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Twenty-seven hours. Tim had been sedated and hooked up to a ventilator for twenty-seven hours.
He looked so small, ensnared in wires and tubes on the hospital bed. Monitors surrounded him, sentinels alerting the slightest change to his battered body.
And battered he was. Bruce had found Tim in a puddle of blood and shattered glass, heartbeat so week Bruce needed to remove his gloves to feel its absence.
In that moment he was a man in two places. Cradling a broken boy in a warehouse in Ethiopia. Performing CPR on a sidewalk in San Francisco.
One man held a body that shuddered and stilled. The other called out for Superman.
Bruce didn't remember the super-speed flight to Gotham General (”We can't explain his presence here, he needs to be treated in Gotham.”) He came back to himself in a waiting room, in civilian clothes with a journalist at his side and a carefully crafted explanation on his lips.
Twenty-seven hours later Bruce sat in the ICU at Tim's bedside.
He was supposed to be safe in San Francisco. Red Hood had shown sole interest in Gotham, his ruthless vendetta against Robin made no sense.
Dick's analysis of the scene at Titan’s Tower matched the meticulous nature of Red Hood’s rise to infamy. He was caught on surveillance one time, saluting the camera before the lockdown kicked in.
The fight spanned rooms and floors, rubble the only evidence of a drawn out encounter. For a time, Tim had clearly held his own. Bruce allowed himself a faint, proud smile at the thought. He'd have to tell Tim that when he woke up.
Because this time his partner would survive.
A small, traitorous part of Bruce's mind imagined a different boy in the hospital bed. He reigned that part of himself in with difficulty, focusing on the sound of mechanically measured breaths.
Red Hood, architect of Robin’s suffering. Someone who waltzed into Gotham like he owned the place, practically annexing Crime Alley in the process.
Someone who, somehow, got his hands on Jason Todd’s security credentials. Someone sick enough to impersonate his son in the service of calculated violence.
Someone who beat Tim within an inch of his life and clearly wanted Bruce to witness that last inch disappear.
Most of Tim's excessive list of injuries matched with a fight come near to a draw. The outlier, of course, was the mass of bandages and suturing that made up Tim's upper torso.
Yes, there was blunt force trauma from the fall. Red Hood’s apparent choice to shoot Tim in the chest with a grappling gun had Bruce's hands shaking with rage.
But when Bruce began to perform chest compressions, Tim's ribs hadn't snapped as expected. They'd ground beneath his hands, as if they'd already been broken.
As if someone else had performed CPR until Bruce was close enough to find Robin's body.
It was that fact that had Bruce seething as he sat vigil. After everything Red Hood had done, butchering Gotham's underbelly, using Jason’s name as a tool, putting Tim on the brink of death.
He'd made sure Bruce would be there for Tim's last breath. Another Robin leaving Gotham to die in Bruce's arms.
Had Superman not come so quickly, that would've been the case.
But he did.
And it wasn't.
Tim was still on a ventilator, but the doctors were tentatively optimistic about his chances. He was a strong kid. Bruce knew he'd wake up.
And when he did, Batman would find Red Hood. He'd find the bastard, and exact the revenge his sons so deserved.