Chapter Text
"Your left," Damian said, in the exact tone he used to announce the weather, and Tim pivoted on the bad angle a half second before a length of rebar would have taken his head off.
"Thanks," Tim said, and drove an elbow into the guy's throat on the follow-through, mostly out of spite.
"I did not do it for you," Damian said, already three steps away, grapple line singing out toward the second floor. "I did it because it would reflect poorly on the operation if you died in a warehouse."
"Love you too, demon spawn."
"Do not call me that over comms."
"Copy," Tim said, grinning behind the domino mask where nobody could see it, and went back to the very stupid job of keeping four very large men in a loading dock from getting anywhere near the civilians huddled behind a stack of shipping pallets.
The building had already come down once, a section of drywall near the north corridor peeling away when the first charge went early, and Nightwing's voice had come through comms sharp and clipped in a way that meant he was actually rattled, which happened maybe twice a year. "Everyone report status, right now, I want confirmed positions."
"Robin, second floor, in pursuit."
"Red Robin, loading dock, civilians secure, four hostiles, I've got it."
"Batman, west corridor, converging on the jammer."
A beat of silence where Cass's voice should have gone. Then, brief: "Perimeter. Clear."
"Good," Dick said, and Tim could hear him exhale even over the static. "Fallback's the alley off Ferris if this goes worse, everybody copy that now in case comms drop."
"Copy," Tim said, and ducked a swing that would have taken his teeth out, came up under the guy's guard, put him down with the kind of clean, economical hit that Bruce had spent four years drilling into him until it stopped being a technique and just became something his body did without asking permission first.
The kid was the problem. Nine, maybe ten, frozen dead center in the loading dock with his sneakers actually rooted to the concrete like his body had made an executive decision his brain hadn't caught up to yet, and the section of roof over the north wall was already groaning in a way Tim didn't like, had been groaning since the first charge, a long low sound like something very large clearing its throat.
"Kid, move," Tim called, already moving himself, and the kid didn't move, because that was the whole problem with kids in a firefight, they froze exactly when freezing was the worst possible choice, and Tim didn't have time to feel anything about that, he just ran the numbers, the roof was coming down in maybe two seconds, the kid was eleven feet away, he could make eleven feet.
He made eleven feet.
He did not, it turned out, have a plan for what happened after that, which was that the roof came down mostly on him instead of the kid, and his knee did something that made a sound he heard through the suit padding, wet and wrong and very bad, and for a second the whole world went white and ringing at the edges the way it did sometimes, and then it came back, and the kid was crying into his mother's shoulder eleven feet away, alive, fine, and Tim was on one knee in the rubble with the other leg screaming at him in a language that didn't have words, just volume.
"Red, position," Dick's voice, tighter now.
"Loading dock. Secure. Civilians clear." True. All of it true. He left out the knee because the knee wasn't relevant to the tactical situation, and also because saying it out loud would make it real in a way it currently wasn't, was currently just information his body had, filed and not yet processed.
"Copy, fallback to secondary in five, we've got a jammer running, can't confirm signal integrity past the..."
The comm didn't fade. It cut, mid-word, the dead flatness of a switch being thrown rather than a signal degrading, and Tim stood there in a haze of drywall dust with smoke starting to curl up off something electrical two rooms over, and listened to a silence that had a very particular, very electronic texture to it, the sound of somebody else's problem becoming his problem.
He gave it thirty seconds, professionally, the way you'd give a delayed elevator thirty seconds before taking the stairs.
Nobody came back online.
"Okay," Tim said, out loud, to the empty loading dock, and started limping toward the fallback point off Ferris, because that was the plan, and plans were the thing you did when nothing else made sense yet.
Nobody was at the fallback point.
He sat down on an overturned dumpster two blocks from a building that was still smoking gently against a sky that hadn't decided whether it wanted to rain, and did the thing he was actually good at, which was think.
His phone, the civilian one, tucked into an inner pocket for exactly this kind of contingency, had a crack running corner to corner and did not respond to the power button, had apparently died sometime during either the first collapse or the second one and he simply hadn't clocked it, too busy keeping a nine-year-old's skull intact to notice his own equipment failing.
His tracker should have still been broadcasting. That was the entire design philosophy behind it, a separate frequency, jammer-resistant, built specifically so a scenario like tonight's couldn't happen.
He checked the little display on his gauntlet anyway. SIGNAL UNAVAILABLE, the same three words it threw about twice a week during ordinary operations, the same three words nobody on the other end had any particular reason to treat as urgent, because Tim's tracker did this constantly, had done it constantly for three years, ever since he'd taught himself, back when being findable by the wrong people had nearly gotten him killed twice in one month, exactly how to make his own signal look like a glitch instead of a location.
He hadn't done it on purpose tonight. He was fairly sure he hadn't. It had just become the kind of thing his hands did under stress without asking his permission, the way some people's jaw tightens, the way some people start biting a thumbnail. He genuinely could not have told you, sitting on that dumpster, whether the dull gray SIGNAL UNAVAILABLE currently glowing on his wrist was real interference or an old reflex nobody, including him, had ever quite managed to switch off.
There was a button. A real one, physical, under a little flip guard on the side of the gauntlet, that would override everything, light up every screen in the cave with something unmistakable, an actual emergency signal, no plausible deniability attached to it at all.
He looked at it for a long time.
"It's a bruised knee," he told the empty street, conversationally, the way you'd explain something to a coworker. "It's a bruised knee and a dead phone. That's not what the button's for."
The street didn't argue with him. Nothing argued with him. He sat there another forty minutes with his back against cold metal, watching the smoke over the wreckage thin out gray and then thinner, watching a couple of fire trucks arrive and then, eventually, leave, and somewhere around the ninety-minute mark he accepted, in the same steady, unpanicked way he accepted most things, that nobody was coming back tonight.
Nobody's fault, probably. Dick had three civilians and a live jammer and Bruce had whoever built the jammer in the first place and Damian had spent the back half of the fight hauling a woman out a second-story window on a grapple line that had already failed once and needed both hands the whole way down. Cass ran perimeter, worked off a completely different feed of information than the rest of them, hadn't been told to specifically check the loading dock because nobody had thought to specifically tell her to, because Tim didn't require checking on, Tim was the one who didn't require checking on, that was practically his whole professional reputation, four years running.
He got up. His knee did not appreciate this decision and made its feelings known the whole way through the movement.
He pulled the map out of his belt instead of thinking about any of that further, an old gas station find, picked up completely unrelated to tonight, three weeks folded soft along the creases, because Tim Drake had kept a paper map on him since he was nine years old and it had never once occurred to him to stop.
He smoothed it flat against his thigh under the orange wash of a dying streetlight and found the town, small and gray on the page, and traced two fingers out toward the distant shape of Gotham, the way he'd trace a suspect's likely route, unhurried, methodical, the one part of tonight that still felt entirely like something he was choosing rather than something that was happening to him.
Eight hundred miles, give or take, depending on road versus rail versus whatever he ended up stitching together out of both.
No car. Forty-one dollars folded into a belt pocket he'd never expected to actually need. A protein bar with a wrapper gone soft at the seams. A knee that had opinions.
He wrote the route out along the bottom margin of the map in pencil, the stub of one that had been rattling around his belt for weeks, small and deliberate, the handwriting of someone doing math to keep from doing anything else. Distance. A pace adjusted down for the knee, adjusted down again once he was honest with himself about how bad the knee actually was. Towns big enough along the way to guarantee a bus station.
At the very bottom corner, almost before he'd decided to, he wrote, Owe: whoever's got a coat I can borrow tonight. Settle later.
He hadn't borrowed a coat yet. Didn't know yet if anyone would offer one. Writing the debt down before he'd incurred it was, if he let himself look at it directly, a strange thing to do, so he didn't look at it directly. He folded the map back along its worn lines, tucked it into his belt beside the useless dead phone, and got up off the dumpster, testing weight on the bad leg, hissing through his teeth at the way it buckled and then, grudgingly, held.
He looked back once. The smoke had gone from black to gray to almost nothing, thinning out over a skyline he'd learned the shape of only that afternoon and would forget again inside a week.
"Okay," he said out loud, mostly because the sound of his own voice was better than the quiet. "Solo egress. Unfamiliar terrain, moderate injury, limited resources." He started walking, matching his stride to something he thought he could hold for a while, dragging the bad leg a half beat behind the good one. "Objective: return to base under own power."
He didn't say the rest of it, the part that wasn't a mission report at all, the part that went something closer to without anyone finding out how long it took them to notice, because saying that part out loud, even to an empty road in a town he was already forgetting the name of, felt like handing someone a knife.
Somewhere around mile three, knee screaming, hands going numb in the cold, he started laughing, quiet and mostly humorless, and didn't examine that either.
"Fifty bucks," he told the dark, "says nobody clocks it before Sunday."
Nobody answered. He hadn't expected them to. He kept walking.