Chapter Text
Tim taps his fingernails along the casing of his camera on his walk back home. It’s a warm night—a little muggy in Bristol, where the ocean doesn’t have quite the same effect it does on the rest of Gotham’s weather.
Since this is the part of his walk that has sidewalks, closer to the bus stop than it is to the wide, empty grounds of Drake Manor, Tim can click through the pictures on his camera without tripping. He’d taken a gamble, after he checked the news this afternoon: there was a buzz of activity down in Tricorner Yards—something up in the Iceberg Lounge, though the broadcaster hadn’t said what. With the fuss over the four drug manufacturers Batman closed down last week, Tim had guessed the police would be more involved than usual.
He'd snuck up to a building near the police precinct where the Bat-Signal is kept, praying that Batman had changed his route for the night. Tim clicks through tonight’s many pictures of Batman and Robin, some including Commissioner Gordon’s silhouette beside them.
They don’t often stop to talk with him, not unless they need to. But when they do, if Tim realizes in time, he can get crystal-clear pictures—so many of his others are blurry or partially obscured by whatever Tim’s hiding behind.
It was Jason’s first night meeting the Commissioner. Tim stops walking to peer in at the tiny display screen of his camera—he’s pretty sure he got a shot of Jason grinning wide enough to show two crooked teeth, but he’ll need to put the files on his computer to check properly.
Tim grins to himself. Jason smiles a lot more, and always wide, like he’s having the time of his life and he’s about to make that everybody’s problem. It’s a sharp contrast to how Dick was with Bruce, for almost the entire year-ish Tim followed the two of them—he’s got newspaper photographs of some of the early Robin’s beaming face, but none of his own. There’s a lot more yelling in Tim’s pictures.
Tim starts walking again, letting his camera rest back against his chest. He’ll be back earlier than usual, which means he can go through the photos in the morning. It’s nearing eleven when he finally gets more than halfway to Drake Manor, which is where the sidewalk stops.
He can cut across his own yard when he gets there, but he’s always careful to not go across his neighbors’ yards. That leaves him stuck walking down the narrow dirt-and-gravel gap between the grass and the road, meaning he pauses and steps to the side when he sees headlights in the distance.
When he first started looking for Batman and Robin – when he realized who they were – he used to sit at the edge of the Drakes’ property and watch the cars that went by, to see if one of them was the Batmobile. It feels similar, standing off to the side of the road as he waits for the old gray Jeep to pass.
Except it doesn’t.
It takes a few seconds for Tim to realize that the car’s slowing down, its headlights not dimming as the light sweeps over him. It takes him a few seconds longer to register the significance of that.
He backs up further, away from the road. He’s on a swath of empty grass, but there’s the dark shape of some hedges, about twenty yards behind him. Tim backs towards them slowly at first, but rapidly as the car slows to a near-stop.
Three of the doors on the Jeep open. Tim watches just long enough to see figures in dark clothes start pushing their way out of the vehicle, before he turns and starts running.
There’s a shout. Tim doesn’t remember what neighbor’s yard he’s in, not sure he knows their name, but he needs to find help. Now.
His camera thuds against his chest as he runs, but he’s not going to bother to hold it still. He runs faster than he ever has, half-stumbling over his feet in his haste. There are footsteps behind him, another shout.
There’s nothing but pure terror. He makes it past the hedges and sees the shape of bushes, thirty yards off, and the dark silhouette of a fountain. No house.
Please, please. Tim can’t do this.
He wants to cry, but crying won’t make it stop. He keeps running.
The bushes are two semi-circles, surrounding the fountain, and Tim’s coming at them from the wrong angle. No opening.
The footsteps are getting closer. The blood’s pounding in Tim’s ears, and he can’t tell how close. He thinks he feels fingers try and catch the fabric of his shirt but he could just be imaging it.
Tim lunges for one of the bushes—please be thick enough to stop them. He ducks low and scrabbles his body into the dirt, trying to shove his way under it and up the other side. He’s smaller, they can’t follow, he can make it—
The back of his camera strap catches. Tim gets jerked backwards, the force of his momentum stopped short. He digs his fingers into the roots of the bush and tries to pull, force himself through, but the strap pulls taut and the edges of his camera dig into his throat.
A hand grabs his calf.
Tim screams. It takes him a second to register the noise as his own voice, and by the time he does, he’s being dragged out from under the bush.
Tim thrashes blindly. Between the dark and the adrenaline, he doesn’t see any features—he’s pulled up, arms pressed to his sides as he’s held with his back against someone’s chest. He doesn’t realize he’s still screaming until a hand forces his jaw shut.
“Christ,” says a voice, just above his head.
Tim tries to slam his head back, but the top of his skull connects with a chin and the burst of pain makes him lose focus for a second. The man doesn’t let him go.
Tim tries to scream again, but it’s closer to a whine with his mouth held closed. He kicks his heels, but another man ducks into his view and grabs onto his feet, pinning them together with one arm.
Tim watches as the second man slides a looped length of thin, bright yellow rope down his other arm. He renews his wriggling, the muffled noises getting higher in desperation, but his best attempts are ineffectual now.
It’s happening too fast. Robin would know what to do, but Tim’s never been less like Robin, and they’re too fast.
The rope is looped around his ankles, once, twice, and tied. Tim wants to be angry, wants to yell and curse, but he can hear his own heartbeat and the men’s ragged breathing and he just feels scared.
Tim’s body lurches when the man drops his feet. He tries to thrash again, but he can’t separate his feet, and it’s even more useless than before.
“Come on,” says the one with the rope.
The grip holding Tim up, pinning his arms to his sides, slackens, and Tim shoves out with his elbows, getting dropped for his effort.
He hits the dirt awkwardly, his feet bound, and tries to scrabble away. He screams again, his throat aching with it. It echoes over the vast, empty grounds like a rabbit in a bear trap.
With a muttered curse, someone grabs first one wrist, then the other. Tim’s face presses into the perfectly cut grass as he feels them bound together behind his back.
He stops bothering. The scream breaks, and Tim can feel the tears now—he doesn’t know how long he’s been crying, but they drip from his cheeks into the dirt.
He’s thrown over someone’s shoulder. He doesn’t even try to muffle the sobs, and if they tell him to shut up, he doesn’t hear it.
They carry him back to the Jeep. He’s dumped on the backseat. He curls up into a ball and cries.
At some point, they blindfold him. It’s easier to shut it out when he can’t see, and he tries to cling numbly to the faint, ugly relief, that for just a few more minutes, he doesn’t have to pay attention.
Tim wakes up sitting in the world’s ugliest kitchen.
The first thing he registers is the nastiest fridge he’s ever seen. It’s off-white, and it’s not supposed to be; the thing is ancient, and there’s a horrible-looking red stain at the bottom of the freezer door.
His dad would demolish the entire building just to rid the world of that fridge. The thought’s oddly grounding.
Tim closes his eyes before he can take in anything else. The adrenaline is picking up again, and Tim swallows, hyper-conscious of the slight motion and the sound of his spit in his mouth. He breathes in on a count of four and lets it out on a count of eight.
What would Jason Todd do?
Normally, Tim reserves the question for Robin, but he doesn’t exactly have Robin’s skillset. Jason Todd, however, is probably a bit better of a fighter than Timothy Drake, but he’s still a kid on the wrong side of puberty for throwing punches.
Tim will gain nothing by freaking out. It takes most of his willpower to keep his thoughts focused, to stop them from scrambling away from him into worst-case scenarios.
His feet are tied to the legs of the chair he’s sitting in. His arms are still tied behind his back, bound at the wrist. He feels his heart pick up when he notices those two things, and then he breathes out. Waits for his heartbeat to drop back down.
Tim opens his eyes.
The fridge was a pretty good gauge for the rest of the apartment Tim can see. He’s seated in a chair next to the kitchen counter, which has a chunk of its faux-stone countertop missing. His feet don’t reach the floor.
One thug leans against the deadbolted door that Tim assumes leads outside. There’s a living room next to the kitchen, which has a circular table with uneven legs, and three more chairs, all with occupants. Two other closed doors, presumably other rooms in the apartment. One is missing a corner, a jagged edge where it was broken off the bottom.
There are three windows on the other side of the living room wall. Weak light filters through the closed blinds; Tim’s been out for at least six hours, maybe more. He has no idea how to tell if they drugged him.
There. That level of detail feels sufficiently Robin-like to him. And none of it made him freak out, so he’s doing pretty well, all things considered.
He feels a little separated from himself right now, shut down into thinking about practicalities, but if that’s what he’s going to need to do to get through this, his parents can send him to therapy to deal with it after.
Tim eyes the four people in the room with him. In all honesty, he has no idea if they’re the same ones who grabbed him last night – he’s childishly relieved that those events are already blurry in his memory – but he’s going to hope they are.
If four people, whose best hostage-holding spot is a shitty apartment worth less rent than Tim’s camera costs, grabbed a lone kid off the side of the road in Bristol, then this is a ransom.
Tim relaxes slightly. His parents explained, as gently as they could, what ransoms look like last year. Drake Industries is an advanced and highly-profitable company, and Jack and Janet Drake are away from home often enough for it to be worth it to warn Tim.
His mom had placed a kiss in his hair, and said, “Make sure they call. We’ll fix it.”
So now that he’s—now that he’s here, weird as it is, in one piece and un-tortured, Tim’s not all that worried. They’ll call the Drakes, who are currently in Sudan, and will be awake, with the time difference. What happens after that isn’t really Tim’s problem: his parents will contact the police, so Batman will know, and then they’ll call the kidnappers and negotiate ransom. He’s heard Robin list the procedure, like reading off a check-list of events, to Batman. Tim’s parents might have to throw in a phone call to an accountant, since they’re not in Gotham, but it should be standard. If he’s lucky, Batman will come to his rescue personally.
His camera is on the table in the living room. There’s a card game going on next to it. The thug by the door is on his phones. Nobody is paying him any attention yet.
Tim really wishes he could keep it that way. But he has to make sure they call.
“Hey,” he says, and it sounds scratchy in his throat, though less shaky than he expected.
Three heads snap over to him. The one currently holding his cards doesn’t look up. After a second, the others look over at that guy, and Tim marks him leader.
If Robin were here, Robin would give them mean but clever nicknames. If Jason Todd were here, he’d call them anything from “buttmuncher” to “assdick,” and Tim really doesn’t think he’s got either of those in him. Blue, Gray, Green, and Leader. He’ll make a new system if they change shirts.
Leader sets his cards down. He gets up from the table, and the guy by the door puts his phone away and straightens up slightly.
He’s visibly armed. A pistol. Tim hadn’t seen that before, and he’s kind of glad he’s only noticed it after he has other stuff to focus on.
Leader isn’t visibly armed, but Tim’s not checking his pockets, so he won’t take that bet.
“Done screaming and crying?” Leader says.
Tim had, uh, actually forgotten about the option of screaming. He saw the immediate obstacles in the apartment and… just figured out how to deal with those on his own.
“Think so,” he says instead, hoping it sounds calmer than he feels.
Leader picks Tim’s camera up off the table, and sets it on the edge of the kitchen counter.
“Have any clue what’s going on?”
There’s no point in playing coy. “You want my parents’ money,” Tim says. It’s grounding to answer: Tim does know what’s happening here.
Leader nods, once. “Lone kid in Bristol, nice camera. Figure you’d be a couple hundred thousand.” He picks the camera up again as he speaks.
The number sends a shiver down Tim’s spine. Not even at the amount – he knows that’s within an expected range – but at making Tim into money. Into how much he’s worth.
All the crime he’s seen Batman stop, and somehow the casual delivery of it still makes him want to tuck himself into one of these ugly kitchen cupboards and tune it all out.
No. Focus on something else. Tim draws a breath in, out. Looks at the camera in Leader’s hands. He’s going to need to get at least a new lens, if he’s allowed to take it with him, after he dragged it through the bushes and the dirt.
Leader presses the power button. Tim watches his entire body language change the second he sees the first picture.
Shit.
Almost all of the pictures are of Batman. Tim knows which one he left the camera on last night.
Tim closes his eyes and thinks about Robin’s wide grin. He’s not allowed to think about Jason Todd whatsoever anymore.
They don’t know he knows that. They have no reason to think he does. It’ll be okay. Batman and Robin will be okay.
“Shit,” Leader says. “Guys. We’re putting a pin in the ransom plan.”
Tim’s eyes open. Dread sinks in his stomach like a stone.
“Please call my parents,” Tim says, before he can stop himself. His voice is shaking.
He’s ignored. Leader has his back turned, and in the harsh quiet of the apartment, Tim can hear the click of the button as he scrolls through photos.
“It’s Batman,” Leader says. “The kid’s got hundreds of these.”
Not on that SD card, Tim thinks, feeling somewhat hysterical. That SD card is new. He’s only got fifty-six photos.
Green and Blue, the guys sitting in the living room, come over to stand with them as all three try to look over Leader’s shoulder at the tiny camera screen. Their eyes flick to Tim, back down to the camera.
Tim doesn’t like this turn of events.
He does a rapid reassessment of what’s in the room. He’s tied to a shitty wooden chair. His hands are bound. There’s now four guys next to the quadruple-locked door, but nobody at all by the windows.
He doesn’t know what floor they’re on. He doesn’t know where in Gotham they are. His breath is coming faster, and he swallows. He wants to calm down but he doesn’t have time.
Tim pulls at his feet just slightly, tests the strain he puts on the chair’s legs. He could snap them. This furniture isn’t built for kidnappings.
He wishes he was Robin. Robin would already have his hands untied; Robin could get to the window before any of these guys could blink.
Tim draws a shallow breath, shifts his weight, and then jerks his legs forward.
The chair legs snap, and he manages to twist his weight to leap sideways as it tips forwards, unbalanced on only two legs. His bound wrists snag on the back of the chair, and Tim stumbles, but he doesn’t let it slow his run for the window.
One of the men shouts. Tim charges for the window, half-pulling at his wrists to see if they come undone, but mostly thinking that he really hopes it isn’t a long drop.
He jumps, and curls his body just enough that the impact of his shoulder is what breaks the glass. Curls his body so that when he hits the metal frame on the other side of the glass, it at least isn’t his skull.
He’s stunned into silence from the impact, his shoulder and spine aching. Tim lies on the floor with the broken glass, unmoving, trying too late to process what’s just happened. He doesn’t blink away the white spots in his vision until Gray hauls him to his feet.
Behind the crumpled blinds, and the cracked and crumbling glass, he can see a metal lattice set in the window.
Gray half-drags, half-walks him the fifteen feet back to the kitchen. He picks up the broken chair, hooks Tim’s arms back over it, and then jams the back of it under the lip of the counter so that it’s forced to balance on its remaining two legs, Tim’s feet far off the floor. Tim’s too dazed to give resistance, even though Gray’s less than gentle about it, and he tries desperately to gather his scattered thoughts.
Tim isn’t going to cry. He isn’t.
“Right, kid,” Gray says, looming over him. Tim feels smaller, sitting at this angle.
Tim feels, abruptly, like an eleven-year-old up against four grown adults. Robin fought guys like this at eleven, but he’s not Robin. He swallows thickly, feeling his bravery growing thin, and clenches his hands into fists to try and stop the shaking.
“We’re not fuckin’ around anymore.” Gray’s expression, the heavyset jaw, certainly match the promise. “What’s your goddamn name?”
“Tim,” Tim says, breath coming too quickly. “Timothy Drake.” He feels his eyes watering, and his next sentence comes out weakly. “Please call my parents.”
Leader taps at Gray’s arm. Gray steps back.
Leader doesn’t pretend this is going to be a good cop, bad cop routine. He says flatly, “Nah, we’re not calling your parents, Tim. We’re gonna call our boss, and you’re gonna tell him about these photos. One way or another.”
They aren’t just four guys.
That’s easier to focus on than one way or another.
“And then?” Tim asks.
“And then we’re gonna bring you wherever the hell he asks,” Leader says, “and leave him to it.”
Leader pulls out his phone and steps away. He opens one of the two interior doors. Tim sees a mostly-unfurnished bedroom beyond, and Leader’s feet moving further into the room through the missing corner of the door as it closes behind him.
Tim doesn’t want to ask. Tim wants to shut his eyes and think about climbing into one of the dark, closed kitchen cupboards and never climbing back out. Tim wants to tuck his legs up against his chest and cry until he passes out again.
The others eye Tim. Green keeps clicking through photos. They have to have been through most of them already, but maybe this guy hasn’t seen all that much of the Bat before.
Tim doesn’t want to ask. He digs his fingernails into his palm so hard it hurts, and he counts to five, and then he says, “Who do you work for?”
Gray scowls, and moves off into the living room. He pulls a lighter and a pack of cigarettes from his pocket.
Blue, previously quiet, looks up at Tim.
“Black Mask,” he says.
Tim wishes he didn’t ask.
Tim knows about Black Mask, is the problem. He knows a lot of his strengths and not nearly enough of his weaknesses. He knows enough to make him scary but not enough to make him real.
If it were Scarecrow, Poison Ivy—hell, if it were the Joker, Tim would know more of how to deal with it. The Rogues with gimmicks and agendas might be volatile and dangerous, but in a lot of ways they’re more predictable.
Then again, Tim predicts Batman’s patrol patterns, so maybe his bar’s kinda low.
But Black Mask is an empty space. Tim doesn’t even know his real name.
The grand total of what Tim knows is that Black Mask is ruthless, incredibly efficient, and one of Gotham’s most skilled crime bosses. The mask he’s named for feels like a footnote, in comparison.
Tim also knows that Black Mask is known for torture.
One way or another rings in his head like a death knell.
Leader comes back out of the bedroom. His expression is set.
“Meeting in the East End,” Leader says. “I’m driving. Blindfold the kid.”
“Now?” Gray asks.
“Now. Move it.”
Tim’s feet get tied back up. Tim gets blindfolded. Tim gets thrown over someone’s shoulder.
Tim isn’t really sure if he’s scared anymore. He might be past that, for now—he’s sort of distant, again, except numbly this time.
Tim’s eleven. He can’t do anything against Black Mask. He can’t do anything against torture.
They were supposed to call his parents.
They dump him in the car, in the center seat, squashed between two of them. Tim can’t tell who, with the blindfold, and this time they don’t give him the space to curl himself up into a ball.
He doesn’t know if he would anyway. He kind of wants to, but there’s no way Black Mask would let him do that. It might be best if he starts putting his brave face on now—that way, it might last more than twenty seconds.
The drive is its own kind of hell. Tim just tries as hard as he can not to think about anything at all.
He doesn’t know how long they’re in the car. He thinks he can see, distantly, a change in the light as they go—passing through gaps of sunlight between buildings, maybe. If he was Robin, he’d be able to figure out how many times the car turned, how long it took them to get to the East End, and figure out where that apartment was.
He’s not Robin, and Tim digs his nails into his palms hard enough he can’t focus on anything else.
The car stops. Tim lets whoever’s next to him drag him out of the car and lift him up. There’s no warmth of sunlight on his skin, and the echo of the car door when it slams confirms they’re enclosed—underground car park, maybe.
He’s going to have a bruise on his ribs from being carried like this, eventually.
He’s pretty sure it’s not going to be the only bruise.
Tim squeezes his eyes shut behind the blindfold, and does his best not to think about it.
There’s the sound of metal scraping on concrete. A door. Tim shivers as the temperature drops, in whatever room they’re in now—he’s still in a long-sleeve shirt and khakis, all he needed for running around Gotham last night.
He’s hauled off the shoulder they carried him in on by a different set of hands, and Tim can’t help the flinch when his back makes contact with the cold of a metal chair. Someone pulls his hands down over the back of the chair – Tim’s small enough it forces his shoulders up uncomfortably – and zip-ties them to something.
His feet don’t touch the floor.
They take the blindfold off. He squints against the light, but he can’t tell if it’s harsh or he’s just been blindfolded longer than he thought.
Tim’s on a metal folding chair. There’s a large stainless steel table in front of him. It reminds him of something he’s seen in an interrogation room on a cop TV show.
He was expecting featureless cement. The walls are a light cream color, and the floor’s a dark red tile. There’s a heavy black curtain to his left, which might be a window, if they’re above ground level.
Sitting across from him is a guy in the most horrific mask he’s literally ever seen. The black mesh of the eyeholes is held in place by bolted black metal around the sockets, and the garish set of the mouthless black teeth give the impression of a scowling skull.
Tim gets why the mask alone is enough to name him for.
The room is silent. Tim uncurls his fingers, stretches them.
Leader sets the camera on the table between them. Tim hears the door close behind him.
Black Mask picks the camera up. He clicks through the photos slowly, silently.
Tim isn’t sure if he’s going for creepy intentionally. Maybe he’s trying to be scary, or maybe he’s just like this.
Batman doesn’t mess with Black Mask much. His henchmen, sure—but Black Mask is one of Gotham’s good crime bosses, and he keeps in his lane enough that there’s not as much Batman can do. The organization, the intelligence, just makes him scarier.
Tim wants to feel around for the zip-tie, see if he can use the rope to saw it off – that seems like a Robin thing to do – but he knows there’s no point. He really has no idea where he is, let alone how many men are between him and the streets of Gotham.
He gave them his name. He’s not even sure running home would be enough.
The thought makes him shudder, and he realizes the mask is tilted in his direction again.
Tim bites his bottom lip.
“Please call my parents,” he blurts out.
Black Mask stands, the motion sudden after his stillness, and Tim flinches back and says, “Sorry.”
“What’s your name?” Black Mask asks, toneless.
“T-Timothy Drake,” Tim answers, hearing the shake in his voice like it’s someone else’s.
It’s not a good idea to give his real name. It’s a worse one to lie.
“How old are you?” Black Masks asks.
Tim can’t pick up any emotion in his voice. Will he be nicer if Tim says he’s younger? Or more straightforward if Tim says he’s older?
“Eleven,” Tim says.
Black Mask sets the camera down on the table. “Where did you get these pictures of Batman?”
Tim says nothing at all.
Black Mask steps around the table. Tim doesn’t want to look at him but it’d be scarier to look away—the even lines of the black suit make him feel taller, bigger, like a black hole swallowing all the air in the room.
He stops next to Tim’s chair.
“Tim,” he says, and there’s still no tone in his voice, no emotion at all, and that’s more unnerving than if he was laughing manically like the Joker does. “Do you know my reputation?”
Tim doesn’t want to answer. He jerks his head, honestly not sure if he’s aiming for yes or no.
“I hurt people,” Black Mask tells him, levelly. “And if I don’t, I have men who do. If I want you to tell me, do you think you stand any chance?”
Tim knows he doesn’t. He bites his bottom lip so hard it makes tears sting behind his eyes.
Black Mask looks at him. Tim can feel the disappointment in the air, like a weight. It makes him feel younger than eleven. It makes him feel tiny.
It would be easier to give in. Tim knows it; Black Mask knows it. The only thing Tim’s going to do here, realistically, is waste Black Mask’s time.
But it’s Batman and Robin. Tim won’t sell out Batman and Robin.
He bites his bottom lip so hard he tastes blood.
“You’re going to regret this,” Black Mask tells him.
Tim’s pretty sure he will, yeah. But he knows Robin wouldn’t give in, if he were Robin.
“If there is one thing you should know about my reputation,” Black Mask continues, “then know I always get what I want.”
Except beating Batman.
Robin would say it out loud. Tim just hunches his shoulders and drops his gaze to the floor.
“The hard way it is,” Black Mask says.
Tim sobs his way through the rest of the first day, but he doesn’t say a word.
By the time they leave him alone for the night, Tim’s more bruise than boy, and the cuts on his ribs reopen every time he breathes too deeply. He has to choke his sobs into shallow whimpers, if only to stop the bleeding enough for them to clot properly.
He can’t give up Batman and Robin. He can’t. He’s eleven and he knows for a fact, an absolute truth, that Batman and Robin are more important to Gotham than Timothy Drake is. He knows that if it’s between their secret and his life, there’s only one he can ever choose.
Tim falls asleep crying, and dreams that Robin comes to save him.
Not far into the second day, Black Mask’s panther-masked lieutenant starts waterboarding.
Tim has no idea how far into that he makes it, but it’s not long. All he knows is he’s gasping for air when he chokes out, “Please.”
And then he can breathe.
Black Mask is in the room. Tim can’t remember if he always was. His head is spinning, and Tim hunches as far forward as his bound hands will allow and tries to cough up the water that isn’t in his lungs.
Tim can feel the weight of his gaze, and he’s still crying, and he tries to scrabble his thoughts into coherency with the few seconds he has before he catches his breath.
Black Mask doesn’t know that Tim knows who Batman and Robin are. He hasn’t asked. Probably would never suspect it of an eleven-year-old.
Tim can keep that secret.
He’ll just have to give up another one for it.
“Can predict them,” Tim rasps out, his voice nearly gone from the crying. He slides his eyes over to his camera, still on the table. He’s not gasping now, but his lungs shudder around the breaths, and he can’t tell if it’s water or tears dripping from his chin.
“You predict Batman and Robin,” Black Mask says. Not once, regardless of how hard Tim sobbed or how loud he screamed, has the cool, level tone of his voice changed.
Tim nods a confirmation. He’s got enough breath now that the panic of asphyxiation is a shuddering echo instead of a harsh reality, and he manages, “Their patrol routes. I hacked the, the police reports.”
“You determined where Batman and Robin patrol, every night?”
“Eleven in fourteen,” Tim says, because it isn’t quite perfect, not yet. “I can—I’ll give you the pattern.” He feels tears run down his cheeks, and can’t stop himself from begging, “Call my parents. Please.”
If they call his parents, this turns back into a ransom. He gave them what they wanted. Now they can ransom him and he can go home, and they’ll leave him alone, and he’ll warn Batman and Robin, and he won’t have to deal with any of it anymore.
Black Mask ruffles a white-gloved hand through Tim’s wet and matted hair. Tim forces down the sob that tries to climb out of his throat, and holds onto that hope. They can call his parents. He can go home.
Black Mask unties Tim’s hands. His shoulders ache, when he pulls his arms forward to tuck them in close against his body. Like the defense will do anything at all to help him.
Black Mask sets a sheet of paper and a pen on the table. “Write it down for me,” he says, and he sounds pleasant, for the first time. Like they’re making a deal.
“How do I know you won’t kill me?” Tim croaks out. Because he doesn’t really have a grasp on how much money Black Mask has, whether or not his ransom would actually be worth anything.
“You are more valuable alive,” Black Mask says easily, which confirms Tim’s hopes. Ransom.
It takes him more than one attempt to hold the pen correctly. The table’s awkwardly high for him to write on, and the stiffness in his arms means his usually-tidy handwriting is a messy scrawl.
The patrol variation is half-formula, half-logic. Tim writes out the method he uses, writes out how to adjust for days of the week, holidays, Arkham breakouts. He notes the most likely times and causes for gaps he hasn’t predicted.
Black Mask leans over into his space to look at it. Tim wants to curl into a ball, but they haven’t untied his feet, and he settles for pressing his hands between his thighs, for hunching forward and making himself smaller.
“Thank you, Tim,” Black Mask says, and something about his tone makes Tim think of his mom, after she closed a good deal: satisfied but sharp enough not to show it.
Tim wants to cry in relief. He did it. A secret—not the secret, not the most dangerous one, but one good enough for this. They can ransom him. He can go home, and his parents will come back to fuss over him and get him a really good therapist.
Then Black Mask draws a pistol from inside his suit jacket.
Everything in Tim shuts down. His mind goes blank, focused fixatedly on what’s in front of him: a man in a mask and a nice suit, with a silver gun.
Tim thinks he should beg. Maybe do something with his untied hands. He doesn’t know what. He can’t think of anything. Total paralysis. This is how it ends.
“This is for making me wait so long,” Black Mask says, and shoots Tim in the thigh.
Tim screams.
The suddenness of the pain is half the reason he screams—everything goes white, for several seconds too long. Tim grabs at his thigh, but that hurts more, and the scream breaks down to a whine as he gasps for air between his gritted teeth.
“Put pressure on the wound,” Black Mask tells him, and leaves the room.
Tim can’t process the words for several seconds. But finally, he realizes it’s something he’s heard Batman say—it’s actual good advice, and despite the amount it hurts, he presses his palms down over the hole in his right thigh. They’re slick with blood immediately, and the edges of the wound scream as he touches them, and he starts crying again but he doesn’t have a choice.
The pain is so much he barely notices when someone enters the room. They crouch on the red tiles and start pulling bandages out. They wrap the wound enough to stop the bleeding.
Tim panics when he sees the needle, but he’s still crying, and it’s almost a relief when the world starts going fuzzy and dark.
If he bleeds out, at least it won’t be his problem anymore.
Tim wakes up on the couch of his second unknown apartment in as many days.
He sits up suddenly, then freezes. He’s not tied down. He honestly wasn’t expecting that. He stares down at his hands. Marks around the wrist, swollen and red, from twisting against the ropes. Blood under his fingernails. His entire body hurts in the aftermath of yesterday, and he can feel the bandages over the slashes on his torso pull against his skin with the movement.
He goes to move his feet and stops the second he tenses the muscles in his legs.
He got shot. He actually got shot.
He’s in shorts. Basketball shorts, too big for an eleven-year-old. He pushes up the bottom hem, and stares down at the bandage wrapped around his right thigh. The skin around it is a mottled and ugly purple-blue, bruises littering his legs like oversized freckles, which only makes the clear white bandage stand out more starkly.
For a few seconds, Tim gets distracted from the overwhelming everything else by the fact he has an actual bullet wound. That’s kinda horrifying but it’s also kinda awesome.
Oh. But it explains why he’s not tied up: Tim’s not running anywhere anytime soon.
He stops to take in the rest of the room properly. It’s nicer than the last apartment he woke up in, but it could have a hole in the wall and still meet that metric.
The faux-hardwood flooring doesn’t have any suspicious stains on it. The living room is bigger, with a corner where a large table with four chairs sits. The kitchen looks mostly clean, a cream-tiled floor and white cabinets with a gray countertop. Three men, all of whom are wearing masks, seem half-attentive to him, but none of them are moving out of the kitchen towards him.
There are three doors. The quadruple-locked door Tim assumes leads outdoors, and probably a bedroom and a bathroom. Same as the last one.
Except that this one looks like a place someone could live in.
…no. No. The thought sends panic flooding through Tim.
No.
He tries to leap to his feet, and can’t help the cry as he crumples to the floor. The bullet wound. Wow, that hurts like every swear word he’s ever heard Robin say. How does Batman drive himself home after getting shot?
“You good, kid?” one of the guys says from the kitchen. None of them move to help him.
Tim curls his hands into fists against the floor. He grits his teeth.
He pulls himself up into a sitting position, his back against the couch. Tim has to take a second to catch his breath, and the heaving of his chest makes the cuts on his ribs ache again.
“Please tell me you called my parents,” he says.
Nobody answers him.
“We’re rich,” he says, despairingly. “We own a company.”
The faces of their masks turn away from him. Disregarding him.
Tim presses the heels of his hands into his eyes. He won’t cry. He won’t. He’s done too much of that. He’s gonna have to pick a new party trick.
He takes a deep breath, and looks around the apartment.
There’s a window to his left in the living room, and a window on the same wall in the kitchen. Both have bars. Three horizontal, two vertical. Even if Tim loses some weight, he’s too big to fit through.
“How long am I staying here?” Tim asks.
A different mask answers him. “Til the boss says otherwise.”
Tim takes another deep breath. In on a count of four, out on a count of eight. He needs to face the truth.
They’re not gonna call his parents.
His heart rate picks up. He takes another deep breath, counting slowly. He lets it out.
There’s no point in panicking. There’s no point in crying.
They’re not gonna call his parents.
Tim wants to curl up into a ball again. He can’t; his thigh hurts too much.
He wraps his arms around himself and squeezes his eyes shut. He pretends he doesn’t feel the tears that run down over his cheeks. He wipes them away on the sleeve of the oversized T-shirt he’s wearing.
That’s all the time he can spare. Nobody else is gonna come save him.
Tim will get out of this. Eventually.
He has to.