Chapter Text
Tim wanted to go home.
There had been a Justice League all-hands-on-deck alert a few hours ago that brought almost the whole Bat-clan out into the middle of nowhere to fight aliens alongside the rest of the League.
Luckily, the actually fight hadn’t lasted long, the aliens apparently having a very exploitable weakness that let them be taken down easily once you got the trick of it, but that meant that by now the debrief was almost twice the length of the actual battle.
Tim was struggling not to let his boredom show, sitting next to his equally bored sibling and trying to project an air of bat-stoicism instead of so-bored-he-could-cry.
Why was he here? He’d barely even joined the fight long enough to throw a punch, but he was still stuck at the hours long debrief? Surely Bruce could let them go home and just fill them in on the important stuff later.
He glanced over at B.
Nope, Batman was also looking ready to tear out Green Lantern’s hair if he took much longer. There was no way he was going to let them skip out if he was stuck listening.
Tim was pretty sure Constantine was actually asleep, and Zatanna had to be using some kind of illusion because she hadn’t blinked in the last five minutes. What was he bet she wasn’t even listening? It wasn’t like the magicians would be getting much out of this. They’d been called in as well, but the aliens had far better defences against magic than technology, so there hadn’t been much for them to do.
God, Tim almost wished something else would attack, just as a break from the boredom.
Across the room, a shimmering, blood-red portal opened in the air.
Goddamn it, he said he almost wished! It was just a joke!
Sighing internally, he shot to his feet with the rest of his siblings, pulling out his staff and holding it ready to attack.
Out of the portal stepped a being. Bright red skin, curling black horns, seven feet tall. It’s eyes glowed yellow, missing any kind of pupil or iris, with what looked almost like trails of smoke rising from them. Its clothes were strange, all black and made out of some kind alien of material in a style unlike anything Tim had seen before.
Yet Tim somehow got the impression that the outfit was almost rumpled, as if it had been thrown on in a rush or worn for far too long.
It was holding a scroll of parchment in its hand, which seemed to be holding far more of its attention than the assembly of superheroes it had just walked into.
Tim might not be an expert in the supernatural, but he knew a demon when he saw one. In the corner of his eye, he could see that Constantine had gone pale.
It was a shock then when, instead of the magician, the demon turned its gaze unwaveringly onto Tim. Even without a pupil, he could feel the force of the stare boring into him. Not any of his nearby siblings, just him.
“Timothy Drake.”
All the bats flinched, imperceptibly. It knew, how did it-
“I have come to collect.”
What?
Before Tim could react, some invisible force tugged his wrists together, holding them immovably, as if tied. His staff clattered to the ground, the sound loud in the otherwise still room.
Tim tugged at his wrist, and then again more frantically as they refused to budge. He could feel the tension in the room climb as his movements got more desperate.
“What-”
Tim choked, and his bound hands flew to his throat, clutching at the collar he could feel had formed around his neck. His fingers were pushed away as a glowing chain sprouted from the front of the collar and grew, the end flying across the room to land implacably in the demon’s open hand.
“What the fuck is-”
“Silence.” The demon said offhandedly, and the words died in Tim’s throat.
He opened and closed his mouth like a fish, trying to force a word, a sound even, to leave his lips, but there was nothing.
He was really starting to panic now, his siblings and the rest of the league were looking at him in horror, while his mind spun trying to plan, to find a way out of this. What was happening? He’d never made any kind of supernatural deal, he wasn’t an idiot. He’d seen the fallout too many times to think it would ever end well for him.
The demon didn’t seem to care though, its eyes were back on the parchment, its body already halfway turned towards the portal. The chain connecting it to Tim was held casually in its hand, like it was off no consequence. Tim couldn’t take his eyes off it.
“Come here.”
Tim lurched forward, his body acting without his input. The chain around his neck had gone taught, pulling him forward and causing the collar to cut into his neck when he stumbled.
The crowd of heroes had unfrozen now, shouting and protesting, brandishing weapons and shouting threats at the demon, but wary of hitting Tim as he moved closer.
Tim stared desperately at them, his eyes wide and terrified behind his mask as he was drawn forward against his will.
Suddenly, there was black in front of him, strong arms pulling him to a stop. It grated at Tim, to stop moving, to disobey, like ants crawling over his skin, but it wasn’t enough to make him do more than mildly strain against the grip.
“Tim didn’t make a deal with you,” Batman growled, and Tim shook his head frantically. Damn right he didn’t, not ever. “You have no right to take him.”
The demon glanced up from the parchment, looking almost bored at the interruption.
“I have a contract with Jack and Janet Drake, promising me their firstborn child.”
What? No, no they wouldn’t…
“I have every right, you cannot stop me from taking what I am owed. Timothy, come here.”
Tim jerked, ripping his arm free in a move Bruce himself had taught him, and started moving toward the demon again. Batman reached for him, and Tim lashed out, throwing precise jabs into nerve clusters that left Bruce’s arm hanging limply.
Internally he was screaming, protests and apologies and pleas, but he couldn’t give voice to a single one. Externally he turned and walked to the demon’s side, collar tugging him forward.
When he reached the demon, Tim bowed, hands still clasped in front of him and head down while his mind was filled with panic.
“Good. Let’s go then.”
With no further ado, the demon neatly turned on its heel and walked right back through the glowing red portal. The chain went taught again and Tim started to move forward.
No, no way was he going through that thing, no, please, please, someone help, no, oh god, no please.
He struggled in vain to stop his feet as they brought him closer and closer. He tried to turn around, managing to twist his head to look back desperately at his family, face a rictus of fear and eyes pleading.
The league that had backed off when the portal first appeared were now too far to make it in time. Tim managed to hold himself still for the barest moment on the edge of the portal, watching his siblings running towards him, hands outstretched in a way he ached to mirror.
But it was too late.
With one last desperate look, the collar around his neck tugged sharply, yanking him into the portal, his family’s cries echoing in his ears.
---
Bruce was frozen, staring at the empty space Tim had just vanished into.
Tim.
His son.
Gone, just like that.
Stolen from him, with no warning, no way to plan, to prepare, to find some way to save him.
He should have been better than this, he should have had a contingency for this, he was always prepared and the one time it really mattered all he could do was stand there and watch as something took his child away from him-
He was broken out of his spiral by the sound of Jason’s fist crashing into the ground where he’d landed after trying to grab Tim. He let out a yell that warped harshly through the helmet.
“God damn it!”
A few of the other leaguers looked at him warily, they’d never really clarified his ex-crime lord status, but most were too preoccupied with what they had just witnessed.
A good half of his children were on the floor next to Jason, all of them had been running at the portal, diving to try and catch their brother when the portal had blinked out of existence, taking Tim with it. God.
“B?” Nightwing’s voice cracked, and Bruce could see the desperation in his eyes even through the domino mask. “B, what do we do?”
Bruce felt frozen. He didn’t know. He’d seen a few demons over the years but had never had to deal with something like this. Didn’t even realise this was a risk. A careless oversight, one he should have thought to correct years ago, before it cost him-”
“Father?” the quiet voice of his youngest, sounding so much more unsure than he ever let himself be in costume, interrupted his thoughts.
Ok. Now wasn’t the time for self-deprecation, regrets were no help to him now. Later, he could feel guilt, later he could try and become better, but right now his son needed him to save him, and his children needed him to make a plan, to give them a direction to follow.
“Constantine.” He barked. When you don’t have enough knowledge, find an expert.
The man slinked forward out of the ranks of the shocked Justice League. His normally rumpled appearance had shifted into downright haggard. He was trying to light a cigarette with obviously shaking hands. A breach of protocol, but Bruce allowed it today, the air filters could handle it.
“How do we get him back?”
Constantine exhaled a cloud of smoke, anxiously running his hand through his already messy hair. The man’s twitchiness was not filling Bruce with hope.
“Bats. Look, it’s not that simple. You might not-”
“This is my son you are talking about Constantine.” He growled, pinning the magician with a glare along with with every other bat in the room. “How. Do we get. Him back.”
“I- This stuff is complicated, alright? It works different for each deal. I’d need to see the actual contract, figure out which demon that even was. Cause it wasn’t a weakling, I’ll tell you that much for nothing. Where are the kid’s parents? I’ll have to talk to them, ask em a few things to even have a chance at figuring out anything else.”
Bruce grit his teeth.
“They’re dead.”
Constantine stared at him, taking a deep drag from his cigarette and exhaling it slowly.
“Well. Fuck.”
---
Tim stumbled, falling to his knees as his vision swirled, the red of the portal struggling to resolve into the darker shadows of wherever they were now. Before he got the chance to catch his bearings, the collar around his neck tugged him up and forward again, stumbling and nearly falling before he managed to get his feet under him.
As his vision cleared, he looked around, eyes wide and heart hammering.
The walls were a dark black stone, constructed with roughly hewn bricks that seemed to swallow the light of the flickering torches hanging in brackets, leaving deep pools of shadow. Normally, Tim would be a fan of shadow, as a bat, but these felt wrong, like they were waiting to swallow him along with the rest of the light. Hell, maybe they were.
There were no windows, no way to tell where they were, anything about the world around them, even if they were above ground or not.
The demon was ahead of him, not paying him the slightest bit of attention, the chain was held loosely in one hand, and the demon was completely focused once again on the parchment scroll, muttering to itself as it squinted at the writing.
Tim thought about grabbing the chain and yanking, pulling it right out of the demon’s hand, but his hand refused to even start the motion.
Up ahead of them, another figure rounded a corner into the hallway, stopping and bowing when they saw the demon leading Tim. They were also notably demonic looking, although much shorter than the first demon.
“Greetings, Lord-” They started, followed by a guttural snarl that sounded like it must have torn something in their throat. The demon, demon lord apparently? Nodded and responded with another horrendous sound.
“Is this the tribute?” The smaller demon inquired, tilting its head at Tim, who was not a fan of anything that was happening right now, not at all, especially not the way the demon lord nodded at the question.
“Would you like me to find somewhere to store it in the interim, my lord?” The new demon asked, hands clasped politely in front of it. Like Tim was just a piece of property to be chucked in a storeroom until needed. Which- he gulped, he supposed he was now. Although that begged the question, needed for what?
“No need,” the demon lord brushed off the smaller demon’s offer. “I will just send it in the dungeon.”
What.
Almost before it finished the sentence, the demon lord airily raised a hand and snapped its fingers, and Tim’s surrounding blurred again.
When he got his bearings, he was once again collapsed on his hands and knees, this time with bars in front of him.
He was in a cell, the walls still made of that same black stone, with an arched doorway cut into one of them, blocked off with rough iron bars. The only light came from a sputtering torch he could see down the hall when he pulled himself up and staggered over to the door.
The cell was small, maybe two metres at most on each wall. There was no furniture, just a bucket of water in one corner that was gradually filling with a plink, plink, plink sound from a drip in the roof. The floor was the same hard stone, nothing but some tatty straw to act as padding.
The chain around his neck had vanished, although the collar was still distressingly, unignorably present. And while he couldn’t see the chain or feel it connecting to the front of the collar, he could still feel that it was there. That even if it wasn’t present right now, it was still there, still connecting to the demon’s hand.
He tried to shove a hand through the bars, to search for the lock or, god, anything, but his hand stopped before it could touch the bars.
It wasn’t that there was something in the way, his fingers weren’t pressing against anything, his muscles weren’t straining against some obstacle. It was just that as soon as he got close to the door, the movement stopped, his muscles relaxed, refusing to even try to move any further.
Tim gritted his teeth, tried kicking the door, putting all his anger behind the motion. Same thing, it stopped before making contact.
With a frustrated snarl, Tim stalked the one step over to the wall and slumped against it, the rough stone scraping his uniform as he sank to the floor, hands twisted in his hair and teeth bared in a snarl even as his eyes started to prickle.
He had to get out of here, had to think. There must be some way out, there was always a way out, he just had to find it. He couldn’t- he couldn’t be stuck here, he’d gotten out of worse situations, hadn’t he?
Except-
Except even captured by the worst of his villains, he’d still had his soul. Never belonged to them no matter what they said. Sure, they’d trapped his body, some had even trapped his mind, at least for a bit, but none had taken his fucking soul from him.
He let out a sob, trying to muffle it behind his hand, desperately trying to blink away the tears that were running down his cheeks.
This couldn’t be it, there had to be something he could do. He had to get home, had to get back to- to his family. They must be freaking out, losing their minds trying to get him back. Maybe they’ll be able to rescue him. He just has to hold on. He hadn’t even got the chance to say goodbye, to tell them how- how much he loved them.
He doubled over burying his face in his hands, as sobs wracked his body, his shoulders shaking with the force of them.
This wasn’t fair! He’d been happy. Finally, after so much heartbreak, so much loss and pain and suffering, the family breaking itself apart and coming back together, everything finally felt ok, for one brief moment before it had been snatched away.
He howled, his grief and rage echoing off the stone walls, bouncing back on itself and harmonising with him until the scream tore at his throat and he broke off, coughing.
He collapsed onto his side, curling into a ball and sobbing, and desperately, fervently wishing that this was all a dream. That he would wake up, safe in his bed with his family downstairs.
It took a long time for the tears to stop.
He didn’t believe in wishes after all.