, but still…
Even though the pulse monitor beeped steadily, Jason pressed his fingers to the pulse point on Bruce’s wrist to keep track himself. At some point it turned into holding his hand. And at another point Jason fell asleep again.
He woke up when the door creaked open.
“Hood, you asshole,” whispered Replacement loudly, “why didn’t you tell us B was out of surgery?”
Jason opened one eye to glare. “Because I don’t want you all here. Go away.”
“Tt.” Robin eyed him like he wanted to stab him, but he wisely refrained and instead clambered onto the bed at Bruce’s feet. He swam in hospital sweats—the gift shop only carried men’s medium and up—and a Nightwing hoodie that nearly reached his knees.
“Aw, Little Wing,” said Dick grossly. “You’re so sweet.”
Jason grunted.
With twin screeches, Replacement and Dick pulled up chairs to sit at Bruce’s bedside. Replacement curled up in his and was out like a light in seconds. Dick, on the other hand, stared at Robin and Bruce on the bed with a shattered look in his eyes.
Then he blinked and the look was gone. He looked at Jason and smiled.
Jason swallowed and looked away. He squeezed Bruce’s hand.
Bruce squeezed back.