Chapter Text
There is sand, dull-golden stones, and vast blue sky as far as the eye can see, and really not much else. Behind him, the tracks of an old, beaten-down vehicle are slowly disappearing as the breeze kicks up the dusty earth. The man Tim had paid to bring him out here had looked at him awfully funny, but had finally left at Tim’s insistence. Who would want to be left all the way out here, after all? Luckily, the money had been enough; Tim hadn’t also needed to lie about his intentions here.
He’d been following Bruce’s trail for over a month now, and it had led him here. Ethiopia, but not terribly near where Jason had died. Tim thanks the universe for small mercies.
He hikes up the legs of his cargo pants just a little (he’d forgone the suit for this particular excursion—hitching a ride out here had been difficult enough as it was) to keep them from dragging in the dust as he makes his way forward. The earth crunches beneath his feet every time his weight shifts. It isn’t like Gotham. He hasn’t been anywhere like Gotham in a long time. Some part of him misses it, and that part wars constantly with the taste of bile in the back of his throat whenever he thinks of his hometown. Gotham is a cold city; she always has been. Chilly to strangers and residents alike, even at the best of times.
Recently, the chill has become a full-blown frostbite. A squall, loud and roaring and fucking freezing . Damian’s sneer, the way Jason’s nose scrunches up, like he’s smelled something foul, any time Tim enters the room, and the way Dick would see, then look deliberately away, awkward and purposeful. The way that Bruce wouldn’t even notice. He has (or, had, now) eyes only for those three. Something deep in Tim’s stomach would twist every time Bruce would ease at the sight of Damian, Jason, and Dick, how those tense shoulders would drop, half-an-inch or less but enough to notice, no matter how much he insisted to himself that he was nothing but happy (no, thrilled ) for all of them.
There’s no chill here. Just sky and sand, and only a light breeze to cut through the oppressive heat of the sunny summer day. Tim makes his way along, following his mental map, the physical version still folded up in a pocket of his cargo pants. With his back turned to the sun, he makes a decent pace.
With his back turned to the sun, he has no way of seeing the murky tan cloud of dust rapidly approaching from the horizon behind him.
The storm seems to come in all at once—before he has the chance to form even a basic plan, it’s whipping around him, seeming to come from every direction at once, and with a force that threatens to sweep him off his feet and knocks the breath from his lungs almost instantly. He stays upright, but it’s a near thing.
He’s been trying to block his face from the storm, but the pouring rain of sand breaks through his defense without any trouble at all—it’s crusting around his eyes almost immediately, and, with every gasp, he draws the tiny shards into his lungs. Coughing is more painful still. When he moves his arms to grasp at the new tightness in his chest, the sand finds its way into his eyes, and he gasps again. Shit, that hurts . Each grain is a little dagger, scraping harshly against his cornea, and hopefully no deeper. Tears well up—a grainy, salty sludge begins to drip down his chin as they mix with the grit now caked on his face.
He’s disoriented now, all turned around from trying to find an angle, any angle, where he isn’t facing the onslaught of wind directly. He wouldn’t know what way was up, but gravity guides him as he drops to his knees, couching down to protect his face in his lap. The wind is howling, and it seems to only pick up speed.
How long do sandstorms last? Even low-to-the-ground as he is now, the wind sways him this way and that, and Tim’s eyes and lungs sting horribly. Dully, he wonders if the sand has made its way under the bandage on his abdomen and reached the still-fresh speelectomy wound there, and how ironic and fitting it would be that a splenectomy infection would be the thing to kill him.
Finally, the wind blows hard enough that even Tim’s smallest, most protective, curled-up position is broken—he sways forward, eyes screwed shut, and goes light-headed and dizzy for just a moment–
–and when his hands hit the ground in front of him, it’s not the slippery, sliding surface of a sandy desert. That’s concrete under his palms.
He freezes for a moment, confused, and even more disoriented than before. The air is still, and the sand seems to be gone, but when he scrunches up his forehead in confusion, he feels the crusty particles scatter down his face. Then his eyes are burning again, and the tears are welling up to try and dispel the grains in them, and the scratchy feeling in his throat and lungs (and maybe stomach, too) is giving him the intense desire to cough, vomit, do whatever it takes to expel the weathered stone inside him. It can’t be that much, he’d been covering his face, but his entire body feels weighed down with it.
He does cough, and he heaves with a retch, too, though nothing comes up just yet.
Tim tries to open his eyes, and he only manages it for long enough to register how blurry and distant everything looks, before the sharp stinging drives them closed again. Of course, having them closed doesn’t feel any good, either; it takes all of his willpower not to rub at them and grind the sand in deeper. The tears well again, and he lets them, hoping desperately that they’ll do their job, even with so much material to remove. Even more desperately, he hopes that the blurriness won’t be permanent.
He retches again, and this time something comes up. He doesn’t open his eyes to inspect it, and tries very hard not to collapse forward into it. He’s suddenly so, so tired.
The queasiness subsides, and Tim, eyes still closed and tears still flowing, takes a moment to take stock of his situation. It’s definitely concrete under his hands. The wind is no longer howling around him. And he’s cold , as if the sun had suddenly just… gone out. He hopes it isn’t shock. And it very well could be, but that, at least, wouldn’t explain the concrete beneath him.
He gives opening his eyes another shot. It feels awful. Every instinct wants him to close them again, but he powers through. ‘ C’mon, Tim ,’ he coached himself. Little blinks only, when the feeling gets too strong; he wouldn’t ever be able to figure this out if he couldn’t get himself to just open his damn eyes. The blurriness never passes, not completely. And the pain never wanes, but eventually the work-oriented part of his brain catches up with his “oh shit, this hurts” part, and the cogs begin to turn again.
Even without the kind of vision clarity he’s used to, Tim can immediately tell two things:
- He’s up high. A rooftop for sure.
- This is Gotham. No mistaking it.
Panic wants him to retch again. Shock just feels numb. Eventually, panic wins out, but the cogs never stop turning, even as he hunches once again over the puddle of bile he’d brought up before. How had Tim ended up in Gotham? He’d been halfway across the planet , in the middle of nowhere , having told absolutely no one from Gotham where he’d be (and why would he?).
Explanation one was brain damage. He’d lost time somewhere, and, he supposes, never had a shower between then and making his way to Gotham. Or seen a doctor, he thinks, as more tears slip down his cheeks, taking glistening sand particles with them. It’s unusually cold in Gotham for summer, too, but the sun is setting already, and Gotham has her cold days pretty much year-round; it’s nothing totally unheard of.
Explanation two: some kind of teleportation? Even then, he has to be missing time; he’d been alone in the desert, and there hadn’t been any tech of that caliber (or at all, really, except his own) within view, and he’d been able to see for miles.
Neither were a good option, but when he tries to come up with anything better, he draws a complete blank.
That would be the brain damage, probably.
Just as Tim is reaching up to palpate his scalp for lumps, there’s the dull thud of heavy boots slamming into concrete behind him. Tim turns, and the moonlight behind the figure hurts to look at, and squinting hurts just as much. Tim’s vision is blurry enough that looking hardly does him any favors anyway, but he knows that silhouette.
“Hey, kid. You good?” The voice modulator confirms it. Tim scrambles back, narrowly avoiding his own puddle of vomit. Oh, shit. He hadn’t been able to tell at first—this is definitely Jason’s territory. Even with the helmet on, Tim knows the Red Hood is looking him up and down, like prey. The last time he and Jason Todd had been alone together, Jason had carved him a happy little extra mouth, gaping right across his throat. He suppresses the automatic instinct to slap his hand over the scar protectively.
When Tim doesn’t respond, Jason keeps approaching, and Tim keeps retreating. Before long, he feels the edge of the roof digging into his shin. Jason sighs, and Tim’s heart beats faster in his chest. “Look, kid,” he begins, and Tim doesn’t know where this is going, but he’s absolutely sure that he doesn’t want to find out. Jason seems surprised to see him here, but the hesitance won’t last. Tim’s vision isn’t clearing anyway; it’s time to get out, now .
He takes the opportunity. Through half adrenaline and half muscle memory, Tim springs away from Jason, over the edge of the building. He lets himself fall for a moment, then catches himself on the fire escape and scrambles down the side. Above him, Jason rushes toward the edge of the roof. “Hey, wait!” Tim can hear the annoyance in his voice, and the adrenaline jumps again. He darts away, a little stiff-legged, but certainly determined, following Jason’s movements to the best of his ability by the sound of his heavy footfalls. He still can’t see very well, but, before this part of Gotham belonged to Jason, it belonged to Tim. Muscle memory alone is enough. It’ll have to be,
He rounds as many corners as he can. He can hear Jason grunting and calling out behind him, increasingly irritated with every stride Tim gains on him, but it only drives him to move faster.
There! He knows this street. There’s a back alleyway here, where he’d been fooled once before. He ducks into the side street and behind the dumpster waiting for him there, making as little noise as possible, except to clip his shoulder against the chain-link fence that splits the alley in two. When Jason rounds the corner, the fence is still rattling, and the Red Hood takes the bait—he launches himself over the fence without thought, and hits the ground running on the other side, leaving Tim, huddled up behind the dumpster, to catch his breath at last.
After several minutes, his heart begins to slow, and the worst of the nausea abates. He takes stock of his situation again. He knows where he is now, and his eyes, though still stinging and certainly scratched up, judging by his vision, seem mostly free of sand by now; the situation is much improved, in any case. His stomach is sore, and his breathing feels scratchy, but he seems to be in no immediate danger, or at least not any danger that he can do anything about.
When he pats his cargo pants’ pockets, he has exactly what he remembers having last—a few whirlybirds, several small smoke pellets, one canister of tear gas, the physical version of his map, and about $90 in emergency funds.
No keys, not to any of his Gotham safe houses. Not enough money for a hotel room, even one of the dingy ones downtown. And he was not going back to the manor. Absolutely not .
When Damian had shown up in Gotham, Tim had taken the hint, okay? He’d gotten it. And when he’d packed up his things at Wayne Manor and left, and Commissioner Gordon had pulled him aside, not two nights later, and gently asked him if he intended to keep going by “Robin” even with Batman’s new partner of the same name, Tim had been downright gracious about it. He’d told Gordon, no, just figuring out something new still . And he’d left, and he hadn’t looked back. No hard feelings for any of them, except, of course, for him.
Besides, he can only imagine how Jason would greet him now, after having just escaped him in his own territory. Tim shudders, blames it on the cold, and ultimately decides not to think about it.
He’s too tired, too frazzled, to deal with this, he decides. His brain feels as fuzzy as his vision, and his heart, though not as erratic now, doesn’t seem to want to slow to a normal rate. He should sort himself out now. He should . But.. No one’s looking. There’s no one to be strong for. And he’s tired .
The best he can do is brush the sand off of himself to the best of his ability, curl up tighter against the building at his back, settle his face between his knees, and wish for more answers tomorrow. Perhaps to not freeze to death overnight, too. That might be nice.