Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

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I cannot draw or illustrate, but I am a bomb-ass creative director, so below is my way of rounding this out to give this fic Comic Book Vibes:

link to my Pinterest for character moodboards: here

[DICK's POV]

"Look alive, shithead."

Jason's voice, muffled from the honestly impressive feat of smoking a cigarette underneath his helmet without hotboxing himself into unconsciousness, startled Dick from his thoughts. Not that they were actual thoughts; just 'bed, bed, I just did laundry and my sheets probably feel like heaven, bed.'

He'd been running himself ragged even before Tim drafted everyone to help with what, according to him, was some big conspiracy run by Scarecrow of all people. Dick wasn't exactly complaining; he loved helping his family, his teammates, he loved making a difference in the world. But he also wasn't not complaining.

The last two weeks had been never-ending, and the combination of catching four hours of sleep a night for those two weeks, the darkened rooftops of these lightless buildings by the harbor, the warm air and soft breeze coming in from the bay, and the silence of watch duty had lulled Dick into a bit of a haze -- at least, as much of a haze that a bat would allow themselves to fall into. 

Turning to look back at the roof two blocks down, Dick squinted to try to catch a glimpse of red. He stood up from his crouch and waved, and he heard Tim and Steph's voices laugh softly as Jason presumably flipped him off in return from the distance.

'It's a middle finger of endearment,' Dick thought hopefully.

Keeping his feet flat to avoid making any noise, Dick squatted back down a bit and lunged to his right and then his left until he felt his knees pop.

"Yeah, yeah. Are we doing this or what?" He groaned.

"Alright, get with it, Nightwing's getting impatient."

Dick's com lit up as the team erupted into noise. Nightwing, Red Hood, Red Robin, Batgirl, Spoiler, and Robin had been watching this warehouse for the past three hours, with Oracle and Signal on coms, and they'd seen no activity for the past hour and a half.

"We know Crane is in there already, we have to assume the shipments from last night and the drop-off at 23:00 were the bulk of what he's waiting for," Tim said as the bats closed rank to join Dick on the central rooftop.

"Yeah, well. There are enough heat signatures huddled together to think they've been working on something in there. It does seem like now is as good a time as ever, but I don't know -- something feels off," Barbara's voice reasoned in Dick's ear as the Bats and Birds kneeled down together, inching towards the edge of the building.

"So do we go or not? I mean, nothing ever feels right with this fucking weirdo," Jason asked, cracking his knuckles. He lifted his helmet up an inch and spit the butt of his cigarette out into his hand, crushing it and depositing it into an aluminum-lined baggie zipped into his motorcycle pants. "It's not like he's some sophisticated mastermind or anything."

"I just never know what to expect with Crane. We know that they're cooking something in there -- we know they have lab supplies, the calibration equipment to measure out immense quantities of toxin, we know he's gotten chemical shipments that far exceed the amount he's handled at any one time in the past. But it feels like something's off. I just -- we don't know how far along whatever experiments Red Robin suspects have come, or if you're barreling into a new gas that could take you out."

"I say we go in. We always approach Crane with the necessary precautions, we all have gas masks. Waiting won't change any of that, but we want to make sure this is contained so he can't stage whatever big thing it is he has planned." Tim's voice-of-reason tone always seemed to be a deciding factor, even if his voice-of-reason insight was pretty bare-boned tonight, and as Dick nodded along with Tim's words, the others did as well. Even Damian.

Dick stood up, rubbing his hands together. They all were tired and impatient.

"Okay, Oracle, we're gonna head in. We'll be careful, stay in the shadows before doing anything. Do you have eyes inside beyond just heat?"

"We do to an extent. There are 30-something people in the central area that Signal and I have thought of as the lab, but there's some sort of sub-basement we can't get a read on. I tried hacking into the geo-location services on some of the phones we could grab onto from techs working for Crane inside, but even with that we can't really gauge what's going on down there."

Cass nudged Dick's arm, making a 'wrap it up' signal with her hand.

"Alright, proceed with caution, rebreathers on, let's go," Dick announced, sliding on his own rebreather and stepping to the edge of the building without waiting for a reply.

He lithely stepped off the edge, turning as he fell to watch the other bats follow his lead off the roof before shooting out his wire and flying up onto the roof of the warehouse across the way, rotating to land facing forward once again.

Dick silently removed the pane of one of the upper-level windows and climbed through, closing the window behind him; he could do stealth in his sleep.

The alcove at the top of the warehouse -- what seemed to be the third floor, though the building seemed to have a pretty open concept devoid of walls or full floors -- was dark enough to conceal any movement, but all the same, Dick stayed crouched as he walked, feeling along the back wall as he moved in deeper. Below were the groups of people Babs had briefed them on, but he could see from his vantage point that there was a heavy-duty door reminiscent of a vault or safe that the goons seemed to be giving a pretty wide berth. He clocked a bubbling set-up of lab equipment, but no Scarecrow.

Across the way, Dick could see Damian slip into the alcove and adopt the same crouched position as Dick. He pulled out his sword as he moved along the walkway, but Dick could see the construction lights set up below glinting off the sharpened silver -- Dick caught Damian's attention and lifted his hand to signal him to sheath the sword for now.

Cass and Steph moved in, flanking towards the corner Jason had seemed to claim. Cass reached up and pressed her com to relay out a Morse code message: 6 goons per bat.

Dick nodded at her as Stephanie gave her a half-hearted fist bump. Dick watched as Cass lowered herself down to the second story, her acrobatics taut and controlled. Damian and Tim followed suit as Steph watched, rolling out her ankles and wrists in preparation.

"Watch the pair by the door -- once they walk left, the whole group will be as spread out as they've ever been. That's the time to strike," Barbara strategized, and Dick readied to drop down.

The pair of scientists below stalled out as they discussed some parking ticket dispute (goons, they're just like us!), but finally after about two minutes they followed the track Barbara had predicted.

Tim held up his hand, counting down. 4, 3, 2, 1:

As a unit, the bats dropped down. Dick scattered some flashbangs below as he rode his wire, and as the sparks flew and erupted he reached to grab his Escrima sticks from his back.

Landing on the closest guy's shoulders, Dick unclipped from his wire and wrapped his legs to then flip forward and throw the man down onto his face, knocking him out almost immediately. Dick rose up, throwing his Escrima stick ahead to take down the woman running at him and throwing a punch at the person running in from his right. Ducking, blocking strikes with counter strikes, flipping his remaining Escrima stick around his wrist, he took on four others as the team all focused in on their allotted bad guys.

Dick may feel tired, but nothing woke him up quite like an easy fight; a boost of over-cocky confidence was as motivating as a boost of adrenaline.

"Dude, this guy just tried to grab my gun!" Jason bellowed from across the room, and a shot rang out as a rubber bullet rebounded off the offending goon's inner thigh. As he fell to his knees, Jason stepped forward and pistol-whipped him hard.

Steph barked out a laugh as she stomped on one of her guy's wrists, a crack resounding around the warehouse. Tim stumbled back as he fought a woman trying to get a shot off with her automatic gun, using the momentum to get the woman to falter forward so that he could reach around and grab her ankle, knocking her to the ground. He somersaulted forward to pull close and punch her out before standing up and, unfolding his bo staff, hitting in a coordinated twirl at the others near him. Damian stayed silent, focused, as he clashed with a scientist wielding a metal pipe like his own sword.

Dick couldn't help but smile as his body went into autopilot. Something about watching his family work so well together seemed to always warm him inside, a whacked-out, bat-appropriate sense of pride and love that came from watching each sibling enact widespread and practiced violence. Dick pressed his com as he ducked under his last combatant's arm, rising up to punch him out before speaking to the team:

"My group's all out, heading for the vault door!"

"Be careful," Barbara cautioned, Duke's voice in the background echoing her warning.

Dick made his way across the room, walking along one of the lab tables and taking note of the various liquids that demonstrated assorted stages of Fear Toxin concoctions pre-gas. They actually kind of looked pretty, the liquids all vibrant shades of green and red. 'Like an animal,' he thought, 'the colors acting as a warning: don't touch.'

He neared the door and noticed that it was visibly thicker than expected. He held up his arm to take a picture scan of the door with the tech on his forearm.

"Got that?"

"Shit, that looks like the door has some sort of thermal protection. That's not just for keeping people out, that's got some heavy-duty chemical protocols," Barbara said in his ear.

Dick stepped up close, feeling up and around the door's skin to see if there were any faults in the design; of course, there were none. The hinges were protected and unable to be pried apart, the re-lockers tightly wound -- Dick would have to try to crack the door like a safe.

Behind him Dick heard a war cry as Damian charged a pair of men twice his height; Cass flipped off of the person closest to her's shoulders to gain some balance as she fought them off.

The others were all busy; this was all Dick.

Pulling out a stethoscope-like device that Lucius had created a few months ago in discussion with Selina, he turned the wheel of the door, listening to the soft ticks and catches. It took about three minutes to crack -- not too shabby for the first safe Dick had had to crack in who knows how long -- and he wrenched the door open quickly, securing a line through the door handle to anchor it to the wall with a clover hitch knot.

He started down the stairs as he spoke "I'm in" into his coms.

Dick flipped on his night vision as he descended into the basement, preparing for anything. He slowed as he neared the bottom of the staircase, crouching down to ready for action and putting his back up against the wall, rounding quickly, ready to lash out as his back stayed protected. No one was there. Rising, Dick took a gas mask and fixed it over the rebreather he'd already been using to be ready for anything, tightening the strap around his chin.

There was a distant light down the hallway across the way, glowing an alarming foggy green through the night vision, and Dick walked forward towards it. The basement was mostly empty, which had Dick worried. 'Where are all the shipments we've tracked?' Dick must be walking towards the epicenter of storage for whatever shitshow Crane had come up with this time.

The hallway was much shorter than he expected when he neared it, but he was alarmed to note that the hall echoed just like the warehouse walls above.

'Fuck it' Dick thought, stealth no longer the best move, and he upped his pace forward. The hall opened into a rounded atrium that Dick could tell led into a tunnel beyond, and Dick immediately spotted a much more elaborate lab set up on one wall of the tiny room -- with one lone figure working at the table.

"Crane!" Dick, tired as he was, couldn't think of any actual sentence or quip to alert the deranged doctor. Usually just saying their name sufficed, but Dick still felt like he lost some of his cred by saying something so boring. He hoped his voice didn't sound too muffled or lame under the double-layered gas protectants.

In front of him, Scarecrow startled. He quickly recovered, though, and began to laugh -- the villains always laughed -- as he turned around.

Dick cursed under his breath. Crane was dressed in a full-on hazmat suit, his burlap mask visible through the clear facial covering. As silly as it looked to see the man wearing his costume underneath his bulky suit of protection, it worried Dick; Crane never opted for personal protection.

"Ah, little blue birdie ... flown down here all alone?" Scarecrow asked, his voice gravelly and mechanic. "How very fearless of you, to brave the dark and unknown without the others."

"What do you want me to say, Scarecrow? You're not very terrifying in a white baggy suit," Dick responded as he twirled his Escrima stick in his hand -- once, twice.

"But as always, you misunderstand from where fear is born. I am the instrument, not the figure. I am the conveyer, not the conveyed. You cannot fear me, because fear traverses, transcends me, fills in the empty space between me and you. I am not fear, I am become fear. I could care less about your reaction to me -- I want to see your reaction to what is beyond me!"

Dick sighed -- how many times would he have to hear these overdone sermons?

He threw up his Escrima stick and caught it like one would a baseball before he aimed and threw it at Crane's head. It hit Jonathan square in the forehead, but the Scarecrow took the full brunt with laughter, his eyes wide and unseeing as the Scarecrow relished and embraced the pain fully. Thankfully the laughter was choked and responsive, a reaction to the stinging hit, not nearly unhinged or untethered enough to measure up to the Clown's ringing cackles, but still -- Gotham villains knew their way around creepy.

Not waiting for Crane to recover, Dick charged right at him, grabbing a stray high-necked flask and smashing it against Crane's neck. Sustaining the element of surprise, Dick pulled Crane into a headlock, choking him out as he backed against the wall. Jonathan Crane was not a formidable fighting partner, per se, especially when without his scythe or any other weapons he'd sometimes fashion -- but Dick realized he made a mistake as it dawned on him how unnaturally adept Crane was at going limp and using it as a fighting tactic. The guy was just too tall, too lanky. His martial arts training didn't help his gangly lack of strength, but it did make him slippery.

'This... sucks' Dick thought as he affixed one arm around Crane's neck and pressed the other against the side and back of his head, applying more pressure to essentially hold Crane up while waiting for him to pass out. In his head, some vague joke connecting scarecrows and ragdolls tried to form, something about limp limbs (not his best), but he pushed it aside.

Scarecrow was nearing unconsciousness when suddenly his flailing arms found and grabbed the broken glass from the flask Dick had smashed -- he held a large shard tightly, making his own hand bleed, and stabbed the pane into Dick's torso. A stab wound not unlike ones Dick had endured time and time again in the past, but still, the pain made Dick momentarily loosen his grip.

Crane bolted up with a hurried elbow thrown back at Dick's eye, scrambling over to lean onto the table. He reached his hands into the steaming cauldron-like container centered within the lab set-up. His rubber suit immediately started to smoke as the liquid, something oily, met the material. Crane coated his gloved hands and forearms before reaching up to paint his fingers across the exposed skin of Dick's neck. The burning substance felt icy hot, it coated Crane's hands like candle wax, and Dick felt it seem to drip through layers of skin and tissue as he stumbled back in shock.

"Fuck!" Dick growled, stumbling forward and reacting on instinct to punch Crane out before stumbling away.

Almost immediately, his vision was beginning to blur and a painful sensation he couldn't quite name spread down each limb. The hallway seemed to zoom in and out, the shadows to lengthen and grow weighted and heavy.

Dick reached up to his com, croaking out a quick "help," but got no reply.

This was bad.

Fear gas had a way of affecting the body through the bloodstream once it was breathed in, oxygenating the blood cells with infected gases; injecting the antidote into the bloodstream then counteracted the poison. Not only did a dermal delivery change how the toxin was going to spread, but Dick wasn't sure if giving himself the current antidote Bruce and Tim had brewed would do anything, especially when more things might differ in the makeup of the toxin itself.

Dick reached down to grab the current antidote from his suit anyway, fumbling, but his fingers weren't working; he was losing dexterity; he couldn't move his fingers from inside of his gloves. He tore off the gloves to try to alleviate the clumsiness, but no: he already could feel his movements lock up, his muscles seizing. It was only in his fingers and toes (and he could feel his cheek twitching), but it was only a matter of time before the tremors spread.

His neck was burning, and his mind started racing, overcome by the sudden and spreading pain blooming under his skin, spreading like water, ebbing and flowing through the typography of his anatomy. He clumsily removed his gas mask, discarding it on the floor behind him as he started to walk.

He shuffled down the hall back towards the warehouse's main level. As he walked through the basement, whispers pounded in his ears, overwhelmingly loud, too loud to discern what they were saying -- he couldn't tell if he could recognize the voices, and he couldn't tell if recognition would be comforting or horrifying anyway.

This was the worst part of fear toxin: his mind was racing, his mental capacities functioning just as always, taking in sensation, his senses alive, but he was reacting to the wrong things, he was analyzing things that weren't there. He hated feeling so aware and even still so unsure of his own awareness.

He knew all these sounds were in his head, he knew the pain was something his mind was making up -- but what if it wasn't? He couldn't ever really know, if this time, something was attacking him when he happened to be under the influence or if it was the under the influence of it all that was making him feel these sensations and presences.

Laughter echoed in the back of his mind, morphing from Scarecrow's mechanized laugh to the Joker's erupting cackle to his mother's light tinkling giggle. Not in the back of his mind -- the laughter was outside of himself, flitting around the room in the negative space just beyond his sight.

He arrived at the stairs, stumbling from right to left in zombie-like incoordination. There was no railing, so Dick switched to lean his back against the wall of the staircase for balance as he shakily lifted his legs one at a time to climb the stairs. Everything was trembling; everything hurt.

The staircase seemed to grow, sprout up, each step becoming taller than the last, an ocean of movement shifting up and down instead of side to side. The staircase wasn't more than 20 stairs, he flew down them on entrance -- now the way up looked 100, 300, 5,000 stairs strong.

A hand reached out from the darkness to help prop him up, and Dick turned to thank the owner of the hand, the black-gloved hand of the Dark Knight, Bruce was always so helpful, but when he turned Bruce's cowl exploded into a cloud of bats that flew right at him and threw Dick off his balance, causing him to fall back down the stairs. He fell for what seemed like minutes, and when he landed, though his mind shifted into focus and understood suddenly and starkly that he'd only fallen a few feet, his body seemed to adopt new pains all over. His leg hurt like hell. He yelled out as he struggled to regain his footing despite the spreading incapacitation.

Rising shakily to his feet, he closed his eyes tight -- that didn't usually help, he still heard and felt things that weren't there, and once the toxin spread enough he'd see things even with his eyes closed, hear feel know think fear things -- but for now he needed to will himself not to accept help from non-entities.

He climbed up slowly, making painful work of the increasingly steep staircase. His shin felt like it would snap under the weight of his body, Dick guessed he really had hurt it in the fall, it was a tiny twig being pressed from both sides. Hypochondria gripped his heart -- would he ever be able to walk again after this? He would, of course he would, it was the toxin blowing everything out of proportion. But what if it wasn't?

Halfway up he began to scream, unintentionally. He was hearing things, sure, the distinct crunch of bones breaking and ropes snapping and coughs full of blood, but he couldn't figure out why he was yelling. It was as if his jaw was locked, open instead of closed, as if this throat was contracting of its own accord. He cringed at the whining keens that pierced his ears, sounding foreign and externally borne.

His skin tingled, burning almost. He felt nauseous, and full of a weird energy that both set him on edge and overwhelmed him with an uncomfortable numbness, and he could feel small bone-like insects burrowing under the skin of his hand, and he felt hands grabbing at his exposed-not-exposed-he's-dressed-in-his-suit skin, and he could hear the breaths of people standing just behind him, puffs of sour air hitting the back of his neck and his uncovered ears. Everything was starting to add up, to build from panic to fear.

Dick was aware of all of these things as endemic to the toxin, but his mind was starting to race and he felt himself start to hyperventilate -- everything was starting to feel too real to protect his mind against, he couldn't connect the thought of 'fear toxin' with the plain, overwhelming thought of "oh shit oh no oh please" and the overwhelming feeling of pain, he couldn't connect the situation to the fear itself.

Everything hurt. Up ahead, he heard muffled grunts and yells of his name through the haze of his own wailing voice -- were they real? He tried to think: how long since exposure? He couldn't open his eyes to look at his watch, but estimated 10 minutes. Maybe an hour. Split the difference, he reasoned 30 minutes. The sounds he was hearing, the yelling of his name, sounded somehow grounded. Were these visual hallucinations, he'd describe it as if everything was coated in a shiny sheen, and the new voices had no shine. He willed his mouth to close so he could try to listen to the voices, the real ones, they had to be real, right?

"Nightwing? Nightwing! Open the door!" Shit. He recognized that voice -- who was that?

"Dick, they're going to kill you, baby. You can't let them through," a soft whisper, close to his ear; someone taller than him was speaking to him, comforting him, protecting him from --

No. He knew that voice, the first one, the low edge. The voice wanted to help, more than the helpful non-voice next to him could.

"Hoood," a small, low, deadpan word barely escaping from his lips. His throat felt tight, it ached. Was that really his voice? Dick crawled towards the door, trying to open it. When had it closed? The mechanics had reset, and none of the others had grabbed Selina's tech contribution, deeming it unnecessary, not even Tim had brought one.

Drawing up next to the door, ignoring the snake wrapping around his ankle -- no, not a snake, it was an elephant's trunk, wrapping too tight, and with it the sound of a distant announcement, Haley's voice off somewhere in the distance -- he heaved one of the levers and tried to open the door from within. But of course, he wasn't even anywhere near the door.

'Don't let them touch you': a voice from inside of Dick's head, his head which was pounding, the pressure piercing, growing, felt like it was going to explode.

What if the toxin could still transfer by touch? He paused, a stab of fear piercing his chest, an aching rotting fearful pain. That felt... like a really smart and prudent thought.

What if they (he knew a they was coming to get him, a group, some friends, who were they?) got infected too, and then everyone was incapacitated, and nobody could call for help because help was all here, help was all dying, help was wailing, and then Dick would die as around him his -- that's right, family! -- his family all died as well, their hearts quickening, their bodies paralyzed, as horrors displayed behind their eyelids. 'Can't let them in.'

Dick stumbled back, "Stay away!" wrenching from his mouth. He repeated it like a chant: "Stay away stay away stay away."

Suddenly, a change in the air as the door was wrenched open. "You can't touch me, you'll be infected, it's not a gas!" Dick warned hysterically, shuffling back so quickly, too quickly, before:

He was falling. Back, down, down, tumbling down the stairs. He felt as if layers of his body were stripping off as he fell, as if the stairs he was falling on top of were made of sandpaper, rubbing him raw, catching on every ache and making it worse. Pain, everywhere pain: was it real? Falling, like always -- his fear was forever tied with falling, so maybe this wasn't real.

He landed at the bottom of the stairs, his head violently smacking against the ground, and his vision blurred as pain exploded. And the pain began to spread, the acute feeling of his head cracking against the floor somehow blooming in his feet, his stomach, his back, his mouth, the pain was everywhere, the pain was fear.

He felt himself start to scream again, his eyes leaking tears, and he couldn't move as his body tensed into tremors and his senses were overwhelmed with sound and sights cloying and aggressive. He tried to move, to retreat, to get away from his family, to save them; he couldn't move.

There were people around him, but he was wrong. They weren't his family. It was- it was everyone. Everyone Dick had ever fought, all the monsters of his childhood who'd grown with him to be the monsters of his adulthood.

Waylon Jones took a swipe at his shoulder; the Joker laughed as he poked at his side, prodding at a widening gory chunk of flesh missing from his torso, the skin and muscle torn and sinewy strands of tissue stretching out littered with holes; Bane's hands wrapped around his calf and snapped the bone in half, his hands like vices; Nygma was drawing on him, Victor Zsasz, they were tearing away his suit and drawing on his skin with knives so that bloodied numbers and symbols were left carved deep and gaping into his flesh. Slade was flaying away a layer of skin and muscle, punishing him.

Dick couldn't move, and in front of him a figure walked into view. Bruce was there, looking on at Dick's abuse. Bruce was there. Bruce was shaking hands with Cobb, with Hush, with Harvey Dent, he was making deals with all his devils. He made eye contact with Dick and Dick felt, understood deeply, that Bruce was laughing at Dick's pain. The weight of his gaze fell heavy.

Dick couldn't move as Gotham overwhelmed him.

###

[JASON's POV]

Goons do as goons are: they always go down quick. Jason felt a rush that came from fighting, a specific rush that came from fighting with instead of just against, protecting his own (being protected by his own). As the dust metaphorically settled, Jason turned to assess the room and check on the rest of the team.

Everyone seemed to have wrapped up their fights relatively unscathed; Steph had a scratch from someone's nails across her cheek, which made sense since Brown liked to fight dirty and often prompted the same scrappy style from her opponents. Tim's cape was torn a bit, which was surprising because he'd worked so hard to try to find a material strong enough to minimize tears; Damian's was intact, he never let anyone grab his hooded cape, and Jason was sure the two would argue about the superiority of one's cape back at the Cave. Jason turned and almost had a heart attack as Cass walked up behind him, having snuck close without him realizing.

Everyone seemed to be doing well, all of them surveying the tied-up lab rats, taking stock of the chemical compounds. All good, except...

"Where is Nightwing?" Damian was cleaning off his sword as scanned the room for Grayson.

"Good question -- O?"

"Red Hood, he entered the basement about 23 minutes ago. I can't access his biometrics and he doesn't seem to hear me over the coms."

Damn. Jason stalked over to the menacing door. The asshole knew better than to forge ahead without securing his exit, so one of the crumpled bad guys must have closed it behind him. Jason examined the thing, all its knobs and add-ons, and- there. A slashed piece of rope was lying on the ground, whatever Dick had used to secure the door discarded without thought. Jason kicked the form of the man closest to the door in frustration.

"Well, how do we open the door?" Steph -- she was skipping over, the annoying brat -- asked.

Duke's voice came over the coms: "Fox and Catwoman sent a new tech spec, I think Nightwing took it, so the rest of you are going to have to use something else." He paused. "Oracle and I think someone should take out their com, and use it as a microphone so we can analyze the audio waves of the lock catches and help you crack it open."

"Let's do that," Jason boomed, reaching up to tap a sequence on a panel on the side of his helmet to open it and remove the communication device from his right ear and hold it up to the wheel of the door. He started turning the wheel, using Barbara and Duke's guidance to navigate the multiple locks. He'd gotten through two of the seven mechanisms from within the lock combination when, suddenly--

"Hey, there's sound coming from the other side of the door. Screaming." Barbara sounded worried, cutting into the progress Jason had made so far.

Damian and Tim's heads perked up, and Cass walked up to the door and pressed an open palm against it.

'So Dickie got himself feared up,' he thought -- 'shit.'

"Well hurry the fuck up and get us in there then!" Jason growled, keeping steady as he maneuvered the lock handles. Everyone crowded behind Jason, impatient and trying to give advice, though they weren't doing shit to help. "Hey, step off, let me fuckin' work!"

"I'm patching in the audio we can detect coming from behind the door on a separate track -- Hood, just focus on the door locks!"

Around him, the others reacted viscerally as Dick's deranged screams echoed through the coms. Jason felt his heart clench at the sound coming through his left-ear com. The screams were bouncing off the metal of the door, echoing; he sounded close to the door's other side.

"Nightwing! Nightwing, open the door!" Jason resisted the urge to pound on the door to punctuate his yell, keeping focused on the mechanics. In the back of his head, the track from the com in his other ear, he heard a moaned "Hoood."

"Red Hood, hurry up!" Damian did all but grab Jason's arm and shake. Over the com, Dick started mumbling something unintelligible over and over. At last, a catch in the locking mechanism -- the door was open. He replaced his com as the others wrenched the door open.

"Hey, we're in!" Jason yelled, just as a voice in front of him and from inside his ear screeched a sharp "You can't touch me, you'll be infected, it's not a gas!"

Through the open door, Jason could see Dick writhing on the ground, the tell-tale shell-shocked expression and jerky looks to unseen figures making it plain that he was indeed dosed with fear toxin.

Tim grabbed Jason's arm as he barreled forward: "Wait, he just said --"

But Jason shook him off. "Let me go!"

"No, Hood, he's right, don't touch Nightwing for a second, we have to make sure it's safe," Barbara's commanding voice cut in.

Before he could do anything, though, Dick's frantic scurrying brought him to the edge of the staircase -- and he fell hard backward.

"Shit!" Jason could do nothing but watch as Dick tumbled down into the shadowed abyss of the unlit basement.

Over the coms, Barbara could be heard frantically typing on her keyboards.

"The door and the lining of the basement are what's been blocking the signal -- I'm scanning the basement now that it's not all sealed off, there's a lone camera down the hall, easy to hack, hold on a second."

Jason hurried down the stairs, Damian close behind. Below, Dick was tensing and locking up, one side of his body racked with tremors and muscle spasms. Tortured screams fought their way from within his writhing frame.

Jason balked; that wasn't fear toxin. Was it?

The team all rushed to the bottom of the stairs, Cass staying up top to make sure the door stayed propped open. Jason crouched next to Dick's prone figure, his hands hovering over his brother's spasming form. There were screams choking out from his throat, interrupted by coughs, awful noises of a hurried fear that needed to be expressed even as the breaths left too quickly from Dick's lungs. Tears leaked from the corners of Dick's eyes. He looked like he was in pain. It was weird, much worse than the normal fear toxin: Dick couldn't seem to control his movements, as if the toxin was affecting his nerves.

"Why wouldn't we be able to touch him? He's wearing a suit for g-d's sake!"

"Crane touched him with something -- coated it onto Dick's neck!"

Jason jerked at Barbara's words, taking out a flashlight to shine it on Dick's neck.

"Oh fuck," Tim muttered as the wound came into view.

Dick's skin was bloodied, flesh torn and bubbling, as if he'd been doused with acid -- a mild acid, but something biting and hungry for matter. The skin around the wound was pulled taut, it looked raw, the blood was dark and saturated, and Jason could see hints of green in the skin around the wound as Dick's neck tensed with each scream. His suit looked melted, frayed at the neckline.

"It doesn't make sense that whatever is infecting him could still be an effective infecting agent -- the shit splashed him in one spot, it's not on every part of his skin or suit," Jason said, reaching down to put a hand on Dick's arm, in comfort or helpless empathy, but Tim stopped him.

"It absolutely makes fucking sense! Chickenpox, impetigo, I mean, fuck, even poison ivy, you've fought Isley -- skin to skin is absolutely an effective way of spreading something like this, and we can see the toxin spreading fast. We don't know what this is."

Tim was pointing his own flashlight along Dick's body, analyzing everything. He continued, "Who knows how Crane's engineered this new toxin, it could aerosolize upon contact so that it spreads all over his figure." At that, Tim pointed to the green veins. "Especially with the blood from the wound coating the outside of his suit, and evidence that it ate through his suit, it's better safe than sorry."

Jason simply grunted and moved forward.

Jason moved the flashlight down Dick's body to check for other injuries, raising his hands a good foot above Dick's body to placate the nerd. Next to him, Steph had her hands up covering her ears -- Dick's wordless screams were hard to listen to. No matter how many times each of the bats came into contact with Crane's toxins, watching someone experience full-blown and overwhelming fear wasn't something even the most disciplined hero could adjust to.

Nightwing's costume had thick material, so there weren't any visible injuries; none except for a tear about five inches in length in his torso, which was slowly leaking blood. A small injury, non-life-threatening; painful. No other cuts or visible wounds.

"Agent A's sending the batmobile, Signal's helping him pack hazmats and some extra materials so you can get Nightwing packed away as we assess what the interpersonal risk level is. How is he?"

"He's -- Nightwing's out of his mind Oracle, what do you want me to say? His neck has some sort of burn from the toxin's application, and he has a semi-shallow wound in his side. I can't really tell anything else while unable to touch him," Jason paused, flicking the flashlight in front of Dick's right eye, his left, "Uh, and his pupils are blown wide, so I can't check for a head injury from his fucking tumble down the stairs either."

"Alright," she said softly, a momentary tremble entering her voice. Then, "Alright, sit tight, keep watch, let me know if his condition changes. The car's on the way, ETA is seven minutes. It's on autopilot, but Signal's on his way behind it. In the meantime -- Scarecrow's gone. There's a tunnel leading out from this basement, leading who knows where, he regained consciousness and entered while Nightwing climbed the stairs, he brought the toxin with him. There aren't any other cameras. It looks like there might be some kind of lighting system, I'm thinking this might go pretty deep, maybe a few interconnected tunnels, but it isn't hackable or traceable. We'll have to keep a watch set up by this doorway and come back to map the tunnels later."

A pause as everyone stared down at Dick. To be honest, Jason had forgotten about the villain in his concern for his br- for Dick.

"Copy," Tim said after the silence went on a beat too long. Jason appreciated the kid responding to Babs; he was always too hard on her, and on the little genius, he was always too hard on everyone when he was stressed, and he often forgot to offer up the normal, necessary interactions needed in these kinds of situations. Devolved into gruff focus. Which definitely wasn't similar at all to Bruce, definitely.

"Bru-, no! No no no no no" Dick's screams suddenly focused in on some unseen hallucination, and Tim, Damian, and Steph's heads all turned sharply at Dick's scream. "No no no no no no..."

They were all used to the Bat-life, and it was practically ingrained into their core to avoid using real names in the field. Dick had once been half-dead and bleeding out with a Grade 3 concussion, and he never once broke into using real identities -- he was really far gone now. Dick's voice was slurred, as if part of his mouth or jaw was paralyzed. "No, 't hurrrtss, plss!"

"What is he seeing?" Damian asked, his voice turning hard as his concern for Dick clearly overwhelmed him.

"How the fuck should I know, kid?"

Jason cringed as Dick churned out hurried and distraught "please"'s and "no"'s. Begging wasn't something Dick ever did. It hurt to hear. His limbs were tensing into epileptic stiffness, his right arm bending atop his chest. His eyes were hurriedly darting from side to side to side. Each shuffle of Dick's limbs caused echoes to bounce off the walls -- what was with this warehouse and its fucking echoes? It amplified everything, made it all the worse.

Cass suddenly appeared at the top of the stairs: "Here!"

At her word, Steph and Tim ran up the stairs, one to run with her to the Bat Mobile and one to keep the door open so that Jason, Dick, and Damian wouldn't be thrust into darkness. A minute later, the three all ran down with bunched rubberized material in their arms, Duke here and waiting at the top of the stairs by the door.

Jason hurriedly grabbed one of the suits and stepped into the legs, pulling it on as fast as possible. Once he had it on, unzipped in the back, he dropped down next to Dick and pressed his hands on his shoulders, feeling along each of his limbs for breaks or other injuries.

Dick had mostly stopped struggling crazily -- he was stuck tensed tight, which was probably torturous for him but was honestly easier for Jason for now -- and Jason felt his muscles roped hard in tonic-like tremors.

"Something's up with his shoulder, his shin is swollen, might be some sort of sprain or fracture, something's fucked in his wrist," Jason started listing off injuries as the others, now clothed in protective gear, joined him in examining Dick.

"Let's just get him up to the car," Tim, crouched across from Jason, had his hand on Dick's shoulders. Damian had his hands resting softly on Dick's cheeks. The three readied to move Dick's prone body, when --

"Wait!" Tim contradicted himself, darting to the first aid supplies and grabbing alcohol and gauze. "We should wipe whatever this new toxin is off, even if he isn't contagious, it's clear that coming into contact with the toxin itself will infect any of us."

He swabbed the toxin and stored it in its own sample case in quick and practiced fashion, then leaned over Dick, hesitating for a second before dousing Dick's neck in alcohol. Dick didn't scream; he sobbed. They all tried to ignore the noise as, with the liquid soaking the wound, Jason and Cass worked to wipe it down with gauze until all the toxin was gone.

"Alright, up, up."

Jason grabbed under Dick's shoulders, and Tim, Steph, Cass, and Damian all grabbed ahold. Together the group struggled up the stairs with Dick. Passing through the door, passing the warehouse full of still bodies, some of the assholes coming to but all of them sufficiently zip-tied into immobility. Dick was pretty docile all the while, trembling but unmoving, until --

"Let- n-no, nooo," Dick jerked suddenly, coming back alive with renewed fear.

"Holy shit!" Jason struggled to keep hold of Dick, unwilling to let him fall again.

"What's going on, what happened?" Barbara frantically called in. The group all fumbled to keep ahold of Dick as he jerked uncoordinatedly, unable to escape whatever unseen monstrosity he was erroneously seeing his family as.

"He's just -- he's struggling. He's scared of us." Tim's voice wavered as he answered Barbara. What else was there to say? Nevertheless, the group made it to the car. Duke remained behind to call Gordon and keep watch in case Scarecrow doubled back through the tunnel system they'd left unseen -- with concrete orders not to engage if he did. Jason would have to buy him coffee or something, the poor guy was going on like hour 22 of working since his start that morning.

Cass climbed into the driver's side, Jason taking the passenger seat. In the back, Damian, Tim, and Stephanie held Dick on their lap, each trying in vain to contain his long limbs and provide some modicum of comfort.

The car ride home through the darkened streets of Gotham was punctuated only by agonized whimpers and moans from the backseat. Cass drove a good 40 miles over the speed limit, weaving around the occasional car driving somewhere unknown in the late twilight. Jason fought every urge to turn and watch Dick the whole car ride; he stayed facing forward; he didn't let the others see how much he flinched each time Dick cried out. 

In the rearview mirror, he watched as Damian softly pet Dick's hair down, his gloved hand awkwardly enacting the thoughtful movements. Steph kept adjusting the seatbelts that Alfred had insisted they install specifically for transporting injured bats.

Cass took a particularly hard turn, and Steph almost fell over in her rush to hold Dick steady. Another turn, and the car pulled into the abandoned subway tunnel systems; another, and they were on the fast track to the Cave's entrance.

"Oracle, is everything set up?" Tim asked, looking out the window to avoid looking down at Dick's stricken face.

"We're waiting for you."

"Good, I'm tired of hearing the asshole freak the fuck out."

At that, they all turned to glare at Jason -- oh, the pain of nobody letting him use sarcasm during painful situations. The batmobile hit a bump, and suddenly: they were home.

"Come on, come on, out out out," Jason rushed to open the door for Damian and help maneuver Dick out from the backseat. But his arms were caught in the straps, and suddenly Dick was screaming, sobbing. Everyone flinched at the noise, the pure agony that dripped from each hurried wordless sound.

They adopted the same positions as before and everyone rushed to carry Dick over to the infirmary. Leslie Thompkins was waiting there, she and Alfred dressed in pristine-looking hazmat suits. Barbara rolled in with a collection of supplies piled up on her lap, her hazmat suit on as well.

"Set him down here on the bed!" Leslie waved both hands, and the others followed her direction and laid Dick down on the oversized medical bed.

He kicked out, twitched onto his side, but they got him on his back and held him still. Alfred reached around to find the secret catch in Dick's suit and expertly started to pull it down off his struggling form. Leslie was taking vitals -- Dick's pulse, his temperature, his heart rate, his oxygen levels. Without the suit, Alfred pulled off Dick's black undershirt and began disinfecting the wound on Dick's neck, irrigating the wound and patting it dry with more care than they'd been able to use when first cleaning off the toxin. The two worked in practiced professionalism, hustling past each other, passing tools back and forth.

"Barbara, hand me the IV bag," Leslie ordered, reaching out a hand. Barbara handed her the bag, unspooling tubing and taking out new sealed needles. Her hand dropped from handing the supplies to Leslie to rest on Dick's shoulder, squeezing his arm in comfort. Of course, he didn't respond, but Dick's eyes were now open and staring, unseeing, up at the ceiling. Leslie quickly set up the IV bag, which seemed to be only saline, and felt around for a vein in the crook of his arm.

"This is odd," she murmured.

"What is it, Doctor Thompkins?" Alfred crossed to join her on Dick's left side.

"His veins are hardening slightly. It looks like how patients react to chemotherapy treatments or neurotoxins, arteriolar vasodilation -- did the toxin get on his arm at all?"

"No," Barbara said, wiping her eyes with the hand that hadn't yet touched Dick. "No, it only touched his neck, maybe his chin."

"That's... hmm..." Leslie trailed off, taking stock of what that meant and reassessing the situation. "No matter. We'll have time to analyze the toxin later. For now -- Tim, what are your thoughts on our current antidote strain?"

Tim stumbled over himself to walk up to Leslie, unzipping his hazmat to access a pouch in his Red Robin suit and pull out a vial of the current fear toxin antidote.

"I think it should work. None of the symptoms of this toxin seem to be counterintuitive to the treatment, I mean, unless any of his vitals seem to be trending a different way?"

"No, everything seems within range for how he's reacted to Fear gas in the past."

"Then yeah, it should work. I mean, it should do more good than harm, it might not fully cure him but it will at least lessen the severity of his symptoms without interacting badly. We were watching the warehouse for long enough that I'm pretty confident we know all the chemical components that were sent in, he couldn't have known we were watching so there'd have been no need to get anything via secret tunnels, although who the fuck knows, right? That's what secret tunnels are for, to do secret things. So, there's a small chance there's another chemical, but probably it's the same ones he's used before, just in a different concoction, it's all probably chemicals we hopefully verified, it isn't anything that should have a bad reaction to the antidote. We could take some blood and test how the sample reacts, but our lab is good, it's not fast, I don't know how long it will tak-- "

"Stop rambling and just give him the damn antidote!" Jason yelled.

On the bed, Dick was practically catatonic -- his eyes were wide and unseeing, his mouth moving around soundless unintelligible words. His left arm kept jerking in unrhythmic tics.

Next to him, Barbara nodded in agreement. "Yeah, just give it to him, please."

"Alright Timothy, let's inject a double dose in the bag and increase the drip," Leslie directed Tim. "I want to also add atropine to the bag, it seems as though this toxin is affecting Dick's nervous system. Alfred, please set up a heart monitor over there." Leslie bent over to examine Dick's leg as Alfred moved out of the way, the Nightwing suit off and folded in a plastic bag set to the side. She felt Dick's leg with both hands as Alfred and Tim worked, her movement eliciting no reaction from Dick.

"Jason, Cassandra, help me wrap his calf please, it seems he has a hairline fracture of his tibia," she straightened up, pointing to Jason and Cass and motioning them to come walk around to her. It was disconcerting how limp Dick stayed while they maneuvered his leg to treat the fracture.

She set up a temporary immobilizing cast so they could wait until Dick's skin was washed and decontaminated to apply a permanent cast. She examined his wrist, concluding that it required no further treatment, with the caveat that, "Oh, the poor dear is going to have some horrible bruising."

She also had Alfred help her set Dick's shoulder before Barbara tenderly slid his arm into a sling. The injury wasn't anything to worry about given Dick's history with dislocations, but all the same, it was best to keep it still.

Slowly, painfully slow, Dick seemed to untense and to react a bit more, to show some awareness. His eyes were neither staring and sightless nor were they darting every which way; he seemed to be a bit more relaxed, a bit less tortured, and, half-lidded, his pupils now dilated and reacted to light. He flinched when Leslie swatched his side with antiseptic wipes -- he was feeling pain, but at least it seemed to be reactive. Not out of the woods, but not giving-everyone-a-heart-attack level of bad anymore.

"So when can we like... touch him? Do we need to keep these suits on?" Jason asked. He didn't actually care too much, but Barbara seemed worried. Yeah, he was just asking for her.

"Well, that we can test quite easily, let me get, oh, where is that solvent," Leslie went to go find her bag as, on the bed, Alfred began washing Dick's skin with a washcloth and simple warm water. Only Alfred could make the clinical seem so comforting.

Leslie returned and swabbed Dick's chest with whatever concoction was meant to test Dick's skin -- Jason had no fucking idea what she was using.

"Someone set a timer for 10 minutes, please." Leslie drew a border around the swabbed area, then returned the bottle of whatever she'd just used to her medical bag. Steph joined her, asking the doctor what she'd used and how it worked.

Next to Jason, Damian, Tim, Cass and Alfred all set timers.

The whine of an engine behind him caused Jason to turn back to the entrance of the Cave. Duke had returned, finally.

"What did my dad say? Has he seen those tunnels before?" Barbara asked him -- apparently, they'd discussed asking Gordon if there was any recorded information about the tunnel network Crane had disappeared into before Duke left -- but Duke shook his head no.

"Commissioner Gordon had no knowledge about any underground network leading to this particular warehouse. He's sending Detective Bullock to see if Montoya knows anything, and he said he'd send over whatever city planning has on record on tunnels in the area, but he thinks we have the same information as he does."

Barbara nodded, flashing an appreciative smile at Duke before returning her gaze back down to Dick, who appeared to be sleeping and much more restful.

"How is he doing?" Duke asked as he walked up to the infirmary area, pulling a chair up next to Jason.

"Fine, I guess. He isn't screaming in overwhelming pain anymore, and he's not all tensed and locked up."

"I think the antidote will be effective," Tim added. "The intended damage of Fear Toxin is to overwork the heart. Even if this isn't a fully curable strain from our antidote, the toxins always leech out of the body's system eventually. He's not in any heart attack danger anymore, and that's what matters, it'll give his body time to fight off whatever toxin is left in his body." Behind him, Leslie smiled approvingly.

"But it was so much more... physical than Crane's other toxins, more neuro-painful-whatever," Jason mused.

"Yes, I was thinking the same. Why was he seizing? Was there something neurological involved?" Damian asked. "How do you know you have the correct information?"

"Seizures can be caused by a number of things, not just neuro stuff, but it didn't look like he was having actual seizures. Most likely, once the toxin hit his bloodstream or lymphatic system the neurotransmitters and inhibitory pathways in his system got heightened all out of wack, kind of like how drug overdoses lead to seizures. It was more just heightened muscle spasms from an overactive nervous system. I think."

"So he's... going to recover?"

"Yeah Damian. I think his body's reaction was just because he was infected physically, it was through his tissue, he didn't breathe it in like we usually do. Nerve agents act similarly. It actually probably did have some chemical overlaps with nerve gases we've encountered."

"Of course it fucking does," Jason muttered, frustrated. Fear Toxin wasn't enough on its own, was it?

"And..?" Steph prompted Tim.

"And what?"

"I dunno, you were giving us a whole friggin dissertation, you don't have any theories on specifics yet? Any, like, spot-on predictions of what's going on?"

"Hey, I was just being thorough, the demon brat asked!"

"Well, how was I to know you weren't relaying incorrect information?"

"Give me a little credit here!"

"You all did a wonderful job dealing with the emergency, analyzing the information, and getting Richard back to safety. That's what matters, and is certainly something to be proud of," Alfred interjected in his grandfatherly way, making eye contact with each bat in turn before standing up from Dick's side and going to put away supplies. Who could keep arguing after that? Cass walked silently over to help him clean up.

All of a sudden, four timers went off all at once -- everyone jumped.

Leslie returned to Dick's side, checking the results of whatever she'd applied.

"All clear. You all can remove your protective suits now," Leslie smiled, rubbing Dick's shoulder in relieved pleasure as she turned to go take off her own suit.

Around Jason, everyone stood up to tear off the hazmat suits, the cave erupting in the sound of hurried rustling as the suits were unceremoniously all dropped to the ground.

"So, did we even need to wear them in the first place?" Jason asked as he stepped out of his suit.

"No, probably not. We know how Dick is under Fear Toxin, he's worried about others, he probably had some delusion about hurting all of you," Leslie replied. Jason nodded, knowing all too well how self-sacrificing the dick was.

By the bed, Barbara shifted in her chair to fully remove her hazmat suit before going to lay her head down on Dick's un-injured shoulder, steering clear of the wound on his neck. Around the bed, with the danger now confirmed to be gone, everyone scooted their chairs a bit closer, watching to make sure Dick was really okay, to take it in with their own eyes.

And he was, as far as Jason could tell; he was sound asleep, unmoving and less tensed up, a soft look of neutrality evident on his unconscious face; a welcome sight after he'd oscillated so intensely along various levels of terror.

Dick was going to be okay; 'for now,' a foreboding voice in Jason's head warned. He frowned as around him the others were all falling into more relaxed demeanors.

'But what the fuck was that?'

Chapter Text

[DICK's POV]

It took about a minute for Dick to realize he was conscious.

He always found that feeling of clawing up from the abyss to be so odd; gone one minute and here the next. When consciousness came, when it really came, and he could feel and think (and understand that he was feeling and he was thinking), the first thing he noticed was the soft weight of two hands clasped around his own. The warmth was comforting, and he squeezed before he even knew he was doing so.

"Dick?" Barbara's hopeful voice responded almost immediately.

He moved his eyes toward her voice before realizing they were closed, then opened them slowly, light flooding his senses. He blinked a few times.

"Hey, Boy Wonder." 

"Babs. Wha' happend'?"

"Same old -- you got yourself hurt." She removed one of her hands from his to brush some strands of hair out of his eyes.

"Yeah, you kinda suck at your job Big Bird," Jason's voice drew close, and a second later his face appeared next to Barbara, who smacked his shoulder.

"Ow! Jeez Barb, I was only kidding!" Jason yelled in mock pain. Barbara patted Jason's shoulder in fake sympathy, using the shoulder as leverage to roll closer to the cot and look down at Dick.

"Dick, what do you remember?"

"Um... it hurt... an' I saw. I saw.." Dick trailed off for a second, choosing to figure everything out in his head before talking aloud. Barbara and Jason waited patiently.

Vague images swirled in his mind of blinding pain, and a group of rogues, and Bruce's face scrunched in hatred.

"It wasn' real, was it? I was dosed?"

"Yeah, it was Crane. New kind of toxin. You don't have to tell us now, but it didn't seem like a very fun experience."

Barbara spoke slowly, making sure to keep eye contact with Dick to make sure he was following her words.

And he was, sort of. He was all there, but the vague images were coming into focus now, blackened by a barrage of unfocused emotions, pain and fear and betrayal, and he knew they were all from the toxin, they were all hallucinations. But.

"Bruce... wouldn' want that, right?"

Barbara's brow creased, and she shared a glance with Jason. "Bruce wouldn't want what, Dick?"

"He... he was, all of them, it.. he's.. he wouldn't hurt me?"

Dick couldn't help the childish edge his question took, and he cringed internally when Jason and Barbara exchanged another look.

He knew he was being stupid, asking such an unnecessary question. He felt laid bare, like he was only half of himself. He would never ask such an odd question normally, would never out his own hesitance. But reality seem muffled and odd as he was becoming reacquainted with consciousness, and his mind wasn't connecting everything the way it should.

"No, he wouldn't. Not ever," Barbara replied softly.

"I know, I know.. I'm with you. Don' think it's still messin' with me or anything, just.. had to ask."

Dick smiled up at her, hoping his assurances hit home despite the slur in his speech.

"Of course," she answered, rubbing his shoulder, and damn if that didn't feel amazing.

They all knew how unsure it felt to emerge from fear toxin, how necessary confirmation of reality was. He closed his eyes, nodding some vague affirmation to both Babs and himself. When he opened them again, Jason's face had gone.

"How long was I out?" He asked carefully.

"All of last night and yesterday, tonight. Nothing crazy, you basically just got a really, really long nap." She checked her watch. "It's around 5:30 in the morning, now."

"Oh, good." Lovely; Dick hated to learn how long he'd been absent and oblivious.

"Yeah, you asshole, you probably really need some more sleep. Not just poisoned-into-unconsciousness sleep."

She stroked his cheek absentmindedly, her worry about Dick written clearly across her tight features, her furrowed brow.

"Do you need anything? You thirsty?

"Ohh... yeah."

He licked his lips, waiting as Barbara's face disappeared from his scope of vision. He could hear her chair hit lightly into the fridge set up across the cave, hear the door opening and one of the reusable bottles clinking lightly against it, but couldn't find the energy to look over. He heard rustling, some clinking. The mundane noises were strangely soothing, and he let his eyes close, giving in to the exhaustion.

Barbara returned in a metaphorical blink, saying a quick "Here you go," as she placed her hand behind his head, guiding him to the water bottle's hard metal straw. He drank in short, measured spurts until, satisfied, he leaned back against Barbara's hand. He sighed as she raked her hand through his hair, her nails scratching softly at his scalp.

"It was bad, huh," she said softly, and he nodded without opening his eyes, the room spinning a little behind his closed lids. The memories of the encounter, which he wasn't so much recalling as much as just floating up towards, were ones of pain like nothing he'd felt before.

She didn't say anything else, just kept her fingers moving through his hair, and he loved her for it. Her fingers, her rings, cold and chunky, just the presence of Barbara; it just felt so familiar, so good a feeling.

He could've stayed like that forever, half-asleep with her silent comfort, and they did for a bit, before footsteps marched down the stairs, the scuffs bouncing off the cave walls.

"Got some visitors for you, 'mano," Jason called as the group of bats grouped around his med bed.

Dick raised his eyebrows in acknowledgment but kept his eyes closed as around him everyone all greeted him with relieved exclamations. 

"Hey guys," Dick smiled, straining to count how many pairs of feet he could hear without opening his eyes. Five, six or so -- must be everyone who was involved with the stakeout, minus Alfred and Leslie.

He could hear Jason walking over to the fridge, his chunky boots unmistakable as an identifier. His brother was giving him a wide berth, probably still freaked about how freaked he actually was the other night, but Dick appreciated the gesture of bringing the family down to say hi for what it was. What better to prove that the vision of his father actively betraying him was untrue than the barrage of family coming to check on him?

"How are you feeling?" Tim asked, his voice pulling Dick from his thoughts.

"I'm okay. Kin'a out of it."

"Out of it how?"

"I'm jus tired." Tired, achy, out of wack.

Everyone around him seemed hesitant, unsure of what to say. Last night, or the night before (his sense of time was still fucked) must have been bad.

"So... what wass it that got me?" Dick opened his eyes, cringing at the blinding orbs each light in the vicinity had become. Babs had already explained what had happened (what else needed explaining outside of "Crane" and "toxin," really?), but Dick knew giving Tim something technical to explain and lay out helped keep him calm, focused.

But it was Damian who spoke first, looking at Dick hesitantly.

"Jonathan Crane created a new form of his toxin, a form that we have yet to identify. He applied it to your skin."

"My... neck, right?"

"Yes. Does it hurt?"

"Nahh. I'm fine."

In reality, bringing the injury up had made Dick aware of just how sore and raw his neck felt, a stinging tightness that streaked up towards his chin every time he moved or spoke, but lying about pain was second nature; Dick knew they all knew he was lying, but hey, he's the oldest -- it was his job to feign alright-ness.

"So... brig me up to speed. What have you found out?"

"We've, uhh, locked down the warehouse and set up cameras and surveillance outside to make sure there's no movement from the tunnels. To be honest, first priority was you," Babs supplied, tugging lovingly at a lock of his hair.

"You haven't gone in at all?"

"Not yet," Tim answered. "But to be fair, it's only been, like, a day. We'll get on it next patrol."

"So... wha' happened las' night? Or, I guess tonight? You haven't done anything?"

Tim looked around before taking charge. "We've been running tests on the toxin, though we haven't got anything concrete yet when it comes to fully analyzing it or synthesizing a treatment. It looks like a hybrid of a bunch of concoctions; OG Fear Toxin, a neurotoxin that seems similar, so far at least, to tetrodotoxin, some chemicals used in chemotherapeutic compounds like cisplatin... it's a whole lot of nasty. Something seems to be interacting with histamine H1 receptors, which is why you were in so much pain. It flooded your system."

"So fucked up," Steph muttered under her breath. 

Dick nodded. His mind was moving faster than his body, his thoughts unhampered, and he ran back through the memories he could grasp. "That tunnel... you don' know where it leads?"

"It's part of some system, but we can't tell how big. There aren't any signals coming from within, no security system or cameras. Seems pretty streamlined, old school, maybe specifically to go undetected. And it's lined. All we know is what they're not; no sewage system, subway tunnel, maintenance route, anything leads there. And it isn't part of the Owl's system or anything batty that we've ever logged..." Babs trailed off. "I wonder, actually, if there's some laboratory-type explanation, just based off the door. Like a wind tunnel or something else that's temp-controlled? But it isn't close to any lab I can think of."

"It could be anything," Jason offered from his place over by the bikes. He was putting some distance between him and the bats, maybe not even consciously, but was still contributing to the conversation. "Gotham runs a lot deeper than even we know. All kinds of sketchy shit, deals and armories and whatever, are placed underground, under the city. I ran into a lot in my sector, you know, when I was Crime Lord-ing and shit and working with Black Mask. We probably won't ever know everything that's down there."

"Should still look," Cass said. Dick nodded sluggishly.

"So... anything else pop up?" It felt like something was gnawing in the empty space behind his eyes, prompting him to look for some missing piece.

"Um... no?" Steph offered. "We're waiting for firm results on the toxin, and we'll start going through the tunnels at some point; what else did you want to know?"

"I don't know..."

"Chill out for now, Boy Wonder. You're still recovering," Barbara chided.

"I'm fine."

"You're definitely not," Duke clapped back.

"You looked like shit last night, Dick. Seriously awful," Steph added. Next to her, Damian nodded solemnly.

"Awful... like more than usual fear tox?"

"Were you listening?" Tim asked incredulously. "Yes, obviously. You're entire system was fucking flooded."

"Lot of pain," Cass elaborated.

Snippets from the other night again floated into Dick's mental periphery, the sensations swirling together. It was weird to try to feel it all after the fact; it was bad, obviously, but in a way that felt completely removed from the here and now. "Oh... yeah, right. That wasn' very fun."

Jason scoffed. "Testing out a new formula made by Gotham's best and brightest isn't something you do for fun?"

"You know what? It really, really isn't." He grinned a shadow of a smile, though he could feel, control-less, that he probably looked loopy.

"I don't know Dick. At this point it seems like you do it on purpose. You know, like this is your way of keeping up the oldest vigilante sibling-teammate shtick by being our own personal guinea pig, try out bad toxins so we know how to prepare. You're just, like, such a good guy," Tim joked lightly. Steph and Duke burst out laughing, Jason barking out a mirthless laugh. Damian let out a sharp 'tt' in indignation.

Ugh, Dick couldn't count on all his fingers and toes and limbs how many things he'd been dosed with over the years, but he didn't for one second miss when he and Bruce had to learn how to deal with and treat it all simply from experience. A guinea pig duo.

"Glad I could help. Love rackin' up these firstss."

"That's not funny," Barbara muttered under her breath, leaning forward to slap him lightly before pressing her lips softly to his forehead.

Dick smiled and nuzzled his face closer to hers. He knew that Barbara loved the physical reality of his being near her just as much as he loved just feeling her close to him. They spent so much of their time apart, it was really the simple things that counted.

She stayed there bent with her cheek next to Dick's for a second while the rest of the bats argued over who had the most 'firsts' under their belts ("I was the first one Joker used that one venom variant on!" "Well, Ivy tried that one truth serum on me, it didn't wear off for a week!" "What about that time, with Mad Hatter..." "Chúpamelo, I've got you all fuckin' beat, seeing as how I was the first to die and come back to life and all").

"Alright, back to the kiddies," Barbara muttered under her breath, earning a breathy sort of laugh from Dick. She straightened back up, calling out, "Anyway, we should figure this out guys. Guys!"

Dick opened his eyes, thinking 'I guess I'll join in now,' and around him, everyone turned back to face him and Babs.

"I don't like that we know so little about whatever this is."

Tim nodded in agreement. "I knew something was going on with him, from what I'd found I thought he was preparing to dose somewhere public, I was so off, but this is so much more than what I expected."

"What was it that made you think that?" Duke asked.

"There was a lot of chatter on the street about a big project Scarecrow was working on. Recruiting a lot of people to help. That plus the increased chemical shipments we'd caught wind of, it all seemed to point to the lead-up to something big. I didn't really expect it to be big and new."

"I think we should wait for Father to come back before mapping out the tunnel."

"Oh, do you? Doesn't sound very fearless Al Ghul heir of you."

"He's far more knowledgable about the goings-on of Gotham than any of us, Drake. I don't want us to miss anything, especially with Richard out of commission."

"Woah, out of comish?" Dick interrupted. With shaking arms and what felt like a Herculean effort, he sat up to look around at everyone. His neck and shoulder only hurt, like, a little bit. He only felt slightly dizzy, and, you know, only a little bit of blackness was creeping into his vision. "Who said I can't join in on canvassing?"

"No, rest," Cass chided, her brows furrowed in concern.

"I'm fine, I shwear."

"Yeah? Then say it without slurring your fucking words, Dickface."

Dick groaned in Jason's general direction.

Tim jumped up to sit on one of the infirmary's counters and cut in: "Bruce isn't home until tomorrow morning. We can't just do nothing tonight. We can start on surveillance, at least, we can set up some sensors and cameras or something. Just to map it, no contact."

"Isn't Fox going all Big Brother and trying out new drones? Why don't we just send a bunch of those down to look around? Or like, use them to cast a wider net?" Steph asked, hopping up to sit next to Tim. He cracked a smile.

"Big Brother's been here, Steph. You literally watch TikToks in the bathroom, you don't think someone's watching you pee through the camera?"

"Gross!" Steph laughed and pushed at Tim's shoulder as everyone groaned. 

"No, but that's not a bad idea," Barbara mused. "It'll help us get a start on everything -- drones, I mean -- though I don't think we should have them go down there on their own. We can at least use the new drones to give us early notice, you know, some more protection since Bruce would for sure be telling us not to go down without him, the control freak. We also should figure out how to make sure our communications can get through that lockdown door that was used," Barbara said. "We don't want to send something down and lose it behind the door, or behind another door down the tunnel that we don't know about." 

Dick flushed a little at that. Their systems were so well-oiled and high tech at this point; how embarrassing that he let his comms get cut off without checking first or setting up some redundancy.

Steph pointed at Barbara in victory: "See! It's a good idea."

"Well I have to go into work for a few meetings, I'll swing by Lucius's lab," Tim said.

"As you should, Drake, this is your operation and therefore your responsibility."

Tim glared at Damian. Everyone again erupted into chaotic overlapping conversations, and Dick closed his eyes in exhaustion, letting the noise waft around him. He felt his body list slightly to the side but stayed stubbornly upright.

The others must have noticed, because suddenly everyone was whispering in hushed tones. Dick could feel all eyes land on him. A chorus of "byes" and "laters" echoed around the cave as they all seemed, collectively, to decide to leave the planning at that and let Dick get some more rest before they resumed tonight.

Dick sighed in secret relief, lowering himself down onto the cot as, next to him, Babs pressed the button on the bed's remote to incline the back of the bed up to meet him; she knew Dick couldn't lie on his back without feeling like a corpse on a slab. The sound of the door to the cave closing boomed around the room.

"So you're okay?" She asked him once it was just the two of them again, turning to face him.

"One more nap and I'll be ready to take Dr. Scarecow on myself."

"Another fight with him, you'll be in a chair right next to me. Let your leg and neck heal a bit, it's okay to not be okay."

He nodded obediently, acquiescing to Babs and her Oracle, I-know-more-than-you-so-you-better-listen-up voice.

"You'd tell me if something was wrong, right? Like, more wrong than the normal... wrongness?"

"I promise, Babs. I'm okay."

She hesitated. "You should have seen yourself, Dick... it was awful."

"I know. I'm not pushing it down, I promise I'll deal."

She smiled; he could hear it in her voice. "Alright. I'll leave you to it. It being taking a nap, you better not get up and do something else. I've got a few things to research anyway, and I want to join Tim later."

With one last brush of her hand on his forehead, she headed out.

So. Just Dick, all alone in the Cave.

He couldn't really remember the last time he was down here alone to be honest -- since he'd moved to Blüdhaven, he really only came down here when he was helping someone else. It was strangely comforting; as much as he loved the chaos that the Bats' endeavors had become, and he really did love it, he sometimes missed how simple it was when it was just Dick, Bruce, and Alfred. Sort of cozy. Simpler times, and all that.

Fuck. Bruce. That hallucination of Bruce chumming it up with the Rogues left a bitter taste in his mouth. It's not like he hadn't had that hallucination under the influence before, but this felt oddly different, like something seeping into his very bones.

Maybe it was the nature of this new toxin, how very viscerally he felt the fear and felt said fear as pain. It had been sharp and biting, cruel. All-consuming. It still felt pretty hazy to Dick, but hazy in a very sinister sort of way. Dick was no stranger to experiencing shitty sensation, but something about pairing the sensations he's normally trained to endure with a loss of agency, loss of control, an overabundance of emotions; it all felt really stifling. Dick worried it was an experience he wouldn't be able to shake very quickly.

At the very least, those feelings all felt very personal and inward; he didn't feel that they were tied to Bruce.

With how complicated their lives had become, Dick often forgot about those first few months he'd been sent to the Manor, when he was convinced that Bruce was some evil scheming billionaire (of course, he sort of was an evil scheming billionaire, in a certain sense) readying to do whatever sinister thing his traumatized adolescent brain could come up with.

He hadn't felt that sense of apprehension around Bruce, or felt that suspicious of his intentions, in a very long time. It felt foreign, thankfully; Bruce was his family, no matter what, and not much could change that anymore. None of the chaos of the new way of vigilante life could change that.

Dick felt sleep tugging at his brain, and he greeted it happily, comforted by his conclusion, silly as it was, that yes, he and Bruce were solid.

But something felt off still, some unanswered feeling left over from the toxin. A nagging sensation that something was wrong, or that something bad was drawing closer. Some feeling of wrongness settled into his bones.

Chapter Text

[TIM's POV]

Dick looked like shit.

Tim couldn't stop thinking about how agonized his older brother had looked while under the influence of this new toxin.

He thought about it all through the night as Dick slept, dead to the world; he thought about it all through the next morning when Alfred drafted him to help cook eggs and pancakes for anyone who'd elected to sleep over at the Manor (anyone being everyone, as they all stayed, even Jason once he checked in with Artemis and Bizarro); he thought about it all throughout the conversation with Dick once he woke up, weak but lucid, later that day; and he thought about it through the two WE meetings he was stuck in for three hours.

They'd all been hurt before, and they'd all been dosed, but it troubled Tim that there was some new poison being used that was so... devoid of meaning. Everything else that Rogues and non-Rogues alike used had some sort of purpose or ideology behind it. Fear toxin, the usual kind, was meant to emphasize some quote-unquote sacred, depraved element within fear; Ivy's poisons helped her incapacitate men or punish polluters with their own chemicals; Joker wanted to spread chaos and insanity with his gases; Hugo wanted people to obey him; hell, if you wanted to count it, even Freeze's cryo stuff or Jervis's tech had a purpose, a story behind it.

What the hell was this new thing that inflicted pain for pain's sake? What was the message supposed to be?

Because 'pain for pain's sake' did seem to be what this toxin was creeping towards, even if it wasn't a fully realized recipe. Tim theorized that the new toxin was still being tweaked since it had so many overlaps with the usual Fear Toxin, but for fuck's sake, why was Crane changing his focus now?

Tim couldn't help it, he often found himself stuck on a thought, picking at it like a hangnail peeling off the nailbed of his brain, and so all day he thought about it, how Dick had been trapped in his own body, feeling some overwhelming sense of fear distilled through pain. Not only that, but the incapacitating aspect of it, the nerve gas elements. Instead of the fear that essentially boiled down to the mind overtaking the body, this was the body overtaking the mind. 

"Hey, earth to Tim, yoo," -- a voice ripped Tim from his thoughts and he flinched, swatting the hand waving in front of his face away.

His meetings had all ended an hour ago so he'd had Harper and Barbara meet him in his office.

"I'm listening, sorry. Go on."

Harper grinned. "I mean, this isn't exactly rocket science, and you should know this shit already, but I can't really talk you guys through it if you're half here, half in Tim-land."

"Harper, we're listening. I promise," Barbara placated, shooting Tim a dirty look.

"Okay, honestly this is pretty simple. You guys have definitely dealt with it in different forms; your Faraday bags, a lot of the jamming devices -- this is the same idea. A Faraday cage is basically a structure that protects whatever is inside from electromagnetic radiation, which is what it seems like your new find is. Where a jammer would send out its own waves to muddy up and disrupt radio waves, this is that to like the tenth degree because it's a fixed structure. Depending on how big the mesh is, like, the diameter of the holes, it could block radio waves and stuff -- the sort of thing that blocked off -"

Here, Harper paused, looking around furtively and lowering her voice comically

"our friend in blue's communication device."

Tim grinned. "Harper, I made sure my office is totally soundproofed, even beyond Bruce's initial soundproofing. Nobody except my assistant is even on this floor right now, and she's watching last night's 'Bachelor.' This isn't a spy movie, you can speak normally."

"Boo, you're ruining my fun!"

"So opening the door essentially disrupted the structure? Wouldn't we have been, like, shocked when we opened it if it was sending off its own electromagnetic field?" Barbara asked.

"Well, I'm sure Jason felt some sort of twitch, but if you're hopped up on adrenaline, and if he was grounded with his feet on the concrete floor, sort of, he probably barely felt it. His boots have all that rubber, thick soles..."

"So how do we disrupt it?" Tim asked, leaning forward on his forearms.

"I mean you can't really. Since it's so rooted in and so big, it'd be pretty hard to find a wavelength that could get through, even with all our tech. You have to physically poke a hole in the membrane; a Faraday is only a Faraday as long as it's an enclosure."

"Well I don't know how we'd do that outside of keeping the door open, but there's no guarantee that if we go down deeper there aren't more doors subsecting different tunnels. Assuming it's a whole system of tunnels." Barbara was tracing her finger along the top of the table, as if she was drawing some array of winding tunnels.

"Hm. Maybe we can find some way to... detect the waves radiating off a cage? So if something, say our drones, runs into it, physically we can have a way of tearing it down?"

Harper nodded at Tim's thought. "I mean, the conductor is made out of metal. We could literally use a metal detector, and it'll probably work. A drone might start tearing down every metal surface it comes into contact with, but it would probably get the job done."

Tim brightened at that. "Nice, easy, a metal detector we can get right on."

Barbara sighed. "But there's still more questions about the whole situation. Why would someone work this into an entire sector of tunnels, especially tunnels that look like the one Crane ran off into, so dingy, like they've been around for what looks like decades? The Faraday cage, plus the heat-controlled and sealed door, plus the bank vault doorlock thing. It's sketchy as fuck, but it's definitely thought out. It had a purpose."

"S.T.A.R. Labs has its branch outside of Gotham main, in Otisburg, maybe it's something born there? Was abandoned for some reason and Crane... found it?"

"I don't know, Tim. We know about the structure there, it was approved by the city. And we've explored deep below. We would have discovered if there was something else leading into those."

"Not necessarily. Even the World's Greatest Detective misses things from time to time."

"Also, that door was in the warehouse, not at the entrance to the tunnel in the basement. If we're assuming that the tunnel and door are connected, which we are since the door closed the Faraday structure that the tunnel is a part of, then that means someone meant to build a building up around the tunnel's entrance. It's not just coincidental; nobody just found it."

'Nothing's ever coincidental,' Tim thought to himself. "Well, B is coming back sometime tomorrow morning. Maybe he knows something that he never put in the computer."

"He might. This shit seems old. Gotham's been, like, completely overrun by new tech over the years; everything is layers on layers of new breakthroughs -- everything is practically dated, you can tell how long something's been here by what era of technology is being used. This is... old, in its simplicity. I'm free later if y'all are exploring more," Harper mused. She was tapping out the Fibonacci sequence on the table with her right hand, and it was starting to drive Tim a little nuts. Watching her tap out to 144... Tim was growing restless.

"Sure, we're regrouping at the Cave at 21:00, you can hold down the fort with Barbara and Dick." Tim stood up as he spoke, adopting his CEO posture as he collected the printed-out images Barbara had brought.

He slid them into the hidden drawer inside his desk as Harper stood up to leave with Barbara.

"Wicked," she smiled, reaching over to grab Tim's hand like a ragdoll to high-five her own hand. He allowed the high five, grinning at her excitement, before powering down his second computer to slide it into the lined hidden drawer as well. Harper and Barbara began talking as they went to leave the office.

"I'm going to walk her out, but I'll meet you and Lucius downstairs," Barbara called over her shoulder as she propped open Tim's door. He nodded, making sure the desk was cleared and the sensitive bat info was secure.

"Yeah, I'll see you there in a sec."

Barbara closed the door, leaving Tim to his hangnail'd thoughts and worries. Being on his mostly abandoned floor, sitting in his Big Boy I'm-the-Boss shoes, didn't really help. It gave him too much space in which his mind could run around in circles.

This was his op, but he felt like he was losing his grip. How had he missed an entire system of tunnels? All the data he'd collected in prep for their stakeout had been so normal-seeming, and Tim felt chastised at his biased outlook that had led to the assumption that this was a normal plan on Scarecrow's part. 

It had all started about 2 weeks ago, when Tim first disrupted a buy between low-level Scarecrow goons and Maroni thugs at the harbor. The goods all seemed to line up with what the bats had logged during their run-ins with Fear Toxin before, large-scale pharmaceutical-grade batches of chemicals and drugs, and Tim had just run with it. All the interrogations he'd held, all the buy channels he'd tracked, the drug networks he'd asked Duke to keep an eye on during the day -- he let himself become so focused in on the assumption that they were gearing up to make new batches of Fear Toxin that he'd never even thought about them making something new. The evidence all just pointed to large-scale production, and Tim had moved quick to make sure nothing big was set off.

And that wasn't even mentioning the fact that he'd missed the tunnels. Why hadn't he asked more detailed questions about how both crews were running their drugs? The harbor was a buzz of activity for the Maronis, which the Bats liked to leave alone so they could keep an eye on what was coming in and going out of Gotham. He'd never even asked about channels of movement, had just assumed they were using their usual routes. Assumed assumed assumed. He was such an idiot.

There was something bigger there to discover, he was sure of it. It made him feel bad to think it, but they kind of needed more things to go wrong so they could fit some more puzzle pieces together. He just hoped those didn't come at the expense of his team, his family. 

Sighing to himself, Tim walked through the building to the bank of elevators.

In very un-Gotham-like fashion, the sun was shining extremely bright through the floor-length clean glass windows. In what world did it make sense that Tim's worry was mirrored by the weather when the weather was nice?

Nonetheless, Tim was stuck on these tunnels. What could they be? On the elevator ride down to Fox's lab, he kept picking at his brain hangnail: Why pain? Why the change? Why change now? And how the fuck did Crane ever find these tunnels?

###

[BARBARA's POV]

Barbara felt like she had a good handle on things; that was her sweet spot, to have said handle, to know everything; that was how it had to be.

She liked that feeling of not just helping, but helping in a way that was truly meaningful, a way that would stick. As Oracle, she got to be the eye in the sky, protecting the city from on high in her clock tower and helping the disenfranchised by keeping the Bats or the Birds of Prey focused on the big-time capital-B Bad Guys. She helped Leslie with her clinic, and Bruce with his charities. Helped her dad keep an eye on corrupt cops and those who would abuse their power. Checked up on cold cases and helped free wrongfully imprisoned inmates or those who'd been given excessive sentences. She felt secure in her actions and her knowledge.

But to find out that there were tunnels, possibly even a huge network of tunnels, winding beneath Gotham, tunnels that she hadn't known about. That was shattering the illusion. It felt weird.

Ever since Joker, the thought of someone lying in wait somewhere for her made her particularly paranoid; she knew everything so that would never happen again. And now there was some far-reaching, running-all-throughout-Gotham, who-knows-to-what-degree fixture that sort of personified the lying-in-wait approach. Scarecrow could be anywhere, if these tunnels were as deep as Barbara suspected. And in Gotham, such an assumption, the worst-case scenario kind, seemed pretty on point.

Usually Barbara felt like she had a good handle on things. 'Not so much right now,' she thought as she punched today's passcode into the keypad entrance to Fox's lab from the building's private elevator with the quick practiced type of an expert hacker.

As she rolled into the high-ceilinged lab set-up under Wayne Enterprises, Barbara couldn't help but chide herself. Her anxiety over Dick's condition was weighing heavy on her, it always did when someone close to her was hurt, and she hated when those focused feelings spread to coat everything else. Paranoia was unhelpful, unnecessary; the as-yet unfounded suspicion served no purpose.

Somehow, Lucius's lab helped ease her mind a little. Where the Bat Cave was dark and shadowed in its cavernousness, and the clocktower was contained and ordered and bathed in a particular familiarity for Barbara, the white high-ceilinged lab was open and clinical. It helped her feel more focused, more purposeful, and gave her a cleansed sort of feeling.

"Barbara, what took you so long?" Tim's voice called from around the corner. He'd heard the elevator let her off, apparently. She rounded behind a column, and Lucius and Tim drew into sight. 

The kid looked awful. He had dark circles weighing heavy on his face -- from mere exhaustion or from guilt, Barbara didn't know. He didn't have anything to feel guilty about, but she knew Tim wouldn't see it like that. Something went wrong, and in his mind that meant there was a failure in the mission; and since it was his mission, he'd internalize it as his failure.

"You know how Harper is, she wanted my opinion on dying her hair darker. How it would look with blue streaks, or something. I swear she changes her hair every other week, and poor Cullen is like her personal colorist." She drew to a stop next to Tim, turning to smile at Lucius. "Hey, Lucius."

"Barbara, nice to see you."

"You too. So these are the new set of drones?"

On the table lay eight golf-ball-sized black machines. They looked different from the drones Barbara usually used when helping other teams; shiny, like they were vibrating. Lucius stepped forward.

"Yes. They're small, can record data as you stream it live, have GPS that immediately archives and saves, which from what Tim was saying sounds especially prudent with all these unknowns and potentially-isolating obstacles, and the exteriors can camouflage against most surfaces, or even in mid-air. The camouflage is something I've been tweaking at for a while, it's meant to absorb light; the absorption also helps to give the drones added charge via solar energy."

"Wow. That's impressive. Is that why they look like they're vibrating?"

"Sort of. It might seem counterintuitive, but certain types of movement actually make a person less likely to see the object in motion; where we'd usually assume that movement attracts our eyes, vibrations at frequencies that run faster than our eyes can see, which is 25 frames per second, renders the object essentially invisible. I've been working on how to make the shell around the drones vibrate while leaving the core stable. It's no use camaflogueing if the software gets sacrificed in the process. Pretty fun to figure out, if I do say so myself."

Tim nodded enthusiastically, clearly excited at Lucius's focus.

Barbara smiled too. "Can we add any other capabilities into those cores, are they big enough?"

"Probably. Their processing power is pretty strong. What did you have in mind?"

"Some sort of metal detector, and a way to fashion some sort of, I don't know, laser to cut through metal?" She smiled sheepishly. "I might be just making up words at this point, but in case the signal gets cut off, we need the drones to have some sort of defense mechanism, escape route, thingie, so it can get back to us. Not just to export the location."

"Sure."

"Oh, and some sort of failsafe. Some sort of trigger where as soon as our connection is cut, it goes into that escape mode."

"I can work something out. But it won't be ready by tonight."

Tim nodded. "That's okay. Can we take half the batch to use until then?"

"Of course."

Barbara examined the drones, their sleek exterior. 'I have a small but mighty handle on things,' she decided.

###

[JASON's POV]

"So how are you really feeling?"

Jason could tell even with Dick's back turned that the older man was smiling when he answered, which he did almost immediately: "I'm all good Jase, really."

Jason barked out a laugh. "Ha! Sure you are. I'm not one of the kiddos, you can talk to me."

"I'm fine. Really, Jay. We've all been through it. My leg feels like shit, my neck is all mummified, I'm a bit sore, but I'm all good."

"Nah. Something's bothering you. Come on, I know you. What's up?"

Dick sighed, sitting and swinging his legs off the cot to face Jason.

"I really do feel fine. It's like this nagging feeling in the back of my head is all. I don't know."

It was a good five minutes before everyone was supposed to roll in and get dressed for the night, and Jason was busy cleaning out his favorite gun -- but he laid it down to walk over to Dick.

He grabbed his brother's face on either side, tilting his head back so he could look at his eyes. Lifted his eyelids. "Well, you have a concussion, dumbass. Your head is off, your thinking's off. Makes sense. Alfred and Leslie both gave you the all-clear."

Dick swatted Jason's hands away, grumbling. "I told you. I'm okay."

"No, but you knew all that already. What's this other shit that's got you all worried? Explain it to me slow, like I'm stupid."

"What a stretch."

"Fine asshole, never mind!"

"Okay, okay. I feel... paranoid."

"That's it? Paranoid?"

"It's just... usually after Fear Toxin, I can pinpoint the exact hallucination that's rubbing me the wrong way. This time, it's just irrational. Like, there's something wedged inside my brain." Dick paused. Then, "The hallucinations didn't stick, we know what to expect from them, and I know none of it was real or even remotely real. But the paranoia stuck, it's just untethered now. Every time I've even moved since waking up, I get some mini heart attack, like I'm about to break a bone or something. It's like... the pain, is scaring me more than the actual feeling of being scared. My body is scared. You know? The more I remember from that night..."

"Yeah man, I get that. That's fucking hard." Jason eyed his brother, considering what else to say. What else was there to say?

They'd all been through hellish injuries and torture, hell Jason had even died; pain and fear weren't exactly unrelated, but Jason understood what Dick meant by his body feeling the fear more than his head.

"Hey, last time I was at the library I saw this book. I mean, I only read the fucking title, not really up my alley, but I got the gist -- 'The Body Keeps the Score.' I have so much stored shit in my body, that I don't think about on the daily anymore, but I feel it, you know. It's a part of how I approach things, how I react. Or it's something I actively need to suppress so that it doesn't affect that... Sucks that Crane's targeting that now, 'cause that feeling is almost worse than, you know, seeing visions of my death or J- the clown or, like, B telling me he hates me. It's harder to shake when you can't pin down the cause, the specifics. You just have to use it instead of ignore it, y'know?"

"Yeah. Can't say I'm used to not ignoring my feelings, or not pushing past them. I'm too bat-trained." Dick scoffed at himself. "It's hard not to just put up walls, which is making this worse because then the feeling sneaks up on me. Under the wall or whatever. You're right, I guess."

"Of course I'm fucking right. Don't take on Bruce's way of thinking. Fuck him. Lean into the shit, you know? Feel the pain and do what's needed anyway, not because you're not feeling it but because you're not running from it."

Dick sat in silence for a second, seemingly thinking over Jason's words; then, the corner of Dick's mouth twitched, a shadow of a smile.

"Since when did the Red Hood become wise and reasonable and level-headed, and give out advice? You're, like, wise now bro."

Jason flipped him off. "Yeah, yeah, I'm the fucking Yoda of pain. Why don't you just focus on getting better so you can be the chatty one giving shitty advice and words of encouragement. The Outlaws don't need this touchy-feely crap, I'm not programmed for this shit."

Dick laughed, and a weight lifted off Jason's shoulders. He sat in silence with his brother for a second, comfortable and familiar. Dick was okay, or he would be. Jason did his duty, he had The Talk with his brother. Everything was all good. 'So why do I still feel so off?' This new toxin was putting everyone on edge.

Turning back to his array of the de-constructed pistol, Jason grabbed a cloth to finish polishing the hardware off. He cleared his throat. The silence was kinda getting to him.

Before he could try to think of something to say, the elevator down from the Manor suddenly dinged, and Tim, Damian, Cass, and Duke walked out to meet him and Dick.

Dick steeled himself before smiling casually at the group. 'End of that conversation, I guess,' Jason thought. Whatever. 

"Richard, how are you feeling?" Damian called down, walking to stand dutifully next to Dick's sickbed. Dick ruffled Damian's hair, and the kid yelped in protest. "You know I detest that. I guess you are feeling better."

Dick smiled. "Of course I am. I'm better than I was an hour ago when you asked, and when you asked then I was better than the hour before that, and the-"

"You're not feeling any side effects?" Tim interrupted. Dick threw a glance Jason's way.

"No way, Timbo. Once my leg heals up I'll be all set."

Cass smiled and walked behind Dick to give him a hesitant, one-armed hug.

"Let's get this show on the road, huh? I want to get out of here before The Big Bat interrupts," Jason stood up. Walking over to get his helmet to calibrate it for the night's activities, he threw one more glance at Dick over his shoulder.

His brother had a cloudy expression, but no thunder. He was going to be fine. Right?

Chapter Text

[JASON's POV]

Jason had to say it: He had straight up beef with warehouses. Every single warehouse that had ever been made and that would ever be made. The entire fucking premise of a warehouse. They only ever ended up getting abandoned and commandeered (and blown up) by evil assholes for evil asshole plans in their stupid populated-by-evil-asshole city.

Though their takedown two nights ago had been very much Not A Secret, Dick had the team enter the warehouse once again from the roof instead of the front door -- for what reason, Jason had zero idea. It wasn't like they had any element of surprise. I mean, G-d forbid a Bat ever use a door.

Either way, it felt good to break in through an attic window. Shatter some glass, wreak some havoc on the building. They'd taken to calling the place The Entrance to Cenobite Central (or The Cenobite's Asshole if you're nasty) because of the whole Causing Pain thing, and if any place deserved to be broken down a bit, it was a place called The Cenobite's Asshole. A few weeks ago when everyone had been snowed in at the manor after patrol, the Bats had all binged most of the Hellraiser franchise, everyone too hyped up on adrenaline to sleep. 

Jason landed on the ground level of the warehouse with a force that reverberated through his whole body. It felt good to feel such a strong twinge, the pure feeling of hitting something so solid with the solid force that was his entire body weight.

Tim, Cass, Steph, Duke, and Damian dropped down as well, and the group all walked over to the door.

Dick and Barbara were working coms together, Harper on her way to join them, and the team on the ground's first order of business was securing the door to the tunnel so it absolutely couldn't lock them down there or cut off any signals.

They drew over to the door and set out the supplies, a collection of twisted cords of wires that were practically indestructible. Damian and Duke began working with Tim to secure the door, helping to twist the cords into a complicated array of knots. Jason was busy breaking more windows with a rubber band he'd found and some broken pieces of glass.

He turned suddenly at the sound of a commotion; Tim and Damian were bickering. Duke was trying to placate the two (or was maybe yelling at them as well?) when he suddenly caught a stray punch to the gut. 

"Can you just back off and let me do it?" Tim asked, voice annoyed, and the others stepped off.

As RR worked on tying the strong-ass wiring into the intricate knot system he'd come up with, Jason worked on some target practice with his little makeshift slingshot. Next to him, Steph was kicking the broken glass pieces into some spiral design on the floor and Cass was twirling in lazy pirouettes. Duke sat creating little balls of light from the shadows cast by the warehouse's looming beams. Damian was pouting.

"Okay, door is secure," Tim finally called, motioning at the team to come over. Jason and the rest all joined him to lay out the drones and surveillance equipment. "Heading down in a few."

"Copy that Red," Barbara answered.

Dick chimed in, his voice going all big brotherly: "Everyone has two sets of rebreathers, right? All skin is covered in material thick enough to prevent infection?"

Jason barked out a sarcastic laugh. "Thanks for checking in Mom and Pops, we're all set down here. You literally watched us get ready."

"Nightwing, no need to check up on us. We are perfectly competent to--"

"Yeah, listen to the demon brat, we're perfectly competent to complete the tasks of our mission, blah blah. I liked it better when only Oracle was in my ear."

"Totally, not like I was there when it was 'only Oracle,'" Duke grumbled. Jason punched his shoulder good-naturedly.

"Don't worry Signal, Red Hood's not calling you out. It's just more important to insult me than to compliment anyone else."

"Exactly. Nightwing knows what's up. I like Signal but I dislike Nightwing more. It cancels out, or something."

"Can you focus?" Damian glared at Jason, his gaze smoldering from behind his domino mask. "Oracle, the drones are all ready for use. We are sending them down now."

"Sounds good Robin, we're picking up the signal here."

The set of drones all flew down the stairs as a synchronized unit, disappearing into the sub-basement and down into the tunnels. Jason led the team down to follow.

It felt weird to pass through what had been the backdrop of such a terrible night so soon after said terrible night; here was where Dick landed after falling down the stairs; here was the splotch of blood from Dick slamming his head against the ground; here was Dick's discarded gas mask; here was the abandoned table on which Crane had made the toxin that paralyzed Dick.

They arrived at the entrance to the tunnels. It was just a simple frame, like a hallway, leading out from the atrium; no door or barrier at all. They'd already discussed how the door was a part of the warehouse, meaning the warehouse was part of the structure, but it still seemed odd that there wasn't even a tarp or something to block off the tunnel. It felt naked, bare.

"Remember, this is surveillance only," Dick's voice advised. He sounded on edge.

"Copy that. We're heading in. Oracle, picking up anything from the drones?" Duke asked into his com.

"Just tunnel on tunnel on tunnel, but the scans show there's a fork up ahead. Like 800 meters or so ahead of you."

"Nice, so who wants to go right and who wants go left?" Jason asked the group. "Girls left, boys right?"

Steph snorted. "First of all, fuck you. Second, there's two of us and four of you."

"Jeez, I was kidding. Fuck the binary and whatever. I'll go with the ladies, Signal Robin and Red Robin, you guys go together down the other way."

Tim shook his head in exasperation at Jason, Damian fixing him with his signature glare. Cass was also glaring at him. Jason shoved ahead.

After a good 10-minute walk, the team arrived at the aforementioned end of the tunnel, which ran perpendicularly into a slightly larger tunnel (maybe 12 feet in diameter as opposed to the first tunnel's 10-foot-diameter) heading in two different directions.

Without stopping, Steph, Cass, and Jason all turned left and Duke, Tim, and Damian headed right. In practiced fashion, the Bats treated the plan like they'd had it all along, walking with purpose, no stops, the unhesitating gait they'd all adopted from working under Bruce.

Jason knew that the other heroes the Bats worked with and the other teams the Bats worked on had all picked up on that swagger, the focused intent with which each Bat executed every action. Roy had even used it as ammo once to compare Jason to Dick, which was annoying. But that was how it had to be in Gotham; no hesitation allowed, ever.

"Sayonara Team B," Jason called over his shoulder, Signal and the two Robins fading down the darkened end of their route. He could see through the shadows Tim flipping him off with a hand held high over his head, presumably for dubbing them Team B and, therefore, himself, Cass, and Steph as Team A. Then, nothing. 

"So, what do you think we're gonna find down here?" Jason asked Steph and Cass. 

"If we run into Pinhead I'm gonna scream, swear to G-d," Steph joked.

Cass laughed softly, chiming in with a quick "Same."

"Honestly? Pinhead's kinda hot. Like, Pinhead could get it."

Over the coms, he heard everyone laugh. "Little Wing, your taste is so fucked up."

"Hey, I'm talking about the new remake! She's hot, come on. Dime que estoy equivocado. Spoiler is the one who wouldn't shut up about Billy Loomis. Not my fault horror villains pull."

"Well, I mean, it's '90s Skeet Ulrich. What, am I gonna not say I'd fuck '90s-era Skeet Ulrich? It's not like I like him because he's a bad guy! And he wasn't a literal monster."

"I don't know, sounds like you like to get freaky in bed. Red Robin, got any fun stories to share?"

"I'm not answering that."

"Chelb! You all are such imbeciles. We don't know what we will find down here, and it actively works against the mission when you behave so annoyingly flippant, Red Hood."

"Sorry brat. I'll shut up."

Over the com, Duke, Tim, Barbara, and Dick gave overlapping shouts of "finally" and "thank the lord."

Jason and the girls walked for a beat in silence before Steph turned to him.

"No, but really, what do you think we'll find down here? Should we be going stealth mode?"

"Nah, the drones are up ahead, we'd have advanced warning if anything was getting near us. Honestly, I think we'll be looking through a lot of empty space. Unless the tunnels lead somewhere I guess?"

Cass tapped Jason on the shoulder to get his attention: "What did you mean? About many undergrounds, with criminals?"

"Oh, it's not like I saw most of them personally or anything, but a lot of the players in Gotham had different sections of their organization hidden underground. As Bats I'm sure we've run into shit here and there, but I saw more of a pattern from that side of things."

"So they use underground networks, like, systematically?" Steph asked.

"Nah, just strongholds here and there. Like storage, usually just caches of money or guns. I broke up a trafficking ring that had some cells underground."

"Yikes."

"Yeah. There was a lot of conversation about underground shit that seemed to allude to more going on. I thought that was just 'cause they were being secret about the Court of Owls or something, once I learned about them, but with these tunnels now, I don't know. Maybe there's a lot of interconnected stuff."

"It's weird that we haven't seen anything like this before though."

Cass nodded her fist up and down in agreement with Steph.

"I thought we'd gotten to the point where we knew mostly everything about Gotham," Dick agreed over the com. "Definitely alarming that something could fly under our radar for so long, if there really is a something that's going on down there."

"We don't need to assume the worst until it gets to the worst," Barbara said, though she sounded like she was trying to convince herself. "For all we know this tunnel is just some abandoned run-off from S.T.A.R. labs or something."

"In Gotham, I'm always going to assume the worst," Jason growled. The others fell silent.

They'd been walking for about 30 minutes (30 minutes spent mostly playing Fuck Marry Kill with various horror movie villains, before that devolved into discussions on hot horror figures; final consensus was that Tony Todd as Candyman and Megan Fox in Jennifer's Body were unbeatably hot, though Harper, when she arrived finally, refused to let go of Ginger from Ginger Snaps) until Barbara's voice interrupted over the coms:

"Quiet down Team A. The drones are picking up movement about 200 meters ahead of you. They're almost at the source, hold tight for more info."

Jason, Steph, and Cass fell silent. They kept up their pace, but Jason unclipped one of his holsters, ready to grab a gun if need be. He turned on his helmet's modulator to hide his voice. Walking silently, making sure to make no noise, no scuffs, the three walked forward, waiting for Barbara's info. 

"Anything we should be aware of?" Tim's voice cut in. 

"No. I'll let you know."

"Copy."

Dick cut in over the coms: "Red Hood, hold your position. It looks like there's a whole group up ahead of you. Let the drones do recon before proceeding."

Jason stopped, looking back; he hadn't realized that Cass and Steph had already paused.

"Copy."

Jason and his team stood waiting, weary but not worried. Two minutes later, Barbara's voice popped back in:

"It looks like there are five figures ahead of you. It's an alcove in the cave, not its own room or leading up to the surface. We can see lab equipment, but no Crane. I sent one of the drones ahead past them and there's nobody down the other length of the tunnel, so no worries about watching your back. Op here is to incapacitate but keep someone conscious for questioning. Avoid contact with any of the liquids, and approach with rebreathers on."

Cass reached up and pressed her com twice in quick succession to confirm that they'd heard. Jason exchanged a glance with her, with Steph. His helmet had a filtration system, but he'd grabbed a rebreather just in case; he was in no mood for hallucinations. Steph was pulling out her rebreather as well, and Cassandra was pulling out a smoke capsule. Jason quickly re-clipped his holster -- firing a gun in the tunnel would almost certainly be too loud, he decided, especially in the event that there were others down the tunnel beyond the drones -- and pulled out his knife instead.

Cass threw out the capsule, and as the corridor filled with smoke, the three moved in. 

It was honestly an insult how easy the fight was.

Cass quickly pounced and hit the first lab rat in the head with enough force to knock them out, using their arm as leverage to twirl inside close, out of range of the beaker a second scientist was holding, to get in and wrench the scientist's wrist until the beaker dropped to the ground. She then hit scientist #2 in the same spot she had the first one, knocking them out as well. 

Meanwhile, Jason quickly slashed the arm of the scientist closest to him, grabbing a small sort of bolas from his belt to wrap around the guy's wrists and bind them together. Throwing him aside, he moved with aggression to close the distance to the next scientist closest to him, electing to just flat-out punch the guy in the face. Nice, simple.

Steph took care of the last scientist by putting them in a tight chokehold, applying enough pressure at the carotid arteries to knock them out quickly.

None of these scientists were fighters, and they had no idea what had hit them by the time they were all sat on the ground, tied up and incapacitated. 

Kneeling in front of the lone conscious scientist, Jason looked into their eyes from behind his helmet.

"Who are you?" He asked, his voice coming out gruff and deep, mechanized. The scientist was tall and lanky, with shoulder-length platinum blonde hair and a pair of oversized gogglesque glasses. 'I'll call you Blondie' Jason thought.

"I, I just work freelance! Please don't kill me!"

"Work freelance, the fuck? For who?" Jason demanded.

"Please, don't hurt me."

"WHO?" Jason growled.

"The Scarecrow!"

"What are you working on?"

"I can't tell you, please," Blondie's voice was climbing up several octaves in fear.

"Look at me." When they didn't listen, Jason reached out and grabbed the person's chin, affixing their gaze to the Red Hood's. "Do I look like I'm gonna take no for an answer? Huh? How long are you gonna hold out before I make you tell me?" Jason raised his knife up with his other hand so that the scientist could see it, flipping it around his fingers in dextrous menace. "How many fingers do I have to cut off before you tell me? You'll talk eventually. Seems to me freelance science lackeys might need all their fingers!"

In front of him, Blondie was straight-up trembling. "Please, I'll, I'll talk just.. please, he can't know if I talk to you!"

"You should be more scared of me than of Scarecrow."

"You don't understand. He's horrible, you, you don't get it. You have to, have to knock me out or something so the others don't know I talked!"

"Alright, don't have to ask me twice to knock you out. Now tell me what your deal is."

Blondie gulped. "We're, uh, we're all making this, um.. this new formula for him. Dr. Crane. He has us split up in case, in case something reacts bad, so we don't all lose the work."

"I got that part. Tell me what you're making!"

"We're mak.. we're working on this... on a.. " Blondie was trailing off, hesitating, when suddenly, one of the other scientists ('scientist #3') who'd gained consciousness without drawing Jason's attention grabbed one of the fallen flasks of liquid.

Lunging forward, he poured the mixture down Blondie's throat, smashing the flask in the process so that jagged broken glass rained down around Blondie's form.

Jason lurched forward, knocking the pieces of the flask he could get to away and breaking the new guy's arm as the scientist Jason had been talking to -- Blondie -- choked and gargled on the liquid.

Number Three screamed in angry agony, holding his broken arm away from his core, and Jason punched him again, breaking his nose and knocking him out.

"Fuck!" Jason yelled angrily. But it was too late.

In front of him, Blondie's eyes were bugging out as they screamed. Whatever the liquid was, it was just as acidic as the one that Crane had used on Dick, if not more so.

As they watched, Blondie's throat trembled and quaked, the interior seeming to melt unseen as translucent pulsing bubbles pushed out against the skin of his neck. Globs of thick blood coughed up, coating the scientist's face, their chin, their neck. Their neck was still a neck, sort of, the bones holding its shape and form and the tendons maintaining integrity, but pockets of skin were bruising and wilting, destroying Blondie's throat from within in craters. It was surely worse inside, where they couldn't see. It was gruesome.

Wordless screams wrenched free of the poor scientist. They were unable to talk, but they were still breathing, still drawing in breaths, and each breath they drew was released in wordless keels and sobs. Jason backed up, and all he could do was watch as the scientist's throat melted from within, clumps of congealed blood, some of it tinged green, drowning their mouth. 

"Holy shit," Stephanie breathed out. Cass was watching over Steph's shoulder in horror, and she stepped forward to place a hand on their ankle, far enough down their body to not risk coming into contact with the liquid, trying to convey some sense of comfort, some sentiment of 'you're not alone.'

"Are you seeing this?" Jason asked, taken aback.

"Yes," Dick answered, his voice clipped, devoid of all the humor from before. 

"What's going on?" Damian asked over the coms. 

"Hold on." Jason didn't want to fill him in yet, didn't want to explain it while Blondie was still writhing in front of him. What could he do? What could he do?

"What is it?" Damian probed. "Tell me right --"

"Shut the fuck up for a second!" Jason roared, and Damian stopped.

Below him, Blondie was opening their mouth wide, trying to take in gulps of air, failing, drowning in thick and viscous black-red blood.

Green veiny streaks were pushing up against their skin, visible along their jawline and the crook of their neck, tinged with the color from within translucent-like clammy skin.

Jason pulled out a sedative from his belt, two doses of the sedative, and, kneeling down, he jammed both syringes into Blondie's thigh.

"I'm sorry," he said softly. He took off his helmet and held their gaze from behind his domino, didn't look away. "I'm sorry."

The scientist's eyes closed drowsily, achingly slow, the pain writing lines of agony into their face slowly growing less pronounced, and their movements began to soften, to turn into twitches, the sedative taking effect. A minute later, their chest stopped rising.

Jason stood back up, pulling his helmet back on. He kicked the leg of Number Three, hard, though the guy was unconscious, and put his helmet back on. 

"What the fuck." He wasn't sure who he was talking to, the girls or Dick and Barbara. "What the fuck."

"Is everything okay?" Damian asked, more timid this time, though still insistent as he waited for someone to tell him what was going on.

Barbara's voice came in over the communications, her voice flat, emotionless; this was her Oracle, I-Mean-Business voice. "One of the scientists is dead, they were force-fed a toxin similar to the one Nightwing was hit with, in a larger quantity. It was acidic in nature."

"Shit," Tim responded. 

"Was it fear toxin?" Duke asked.

"We didn't have time to fucking see. They were too busy drowning in their own blood for us to tell if they were hallucinating," Jason's voice was biting, but the Bats all knew his anger wasn't aimed at them.

"That was so fucked up," Stephanie said softly. Cass was closing her eyes as she turned to face away from Jason and Steph, collecting herself.

Suddenly at their feet, one of the scientists groaned. It wasn't the one who'd killed Blondie, but he looked older; definitely a step above Blondie in the evil chain of command. 

Jason grabbed the guy by the neck and dragged him roughly out of the alcove, away from Blondie's body and the other vials of toxins.

He shook the man, hard. "Wake the fuck up!"

The scientist groggily took in his surroundings, Red Hood's voice, the hands gripping him tightly. Gaining awareness, he glared at Jason: "Holy shit, you're the, the, th --"

"The, the," Jason said as pathetically as he could, mocking the man. Then he flipped the voice modulator back on, turning his voice hard and menacing: "The Red Hood."

The guy's eyes widened as he flinched at Jason's change in voice. Behind him, Cass looked on with her arms crossed across her chest, Steph adopting a similar stance. 

"Your friend was just killed by one of the others for talking to me," Jason began, grabbing the man's chin roughly and turning his face to look at Blondie's dead body. The man's eyes widened in horror, and Jason turned his chin back to face him. "I swear to fuck, if you don't talk to me, you'll get worse. He died quick. You won't."

The man, who'd been glaring and trying to put on an air of menace when he first awoke, crumbled in front of Jason. "Okay! Okay, I'll tell you anything, oh my g-d!"

Jason slammed the man's head back against the stone wall of the tunnel. "Good. What are you making down here?"

"It's, a, a synthetic version of his toxin, Scarecrow's, of his toxin."

"Synthetic?"

"Synthetic, syn- Different!"

"Different how?"

"Instead of targeting blood cells, he wants it to bind to nerves, receptors, neurotransmitters, all the- different parts of the nervous system."

"What does that mean?"

"It's meant to have a physiological effect. Deeper than his other strains."

"Why?" The man was frozen in fear, and Jason shook him roughly against the tunnel wall again. "WHY?"

"It's... it's for you."

Jason looked at Steph and Cass, whose faces were scrunched in confusion. 

"What do you mean it's for me?"

"For the Bats, I mean, for vigilantes. To be more incapacitating, to cause different sensations. He's... he's angry that you know how to treat the fear gas."

"So he's making it for us?"

"That's what he said. I don't know, I don't know anything else, please!"

Jason grabbed onto the first part of his sentence. "So you've met Scarecrow. He explained this to you personally?"

"No! I mean, I was in the room, it was a whole crowd, like a lecture! I don't know him, I swear!"

"Do you know where he is?"

"No."

"Don't lie to me!"

"I'm not!" The man sobbed. "I swear I don't know, we're assigned our lab locations at random so nobody knows where anybody else is working... this is my first shift, I haven't been anywhere else."

"How many locations are there? How big is this tunnel system?"

"This is a whole tunnel system?" The man asked, his voice small.

"How. Many. Locations."

"I don't know! I swear, I don't! 

"How many people?"

"I'm not sure, I -- I think maybe, more than 50? The lecture, uh, that I was at, it had about 50, 60 people there."

Jason turned to look at Steph and Cass again. "Anything else?" he asked into his com.

Thinking that the question was aimed at him, the scientist continued desperately. "I think he wants to make the new compound as, um, severe, as possible. He talked a lot about 'achieving agony' and 'the sanctity of sensation.' 'Nerves on fire.' He also said something about stimulating the amygdala."

"Ask him what chemicals his team was using," Tim instructed. 

"What chemicals did you use for this batch?"

"We, it was a whole combo..." As the man listed off chemicals that Jason truly didn't care to listen to, he found his mind drifting.

He was fuming behind the mask, pure rage and fury. How could someone create something that would kill a person so horrifically? How could these fucking scientists treat this as just some job? The others helping to create these toxins as co-workers? Co-workers they were fine with killing? The Scarecrow was just their boss -- he gave fucking lectures? Like a college professor? 

"Please, what are you going to do to me?" The man's eyes were filling with tears.

"I'm not quite sure yet." Jason let his voice take on the sadistic tone he'd used as the first Red Hood. The voice of the man who'd filled a duffel bag with severed heads, something that evoked the sense that 'this guy is going to hurt me, and he's going to have fun doing it.' "What do you think I should do with you?"

"Please, I don't want to die. I'll, I'll leave Gotham, I swear, this is the last fucking straw, I promise there's nothing tying me here anymore!"

"Really. You think I should just let you go?"

"I told you everything I know! Please!"

"How did you get here? Which way did you come from?"

Since his hands were tied, the man simply jerked his chin down the tunnel in the direction opposite from where Jason, Steph, and Cass had come. Jason nodded. 

"Alright. You're gonna show us, and tell us anything else I want to know. Then maybe we'll let you go."

The man nodded hurriedly. "Okay, okay, I can do that."

Jason let go of him, letting him fall to the ground.

He turned to Steph and Cass. "Not quite Pinhead. You guys good to go?"

"Yeah," Steph nodded.

Cass held up a hand to pause. She turned to the man, now cowering, on the ground. "Name?"

He looked up at her. "Um, Danny."

She turned around back to Steph and Jason. She whispered emphatically: "Not his fault. Let him go after."

Jason sighed. "Yeah, yeah, I know." He wasn't fucking letting Number Three go, though. Lowlife murderer. 

"You guys alright?" Tim asked. "We can double back if you need."

"No, Red, you guys stay there," Steph said lightly. "We got this. We still need to know how far these tunnels all go -- in both directions."

"She's right. Team B stay there. There's no activity on the drones yet, keep going," Barbara instructed. "Team A, see where Danny can lead you and make sure not to go ahead of the drones in case he's leading you into a trap."

"What kind of trap could this guy possibly lead us to? He caved in almost immediately."

"Red Hood, come on. Stick to protocol. We know how these guys play the victim." Dick also was using his No Nonsense Nightwing voice, though it was considerably less commanding than Oracle's. 

"Copy that." Jason walked over to collect a sample of the liquid pooling around Blondie's neck (making sure to avoid his flat and dead-eyed gaze). "Got a sample, securing the targets, then we're on the move."

Making sure the sample's top was completely sealed, Jason zipped it into one of the padded and lined pockets in his costume. He leaned over the other three scientists, all of whom were still soundly knocked out. He tied them into immobilized positions, their knees bent up and bound to their chests and their arms secured behind their back, and once done he stood up and kicked the guy who killed Blondie again. His steel-tipped combat boot dug satisfyingly deep.

He walked back over to Steph. "You good?" 

She nodded. "Ready to go." She loosely saluted him, then awkwardly lowered her arm. "I don't know why I did that."

Jason softened. "I get it." He did. That death was fucked up, truly. Not something he'd forget about anytime soon.

He walked back over to Danny, standing him up roughly. Though his hands were bound, Jason left Danny's feet free. 

"Alright guy, lead the way."

Chapter Text

[STEPH's POV]

Damn. Steph had just watched what was quite possibly one of the most fucked up deaths she'd ever seen, and this was the night she forgot her bo staff back at the Cave. Figures. She hadn't even realized she'd left it behind until Tim had shoved his staff at her to hold while he tied the wiring around that huge-ass door, and she sort of wished she'd fought him for custody or something. She'd feel a lot better just holding it in her hands right now. 

Not that having the staff would have changed anything. The tunnels were honestly probably too cramped to use a staff well anyway. But Steph felt totally out of wack, off-kilter, and she wished she had something she could hold to occupy her hands. As it was, opening and closing her butterfly knife over and over wasn't doing much to quiet her mind (and she could tell Cass was losing patience with the repetitive noisy thwack of the knife fitting in and out of itself). 

Up ahead, Jason was walking behind Danny, holding his hand bindings and leading the scientist like a guard dog on a leash. 

"So you didn't find it at all sketchy that you had to climb down into some underground tunnel to get to work when you signed up for this job?" Jason asked the guy.

"I mean... it's Scarecrow, I kinda knew when I got it. You know, that it would be sketchy, the job."

"Fuck, I mean. I know the economy's gone to shit, but you couldn't find a job working as a lab assistant in, like, any other lab?"

Danny elected not to answer, which Steph sort of got. He'd already messed up, and he'd already seen the heavy consequences that his co-worker had met, so sharing some new job regrets probably wasn't something he'd want to do, even at Scary Crime Lord Red Hood's request.

"So, the acid -- the guy literally melted from the inside out?" Tim asked over the coms. 

"Way to be sensitive Red. It was horrible," Steph replied, annoyed at his straightforward and brusque curiosity. She closed up the butterfly knife and stowed it back in her belt.

"I didn't mean it like that, sorry Spoiler. It's just, it's odd that the poison would be that destructive. I mean, from within the throat it makes sense, because that's so delicate, but. With his other toxins, the more gas you inhale the worse the symptoms are. If this will literally kill you before you experience anything, what's the point? He can't overwhelm someone up on the stuff."

"That's actually a good point. It doesn't track -- if he's trying to punish us or something, he'd want something he could build up," Barbara agreed.

"Great. Overwhelming pain," Jason muttered.

Steph could hear Dick talking to Harper in the background, updating her on where Team A was at since she'd gone upstairs to hang with Alfred for a bit, and he chimed in over coms: "Honestly, I'd like to stay at a solid Whelmed level of hallucinatory shit, so not really begging Crane to 'overwhelm us.'" 

Barbara laughed. (Steph swore she heard Barbara call him Robin softly in the background, that she said something about 13-year-old Dick, but she missed most of her words.) 

Jason tugged on the strap of the makeshift leash, urging Danny to stop walking so he could talk.

"Hey, what's the deal with this toxin? Why did it butcher your co-worker like that?"

"I don't think it's supposed to. Um, that's one of the things all our tests have been trying to phase out."

"Is the end product supposed to be that acidic?"

"No? I mean, maybe?" At Red Hood's silence, Danny continued. "I don't think he's like, mad at some surface-level burns, but he doesn't want the acids to be so strong."

"Lovely. Glad Scarecrow doesn't want to burn us too badly with acid when he makes us die amidst hallucinations of terror and pain."

"I think he's kinda having trouble with this new formula. He's putting a lot of random crap in it."

"Is that why he recruited so many of you science goons to help brew it up?"

"... I guess?"

"You're kind of an idiot, huh? How do you not know anything about this Very Dangerous thing you signed up to actively be a part of?"

"Trust me, I'm never applying for a job off Craigslist again."

Steph couldn't help but laugh at that, and Danny glared at her in pointed embarrassment-born anger.

'Cry about it,' she thought to herself. Steph felt bad for the guy, she really did, but Jason was right: What an idiot. 

Their group of four started walking again. Steph wished they had a better landscape to look at, something that would hold her attention more than just plain dark walls and the occasional flickering fluorescent light. 

"So how long did you walk before you got to that setup back there?" She prompted Danny. What she really wanted to say was 'Are we there yet?' over and over like a little kid, but after that guy decomposed in fast forward a few minutes ago, she thought it wouldn't be appropriate. 

"We're close, the entrance I came through is around the next bend."

"Great. Where did you enter from?"

"Um, stairs?"

"No shit. Where'd the stairs lead down from?"

"It was a basement in Gotham U. The school's been empty for winter break."

Cass nudged Steph's shoulder: "Student?"

"No." The guy was decidedly less chatty when he didn't have the threatening Red Hood asking him the questions.

A few minutes later, he stopped walking abruptly, pointing down the tunnel. "Um, we're here, it's right up ahead."

The group stopped, and Jason asked, "How busy was the basement? Are there people in there?"

Danny shook his head. "No, I don't think so. They staggered the times we entered. I think Dr. Crane wanted us to know as little about each other as possible."

"Copy that, we'll send the drones up ahead," Barbara responded. Steph heard her keyboard clacking as the two little drones swerved towards the door frame that was up about 150 meters in front of them. 

Steph walked over next to Danny and squatted down to stare at him, widening her eyes comically behind her mask until the eye contact was excruciatingly awkward. "You sure you don't know anything else about the tunnels? You didn't explore down here, maybe look around a bit?"

Next to her, she felt Cass looking Danny up and down.

"I swear, I walked from the door to that alcove, that's it. They told me to walk down that way until I came up to the testing setup, and that's what I did."

Steph held his gaze, flitting her eyes between him and Cass. Cass nodded at her, confirming that he was being truthful, and Steph nodded minutely back at her.

She held Danny's gaze for a few beats longer, then straightened up quickly, making Danny flinch at the suddenness. "Kay kay!"

He seemed taken aback at the difference in demeanor between her and Jason, which was the point, to throw him off balance and everything, and Steph smiled to herself as she walked over to stand with Cass and Jason. She brought her hand up to her forehead, pinkie out, signing 'idiot' to Cass, who smiled and laughed back silently.

In her ear, Dick was muttering to himself as Barbara reviewed the drone feed. "That's weird, there's no door from the tunnel into the basement," he commented. 

"Yeah, I noticed the same thing back when we entered the Ceno-A-hole," Jason supplied, and next to him, Cass nodded. 

"Well, better for us since the drone can just go on in. The basement's empty, by the way, you're good to go through."

At Barbara's okay, Steph and the others walked up and through into what looked like a high school locker room with no windows. Metal lockers lined the walls with rows of benches placed in front, and along one wall was a set of sinks. 

"Feels like I'm back in the dorms," she mused. 

Jason stomped his way down each row of lockers, then walked back over. "Clear."

"Yeah, that's what Oracle said dumbass," Dick muttered.

"Same door?" Cass asked. Jason stomped over to look -- he took a picture quickly, then walked back over: "Yeah."

"What now?" Steph asked. 

"We've marked it down on the map here," Barbara started. "As long as you can confirm he doesn't know anymore, I say cut Danny loose."

"I'm not letting this asshole run off to sound the alarm." 

"Hood, that's not what I meant. But you can't exactly walk him through with you through your whole check. Tag him, tell him not to talk, and let him know we're watching him with your signature Menacing charm."

Jason groaned. "Fine, Mom." He turned to Danny, who'd sat down on one of the benches when they walked into the basement. "Which one's your locker?"

"Over there." He pointed in the general direction, and Steph walked over.

She pointed a finger at one of the lockers. "This one?"

He nodded.

Steph slotted a knife into one side like a crowbar to bend the locker open. Inside was a normcore selection of boring Average Guy objects; a pair of gloves, some books, a pencil with no eraser, a backpack (she rifled through and found it was empty save for a frayed wallet and a set of keys -- a quick check at the ID in the wallet confirmed the guy's name really was Danny. Like, not even a nickname, the ID said Danny. Who woulda thought). Nothing that suggested that he was anything other than what he'd said he was, anything other than a down-on-his-luck lab assistant who'd taken a random job with Crow.

Steph gave Jason a thumbs up and he nodded. Steph liked that Jason always expressed some modicum of approval towards her, some casual acknowledgment of the 'yeah, we're cool' variety. He was chill with her; with the others, he was way more snappy. Maybe it was because they had that shared experience of Dying As Robin And Coming Back With A New Supersona or something, even if she hadn't actually really technically died. 

Jason pulled out his knife, way more menacingly than he needed to, and bent down to meet Danny's eyes.

"Listen. We're letting you go. But we'll be watching you. Intently. We have every kind of tracker you can think of, the kinds that you will never find on your own, and we have your location on lock. The minute you mess with anything Scarecrow-y, Gotham PD is getting your info and location and you're getting locked up. And trust me, we'll make sure your roommates know you snitched. Go straight home and make arrangements to leave Gotham. Capiche?"

Danny nodded hurriedly, holding his hands out for Jason to cut the binds. Jason went to do it, then pulled back the knife with a cautionary "uh uh uh." Danny looked startled, and Jason repeated himself: "Capiche?"

"Capiche! I promise I won--"

"Yeah yeah," Jason cut him off and roughly cut the binds around the guy's hands. "Count to 200 after we leave, then you can go."

"Thank--" Jason stepped through the doorway back into the tunnels, and as Steph and Cass followed, Danny's echoing "--you," followed behind them.

"G-d I hate babysitting," Jason muttered as they continued on down the tunnel. One of the drones whirred next to Steph, and it took everything in her not to swat it away like a bug. 

"You guys back on track?" Duke asked in her ear, and next to her Cass beeped a quick "Y" in Morse code through the coms (yes). 

"It's so fucked that Crane is expending so much energy just to take us out," Steph said. It made her feel special, but in a bad way.

"Yeah. Not a good development. I'm not looking forward to filling in Batman," Dick agreed.

"He'll be chill about it. He'll just be like, 'We approach every obstacle with the same level of preparation, this changes nothing. You gotta have a plan for every contingency,' and so on," Tim replied, his voice going low and grumbly when doing his imitation -- and honestly, yeah, that's exactly what Bruce would say.

"'This wouldn't be an issue if you took the necessary precautions,'" Steph joked in a deep alto, her attempt at a Batman impression. It sucked, but she could hear that she at least got Tim to laugh.

"How's it looking on your end?" 

"Dark, dank, and neverending," Tim replied. "I feel like I'm descending into Hell or something."

"Is Robin a good stand-in for Virgil?" Jason shot at them, and Steph heard Damian scoff.

"Who are you talking about now, Red Hood?"

"Ra's never made you read Dante's 'Inferno'? 'The Divine Comedy'? I thought you said you didn't need to go to school because, and I quote -- "

Damian cut in with a quick "I don't need to go to school,"

"-- 'if the Demon's Head didn't deem it fit for my education, then I don't need to know it.' And yet, here is a book relevant to our conversation, and you don't know shit."

"Red Hood, would you quit it?" Dick interrupted. School was still a sore spot for Damian, and Dick was nothing if not protective. 

"Just trying to give the brat some culture."

Steph bumped her shoulder into Jason's. "You know, you're not as scary when you let it slip that you're secretly just a big nerd."

"Fuck off."

"Other than that, Spoiler, thanks very much for asking me, our end is quiet. Signal's not sensing anyone's been here recently either. We're in purgatory."

Barbara interrupted. "Actually Red Robin, there's something on one of the drone's sensors. Slow down a sec."

"Copy."

Steph and Co. kept walking as they waited to hear what was going on over in Team B-land. The sound of Oracle typing was oddly therapeutic in her ears.

"Okay, there's not any people, but I'm picking up some sort of contraption that's been put into a little compartment, a bluff in the wall about 250 meters up ahead of you. It's not online, but it's got heavy machinery. Approach with caution."

"Will do."

Steph waited with bated breath to hear what it was the group was walking up to. 

Finally, Tim popped back into her ear. "Oracle, are you seeing this? It looks like some sort of dispersal device."

"Dispersal?" Steph asked with alarm. No way did she want anyone to get dosed, especially when they'd walked so deep down the tunnels. 

"Yeah, there's a nozzle, looks like some sort of hose. A tiny tank holding a mystery liquid." Tim's voice was methodical as he examined the device and relayed the information. "It's built into the wall so I can't tell how big it is."

"Yeah, seems like it's not a big device. Looks like someone set it up haphazardly," Barbara supplied, looking over Tim's shoulder via drone.

"Looks like maybe some catches... Why would they booby trap their own tunnels?"

"Not sure RR, it looks like maybe it was just discarded. Focus on the device. What else do you see?"

"Not discarded, it's built in... There's scaffolding collapsed in on itself, so it looks like this can expand once activated. Looks like some sort of wheel... shit."

"What?"

"What's going on?" Steph asked, a hint of worry edging into her voice. She waited, greeted with nothing but a few minutes of silence.

"Stand back!" Damian's voice suddenly interrupted, laced with alarm and command. "Something just activated. There is liquid leaking from the wall, Signal move your foot."

Steph stopped walking, and next to her Cass and Jason did the same. They exchanged worried looks.

"Where is this coming from?" -- Tim's voice. "Shit! The - hey, move back, come on - we must have hit something without realizing, the device is pumping out liquid and it unfolded some sort of barrier and wheel track, it's corralling the liquid down towards us. I think the device is detaching from the wall?"

"How much liquid? How fast is the flow?"

"It's coming fast, and the walls are all sleek so -- shit! I dropped the vial, I was trying to get a sample, but it's coming really fast. We're booking it down the tunnel, don't want to risk infection on a recon mission." Tim's voice was strained, and Steph could tell he was running now. "Ok, that's why the liquid is -- Oracle, the device detached from the wall and is moving down the tunnel towards us, it's moving, the barrier, it's like that Indiana Jones scene with the stone booby trap in the temple but more high tech, the barrier is fitted against the walls and moving, pushing the liquid towards us. Luckily not pumping out more, seemed like a small tank to hold it in the first place, but it's closing in, and looks like the liquid may be turning gaseous as it moves. Not too fast a pace. Well. Sorta fast."

'Shit.' Steph was on edge, and she started backtracking unconsciously, itching to somehow get over and meet the others. They were way too far away to help out in any capacity, but still. Cass was straining to listen, tense and primed like she was thinking the same thing as Steph.

"Alright, I got a Batarang hinged into the corner of the barrier, I'm on a wire a few feet up and trying to secure it so it won't keep moving, otherwise we're fucked. Signal and Robin moved down the tunnel for now. These damn tunnels, there's no room."

Duke chimed in: "The liquid looked way less thick than what A Team found or what infected Nightwing. Like it's watered down. It's definitely flowing faster than a thicker viscous fluid would."

"This device isn't sophisticated at all, but it's strong and we're too cramped in for a good fix." Tim's voice was growing more even now that he wasn't running, but he still sounded vaguely worried. "Doesn't make any sense, why would they set up a trap if they're working down here? I'm sticking up the hinges so it can't keep moving forward toward us, we're good for now, but we don't have any suction to vacuum out this liquid. It's just gonna puddle."

"Did any of you come into contact with it?" Dick's worried voice asked.

No one replied.

"Red Robin. Did anyone come into contact with any liquid?"

More silence. Steph's thoughts devolved into a steady stream of 'Shit shit shit shit.'

"Red Robin!" 

"Sorry, no, I don't think so." Steph let out a breath of relief at Tim's voice.

"No," Duke and Damian chimed in. "We are wiping down our suits just in case," Damian continued.

Tim elaborated: "Scarecrow's dumb as shit, I don't know why this is here. I've made sure this barrier won't move anymore, so gonna swing over on my grapple to Signal and Robin. Ha, I really am in my Indiana Jones era."

"Be careful Red," Steph cautioned. 

"Okay, back on solid ground, we're backtracking out. Not gonna be able to map down this way tonight, so let's block it off once we get back to the - woah."

"What?" Barbara and Dick's voices overlapped. A pause.

"Shit. Red Robin cut his hand on the wire, through his suit. I think he got wet, or maybe some of the fumes... He's dizzy," Duke's voice sounded worried. 

"Idiot!" Robin could be heard chiding Tim, though Steph knew the venom came from a place of worry. "We are on our way out. It took us about an hour at a leisurely pace so we'll hurry and make it in 25 minutes."

Everyone stayed silent as B Team moved out, not wanting to fill up the channel if they needed to say anything. Steph knew they'd have to sprint to gain some ground before Tim was incapacitated.

"We should go back," Steph said softly to Jason and Cass.

Jason was hesitant. "If we can't map out that side, we shouldn't leave this end unexplored too. After tonight, when that alcove of knocked-out bad guys and Blondie's dead body is discovered, they'll know we were down here. There's nothing we can do, Spoiler."

"Red, how are you feeling?" she asked, ignoring Jason.

"Mm' okay," Tim said, his voice hazy, definitely impaired. 

"He is not okay," Robin retorted.

"M' not.. hallucintatin'. I'm still o - okay."

Fuck, he sounded bad. Steph turned to Jason: "Come on, we can't leave him with just Robin and Signal, they can't carry him the whole way."

"No! You know I care about the kid, but we can't just run over to help."

"Oracle can send people, I'll go over just myself!"

Cass seemed to consider this. Jason groaned, frustrated -- Steph could tell he was especially chagrined at having to coordinate for the Bats, having to allocate who would go where. The asshole just couldn't let go of his Lone Wolf mentality. 

Finally: "Oracle, can you get some reinforcements down here? Spoiler wants to help the bird with the broken wing."

"Let me see, I think Batwoman is out tonight with Huntress. I'll try to flag them down. Bluebird is already on her way to you and will enter through Gotham U. Batman's been getting updates from Agent A and is trying to get back tonight."

Jason shrugged his shoulders at Steph: "Fine, you wanna go, go."

Over the coms, Robin was giving intermittent updates on Tim's condition, though not much was progressing yet. 

Cass grabbed Steph's shoulder: "I'm staying. Need to continue, too complex."

Steph nodded in understanding. Her friend couldn't leave Jason alone underground in these tunnels when they didn't know what to expect or to what extent they stretched on. Cass would conjure up images of worst-case scenarios if she left him alone.

Steph squeezed Cass's shoulder, trying to convey some heavy emotion she couldn't quite place, then turned to go. 

"I'll see you back at the Cave," she promised, then sprinted back down the tunnels.

###

[TIM's POV]

Tim could've sworn there weren't this many shadows when they first passed through this tunnel; they looked like they were moving, bouncing off each other in lazy anamorphic designs. He couldn't help but turn his head to look at all of them as they ran, Duke and Damian on either side of him. 'So pretty. I thought this place was supposed to be scary.'

"Red Robin, focus!" Damian demanded, slapping the back of Tim's head.

He blinked. Focus? 

"I'm runnin', arint I? M' foc - focused." Yikes, he did not like how his voice was sounding in his ears. What the fuck was going on? This didn't feel like Fear Toxin, and he definitely wasn't as messed up as Dick had been the other night. He just felt... floaty.

He stumbled forward, and it felt weird, to feel his feet tripping over each other, his feet felt weird.

"I'm... twit-chee," he tried to convey how bizarre his body was starting to feel, but couldn't get the words to come out right. 

"Just run, Red. You're okay, just focus on running," Duke encouraged next to him. Tim nodded, soldiering on with unsteady and un-nimble steps. This was bad.

How had they not planned for someone getting infected again? It's like they were so freaked out when it happened to Dick that they'd convinced themselves it was a one-time thing, that they weren't going to come into contact with the toxin again. Like they'd been prepared for the worst in a general, amorphic sense but hadn't drafted any specific contingencies.

The plan was to avoid contact; why didn't they plan for the inevitability that of course something would go wrong and of course contact would occur?

It felt incessantly unlikely for something to go wrong like this, with all the precautions they all took. Actually, scratch that. Actually, in Gotham, it made sense for everything to go wrong. Always. The thought made him think of Bruce, how he'd driven home to Tim over and over: 'You have to be ready for any and everything.'

Tim felt a twinge of pain in his ankle. He tried to look down as he kept moving, tried to coordinate moving his head while continuing to move his feet, but it was rough. He couldn't stop tripping, and if it wasn't for Dami and Duke's grip on his shoulders he probably would've fallen by now. 

"Heyy, why isss my angle, broken?" He tried to ask, his mouth moving in all the wrong ways. Duke and Damian refused to stop or answer him, and he tried again. "My.. a - ankle..."

"Red Robin, stop talking," Robin chided. His voice was hard, pointed, angry. Tim felt his mouth turn down in a frown. Fuck, did he feel weird.

His body was adopting a heavy sort of numbness, the sort of numbness that felt cloying and claustrophobic, a very noticeable numbness, a numbness that sent pins and needles down each limb. The feeling was all he could focus on. Next to him, the other two heroes were focused on running and holding Tim up, which felt nice, but he was scared at the fact that he was feeling their hands less and less. Why couldn't he feel them?

"How close are you?" A voice asked in his ear, and he flinched hard, careening to his left and taking out whoever was standing next to him. The figure regained their footing and stayed standing above Tim as he felt the upsetting sensation that he was still falling. Like when you wake yourself up from a dream by falling awake, a feeling so physical yet based on knowledge so foreign to him right now; there was no great distance for him to be falling down, why did it feel like he was falling on solid ground? 

"Shit!" The figure above him cursed. "10 minutes out, 4 from the split, but the coms scared Red, hold on, we're picking him back up."

"No..." he tried to assure them that he wasn't scared, but his mouth wasn't cooperating. "M' okaayy." 

"I'm at the diverging branch, I'll wait for you!" A familiar voice came into the mix. 

"Stfff?"

"Shh. Come on, grab my hand man, get up." A hand reached down towards Tim and he flinched, his body reacting though his mind didn't register anything as dangerous. Faltering, he climbed to his feet, his entire body trembling.

Upright, a wave of nausea overcame him. The shadows that a second ago had seemed so enchanting now looked menacing and spindly. He shut his eyes tight, 'just got to keep going,' losing feeling in his feet. He just had to keep going, keep letting the figures on either side of him buoy him forward.

From a distance, he heard the comforting voice of Barbara, speaking as if through some auditory kaleidoscope: "I have the drone already exiting the tunnels, I'm gonna run it back to the cave on its own. I used it to collect a sample of the liquid. The other one's heading to you Hood. Signal, you're right, it's not the same as the other compounds. How's Red reacting?"

"Just super dazed and out of it. He's got some tremors."

"Copy."

They continued on. Of course they did; a bat never stopped.

Tim was starting to finally feel fear, but not because he was hallucinating. It was an anticipatory fear, of something he knew was inevitable. He was scared of the pain that Dick had felt, scared of it shooting down each limb, from underneath each acre of skin across the landscape of his body. Fear was one thing, but pain? Physical, inescapable, unrelenting pain? He didn't think he could handle it. 

"Red!" Up ahead, Steph's purple hood was drawing into view. The trio ran headlong into her, and Tim felt her arms catch him before he could fall to the ground again. She turned to talk to the figure in yellow, Duke, worry etched clearly across her masked face. "How is he?"

"Keep walking, talk on the way!" Damian urged, and Steph nodded, hurrying along in front of them. Tim was glad she was here because he really didn't know how much longer he'd be able to walk. Next to him, Damian continued: "He's been mumbling, unintelligible. He is dazed, uncoordinated, confused, but not fearful or hallucinating." The kid listed off the symptoms methodically, and Tim balked. He'd been talking?

He went to open his mouth, but in some mistranslation, his foot instead lifted and caught on a lip in the floor. He felt himself propel forward, and though the others caught him, this time he couldn't regain his footing. One of his legs was trembling uncontrollably, and he could feel neither one enough to carry his own weight.

"Shit," Steph cursed next to him. He felt pathetic, unable to move and help the others to help him, but moreso Tim was growing scared; he couldn't feel. He was going to be overcome by pain, and he couldn't feel the comforting hands of those around him. He couldn't feel her hands.

Around him, the three heroes paused. Duke and Damian bent next to him and each took one of his arms, wrapped them over their shoulders, and in front of him Steph grabbed his legs together at a bent angle and together the three picked him up. 

And then suddenly they were walking out of the warehouse. In what felt like the blink of an eye, in what was a disconcerting degree of unfelt movement, they were out of the tunnel system. His eyes roamed to look at the sky above him, taking in the new location. His eyes were moving, but nothing else. He felt locked in. He felt nothing. He felt an overwhelming Nothing.

He took in the information that he was being put into the Bat Mobile, and he felt nothing. His head was propped against the window and somebody buckled his seatbelt, and he felt nothing. He heard the car growl to life and words being exchanged, then saw the city moving outside the car window, heard someone tell him they were close.

And he felt nothing.

Chapter Text

[DAMIAN's POV]

As much and as often as he may criticize him, Damian really did think Timothy was smart. His analytical skills and technical prowess were practically on par with his father's abilities, and he'd met and in some ways even challenged the exacting standards set by his grandfather.

Damian might call him an idiot, loudly, but he admired Tim, he respected him. So how, how, did he make such a stupid mistake?

Dragging the increasingly incapacitated former Robin through the tunnels with Duke, Damian had felt himself growing angrier and angrier. Injury during combat was often inevitable, his father had stressed how pertinent it was to prepare for error or disaster -- but in this particular case, the error was so avoidable! How had Tim cut his hand, then contaminated the wound, and then not even noticed the injury until he was actively symptomatic? Tim should know better. 

He was glad that Duke and Stephanie were there to help, as trying to drag Tim alone would've betrayed a chink in Damian's armor (alas, it wasn't his fault that he was younger and therefore smaller than the rest of the team, and it shouldn't reflect negatively on him that that meant he was unable to carry a grown man to safety) -- but more than that, Damian appreciated their sincerity and their competence in placating Tim as he grew more and more disoriented. His own first instinct was always to close himself off, to grow prickly and angry when emotions grew heated, and he wasn't always proud of how that made him come off when his teammates were in trouble. Jon was helping him to open up a little, but he felt awkward trying to comfort Tim. He couldn't meet Tim's blank and glassy gaze.

By the time they'd gotten Tim out to the Bat Mobile, Damian had been sufficiently worried. Timothy had stopped responding and was physically unreactive. He was completely lax, limp, like a ragdoll.

Damian had even hit the hilt of his sword below Tim's knee to test his reflexes when they stopped for a brief pause inside the warehouse, and it was dismaying when the test proved that Tim's reactions were practically nonexistent. He wasn't simply unconscious; his body was no longer responding correctly.

Stephanie had frowned at Damian when he'd done that, thinking at first that Damian was hitting the prone Red Robin for no good reason. 'I'm trying to help,' Damian wanted to say, 'I'm doing what I can,' but instead, he stayed silent and let her think he was the demon they all made him out to be until her preoccupied mind finally recognized the test he was performing. 

Now, Damian watched as the Bat Mobile growled to life with Stephanie at the wheel to bring Tim back to the cave. "We're on our way, ETA 12 minutes," her hurried voice called over the coms.

"Copy that Spoiler. How is he?"

"Practically catatonic. He's, uh... he keeps whining, I can't tell if he's crying or if it's just his vocal cords contracting or something."

"Shit. Drive safe, Agent A and Nightwing are ready for you here."

Damian turned back to the warehouse, satisfied that Tim was packed off and heading to the people who could help him. 

"Come on, Signal. We should block off the tunnel for now so nobody can approach from behind as we go join Team A."

Next to him, Duke nodded. Damian appreciated his cordial relationship with Duke. He was largely un-antagonistic, even if they had met under negative circumstances.

"Good idea, Robin."

The two walked back through the warehouse in silence. The ruined remnants of their first fight in that warehouse two nights ago, the broken glass and grime and dried blood, seemed like a fitting backdrop for the comedown from such a stressful situation. The combination of such disarray and yet such big and empty openness helped to clear Damian's head, to reset him so that he was prepared again for the tunnels below. The expansiveness was like a breath of fresh air in comparison to those tunnels.

"He's going to be okay, you know." 

Damian turned sharply at Duke's words. "Tt. Of course he is. You don't need to comfort me like a baby."

"I just meant- I only wanted to say, it seemed like a not-as-bad version of what Nightwing was hit with, but still related. So we know we'll be able to treat him"

"That sounds correct."

"And I wasn't babying you. More like I was reassuring myself." Duke held Damian's gaze as he said this, and Damian felt his face soften as he acquiesced to Duke's words.

"I know."

They fell into a more comfortable silence as they traced their way back through the tunnels. There were occasional sconces along the tunnel walls at random intervals, which seemed like a stupid way to lay out the interior.

This was such a shoddy operation, and that fact, that everything was so messy and unsophisticated, made the errors they'd encountered sting all the more. How careless could they be, to allow such an operation to affect them?

"Robin and Signal, you guys coming to us?" Jason's voice interrupted his thoughts. 

"Yes, but I think we should block off the tunnel we'd walked down at the point of divergence."

"Yeah, we're gonna set up some surveillance," Duke agreed next to him. 

Jason responded with a curt "You do that," and that was it.

The time seemed to pass quickly as he and Duke made their way to the tunnel branch, as they set up trip wires and motion sensors and cameras, and as they then continued on in the opposite direction to go meet the others. The minutes had passed incessantly slowly when Tim had been hanging off of Damian's shoulder, and now it seemed to speed up exponentially to overcompensate. 

Flickering fluorescents preceded the alcove where Jason, Stephanie, and Cassandra had had their run-in with the team of scientists, and Duke relayed that information to the others: "Passing your guys's leftovers in a second."

"Hey, if the guy with the buzzcut is coming back around, can you break his other arm for me?"

"Why would we do that if he is already incapacitated?"

"Because that asshole signed up for a mundane job working as a lab assistant and then didn't even hesitate to brutally murder his fucking co-worker."

As Damian and Duke passed the scientists, all of whom were still unconscious, Damian spotted the man in question. "I'll electrocute him with my taser for you."

Damian didn't actually do so, as it wouldn't have had any effect on the man since he was still knocked out. Still, it secretly made him feel warm inside to impress Jason, at least lately, since he'd been codifying his new approach to dealing with Gotham (and Batman). The man's triumphant "Way to turn up, Robin!" caused a smile to flicker across his face (though he made sure to make his expression neutral before Duke could see). Jason practically never called him Robin; it felt like a special occasion every time it happened.

Damian made a pointed effort not to look at the form of the dead scientist -- 'his fate could easily have been Richard's,' Damian thought uncomfortably -- but next to him, he heard Duke let out a breath of some combination of surprise and disgust when they passed the prone body. 

The rest of the walk allowed Damian to adopt a zen sort of focus born from the monotony and silence. The somatic memory of Tim's dead weight draped haphazardly over his shoulder was practically fading; Damian wasn't worried, or upset, or guilty for allowing his teammate to be injured. Just focused and mission-ready. Zen.

"Hey, I'm passing through the underbelly of Gotham U, meet you guys in a sec," Harper's voice interrupted his thoughts, and next to him Duke checked the GPS on his suit's arm to see how close they were. 

"Copy that, Bluebird."

"Can't believe I'm missing out on the party," Richard said over the coms, and Robin frowned. What a stupid joke. He should instead be updating them on Timothy's condition.

"Well if we got all these booby traps lying in wait for us here, it's probably best you're not down here Dickhead. You'd probably trip all of them and die or something."

"Don't call me that, Hood. And no I wouldn't."

"You so would."

"Give me a little bit of credit."

"Nah, it's a miracle your dumbass hasn't accidentally killed himself yet."

"Sacrificing," Cassandra offered, half-agreeing with Jason and half placating Richard. 

"Totally," Harper agreed, though her voice sounded distracted as she (Damian assumed) made her way into the tunnels.

"Nightwing uses his danger radar powers for evil and always ends up down for the count, like, right after he warns the rest of us," Jason joked.

"Aw Red, you think me getting hurt is evil? I didn't know you cared about m--"

"Fill me in." A gravelly voice interrupted the group's attempt at levity, and Damian felt a twinge in his chest. That was his father's voice. 

"Batman, are you joining us?" he asked (did his voice sound too hopeful?). 

"No. I'm still about two hours outside of Gotham City's limits, but Oracle was able to connect me to your communications."

"Welcome to the party, pal," Jason said, voice odd; he was probably doing an impression from some movie Damian didn't know.

"Fill me in on what's going on."

"We're on a recon mission to explore newly discovered tunnels under the city," Damian obediently responded. Next to him, Duke seemed to stand up taller, as if father was watching them.

"Can't tell dept-d- how far down, or amount," Cassandra cut in.

Damian frowned at the interruption, even if it was only Cain, and continued: "It's been hard to scan down here, which necessitated we physically perform the reconnaissance. So far we've only found one intersection from where we began, and we had split to explore both directions, but after Red Robin was incapacitated we elected to simply place sensors at that end and reconvene down the other tunnel direction."

"Understood. What is Red Robin's condition?"

On their end, Harper found Damian and Duke, and the three continued on to catch up with Jason and Cassandra.

Over coms, Richard took over for a second as Barbara typed on her computer: "We're treating him with what we've got, but his symptoms suggest that this version of the Tox veers more Nerve Gas than Fear Gas, so Agent A's having our doc send over more effective treatments. We, uh, used up the Atropine on me the other night."

"Is he conscious?"

"... Kind of. He's in and out, but even when he's in he's not totally there."

'Poor Drake,' Damian thought automatically, but he remained stoic as they exchanged information.

"We have a sample of this toxin from one of the drones, so we've begun categorizing the strains we've come into contact with so far. Spoiler also brought Oracle the sample Red Hood collected from their whole fiasco, so we're analyzing and she's having the computer set up an algorithm to track chemical components and variations. I'm stuck at homebase, and it's like seeing the man behind the curtain to be honest. Oracle's a genius."

"Glad you're having fun," Bruce deadpanned. "Oracle, ping me if anything changes. Otherwise, I'm going dark."

"Copy that Batman, see you soon."

The air seemed to grow colder as Father's voice departed.

Jason's gruff imitation of Batman filled his ears instead: "Glad you're having fun. But don't have too much fun. If you have too much fun then you will die. Fun equals death. And if you die I forbid anyone from bringing you back using the Lazarus Pit, because it will have been your own fault. That you allowed your attention to be diverted. By fun. Disappointing," he deadpanned in a gravel-filled barking grant.

"Wow, that's spot on," Stephanie's voice sounded like it was coming from across some distance, like she was talking from over by Tim's bedside across the Cave to Barbara's microphone. 

Damian scoffed. "As if Batman has control over the Lazarus Pits."

"That's what you took took issue with?" Jason sounded incredulous.

"Just because you were being melodramatic doesn't mean that your sarcasm was wrong. If you got distracted on patrol, any consequences would be your own fault."

"Copy that Batman Junior," Jason said, coincidentally as Damian, Duke, and Harper drew up to meet Jason and Cassandra. Jason saluted at Damian as they assembled. Damian was about to insult Jason back in kind, but before he could he was interrupted by Barbara's voice in his ear.

"Oracle here, I have some updates for you all. I had the drones go up ahead to scope out your route. There's another branch about 2 miles ahead of you, so get walking."

"Damn. Can you program a step counter into my helmet O? I wanna know how many calories I'm burning."

"Of course, that's at the top of my To Do list."

"O, tell them the other thing," Damian heard Richard call from what sounded like a distance away, as he was (as Damian assumed) now sitting with Timothy in the infirmary with Stephanie instead of at Barbara's side by the computer.

"Right. Huntress and Batwoman are working on assignment with Black Canary, I'm not supposed to tell you where, and though they're preoccupied for now, if any issues arise they should be able to provide aid."

"I want all my Mommies to come join us even if we don't need help."

"Red Hood, gross."

"Focus," Cassandra said in a clipped, dissapproving tone, before she punched Jason's shoulder. Hard. Jason flipped her off.

Harper laughed and pulled out what looked like an iPhone but smaller and round. "I've routed the drone footage here so we can see it, too. Not to step on Oracle's toes or anything. Once we get up ahead, I think it might be better to just set up some sensors down one way for now, and all walk the other way. Just 'cause mathematically there are totally going to be more branches down that way, and it might be better to focus on all the twigs on one branch, y'know?"

"Good idea, Bluebird."

Damian nodded his agreement with Barbara's approval.

"Like keeping your hand on one wall if you're lost in a maze. Smart," Jason voiced his agreement as well.

Their group all set off, walking in a loosely unordered set of two lines.

Damian couldn't help but wish Batman had actually been back to join them when he elected to talk to their team. His father was the only one of the Bats, except for maybe Richard and Barbara, to treat him with respect. Like he was a part of the team no matter what -- his demeanor, his affect when speaking, nor his past were ever used against him by Batman, or Bruce Wayne, for that matter. 

"Race you to the tunnel branch!" Jason interrupted his thoughts. It seemed as if Jason was saying this to boost morale, which was odd, but Damian couldn't really tell due to his helmet. 

"You're on," Duke chimed in, and the two both took off down the tunnel. Damian ran to catch up, Cassandra and Harper behind him, and as a group, they all ran the 2 miles together. They might have shoved and pushed at each other along the way, but the brisk run, the uniformity of their formation, and the straightforwardness of their actions made it the best part of his night.

###

[JASON's POV]

What a weird fucking night. This vague sort of ~let's go run around these tunnels and see where they lead~ mission was so simultaneously boring and off-putting. 'Like, tell me straight up what you want me to do,' Jason thought. Since when did the Bats think an unplanned wild goose chase was the way to go? I mean, Jason had joined in, but he was a follower not a leader this time! He was chilling in the back seat! He was for sure not the responsible one!

Not only that, but two injuries two patrol nights in a row felt like a bad omen. This was Scarecrow, after all; they should know how to stay operational when dealing with him.

After years spent priming his body to stay in fighting form, running through the tunnels gave him a good chance to relax and refocus. It also had the added bonus of getting them to cover more ground in less time. These tunnels were boring.

"Okay, coming up on that split Oracle. We'll head about two feet in on the right, set up some sensors, then double back and go down the left branch."

Cass and Duke disappeared up ahead to lay out some sensors and trip wires. Damian followed, and Harper loitered lazily behind them.

"Copy that Red Hood. Any chance you want to name the tunnels so you all can stop just repeating 'this tunnel' and 'that branch' over and over?"

"Oh, I'd love to. I'm feeling really creative, these juices are flowing. Okay, so the tunnel route Red fucked up in, that's Tunnel A. The tunnel we're in now will be Tunnel B. At this split we'll make it B.1 and then B.2, and then I, hmm, do you want me to come up with a few names to keep on the back burner for subsequent tunnel discoveries?"

"You really have a way with words, Hood."

"Yeah, these grey walls and grey flooring and grey shadows and whatever are so inspiring."

"Tunnel B.2. is securely monitored," Damian cut in as the four walked back over. G-d was this boring. They regrouped and set off down Tunnel B.1, Harper marking something on her little device as they soldiered on.

"Hey, did you make me come map out these tunnels as punishment for something? I swear I've been a good boy Oracle, this is just mean."

"Not every patrol is exciting."

"Easy for you to say, you can just watch Netflix on a separate window while we walk around down here if you wanted, or something."

"Would you shut up and just focus on the tunnel?"

"What the hell am I supposed to focus on? That wall on my right? Not very detailed, doesn't hold my attention. Oh, maybe this flickering overhead light? The dead flies trapped behind the glass are kinda cool, but I don't think they're trying to tell me anything, not really that striking. Or how about -- oh shit. Dead body." Jason stopped abruptly, and Harper, who'd been following behind him with her head buried reading whatever information she was getting, ran right into his back.

Duke, Cass, and Damian, all drew up next to him to look down at the dead body. It was a man, white, late 30s, with a frizzy mop of over-dry brown hair and large, open, unseeing green eyes. Gross.

"Say again?"

"We found a dead body. Checking it over," Duke filled in as Jason kicked the guy. Yup, definitely dead. He stepped forward to crouch down and look at him. There wasn't any blood or visible wounds, but the guy did have a disgusting white crust dried around his mouth. 

Jason rifled through his belt to unclip a baton, and he reached down with it to poke at the guy.

"Don't poke him!" Harper exclaimed in disgust.

"I'm not, I'm trying to lay him out flat so we can look him over, chill." Why did everyone think he couldn't be a grown-up big-boy vigilante and actually investigate things? "He's stiff, been dead at least a day or two. Rigor mortis looks fucked on this guy, like his blood pooled all wrong. Definitely was poisoned with something."

"If that timeline tracks, he might've been involved with Scarecrow when we were here the other night," Dick's voice reasoned. "Does he have ID?"

"Ugh, one second, I'll see." Jason really did not want to touch this dude's clothes -- not because of the whole dead thing, but because that white crust looked like dried yogurt and it was giving him the ick.

He moved the guy's jacket and spotted a pocket inside, so he reached in and grabbed out what turned out to be a cheap blue plastic wallet. Checking for wires or catches, he pulled it out and spread it open. "Yikes, fake ID here says this is Jonathan Crane."

"It's not, right?"

"That would've been the first thing I'd've said if it was him." Jason turned on the penlight on the side of his helmet and looked up, holding the ID up above him. "I'm no bouncer, but this isn't even a good fake, it's totally butchered. It's clear that this has been cut up and re-printed."

"Turn his face to your cam, I'll take a screenshot and see if facial recognition can tell us anything," Barbara instructed. 

Reaching down, he turned the guy's head so that it lay flat on the ground and bent over to look at it straight on. "So gross."

"You've been dead before, you can't be grossed out by dead bodies." Damian's snide remark almost made him drop the guy's head to turn around and smack the kid, but he willed himself to not react.

"Okay, got the scan. No immediate match, I'll keep it running though."

Jason stood up, wiping his hands on his pants. He turned to face the group. "So. Thoughts on what we should do with the guy? We can 'Weekend at Bernies' him through the rest of our exploration."

In his ear, Dick and Steph groaned. Cass stepped forward to get Jason's attention: "What's on his mouth?"

"Noo, please don't make me take a sample."

"I can," she signed with a haphazard raise of her hand, patting him on the shoulder. He handed her a swab and tube and she collected the sample while Jason watched over her shoulder in disgust.

"Shit, you guys have company. Movement detected from the sensors you set up," Barbara's voice interrupted. Cass quickly sealed the sample and handed it to Jason to stow away (what? he had more pockets) to stand at the ready. 

"Who is it?" He asked her, lowering his voice a bit. Next to him, Damian had unsheathed his sword.

"A lot of someones. Shit, sending the drones down ahead of you to check for a way out. Get ready for contact."

"These drones kinda suck. Didn't even warn us about the dead body," Jason muttered. Maybe Barbie really was slacking off and watching Netflix. "Rebreathers on," He instructed, pulling out a few throwing knives.

The five of them drew back to stand together facing the shadowed hallway. Jason flipped on his night vision to try and see ahead of time who was coming closer. There were at least 10 people just based on the density of the crowd walking towards them, but they were still too far to see any details. He flipped the night vision back off. 

"Are we running or fighting?" Harper asked next to him. 

"Fighting," He said. 

"Running," Dick offered over the coms. 

"Maybe both, the drones haven't reached another exit yet," Barbara cautioned. 

With nothing to do but stand at the ready, Jason and the rest watched as shadowed figures drew closer and closer -- until one, clothed in a stained and heavy burlap sack, stepped out alone, dragging someone behind him.

"Shit."

Chapter Text

[JASON's POV]

"Red Hood. I wish you'd told me you were coming. I had to find out you were here from the help," Scarecrow greeted the bats, his words transforming at the mention of 'the help' to drip with melted poisonous disdain.

Scarecrow's mechanized voice sounded as if it was bouncing down from behind him, gusting down from deep within the tunnel system to reach Jason and the bats standing in front of him. Crane threw the figure next to him down to the ground, and the sound of his body hitting the hard flooring had its own deep and dark echo. 

In his ear, Jason heard Barbara breathe out in shock: "Danny." She sounded guilty, which they should be; why had they only considered how letting Danny go would impact their mission? They should've taken Blondie's fear about snitching more seriously, paid closer attention to Danny for the rest of the night. Jason should've known -- sure the guy was annoying, and technically a bad guy, but it wasn't really his fault; he had just taken a crappy job.

"Yeah, well, where the hell is here? What, you decided to run underground like the cockroach you are?" Jason asked, staying poised and ready, not letting his guilt-born anger show, trying to only come off as menacing.

He kept his stance neutral as behind his helmet he cut his attention between Scarecrow himself and the crumpled figure of the unlucky scientist whom they had let go. Danny's eyes were darting around from within shadow-set eyes, dark circles carved valley-deep below puffy eyelids -- he was hyperventilating, diaphoretic, shivering. He was terrified. Shit.

"Ah, these tunnels are my little secret, a love letter from Gotham to me. It's not quite time for me to reveal all my mysteries yet, though. You bats might have caught me off guard the other night, but I'm afraid you've since lost whatever upper hand you thought you'd gained."

Damian raised his sword. "You always underestimated Batman, Crane. You shouldn't underestimate us!" 

"Ah, and where is the big Bat? Is he hiding in the shadows behind you? Should I be scared, looking over my shoulder, peering into every corner?" Scarecrow crept forward one step, but Jason and the others held their ground. "Or is it just you five? You see, I have been brewing a new recipe just for all of you. You vigilantes. You caught a preview of it the other night, a little sip from the great and vast array that my myriad experiments have borne, but never fear; that was just a taste of what I am preparing. Because you're right, I did underestimate Batman -- I should have known that a man so intent on striking fear in his opponents' hearts would ultimately be my Toxin's match. I could infect as many of the masses as I want, but he's ruined it for me. Instead of seeing the ethereal elegance of my creation, the purity of my vision, he corrupted it. He treated the Fear like some ailment that needed to be cured." Scarecrow's voice was full of disgust. "But no more. I want to show him the depth of fear's potential."

Crane took another step forward.

"So until he is back home from wherever he has disappeared off to, I'll give you all a gift: I want to leave you with the simplest of fears. A shiver you'll feel running down your backs. Phobophobia, my dear bats: Fear the fear itself, the certainty of the fear that is to come. Know that it is inevitable."

Crane stepped back to within the fold of his crowd of goons. He motioned with one hand, and those in the back of their crowd began to walk back down the tunnel. Jason was itching to attack, but since they were so outnumbered he knew it wouldn't do them any good. He was left with only verbal barbs to throw.

"Chicken. You outnumber us, literally on your home turf, and you're just gonna cut and run? Did you seriously just march down here to give us some shitty monologue, and that's it?"

"Red Hood, shut up," Dick cautioned in his ear. 

"Isn't that so simple, so elegant? A five-minute exchange, and with that you are filled with fear, I know you are. Because the horrors to come, you know that they will come. You trust in their inevitability. Trust in my inevitability. I will be back. And you will be waiting." 

"There's an exit behind you guys about a mile down, on the right," Barbara whispered as Crane continued on.

"And... what makes you think I came down here for you?...  When I elected to meet you once I discovered you were here, what makes you think I only came to talk?" 

At that, Jason saw Cass tense next to him. Her head moved almost unnoticeably, scanning the retreating crowd. And -- there. Two tanks of gas were left behind as the number of people disappeared back into the dark, left next to the few remaining figures standing next to Scarecrow.

As he stepped back, Crane bent down to unscrew the top of the tank on the right, releasing a thick cloud of white-green smoke. A goon at his side bent to unscrew the other tank, and Jason took his chance.

He quickly threw two of the throwing knives -- one of them caught Scarecrow in the upper arm, the other sinking deep into the goon's wrist at a 45-degree angle. Though Crow had already unscrewed one tank, the goon let out a scream of pain and dropped the tank he was holding.

Rather than help him, Crane simply laughed, pulling out the knife in his arm and dropping it with a clatter on the ground, joining the rest of his goons back down the tunnel and into the shadows beyond. The goon Jason had nailed stumbled to his feet, running off with Jason's knife still stuck deep into the bone and muscle of his wrist. 'Damn, that was a good knife.'

'We should follow,' a voice in Jason's head said. 'We don't know enough to run in blind when they have such strong numbers,' another voice reminded him. 'Sureveillance only' Dick's voice echoed. The scuffs of boots walking receded down the tunnel, retreating down into the unknown. The gas was clouding around them, making it hard to see much of anything, but they'd all been prepared with their rebreathers and gas masks, covering up.

"Well that was easy," Harper said next to him, relieved they didn't have to fight so many in what would surely have been an injury-filled event. 

"Oracle, follow behind with the drone, let's keep eyes on Scarecrow if we can. We gotta get out of here, even with our masks that gas is gonna cloud too much down here in the enclosed space, we can't stay," Jason muttered, pushing Harper aside to dart forward and try to grab Danny to bring along with them. 

"Copy, already following."

As soon as Jason placed a hand on Danny's wrist, the man started screaming bloody murder. The gas was pooling around him, his already addled mind surely falling deeper into terror and insanity.

"Shut up, I'm trying to help," Jason said gruffly, keeping a tight grip on his wrist to keep him from running away. "Hey, I need a sedative and vial of fear tox antidote," he called, unable to rifle through his own pockets with Danny struggling below him. 

Signal walked over and injected both into Danny's neck. He fell unconscious almost immediately, thankfully, and Jason bent the guy's legs, grabbed both arms, and strung him over his shoulders in a firefighter's hold. The guy was heavy, his weight digging into Jason's neck uncomfortably, right under his helmet. He turned to the other bats, who'd all been readying to get the hell out of the tunnels.

"Come on, let's get the fuck outta here."

"What do we do with the dead guy?" Duke asked.

Jason shrugged, though the motion was hidden under the form laying limp on his shoulders. "He's dead, he ain't going anywhere."

"I'm taking a blood sample first!" Damian called. He crouched down to take the sample, his face behind his rebreather pointed and focused -- he seemed to be rushing to take Tim's place, to quantify the situation and focus on the science. Maybe the demon really did have a heart; he seemed genuinely upset about Tim's condition, ready to bring him back information to make up for his absence.

Jason turned to survey the others; they all looked a lot like how Jason was feeling, somehow both relieved and on edge.

"You first," Cass said, clipped and fast, pointing at Jason's shoulders, and he nodded, leading the way with their enemy-turned-prisoner-turned-informant-turned-collateral-damage laying heavy on his back once Damian finished his extraction.

"What the hell do you think Scarecrow was talking about?" Duke asked as they made their way out. "I really don't like the idea of that guy scheming. Usually it's just, like 'squirt' here's some Fear Gas, and that's it. This is so thought out."

"It's thought out?" Jason asked incredulously. "It seems like he kinda left things scattered all around down here like, I don't know, like socks or dirty laundry someone didn't want to throw in the bin."

"Confusing," Cass agreed. "Very dumb. But prepared. Big something."

"We'll figure it out, just get outta there," Barbara instructed. 

They all shuffled quickly down the length of the tunnel, unease filling the air quicker than Scarecrow's gas had.

It felt like such an exercise in futility to be leaving so soon, but honestly, they weren't getting anything done tonight. They had to get Danny out, had to regroup and come up with a better recon plan of action. What the hell was going on? These tunnels were full of random shit -- some dispersal device prototype, a lab setup, a dead body -- but it was all so haphazard. There didn't seem to be some sort of organizational layout, a method to the madness. But there was some larger plan at play, that much was evident from Scarecrow's little speech.

"We're coming up to it now," Harper's voice called from behind Jason finally -- apparently she'd marked where the exit was on her little device when Barbara had announced it -- and Jason saw the outline of a doorframe coming up. They turned and filed through into what appeared to be a basement in, what else, another abandoned warehouse somewhere in Gotham. The layout looked similar to the first one they'd encountered, right down to the same exact sealed metal door that they'd seen again back under the university. 

"Move aside," Damian pushed Jason away as he pulled out the piece of tech that Dick had used the other night. The little demon got the door open fast, and he peered out to check for anyone lying in wait for them. "It's empty."

They stepped out, and even just in the warehouse, the cold air of a space that was Not An Underground Tunnel felt nice. He walked out to the front of the building, depositing the limp form of Danny on the ground and rolling out his shoulders. Ow. He sat Danny up to sit against the warehouse wall, making sure to leave him in a position that wouldn't compromise his airway.

"Oracle, send an ambulance. We're leaving Danny here and heading home."

Jason removed his helmet and turned off his communication devices without waiting for an answer. He didn't realize how claustrophobic those tunnels had really been until now, when he was out, and he needed to feel the cool night air on his face. Looking at his helmet, there seemed to be a film of crust left from the accumulation of the gas from down below. Gross.

"Hey, don't touch the outside of your suits," He called, turning to face the others, but found that he was alone. 'The hell?' He turned back around, circling to look down the alleys winding away from the warehouse.

"Hellooo?"

Nothing answered him but the unconscious whines Danny was letting out from across the way where Jason had left him against the warehouse. He was alone, all alone.

"Red Hood, come on!" An angry voice called from above him. He jumped. 'Ah, they didn't disappear, they just left me behind.' For some reason, the slight pick up in his heartrate at the thought of being left behind didn't dissipate; he could feel his heart thumping slightly within his chest.

He looked up and shot his grapple to the roof from which Damian was yelling. The kid yelped and hurried back from the edge, Jason's grapple almost taking out his eye. 

The others were huddled on the roof, talking, so Jason laid down his helmet to put his coms back in both ears.

" -- five minutes out." Barbara's voice was speaking as if half there, and she was clearly focused on something or someone else as she spoke.

"What's that?" Jason asked, talking to both the group and to Barbie.

"Car's on the way to you."

"I'm gonna swing back to Cenobite Central and grab my bike."

The others waved him off, not even taking the time to say anything to him. 'Fuck me, I guess,' he thought ruefully as he stepped over to swing away. What was with them? Nothing was coming through the coms as he swung far above Gotham, the warehouse district's evenly spaced rooftops lulling him into an even and enjoyable pace.

It was actually weirdly silent. The sky was getting dark around him, which was another weird thing to tick off his list; it was like 2 a.m., if anything the sky should be getting a bit lighter. Ugh, this night fucking sucked. His arms were sore and his neck ached. He was so ready for a fucking nap.

Though they'd been walking around for hours underground, it only took about 20 minutes above ground to get back to where Jason had parked his bike. He warmed up the bike, appreciating the loud growl it let out, then set out back for the Cave.

There were some things he appreciated about being part of the bats, back with them as a part of the team -- the camaraderie, the tech, the feeling that maybe he wasn't an unredeemable and essentially bad person who was a byproduct of the worst city in the world, Alfred's cooking -- but something about riding his motorcycle, a singular feeling that could only be appreciated alone, going fast, was a must at the end of a long patrol. Yes to the whole 'team' thing; no to carpools.

The streets of Gotham were empty, the lamplights dimmed and dull. Jason had been looking forward to the feeling of the nighttime breeze, but he felt weirdly warm. He was sweating from beneath his jacket. It felt gross; the brief sense of relief that came when he'd emerged from the tunnels had all but disappeared, replaced by a feverish sort of discomfort.

He sped up as he rounded a bend. Five minutes to the Cave, the bulk of the ride was behind him. 'Almost back to all the chaos, and I couldn't even enjoy my little break.' He might as well get back fast. Why was he so hot?

Suddenly, the twinge of soreness Jason had been feeling in his arms and neck disappeared. 'Thank G-d,' he thought gratefully. 'I probably just needed to stretch out.'

He went to roll his shoulders appreciatively but found that he couldn't. He couldn't move his shoulders, or his arms.

Something was wrong.

Jason tried and failed to force his arms to move, to fix his grip on the bike, but even squeezing the throttle and the brakes was becoming difficult. 

"Hey.. uh, Red Hood to Cave?"

Silence responded.

Shit, something was wrong. And they'd all left him to his own devices. Nobody was listening. He was all alone, abandoned.

"Red Hood to literally anyone!"

Nothing.

"Cave, Oracle, somebody, anybody. Someone answer. Or, just, respond to the motorcycle crash that's about to happen a few minutes away from.. from the.. the manor. I mean the cave. He- Hello? Hello. Helloo?"

Damn, nobody was answering, and Jason couldn't move his arms or keep his balance. His head was pounding. With a monumental effort, he started to squeeze his hand on the brake.

But the brakes weren't doing much when, rounding another turn (or at least trying to round it), Jason leaned too far over, too close to the road, and the bike lost its traction. 

Jason could do nothing as his motorcycle collapsed on its side at 45 mph, trapping him roughly beneath the bouncing frame of the bike and the asphalt of the road.

A minute ago he couldn't feel his shoulder enough to rotate his arm; now, all he could focus on was the shock of pain as his shoulder collided with the ground, hard, and bounced a few times.

He skidded for what seemed like minutes, his hearing going in and out between a cloyingly heavy silence and bursts of squeals from the crashing vehicle. 

He finally drew to a stop by the side of the road. He had gotten close enough to the Manor to be on an open road instead of the clusters of the city's sprawling buildings, and he could feel the dewy touch of grass on his face, feel the thrum of the back wheel of his bike spinning in the air. 

Wait. How could he feel the grass? Jason clumsily tried to reach a hand up to feel his face, and though he couldn't, he could move his head enough to understand: he wasn't wearing his helmet. Where the hell was it? He felt consciousness leaving him, something dripping from his forehead to his nose. Confusion and a freaky overwhelming paralysis overtook him as he succumbed to the darkness.

###

[DICK's POV]

Dang. Jason and the others got a much better monologue out of Scarecrow than what Dick had got the other night. Off-putting and foreboding, of course, but at least it was dramatic.

Once Scarecrow left and the group began making their way out of the tunnel, Dick left Barbara at the computer to head over to the infirmary and check on Tim. The kid was looking a lot better already, though he wasn't conscious yet, but Dick felt his chest tighten at the sight of him lying there, slack-jawed and sweating in his sleep.

He seemed to be feeling a bit of pain (he was still whining a bit in his sleep), but Alfred reasoned that it was just because the nerve gas was wearing off and he was getting overwhelmed at the returning sensation. As far as they could tell, this was a completely different thing from what Dick had been hit with.

Steph was by Tim's side, pushing his hair off his sweaty forehead and laying a cool cloth on it. 

"How's he doing?" Dick asked her. She startled at his words. 

"Okay, I think. He's reacting more to me now, I mean, he's still not conscious but his reflexes seem like they're returning back to normal. Whatever the nerve agent treatment thingie Leslie gave to Alfred was, it's helping a lot."

"That's good." Behind him, Dick heard Barbara relaying information to the team over the coms. Scarecrow's words were ringing in the back of his mind. 'Just a taste.' Dick really did not want to come into contact with whatever Crane's final product was going to be, not after the 'just a taste' toxin had fucked him up so much.

"Alright, good job guys. Batman's almost back, so just head straight over. The Bat Mobile is five minutes out." Barbara spun around to look at Dick from across the Cave, motioning for him to come back over. She looked worried, her face marred with frown lines. She looked so tired.

"What was that?" Jason's voice asked.

"Car's on the way to you."

Dick walked over and laid his hands on Barbara's shoulders as she filled Jason in, massaging her neck to try to comfort her. He knew how much it got to her sometimes, to be so far away from the others instead of down in the thick of it.

"That feels great. How's Tim doing?"

"Alright, I think."

"Good.. that's good. How are you doing?"

"Basically 100%, I swear."

She laughed, the sound light. "You're totally healed? You're that sick of me after only one night?"

"No. I think we'd need to work together down here for at least a week before I got sick of you." She bent her head back to look at him, smiling, and he leaned over from behind her to kiss her softly.

He really was feeling better. The break, which had felt so earth-shatteringly painful when he was under the influence, was barely a hairline fracture, more like a twist or something. Painful, but not crippling.

Even so, he took his weight off his hurt leg while standing behind Barbara as she turned back to the screen to navigate the remaining drone through the tunnels after Scarecrow, balancing on his other leg. He still felt some shadow of worry at the back of his mind, a hypochondriatic voice telling him that something was wrong. But he was better.

He pointed at the screen. "Where's he going?"

"I don't know, so far they've just been walking down the same length of tunnel, uninterrupted. It's helping fill out my map at least, but it's sort of weirding me out just watching Crane walk like a normal person. Like, he stepped on the person in front of him's shoe, and it came off partially, and he apologized to the guy. He's being so person-like it's freaking me out!"

Dick laughed at that, the image appearing hysterically liminal and weird in his head.

"We're in the Bat Mobile and heading home," Duke's voice came in over the coms. "Red Hood went to get his bike a while ago, he should be back before us. He forgot his helmet with us, though, which I didn't think he could do. Like physically, he's way too attached to this thing."

"Copy that Signal," Dick called back. "Red, what's your ETA?"

Jason didn't answer. Weird. "Guess he's mad you guys are holding his helmet hostage. See you guys soon."

Dick pulled up a chair to sit down next to Babs. "So is Bruce really almost home? How'd you get him and Selina to leave whatever secret vacation spot they were hiding out at?"

"Honestly? I think he was itching to get back."

"Sounds about right."

Dick and Barbara sat in comfortable silence watching the drone footage for a while.

When he wasn't the one out on patrol, it was honestly really hard not to fall asleep; he didn't know how Barbara did this every night. He was still burnt out from the last month spent splitting his time between Gotham and Blüdhaven, and though he arguably did get some sleep the night before, the rest that came from being given some untested and incapacitating toxin wasn't really conducive to a good night's sleep.

Dick rested his head on Babs' shoulder, content to keep her company while she worked. 

"Hey.. uh, Red Hood to Cave?"

Barbara nudged her shoulder to get Dick off of her. "What's up, Hood?"

Dick rubbed his cheek, sitting up. Next to him, Barbara stopped typing to pay more attention to the coms. "Red Hood?"

"Red Hood to literally anyone!" That got Dick to sit up straight, and Barbara turned to give him a worried look. 

"Red Hood, we're here, are you okay? Where are you?"

"Why can't he hear us?" Dick asked Barbara, feeling worry grip his heart. Jason sounded upset, which was weird in and of itself. But upset and alone, unhearing? Not good. Barbara was busy typing now, trying to run diagnostics on the communication system.

"I don't know, I don't know, everything looks like it's online, he should be hearing us."

"Cave, Oracle, somebody, anybody. Someone answer. Or, just, respond to the motorcycle crash that's about to happen a few minutes away from.. from the.. the manor. I mean the cave. He- Hello? Hello. Helloo?" 

Without even thinking, Dick was standing up to walk over and pull on his suit, ignoring the dull pain in his leg. Changing quickly (as cumbersome as the suit was, it was a practiced routine to get it on), he grabbed an earpiece and a domino mask from a table where both had been laid out on his way to the garage.

"Babs, I'm going after him, do you have a location?"

"Yeah, sent it to you now. Hood? Hood?"

"I'll come with you!" Steph offered, going to join Dick, but he shook his head: "No, stay here, the car's not too far away and Alfred might need help."

Dick walked quickly to his bike, feeling it roar to life underneath him as behind him Barbara kept repeating Red Hood's name. He could hear Duke trying to reach Jason as well from the car, his and Barbara's voices overlapping as Dick rode out of the Cave. 

'A few minutes away.' Dick kept his eyes peeled on the side of the road just in case Jason had been thrown, riding as fast as he could towards the beeping dot on his GPS readout that Barbara had marked as Jason's location. 

He almost missed it. He was turning a corner when, across the way, he barely spotted the motorcycle lying hidden on the side of the road, a dark mass half-visible in the shadowy night. Dick screeched to a stop, letting his bike fall to the side sans kickstand, and ran across the street to Jason. 

"Hood!" Dick made quick work of picking up and moving the scraped-raw bike that was lying heavy on top of the unconscious figure of his brother. Jason was out cold, lying prone on his stomach.

Dick dropped to his knees to check over Jason when he paused. There was a white crust on the back of his neck, tinged slightly green. It was a thin coating, and looked like it was causing only mild skin irritation, but it was eye-catching all the same. It looked like what had been on the dead body Jason had found just a few hours ago.

"Oracle, what the hell is that?"

"Shit, I'm not sure. He has the sample in his pocket, we haven't tested it yet. Is he okay?"

"Right," Dick shook himself out of his shock, shaking Jason by the shoulders to try and rouse him. "No deep injuries, looks like the gas is what knocked him out, but I can't check him over great with how he's lying. Hood! Hood, wake up! Come on!"

Jason stirred a bit but didn't seem close at all to gaining full consciousness. 

"Nightwing, we're almost to you!" Duke's voice came over the coms. 

Dick kept his focus on Jason, keeping his hands on either side of his head to keep his neck immobilized, a hard feat in the awkward position he had fallen in. A pair of headlights grew closer and closer, then pulled off to the side a few feet away.

Next to him, Cass and Duke ran over. In practiced fashion, they leaned over and helped Dick turn Jason onto his back. Once there, Dick moved to check him over, Cass taking over holding his head to immobilize his neck. Jason had a nasty gash on his forehead, blood staining the white streak in his hair. Otherwise, though, Jason's suit had miraculously saved him from any scrapes or cuts. Dick felt along his neck, pressing down to check his spine, and found that, despite Dick's worry, Jason's spine was uninjured.

"Red Hood! Hood!" He took out a pressure pad and held it against the cut on Jason's head. "Hood! Wake up!" Jason's eyes slowly opened halfway, his gaze dazed and not quite there yet. "Hood?"

"Nigh-wing? Wha' are.. why're you here?"

"You crashed your bike. What hurts, you okay?"

"Can't feel.. anything."

'Crap.' Dick turned to Duke. "Let's get him in the car, he's good to move." Jason's bulky, heavy-as-shit 6-foot-2 frame was hard to maneuver, but between Dick, Duke, Cass, Damian, and Harper, they got him laid out inside the car. Jason's eyes followed their movements lazily, half-lidded.

Everyone piled into the car except for Dick, who went to grab his bike. 

"I'll follow behind, you guys go, go!" The car peeled off and Dick hobbled over to get his bike. He then stopped, turned back, and made sure to drag Jason's bike all the way off the road, hidden, and turn off the ignition. Jason would kill Dick if he left his motorcycle out in the open to get crushed or stolen.

The adrenaline comedown made his leg hurt more than it would've otherwise, and it took everything in Dick to ignore it. Normally it wouldn't even be a question -- someone else was in trouble, everything else faded to back of mind -- but he was having trouble getting unstuck from the corporal worry.

No matter; he climbed onto his bike and followed the others back to the Cave. He hadn't re-hurt anything, he could tell. He wasn't important right now while they dealt with Jason. He just had to get his body to listen to him. 

Back at the Cave, Steph was standing at the ready with Alfred; when Dick drove back in, she and the others had already extracted Jason from the car and were bringing him over to a bed next to Tim. 

"Hand me the swab from his sample, I'll test to see what this is, come on," Barbara instructed as she swabbed the back of Jason's neck with a different cotton swab. Dick walked over to join them as she ran both through the computer. He rifled through Jason's many pockets until he found the sample, and handed it to Barbara. She went to go get the testing started with both substances. On the bed, Alfred made quick work of cleaning the substance completely off of Jason's neck before the others were allowed to help.

"While we wait for the test results, let's get an I.V. set up with the nerve gas treatment from Dr. Thompkins," Alfred instructed, walking over to the infirmary closet then back again. "His symptoms seem very similar to what young Timothy was experiencing."

Dick nodded and grabbed the bag from Alfred, getting everything set up. Everyone bustled around, each person momentarily stopping whenever they were next to Jason or Tim's bed to check on them. It was a little disconcerting, not just that they were unconscious, but that they were so limp and still. 

They got Jason set up with treatment, and splinted his shoulder, which seemed to be dislocated. Once Alfred had confirmed that he was alright, the others all moved to take off their suits and shower in case any of them were carrying any of the gas residue. 

Dick went alone to undress from the Nightwing suit, the material still a bit frayed from the other night. He hadn't had time yet to go back to his place to get a new suit. It felt odd to take it off so quickly.

"How the hell did he get infected?" Barbara called to ask Dick, from the infirmary to the area where Dick was hanging up his suit.

"I dunno. Maybe the way he was carrying that scientist guy, Danny?"

"Huh. That would do it, it probably chafed the neckline of his jacket."

Dick walked back over to Barbara, the two alone in the cave with passed out Tim and Jason while the others were upstairs getting cleaned up. The rush of adrenaline wasn't just messing with his leg; Dick was ready for a nap. A long one. "Do you think Bruce would kill me if I went to bed before he got back?"

"You tell me." She pointed to the Cave's security footage of the Manor's garage -- where Bruce's Cadillac was pulling in. 

Dick sighed. "Guess I'll be up a bit longer."

He and Barbara checked over Jason and Tim, making sure both were stable. Neither one stirred as he examined them, and both of their vitals were looking good.

Satisfied, Barbara loaded Tim and Jason's vitals onto her phone (and the chem tests in case the results came back, and the facial recognition software, and the drone footage) and the two went to the elevator to head upstairs to the main house. Babs took Dick's hand as they rode upstairs, leaning back in her chair and closing her eyes for a second. Tonight was just one of those nights; it wasn't anywhere close to the worst thing Dick or the bats had to deal with, but nevertheless he couldn't wait for it to end. But it wasn't over yet.

It was time to update the Bat. 

Chapter Text

[DICK's POV]

Dick sat criss-cross-applesauce on the couch in the foyer, massaging his calf and shin as if applying pressure to the muscle would do anything to affect the streaks of semi-painful funny-bone-esque sensations running down to his ankle and up past his knee. Across from him, Bruce was sitting in his favorite armchair.

They were waiting for the others to join them for their informal debrief, and Bruce was in that disconcerting stage he sometimes entered when he was wearing his Bruce Wayne persona but was amongst family and those who knew his secret, where he was switching back and forth, from a normal person to The Batman, smiling slightly as he spoke to Selina and Alfred and falling into a deadpanned scowl in between sentences.

When they'd first walked in, Bruce and Selina had both checked in on how Dick was feeling, which he appreciated, but he could tell that Bruce was still on edge and thinking about Tim and Jason down in the cave. He had asked a million questions about their health status when he first walked in (Were their respiratory systems compromised? Did their heartrates indicate fear toxin? Did either one show signs of hallucinations? Are their vitals staying in stable ranges?), proving what Dick already knew, that if Bruce loved anything, it was a status report. Requesting detailed pedantic streams of information was how Bruce showed that he cared.

After a while, though, Alfred got him to shut up, pushing decaffeinated tea and some lemon lavender scones on him, along with questions that steered the conversation towards decidedly more everyday 'normal' topics while they waited for everyone. 

It was only about 20 minutes of waiting, thankfully; even with Alfred's cache of questions, it was a weird vibe steeped in waiting. Like, Alfred asking Selina where she bought her new coat kind of weird.

"You're back!" Cass called happily, finally. She had walked into the living room with silent steps, the first to come down to join them, and happily went to greet Bruce with an affectionate hug before walking over to join Dick on the couch. Steph walked down the stairs a few steps behind her, wearing one of Tim's hoodies.

"I'm back," Bruce answered warmly. Selina was draped across one arm of his chair, and she waved lazily at the girls as they walked in. Cass settled in next to Dick, patting a hand on his leg in sympathy when she noticed his massaging. Next to her Steph curled up on the couch to rest her head on Cass's shoulder.

A few minutes later and Duke filed in as well, announcing that Harper had just gone home, saying she had to check in with Cullen and would be back tomorrow.

A minute later, and Damian arrived.

"Hey, kid, you're making us wait forever, what took you so long?" Steph welcomed Damian with mock anger, and he glared at her. He sat on one of the chairs furthest from Steph, by the end of the couch next to Dick. Dick reached a hand out to his brother, squeezing the kid's shoulder in comfort.

Once everyone was settled, Bruce seemed to grow a few inches, sitting up straight like he was leading a Justice League meeting. "Alfred and Barbara were keeping me in the loop, but give me the recap."

Everyone turned to Dick, expecting him to take charge; he took it gladly, falling comfortably into debrief mode.

"Ok, stick with me, I'm like half asleep at this point B. We're dealing with a new kind of Scarecrow conspiracy. He isn't hitting large swaths of people with his gas or targeting any public place or figure in particular -- something public and wide-reaching is what Tim initially thought this would be. The bulk of his plan lies in his deviation away from his usuals, actually. Scarecrow is engineering his toxin to create some sort of a sensory fear rather than a psychological one. He wants to hurt us, and by us I mean us, like this is specifically for us. You. Not just a general, 'I want everyone to understand my vision' type of thing. So far we've encountered five toxins that fall on some spectrum of combination between his gas and different nerve agents and acids. We've been exposed to both liquid and gas variants. They're all still being analyzed, we have some of them running in the mass spec, but they're definitely all related. And they definitely aren't the final product that he's working toward. We've ID'd some of the same ingredient bases across all the variants, to different degrees and in different concoctions. Tim and Jason both experienced paralysis and hypoesthesia; Jason appeared to lose his hearing, and had an elevated heartrate. Both are still unconscious, so we don't know what, if any, psychological symptoms they endured."

"And Jason's exposure was via a gas that was infectious through the skin?"

"Yeah, which is another reason why we think all the different versions are related, because all of them have been toxic and contaminant through the skin instead of only through inhalation."

"And what about the tunnels?"

Barbara cut in: "We've started mapping, but as of right now they seem to be part of a network much larger than we expected; the tunnels we got through went on for miles before branching off, which indicates that each subsequent branch will stretch on for extended sections. They could be all underneath Gotham; we've never encountered the ones we've found so far before, so who knows how many more we've missed. We have some surveillance set up, and one active drone that I have tailing Scarecrow from a distance."

Bruce nodded, lost in thought. "Any estimates for the size of the network?"

Barbara shook her head. "Honestly, no. I'll need to compare all our various maps, try to get some sense, but for now... I don't know, big."

"That is worrying, that such a network could exist without us having heard about it. And it's true that I've never encountered these kinds of tunnels on patrol. But that doesn't mean they are completely unknown. I've been thinking, and I believe I might have at some point come across a tunnel that could be part of this network through Wayne Enterprises, depending on how vast this system stretches. I'll have to go through the records, it would've been years ago."

"If you knew there were tunnels, why wouldn't you have marked them down in our files?" Damian asked, his voice accusatory.

"Because I didn't think they were relevant; the tunnels I'm thinking of, the tunnel, was barely consequential, it was a single tunnel that prevented a construction project from moving in a certain direction. It was... the early days of Batman, when I didn't have as detailed a catalog of information. Bruce and Batman were still very separate entities in my mind. But the memory came when we were driving back; I'm curious to see if this construction project could be relevant."

Alfred perked up at that, setting down his tea cup.

"I remember, Master Bruce, a similar thing happening when Master Thomas was scouting locations to build his foundation's first building. The particulars, I will admit, I may have forgotten in the time since, but I recall clearly that he ran into some sort of subterranean issue under the basement of one of the buildings he was considering. It may have been something similar. I shall go through his files tomorrow as well and see if there is any prudent information to be found."

Barbara looked to Bruce and Alfred. "Did you know what they were for, or who bought them? Either of you? Because these tunnels, they seem old, but there's a pattern of heavy-duty protections guarding every entrance we've come across, on both a technological and chemical front. And, the tunnels seem to be built out into buildings that someone would have had to own, the two warehouses we came across and even the basement in one of the buildings on Gotham University's campus. Somebody paid to build these buildings, and that somebody knew about the tunnels."

Alfred shook his head.

Next to him, Bruce did the same. "I... can't answer that yet. I need to check over the files, and see if they are associated with the project I am thinking of."

Dick caught Bruce's gaze: "So you have some idea of what this is then?"

Bruce hesitated. "Nothing I can confirm."

He was hiding something. Dick could tell. Changing the subject, Dick turned to Selina. "Jason said he might have heard some talk about tunnels like these from members of Gotham's underbelly. Any chance you've heard of something?"

"Honey, I don't do underground. If someone did mention tunnels, it was nothing that I would remember or would've paid attention to." She stretched against Bruce's side, then added as an afterthought; "I can ask around, though."

"Thanks, nice. Okay, either way, though, our best bet is to go through records of ownership of the warehouses and records on the mysterious construction projects you won't tell us about." Dick rubbed a hand over his eyes. "And we should check Gotham U's records for alumni who may have donated money to the school, or aided in construction in any way. Or, I guess, we should widen the search beyond alumni, to anyone associated with the planning and/or construction."

"Yes, I think you're right Dick. It seems very likely we'll find some overlap."

"On that note, I do believe you all should get to bed. You're nearing the 24-hour mark, and I must insist." Alfred's face betrayed nothing, but Dick secretly thought the older man was heralding everyone to bed so that he could get to sleep. But Alfie had a better poker face than even Bruce. 

It wasn't as if anyone was clamoring to stay awake -- as opposed to staying awake researching, fighting, corralling, or investigating Gotham's nightmarish collective, the early days of a conspiracy were never that exciting, so there wasn't any reason to push it.

Everyone stood up to get ready for bed, Cass turning to Steph as they left to whisper something. Selina also slinked off to wait for Bruce upstairs; only Dick, Barbara, and Bruce remained.

"You gonna fill us in on your suspicions, Bruce?" Barbara angled her chair to face Bruce head-on.

"No. I don't have a concrete idea yet, and don't want to stain our expectations with a wrong assumption. It's just a gut feeling."

Dick sighed. "You and your gut feelings."

"Yes." The silence stretched on, Bruce unwilling to elaborate, Dick and Barbara unsure whether Bruce's resolve would hold.

It did, apparently, and, changing the subject, Bruce stretched, a motion he'd started doing regularly since his back injury. "We'll discuss later. In the meantime, I'm going to go downstairs to check on the boys."

"I'll come with," Barbara added. "I need to get everything set to run on its own overnight; the drone should be easy enough to calibrate to stay a certain distance behind its mark." Barbara started over to the elevator, burying her head in her phone. Next to Dick, Bruce stood up.

"You feeling okay, chum? Barbara seemed... worried."

"Yeah. I mean, no, but yes. I will be."

"And you've filed all the symptoms, worked up the toxin?"

"Yeah, once the lab tests come back tomorrow and once Tim and Jason wake up, we should get a better idea from comparing-contrasting it all."

Bruce looked cloudy, his expression unreadable. "Alright, well. I want to know if anything changes. About anything, I mean -- keep me in the loop. Don't shut me out."

Wow, that was new; was Bruce initiating an emotional conversation? 

"Of course, B. I'm all good, really."

Dick saluted loosely; it was almost habit, because he knew it pissed Bruce off. It was like a tic they'd all picked up, saluting each other. Bruce thought they were making light of the serious approach needed to expertly investigate, which they were, and he gave strict orders to stop saluting him, which they ignored.

Bruce's gaze held Dick hostage for a few drawn-out seconds before he nodded and walked to the elevator, placing his hand on Dick's shoulder and squeezing once as he passed.

Dick listened as the elevator whooshed down below, then walked upstairs to the room Alfred still kept ready for him. He liked that it shared a wall with Damian, as it allowed him to check in on the kid without being too obvious. Walking up to his door, he paused outside of Damian's to knock lightly.

"Hey, don't kill me, I'm coming in." 

From inside, Damian grunted some wordless acknowledgment. He was sitting on his bed with a book, and Dick smiled when he caught sight of the title.

"You're reading Dante?"

"Tt. I needed something to help put me to sleep, and anything Todd recommends seems like it would do the trick. I knew father would have a copy in the library."

Dick grinned as he sat down on the edge of the kid's bed. Damian looked at him disapprovingly over the top of his book -- he had a thing about others sitting on his bed in their outside clothes, though technically Dick was wearing clean sweats that he'd changed into from his Nightwing suit -- but said nothing.

"Are you okay? You were pretty quiet when Bruce got back."

"He was gone for barely a week. Why would I need to fawn over him?"

"Hey." Dick reached a hand over to lower Damian's book away from his face. "Are you okay?"

Damian stared at Dick for a second. His face betrayed nothing, though Dick could see the tense set of his shoulders melting, becoming less severe.

"I don't need to discuss anything with you. Just because I might have felt a little guilty about what happened to Drake, does not mean I need to be comforted or patronized. He was an idiot for allowing himself to get hurt like that."

"Stupid things happen. No matter how much training and planning we put in."

"Well, they shouldn't."

"Shouldn't doesn't really factor into this kinda thing. It's, like, Murphy's law for vigilantes or something: anything that can go wrong, will go wrong."

"I don't accept that."

"Well, that's okay. They'll go wrong anyway."

Damian scowled; it was actually kind of cute. When out of costume, and with the distance of the few years that had passed since the kid left the League, Damian's scowls had wavered over into a more petulant, child-like expression as opposed to the assassin-like surveil that had remained through the first few months that Dick knew him. He wasn't just someone Dick had to convince over and over to be his brother, to be a kid; he was his brother, and he was a kid.

"Why don't you put the book down for the night, get some rest? You can yell at Tim tomorrow, tell him all the faults you found with his process or whatever -- way more productive than wallowing."

Damian hesitated, but he folded his book and placed it on the nightstand. His scowl turned into a glare aimed at Dick, though the venom again lacked acid, it seemed almost ironic, like he was glaring out of habit. "Yes, well. You can go now."

"Yeah, yeah. Sleep tight, don't let the bedbugs bite."

"Pennyworth would never allow bedbugs to spread within the Manor."

"It's just a- never mind. G'night."

"Goodnight," Dick almost missed Damian's soft reply. He smiled as he left Damian's room, stopping for a silent second just outside to spy on the kid. Dami made no noise, though, and once Dick saw the lights filtering through under the door turn off he turned to walk back to his room.

It felt weird now to stay here as an adult; Dick had outgrown many things since his childhood, but somehow the manor never shrank down as Dick grew. It was still just as daunting, just as looming. The gothic musculature, the infinite puddled shadows, it all seemed so tied to Dick's conceptions of Batman that he couldn't imagine it ever having been owned by a real, non-vigilante family. It still had that imposing element, a sort of mind-of-its-own facade. 'Just less empty and cold now.'

Dick considered his door for a second before he walked past his room to Tim's, flicking on the light. In usual Tim fashion, the place was a mess, in the most organized sense of the word. The little feral weirdo.

There were plates piled up high from meals Tim had taken to his room, but the plates had all been washed (in his bathroom?) and stacked on top of all his dressers; he had dirty laundry piled in a neat border against one wall according to color, and against another wall stood stacked overflowing boxes of film and hard drives, pens and surveillance tech and other knickknacks, boxes of junk drawers, basically. Looming piles of papers that had been moved into some specific order crowded the desk. And red yarn, lots of it, thumbtacks spearing into its frizzed webbing to connect various printouts of chemical analyses, maps, marked-up schedules, and pictures Tim had taken from that first night when Dick was dosed, was splayed up above his desk. 

Dick drew up close to examine it all. Somehow, Tim had already printed out frozen frames from his cowl's footage of the night Dick got dosed, frozen frames of Dick, from the point of view of Tim staring down at Dick from above. Dick looked horrible; 'is that really me?' he thought apprehensively. His eyes were open wide, the pupils overtaking the color of his eyes so that he looked pale and washed out in comparison, his mouth caught in a scream, one corner drooping and the other pulled taut. There was blood all over his neck, slick-looking and black.

Dick didn't like that Tim had those in his room, that he was letting their nightlife bleed into his everyday life. He scanned the other documents, careful not to knock over one of the half-dozen half-filled drinking glasses. Tim's notes were in-depth (of course), and though they had a few hypotheses that Dick was planning on discussing with Tim, his vision was blurring trying to track the trains of thought Tim had corralled it all into. 

Dick turned around to look at the rest of the room, and on the nightstand saw Tim's neon-red alarm clock, 4:43 blazing across the deep black screen. 

It felt weird to be in his brother's empty room, and it felt weird to be there so late at night (so early in the morning?) where the emptiness screamed out all the louder; were this any other night, Tim would be hopped up on caffeine and working (or, as Dick remembered from a few months ago, hopped up on caffeine and binging "The Sopranos" and "Bob's Burger's," alternating between the two shows like a fucking sociopath with Bernard and Steph). Dick didn't think there was anything else to do tonight, and the silence was starting to get to him, so he turned, finally walking to his own room.

His room. Besides the bed and its deep blue comforter, it had all the little remnants and souvenirs of his childhood. It was a bit of a trip to the past, right down to the little Superman alarm clock Clark had given him years ago. 

Without bothering to shower, change, or even turn out the lights, Dick threw himself down on the bed, curling up under the covers, and fell asleep almost immediately.

###

[TIM's POV]

He was in the Cave. That much he knew. Tim could hear beeps and the whirring of something mechanized, the echoes of which bounced so loosely that Tim knew he was alone down here, that the cave was uncrowded and empty. He opened his eyes, head pounding, and sat up slowly, feeling aches all over. 

Scratch that; he wasn't alone. Jason lay motionless on a bed across the room from Tim, dead to the world.

'Probably shouldn't think of him as dead,' Tim thought to himself as he went to slide down off his own bed. 

He faltered just a bit, feeling dizzy and uncoordinated, but once righted Tim walked over to Jason's bedside. It seemed as though both he and Jason had been dosed with something -- though Tim's memory was gapped and slow -- but Jason's lax face betrayed no signs of distress. 

Tim felt sort of horrible. Pinpricks of solid little pins and needles were poking up and down each limb, and a killer headache was pounding behind his forehead. The last thing he could remember was walking through the tunnels as one group, but that was just monotonous, betraying no details about what had landed him down here. Looking at Jason's vitals being read along the few machines he was hooked up to didn't provide many clues, either, though Jason had a huge bandage covering half his forehead. Tim felt a hand up to his own forehead but found no bandage of his own.

Dick hadn't had any memory loss, so whatever Tim had been hit with wasn't what Dick had been through. Which was good, because Tim did not want that at all. But... that was about all Tim could deduce on his own. Why was he alone down in the cave? He must be fine, if everyone was okay to leave him down here. 

He felt his lids drooping a bit. Time felt solid, cement-like, as if it was standing thick all around him -- he felt himself blink in slow motion as he tried to stay awake next to Jason's bed. 

A hand suddenly fell on his shoulder, and Tim jumped.

"It's just me, Tim," Bruce's voice placated, low so as not to disturb Jason. Tim softened.

"When did you get back? Actually, what time is it? How long have I been down here?"

Bruce walked around to sit in a chair next to Tim. Off in the distance, Tim heard the sound of keys clacking, probably Barbara doing something.

"I got back about a half hour ago, you've been down here for about three hours, I think, and it is almost 5:00 in the morning."

Tim could always trust Bruce to get right to the point. "Did they fill you in on what happened?"

"Yes, I'm all caught up."

"... Want to fill me in? I have a few gaps."

Bruce nodded. "You all were exploring and surveilling the newly discovered tunnel system; it seems you were dosed with an unknown toxin. It was similar to a nerve agent, and appeared to paralyze you. Do you have any other pressing symptoms?"

Dosed? Tim paused for a second, thinking. "I don't really remember, which is maybe a symptom? I feel sore, which could definitely be from the rush of sensation returning or something, so paralysis seems right on the money. What about Jason?"

"Dosed with a different toxin. We're not totally sure, but the symptoms seem similar, though he also possibly experienced some hearing loss as well."

Tim snapped his fingers next to one ear, then the other. "No hearing loss on my end."

"Good. Good." Bruce seemed to be surveying Tim; he wasn't actually looking at Tim, but he could still somehow feel Bruce's gaze. 

"So... how was your trip, I guess?"

"It was good."

"... Good."

The two sat in comfortable(-ish) silence for a minute and Tim again felt his eyes begin to involuntarily droop closed. 

"You should get some more rest. I'll be down here the rest of the night, it's alright."

Tim nodded and began to stand up; Bruce supported him by grabbing his right elbow, and the two walked back over to Tim's bed.

Tim climbed back up, happy to get some more rest after his little vacation into consciousness. He normally wouldn't even consider tiredness as an option, but honestly, getting dosed with a mystery toxin seemed like a good excuse to let his guard down a little.

He settled in, and Bruce drew the blankets up to cover Tim, even tucking them in at the foot of the bed the way Tim liked. Going on his little trip, the very act of doing something so normal, something that other people do, seemed to have made Bruce a bit gentler. Or maybe it was just the early morning hour.

"Thanks Bruce."

"Of course. Get some rest, and we'll discuss next steps tomorrow."

Tim heard Bruce's footsteps walk over to the Bat-Computer set-up, some hushed exchange between him and Barbara, and then the footsteps return back quickly to the infirmary.

Gratefully, Tim gave in to the exhaustion overtaking him surrounded by the oddly comforting background noise of Bruce flipping through papers. 

Chapter Text

[JASON's POV]

Jason was riding his bike. He was riding fast, but it was wrong, somehow. It was too fast, his surroundings rushing past him in dizzying motion-blurs, the images disappearing out of his peripheral vision at a pace that would normally be impossible to retain. Air whipped his face, but the rushing pressure made no noise. He could feel it blowing through his hair, on the nape of his neck, slapping each cheek, but he couldn't hear it.

It was sensation without action; he was riding his bike, but he wasn't the one driving. He wasn't thinking, wasn't moving, he was just being moved. He wasn't aware of all this, even; life was simply happening, passing around him, and Jason wasn't stuck or immobile, he was just there, drifting through the dream.

It was odd, essentially wrong and impossible feeling, but not unpleasant, necessarily. Jason wasn't aware of feeling like this, he wasn't aware of time passing or spatial movement. He just was. 

And then he wasn't.

Jason woke with a start, no gradual climb or sense of return. He bolted upright, moving without thinking, rushing to leave somewhere, unsure of what that was. 

"Hey, hey, Jason, calm down! You're alright, Jason, you're okay!" A strong set of arms pressed down on Jason's bucking shoulders as a deep yet muted voice called out to him. He pushed against the hands, and the voice repeated the same declaration, repeated the "you're okay"s.

Jason blanched, the feeling returning to his body in a rush. He started to still, letting his eyes roam his surroundings.

Jason was in the Bat Cave. He would recognize it anywhere. The whooshing in his ears was a storm that seemed to grow even as Jason's mind calmed, the sense of anxiety-thick confusion easing away. 

He turned to focus in on the voice who was speaking to him, a lighthouse breaking through the din of busy white noise in his ears, and found Bruce's piercing blue eyes regarding him critically.

"Bruce?"

"Hey Jay. How are you feeling?"

"You sound... weird."

"Weird how?"

Jason wrenched his body forward to sit up, ignoring the tiny wave of nausea he felt as he turned to face Bruce's towering frame. "M'ears are all.. blocked. Like you're underwater."

Bruce smiled, barely. "That's good, actually, it's coming back. It'll return fully, just might take a little bit."

"Why, what happened?"

"You were dosed, something from Crane."

"And it made me lose my fucking hearing?"

"We found high traces of cisplatin in the sample, which is a chemotherapeutic drug that can cause temporary hearing loss."

"Why the fuck did he put cancer drugs in his gas?"

"Gas? Do you remember how you were dosed?"

Jason paused, thought for a second. "Yeah, in the tunnels. Cannister of.. something. Why?"

"I'm trying to gauge what you remember."

"Yeah yeah, I remember the tunnels, his whole melodramatic speech, leaving to get my bike. Why'd he dose me with a cancer drug?"

"Don't know yet. It's odd, for sure. They carry a host of side effects, he could be playing Russian Roulette with them all, trying to just make his victims feel sick. He could be trying to amplify the sympathetic systemic responses he usually causes; the chemistry of his usual recipes induces adrenocorticotropic hormone secretion, which is associated with the body's stress response. Maybe he's trying to overstress the body in a new way. But it doesn't really make sense."

Jason closed his eyes and shook his head, like a dog, trying to shake the clogged feeling from his ears. "Fucking weirdo."

"Are you feeling okay otherwise?"

"I think so, yeah. Have some pins and needles, a bit nauseous. My head is killing me. My shoulder, too, kinda."

"You crashed your bike, son. Needed a few stitches. The toxin paralyzed you."

Fuck, he crashed his bike? "Of course I did. Is it totaled?"

"No, we picked it up when we drove in, Selina and I. Dick made sure it was out of the road."

Jason nodded.

"Wait, how did I crack my head?"

"Your thinking was off. You left your helmet with the others."

"No shit? They brought it back for me though, right?"

"Yeah."

Ugh. How fucked up was he last night that he took off his helmet and left it somewhere? 'Fuckin' embarrassing.'

"Where is everyone?"

"Upstairs. It's around noon, Alfred made a late breakfast."

"Copy that, I'm going up to get some of Alfie's pancakes."

Jason went to swing his legs off the bed, but Bruce stopped him, putting a hand on Jason's shoulder. He didn't mean to, but Jason flinched a bit at the movement, at his touch, and Bruce paused imperceptibly before lowering his hand.

"Are you sure that's a good idea? Can I.. do you want me to help you upstairs?"

Jason felt guilty. Why did he flinch?

"No." Jason stood up, stumbling just a bit. Guilt was a feeling Jason hated the texture of; it felt cloying and overpowering.

"Alright, well. I have some research to finish, but tell Alfred I'll be up in a few minutes... I don't need him yelling at me about missing meals again."

"Okay." Jason nodded, trying to convey some level of apology through telepathy because he honestly still didn't know how to apologize in any real shape or form to Bruce.

Unsure if that did anything, Jason just walked to close the distance to the elevator. Someone had dressed him in a pair of sweatpants and a T-shirt, surprisingly soft. Being back in the manor meant Jason got the high-quality shit. He was missing his boots, though.

His head was foggy, his ears were thunderstorms, but Jason felt the most fucked up by the absence of his boots. It felt weird to walk around in just a pair of socks.

Alfred had a weird need to make sure everyone in the infirmary was dressed in thick socks, a quirk that Jason had actually kind of missed (it was nice to wake up to the little act of care), one that had started after an incident when Bruce had tried to rush to leave his bed and ended up cutting both his feet and then his palm by walking on some broken glass that nobody had noticed. Despite the sentiment, Jason craved the purchase his thick-soled boots gave him. Stomping in socks? Not exactly badass.

As the elevator rose upstairs, Jason leaned gratefully against the wall. The faint sense of nausea he'd felt when waking up seemed to grow with the movement of the elevator. 

Once upstairs, Jason made his way to the kitchen. It was raining outside, the light coming through the windows dark and muted, but Jason could barely make out the shrouded sound of rainfall that he'd usually find comforting.

"Heyy, he lives!" A voice called out to welcome Jason into the kitchen -- Dick, it turned out. The man was sitting at the counter with Alfred, and Cass, Steph, Duke, and Tim were sitting around the kitchen table. 

"What, you were waiting for me to die again?"

"That's not funny," Alfred admonished, and Jason smiled in apology.

"Where's Barbie?"

"At her apartment. She'll be back."

"You were out even longer than I was," Tim called from the table, the lower half of his face obscured by his open laptop.

"Yeah, well, you could use some more beauty rest. You look like shit." The kid did, from what little Jason could see -- he had dark circles under his eyes that stood stark against his skin.

Tim shrugged.

"How are you feeling?" Duke asked, and Jason went to join the group at the table. 

"M'okay. Can't hear great yet, but Bruce said that was temporary."

"You can borrow Alfred's hearing aids in the meantime."

Alfred, who was steeping a mint bag in his teacup, turned sharply at that. "For the last time, Miss Brown, I am not old, I do not have arthritis, and I do not require hearing aids."

"No, but I know you do Alfie. No shame, I think it's kinda-"

Cass kicked Steph under the table, and the blonde yelped in surprise. 

"How long until it comes back?" Dick asked, his arm thrown loosely around Alfred's shoulders. Jason shrugged in response, wincing at the way the movement sent a twinge from his shoulder down his arm. He stood up to grab some food.

"Does it hurt?" Cass signed to him as he passed her.

He grinned. "Oh no, I'm not deaf yet, fuck off with that."

She smiled, sticking her tongue out at him. "Ears hurt?" she asked instead.

"Nah, just feel really clogged."

Alfred stood up from his seat to help Jason fix himself a plate. Walking around to the counter, Jason stepped up next to Alfred, patting the older man's shoulder in greeting.

"What would you like to eat?"

"Load me up, I'm hungry. Well, I'm nauseous, but I figure eating a lot will either fix that or flush it out."

"Master Jason, that plan of action sounds essentially flawed. Eat slowly, please." 

Jason nodded, in acknowledgment or thanks, and took the plate gratefully from Alfred. He turned to walk back to the table and, with his back to Alfie, mimed gagging and throwing up onto his plate. Duke laughed.

"So, fill me in. Scarecrow give any more sermons after I passed out?"

Dick walked to join the bats at the table. "No, you caught the highlights. We heard from the hospital that Danny's responding to treatment, though, and have some tests back on the toxins, but otherwise nothing new."

"Great. Solid." Boring. 

Jason dug into his food, squirting some ketchup and hot sauce onto the plate for his eggs. This whole saga was annoying more than anything. Jason preferred the sort of cases that were more straightforward, where those involved were all easily identifiable targets instead of misguided people down on their luck. He grew up in Crime Alley, he knew how hard it was to just get by sometimes -- he wanted the cases where he got to fuck up the guys who took advantage of that desperation. He wanted to take down Scarecrow already, instead of having to parse through the layers of planning and personnel he'd surrounded himself with.

"So. What are we doing then? I mean, how long until we get to kick the shit out of Crane?"

"We're having trouble getting a handle on a lot of the details of his whole operation," Dick said. He pointed in the general direction of Tim and his laptop; "Tim's trying to hack into the city registrar's office to get a printout of commercial property ownership in Gotham. We're gonna track down who owns those warehouses."

"Trying to?"

Tim frowned. "Dick's just being nice. I'm going slow right now."

"How much did your gas fuck you up then? Or, you weren't gassed. How much did your... liquid fuck you up? Gross that doesn't sound as good."

"My toxin? Poison? I don't know. Either way, not too bad. Tiny headache, a little paralysis, you know. A touch of ataxia."

"Come again?"

"It means loss of muscle control, it affects coordination," a voice (Damian) called from the entranceway to the kitchen. Jason jumped; his hearing was fucked and he hadn't heard the demon walk in. 

"G-d, warn a guy," Jason grumbled. He speared a piece of pancake, a piece of bacon, some eggs, and a strawberry on his fork and dipped the combo in his ketchup.

"That is disgusting, Todd."

"No, it's actually really really good." Jason made a show of folding the spear of food into his mouth and chewing loudly, openly, in Damian's direction. 

Tim suddenly straightened. "I'm in, finally. Only took me 30 minutes, fucking headache."

"Do you have all the information?" Duke asked.

"Yeah, but the database doesn't let you enter addresses. I'm looking kinda generally by map." He typed for a few minutes, everyone at the table waiting for him to fill them in. "Alright... warehouses, was near Dixon Docks but not in Chinatown, near the river edge... got one of, wait no both of them, same owners... Shit."

"What, what is it?" Dick asked.

"They're owned by Marla Elliot."

Everyone turned to look at Tim.

"Thomas Elliot's mom?" Steph leaned over Tim's arm to look at the screen herself.

"That's what it says."

Jason lowered his fork. "You're joking."

"According to this, she owns 20-something buildings around Gotham. Even the Water District Tunnel. Whoever's using her name, definitely has ties to the tunnels."

"It's not her, though, right? I mean, it has to be Hush."

Dick nodded. "Fuck."

"Hush?" Damian echoed Dick's shocked tone. 

"What did you just say?"

Jason turned to see Bruce standing at the entrance to the kitchen. As opposed to his normal poker face, Bruce looked appalled; the shock of Dick's tone, Damian's tone, the shock all the bats were feeling, was reflected tenfold on Bruce's face. 

"Scarecrow's working with Hush?" Bruce walked in to join the others, standing with his hands resting on the back of the chair at the head of the table. "They know each other, Crane was his doctor, they've worked together before, that's not out of the question, but... I haven't heard from him in, it has to be years. I thought we were sure that he was out of Gotham."

"Well, could it be that it's not him? Maybe someone else is using Marla's name?" Damian asked.

"No. No, my father saved Marla's life after Thomas tried to kill her. He hated my father for it, that's what started his whole delusion with my family. It's intentional."

Tim surveyed the others. "If they're working together, though, that changes things. Especially how pointed Scarecrow's focus has been on us."

A thought struck Jason suddenly. "He knew you were out of town. Bruce, in the tunnels, Crane mentioned something about Batman being out of town, but. We'd planted sightings of you, Dick and I traded off wearing the suit. He couldn't have known you were gone unless..."

"Unless Thomas told him my identity."

Around the table, everyone paled. "Are you sure?" Duke asked. "He could have just known by appearance or something. I mean, the rogues all know there have been multiple Robins. He might not know."

Dick shook his head. "But it makes a lot more sense as a reason for him to be targeting us. That much hatred, he doesn't usually seem motivated by hatred. I mean, fear's his whole thing; he doesn't have vendettas. But if he knew the identity of Batman, and if he knew that it was somebody he'd targeted both in and out of costume, Batman and Wayne, that could push him over the edge."

"And he's not the type to reveal your secret; he'd want to capitalize on it for his own sick experiments," Tim continued.

"Dangerous, even if not compr... comp-ro-mising," Cass muttered. Next to her, Duke nodded in agreement. 

"Well, how do we know if Crane knows anything? He knows we know about the tunnels, and he knows that we know we can't navigate them yet. He can just hide out down there, and we have no way of interrogating him. We don't even know if anyone working for him knows anything," Steph thought out loud. She was drumming her fingers on the table, and next to her Cass suddenly reached up to cover a hand on top of Steph's to still her restless movements.

"He did act like he knew more than he was letting on. I mean, I could just be reading into things, like, painting his words with this knowledge now in hindsight. But he did, right? Like, his whole thing about inevitability or whatever..." Duke was looking at Jason. 

Jason nodded absentmindedly, but his focus was on Bruce; he could tell something was clicking behind Bruce's eyes. "Hey, what, what else are you thinking about Bruce? You can't hold shit back."

Bruce looked around at all the bats gathered around him. He sighed.

"I was looking through old files, of Wayne Enterprises projects. There was an old dispute, buried deep, but I found it. We were trying to find a location to establish another building for our engineering sector, and there was a warehouse we were looking at. During the inspection, they found a tunnel that had a violation with the city or something, it violated some city ordinance. We had some people try to look into it, but ended up closing on a different building, and all of that got scrapped. Someone else ended up buying the warehouse. Sean Riley."

"Wait, the mob boss?"

"Yes."

Tim's eyes widened. "Wait, his daughter-"

"Yes, Peyton. She was, at the time, dating Thomas Elliot."

"Thomas fucking Elliot," Jason grumbled.

Dick scoffed. "So it's all leading back to him." 

Bruce nodded, his brows furrowed.

"All roads lead to Hush."

Chapter Text

[BRUCE's POV]

Thomas Elliot.

Bruce had been at this for a long time -- a long time -- but nobody filled him with such a particular sense of apprehension as his old friend. Well. Maybe a few did. But Thomas Elliot was his own brand of menacing. He'd stolen Bruce's face for G-d's sake.

"Why were we not alerted when or if Elliot returned to Gotham?" Damian's voice cut through the din of exclamations. He was turned in his chair to look up at Bruce, his expression open, questioning, trusting (how could his son put so much faith in Bruce?). Alfred the cat was curled up on his son's lap, pawing at the string of his sweatshirt.

Bruce lifted a hand to press against his temple; he could feel the beginnings of a headache brewing.

"We should've been. I'll check the computer, there are redundancies that should prevent any notifications of this magnitude from going unnoticed."

Damian had a point, though; if Thomas was back, which seemed incredibly likely, then why wasn't he notified?

Dick turned in his seat to join in: "He might not be in Gotham, not physically. He could be communicating with Crane from somewhere else."

That was a good point, but Thomas enjoyed being the center of attention; he'd find a way to get back to Gotham. 

"If that's true, we could access Thomas Elliot's bank accounts to find any devices he's bought, track his IP activity that way. He's pretty set in his ways, and even if he makes or steals money under the radar, he's almost definitely going to deposit it in one of the accounts we know about," Tim offered, his voice taking on an air of thinking out loud rambly-ness. 

Dick looked hesitant. "Well, that could help with tracking his online movements, and if it works it could help us locate him IRL, but that's a big assumption; if he knows that we're aware of his involvement, or if he planned on us eventually knowing, he might have covered his tracks better. We can try maybe looking through banks we know he's used before, which he could be using with a fake name, I mean even that's just somewhere to start, not very comprehensive. But we won't really know what banks to look into until-"

"We can't know until we locate him. I'll check on surveillance in and outside of Gotham. He's been gone for so long, we'll have a lot of retracing to do."

"Babs is on her way back, she had to check in at the library on her way over. She can help, me and Tim too."

"In the meantime, I will take all the non-computer nerds back down in the tunnels. We'll have a better idea of what to expect now since we can map out what properties 'Marla' owns," Jason cut in. Across from him, Cass was nodding, apparently thinking the same. Bruce smiled at Cass when they locked eyes, but he gave Jason's gaze a wide berth. When his son had flinched at his touch downstairs... there were too many chaotic elements already going into this investigation. He couldn't handle resurrecting past baggage.

Tim, though, looked excitedly over at Jason. "We can run the names of anyone associated with Thomas, make a way detailed map of any buildings owned by anyone in his orbit. Marla and Sean, and Peyton, are all flagged on our list now, there's a few more people we can look for just in case. Should be able to do it in an hour or two, you guys can slip in this afternoon while it's still light out."

Bruce nodded. "Yes, you take care of that Tim. I'm heading back downstairs."

"Wait, now? To do what?" Steph asked.

"To start on research. As I said, there's a lot of data to cover, years' worth of surveillance that I haven't kept active on."

Bruce had lapsed on checking up on the back-burner activities his computer systems were running; this was his fault. Crane was dangerous enough as a lone adversary, in his own simple chaotic way, but to let the genius mad doctor tie his aim to that of another's was potentially catastrophic. Any time any of Gotham's villains teamed up, things went spectacularly wrong; anytime the Rogues teamed up, which thankfully wasn't often, Bruce's way of approach was thrown off. 

Bruce straightened up from the chair he'd been leaning over, smiling internally when he heard Damian 'tt' in annoyance behind him as he walked to the kitchen counter; his youngest was still so aggressively uninterested in the tech side of vigilantism. How such a young child could become so set in their ways even Bruce couldn't understand.

Behind him, the group continued, planning out their point of attack in the tunnels. Comments about types of maps, the best weapons for close combat in tight quarters, how to avoid toxic contamination; the group's focus was bouncing around in interlocking circles.

Bruce let it all fade away, trying to force a meditative blanket to lay heavy atop the anxiety he felt blooming within over the situation. He never let the others see when cases got to him; to be The Batman, they couldn't get to him. And compared to the magnitude of everything Bruce had dealt with before, this really shouldn't be getting to him. But it was as if his intuition was prophetic, as if he was feeling not anxiety over the situation but trepidation over what was surely going to happen. Bruce had the feeling there was more, much more to this situation, and he wasn't eager to uncover those details. So many unknowns of which the very existence was yet to even be discovered.

He took one of the travel mugs out of the cabinet, filling it to the top with the coffee still hot and steaming in the pot. It was oddly soothing, to pour the hot liquid so smoothly. He heard footsteps approach behind him.

"Master Bruce, might I advise you to wait for Miss Gordon before heading back downstairs to begin your work? You should eat, prepare. I know how this case will go, and I know how you are. Don't get overfocused too quickly."

"Alfred, I appreciate that. But this is my fault; Thomas is my responsibility, his surveillance my obligation. Three of them have already been hurt because of a conspiracy started under my nose."

"Them? Your children don't blame you. They want to help, and you need to let them."

"I am."

"Then wait, just for an hour. Have something to eat, agree on a more concrete team-based plan of action. You cannot treat everything as a project balanced atop your shoulders alone, the others here only to pick up whatever is leftover."

"You know that's not what I'm doing."

"Master Bruce, I know you better than anyone. I know that is exactly what you are doing."

Bruce sighed. Alfred was too all-knowing. He sometimes wished he didn't always have an angel on his shoulder to counter the devil he'd constructed on his other. 

"Alfred. This is different. This isn't just Batman's case; if Thomas really is involved, it puts all of us at risk, not just on patrol. Bruce and his family. You. I need to-"

"You need to let the family defend itself."

"You're not gonna let me disagree with you, are you?"

"Astute as always, Master Bruce."

Bruce sighed affectionately. "Did you have this much control over my father?"

Alfred smiled knowingly. "I don't know what you mean. You're the boss, sir."

"Yeah, right."

Alfred placed a comforting hand on Bruce's shoulder. Bruce sometimes felt overcome by the affection he felt for Alfred. It wasn't just the close relationship they shared as faux father and son; all the potential that had died with Thomas and Martha, all the disappointment and the fractured missing pieces of his life. They'd all been mended by Alfred and his steady hand. Alfred had walked next to him during every low point in his life, through every trial and tribulation. There would be no Bruce Wayne, nor would there be a Batman, without Alfred Pennyworth. Not just because of the role he'd taken on, but because of, comparatively, the deep sense of loss and sadness tied to all the similar roles Bruce had lost throughout his life.

"Alright." He turned back toward the table, where Jason was now yelling in Damian's face about something. "I'll hold off on going downstairs while we figure this out." Turning tail and running off on his own with the new info about Thomas's involvement seemed so much more preferable, but who was Bruce to argue with Alfred?

"You're such a pain in the ass, demon!"

"Don't call me that, zombie!"

"Not as cutting an insult when you've died too, y-"

"Can you guys shut up?" Tim demanded, lowering his computer screen with one hand. 

"What's wrong?" Bruce asked, walking back over, Alfred at his side. 

"Jason wants to go into the tunnels in two teams, Damian doesn't want to split up, they argued over being scared to go back down ther-" Dick began.

"I am not afraid!" Damian exclaimed.

"We're good, just nailing down the details," Dick finished. He had one hand on Damian's shoulder, the other on the table in front of Jason. Alfred the cat was standing on his haunches to lick Dick's wrist. "We don't have enough people for two groups of three anyway."

"Kate messaged me, checking in after Barbara's update last night. She can join, Helena as well." 

Steph perked up at Bruce's words. "They're on their way?"

"Yes."

"Hell! Yeah!"

"See, so then we need a better and more thought-out entry into the tunnels. Going in blind last time didn't work out great for us," Dick continued. 

"I mean... what else is there to do except just, walk in? Walking in with the beginnings of a map is our new plan." Jason's mouth was partially full as he spoke. He speared another forkful of food before continuing: "Tim fucked up by cutting his hand somehow, I fucked up by not wearing another layer under my helmet. We live and fuckin' learn, right? We'll get some long underwear and balaclavas or whatever, and not cut our hands on stray wires, easy."

Dick seemed to consider this. Bruce could tell his oldest was on edge.

"Heyyy, anyone home?" a voice suddenly called out from somewhere in the house -- Kate. Of course she showed up just after she was mentioned.

The others seemed to have a good handle on their approach, and they barely noticed as Bruce left them to their discussion, walking into the depths of the manor to greet his cousin.

Bruce had been gone for a week, enjoying some relaxing time away in the sun (since when was he someone who relaxed? And since when did he actually enjoy devoting time to relaxing?), but as he walked through the house the downpour of rain outside welcomed him back thoroughly to the Gotham he knew and loathed loved.

"Kate, nice to see you," Bruce called as he walked into the atrium, Kate drawing into view bright-red-hair-first. She was examining one of the marble busts lining the room's wall, buffing the figure's cheek with the sleeve of her leather jacket pulled up over her hand. She looked up when Bruce walked in, smiling in greeting.

"Bruce. It's been a while," she approached him warmly.

"Well. You've been busy."

"You know how it is. From Barbara's messages last night, seems like you're loading more busy work on my plate."

Bruce turned to walk back to the kitchen, waiting a second for Kate to fall into step with him. She quickly picked up her gym bag and joined him back through the corridor through which Bruce had come.

"It seems like it. We're dealing with, presumably, Scarecrow and Hush. We've come into contact with some new toxins, and have learned that they've been using a network of tunnels we only just discovered."

"Hold on, Hush? Barbara didn't say anything about him."

"New development. We're... well, about 60, maybe 70% sure he's involved. Which could indicate more unknown players, but, for now, we just don't know."

"Okay, I'll leave all that to you. I'm just here to help scour the tunnel system."

"I appreciate it, really."

They stepped into the kitchen. Jason and Steph both turned to greet Kate, Cass waving to her as well. Dick, Duke, and Tim were busy discussing something behind the younger's computer screen.

"Miss Kane, it's lovely to see you again," Alfred drew close with a mug of tea ready for Kate. She took the cup gratefully, giving Alfred a warm smile.

"You too Alf."

"Kate! Come sit, we're getting a plan together to explore the tunnels Barbara told you about," Tim motioned Kate over to sit by him, not tearing his eyes away from the computer. The glare from the screen gave Tim an unhealthy pallor.

"Give it to me straight," Kate said in greeting, her voice taking on the commanding army general-type tone that came easily to her. At the term 'straight,' Steph scoffed, and Kate easily ignored it. Bruce and Kate had such different approaches, personalities, methods, madnesses, but they both had that same tonal range that allowed them to lead and take charge. Maybe it was the Martha within.

"We're still gathering data, but we have at least 25 locations around Gotham owned by people associated with Thomas Elliot. We're coming up with a rough map and correlating the locations to the tunnels we've already been through or that Barbara's drone has logged," Tim shared. He was typing something as he spoke. "We're also crossing out any known tunnels not a part of this system."

"25 locations, so how big is the network?"

"We're going wide with it just in case, but it seems like the outerbounds of the tunnels reach the entirety of Gotham. Doesn't seem to reach Bristol or anywhere near the Manor, but..."

"So the plan is to have two teams, one starting on the west side, one on the east side," Dick took over. "Last night our op was limited to surveillance, but since we have a rough idea of the network, and since we think there's a bigger plot at play, we're looking to apprehend Crane himself. We think he'll be hiding out down there on the assumption that we won't know how to approach."

"Apprehend -- do you know how to treat his new toxin then?"

"No. To be honest, we don't even know what the final form of this new toxin is going to be, though we have some idea based on the concoctions we've come into contact with already."

"And the sketchy-ass speech he gave to us," Duke added.

"So what's the plan if he doses us?"

"We, so far at least, have been able to treat the toxins with various medicinal combinations. We're gonna provide you all with material to cover up completely. We can even use hazmat suits if we want, which honestly might be best, but the goal is to avoid contamination entirely."

"Solid."

"Master Bruce," Alfred called, motioning Bruce over to the kitchen island. Bruce left Kate and the others to their discussion.

"Thank you, Alfred." On the island counter was a plate of food for Bruce. He dug in, letting the others' words waft around him. 

Alfred was right. Micromanaging might be Batman's superpower, but it wasn't the only viable approach to this mission. The bats brought the energy, chaotic and off-the-walls as it may be, that proved Bruce's instincts when bringing others into his operation weren't misguided. He had to trust that they could handle it, and work with them instead of over them.

Chapter Text

[BARBARA's POV]

She was at the library, helping to go through the backlog of system updates the ancient computers so desperately needed, when they found her. Tucked into the corner in one of the stacks near the back with her laptop open and running diagnostics for the library's system, Barbara was letting the anxiety of the past few days melt away into the easy busywork their underfunded library needed doing when a long acrylic-nailed hand gently pushed her screen down and closed.

Barbara sighed at the imposition. "I thought you were at the manor."

Selina smiled. "I come and go as I please."

The woman looked amazing -- Selina always did -- but despite her coiffed demeanor and appearance, she had an aura of something hiding behind her seemingly positive expression.

"Well, what's up? Did you need something?"

"Don't be like that, Babsy. I want to help."

At that, Barbara turned to look at Selina, really look at her. Behind her eyes ringed in chic black liner, her expression did look earnest. Barbara thought back to the other night, how freaked out both Bruce and Selina had been about Dick, Jason, and Tim's conditions.

Barbara softened. "Sorry, yeah that's great. What do you have?"

"Some friends want to meet with us. About that little real estate problem you were dealing with."

"Friends?"

"Harley and Pam. I broached the topic with them, about our underground issue, like I told Dick I would. They think they can share some helpful details."

"For real? They're not just toying with us?"

"Do you want their help or not?"

"Yes, yes, I do. Let me just..." Barbara patted the tabletop, gathering up all her things to stow away into her tote.

Whenever her mind was busy, her workstation tended to reflect the mess; chargers, notebooks, lip gloss, her mace, everything was scattered over the back table Barbara had claimed. She quickly collected everything, setting the algorithm she'd put in place to continue running remotely off the library grounds. 

"Where are they?" Barbara asked as she collected everything.

Selina just shook her head, indicating she wouldn't share -- Barbara was stuck following Selina into the unknown.

Barbara wheeled out of the stacks and through the library's main atrium after Selina, waving to Nancy at the help desk to let her know she was leaving. Gotham's brisk afternoon chill welcomed the pair outside the library's double doors, and Selina bundled her chic trench coat around her as the two made their way to Selina's car -- scratch that, Bruce's car. One of the nondescript ones he used as The Bat that wouldn't be associated with the huge Wayne family car collection.

Selina threw her coat in the trunk, revealing her sleek catsuit underneath, and grabbed her mask before walking to sit in the driver's seat and pulling it on. Barbara smiled to herself as they took off in the sleek sports car.

"Does Bruce know you took his car?"

"We're a couple. What's his is mine."

"What does he take of yours, then?"

"Oh, you know. Lingerie, cat food for Dami's cat, my good skincare products. That cowl has been wreaking havoc on the poor man's moisture barrier."

"Yes, the poor man. He's really suffering." 

Selina smiled. Barbara would kill to see Bruce wearing a layer of some uber-expensive face mask. She texted Dick, letting him know they had to find a way to get a picture of that sometime, before throwing her phone into her bag.

It felt nice to talk with Selina like a normal person after so many charged back-and-forths from the past. Barbara could still remember how antagonistic the Bat and the Cat once were, back when she was still Batgirl and Dick was still Robin.

"So, what did Harley and Pamela have to say? I mean, what type of info do they have to share?"

"Well, the two might know of some tunnels being used to move chemicals."

"Let me guess, they'll share what they know but not how they know."

"They're not exactly goody two-shoes, Babs. I'm not going to rat on them for using the tunnels, if that's what you mean, not that I'm saying they even have used them, but even still. You can't get mad at them or they won't help."

"I know, I know."

The two lapsed into comfortable silence as Barbara worked to change into an Oracle ensemble that wouldn't reveal her identity to Harley and Poison Ivy. She always had something easy she could throw on somewhere in her bag, even if that something ended up just being a baggy hoodie to hide her hair and a domino mask to hide her face. The two women probably had some inklings about Babs's identity, to be honest (her chair was nondescript, but nevertheless there were only so many wheelchair users in Gotham), but Barbara wasn't going to do anything to help confirm anything.

Gotham's downtown buildings, cloaked in some on-vibe fog, loomed above the grid of roads. Varying from cold glass windows connoting tech-oriented buildings, gothic stone facades connoting old money, and dilapidated crumbling smaller buildings covered in overlapping graffiti, the cityscape never failed to hold Barbara's attention. It was a layered form of urban art, almost, something that always felt somehow homey to her. It sometimes made Barbara laugh if she really thought about it, how utterly cliche her home city really was. Like, of course the Bats and Rogues and mobsters overran this city; the bones of Gotham itself proved the city was built for the kinds of dramatics borne on its streets. 

Her attention was torn away when she felt her phone buzz on her lap. She rifled through her bag to find it, reading through as it buzzed again and again. 

"What is it?" Selina asked as the phone let loose a barrage of messages.

"Shit..."

"What?"

"Hush. They think Scarecrow is working with Hush."

Selina blanched at that. It wasn't so long ago that she and Thomas had had their... run-in, after all. The car sped up as Selina stepped on the gas, the news of Thomas Elliot's involvement pushing the usually laidback woman to act with more prompt action.

"Why do they think that?"

Barbara read through Dick's texts, gathering information. "They tracked down ownership of some of the warehouses we connected to the tunnel system, they're owned by people associated with him. His mother, Peyton Riley,..." she trailed off as she read on. "Kate and a bunch of the others are going back down to track the tunnels in an hour or so. I should get back..."

"After us girls chat. We'll head over in a second."

"Where are we even going?" Barbara turned in her seat to look around. She had no idea where they were now. Selina simply pressed her lips together, concentrating on the road.

Barbara sighed, texting Dick: i'll help when i'm back, w selina now to talk w hq and pi... think she might be kidnapping me

Dick responded quickly: lmk what they say. Then: and also if u need saving lol

Suddenly, Selina pulled into a back alley. Barbara went to exit the car, but Selina put her hand out, motioning for Barbara to stay where she was.

"Heya girlies," Harley Quinn's voice barked as she slid into the backseat. "Drive, drive, we gotta split fast! Haha just kidding, we were just getting waffles. Pammy loves the vegan matcha waffles they make at this place, you gotta try 'em..."

Harley trailed on, babbling with no care whether Selina or Barbara were paying any attention.

Pamela Isley slid into the backseat next to Harley, wrapping an arm around the (still fast-talking) woman's shoulder. She lazily swirled her finger to trace a circle in the air in time with Harley's energetic chatter, her nails a deep forest green against her bleached laurel skin. 

"Hey Harley, Ivy. Thanks for helping us," Barbara greeted the two, turning awkwardly in her seat to address them.

With Selina's introduction into the family, the Sirens had sort of reached an honorary ally status with the Bats. Plus, Barbara's work with the Birds of Prey often saw them all crossing paths. They held a mutual sort of respect for each other. At least, that's how Barbara felt.

"I'm not exactly Crane's biggest fan," Pamela offered, as either a greeting or explanation. A bit closed-off, a bit weary of Barbara, but nonetheless at ease. The chemist was cool and collected in ways that always made Barbara feel intimidated. She was practically statuesque.

"So you-" Barbara started, but was thrown off when a gunshot prompted Selina to abruptly step on the gas. 

"What the fuck, kitty? I don't even have my seatbelt on!" Harley objected from the backseat as the car lurched from 0 to 60, continuing to climb as Selina raced away from the gunfire. 

"I thought you all might want to get out of here before the three men with guns that were walking up and shooting from the other side of the alley actually hit us," Selina responded, deadpan, her focus on the road.

Barbara scanned behind them in the passenger side mirror. From the alley they'd just left, five figures on motorcycles suddenly burst into traffic, locking onto their car.

"Shit!"

Selina made a right, then a quick left -- Barbara could tell she was trying to get to the highway to fast-track it back to the Cave. 

In the mirror, Barbara tracked the figures as they zig-zagged through traffic. She pulled out her laptop, quickly opening a new window to hack into the traffic network. As the car sped up at breakneck speeds, Babs worked quickly to access the traffic lights to try to box their pursuers in behind them with red lights. 

Selina turned a corner, throwing Barbara hard into the car door, before letting out a stream of curses. They'd turned into standstill traffic. Barbara's fingers flew as she tried to unclog the road they were on, working out which side roads to corral the other cars onto.

"Who are these guys?" Barbara asked the two women in the backseat, keeping her eyes on her screen, her mind moving a mile a minute. 

"Fuck if I know!" Harley drawled. She didn't look too upset by the chase. 

"I knew I smelled something off in the restaurant," Pamela said. "Someone in there smelled dank, like underground."

Her brows were knit in concentration as she watched through the rear window, tracking for any motorcycle movement. Cars had already filled in the road behind them, blocking their car so they couldn't backtrack.

The position also meant they'd spot immediately when the motorcycles caught up to them, though. 

"So they are after you, not us. Why are they following you?"

"They may be mad that I... uh, shorted Crane's people at a buy a few days ago." Pamela smiled, probably remembering the ire she'd caused at whatever chemical trade she'd messed up.

In the back of her mind, Barbara tried to stow that away to check up on later; just because they were allies didn't mean Barbara didn't want to keep track of whatever concoctions Pamela was buying ingredients for.

"So you do know who they are."

"Hey, I said I don't know. I can't keep up with my woman's business all the time!" Harley objected.

She was rifling through her backpack, probably looking for some weapon amongst her trinkets. She was dropping knickknacks at random onto the car floor as she looked -- a neon pink Tamagotchi, a leopard print scrunchie, a roll of Hubba Bubba, a stuffed cartoon hyena, lipstick and perfume samples, what looked like a bag of teeth, a Nana coin purse, three bic lighters -- before finally pulling out a bedazzled gun with a high pitched "aha!" 

"Okay, I'm redirecting traffic. Catwoman, in a second you're going to take a left onto Sweetzer, then another, we're going to backtrack around to lose them and get on the highway at the previous ramp entrance," Barbara instructed Selina, ignoring the chaos that was overtaking the backseat.

Selina followed the directions as ahead of them the other cars trickled forward, Barbara's work freeing up some space to drive through. Selina maneuvered the wheel, turning to disappear back into the city gridlock. Just in time, too, as the growl of motorcycle engines hummed behind them. 

Harley unbuckled her seatbelt and rolled her window down, leaning entirely out of the window to start shooting at the figures following them. 

"Hey, don't kill them!" Barbara called. She'd gotten used to it with Jason, but guns still made her uneasy. A phantom pain sprouted at the base of her back, but she ignored it. "Do not shoot to kill, Harley, I swear!"

"Okay, okay, party pooper, I won't. You're such a buzzkill Oracle!"

They drove on, Harley letting out whoops as she shot out motorcycle tires and created unavoidable obstacles that caused three of the mysterious figures to crash out.

They finally made their way over to the next highway entrance, Selina merging quickly. The ramp was not nearly as clogged as the traffic they'd left behind had been. 

"How many are still following us?" She asked, keeping her eyes on the road as she swerved to get in the left lane.

"Just two," Barbara answered, her eyes tracking their movements in the side mirror. She switched her attention between the side mirror and the traffic cameras she'd commandeered, checking to make sure there really were only two left.

"Not for long," Pamela called.

In the mirror, Barbara looked up, catching onto what Pamela was saying; there was a grove of trees looming over the highway from the middle divider. She watched as two of the branches grew and dipped down towards the highway. With the mannerism of a spindly inhuman finger, the branch reached around to spear through the front wheel of both cyclists' motorcycles, sending the remaining goons flying.

Barbara winced; at the very least, those two were dealing with dislocations. She sent a text off to her dad's work phone, letting him know to send ambulances and squad cars and that the men were armed. 

"So. They wanted to kill you because??" Barbara asked, turning back in her seat once again to probe for an explanation.

"You know, you're welcome, Oracle."

"They were here to kill you. It's not exactly like you saved me if I was only in danger because of you."

Pamela sighed. "The supplier I was buying from last week let it slip that he had stuff in his bag for Scarecrow. I sensed it was bad news, and I'm still mad about the last time he hit me with his fear toxin, so I took them. I guess he really wanted the shitty synthetic stuff."

"Do you have them with you?"

"Not with me with me. They're hidden away."

"Can you show me?"

Pamela looked hesitant. "... why?"

Barbara looked exasperatedly over at Selina. "I thought you filled them in on the situation."

Selina tt'd. "I told them what they needed to know. I was asking, not sharing."

"Scarecrow's brewing some new kind of toxin. He hit Nightwing with the newest version a few nights ago, and a few others got hit with other concoctions. We're trying to track both where he's going underground and what he's making," Barbara explained. Pamela listened intently as next to her Harley fixed one pigtail. 

"Aw, how's Nightwing?" Harley seemed genuinely worried for Dick, which was hilarious to Barbara for some reason.

"He's fine. But we have a bunch of samples from what we think is Scarecrow's ongoing development process. We need to figure out what he's working towards," Barbara said, punctuating that last sentence by pointedly looking over to Pamela. 

"Sure. I can help with that. Hey Sel, take the next exit, I'll grab the shit I stashed at the park."

"You hid the chemicals you stole at the park?" Selina asked incredulously.

"Yes."

Pamela lapsed into silence; she was so on top of her game, Selina really couldn't even make fun of the obvious hiding place. Nobody argued with Poison Ivy.

Harley leaned forward suddenly, reaching a finger to poke a button on the dashboard and turn on the radio. "Hey, who's a gal gotta french around here to get control of the aux?"

Barbara rolled her eyes and rooted around for a cord to plug into the car, stringing it along to hand it to Harley.

The clown squealed in pleasure, plugging in her phone (the screen's cracked surface making Barbara cringe) and pressing play on "Pink Pony Club." She closed her eyes to sing along to the music, leaning into Pamela and singing obnoxiously until her girlfriend joined in. 

In the front seat, Selina turned to Barbara. "I don't like how quickly those guys found us. Maybe it's good we're making a stop before we get to the cave."

"Yeah, true. I don't think there was anyone else, though, the traffic cams were only picking up the five that we all saw... I'll keep an eye out just in case."

Selina nodded. They drove in silence for a while, letting Chappell Roan's music grow increasingly louder as Harley tried to subtly keep bumping up the volume.

As "Red Wine Supernova" was winding down, Selina turned into Gotham Park's parking lot.

She rolled to a stop: "So, where are they, Pammy?"

"Stay here, I'll be right back."

Pamela slipped out, going to dig up the bag from wherever her hiding spot was. 

"Soooo," Harley trailed off in the ensuing silence.

"How's everything with you, Harley?" Barbara asked politely.

"Oh, peachy babes! You know I've started getting into climbing? It's really fun, though not as fun as roller derby, but Pammy wanted me to get some less violent hobbies. You ever climb Kitty? Oracle, you're buff, I feel like you could do it with your legs secured. Cat, you would totally love it. Ohmygosh you should totally come with me next week!"

Selina nodded, annoyed. "Maybe."

"So what's up with this new toxin that has you so freaked out, O?"

Barbara considered how much to share with Harley. It was pretty clear she wasn't a fan of Jonathan Crane, at least not right now, so she thought it was safe enough to talk about. "It's a weird take on his usual thing.. it caused pain instead of fear," she explained.

"Ah, somatic fear. That's pretty shitty of Crane. You know, studies are showing PTSD as more of a somatic disorder than we used to think it was? You should check on Nightwing, make sure he isn't having persistent symptoms."

"Thanks, yeah I'll check with him."

"Y'know, it never made sense to me, Crane's whole shtick. Therapeutic fear is, like, a completely different approach from his stupid gas. He's such a little bitch."

Barbara couldn't help but laugh.

Pamela suddenly rapped on the car window, holding a duffle-sized backpack. Selina unlocked the door, and the red head got back in: "Alright, got it."

"What's in there?" Barbara asked.

"It's a ton of vials of synthetic chemicals, acids, steroids, stuff like that. Nothing I'd ever use, so you Bats can keep everything, test it all. Better you have it than Scarecrow."

"Thanks. So tell me more about the tunnels where these meetings happen."

"What am I supposed to say? Wait till we get where we're going, I'll point it out on a map."

Barbara nodded; for now she'd wait and let Pamela draft the information out when they got to the Cave.

The rest of the drive from the park to the cave was monotonous, interrupted only by Harley's commentary on the songs from her playlist.

Barbara sent a mass notification to everyone letting them know not to go down into the Cave without a mask, and, as she felt a familiar rush as Selina drove down to the Cave's entrance from the city, clicked a button on the dashboard to tint and darken the windows so Ivy and Harley couldn't see the route into the cave. 

Light broke through in rounded glazed bulbs through their patented tint as the car pulled up into the Bat Cave. 

A sudden lurch rocked the two against each other int the backseat as Selina put the car in park.

"Alright ladies. Behave," she cautioned, prompting a smirk from Pamela.

The four all got out of the car to join in whatever planning was going on in the cave.

Chapter Text

[DUKE's POV]

Duke couldn't help but stare daggers across the table at Harley Quinn.

He didn't hold what happened to his parents against her or anything -- if he did, Duke knows Barbara would never have brought her to the cave, she would respect his boundaries, especially around anything Joker-related -- but he'd also never had to actually interact with her. It was a little infuriating how light and breezy she was acting. He didn't exactly want her to not be light; he knew better than most that brushing past trauma was a skill and wasn't something to take issue with. But also, Duke was angry, always, and Harley was there, and an easy point on which to focus the anger. 

So -- eyes, daggers, Harley. Across from him, Harley was absentmindedly braiding a long strand of Poison Ivy's red hair, keeping her hands busy following an outburst of annoyance from Dinah when Harley started asking too many questions about her Canary powers. She probably didn't even know Duke's vigilante name, let alone register his presence across the table from her. 

Duke shook his head mentally, loosening himself up and breaking the concentration he'd been levying her way.

The cave was more full than he was used to, so it wasn't all that hard to find other things to focus on -- the Birds of Prey and the Bats were all chatting amicably ahead of their imminent trip back down into the tunnels, with the Sirens along for good measure.

Bruce seemed weirdly okay that Harley and Pamela were helping out, the two even drafted into the team-ups heading down under Gotham. If Duke had to guess, it wasn't so much Scarecrow as it was Hush that was motivating him; the enemy of your ultimate sworn enemy is your friend, or whatever.  

"Wow, gang's all here, huh?" Helena Bertinelli called out, breaking Duke from his thoughts -- she must have entered the cave without Duke noticing. She walked in long, even strides to join the group at the big table ('baby's first hall of justice' is what Dick had called it) they all were standing around. "So, what are you studying over here?"

Duke smiled at her as she came to stand next to him, and she clapped him on the shoulder before turning to hug Kate hello. Around the table, everyone muttered scattered greetings -- everyone except for Bruce, who was intently studying the map they were marking up in front of them, and Pamela, who was labeling the synthetic drugs she'd brought to the cave with Babs and Selina. She, Tim, and Duke had already gone over what was included in the haul of stolen Scarecrow goodies, and Pamela had already provided them a list of the common uses of each chem component their tests had ID'd so far. She'd also marked the tunnel where the buy she was at was staged -- it turned out she'd only been in one tunnel -- on their map.

"Yo, you got here fast," Jason called out, shooting a gruff smirk Helena's way, and she laughed. 

"Well, The Bat said it was urgent."

"Thank you for coming," Tim said in response; he was trying to maintain some semblance of leadership, which was a bit hard when he was standing next to Batman himself.

Bruce didn't look up, his finger tracing along the map and marking it up in different colored pens. Across the way, Barbara was sat at the Bat Computer, grabbing coordinates for Bruce to then add to the map.

Bruce sometimes got like that, when there was a lot of overlapping evidence to parse through -- he liked to have one central document on which they could focus, and would totally zero in on making it clean, neat, analytical. 'Organization is a super power,' and all that. Barbara was marking up a similar, digital version on the screen, one that she could update once the others ventured down and could distribute in real time to everyone's information readouts.

"So, this...?" Helena asked, waving her hand once again at the map.

"We're mapping out a game plan of how to enter the tunnels the Bats found," Kate responded. Next to her, Damian was sharpening a dagger as he followed Bruce's movements carefully.

"We haven't been in all the tunnels yet, but based on the ones we have been in and on ownership logs, we can extrapolate where they wind around and everything so we can best coordinate our movements and block Scarecrow in," Tim explained. Helena nodded, looking over the map. 

It was a little daunting, the fact that Bruce and co. had been able to draft so many people on short notice to help; Dinah Lance, Kate Kane, Helena Bertinelli, and Renee Montoya had all arrived over the past two hours, and Luke Fox and Harper Row were going to meet them on assignment as well. Big Barda was away on a mission with the Justice League, but both she and Oliver Queen were in communication with the Birds of Prey should they need more backup.

Duke felt like he should be warming the bench instead of joining in on the whole operation; he wasn't a first-string kind of hero, was he? 

"'Box Scarecrow in'?" Helena asked.

"Yeah, we have eyes on him, he's currently posted up right --" Dick pointed on the map as he spoke, "right here. We need to track and log the whole system, but for now our objective has changed to focus on apprehending him first before cataloguing. That's why we need all the man-power; we need to make sure we don't lose him on this first venture."

"Gotcha."

"Oracle and I will be coordinating from here in the cave while the rest of you split into teams and approach him from all sides. You'll be dropping cameras throughout as well," Dick continued.

Duke tuned out as the various vigilantes milled around the table. He had to psych himself up for the mission. He was so used to working along the rooftops of Gotham -- and used to doing so during the day -- so working underground was more than a little claustrophobic.

"Whydja make this big map if we all are leaving so soon, Batsy?" Harley asked, hopping lithely from Poison Ivy's side to sidle up next to Bruce.

"Organization is a super power," Bruce deadpanned, sounding remarkably like the voice Duke had constructed in his head.

He hadn't actually thought Bruce would say the adage in front of, like, non-Bat people -- Duke wasn't sure where the Bat he'd constructed in his head ended sometimes and where the Bat IRL began. Bruce had such an aura about him, though, that even saying something incredibly cliche sounded power-laced and meaningful.

"Organization is a super power," Harley mimicked, crossing her arms and playing at being stern.

"Harley, quiet," Bruce ordered. He straightened up. "Gather around, everyone, it's time to talk strategy."

The heroes milled about to fill in the gaps around the large table. 

"Alright, we're working in teams of 3. I'll meet Bluebird and Batwing, and fill them in in the field. Red Hood, Black Bat, Huntress, you're team 2. Robin, Signal, Spoiler, you're team 3. Question, Batwoman, Black Canary, you're team 4. Catwoman, Harley Quinn, and Poison Ivy, you're team 5. Nightwing and Oracle will be on coms, with Red Robin directing from the Cave as well as coordinating all procedure and investigating virtual leads. Any questions so far?"

Around the table, everyone shook their heads no. Across from him, Steph shot Duke a peace sign, apparently just as happy as he was to be paired together, and Duke returned the lowkey gesture.

"Alright. Oracle and I have coordinated the best entry points based on the tunnel information we've garnered so far, but I'll let Red Robin take over going forward."

Bruce turned to Tim, gesturing for him to take the lead. Duke could tell how much that meant to Tim as the younger hero stood up straighter. 

"Yeah, so I know for the newcomers we've been a bit vague with information outside of the larger, structural need-to-knows. So here's the rundown; four nights ago, Nightwing was hit with a new Scarecrow toxin. It had many of the same hallmarks of his core compound, with a few key differences; it was toxic via skin, first of all, so we'll be heading out with more protective gear, and it elicited pain as well as fear. Two days later, myself and Red Hood were hit with two more toxins, both unique, one via skin and one via inhalant. The symptoms weren't pain or fear-focused, though both elicited heightened anxiety that suggests fear is still a central component. Other symptoms ranged from paralysis to loss of consciousness to hearing loss. After our second encounter with Scarecrow and these new toxins, we were able to connect the dots and discover that Scarecrow may be working with Hush; in fact, that is extremely likely. We've had a cam on Scarecrow since that second encounter, but haven't seen any concrete signs of Hush yet, so TBD on whether he is physically in town. Scarecrow is operating from within a vast tunnel system under Gotham, which we've mapped out to the best of our knowledge here."

At that, Tim brought everyone's attention to the map. Behind them, Babs updated the Bat screens to display the map as well.

"We think there are upwards of 20 structures around Gotham that act as entrances to the tunnels, but we've chosen 5 main ones to enter through to box Scarecrow in -- based on our current estimations, these tunnels statistically are more likely to prevent his escape. The goal here is pretty direct: apprehend Scarecrow as quickly as possible, without risking contamination. Teams 2 and 4 are going to be our first line of contact; you'll be heading towards Scarecrow first. Other teams will be on reserve, and will make sure there aren't any incoming dangers heading towards our points of contact. Keep in mind -- we have run into various hubs of people, contraptions, etcetera, throughout tunnels we've been through already, so stay on alert and be prepared for anything."

Tim abruptly stopped, looking around to gauge the group's reaction. Everyone was cataloguing the map and mentally preparing for their designated duties. 

Duke felt the shadows that filled the Bat Cave lapping at his back, his cloudy thoughts echoed by the cloudy atmosphere his senses were able to identify. The tunnels were much of the same; with so few lamps throughout the system, and with the depth below ground hampering much (but not all) of his x-ray abilities, he felt, though limited, a certain sense of responsibility with his place on backup -- he would be able to sense incoming danger to much higher degrees than the other heroes on their teams. He hoped he'd be able to protect everyone along the different routes. 

"Okay, everyone check in with Oracle for comm links and some protective gear and surveillance tech; we aren't going to go in with full hazmats since the tunnels are already cramping fighting room, but nobody should underestimate the likelihood of running into some form, known or unknown, of these toxins, so make sure the protectants are easily accessible at a moment's notice."

Tim looked around at the room, the gathered vigilantes all nodding in understanding. Duke felt somehow proud of his friend's leadership, especially in the collective of such experienced vigilantes. 

As everyone broke apart, Duke walked to join Tim, Steph, and Cass. 

"Alright, over/under on nabbing Scarecrow in 4 hours?" Duke asked them all. 

"Under, for sure," Steph answered almost immediately. She was bouncing on the balls of her feet, her purple-hooded cape swaying with each movement. "We're beelining straight to him, and he thinks we can't get to him right now."

"Two and half," Cass echoed, predicting a much shorter time frame. 

"Don't jinx us.." Tim warned half-heartedly, his eyes still on the map and his mind moving an obvious mile a minute. "None of this is simple, and I don't want us getting comfortable and losing perspective."

Duke studied his friend, the way he was hunched over, the spectrum of light waving in intensity around him. Tim had a slightly raised temperature, probably from whatever he was dosed with, and Duke could tell he was bummed to be staying behind while he sent everyone out. 

"We'll be fine," Duke assured him. 

"Smart, focused, strong teams," Cass agreed.

"I know, I know."

Steph drifted off, dragging Cass along with her, to go talk to Kate and Helena. Tim stayed keyed-in on the map. 

"You need anything before we head out?" Duke asked softly. 

"Nah, thanks though. I'm actually going to go get some systems running to hack into bank systems Elliot's used in the past, see if any suspicious accounts have any money running through Gotham."

"Good idea."

"It still doesn't make sense to me -- something's not right with the info we have so far. I don't understand why Scarecrow would change his recipe even if he was working with someone else. Or why Hush chose him of all people to team up with, since the tunnels could have provided so many different agendas a safe haven and an element of surprise. There has to be something else going on."

"Well let's think about it; we know the how, the what, most of the where, but we're assuming the who and going from there to the why. There could be other people involved, too, there could be different dynamics, all that. I think we should make sure we know the answer to those questions of exactly who we're dealing with to best understand what's going on, maybe then things will fall into place."

"Signal's right," Bruce chimed in, walking unseen to stand with Tim and Duke. Duke was super proud of himself for not jumping at the abruptness. "Hopefully Scarecrow will be able to provide some of those answers once we have him in custody."

"Yeah, good point. Regardless, hopefully bank records will help solidify some of those answers, too."

"Yes. This is good work, Red Robin. Despite the hiccups, you're leading an excellent operation."

Tim blushed at the unexpected compliment. 

"Thanks B. You go get ready, I'm going to link up with Oracle."

Once the coast was clear, Duke burst out laughing. "Dude, you got a genuine compliment from Batman. Are you sure you're not dying or something?"

Tim frowned and kicked at Duke's shin like a little kid, before turning to walk over to join Barbara in front of the computer. Duke went to stand with Steph and Cass, who were chatting with Dinah, Kate, and Helena. 

"If anything, the tunnels help project sound, focus it, so I should be all set. Just have to make sure not to hit anything structural. Don't want to bury anyone important," Dinah was saying, ending her sentence with a wink directed at Duke as he joined the group. 

"Wait, yeah, you two are our resident metas, right?" Helena turned to look at Duke. At the other end of the cave, Duke saw Pamela Isley looking over towards the lab with an odd expression, but Duke kept his focus on Helena as she continued. "How'd you hold up underground?"

They all turned to face Duke. 

"You mean is there anything down there that might effect metas, something in the lining of the tunnel walls? Or are you just generally checking in."

Helena shrugged. "Both."

"Not that I could feel, and fine I guess. There's not much light down there, only a lamp every 50 or so meters. It was hard to get exact reads on light wavelengths, but I can still get a rough estimate. Lots more shadows, though, which helps if we need to go stealth. It's fun to play around in such a different environment, a little, so I'm not complaining."

"I am. I fucking love complaining. And I hate shooting in such tight spaces. At least it makes it easier to collect and keep bolts, but shit do I hate fighting underground," Helena smirked mirthlessly, shaking her head. 

"Ditto. Rooftops are more fun," Kate agreed. She kept looking over towards Renee, who was standing talking with Bruce at the moment. 

"Team 2, let's fucking go!" Jason called suddenly by the garage, finished packing supplies into packs on his bike.

Helena's lips quirked up at Red Hood's tone, slowly backtracking away from the group: "Guess that's us. Stay safe, see you on the other side, and all that." She waved once, curtly, and Cass waved a quick goodbye to Steph, before the two turned to walk shoulder-to-shoulder over to Jason to talk strategy.

Following their lead, the rest of those gathered in the cave began to split off into their groups.

Damian came to stand with Duke and Steph, stowing the last few of his knives around his belt. 

"Have you both met with Oracle yet?" the kid asked.

"No, you?"

"No. Let's get the necessary equipment, then go -- I do not see the need to wait around for everybody else to be ready once we are all prepared."

"Copy that Robin," Steph turned to walk over to Barbara, but something odd caught Duke's eye suddenly.

"Wait..." He trailed off.

He turned around, trying to figure out what was bugging him. Something by the lab... he began walking over, and realized suddenly that Pamela Isley had walked over as well. It was weird; there was something fuzzy in the air around the spectrometer. 

"What is it?" Damian asked, catching on to Duke's expression. 

"Dude, you okay?" Steph seemed worried.

"There's something... some kind of light being emitted from the toxins breaking down under analysis. They must be emitting phosphors..."

Duke, Damian, and Steph all arrived at the LED screen readout and stood next to Poison Ivy.

"Do you sense that, too?" Duke asked. He was engrossed in the odd sensory output; it wasn't bright, or informative, but there was something... wrong, coming off the liquids as they were broken down, analyzed. Duke noted that this was some hybrid of a mass spectrometer, meaning that it was analyzing the liquids by the molecular weight of the various components.

"Yes, there's something there that I can sense," Pamela said, her brows scrunched together in intent confusion. "It's organic. It seems normal, and yet something feels... off to me."

Something clicked in Duke's mind at her first sentence; this made sense. "Organophosphates. They're found in nerve agents."

"Pesticides, too," Pamela echoed. They locked eyes; Duke could tell Pamela was running through the same thought processes as him. 

"Red, come over here!" Duke called over to Tim. Tim turned and jogged over to join their little impromptu group.

"What's up?"

"Cholinergic toxidrome. That fits your and Red Hood's symptoms, right?"

Steph's eyes widened as she caught on to Duke's line of thinking; her biochemistry knowledge was probably right around Duke's, but Tim would know better than both of them. 

"Choli... I mean, yeah, under the umbrella of symptoms we had, a few match up. Why?"

"Whatever's in the spectrometer is emitting light -- I can see the wavelengths. Poison Ivy sensed the organic compounds, too. Something's super weird with all of them."

"Wait, what is cholinergic toxidrome?" Damian asked insistently; he hated being out of the loop.

"A subset of symptoms caused by the buildup of acetylcholine, which is a neurotransmitter, at the cholinergic synapses, where transducers convert electrical signals into chemical ones. They're like converters, taking impulses from the presynaptic to the postsynaptic sides of an impulse, spreading it along. They act between neurons instead of between a neuron and a muscle cell. Cholinergic toxidrome happens when cholinesterase inhibitors block the enzyme acetylcholinesterase, which breaks down acetylcholine, it all leads to the cholinergic receptors getting overstimulated," Tim explained. "Organophosphates can cause it."

"But what does that mean?" Damian asked, annoyed.

"Well, it lines up with a lot of what we already suspected -- Crane's attacking the nervous system. But these are also involved with memory. And it also means that Scarecrow isn't looking to cause physical symptoms so much as physiological. It makes sense why the pain Nightwing felt was so extreme -- it was at the receptor level, meaning at every synapse, at his base core."

"Why is it lighting up, though? Or at least, lighting up enough for Signal to see it, when he hadn't noticed any light waves like this before?" Steph asked. "We aren't using any spectrophotometers, or anything messing with the light waves, right?"

"I'm not sure..."

"Green is a medium-sized wavelength," Duke added. "I don't understand how the toxin could appear green when used -- you all saw that every toxin we've run into so far has been some shade of green -- and then emit the different, unidentified type of wavelength that I'm seeing now."

"Maybe there's something to this toxin's makeup that's related to colorlessness, like how Sarin gas has no visible color. It could have something to do with the frequency," Pamela mused. 

"How would that even work?"

"How does any of this shit work? I mean, cisplatin and chemotherapy shouldn't be used as a bioweapon, but somehow it was in these, too. I don't understand how Crane is frankensteining all these chemicals together," Tim began. "If this has any phosphorous material in it, though, about 20 isotopes of phosphorous are radioactive. Chemo and radiation... maybe Crane's getting his supplies from a hospital or medical supplier?"

"Maybe none of that is intentional," Duke mused aloud. "Maybe he's getting his supplies in bulk from pre-made concoctions, so part of their process now involves both breaking down the original compounds and making his new formula from those broken down components? We couldn't figure out why he'd be throwing all this shit against a wall to see what symptoms stick, but maybe that's not the point, it's just the only material he could get his hands on."

"Yeah, maybe..." Tim's eyes were alight, thinking through possibilities. 

"So we check out hospitals?" Steph offered. "Track any missing supplies from hospital stock?"

"Medical suppliers are really tightly regulated. I don't see how he could be doing that to the degree we know he has without us noticing. We do know how many shipments he's gotten from criminal suppliers and mob drug runners, and if he has such large quantities of those then to even it out he'd need just as much of the pre-made compounds, and I just don't see how that could happen."

A thought suddenly occurred to Duke. "What about universities? Does Gotham U have a medical school on campus?"

Tim's eyes widened. "The University entrance. Oh shit, you're right -- we never looked into, or never found, donations made to the school tied to Hush. But there has to be something there, and if there is, that could be where he's getting the chemo and the premade toxic agents. At the very least, there would be less oversight so someone could sneak in through that university tunnel entrance and steal it all. We'll see if anything's been stolen from the school."

"Go back. How is any of this new information? We already knew it was a nerve agent because atropine worked, and we already knew the university was involved. What am I missing?
 Damian asked. 

"Nothing new, these are just... new specifics. We're just fleshing all the info out."

"So... we can go then? I do not see how prudent this can be if we are simply reiterating the same information over and over. We need new things to focus on."

"Robin's right -- you all go. Oracle, Nightwing, and I can analyze all this and look through Gotham U backchannels and update you in the field."

Duke nodded. "Alright Red Robin, but let us know what you find out. Maybe after this op, we can work with Black Canary to see if a change in frequency is effecting the compounds."

"Good idea, Signal." 

With that brainstorm session, the group split up, Duke walking over to the Bat Computer with Damian and Steph to grab their gear and get on the right communication channel. Pamela and Harley wandered over behind them, murmuring quietly with their heads pressed close together. 

"You all set?" Barbara asked as Duke and his team approached her. She had about five different screens open, all running different programs. 

"Yeah, we're good to go," Steph answered.

There was something to this most recent discovery they had found that was leaving Duke (and probably the others involved) uneasy. There was a sense of muddled clarity; things were coming into focus, but in the way that sands through an hourglass began to look more solid the more they accumulated -- the feeling that they were running out of time, or else missing something big, was pushing at the back of Duke's mind. 

He grabbed the necessarily equipment from Barbara, said goodbye to her, Tim, and Dick and, as these worries bloomed unhampered in Duke's mind, his team of three set out from the Cave. The sky was darkening into a deep black-pitched indigo, the cityscape too full of smog to show any visible stars. 

It was going to be a long night.

Chapter Text

[CASS's POV]

The tunnel Cass found herself walking through with Jason and Helena was winding in perpetual loops, going down deeper and deeper underground.

It was subtle; if you weren't paying close enough attention, one would think they were walking on even ground and simply progressing on straight ahead. But Cass could feel the subtle slope of the tunnel ground leading them deeper down into the heart of Gotham, slowly but surely. 

They'd entered through a water company's abandoned storage facility. Though the building and its contents looked well-kept and modern, as if it had been in use relatively recently, it was abandoned by the time they arrived, and its basement had the same locked door as all the other tunnel entrances Cass had gone through so far.

The doors were all cold, strong metal, and this one glinted in the slivers of moonlight aiming through the few windows dotting the building. If Cass focused really hard and stood perfectly still, she could see her reflection in the heavy contours and crevices of the imposing door despite its slightly matte finish. When she placed her covered hands against the surface, she could feel the metal's coldness radiating off the door.

As Helena and Jason secured it open, Cass had simply observed, taking in the door and all its detailed, oddly intricate mystery. Which was a good thing; she noticed a ripped sliver of cloth, no bigger than two square inches, stuck in one of the upper hinges. A rough, black-grey cloth. She'd fished it out and flagged Barbara's attention back at the cave and sent the ripped sample back with one of the little drones. 

"Great work, Batgirl."

"Thanks."

It still sent a little blush of pride into each cheek whenever Barbara called her Batgirl. She liked the feeling of... earning her goodness, rather than just earning her skills. She was a good fighter; scratch that, a great fighter. But that wasn't enough -- she wanted to be a great person. And Barbara? If Barbara approved, especially if she approved enough to let Cass use her name, then Cass knew she was heading in the right direction.

Now, though, as the tunnels wound around in an annoyingly boring passage to nothing and more and more time passed, Cass felt a bit like she was fading into the background. Jason and Helena were both so loud, it made Cass a bit self-conscious. Not to mention that they kept trying to one-up each other with niche literary conversations that left Cass completely in the dark.

"I don't think you can call sex a Chekhov's gun in Frankenstein, the fuck?" Jason sounded incredulous, though he strung along a few terms Cass didn't get.

"As soon as his monster asked for a partner, it created a whole other level of inevitability! And it inevitably led to everything falling to shit!" Helena retorted. 

"This is a... book?" Cass asked. She loved movies and tv, but reading still felt like a chore to her. She needed to flex that part of her brain, that new muscle and new language that was slowly becoming less atrophied, more often.

"No, it's a great book. It's the first sci-fi book ever written, basically -- you'd probably really like it actually. A lot of it is about personhood when you've been created by somebody else, not fitting into the role society wants you to play, all that..."

Cass felt a slight pull of tension growing in the space behind the crease between her eyes as Jason explained. She wasn't created. Jason thought he was being helpful, but did he really think of her like that?

"You think that's me? I was created by D- by him?"

"I mean..."

He raised an eyebrow at her, and she reached out to pinch and twist a spot on his neck through the fabric of his undershirt showing beneath the gap of his jacket. 

"Ow! Fuck! Batgirl, I was just being a dick, it's a good book. I genuinely think you would enjoy it, that's all."

"Oracle. Do you agree?" Cass asked slowly into her comm.

"Actually, yeah, you'd like it I think. I can help you find it at the library sometime if you want."

"Hmm.. maybe."

She let go of Jason. Next to her, Helena winked at Cass, pausing to wait and then walk in step with her behind Jason as he re-adjusted his layers to avoid letting an enemy do what Cass had.

In her ear, she could hear the various teams chattering amongst themselves on the open channels, but everyone was staying off the direct lines and staying at low volume until they made contact or found anything useful. It was nice to listen to it all all at once, and it made Cass feel like she was sitting anonymous somewhere in a big populated city, one of those comforting feelings that made her feel blanketed in, like she was a part of humanity instead of outside of it.

Cass's team -- Team 2 -- was entering towards Scarecrow first, with Team 4 waiting as immediate backup to keep any stragglers from leaving and alerting anyone else in the tunnels. Teams 3 and 5 were further down the tunnel system, standing at strategic exit points to do the same. The plan was to keep this fast, simple, surgical, but this was a just-in-case kind of night. Batman had just met Luke Fox and Harper Row and was filling them in above ground before they descended to provide additional cover, too, as team 6.

"How close are we to the target?" Helena asked as they made their way forward.

Dick's voice answered almost immediately: "Should be there in about 20 minutes if you keep up that pace."

"Copy that. You have an estimate on how many people we're walking in on?"

"Could be 10, could be 20, just depends since people keep filtering in and out."

"Easy," Cass replied. She, Jason, and Helena had compatible fighting styles, and between them she wasn't worried. Besides, their job wasn't to fight everyone (though who knew) -- they just needed to grab Scarecrow. 

"What's he doing?" Jason asked. He had one of his guns out and was flicking the safety on and off like a fidget toy -- he reminded Cass a lot of Steph sometimes with how restless they both could be. After years of training for rigid, pointed, intentional movement, Cass was never restless. That's what looking, scanning your surroundings, was for. Stillness was centering, and to be good, to be ready, was to be centered. 

"Labeling materials. Seems to be base components and various ingredients, not any actual toxins, but approach with caution."

"Yes sir." Jason turned back towards Cass and Helena; "No shit, obviously I'm going to treat any of this shit as if it's toxic as hell."

As the tunnel rounded minutely down and slightly to the right, the lamps on the tunnel walls began to appear more often and closer together. Cass nudged Helena and pointed them out.

"Shit, I didn't notice that."

Jason turned back (again) to join them: "What?"

"Batgirl pointed out the lamps are getting closer, there's more of them -- could mean this is a well-used section."

"I'll mark it down," Barbara responded. The lamps themselves were odd to look at -- no shades or coverings on any of them, they were able to see that each bulb was slightly different in size, tone, luminosity. They shone faintly green.

As they walked, Barbara ID'd and powered down two cameras set up on the ceiling via her drones. These drones were smaller, tighter, much more specialized than the ones they had used the other night, courtesy of Lucius Fox. Luke had brought a few extra after his dad dropped off the first shipment at the Cave, and was coordinating with Batman over where to send them. 

"Red Robin, count -- two drones heading to team 3, one to team 4, one to team 5, one to trail team 2, and one's staying with me. Got it?"

"Copy that B, Oracle's got the camera feeds organized up now, we're all set." 

By the time they were at the entrance to the section of the tunnel where Scarecrow currently was, Cass was itching for a fight. She could tell Helena and Jason were, too -- both of them had more tension in their shoulders yet were looser in step, taking longer strides. Impatient.

They all paused silently before rounding the final bend.

As a precaution, Cass and the others checked each other over for any exposed skin. Their movements made no noise, but even in their relative bubble of silence they couldn't hear anything coming from the tunnel ahead; either everyone in Scarecrow's orbit was relaxing, or everyone was focused, but either way they'd be off guard when Cass and co. made their way through.

Jason punched a quick message into his comm to avoid speaking, asking whether Kate, Dinah, and Renee were all set on their end. Upon confirmation, and once they were all ready, Jason nodded to Cass, and she pulled out two smoke capsules.

She held up a hand: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1.

Helena went through first, brandishing her crossbow in a steady straight-armed motion to shoot bolts in a blanket arc over those closest to their group. She immediately took out 4 of the figures before anyone even noticed they were down there. Jason moved in second, shooting rubber-point rounds from the opposite end of the room to cover ground in tandem with Helena's movements.

They moved soundlessly, working methodically. 

Cass quickly rounded on the closest figure as the other two moved deeper into the room, flipping around them to disorient the huge person before hitting them in the head to knock them unconscious. She made her way through efficiently, taking out two more people before even looking towards the table where Scarecrow stood. 

The villain looked... oddly calm behind his burlap sack mask. He was simply watching the fight as it erupted, his eyes glued to the action, flitting back and forth like the crowd at a tennis match. The frayed edges and rough-hewn fabric may have concealed the lines marring his face, but his posture was loose and undone, completely devoid of tension.

Without drawing his attention, Cass reached into her belt to retrieve a weighted bolas that had a taser running through it. She threw it quickly to wrap around Scarecrow's torso, binding his arms to his side, and before the villain could shout or even exclaim in alarm, she flipped the switch to send a current of electricity to circle him. 

"Dr. Crane!" A nearby technician yelled in alarm. He grabbed a syringe from a nearby table array and ran to confront Cass. Cass kept both hands up in a defensive position, watching for the man to strike out -- when he did, she grabbed his arm and squeezed at the pressure point on the outside of his wrist until his hand seized up and he dropped the needle. 

"No!" He yelled out in frustration, struggling against Cass. Cass held tight and used the man's own momentum to pull him forward and send him sprawling on the ground before landing a decisive blow to him temple, using just enough force to knock him out cold. 

"I have him!" Cass yelled out, turning to run back to where Scarecrow had fallen prone below his work table. The man's eyes were fluttering open behind the two rough eye-holes in his mask, so she reached down to taze him a second time. His inert body jerked a few times before stilling.

At the other side of the room, Helena was using her bow as a close-quarters weapon to swipe and swing at the combatants around her. Jason suddenly donkey kicked one of the imposing figures -- a broad-shouldered women brandishing two curved blades -- back towards Helena, who seamlessly beat her down before turning back to her last remaining goon. 

Finally, the action calmed to a stop, and Helena and Jason both walked to join Cass at her place standing over the downed villain. Jason, in one fluid motion, walked to greet Cass and then kicked Scarecrow's midsection -- hard.

"We got the package, gonna rough him up and bring him home," Jason spoke into his comm device. Barbara began chastising him (Bruce's voice echoed in the background with a gruff "Red Hood, behave"), but Cass barely paid them any mind. Something about the way Scarecrow had stayed so calm was bugging her. 

She bent over to feel around along Scarecrow's mask and, once satisfied that there were no catches or tripwires, pulled it off. 

Scarecrow -- Jonathan Crane -- looked noticeably more gaunt than when they'd last seen him. Granted, he'd been masked all three times the bats had run into him during this saga, but he looked completely unhealthy; wane greyed skin, gaunt cheekbones. His lax features betrayed nothing from within his state of unconsciousness, but the set of his mouth made it look as if he was clenching his teeth. 

"He looks.. bad," Cass mused.

"Piece of shit looks like a piece of shit; who woulda thought?" Jason looked uninterested.

"Is he sick?" Helena asked.

"Not sure. Skin seems.. cold? So maybe," Cass said. She made quick work of getting the man ready for transport out of the tunnels; the fight had been easily won, and Cass didn't want to push their luck.

"All good on your end, Team 2?" Dinah's voice asked in Cass's ear. 

"Canary, if you're all set you guys should come join us," Helena answered. Now that the hard part was over -- not that it was very or even kind of hard -- it seemed okay to join teams.

"Red Robin, Oracle, is that okay? We're going to team up?" Kate asked in response.

"Sure thing, but watch your backs, and break off if needed to prioritize team 2's exit with the package," Tim replied.

"Copy, on our way two!"

Jason and Helena busied themselves with securing all the downed goons around the room to cover their exit. Cass didn't want to stray too far from Scarecrow, so she dragged him along at her feet as she went to the nearest wall to help with the process. There were 22 people scattered around, and though all of them were unconscious, the three vigilante were making sure they were immobilized as well. 

In the background, from someone ostensibly back at the cave, Cass heard the sound of a computer ding.

"Hey, we got some new info," Tim's voice chimed in again. Cass listened as she tied up the figure in front of her. "We got an ID on the body you guys found in the tunnels."

"The one with fake Jonathan Crane identification?" asked Damian.

"Yeah."

"And?" Jason prompted.

"Name is.. Warren White."

"White.. the mob boss?" Bruce's voice responded. He had a superb recall and was better than any other hero at keeping track of villain names. "Sometimes goes by Great White Shark now? Why the hell would he be down there?"

"He has ties to Black Mask... He also shared a cell in Arkham with Death Rattle, that fuckass cult leader..." Tim also sounded confused as he relayed the info. "I'm not really sure. Yet."

"And he's dead?" Damian's voice asked again.

"Yeah, Robin, we got a pretty airtight positive ID, 99.8% accurate. Took a while to confirm because he's supposed to still be interned at Arkham."

"Is Death Rattle still there?" 

"Supposed to be. We'll have to check."

As the last of the goons were being tied down, and as the conversation unfolded, Batwoman, Black Canary, and Question walked through one of the entrances into the atrium to join Cass and her team. Helena walked over to greet them as Jason finished securing the last two people and Cass stood watch over Scarecrow. 

"Oracle here -- just some background, Death Rattle aka Erasmus Rayne, is a former minister who led a cult in Gotham City based on his belief that he could hear the voices of the dead. He killed 52 of his congregants. The guy is super psychotic, and the few times he's made it out of Arkham, he's basically just gone straight to killing, no clear agenda. Warren White is slightly less notable; low level mob boss who got out of prison time by pretending to be insane, so he was sent to Arkham. While there, a mishap with Freeze led him to lose his nose, ears, hair, etcetera from severe frostbite. He sort of went off the deep end after that, filed all his teeth into sharp points -- hence the name Great White."

"He didn't have teeth like a.. I mean, he didn't look, like that, when we found him?" Cass asked. The man they'd seen had looked relatively normal; two ears, two eyes, mouth and nose, full head of hair, regular human teeth.

"The ID match connected our scan with his original intake photo and his mugshot. He may have had reconstructive surgery, but since we left the body behind we can't tell."

"Can somebody go back and look for the body?" Damian asked. 

"Dude, nooo," Cass could hear Steph and Duke exclaim in overlapping jokey cries of annoyance in the background through Damian's comm device. 

"Good idea -- team 3, you head over and see if it's still where you left it. The sensors we set up haven't picked up any activity since your run-in, so should be untouched still."

"Copy that," Duke and Steph's voices chimed in simultaneously. Cass could hear a hint of tired resignation in Steph's voice, and something similar in Duke's, and guessed they'd been joking around together before being interrupted.

"Dude, help me with this," Jason nudged Cass, motioning to Scarecrow. They patted him down, confiscated his mask, and Cass helped pick him up and throw him over Jason's shoulder. 

He waved to the others, who'd been boxing up all the ingredients Crane had laid out on his table, and as a unit they made their way back through the tunnel they'd come through. 

"So you think he's sick?" Dinah asked as they proceeded. "Wonder if that's why he's acting so different from usual?"

"That could make sense," Kate agreed. "Illness is a major life change. Criminals are just people, even when they're totally unhinged from reality."

"You know..." Renee nudged against Kate's shoulder. "We've been wondering why there's so much chemo shit in his stuff now. Maybe he has cancer."

Cass turned at that, surprise running in a cold line down her back.

"Holy shit. Why didn't we think of that? Just straight up, 'I have cancer so I'm using chemotherapy products'? Fucking unimaginative idiot!" Jason whooped, staying facing forward with the man balanced on his shoulders so making up for the lack of eye contact with volume. 

"We'll run some tests once you get him to the cave, but that's not necessarily true," Bruce responded in everyone's ears, his tone neutral, guarded. "There could still be other reasoning and motivations we have yet to uncover. Don't get stuck on one theory."

"I second that. I feel like there's gotta be another reason he's introducing these things into his toxins," Tim agreed. 

"Although..." Dick cut in.

"What?"

"His whole thing has always been predicated on sharing personal sensation, you know? He makes others feel what he's felt, he targets the rational to spread irrational fear. Maybe he's, like, got a complex about having to undergo chemo?"

"That's not enough to be a motive, though. Not for him," Tim responded. "Beside, with what seems like a multi-person team up with our presumptions with Hush and now another Arkham inmate, we don't know for sure that Scarecrow's in charge. Could just be that the treatment gave him a new idea or access point or something, and any one of those involved could have cancer."

"Hush is also a doctor," Cass mused out loud.

"Correct," Bruce responded, seeming to be going in the same direction. "The surgical changes to White's face especially seem to point to Hush's involvement. Even if it isn't White himself, he was made to look like Warren White, which is still surgically notable. I do wonder if there is something correlated to the fake ID that you found on the body -- conflating identities, or otherwise hiding, switching, or obscuring them, could be part of this conspiracy they're crafting. They, meaning whoever is involved, seem to be prioritizing sharing their conspiracies with us, leading us along the layers -- they anticipated our involvement."

"Well with the Gotham University angle, are there any professors, part time or otherwise, who have medical degrees or would in any be able to access chemotherapeutics? Maybe Crane- sorry Batman, maybe whoever is potentially sick, was getting treated by someone off the books and that's how he met his supplier," Duke interrupted. 

"True, we should also check vet school faculty," Steph added. "Sus people always go to vets when they need to stitch up bullet wounds in movies, or whatever."

"Bioengineering, too. May not be directly applicable, but they have a larger program, and unlike other bio concentrations they get to handle actual chemical compounds. Maybe biochem, too?" Luke Fox added.

"Good idea on all counts. We've been a bit preoccupied, but adding that line of thinking to our list of priorities," Tim's voice responded, Tired as it sounded, Tim's tone was tinged with a certain element of excitement that Cass had come to think of as his "my brain is running through all the ways this could be wrong in order to disprove them all and prove that I'm right" mode. He'd once explained to Cass that in debate, your best argument is to anticipate your opponent's argument and address it before they even get the chance to start, and Cass had since noticed that he approached most ideas with that mindset. He liked to check all the ways things could go wrong and prove they weren't the case before getting his hopes up.

"Your transcripts from the other night seemed to show that Crane spoke to a lecture-sized group of people. Even if they're not where he's getting his supply, a lot of these people we begin investigating could still be involved in other ways," Renee reasoned. "We've got a lot of work cut out for us. Is it really best for everyone to be down here instead of running down other leads?"

"For now, yes. It's true we don't know a lot yet, but Scarecrow, even if not in charge, is an integral part of the whole operation, and I'm okay with us stalling on other foci in pursuit of his capture." Bruce's voice was even-toned.

"It was weird. Very easy to cap-, ah, to get him," Cass responded. She knew it was too easy and needed Bruce to mirror her thoughts and help her figure out why. "Feels like he knew we were coming."

"Like B said, they intended for us to be a part of the process of the conspiracy," Kate spoke from behind Cass. On com, everyone else weighed in as well.

"But... what if there is something else, still down here." Cass's eyes wandered over to Scarecrow's body lying limp across Jason's shoulders.

Dick seemed to be thinking similarly: "You mean in that they planned to lure us down here? We can run through the camera log and look for any indication that they knew they were being watched, but we haven't suspected anything yet."

"Batgirl, what is it that you suspect?" Bruce asked.

"Not sure. Felt... too easy and I don't know why."

"Run through it for me."

"22 people down. But they were quiet, silent, before we walked through. No big stock of poisons. No equipment. One person was directly worried about Scarecrow when we captured. Everyone centered in same room, none ran in after fight began." Cass was trying to run through all the aspects of this fight that just seemed wrong to her. "Just feels like... prepared?"

"There hasn't been any centralized activity as far as we could tell through all this, in any of the tunnel areas we've been through, so I don't think this isolation is a bad thing necessarily. But it is odd, sure."

"And the two cameras we powered down couldn't have given away your approach, I'm sure of it," Barbara countered. 

"Maybe something with all the lights? We did think lots of them together meant it was a high activity area, but maybe have other purpose?"

"They did look a bit odd, maybe different from lights in other tunnels," Jason agreed. "But that could just be because these tunnels aren't uniform anyway."

"Describe the lights," Barbara responded. Cass appreciated how ready she often was to look into various modes of thought.

"Round bulbs, no shade, green tint--"

"Green tint?" Duke asked.

"Yes."

"Yeah, we saw here in the cave via drone, too. What is it Signal?" Barbara asked. She, like Cass, seemed unsure where Duke was going with all this. 

"We noticed that the toxins have all been green, but in the spectrometer they started emitting a weird wavelength and I couldn't figure out why. Maybe it's because it isn't light at all; the chemiluminescence has been messed up from the start with practically every element of this conspiracy."

"Chemilumi- what?" Renee asked. She, Kate, Dinah, and Helena had all drifted closer together from the single file line they'd been walking in for the past few minutes, and Cass began to move up towards Jason so he was included in their deliberations.

"When a glow is produced from a chemical reaction, not from light," Duke explained. "Anyway, there's gotta be some type of chemical reaction that's fucking with us, and I wonder if maybe it's used in the lightbulbs' batteries."

"But why would that mean anything?" Jason asked.

"It'd be harder for Oracle's drones to detect mechanics if they're behind other stuff, like maybe the weird-looking stuff is meant as a decoy... something could be hidden in the lining of the walls, maybe?"

"Shit, which means there could be cameras down here that we didn't pick up on." The sound of hurried key clicks reverberated behind Barbara's voice. "I thought I'd been careful by checking for signals coming off the bulbs since green light is used to mask hidden cameras, but I don't think our drones have a way of even picking up on chemical reactions. I mean, they can catalogue information, so we can at least get a sample, but that would tell us the makeup, not necessarily the reaction itself."

Cass turned to shoot a confused look back towards her companions; none of them were exactly science heads. When she turned back to face forward, she was alarmed to see that Scarecrow's eyes were open and looking right at her. He had a faint smirk on his face. 

"Um..."

"Oracle, look at this," Dick said to Barbara, the two working to try to address the problem they'd just raised. 

"Red Hood, I think..."

Cass trailed her eyes along Scarecrow's face, scanning for the reason behind his smug aura. Everyone was speaking in loud, overlapping chatter, and the open channels were no longer full of comforting co-habitation -- nobody was listening to Cass.

Scarecrow's pinpoint pupils seemed to be reaching deep inside to Cass's core; he knew she was watching him. His limbs were tied tight, but they hadn't secured Crane's mouth; he'd been unconscious, so there was no need, and they had come to expect caught villains to spew information that could be useful. But now, as Cass watched, he took stock of the group he was with and looked as if his excitement was gaining momentum. 

"Red Hood!"

Jason turned to face Cass, Scarecrow now facing away from her and the others. "What?"

"Something's wrong, he-"

From behind Jason, Scarecrow's voice boomed loud in an unexpected yell: "DO IT NOW!"

The heroes' heads all turned towards the figure hidden behind Jason's back. They started forward when, with no warning, a loud beeping began sounding very nearby. 

Cass barely had time to look for the origin of the sound before the tunnel around them exploded.

Chapter Text

[JASON's POV]

Thank fuck for helmets.

The explosion came out of nowhere, rocketing Jason into the left wall against his bad shoulder and sending the tunnel into a hazy post-boom lull of darkness. It felt like a full 30 seconds passed before Jason could even comprehend what was happening, before his brain made the necessary connections:

Scarecrow had given someone a signal. 

That meant the tunnels were being watched.

The signal was to blow the tunnel. 

There had been a plan in place ahead of time to blow the tunnel.

Scarecrow had expected them to come after him.

Jason was caught in an explosion.

Joker knew what he was doing and Batman wouldn't make it in time.

He had to check on the others. 

As smoke filled his already dim visibility, Jason reached around his helmet to flick on night vision. He took in the unhelpful overlay of smoke and dust, the faint outlines of a wall that was still intact, the faint outlines of the section of ceiling that had collapsed and crumbled down around them. 

"Ca-" he coughed, dirt sinking down his throat. He opened a panel in his helmet, spit out a glob of bloody dust-filled spit from biting his lip, and continued, "Call out! Call out! Batgirl! Huntress! Canary! Question! Batwoman!"

There was a faint ringing in his ear that made him think maybe he was missing chatter in his coms, but it was indistinct and high pitched -- it sounded like a tech problem rather than something with his ears, so he continued scanning for any sign of one of the others responding.

He turned in a circle, stumbling slightly, until his eyes landed on a body lying prone a few feet in front of him. He coughed twice, closed the helmet panel, squeezed his eyes shut and opened them, and shook out each limb before walking determinedly towards the figure. 

It was Cass; she'd been right in front of him when the tunnel exploded. Her mask hid her face from Jason, but the way her body was lying, it seemed as if she was unconscious. He crouched down next to her, laying her out flat on her back and cushioning her neck before shaking at her shoulder. 

"Batgirl. Batgirl! Can you hear me?!"

He repeated a steady stream of questions and shouts and began rubbing a fist into her sternum, hard, until her eyes blinked open from behind her suit. 

"What...?"

"Explosion. Fill me in, you good? Any injuries?"

She took a second to take stock of her body before replying with a simple "no" and sitting upright. 

"Stay here, I'm checking for the others."

"No. No, I can help."

"Fine."

Cass shakily got to her feet and, together, Jason and Cass turned to survey the chaos. It was smokey, dim without the lights that had dotted their vision before, thick darkness coating the already-tight space. Dust particles danced in claustrophobically-thick clouds. 

The two moved in methodical steps horizontally, covering the entire width of the tunnel as they made their way in the others' direction. Cass kept raising a hand to press to her ear, and Jason could tell she was getting feedback as well -- they were cut off from the others for now. Calling out occasionally, it wasn't until a few minutes had passed that Jason heard anything suggesting purposeful movements.

"Over here!" a voice called out. It sounded like Kate.

Jason pushed ahead, clearing rubble with his foot as a hazy silhouette came into view.

"Red Hood. What the fuck?" Kate huffed out as he came into view. She had a few gashes in the outer extremities of her suit, but the protective gear meant for chemical attacks had protected her from anything too debilitating. 

The same couldn't be said for Renee and Helena, who were both lying in front of Kate. Kate had loosely draped her cape over the two women, and Renee looked unconscious behind her faceless mask.

"No clue, Scarecrow somehow signaled his people to blow the tunnel. Coms are down. How are you, what's their status?" He waved at the two women.

"Question is in and out, I think she has a concussion, grade 2 but nothing debilitating. Huntress has a broken arm and wrist, she was thrown hard. We set it already with a makeshift immobilizing cast and secured it. I can't find Black Canary."

"And you?" Cass prompted from Jason's side.

"Fine, fine, some cuts and bruises. Go look for Canary, report back here."

Cass nodded, stumbling over herself as she made her way through the other direction in the rubble to look. Jason followed her lead, heading in the opposite direction to cover more ground.

"Question, look at me, come on babe," Jason heard Kate repeating from behind him. "Wake up, come on." Next to her, it seemed as though Helena was trying to get the coms up and running, cradling her bad arm close to her chest.

In front of him, the dust was settling in clouds of hazy yellow. It didn't look like any toxin, but something was for sure fucked in the lining of these tunnels for the rubble to be such an odd color -- that or it was something in the explosives.

Jason didn't have time to focus on that for now, though; he needed to focus on finding Dinah. He'd grown to think of Dinah as a mentor whose friendship he did actually value after he and Roy sometimes had dinner with her and Oliver, and didn't want to let worst case scenarios enter his mind.

"Black Canary! Canary, call out!"

"Black Canary! Black Canary!" Cass echoed. 

A sudden flash of noise seemed to cut in front of Jason, the reverberation breaking off the corner of a piece of stone lying in front of him. Two more quick bursts followed.

Jason turned quickly towards the trajectory's origin and saw a flash of blonde some feet ahead of him. 

"Canary!" 

Jason scrambled over to help the downed hero. When he drew up close, he found that she was pinned quite severely, though she didn't seem to be seriously injured. Rubble was piled atop her midsection, both arms, one leg, and her hair was pinned beneath a support beam so that Dinah was stuck screaming towards one direction, her head stuck cocked at one cramped angle.

"Over here, I found her!"

He leaned forward to first free her head and hair, brushing dust and pebbles off of Dinah's forehead and away from her eyes, nose, and mouth. 

"What the fuck just happened, Hood?" she coughed out.

"Crow knew we were coming, he signaled someone to blow the tunnel."

"Where is he?"

"Not sure."

"The others? Is everyone okay?"

"They're just over there. No critical injuries. Now shut up for a second so I can get this shit off you."

He worked quick and methodically, moving rubble starting from her core and fanning out until she had better range of movement. Cass showed up on Dinah's other side and began bailing her out as well. 

"I have coms! I think!" Helena suddenly yelled over from the group. "Anyone have eyes on Scarecrow?!"

"Yo, you got her?" Jason asked Cass.

She nodded, her head bobbing in jerky almost panicked movements rather than her normally smooth liquidate motion.

Jason turned in a circle, turning on his helmet's radar to parse through the multilayered mess the bomb had turned the room into. The overlay revealed huddled heat signatures in a few places, but they seemed to indicate fallout from the explosion rather than body heat. 

"I don't see him, can you contact Oracle yet? Is the drone still operational?"

"One sec."

At his shoulder, Dinah and Cass walked over to join him. Dinah clapped Jason on the shoulder to thank him before smoothly gliding past to join Batwoman and the others. She knelt down next to Renee as Helena continued to try to get someone on the comm line.

"Damn. Something was coming through the static, but now it's gone."

Jason shook his head. "We need to find Scarecrow. Do the others even know he set off an explosion?"

"They have to. They have our location, they know we aren't online or responsive, and the drone was sending footage. Are you oriented, do you think we can find our way out without communication?"

"Yeah, I think so. My tech has a copy of the map downloaded, offline. I'm worried that we can't find Scarecrow, though -- he was literally over my shoulder, I'm not sure where he went but he was definitely secured hand and foot."

"Worried like he's dead? Or someone else down here freed him?" Cass asked. 

"Either. Both."

"Let's decide on a course out of here as we look," Kate commanded. She was helping a shakey, half-lidded Renee to her feet. "We were about a mile out from the exit, right? It looks like the collapse is traversable, I think the best option is to force our way through and make our way to the intended exit."

"Why not try doubling back? We'd get out faster without having to clean up debris," Dinah countered. "We can exit where our team entered."

"I'm worried the explosion was meant to corral us back that way, though. We don't want to panic and end up further down in the system, further away from any exits."

Helena nodded. "Good point."

Cass suddenly raised her hand to quiet the others. "There's slight movement a few yards that way," she whispered, pointing over Jason and Helena's shoulders. "Could be Scarecrow."

The others shifted uneasily; Jason itched to turn around and look. 

"Facing us?" He asked her.

She shook her head in a noncommittal 'can't tell' motion. 

"It's too cramped for him to make a quick exit, I'm going for him, the shit can't run away."

"We're backing you," Dinah confirmed, and Kate nodded her head in agreement. Jason flashed a hand signal indicating he would take the center, Dinah and Kate taking Left and Cass flanking Right. Helena stayed back with Renee, still fiddling with the coms in her ear and the tech built into her suit on her good arm. Renee, though shaky, steeled herself and also began running diagnostics on her own devices.

They all nodded at each other, a quick and confident and silent 'see you later.'

Kate counted down, and as a unit the four on offense surged forward to rush the shadowed figure.

"Hey fuckface!" Jason roared as they rounded some rubble to confront the figure. They weren't running in case it was a trap, were staying on their toes, and when they were seven feet from him the group collectively paused just in case. "How the hell did you get loose?"

The figure turned at the taunt.

It was Scarecrow. Scarecrow as Jason had never seen him before, which was really fucking saying something.

His thumbs on both hands were hanging crooked and bruised from the now-frayed remnants of his bindings, ruddy-looking rivers of blood leaking down his wrists from the wires tearing at his skin when he tried to get free. The man was smiling an eerie, unhinged sort of grin.

Not unhinged, actually, Jason mused as they stepped closer. It was... relieved. The smile of someone reaching the finish line. Someone who felt accomplished, or fulfilled, in some way Jason had never known Jonathan Crane to look. Fear was never-ending, Scarecrow always working forward towards it; he had never seemed this collected in all of Jason's run-ins over the years.

"Welcome, welcome, welcome." 

"Come with us willingly, and we'll get you treatment for that," Kate called out, addressing his broken bloodied hands. 

"Treatment?" Scarecrow looked confused, then brought his hands up to inspect them. In languid, unhurried movements, he met his two hands in the middle to grab at opposite thumbs and bent at the broken origin where his left thumb met his wrist, twisting, phantom crunches rebounding in Jason's ears as he watched what was surely a catastrophic, not-coming-back-from-that, there-goes-his-thumb sort of injury. 

"Stop!" Cass yelled out, her and Dinah surging forward, but Kate raised a hand to hold them all back. 

"The pain is... exquisite," Scarecrow mused aloud, raising his eyes from examining his hands up to meet the heroes. His pupils had grown to overtake the irises. With a sickeningly audible cracking noise, he bent his thumb one final time so that it was wrenched like a lightning bolt, perpendicular to the socket.

"I really meant what I said the other night, you know. This isn't some agenda for me. The fear is real, to me for me within me around me. It's freeing, to escape into it, to go somewhere of your own un-free will. I love it, and I really really do want to share it with you. That wasn't a threat, and it wasn't empty. I... want. I want it, I want it for me, I want it for you, for Gotham. They're helping me give it to all of you. Isn't that amazing?"

'This is a new level of insanity for him,' Jason thought to himself. The man was raving, was almost lucid (or at least active) in his decision to fully embrace the fracture.

Jason glanced sidelong at the others, their similar thoughts reflecting back through their eyes.

"Who? Who is helping you?" Kate asked, again taking the lead. 

"They've been here.. so long." 

Scarecrow paused, looking not at Jason but beyond him, beyond the group facing down the man's deranged devolving ramblings. 

"I'm finally free. It's not invading me anymore. The fear isn't coming in. It's here, it's filled in all my cracks. Can you believe it?"

"This is really fucking not good..." Dinah muttered under her breath to the others.

Jason was getting antsy -- was this a loose thread of non-thoughts compulsively vomited from Crane's mind, or a monologue ramping up to its finale?

"He's very sick," Cass offered, echoing the sentiment of oh shit they all were feeling. "His shaking.."

"Crane, we're listening. Tell us what's going on, come on," Jason offered, the gruffness still there despite Jason's menace losing its footing. 

"The shadows of Gotham have all bled together. We're learning all of its secrets. I was chosen. I can choose too, now. I can share it all."

"Who?!" Jason bellowed. He was losing his patience. 

Kate took a miniscule step forward, both hands up in a placating gesture. "What secrets? In the tunnels?"

Scarecrow's eyes pulled focus then, landing on Kate.

"Hushhhh. Quiet now."

He stepped forward, a small step to match Kate's.

"Jones found it. Can you believe that? Waylon was swimming deeper and deeper below our Earth, and Gotham brought him to its center. These tunnels, they've been used. They are the veins pumping blood throughout Gotham. He saw the light and brought it with him to Arkham. It spread there like a virus. We all were welcomed to work down in the tunnels, work, divine in its intent. I've been so silly all these years, making new goals, all without real purpose. But now I know the fear was serving something else, and I've crafted it into that something else."

"What's in the tunnels?" Kate repeated. 

"Got closed circuit coms back, working to spread the signal," Helena's voice suddenly whispered in Jason's ear. The others jerked in acknowledgement. 

"Get an exit ready right fucking now," Jason responded. 

"

Chapter Text

UPDATE!!! 

I AM PLANNING TO RESTART THIS FIC FROM THE BEGINNING WITH A MORE REALIZED OUTLINE -- I WILL LINK THE NEW FIC HERE IN A NEW CHAPTER ONCE I DO, BUT FOR NOW THIS FIC IS ENDING SO I CAN WORK OUT ALL THE PROBLEMS I'VE BEEN TRYING TO TROUBLESHOOT CHAPTER-BY-CHAPTER. 

WATCH THIS SPACE (LOL) FOR UPDATES AND ANNOUNCEMENTS! THANK YOU!! <3