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Tim was elbow-deep in a crate of unlabeled drugs - Crane’s disregard of WHMIS was almost as galling as his terrorism - when the hairs on the nape of his neck stood on end. A glance around the dingy compartment revealed nothing except the same tangled cobwebs he’d avoided on his way in, and a suspiciously large but entirely benign dustbunny.
Given his line of work, Tim wasn’t convinced by the seemingly innocuous scene. He switched his communicator on, and tuned in to the mission frequency.
Silence helped with detective work. Between Dick and Jason, who were both notorious loudmouths, it was easier to tune out from the channel entirely and rely on Barbara to patch him in if things were dicey.
“Nightwing, come in.”
“How’s it hanging? Find anything in those crates?”
“Nothing we didn’t already know. Scarecrow’s been manufacturing fear toxin, again. How have chemical manufacturers not blacklisted him by now?”
“That’s the power of cash money, moron,” Jason chimed in, helpful as always.
“Like you would know anything about that.”
“Gents,” Dick interrupted whatever comeback Jason had brewing. “You’re both pretty. We can keep arguing, or Red Robin could say his piece. Hood, stop flipping me off. It’s not going to change my mind.”
Tim stepped back from the crates and snapped a picture of the scene to examine in the Cave. He dusted his knees, covered in the floor’s filth, and double checked his gear was in place.
“Any eyes on Crane yet?”
A chime came over the comms as Barbara opened her channel. “Nothing yet, but I have eyes on all the exits. He’s still somewhere in the mall. Try checking the central storefronts.”
The only place they hadn’t been yet. Gee thanks. Maybe they should try and play marco polo with the crazed chemist too, if everyone had to share unhelpful suggestions.
“Thanks Oracle,” Dick snarked.
“Yeah thanks big brother.”
“Hood, be nice.”
“What? It’s accurate.”
Barbara sighed loudly. “I’ve been called worse by better. Surveillance is under control, you boys just need to stop standing around and catch Crane. We won’t know what additions he’s made to the toxin until we can analyze it.”
Tim patted his belt. “Samples secured.”
Exiting the abandoned storefront into the larger body of the mall, he cringed as a metal grate churned against mud-splattered tile. If he gave his location away to Crane, it would prolong their hunt, and their night, and he was really looking forward to the new Wendy the Werewolf Stalker Episode airing at ten.
Tim made his way to the base of the mall’s annex, glancing at the building which rose out of the glass roof. Dick and Barbara were flirting over the comms. Tim’s hand rose to disable his headset.
“And Tim?” Barbara caught him at the last second. “You’re a bad Robin, and you were never supposed to get this far. It’s a miracle Bruce hasn’t fired you yet.”
The statement was so absurd, it took Tim a few seconds to even wrap his head around it. More than anyone, Barbara had welcomed him into the fold with open arms, and he’d learned most of his coding skills under her tutelage. Even if she thought that he was a bad Robin, she would never say it. Right?
“Excuse me?”
Static frizzed the comms line, drowning out her response.
The temperature in the annex’s hallway bottomed out, goosebumps forming on the exposed skin of his arms. Tim’s breath fogged as his head spun, trying to make sense of the sudden atmospheric change and the coldness in Barbara’s voice.
Something was very, very wrong.
Tim unholstered his bo and spun in place, but saw only the endless grey sprawl illuminated by intermittently flickering lights. No one else was visible in the featureless expanse, but his senses still screamed that danger was hidden just out of sight.
Down the hall where the light stuttered, then died completely,movement caught his eye. Humanoid in shape and size, stumbling towards him with the grace of the deeply infirm. The walls were spinning, Tim’s head floating somewhere above the rest of his body, and his heartbeat was tachycardic and racing ever-faster.
Tim squinted, trying to make out their features against the grey-tinted shadows. Blonde hair, then black, morphing together like putty in a sculptor’s hand. The figure was achingly familiar, but no he knew would make his skin crawl and gut wrench like that.
Bruce, garbed in full Batman apparel, stepped out of the shadows, cowl up and mouth set. It made no sense. Bruce was working the Madria case half-way across town. Didn’t he trust Tim to handle Crane? Advancing like a glacier, Bruce made his way down the hallway, lights bursting into crystal rain as he passed beneath them. He said nothing, and made even less noise.
“Is there something wrong, B?”
Tim tried to make smalltalk. Tried to sound like his heart wasn’t pounding against his ribs, like a cold sweat hadn’t broken out across his brow. His eyes darted around the room, searching for a vent or a door, anything to put between him and Bruce.
If he could find a closet or cubby somewhere in the building to hide in, curl up and make no noise, Bruce wouldn’t look like he was staring down the Joker instead of his partner. But he was frozen, legs ignoring every command to run, and Bruce kept coming.
“Please. I was trying my best. I did everything you taught me. I’m trying. Please let me try.”
So quick to beg, said a voice with his mother’s stilted cadence. But Tim still fell over himself, begging Bruce to keep him, as Robin and as a son. He could be useful and clever, pushing himself beyond the limits to which others held firm.
Bruce only watched as Tim crumbled, white lenses ice-cold, and continued his advance.
A hand landed on his shoulder, red-leather glove almost brown in the light. Tim’s frozen limbs came alive as he jumped in surprise, towards Bruce, but away from the hand.
“Been a while, Boy Wonder.”
Tim couldn’t hold back the scream that ripped from his lungs as Kon’s face came into view, grinning sharply, a wedge-shaped dent in his skull. Speckles covered his face, which Tim thought were freckles until he saw the dusting of blood splatter on his glasses and face. Red on red.
“You’re dead. I buried you in Kansas.”
Kon cocked an eyebrow. The piercing gleamed.“Or do you just wish you had. I noticed you never came to my funeral. That hurts.”
“I tried. I promise.” Tim lunged towards Kon. What for, he couldn’t say.
The floor greeted him like a scorned lover, Tim smacking face first into the concrete floor. Kon had disappeared, or he was never there to begin with. Feeling his pulse-point, Tim grimaced at the pain and his racing heartbeat.
Looking up, Kon wasn’t where he’d last seen him. Tim’s head swiveled until he caught sight of the familiar red and black suit. A building’s worth of rubble had appeared as he’d fallen, and was crushing Kon beneath it. The scene felt like deja-vu, but Tim couldn’t piece together where he’d seen it before.
“Kon!”
Tim raced down the hallway. He needed to get to Kon, to stop the blood he somehow knew would be gushing from his femoral artery and to pry him free before the building collapsed completely.
Uneven flooring caught Tim by surprise as he face-planted for the second time in as many minutes, within arms reach of Kon’s leg. Pain bloomed from his shin, likely an old break re-fracturing, but he continued to crawl. He couldn’t let him die.
Tim shook Kon’s arm as he pulled himself to a stand, eliciting nearly blinding pain from his leg as he forced weight on it. Kon’s lifeless green eyes looked completely through him, half his head crumpled like an empty can, the other half pallid and blood soaked.
White specks were caught in Kon’s hair. Kon loved his hair, so Tim reached to pull them free from the curly mess.
Bone caught the light and shone. A perfect pearl.
A heavy hand, Bruce’s, landed on his back. Then another, then a third. Dragging him away from Kon as Tim struggled against his hold.
But darkness had him, the hallway completely suffused by Bruce’s presence. Tim succumbed.
–
To be frank, Jason was getting kind of tired of Tim’s screaming.
After the first ten minutes or so, the sobbing and begging got pretty old, and Dick certainly wasn’t helping. Curled over his shoulder, muttering something Jason couldn’t quite make out over the whirring of his helmet’s air filtration system, he was absolutely no help in solving their current problem.
Crane had really cooked this time. The new version of fear gas had overwhelmed the maskless members of the team in seconds, and Jason knew his helmet was fighting a losing battle against the almost invisible substance. A faint shimmer where the heavier gas met lighter air gave it away, and had given him enough time to throw Dick over his shoulder and hightail it away from the source. Tim hadn’t been so lucky.
“Oracle, Crane try to weasel out yet?”
“The exits are undisturbed, and he’s probably hiding somewhere in the central annex. Are you aware your heart rate is nearly double your resting rate?”
Ignoring his racing heart had worked well enough so far. The real effects of the toxin, hallucinations and blackouts, had yet to manifest.
“You don’t say. Can you also tell me where exactly Crane is, or are you only good for shit I already know?”
Bab’s voice went short. “Alright. You’re a big boy Hood, you figure this out.”
The comms clicked shut, cutting off Tim’s screaming, and leaving the weighty silence of Bab’s disappointment. She’d still monitor them, he knew, in case Jason couldn’t tough through the toxin and backup was needed to capture Crane, who was still hiding like a rat in a warren.
Scarecrow had gassed the mall to put them out of commission and give him time to escape into the endless alleys of Gotham. But he hadn’t counted on Jason’s presence. Neither could he have predicted Jason’s stupidly high resistance to fear toxin, gained as he relearned how to fight crime in a body which stampeded out of control at the slightest hint of adrenaline.
Bull in a china shop my ass, Jason thought. I choose when to lose control, so I also choose when to keep it.
A shrill alarm beeped in his ear, meaning the air filters were almost completely burnt through. A choice was coming.
Whoops. Time to get moving.
Keeping Dick over his shoulder was as easy as restraining a hundred and eighty pound bag of sand that wanted you dead. This was to say, not easy at all.
Dick oscillated between bouts of cat-like limpness and ferocious attacks as he struggled against Jason’s hold and his own fears. Jason did his best to ignore the stream of words slipping from Dick’s mouth. The man deserved the little privacy he got, in a family of control freaks and occupational snoops, it was very little indeed.
Tim’s last known location was close to where Babs thought Crane was hiding, in the thick-walled annex at the center of the mall. Though defunct, the tower still held the mall’s surveillance system and would have direct access to the building’s HVAC, which was still pumping toxin into the complex like it had rent due tomorrow.
Jason kicked the double doors to the annex in, meeting, then breaking through the resistance of a wooden beam placed between the handles. The wood splintered into two chunks, and a wave of toxin-laced air raced past him, mingling with the highly concentrated dose within.
As the doors swung shut, he moved to put Dick down amidst the wood fragments and dust. One fear toxin addled vigilante was more than enough, and Dick seemed unlikely to move under his own power.
“No, no. Jay. Don’t leave,” Dick whimpered, grabbing at the fabric of Jason’s pants. “Not again. Please.”
“I need to get Red Robin.”
Mentioning Tim seemed to be the wrong move, as Dick burst into loud sobs which echoed down the hallway and wrapped both arms firmly around Jason’s knees, locking him in place.
Of all people, I get stuck with the needy one.
“Whatever you’re seeing, it’s from the fear toxin.”
Jason was never sure how much got through to someone hopped up on the gas, or how much they could rationalize the experience. But communication was supposedly good, regardless.
Dick continued sobbing, cut through with apologies rolling into accusations rolling into more crying. Whatever he was seeing must have been hell. And Jason couldn’t just abandon Dick now, in this half-light state it might actually break him.
A hair raising cackle bounced down the hallway, a figure in purple and green emerging from the distance. The Joker grinned, blood-red gums on tile-white teeth. Grinned until his skin split and foamy pink spit ran down his neck.
“Well, well. Daddy dearest always finds you in the strangest of situations, doesn’t he?”
Put a checkmark beside Jason’s name on the ‘affected by the toxin’ list, because Jesus fucking Christ. A habitual visitor to Jason’s nightmares, and a constant presence during his months in recovery, his memory of the Joker was old-hat, but fear toxin made him feel nauseating visceral.
The hallucination stalked over to Jason, pressing closer and closer until the texture of his face paint and the smell of his novelty cologne was overpowering. Exactly how Jason remembered him.
He’s in Arkham, hopped up on enough tranqs to kill a rhino. And Babs would warn me if that changed. Jason reminded himself. The fear did not leave him, but the symptoms were as familiar as his reflection, and could not hurt him.
“Oh fuck off. I do not have time for your bullshit.”
“Oh don’t say that. You’ll hurt my feelings.” Joker raised his hand to his chest, clutching invisible pearls. “I created you, of course you have time for me.”
Jason huffed. The adrenaline pumping through his body made thinking straight nearly impossible. He wanted to punch the clown and be through with it, but figments of one's imagination were notoriously unphased by violence.
“Fine. You want to do this?”
He shrugged. “It’s your hallucination. I’m just here for the show.”
Dick piped up, still hugging Jason’s legs. “Jay? Who’re you…”
“Shh. Don’t worry,” he said to Dick, then turned back to the Joker. “Crowbar, beating, daddy never loved me, explosion.”
“What?”
“I just figured we’d cut to the chase. Got anything to add, maybe something about dying, or brain damage, or did I about cover it?”
Jokers lips curled into a sneer. “You’re no fun!”
“Not trying to be,” Jason shouted over his shoulder at the retreating figure.
Lines of tears slipped between cracks in the silicone adhesive of Dick’s mask. The longer he spent exposed to the gas, the longer more powerful the hallucinations would become. Jason could fight a lot, but he knew there would come a level of exposure that would overwhelm even his resistance. They needed to find Tim and get the hell out of this joint, Crane be damned.
“Time to go.” Jason offered Dick his hand.
“Together?”
“Yeah you sap. Together.”
As they traversed the annex’s concrete halls, aiming for the control room at the pinnacle of the structure, Jason was on the verge of gouging out his own ears to stop the constant commentary from the purple peanut gallery.
Unsatisfied with scaring him, his brain had apparently decided to annoy him to death with hacky prop comedy and bullshit observational humour. In the corner of his eye, the Joker was monologuing about the ways villany had ‘gone downhill’ since his capture, which was the exact kind of nonsense Jason would expect from a self-titled clown prince, and kept him centered enough to fight off the worst of the toxin.
Still, his body was only human. By the time they reached the top floor, with Dick once again thrown over his shoulder, Jason’s pulse was in his throat. Too much fear and adrenaline was pushing his body to its limits, and even the pit struggled to keep up with the abuse.
Just a bit more, then we can shut down Crane’s machine, Jason told himself, willing his leaden legs to move. Just a bit more.
“Crane better be here,” he said to the room.
“Oh Jonny-boy? He’s such a little freak, and that’s coming from me. Of course he’ll be here, probably jerking it to all the fear. Never did understand what made that one tick.”
“Oh my god. Literally no one cares.”
Joker blew him a kiss. “I’m in your subconscious buddy, you literally do.”
Dick was crying again, a soft bubbling noise instead of the loud sobbing of earlier. Hopefully that meant whatever he was seeing was kinder, or at least less awful.
The apex of the building was dominated by a long, narrow hallway leading from the stairs to Cranes domain. Blue-tinted lights were recessed into the white-tiled ceiling, reused material from the mall below. The pale light illuminated a grim scene, empty food containers and the scattered belongings of the previous tenants piled between chunks of tile shaken loose from the ceiling.
A trail of blood led down the corridor. Frightening in most contexts, but to Jason, who had seen more blood than most, it was nothing more than a reliable clue to where Tim had gone. He followed the red line, Dick over one shoulder, his free hand on the holster of his gun.
As they neared a pile of rubble, the blood trail abruptly changed. Where the droplets had been flat and round before, spaced even distances as Tim slowly moved under his own direction, the new pattern was smeared across the concrete floor by the weight of a dragged body.
Crane had Tim. A wave of fear, the real brain-numbing and chest clenching kind, washed over him.
Fear toxin hijacked the amygdala, and flooded the body with adrenaline and cortisol to dangerous levels. It induced nightmares, but like the still-chattering figure of the Joker, those nightmares couldn’t directly harm. Jason had lived through his worst nightmares and came out the other side still fighting.
But in Crane’s clutches, Tim was in real danger. A danger that couldn’t be ignored through iron-clad determination and a willingness to move, despite how his body was screaming to run. This kind of problem required force, and a hand willing to strike, and oh buddy, he was willing.
Jason pulled his gun free. The sleek black beauty only carried non-lethal rounds. A damn shame, if you asked him. He’d have to resort to teaching Crane how to fear the old-fashioned way.
At the hall’s end, the metal double doors loomed, plastered in safety instructions and caution signs. Whatever was through those doors, Jason would make sure Crane suffered for hurting Tim and Dick.
Never one to lose the final word, Joker had placed himself between Jason and his goal, arms crossed petulantly.
“So this is goodbye.”
Oh buddy, how I wish that were true.
Jason flipped him off, and continued towards the door.
“Wait, wait. Before you go in there, I have one thing to say.”
“Get a diary.”
Joker leaned in, his eyes bloodshot and manic. “Give him hell, just like daddy taught you.”
Jason suppressed the shudder that Joker’s voice elicited in him, and carried on ignoring the clown. He’d come to terms with the Joker-shaped mark his death had left on him, and honestly? He had bigger things to worry about right now.
After placing Dick near the door and assuring him that, yes, Jason wasn’t leaving again, and yes he could watch the whole time, Jason kicked in the door.
Crane and Tim were in the center of the control room, surrounded by a wall of blacked-out security cameras. Crane was watching Tim from a distance, sitting on a jerry-rigged pressure tank connected to the building’s HVAC system with a thin rubber tube.
Unsurprisingly, Tim was still screaming. He clutched at his leg, shin angled away from the rest of his body, a pallor heavy on his exposed skin. It took Jason nearly thirty minutes to get to the top of the Annex, and Tim had been alone with Crane for nearly as long.
The hand-shaking fear which had clutched his heart in the hallway evaporated like water in a steam-kettle, a shrill whistle of anger foretelling disaster. A behemoth rose from the depths of his psyche, cutting off the Joker’s laughs and Tim’s screams. Narrowing the world to Jason, Crane, and the tightly chained beast now set loose.
Just a bit more. Just a bit more.
The phrase became Jason’s lifeline as he pushed through blurry vision and the taste of metal in his mouth. He only needed a few more minutes, then he could rest.
Crane barely had time to notice Jason before the first bullet hit him. The rubber-coated rounds bounced off his chest and knocked him off the tank. Jason knew from experience that a nasty welt would form in a few minutes, and the bruises would last for days.
Stopping the fear toxin was the priority. He walked past Tim and towards Crane, who had scrambled to his feet and made to flee. Funny, how fast the master of fear folded when faced with resistance.
Crane’s throat was thin and pulsing under Jason’s grip. Like a bird. He beat furiously against Jason’s arm, clawing and wriggling in an attempt to break free. Unlike some of Gotham’s rogues, Crane wasn’t a fighter. He preferred to sit back and watch his toxin hurt people, and ran when the Bat drew near.
It would be easy to snap his spindly neck, feel the bones fracture and windpipe collapse. Too easy. Rage-green and frothing, the beast wanted to play with its food.
“My toxin. No mask is that strong,” he said, trying to puzzle out how Jason was still standing, let alone kicking his ass.
Jason twisted the tank’s release valve closed. Regular, non-shimmering air immediately flooded the room. It wouldn’t help with previous exposure, but it would speed up recovery.
Then the room spun, blurred vision narrowing as black encroached. Jason couldn’t muster the mind to snark at Crane. He was almost completely consumed by the pit and the toxin, only a small fragment of his mind remained, fighting to keep his anger aimed at Crane.
“You can’t-” Whatever Crane was saying was cut off, as Jason’s consciousness sunk within and the world vanished.
He awoke to the Joker leaning over him, dressed in a white lab coat over his familiar purple suit, a thin trail of smoke drifting from his cigarette. A black void surrounded them, presumably wherever his mind had been shunted to while the pit took control of his body. In the year or so after the pit, blackouts like this had been frequent, but he’d never been conscious during one. Either this was another fun side-effect of fear toxin, or the work he’d done to overcome Bruce’s own formula had inadvertently caused this.
“Hmm, disappointing. I bet a lot of money on you snapping his neck, but it looks like you’re just kicking him around.”
“Bet money to who exactly?”
Joker laughed. “I might be imaginary, but I still have principles. Now no one wins, not even me.”
Jason stumbled to his feet. For a disembodied mind, he felt seriously out of it.
“Oh! He’s trying to fight back. Good boy Jon, I guess old dogs can learn new tricks.”
So Joker could see what was going on out there. If Jason could establish a connection to the outside world, maybe he could wrest control back from the pit before he hurt Tim or Dick.
“How are you doing that?”
“Doing what?” Joker was reclining in a dirty purple loveseat, sipping out of a Bat-Burger cup. He flipped his shades up, looking at Jason like he was stupid.
“You can still see out of here. How are you doing that?”
“Can I? News to me.”
Just a bit more.
“You’re part of me, right? Some fucked up part of my subconscious that latched onto the Joker while he was beating me to death?”
The Joker fiddled with the controls of the recliner until the leg rest popped out. He sighed and took another sip of his drink.
“Something like that.”
“If I can’t get the pit under control and I hurt Tim or Dick, there’s not going to be any piece of me left for you to leech off of.”
“Suicide threats? So last year.”
Just a bit more.
“Not suicide. I wouldn’t need to lift a hand with the way Bruce barely tolerates me now. If I hurt his real kids he wouldn’t stop at handicapping me with fear toxin.”
“And what, you think I care? I’m the Joker, I don’t care about anything.”
For the second time that day, Jason lost control. He stormed through the void to Joker’s recliner and flipped it, sending the Joker spilling onto the endless black floor.
“You care a whole lot, dipshit. As you’ve been saying, again and again, you are me. The only way you get to keep living here is if there’s a here to live in. You’re going to help me, or we’re both gone.”
Joker raised his hands in surrender. “Fine, you got me. I care. But I can’t help you. I have no idea how any of this works.”
“Bullshit.” Jason’s hand hovered over his gun, which had apparently decided to join him in subconscious exile.
“It’s the truth! I’m just a part of you, and since you have no idea…”
Damn.
“Just tell me what’s happening out there.”
Joker sighed and his bright lipstick pulled into a deep frown.
“Oh! Jon’s dead. Wait, no. Jon’s just taking a nap. What a spoil-sport.”
“Relevant information.”
“The little birdy is trying to get up. Ouch, what a break, clean through the skin. You know, I really think I should have been more creative with you. A crowbar is rather gauche if you think about it, I could have done better.”
“Don’t make me slap you.”
“You’d only be hurting yourself.”
“And when has that ever stopped me? Focus.”
“I think he’s still hallucinating. He’s so much smaller than you, and he’s probably had more exposure. How cute! He’s actually trying to fight us.”
“No, Tim!”
Jason tried to force his way out of the void, focusing on the few sensations limping their way to him. The burning in his chest, the way his skin itched as the pit coursed through it. Somewhere between him and his body, Jason bounced off the mental curtain which all but severed the connection.
Trying again, Jason hurled himself uselessly against the wall.
The pit was survival in its purest form, animating the body to keep moving, keep fighting until whatever threatened it was gone. That instinct, which had kept him alive even as his neck split open and the bomb went off, would be useless against the toxin.
Jason jealously guarded that knowledge. Tim didn’t know that fighting the pit was like fighting a grizzly. Playing dead was the only option.
He whirled on the Joker, hoisting him by his lapels.
“Get me out of here.”
“I can’t. I already told you that. Are you stupid?”
Before Jason could respond, pain hit him like a truck, his muscles suddenly seizing then releasing. He fell to the floor like a rag doll. The Joker, who he dropped, did the same. They both convulsed as another wave of pain hit Jason, this time centered on his back.
“What’s-”
“Don’t. Be. Stupid,” Joker choked out between gasps.
And he did. It wasn’t the first time Dick had used his escrima’s on Jason, but the pain of fifty-thousand volts of electricity hurt like it was the first time. But despite the pain, Jason smiled. Dick could handle him in a way Tim couldn’t yet.
“There he goes! A big flip and-”
Jason lost consciousness as something hard connected with his chest.
–
In one moment, Tim was half-way down a flight of stairs in the Titan’s Tower, the Red Hood on his heels. He was alone, his team was dead, and no one was coming to save him.
The next, he breathed deeply and came back to reality. Brain stuttering online like a computer with a crap CPU, he was hit with the mother, father, and uncle of all headaches, then with the realization he could see his own tibia sticking through his skin and pants.
That should have been the most alarming part of the scene. Dick was across the room, standing over Jason, who was splayed across the floor. Crane was behind them, either knocked out or dead.
Something loud was in his ear. Tim scrambled to pull it out, before he realized it was Barbara over the comms line.
“Nightwing, come in.” A pause, then a second more frantic call. “Dick, you need to snap out of it. Jason doesn’t have a pulse.”
“Oracle, I’m here,” Tim replied, crawling with one leg, the other dangling uselessly behind him.
Dick still wasn’t moving, and his escrimas were live and crackling with voltage.
“Thank god. Tim, I need you to wake Dick up. I think he’s still under the effect of the toxin and-”
“And Jason’s dying.”
Barbara swallowed loud enough for her mic to catch it. “Yeah.”
“We’re going to need backup. I can’t walk, and even if Jason wakes up, he won’t be able to either.”
“I know. Backup is less than ten minutes out.”
Tim’s agonizing crawl to Dick was filled with Barbara’s updates in one ear, and his own huffs of effort in the other. Jason had gone dark almost a minute ago, which meant Tim had less than two minutes to talk Dick out of his fugue state and get him to administer CPR, or anoxia would set in.
“Hey, down here.”
Dick’s head swiveled down, his hair a sweat-soaked halo against his forehead.
“Jason needs you.” Tim pointed to Jason’s prone figure, ignoring the shoulds racing through his brain. Tim needed him too, but it felt easier to point to Jason than admit how scared he was.
“Tim?”
“Yes. Tim. And that’s Jason.” Tim pointed again. “He needs C.P.R.”
Dick lagged for a moment, thinking so hard Tim could hear the snap of neurons firing, then sprung into action and onto Jason’s wide and terribly still chest. Time went wide as Dick pressed again and again onto Jason’s chest, each push filled with an aching desperation.
To Dick, this was probably a continuation of his nightmares. It was Dick’s worst fear, confirmed years ago after Tim’s first encounter with fear toxin left him weak and rattled. Even Tim, who only knew Jason as Robin, and then as an asshole, felt paralyzed by his own helplessness seeing his immovable brother corpse-still.
None of this should have been possible. Jason’s helmet bought him minutes at best, but he would have been breathing the same formula that knocked him and Dick out completely. Nightmares weren’t uncommon in their line of work, and Jason had it worse than most of them. He should have been gone, just like them.
But Barbara confirmed it. Until Jason turned off the release valve and got his hands on Crane, he’d been in full control. Tim didn’t like the conclusions his mind was putting together. Zur-En-Arrh, and Bruce’s doomed attempt to force Jason into a normal life.
The case files had gone untouched, Tim reluctant to bring up his own bad memories of the time. And Jason had been fine, back on patrol a few months later like he’d never left. But what else could explain an apparent immunity to fear toxin?
Agonizing seconds later, Jason gasped deeply and shot up, bucking Dick off in the process. He landed in a blue and black heap.
“Holy shit. Was I dead?”
Dick pulled him into a hug, gripping the back of his jacket like it was trying to escape. Tim only nodded, as he was pretty sure he’d pass out if he moved again.
“AGAIN? You hit me! With the sticks turned on!”
Dick’s reply was lost into the leather of Jason’s coat.
“Sure, I was the danger. But which one of us died? Again?”
“Why are you resistant to the toxin? That would require weeks of constant low-level exposure to build an immune response, or some sort of mental barrier.”
“There are some questions you shouldn’t ask.”
But Tim’s mind was moving, rolling to new conclusions faster than he could press the breaks.
“Is this what Bruce did to get you to stop?”
Dick pulled himself away from Jason, leaning back against the leg of a desk. “We all know it wasn’t really Bruce. Zur-”
“Zur is Bruce. Or at least he was. We all know that too. So why didn’t I know this?”
Instead of looking at Tim, Dick kept his eyes on Jason. Whether it was guilt over keeping secrets, or concern for the brother he’d nearly lost, the struggle was evident in the way his forehead creased and smile dimmed.
“I asked him not to tell you,” Jason finally said. “Didn’t think it would help anything. Besides, I’m fine.”
So Zur, or Bruce, hadn’t just tried to make Jason retire with threats. Knowing that Jason wouldn’t quit unless forced, he’d baked in a failsafe. It was the kind of realization that revealed the cracks in the foundation of his life, so Tim shoved it away with all the other horrible events of the day.
Dick snapped. “You lost control.”
“I got us out. And took Crane down, while you were both busy crying for daddy.”
“You still lost control. What would you have done to Tim if I wasn’t here?”
Jason shuddered. “I don’t know. If he wasn’t trying to fight me, I would have done nothing. The pit’s not interested in anything that’s not a threat. Talk to him about bad instincts.”
He gestured to Tim, who sneered back.
“I was running for my life.”
“You were whimpering on the floor, then suddenly decided that fight was better than flight.”
Tim, admittedly, did not remember any of this, but had principles to uphold. He went to move, but was met with live-wire hot pain. Right, his leg was still broken.
Seeing the spasm that ran up Tim’s body, Jason’s annoyance lost its edge. He slumped in on himself, grey-mottled skin and still-bleeding nose finally looking in place.
“Sorry,” he said to Tim’s leg.
“Sorry,” Tim parroted back.
Neither could bear to look the other in the eye, not as Batman and Black Bat crash into the Annex and haul them to safety and Crane to Arkham. Or during the long ride to Dr. Leslie’s clinic, where Tim is sedated and his leg is reset.
The next time he sees Jason is almost a week later. Despite literally dying, he was field ready far before Tim, who is still in crutches and itchy enough to cut the cast off himself. It was a slow night, Gotham satisfied with a few petty thefts and one car chase on the East Side, leaving Tim to monitor police chatter and pretend Jason wasn’t there.
Jason worked on his bike, occasionally swearing under his breath when a tool bounced out of reach, seeming equally as happy to ignore Tim’s whole existence. It was a comfortable silence, one neither were keen to break.
After another hour of silence, during which Tim flagged an armed robbery in the diamond district, and Jason’s bike coughed out putrid smoke that made the cave smell like diesel, Jason finally had enough of dancing around the subject.
Stalking up the stairs from the carport to the main level of the Cave, Jason came up behind Tim, who spun in place on Bruce’s chair.
“You figured it out.”
“Jason, I’ve figured a lot of things out. Are you talking about where Jones went, because the sewers were an easy guess. Or are you talking about the smuggling ring? The mainstreet murders? You have to be more specific.”
“About Zur, and Bruce. What they did to me.”
Oh, that’s what this was about, and why Jason kept glancing at the stairs to the manor. He was worried someone might overhear. Tim stopped the chair’s motion and sat up.
“I figured you didn’t want to talk about it.”
“You’re right. I don’t”
Raising his arms in a gesture of questioning, Tim waited for Jason to say something more.
“Just… Look, I wanted to tell you that you’re right. It was related to the toxin, and I’m better now. To stop that mind of yours from chasing every thought you have about this.”
That was oddly sweet, and wildly out of character. Tim traced Jason’s face, his crooked nose, tense jaw, and the furrow between his eyebrows, for signs of deception.
“And I wanted to apologize.”
Now Tim was convinced something was wrong. In Titan’s Tower, Jason had terrorized Tim for half a night and turned a place that meant safety into a deathtrap. Tim still couldn’t sleep a full night in the tower, where every suit or lumpy pillow could be someone out to get him, and Jason had yet to apologize for that.
Tim’s cast was itching again, and he wanted to get back to scratching it. “Did Dick make you do this? You can tell him the apology was accepted.”
“What, no. Dick doesn’t even know I’m here.”
“So you came up with this, all on your own? Sure.”
“Stop being difficult. I’m trying to do the right thing. You know, be the bigger person and all.”
“You’ve said your piece. You can go.”
Jason’s hands cupped his head, hard enough to whiten the skin, and leaving dots of thick motor grease behind. Although it was self-directed, Jason’s anger made his stomach drop.
He was in the Cave. He was safe.
“Just- Fine, you know what. Take this.”
From his jacket, Jason withdrew a thin black object and threw it at Tim, then turned and stormed back down the stairs. Catching the object, a leather journal tied with a narrow strip of the same material, Tim turned it over in his hands.
Distantly, Jason’s bike roared to life.
The book was worn, leather supple from use and warm from its place next to Jason’s chest. He flipped through the pages, each written in Jason’s tight cursive, recording the symptoms of pit madness, the techniques he found were most effective to avoid them, and how to trick the instincts completely. A handbook to the pit.
And Jason had just given it to him, without question or explanation. Jason’s brusquer-than-usual demeanor made sense, as did his storming off. This was a real apology, and Jason and apologies were oil and water.
The book was also insurance, the pragmatic side of him whispered. With the information within, Tim understood as much about the Pit as Jason did. When he lost control again, an inevitability no matter how much Bruce pretended it wasn’t, Tim would be ready.