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Jason wakes up with his mouth dry and his head aching. Not his favorite way to start a day, but not cause for alarm until a sleepy attempt to rub his eyes is jerked to a halt with the rattle of metal. That has him wide awake instantly, assessing the situation. He’s laying on his side on a bare concrete floor, hands cuffed and chained to a metal plate fixed to the floor in front of him. His legs are cuffed together too, but there’s no matching plate for them. Could be promising. His helmet is gone, but he can still feel the domino he wears beneath in place. His surroundings look like an empty warehouse—not his favorite kind of place to be. Looking around, he finds the red glint of his helmet sitting in a small pile with his weapons on a crate in the center of the room. There’s a crack in it he doesn’t recognize.
He thinks back, trying to put together how he got here. He was meeting an informant to get a report on a new trafficking operation, but the guy never showed. He remembers waiting at the meeting point, an alley behind a restaurant that had been closed down for failing health inspections. He doesn’t remember leaving the alley. That bastard must have betrayed him, and whoever he’d snitched to had got the jump on Jason. People will pay for that when he gets out of here.
And if whoever caught him was stupid enough to leave him unguarded here, he’s not going to stick around. He starts inspecting and testing his bonds, searching for a weakness. The cuffs on his hands are tight enough that he can feel his fingers tingling when he flexes them, so no chance of slipping out of those, even if he dislocated his thumbs. The length of chain between them and the plate isn’t long enough to be useful. It’s so short that sitting up is a hassle, but he manages. Maybe he can target the bolts of the plate in the floor, he thinks, reaching out to test for looseness-
Something beeps, and he freezes for a moment before looking around for the source of the sound. It’s- there’s a bomb, with a timer that must have just started counting down, it’s sitting there on the crate with his things, how could he have missed it? Less than an hour left. He has to get out of here, he can’t do this again, he won’t get a third chance at life (couldn’t handle another round of fresh Pit madness if he did).
It feels like his thoughts are racing too fast to catch hold of and dragging like molasses at the same time. He forces himself to evaluate again–can’t slip the cuffs, check the short chain for any weakness (none), try to untwist the bolts of the metal plate by hand (too tight), no weapons no gear no one knows he’s here no one is coming just like last time-
He loses a few precious minutes thrashing in a blind panic before he regains control of himself. Whoever chained him up and took his stuff didn’t remove his boots, his jacket, any of his armor. Maybe they missed something, some miracle gadget that’ll get him out. He contorts himself trying to feel each and every pocket and sheath and hidden zipper across his whole body. They didn’t take everything, but nothing they left him is useful. He can’t use bandages or lollipops to break out.
He forces a deep breath through gritted teeth, then another, before letting his head tilt back to knock into the wall. It jars something in his ear, and he jerks at the chain again trying to reach up on reflex. The backup comm unit! His main communications array is in his helmet, but he has a piddly little mini-unit in his ear for when he uses the helmet as a bomb (sitting here now, he wonders why he’d ever thought that was a good idea).
He has to bend in half to bring his head low enough for his bound hands to reach, but he taps the button to turn on the comm, and it chirps to signify connection before filling his ear with the chatter of the Bats.
“-telling you, you’d be Leonardo, and I’d be Donatello. We even have the same-“
“Hey.” Jason cuts Red Robin off, and the line goes quiet. “I-I need an extraction.”
“Where?” Oracle responds instantly, and he abruptly realizes he doesn’t know.
“I don’t know, a warehouse. I wasn’t conscious for the trip here.” He can’t seem to stop staring at the red numbers on the timer. “There’s… there’s a bomb.”
There’s some sort of choked-off exclamation on the line, but Oracle stays professional.
“I don’t have any trackers on you, I need you to give me your last known location and any hints you have on your current one.”
He gives her the address of the restaurant and its back alley, the details of who he was meeting and why, but he doesn’t have any clue where this warehouse is.
“Okay. I’ll check cameras in the area and send teams out to start searching.” She gives orders to the others rapid-fire, but he can’t focus on who’s going where right now.
“Hurry.” He says, dry throat turning the word into a croak. “Please.”
“We’re coming, Hood.” Batman promises, but that’s what he’d thought last time, too. He can practically hear the laughter ringing in his ears, feel the crack of bone under the crowbar.
“Forty five minutes.” He reports distantly. More time than he’d had then, and maybe that’s worse, to sit here and watch the end come rather than just barely grasp that it’s over in the final seconds. Which hurts more? A, or B?
“Can- can someone talk to me?”
“I was just telling Nightwing that if we were the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, he would be Leonardo. I would be Donatello, of course.” Red Robin starts rambling, but there’s a nervous edge to it. “You’d be Raphael, and I guess that makes B Splinter.”
“Who’s uh…” It takes him an embarrassingly long time to come up with the last turtle’s name. “Michelangelo?”
“I don’t know, I’m not sure anyone fits his personality. But if this were, like, a group costume, we could just make Robin wear the orange headband to complete the set.”
“I am not familiar with these turtles, but I can still tell I wouldn’t agree to that.” Robin huffs disdainfully.
They keep up the mindless chatter, Nightwing stepping in when Red Robin runs out of things to say. Jason’s not really taking most of it in, but it keeps the echoes of the past at bay. They’re interrupted occasionally by reports of the Bats clearing different possible locations, or by Oracle redirecting them. The timer passes forty minutes, then thirty five.
“If…” Jason hesitates, but he’s not feeling very optimistic right now and he may as well make his wishes known, just in case. “If time runs out. Don’t put my fucking helmet on display in the Cave.”
“I won’t need to.” Batman’s voice is firm. “We’re coming for you. I’ll find you.”
“But what if you don’t?” It comes out plaintive, scared. “I can’t do this again.”
“Jason,” Bruce says, and he almost wants to make a crack about names on comms on pure reflex. “I’ll be there. Whatever it takes.”
“Please.” He whispers.
Time keeps passing at an agonizing crawl, each second ticking by twisting something in his chest tighter. Thirty minutes turns to twenty, to fifteen. The Bats must’ve cleared half the city by now, but what if he isn’t even in Gotham anymore?
At ten minutes the tension in him snaps and he feels tears welling up in his eyes. He can’t hear his siblings trying to distract him anymore, just the pounding of his own heart, the rush of his too-fast pulse in his ears. Maybe coming back was some kind of cosmic mistake, and this is the universe setting things straight, putting him back on a cold concrete floor to recreate his death so it sticks this time.
“-on, can you hear me? You’re okay, breathe with my count. In, two, three, four. Hold, two, three, four. Out, two, three, four.” Bruce repeats it until Jason’s gasping breaths start to match.
“Dad.” He sobs, and Bruce keeps promising he’s coming, that he’ll make it in time. The timer is blurry through his teary eyes, but no less inexorable in its progress. Five minutes. Maybe he should say some sort of goodbye, he thinks.
At three minutes there’s a sound like splintering wood from somewhere across the room, and the door flies open so hard that the bang of it hitting the wall makes him jump.
“Here!” Batman shouts, voice overlapping with its own echo on comm. “Nightwing, bomb!”
Nightwing hurries to the bomb, but Batman runs straight to Jason. He crashes to his knees in front of him and wraps him in his cape like he’s shielding him. As if he’d take the brunt of the blast if something goes wrong. The reversal of how things had been with Sheila makes that hurt, betrayed part of him that never truly went away twinge.
“Clear!” Nightwing calls, and then he’s kneeling with Batman, arms around both of them.
“We’re here, Little Wing, we’ve got you.” He murmurs shakily.
They cut the cuffs off him, and somewhere along the way the others arrive, Red Robin and Robin and Spoiler and Black Bat and even Signal up way past his bedtime, all hovering quietly in the background while Jason clings to Bruce. His wrists are chafed raw from the tight cuffs and all his struggling, his head still hurts, and he feels wrung out.
“I wanna go home.” He says, and Bruce stands with him still in his arms like it’s nothing, even though it can’t be good for his back.
“We will. All of us.”