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If he survived the next ten hours, Tim would swear on Batman, Nightwing, and his collection of Robin trading cards to never, ever go on a mission with Jason ever again.
Especially not if the man promised that it would be “easy” and “over before you know it”.
It didn’t matter that Tim owed him for that time with the clones. Or that Dick had encouraged their spending time with each other as a form of “brotherly bonding”. It was entirely unimportant that Jason had rightfully claimed this to be a human trafficking case big enough for the two of them to leave Gotham.
Tim would never do it again.
If he survived, that was.
Currently, his chances were about 50/50. If Tim closed both eyes and wished really hard.
“Shit.” Jason’s distorted voice reached him through the maelstrom of his own disorganized thoughts. “Are you still with me, shithead?”
Tim kept his eyes stubbornly closed. Breathing was easier that way. As was ignoring the panic growing steadily in his stomach. The ground was wet, and it wasn’t raining. Tim counted to ten. He refused to acknowledge how the gravel was steadily growing wetter somewhere below his waist. The pain was thankfully still blocked by the adrenaline cursing through his veins. Small mercies.
“Hey!” Gloved hands tapped his cheeks none too gently. “Look at me— shit, Batman is going to kill me.”
“Worse.” Tim opened his eyes to glare up at Jason. The red helmet was blurry, swimming in and out of focus as Tim blinked slowly. While his vision didn’t clear, it was still good enough to see Jason flinch back at Tim’s sudden return to the living (for now). “Nightwing will get you.”
Hiding his shock behind a quick parameter check (they were still at the docks in Norfolk, only now about three warehouses deeper in the stack of shipping containers and shadow drenched heavy machinery where they encountered the surprising amount of goons and their bazookas), Jason waved his hand dismissively. “How would that be scarier?”
“Nightwing can burst a watermelon with his thighs. What do you think would happen to your head if he tried that on your melon?”
“I wear a helmet for a reason.” Jason frowned down at something outside of Tim’s rather limited field of vision. Basic math told him his gaze was directed somewhere on Tim’s lower body. The bad feeling in his gut intensified. “And I can do that too. Dick’s not special for that.”
“But can you do a double-twister while—” Tim trailed off, attention dragged away from their useless banter by searing pain steadily growing unignorable. With a burst, it raced up his left leg, the sensation as sudden as it was unsurprising. His gloved fingers dug into the gravel. His lip stung when he tried to stifle his gasp. It was useless anyway.
He had known the pain would come. Still, it somehow always caught him unaware.
Cold sweat collected behind his cowl and gear, his costume a set of restraints holding him down. Poly-kevlar weaves might be great for maneuverability in battle, but lying on the cold ground, aware of his own mortality, he felt as if someone had shackled him. It didn’t help that Jason had reacted to his sudden shift in demeanor by pressing his hips down with one of his stupidly solid arms.
Tim was a pinned butterfly, only someone had mistakenly put the needles in before he was dead.
“Damn,” he grunted. “Is my leg still there?”
Because of the damn helmet, Tim couldn’t actually see Jason’s facial expressions, but even so, he knew the look of utter stupidity currently adorning his maybe-brother’s face. The growing silence didn’t help either.
“Jason?”
“Well,” the voice modulator hid most of his real hesitation. “Most of it.”
“Most of it is still there?” Tim asked, “Or most of it is gone?”
“Uh.”
“Dick is going to rip your balls off.” He had to close his eyes again, a wave of vertigo crashing down on him even lying down. A shiver trickled down his spine, like an army of angry spiders. “And then feed them to you. And then— only then, is he going to explode your head with his thighs.”
“I am aware.” At least annoyance translated well through the modulator. “Which is why I am trying to save your stupid life.”
“I always thought…” The gravel underneath him kept tipping sideways. Pressing his palms flat against the tiny stones, he had to focus to remain lying flat. The tingling in his extremities certainly didn’t help. “Bruce always talked about you being well read.”
“Bruce doesn’t know shit.” That was all the warning Tim got before agony swallowed him whole. Jason must have tightened the tourniquet on his leg some more. Probably in an attempt to stench the heavy blood flow that he couldn’t see but knew was there.
Tim was well aware that he was displaying all the symptoms of extreme blood loss.
The world a tilting mess, his own breath a caged bird, reality seemed impossibly far away. His thoughts spiraled with the dizzying chaos of the bloodless – the pins and needles in his extremities promised that his situation was steadily approaching dire.
Even his heart was trying to frantically escape his chest, but the racing heartbeat was almost comforting. A steady bum-bum-bum that echoed through his head, fast and frighteningly alive.
As long as he could hear that, he wasn’t dead just yet.
Tim liked not being dead.
The ringing in his ears drowned out everything but his own thrumming pulse. It took a while before the agony died back down, every nerve ending in his left leg raw and screaming. He didn’t even know how much of it was still there. He just knew the pain.
It was intimate and all-consuming. It wrapped around him like a lover, only its caresses left trails of fire on his sensitive skin instead of comfort.
If he were a civilian, he could pass out right now. He could give into the shock and the agony, close his eyes, and let unconsciousness carry him away.
Unfortunately, he was Red Robin.
He was trained to withstand worse.
It was a battle against the throes of agony, a fight to return back to the surface of awareness.
The buzzing died down, and the first thing Tim heard was Jason.
“–and it’s not like I’m some pretentious shit. I have class conscience, you know? But so did Shakespeare, and he wrote some shit that’s still applicable some 500 years later. ‘Your fat king and your lean beggar’. I mean, I’m no Hamlet, but we all felt like that at some point in our life, right?”
“What…” Tim’s mouth was dry, his tongue cast out of lead. “The fuck are you talking about?”
“Oh.” A beat of silence, and then, “You’re still alive.”
“Unfortunately.”
“Yeah.” Jason was blurry above Tim, just a red smear of pain against the dark night sky. Every inhale tasted of smoke; every exhale felt a little bit like giving up on life. “This is gonna suck for you.”
“This already sucks for me.” His eyelids were unfathomably heavy, the fingertips numb. “When did you start that fire?”
“Oh, those were bombs I planted on a timer before the start of the mission.” Jason shrugged. “Turns out they’re great distractions. They should buy us enough time to get out of range of the jammers so we can call for a med evac.”
“Ah…” Bile brushed against his esophagus. It took more strength than Tim had to swallow it back down. Gross. “So that’s why it’s gonna suck.”
“Yeah.” Jason checked on Tim’s leg again. “Sorry.”
Tim should be more concerned about their situation. About his situation, in particular. It could very well be that he just lost half his toes to some stupid trap meant for Jason. He should be freaking the fuck out. There was blood all over the ground, and all of it was his! But Tim was too tired to freak out. Instead, he whimpered when Jason’s gloved fingers brushed against something that felt decidedly open. Like a part of him that should not be there for the public to see. Something fleshy and human and pulsing.
Tim sucked in a deep breath in order to keep from throwing up.
“I’ll have to carry you.” At least Jason sounded actually apologetic.
“No shit, Sherlock,” said Tim, and it would have been more impressive if he weren’t panting like a dog.
“For someone who is one limb down, you sure are a sarcastic bitch.”
“Why do you— why do you think Ra’s al Ghul likes me?” Tim smiled, though it was an ugly thing.
It was just fitting.
His insides felt all wrong. It was as if his heartbeat filled every inch of his body, pressing into every nook and cranny, until even his injured leg was just an echo of the bum-bum-bum of his heart. His chest was really tight, the tingling up to his elbows by now.
His fingers were numb.
So were his toes.
Probably a good thing, considering he was probably missing most of those.
His thoughts kept circling that detail. It was strange to think. Most people had ten toes. Losing a few wasn’t the end of the world. Quite a few heroes had lost a finger or a toe here or there. It was honestly strange that it didn’t happen more.
It was just…
Tim had always had ten toes.
And now he wasn’t sure if he even still had two legs.
Jason wouldn’t answer him.
“Jason…” His voice was strangely breathy. Huh. Yeah, it was kinda hard to draw in a deep breath. Tim hadn’t even noticed. “How much— my leg?”
“That’s a problem for Later Tim.”
“But—”
“One. Two. Three. Up we go, idiot.” There wasn’t any real warning. Jason simply bent down and picked Tim up. One arm behind his upper back, the other just below his ass, it wasn’t quite the fireman carry they had all learned from Batman.
Tim didn’t want to think about why Jason had to adapt how to carry him.
Then again, the sudden change in position made it hard to think at all. Tim clenched his eyes closed against the onslaught of blurry images. Shipping containers turned into red-blue streaks of color, the night sky a vortex trying to swallow him up. It was safer with his eyes closed.
Less confusing.
His stomach lurched anyway.
His leg screamed.
It was getting harder and harder to ignore.
With each hurried step Jason took away from the shipyard, the force of the impact traveled through Tim’s body and hit him right in the open wound of what was left of his leg. A few bandwidths down from his hip, he felt as if someone was pushing a fork into an electrical outlet every couple of seconds. Only the outlet was his thigh bone. And the fork was raw, naked nerve endings.
It was probably just his imagination, but Tim swore he could feel drops of blood run down the length of his massacred leg only to drip down onto the ground.
He was too afraid to open his eyes and check.
Jason’s panting breath mixed with his own gasps for air, his heartbeat strained now that he had lost the steady support of the gravel against his back. His limbs were dead, even the ones not actively lost. Tim tried to curl his fingers, but they wouldn’t react.
There was not enough blood left in his body for panic to spike his blood pressure.
“I’m—” It was a mumble of disjointed syllables. “I’m no’ feelin’ so good.”
“Fuck.” It was comforting to hear Jason panic when Tim could not. “We’re almost out of range of the jammers, Tim.”
“You… you said my name.”
“Don’t tell Dick. Or Cass.” Jason laughed. It sounded wet through the endless buzzing of the world twisting and turning away from Tim. “They’ll think I’m growing soft on you.”
“Ew.”
“Exactly.”
Jason must have jumped, the sudden feeling of airlessness followed by the thumb of the impact enough to steal Tim’s breath away. For a long moment, he heard nothing after that, the world consumed by burning red agony.
Tim was ready to give up.
He might not want to die, but even heroes had to go to sleep.
Faintly, as if through a radio transmission from a hundred years ago, he heard Jason’s voice.
"Medevac to Norfolk, Code Red. Fuck, I repeat: medevac to Norfolk, Code Red. Call Batman.”
Who knew, maybe Jason had a heart after all.