Chapter Text
When Tim wakes up, he has no idea where he is.
There's a slab of stone beneath his back, and his head is spinning; even before he opens his eyes, the world swirls in sickening, dizzying loops like drunken partygoers on a dance floor. When he does open them, he regrets it immediately; the nausea swoops in to blindside him. An instant later, he's leaning over the edge of this stone not-really-a-bed to retch onto the floor, hands shaking where they cling to the edge of the platform.
Nothing much comes up — water, and bile, and the reminder that he's been too busy the last day and a half to eat much of anything — but the nausea stays, a lingering pit in his stomach.
"Ugh," Tim croaks, because he knows what a concussion feels like, thanks very much. This is not his first rodeo, but he does his due diligence, running his fingers lightly along his skull to check for damage. He finds it in the back, hidden by his hair: a goose egg that makes him hiss in pain and yank his hand away.
When he blinks down at his fingers, he sees that they're bloody. Great.
Self-assessment complete, Tim peers blearily around at the space: a small room, all stone, with a single opening that leads into what looks like a hallway. There's something heavy and drifting in the air, like smoke, or mist, or one of Scarecrow's more airborne experiments.
Even better.
Tim can't quite seem to remember how he got here, or what happened to his head, but he's in his uniform, at least. On the downside, that means that whoever grabbed him had it out for Robin, which indicates a different caliber of villain than the sort of jerks who might try for a Timothy Drake kidnap attempt. On the plus side, it means he's got armor and his utility belt. At this point, he'll take whatever he can get.
First order of business: see how cut off he is.
Tim toggles on his comms, and he rasps, "Hey, can anybody hear me?"
There's nothing — just static, echoing in his ears. Figures.
He gives it an extra second or two, just in case Babs is working on a fix, but no luck. Thirty seconds become a minute, and still nothing.
"Okay," says Tim. "That's okay. You got this."
The words hang sort of weirdly in the empty space, flat and echo-less. He swallows, and his throat clicks with the motion, dry.
Tim shoves himself up to sitting, and instantly he kind of wishes he hadn't. He kind of wishes he'd just stayed down for a minute or two, but that isn't exactly an option here. The world spins wildly around him, and his head throbs like it's an egg about to split down the middle, and for a second he lists hard against the wall, leaning there and just breathing.
When a long few seconds pass and the world more or less returns to stillness and he doesn't puke again, he starts to move.
He keeps one hand on the wall — the hallway is swimming around him in a way that's kind of making him feel seasick — and keeps his eye on the proverbial prize. The prize, this time, is getting back to the Belfry, taking a bunch of ibuprofen, and lying down on the couch for half a day until the throbbing in his head subsides. The more he thinks about it, the more amazing it sounds.
So he keeps moving, every step unsteadier than the last; he keeps putting one foot in front of the other, wobbling and off balance.
There are noises up ahead, strange and grinding, and something about them tickle the back of Tim's mind. That's a sound he ought to know; that's a sound, he thinks, that he's dreamed about recently.
Then it clicks, and the certainty of it settles into his bones as ice-cold terror. It's the grinding sound of stone-on-stone, the whirring of automated metal that heralds the blade traps the Court of Owls nearly killed him with just two weeks ago.
For a second, Tim stands there, frozen, hand on the wall. Even at full mobility, he'd barely gotten away from those things alive, a deep gash up the side of his calf and a slice across one shoulder
Both had required stitches. Either one of them, if he hadn't moved quite so quickly, might have removed a limb or worse.
It's fine, he tells himself; he hears them, this time. He knows what's coming. If he reaches the blades and the world still hasn't stopped moving, the ache in his head tamping down on his usual pinpoint precision, he can always rest a little while before he proceeds.
So naturally, that's exactly when he hears the sound.
It's a strange sort of a sound, like a person trying to talk but not quite able to form words. It raises the hair up all along the backs of Tim's arms, because it almost sounds like — his voice.
It sounds just like Tim.
He turns, heart cold with dread in the center of his chest, and he finds that the voice sounds like him because it is him.
This other Tim is crawling down from the wall with all the sinuous grace of a Talon, coming to a crouch on the floor. There's something not quite right about the tilt of his own head, something not quite proper about the stance.
He can see that his own eyes are dull and lifeless, fixed on him with a focus that belies the blank emptiness behind the stare.
Tim doesn't take a step back, but it's a near thing.
Already his mind is running on ahead, considering possibilities. Is it a hallucination? A convincing face sculpt? A clone? With the strange mist in the air, he can only suspect that it's the first, but he can't say for certain. He can't even say for sure that there's really anything here.
The person wearing his face lurches forward. For half a second, Tim's mind conjures up a memory: himself sprawled out on the couch in Dick's Blüdhaven apartment, midway through a weekend horror movie marathon, Dick explaining that the common practice in Japan for low budget movies used to be to hire actors trained in classical Japanese theater, people who knew how to control their body movements to make them look unnatural long before CGI made it possible to adjust that through technology.
The person in the hallway moves like that, strange and jerky, skittering interspersed with unusual stops. The creature with his face is bleeding from a wound to the temple; his arm hangs at an odd angle. He scuttles forward, and forward, and forward, and Tim has to steel himself not to retreat.
Instead, he fumbles at his waist for the bo staff — snaps it open to extend and faces himself head on.
"Don't come any closer," says Tim, and he tries to make it sound dangerous, sound like a word of warning for anyone with enough sense to heed it. This creature wearing Tim's face, whatever else it is, does not seem to qualify.
It crouches low to the ground, like a predator preparing to strike; when it moves, it surges, the motion smooth and rushing as the crest of a wave. Tim gets his bo up in time to block the first blow, but only just; there are claws all in metal on the creature's gloves, and as they catch along the bo staff and drag, a ghastly squeal rends the air. The second strike comes faster still, darting in toward his side; the third is an upward wrench of those curved claws that seems intent on slicing a line through the skin of his neck, just over the jugular.
Tim blocks all three, but with his head reeling, he barely manages. The creature with his face is fast, and without meaning to, he finds himself giving ground.
He can hardly get a blow in edgewise; whatever this thing is, it's faster than he is, even at his most capable. He takes a gash across one cheekbone; a second lays open his calf. The gush of blood that surges from the wound is sudden and hot, enough of it that Tim knows instantly that it's a problem.
When he stumbles backward, it won't take his weight.
Tim hisses a breath of alarm; he reaches, automatic, for his utility belt, drawing out a smoke grenade. A second later it hits the floor, and a thick gray cover billows out, obscuring hallway and creature alike from view.
He can still hear it moving — hear it scrabbling along the floor toward him. He lurches backward, automatic — turns to run.
His training as Robin has covered a wide array of situations. One of the very first, the one that Bruce insisted was the most important one he'd ever learn, was when to retreat.
Tim retreats now, footsteps that are usually fleet and graceful stumbling and uneven; the leg of his tights is wet, and he can hear the splatter with every step he takes, more blood than he can afford to lose.
He needs to ditch this thing and find a place to patch himself up. He needs to find someplace to lick his wounds or he's never going to get out of here alive.
Behind him, he feels the soft rush of air, as of claws catching at nothing. He doesn't think; he only moves, darting sideways and out of range.
His shoulder strikes a wall, and he feels around it: a corner, and he uses it now for cover, ducking around the edge for what little protection it might afford.
It's then, and only then, that he registers how close that grinding noise has become, the shifting of stone and metal, blades he's forgotten about entirely in his push to get away.
Tim doesn't see them in the cloud of smoke; the thick, choking gray fog hides the flash of metal from view. He can feel them, though, sense the shift in the air, feel the rumble in the floor.
He sucks in a breath and turns back the other way, but there in the smoke he catches a glimpse of a silhouette: himself, but not quite. Himself but dead, resurrected into something else entirely.
He ducks the next swipe, and he sidesteps the second, and he dodges the third. His heart slams in his chest; his leg barely holds his weight.
The first of the blades bites into his elbow, turning and churning, ever in motion. Its rotation catches him on the edge and draws him in, and Tim just has time to say "No —" high and frightened, before he's dragged into the trap.
He feels the impacts, one after the next, hard and inexorable, nothing he can fight. There's a splatter, and a thud, and he slides sideways with nothing to support him
Distantly, dizzily, he thinks he's lost a leg. Even more distantly, he's aware that at some point he's started to scream.
Then, abruptly, there's a crunch — and after that, nothing.
When Tim wakes up, he knows exactly where he is.
There's a slab of stone beneath his back, and his head is spinning; even before he opens his eyes, the world swirls in sickening, dizzying loops like drunken partygoers on a dance floor.
Strangely — impossibly — nothing hurts except the persistent throbbing ache of his head, a goose egg he's already checked on, but not here. Not now.
All those too-deep gashes have vanished; the blood soaking through his shirt has evaporated. He has all of his limbs.
Somehow, he can still feel the bite of the blades.
Tim shudders, involuntary — shoves himself up to sitting and then to standing, head reeling, squared off to fight against an enemy that isn't here. Nobody is here, except for him.
He wobbles like a newborn colt; he's half afraid to touch the wall, even to hold himself up, some paranoid part of his brain whispering that it will trigger another trap, but it doesn't. He leans there, breathing hard, for long moments.
He's got to move. He knows that.
But he knows, too, what lies down the path in front of him. He doesn't believe in omens or premonitions, but whatever that was, it felt real. He still feels the phantom pain shivering through his limbs.
"Hello?" he says into the comms, just in case. "Anybody read me?"
Nothing, of course.
Tim takes a steadying breath, and he sets his jaw.
Then he turns toward the hallway — and he pauses.
Because where before there was only blank wall, someone has hung a photograph. It's broad and glossy, properly mounted as though for an exhibition. A few years back, Tim had prepped a few of his photos like this, strung them with wire, gone early to the Gotham Museum of Contemporary Art to hang them in the rotating exhibit, where he'd won a spot in a competition through his school.
He'd wanted his parents to come, but they'd been out of the country at the time. Tim had gone alone instead, meticulous as he arranged his work for the grand opening.
This looks like that, almost. He recognizes his own efforts in the glossy sheen of the print, and the attentive mounting job, and the careful angle of the photo itself.
But the image on the wall isn't Gotham at night. It's not long shadows and aesthetic fire escapes and city lights.
It's him, dying.
Him, with blades biting into skin.
Him with a leg on the floor, the damage so brutally sudden that he hasn't had time to fall over yet.
Him with his mouth wide in a scream of denial that, in the end, did nothing at all.