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Nightwing doesn’t hesitate when he gets the distress beacon. He makes a beeline for the nearest Zeta, stumbles through a sunlit squeeze that soaks and shakes him, and bursts into a wall of Gotham gloom. His destination thrums to the balls of his feet like a livewire—Docks—and Nightwing moves.
The air is dust and metal and cold that he sucks down greedily as he jumps across rooftops and grapples from block to block. He’s closer than Batman, but not close enough. Each step feels like quicksand. Knitting wounds tug and pierce his body, threatening to slow him down. Nightwing doesn’t allow that. How long has it been since the beacon lit up a dangerous, heart-seizing red?
When he finally drops onto the water-licked pier, an anchor drags Nightwing’s heart to his toes.
No, he moans internally.
Because he’s not too late.
Except he is.
“You’re not the Batman,” says the woman. She’s young and the bodysuit she wears shows off an athletic build. Her hair falls in neat coils, her nails are clean and cut, makeup and jewelry conservative. She’d be attractive, if it weren’t for her expression—pinched and pinned and pasted into an ugly sneer.
But Nightwing isn’t looking at her. “Step away from him,” he demands.
“The note said I’d return him if the Batman made it before the timer ended,” the woman says. She pulls a pocket watch from her suit and holds it up. Nightwing can’t make out the numbers with the distance, but his gut wrenches anyway. “And he’s not here.”
“You don’t want to do this,” Nightwing insists. He takes a step forward, only to freeze as the woman’s hand shifts, crawling closer to the control panel at her back. The control panel that moves the crane. The crane with the chain trailing to the dock’s edge, where a net—
“Except I do,” the woman says. “Batman had his chance—he didn’t care. He doesn’t care about the children. My children—and he doesn’t deserve. To. Keep. His.”
And then Nightwing knows it’s not just the sneer ruining her looks, because the woman smiles as her hand slams against a button, and she’s just as hideous.
Nightwing moves when she does, but something in the crane releases, and the net hanging from it is plunged into the depths of Gotham bay. Inside, Robin—bound, gagged, with wide eyes and bent limbs and split lips—is helpless to stop the murky slog from swallowing him whole.
Nightwing doesn’t yell. He doesn’t bother with the woman. The only thing on his mind is reaching Robin. He races to the dock’s edge, yanking a rebreather from his suit and smashing it between his teeth as he leaps into the waves.
Cold. Dark. Wet. The sensations are only noted as obstacles to his goal. Nightwing cuts into the depths, grateful only that they are in a more shallow area. He can barely see the bottom, but reaches a silty layer where sludge and trash are so thick, he knows he’s close.
Visibility is near zero. Nightwing’s hand comes up, presses a known spot, and the waves around him turn to thermal readings. He twists around himself, seeing blues and grays and colds that slosh and mix his eyeline into a distorted blur of failure. Robin is red. Robin is red and Nightwing should be able to see red. Where is the red?
Nightwing’s lungs spasm and he sucks a breath that pools in his lungs and drips down his throat like nausea. He bends around himself, scouring the sea as something dark and mildew crawls down his spine—
There.
Nightwing closes the distance between him and the warp of red-hot and white. It’s only when he’s right on top of it that he sees Robin. His limbs are lax and his body drifts to the tugging of shallow currents as the coils of rope and net surround him a weightless web. He’s not stolen by hungry currents or swallowed by deep blues and darker distance. Nightwing’s found him.
What’s left of him.
The adhesive gag has worked its way off in the water. A bolt of alarm ricochets through Nightwing when he sees Robin’s mouth is open.
In several strokes he reaches Robin’s side, yanks him free of the snarled netting, and gathers his weightless body against his own. There’s no point to the rebreather—Nightwing snakes a hand under Robin’s back. Kicking and using his free arm, he pulls them to the surface.
The bay water shatters and sucks at them, roiling on all sides as Nightwing drags them into the air.
His head whips around, scanning the dockside. The woman is gone. No sign of any person according to the thermal readings still showing on his domino. Nightwing doesn’t spare the time or movement to turn them off, even if the distorted mix of colors clouds his vision. The priority is Robin.
Even above water, his body is motionless, tugged at the mercy of lapping currents. Nightwing adjusts his grip so he’s behind and under Robin, one arm wrapped around his upper body. The waves buoy Robin to their top so Nightwing can focus his own energy on swimming parallel to the docks.
The waves bring them closer to land, but it’s Nightwing who aims them to the shoreline of gray, slimed bank, where trash and rubbish swirl in shallow, silted pools. It’s more accessible than the dock itself, where Nightwing doubts he could find a way to scale mold-slick and sea-scrum with Robin’s dead weight.
When a mire expanse of sand knocks his feet, Nightwing switches to walking. He lifts Robin against his chest, arm under his thighs, in a hold he’s too old for. With his other hand, Nightwing cuts through the binding. He discards the ties into the sea as Robin’s sea-salted tangle of dark hair brushes against the underside of his chin. Hurriedly, Nightwing carries him to the bank, sparring crucial seconds to scramble past the scatter of rubbish and grime. Then, he lowers Robin to the sand.
“Robin?” Nightwing croaks, one hand lowering his head, the other presses urgently against his suit, searching for a rise and fall. Nothing. Nightwing doesn’t waste time. With deft fingers he removes the upper portion of the Robin costume and its kevlar. Without pause, Nightwing dives into compressions.
One, two, three…twenty-eight, twenty-nine, thirty.
Two rescue breaths.
Jason’s lips and skin are cold like marble, blues and purple and pale.
He resumes compressions.
Each cycle is too-long and too-short and Nightwing has to swallow down the panic sticking in his throat and shaking down his fingertips. He bundles it all up—the fear, the anger, the strangling grip of anticipation—and shoves it away. Nightwing is the heels of his palms, pressing against his little brother’s rib cage, and lungs giving to smaller lungs. Nothing else.
How many minutes are they there? Laying in the grit and grime of Gotham, teetering between two outcomes like toes on a cliff-edge. Nightwing performs CPR with textbook efficiency. This has to work—it can’t not work. He doesn’t want to think about wrapping this boy in Robin’s uniform colors—his colors—like a shroud. Bringing him back to Alfred. To Bruce.
They wouldn’t…how could anyone survive that?
C’mon, Nightwing thinks. C’mon!
And then Jason moves.
It’s a jerking, spluttering movement, body shaking with involuntary spasms. Water passes his blue lips, sluicing down his cheeks, his nose.
Nightwing lets out a breath, heavy, shuttered, as he tilts Jason on his side, one hand resting against his shoulder, the other running up and down his back as he ejects mouthfuls of dirty water around sharp, painful gagging noises and gasps.
“You’re okay,” Nightwing tells him. “It’s okay, you’re okay.”
Jason shudders and makes a reflexive noise. Something plaintive and hurting that Nightwing’s never heard him make. Nightwing isn’t blind—he knows the kid had a hard time of it, before Bruce snatched him up and dressed him as a crimefighter. But Jason has always been so smart, so charismatic, so happy when he’s around. Seeing him drenched and cold and struggling to breath digs like barbed pins around Nightwings body. He holds him tighter.
“Get it all out,” Nightwing urges.
Jason makes the first sign that he understands anything Nightwing is saying with a small nod. He’s otherwise limp.
“B is on his way,” Nightwing tells him, even as rechecks his own active beacon. The quicker Batman finds them, the better. Jason needs warmth and medical help and so many other things Nightwing doesn’t have sitting cold and wet on Gotham’s gray, sludgy beach. “We’ll have you back home soon—Alfred’s going to get you cleaned up and warm and dry and then you can rest up until you’re all better—it’s going to be okay.”
The stream of choked-on water ends and Jason just shivers. Nightwing pulls him up, resting against his own chest, and wraps him tight in Robin’s cape. It’s soaked through and gritty with sand but Nightwing decides it’s better than the biting cold of Gotham air.
“Y-you…” Jason coughs.
“Shh,” Nightwing says, petting the hair plastered across his forehead away from the lenses of his mask.
But Jason is determined to say something, head-strong as always. “You said…said home.”
It takes a moment for Nightwing to realize what he’s talking about. Home. He had called the manor that, hadn’t he? It’s the first time since he left. Since Bruce—
No. Nightwing pushes that mess away. This is about Jason.
“Yeah buddy,” Nightwing says, barely managing to hold Jason any closer. “We’re gonna get you home.”