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Part 1 of Whumptober 2020
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Whumptober 2020, Superheroes and Other Heroes, my heart is here
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2020-10-06
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2,088
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1/1
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Separate Scores

Summary:

Tim gets captured by the Riddler.

--

No 4. RUNNING OUT OF TIME
Caged | Buried Alive | Collapsed Building

Notes:

Figured I'd actually participate in whumptober this year. Not doing these prompts in any particular order. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Please leave a comment if you like this fic, comments are what keep me going. :)

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

The tinny squawk of the Riddler’s voice whined through cheap speakers and bounced off of the bare concrete walls. Every syllable made Tim wince, his aching head throbbing with his heartbeat.

He felt like such an amateur. He hadn’t been captured by the Riddler since his early Robin days. This was his punishment for overworking himself and letting sleep deprivation make him sloppy.

Bruce was going to kill him.

“Why is it, Red Robin, that I feel like you aren’t quite paying attention?”

Tim shook his head, blinking hard. Riddler was right, he was having a hard time focusing.

“You know, Nigma, it’s a lot easier to think without a concussion.”

Riddler just sighed, the sound not much more than a low buzzing crackle through the speakers.

“Again, then? We are on a time limit, might I remind you.”

Tim didn’t need reminding. The digital display of the bomb blinked happily at him from across the room as it counted down.

Tim gripped the thick metal bars of his cage and sighed.

“Again,” he said through gritted teeth.

“Four jolly men sat down to play,” Riddler chirped. 

“And played all night till break of day.

They played for gold and not for fun,

with separate scores for every one.

Yet when they came to square accounts,

they all had made quite fair amounts!

Can you the paradox explain?

If no one lost, how could all gain?”

Five minutes. Four fifty-nine. Four fifty-eight.

Focus.

Tim used to like riddles. Way back before he first donned the yellow cape. Simpler times.

Four men. Was that number significant? Sat down to play. Play what? That felt important. Played for gold…Separate scores... Scores? What kind of game could they be playing that relied on scores... All their scores were the same...Play...scores…

“Music…” Tim muttered. “They were playing instruments. Musicians. That’s the answer. They’re musicians.”

Two thirty-nine, two thirty-eight.

Two thirty-eight…

Two thirty-eight.

The timer had stopped, the numbers frozen on the display.

“Oh! You got it! Clever bird.”

Nigma’s voice darkened.

“Good warm up. Now let’s—”

——

 

Rough concrete was scraping against Tim’s cheek. His ears were ringing. He coughed, his tongue and teeth coated with dry grit, mixing with his saliva and forming a clogging paste. He spat and coughed and choked.

His ears were ringing. There was something in his eyes, he couldn’t—

What—

He coughed and coughed, the dust was choking him he couldn’t— 

——

 

Concrete. Cheek.

Blink. Eyelids scraping roughly against sandy corneas.

Everything hurt. Everything. His bones. His teeth. His toenails. His hair.

He could— 

Blink. Blinkblink. His eyes stung. Precious tears formed, clearing away some of the grit.

His ears were still ringing. Less so now.

He worked his tongue along his teeth. Tasted copper. Some of the paste had cleared away—spat out or slid down the back of his throat and swallowed. Concrete dust slimed with spit and blood.

He could breathe now. In fact, he was sucking deep breaths in past dry lips, his chest expanding painfully far with each panicked inhale.

Focus, Drake. Slow your breathing or you’re going to pass out again.

Blink.

Dark. He couldn’t see. Was he blind?

Nono. Don’t panic. Think, Red Robin.

It was hard. He was so tired. Everything hurt.

He fumbled around for his belt. Nigma had left him with it. Cocky.

He dug blindly through his pouches with one hand, feeling around for the emergency beacon on his suit with the other.

The trigger for the beacon was gone.

Cocky, but not stupid.

With his other hand, he finally located the small flashlight in one of his pouches.

Click and...

Shadows formed into blurry shapes.

Something was in his eyes. He reached up a hand and swiped at his face. It came away wet and dark. Blood.

Breathing. He needed to control his breathing. It was so hard to think. He closed his eyes and focused as hard as his dull brain could manage. Focused on each breath. In out.

Eventually, the rasping gasps shuddered to a slow wheezing.

He opened his eyes again and blinked until the world around him came into better focus.

The cage. He was lying on his side in the cage where the Riddler had trapped him. It wasn’t quite—the shape was different. The bars were twisted, the cage bent in on itself, the ceiling bowing heavily inwards. He couldn’t see...there was—

Blink. Breathe.

The room outside the cage was gone. Concrete rubble pressed into the bars on every side of him.

The cage creaked dangerously against the weight. Against the pressure of an entire building collapsed in on it.

The bomb.

Something must have gone wrong with the bomb. Nigma, that idiot, had screwed it up. It had gone off on its own or he’d triggered it by accident.

And the only reason Tim wasn’t dead, crushed, flattened, was because of the cage over his head.

But for how long?

Metal groaned. A small chunk of concrete tumbled through the bars to his left, clattering to the ground and rolling, coming to a stop against Tim’s knee.

Tim shifted, tried to sit up, and everything blurred. The throbbing in his head had intensified with a renewed vigor and he bit back a groan.

He was not doing that again. Could not.

Comms. Comms, Drake.

He hadn’t had a chance, before. He’d only just woken up when the Riddler presented his riddle and the bomb ticked away in Tim’s face. All of his attention had been on solving the riddle. Stop the bomb first, focus on rescue second. Normally a sound plan.

Not this time, apparently.

He reached up, tapping the comm in his ear.

“R—” he tried. The effort was rewarded with a coughing fit.

“Red R-Robin to—Can...does anyone read me?”

Nothing.

Busted? No. Their comms were military grade. Better than, they were Bat -grade. Nigh-indestructible and more than powerful enough to reach through miles of stone and rubble—the building currently pressing in on top of Tim should be nothing against the signal.

Jammed, then. Riddler had upped his game. The cold, clinical Red Robin part of Tim’s muddled brain made a note to look into that later. If he— when he got out of this.

Except... how?

He couldn’t move, he couldn’t—no one knew he was here. He couldn’t communicate.

Think.

God he was so tired. It was getting hard to keep his eyes open.

Was the ringing in his ears getting louder? He couldn’t think through it.

Maybe if he just...he just needed to close his eyes for a second. They burned, if he just closed them for a second, maybe…

——

 

A groaning sound jolted Tim awake. It was a deep, almost Lovecraftian sound—a massive, malevolent rumbling that Tim could feel down in his soul, and it chilled him.

It was the sound of a crumbling building shifting.

Dust rained down on him and he closed his eyes again. He didn’t panic, didn’t cry or beg. There was no point.

He just waited. Waited for the end, hoping it didn’t hurt for long.

More dust sprinkled down. More groaning and shifting. Tim squeezed his eyes tighter.

The dust-fall was getting worse, and Tim spluttered as it rained down onto his face, getting sucked into his nose and covering lips that he tried to clamp shut against it.

More shifting rubble, closer now. The cage creaked dangerously and Tim couldn’t help but flinch when suddenly he could hear metal bending and tearing. This was it, the cage was finally giving into the weight—

I’m sorry, Bruce. I should’ve been better, please don’t—

“Red Robin! Tim!”

Tim startled at the sound, his eyes flying open and he blinked up at—

Batman’s face, hovering above him, the visible bottom half twisted with worry.

“Tim! Can you hear me?”

Tim blinked owlishly, his jumbled thoughts not quite coalescing into something coherent enough to form words.

A breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding whooshed out of him in a stuttering gasp and he saw Batman’s mouth relax into something like relief.

Then the world grayed out and everything suddenly felt very, very far away and Tim was sinking...

——

The next thing Tim was really aware of was the heavenly feeling of fingers carding slowly through his hair. He leaned into the touch, a small sound escaping past his lips in a weak huff.

A quiet chuckle. “Like a cat,” the voice mumbled warmly.

Tim tried to open his eyes but everything was so heavy. He noted, distantly that the concrete beneath him felt different now. Soft. The throbbing in his head was gone. In fact, he couldn’t feel any pain at all. He wondered if he was dead. If he was, it wasn’t so bad. Nice, even. The fingers continued to card through his hair and he sighed contentedly.

“Timmy?” the same voice asked, a bit louder now. “You waking up?”

That voice was...Dick? That couldn’t be right. If Tim was dead, then Dick wouldn’t…

He tried harder to open his eyes this time and succeeded in lifting his lids into narrow slits. He couldn’t make out much more than light and shapes.

“Hey, Timbers,” another voice rumbled. Deeper, more gravelly. “You with us?”

Tim tried to make his voice work, but all he managed was a small moan.

“Damian,” Dick’s voice again. “Go get Alfred, will you?”

There was a shuffling noise and the sound of a door closing.

“Timmy, can you hear me?”

Tim hummed softly.

“There he is,” the gravelly voice again. Jay? “Welcome back, kid.”

Tim blinked and the world tried to come together around him. He could make out two blurry shapes, one on either side of him.

The fingers left his hair and Tim’s eyebrows pinched together and he groaned in protest. His hand twitched, trying to find the fingers again, to bring them back.

Dick laughed and the fingers returned to their rightful place. “Okay, okay. Sorry.”

Tim hummed again.

“You need to wake up, Timmy. Can you do that for us?”

Tim huffed and was rewarded with another warm laugh.

“I know,” Dick said. “You can go back to sleep soon, okay? We just need you to wake up for a bit. Pretty please?”

Tim groaned and blinked harder, obediently trying to focus.

The first thing he realized was that he was no longer in the cage, no longer trapped beneath the weight of a collapsed building. The lights here were bright. There was a blanket over him and a pillow beneath his head. Dick was sitting on one side of him, combing his fingers gently through Tim’s hair. Jason sat on the other side.

“Where—” he croaked.

“Medbay,” Dick said. “The Cave. Do you remember what happened?”

Tim screwed his face up, trying to think through what he was quickly realizing must have been a truckload of pain medication.

“R—” he tried and failed.

“Hang on,” Dick said. He reached over somewhere and pulled out a bottle of water with a straw. He let Tim sip it slowly, coughing and spluttering until it soothed his dry throat enough to speak.

“Riddler,” Tim said, finally. “Bomb.”

“That’s right,” Dick nodded.

“What...how—”

“Nigma called us, if you can believe it.” Tim flopped his head over to look at Jason. “The idiot fucked up and set off the bomb by accident. He was panicking, worried that he’d killed you.” Jason snorted.

“Why?”

“You solved the riddle,” Dick said with a shrug. “Guess he didn’t think you deserved to die.”

“I think he was just scared shitless the Bat was gonna really come after him,” Jason said with a smirk. “I don’t think he’s ever actually expected to take one of us out for real. Guess reality sunk in pretty damn quick.”

Tim hummed in agreement and his eyes slipped closed again against his will.

“Wait for Alfie, kid,” Jason said, nudging him gently.

Tim grumbled and lifted the ten pound weights that his lids had suddenly turned into. 

“‘S Batman mad?” he asked quietly.

“Mad, why would he be mad?”

“Got caught by Nigma,” Tim stressed. “Amateur.”

Jason snorted and patted Tim's hand. “He’ll probably put you through the ringer once you’re healed up, but he ain’t mad.”

“He’s just glad you’re okay, little brother. We all are.”

“And I, for one, am just kinda relieved it was someone else being buried alive for once.”

Dick groaned. “Jay!”

Tim would blame it on the drugs later, but he couldn’t help it. He laughed.

Notes:

IMO, whumptober fics always seem to be all hurt no comfort and I'm a sucker for the comfort, so you're welcome.

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