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lurkinglurkerwholurks · 2 years

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Whumptober prompts fulfilled listed at the end.

His hands are red to the wrists, like he has dunked them in a bucket of paint. Blood pours from the lacerations, but he can’t feel any pain. He can’t feel anything at all.

Dev stares at his fingers, willing them to move. They don’t. He can see them, those pieces of himself he knows so well, can make out the sparse black tufts of hair plastered flat to the knuckle beneath the red. Still, nothing.

Somewhere in the back of his head, a shrill voice suspiciously like his own screams that he needs to move. There is something he is supposed to be doing. Danger he is supposed to be fleeing. Dev turns over his dead hand to stare at the palm instead.

“Yeah. Yeah, I got him,” says a voice off to the right.

It should startle him. Dev continues to stare at his hand. Maybe if he focuses just on the tip of his index, he can get it to twitch. He should at least try to stanch the bleeding.

“Dev?”

A figure stands between him and the flickering streetlight, far enough away not to crowd, close enough to loom.

“Dev?” the figure says again, stepping closer. “Whose blood is that?”

Dev tilts his chin just enough to bring the man into his middle periphery. Nightwing. Of course. He knows that voice. Dick, though he mustn’t call him that here, out in the open.

“Is someone hurt?”

Someone is hurt. That’s right. Someone is hurt and he can’t move his hands. The zip-ties. He can’t get the zip-ties off. Can’t—too tight. Can’t—he might bleed to death. Is bleeding still.

Nightwing takes another step forward, then pivots away again, looking for the injured party. Dev should help. He considers standing, then discards the idea without trying. His legs are as numb as his hands. He looks down and is relieved to see no zip-ties on his legs. That’s something.

Nightwing is speaking again. Dev isn’t listening. That feeling is building in him again, of danger and alarm. Is he supposed to be helping someone? How can he, with purple-swollen fingers and hands dipped in his own blood?

… It is his blood, isn’t it?

Dev blinks and tries to focus on his hands again. When did he grow so many fingers?

“Yeah, I don’t know, I don’t see anyone else. She didn’t say anything else?” Nightwing asks, nonsensically.

There’s a snick at the edge of his hearing, like a latch, like a… like a knife being flicked open.

“—blood all over his hands but I don’t see anyone. Ask Jay—”

Jason. Zsasz.

Dev is on his feet, staggering toward Nightwing as the asphalt rolls beneath him.

“I think you should—whoa!”

Gloved hands catch him, brace him up even as Dev scrabbles slippery hands for purchase against Nightwing’s uniform.

“J—Hood,” he rasps, mouth dry as cotton. “He has him. He has him, I—”

“Who?” Nightwing’s voice is pitched low, firm but soothing, the Wayne way of addressing the panicked and insane. He echoes when he speaks, like talking into a barrel of water.

Dev isn’t a victim. They need to find Jason. They need to find Jason Wayne right now before blood bags and clamps won’t be enough.

Dev wrenches away from Nightwing and stumbles in the direction of the alley’s opening. He needs feeling in his hands, his feet, but he will have to go without for now. That will be the next problem, once he finds the boy wherever he is currently bleeding out.

A hand catches his arm and Dev wrenches away. All goes black, then blinks back on in time for him to catch himself, hands crashing against the pavement. He can hear himself, mouth moving of its own accord—

“Zsasz, he’ll have—We’ve not long—Got to, got to—Tell Batman, Zsasz is waiting for, for—He’ll bleed out—Must get to him—These bloody zip-ties—”

He will get back on his feet if it was the last thing he does, because somewhere in the night, Jason Wayne is bleeding out from brachial lacerations and Dev will be damned if he lets that boy die.

He will not look Bruce Wayne in the eye and tell him he let his son die. Will not tell Timothy his brother died on his watch. Will not be the reason Alfred is made to mourn.

“—don’t know, he’s saying something about Zsasz, I don’t—” Nightwing is saying, voice no longer low and soothing. “His head—”

He is moving in blinks, like stop-motion with frames missing. He is on the ground, hands and knees smarting from impact, then meters away, then further still. He can see streetlights where the little side street meets the larger thoroughfare, but he can only look at their reflection off the sparkling glass fragments. The light itself stabs at his eyes and swirls in nauseating loops. Still, it is a direction to aim for.

Dick’s gloves are at his shoulders again, trying to stop him, steady him.

“Jason,” Dev rasps, code names abandoned. They are too hard to keep in his head. “Dying, he’s—cut off these ties, I can’t—”

“—covered in blood, Dev, what—”

Dev is tall and Dick is not, and it hardly matters because even with the aggression of fear and pain, Dev is a willow wand trying to shove past a brick wall, and he wishes he had paid more attention when Wayne taught him how to throw a punch or flip a man over his shoulder, because Jason is dying, it’s his blood, it’s Dev’s blood, he’s a doctor, he’s meant to stop it—

He blinks back the black and the black is still there.

“Dev,” says a new voice, as if it has been saying his name for a while now.

Dev squints up, out the one eye that can still see, at a thin-lipped Batman.

“Jason,” Dev pants, and is cut off.

“Is fine.” Wayne’s tone brooks no argument. “I can hear him on comms right now.”

“Zsasz,” Dev tries again.

“Is dead.”

Wayne has him pinched by the shoulders between two broad, gauntleted hands, bedrock in the sloshing sea that standing has become.

“—wound first,” Wayne is saying, lips a fraction out of sync with his voice. He has shifted his grip from supporting and seizing to guiding, moving Dev backward until his heels knock against curb.

“Sit.” And Dev is sitting, not because he’s told to but because his legs will no longer allow for the alternative.

There is shadow in his periphery, sweeping across his face to the side that is already dark. He flinches back, but Wayne catches his chin and holds him still as something presses to his forehead.

“Packing.”

That’s a word he knows, the sensation settling into place a long, syrup-slow moment later.

Dev blinks, what feels like his first blink that’s not a dip into darkness in a very long time, and lifts a blood-soaked hand to his head. Wayne’s hand is already there, steady pressure against his frontal bone, and Dev’s fingertips trace the lines of his gloves, running down to where material meets flesh.

The hand that was holding his chin releases to catch those fingers, and then Dev’s hand is pressing the gauze, and Wayne’s hand is steady atop his.

“—need to get back to the Cave,” Wayne is saying, to him or Dick, Dev isn’t sure.

“Jason,” Dev says, because he can see the warehouse, Jason prone on the floor, face bloodied, wrists slashed. Are they outside the warehouse, then? This warped, funhouse space, are they outside? Zsasz jumped him from behind, hit him upside the head, his head aches—

Whoop, he is up, lifted from the curb into Batman’s arms, his own hand still pressed to his head.

“—ahead,” Wayne is saying to Dick. “Help Agent A prepare.”

Dev thinks he may vomit. May have already vomited before? His mouth tastes vile. A woman is at the intersection, arms crossed, watching them pass.

He is not in Batman’s arms but the backseat of the car, prone, familiar leather under his back. The streetlights fly by, casting flickering shadows on the ceiling that make him sick to look at. He closes his eyes.

The lights hurt even though some part of him recognizes that the Cave has been deliberately dimmed. Another ceiling he knows well, and Dev blinks up at its shadowy contours, wondering how long he has been here without realizing it.

Jason is the thought that sends him rocketing up, or would have, except for the straps across his chest. Dev claws at the plastic, and can see his hands are still covered in blood, but drying now, no longer crimson and fresh.

Wayne is standing over him, cowl gone, catching his hands. A touch on the other side makes Dev jump and twist, the wobbling vision in his one good eye looking long enough to catch Alfred on the other side, nimble fingers working at the straps, before turning back to Wayne.

“Wayne, listen, you have to—”

“Jason is fine,” Wayne interrupts, low tone an echo of Dick’s. “Jason?”

Alfred has undone enough that Dev has managed to prop himself up on one elbow, but he slumps back again when the thirdborn Wayne steps into view. Jason is unmasked though still in his Hood attire. He looks utterly grim, but not dead. The only speck of red on him is the bat splashed across his chest. There is no blood spatter on his face, no life-ending lacerations carved into his arms.

“I’m alright, Dev,” he says. He sounds like he’s been smoking. He sounds very young.

Dev sags back onto the table and closes his eyes.

When he opens them again, he is staring at the same ceiling, just a different portion. The nearby lights are off, the only visibility from far-off reflections at the other end of the Cave. Dev lifts a hand to his head and flinches at movement in his periphery.

“You here?” Wayne murmurs as he leans into view. There is only one of him now, though his edges are a little blurry. He is no longer in uniform but dressed in a navy Gotham Knights sweatshirt, reading glasses perched on his nose.

“Jay—” Dev begins, then stops when Wayne shifts in his chair and leans back so Dev can see across to the second cot, where a shape he recognizes as Jason lies curled, face barely visible beneath the pillow smashed over his head.

Dev goes limp and exhales. He has a vague recollection of asking before, of reassurance from various mouths, of Jason himself sitting in Wayne’s chair, awkwardly patting Dev’s arm. He wonders if this time will stick. He wonders why it hasn’t before.

Dev lifts a hand before his face and is relieved to see his own skin unmarred by blood, then lowers it to feel the edges of his own face.

“Careful,” Wayne murmurs, catching Dev’s wrist before he can prod too much. “Twelve stitches and a black eye. You’ll be hurting for a while yet. No skull fracture, though. You were fortunate.”

“What…” Dev stops, face contorting. His mouth tastes like death.

A cup of water appears, straw tapping against his lips until he parts them and takes a sip, then another.

He tries again once the cup has been set back on the bedside table. “What happened?”

“What do you remember?” Wayne asks instead, as Dev half-anticipated he would.

Dev thinks, then frowns in place of the headshake he dare not give. “I remember Dick. The little alley or lane, whatever it was. You showing up.”

“Nothing before?”

“Zsasz?” he asks tentatively, though by now he has pieced together context and his own fragmented memories of a morgue visit in the dead of night.

“Still dead,” and it sparks a satisfied kind of warmth in Dev’s chest that Wayne can say so with a wry upturn to one side of his mouth. But it also means that Dev has no more pieces to add to the puzzle of his night.

Wayne nods, as if that is what he expected. He was sitting forward, elbows planted on his knees, hands collapsed, but now he sits back again. Dev can see both him and Jason slumbering beyond from where he lies.

“We pulled footage from your apartment,” Wayne begins, and his tone is conciliatory, if not apologetic. Dev doesn’t mind. The devices were meant for emergencies, and this seems to qualify.

“You left your apartment just after 1 AM. You seemed distracted, but nothing too concerning.” No massive head wound, then. No hands coated in blood. “You wandered a bit. We were able to follow you via street cams until you got to St. Marks. The surveillance camera was broken the night before. It was a blind spot.”

Wayne’s voice had dipped, a bit of edge and gravel creeping into the underside of his tone.

“Not a coincidence?” Dev surmised.

Wayne shook his head. “We think you were mugged.”

Mugged. Dev sat with the concept for a moment, then patted at his own pockets beneath the sheets.

“Your phone, keys, and wallet are missing,” Wayne explains, and Dev almost feels sorry for the criminal that will receive that steel bite. Almost. “You were either jumped or fought back. Nightwing found a brick covered in blood at the scene.”

Dev snorted despite himself, then grimaced at the pain that shot through his head. “Jumped, maybe. More likely couldn’t keep my sodding gob from mouthing off.” He had a pattern of that, letting his mouth run off with itself when under duress. It was a maladaptive habit.

Wayne grunts, conceding the point. “They kept to the blind spots. The next we see is you staggering to the next intersection.”

Dev lifts his hand again, flips it to study the back, then the palm. “I remember blood on my hands.”

“From your head,” Wayne agrees. “Where you were hit,” and here his hand lifts and ghosts into Dev’s blind spot, feather-light touch against the edges of the bandage, “the wound isn’t visible from your right side.”

That explained some things.

“Jason got a call from a mutual contact who said you were wandering down Tenbruck, blood on your hands, muttering to yourself about getting help.”

“Mutual contact?” Dev echoes.

Wayne, uncharacteristically, hesitates. “Apparently someone recognized you as an acquaintance of Red Hood. Something about fish tacos?”

Despite his lingering nausea, Dev’s mouth salivates. He still mourns the loss of those tacos.

“Nightwing was closest, so he arrived on scene first,” Wayne was saying, and Dev forces himself to focus on the matter at hand. “Your right side was to him, and he only saw blood on your hands.”

“So he assumed someone else had been injured,” Dev finishes for him.

Wayne nods. “Up until you lunged at him like an extra in a horror movie.”

Dev cringes, picturing it. “Sodding bad job, that.”

“You left us all feeling… unsettled,” Wayne admits quietly. Dev glances at him, and his face is grave. “CT scan shows no permanent damage, but we’ll do a second MRI in a few weeks to compare with the one from tonight, to be sure.”

Dev would have expected nothing less, though it is a relief to hear that both scans were done and that the CT showed nothing. He can’t help squinting, the concussion leaving a distortion to his vision even in the dim light, but he lifts a hand again and stares at it.

“Couldn’t feel my hands,” he murmurs, almost to himself, but loud enough for Wayne to catch. “Shock, most likely, but I… I saw zip-ties.”

A hallucination, a fragmentary image brought on by head trauma and… A not-quite-memory, less image than emotion, flickers.

“I think I had a nightmare,” Dev says. “I think that’s why I left the flat.”

He still can’t actually remember leaving or the mugging itself. Everything before Nightwing’s arrival is a blank. It might always be; such is the way with head trauma. And he’s not certain about the nightmare either, but it feels right.

“Zsasz?” Wayne asks.

“Zsasz,” Dev agrees. He’d had nightmares for months after the attack, a putrifying mish-mash of what had happened and what might have happened. Jason had nearly bled out. Dev had nearly died at the hand of a maniac with a blade fetish, potentially one of the top five worst fetishes, in Dev’s biased opinion. And Dev had come close to losing utility of his hands, his one reliable tool, the one part of him that made a difference.

His hands still feel cold and wooden—again, likely the comedown of shock—but it’s too close to how they had felt in the warehouse. Dev flexes his fingers and cracks his wrists, just to feel the movement of them, to verify that he could.

Wayne’s hands settle atop his, warm, calloused skin enveloping cold fingers in heat.

“I didn’t realize you were still having nightmares about that. I’m sorry.”

Dev tried to flutter a hand dismissively, but his were still being held, and he didn’t want that to change, so instead he gave a small shake of his head. “M’not on the regular. Just a fluke, I suppose.”

He has little emotional privacy left with this lot, but Dev still feels compelled to clear his throat and change the subject. “Taking shifts, then?” he asks, tipping his chin slightly in Jason’s direction.

Wayne’s expression doesn’t change so much as soften around the edges into something Dev has come to read as fond. “Alfred will be down later to take my spot. Jason decided to stay close. You weren’t retaining much for the first few hours.”

Blathering like a madman and reliving one of the worst nights of all their lives on loop, that’s what that meant.

Wayne must have noticed some of Dev’s chagrin, because he gave a small shake of his head. “He wanted to stay close. He…” Wayne considers the right words, letting them form fully in his mouth before admitting in an even quieter voice, “He was more shaken up than he’d like to admit, seeing you hurt.”

The details are too fuzzy to make out right now, but Dev knows, beneath the shadow of the pillow and the sheets wrapped up to Jason’s chin, pink scars that will continue to heal but never fully disappear. Dev has a few of his own—and now, he realizes, a new one to add to the collection. Bloody fucking mugger.

Wayne flicks his gaze beyond Dev, toward the blind side of his vision blocked by his swollen eye and the bandages taped to his head. “Tim’s on the other cot. Damian and Cass would be down here, too, but Dick and Alfre managed to convince them that you would be overwhelmed if everyone were down here when you woke.”

He would be, too. He loves them, all of them, but they are a force en masse, and Dev is too accustomed to recovering in solitude. That he is already flanked on either side by Timothy and Jason, unwilling to leave him to himself, like bodyguards of the physical and mental kind, is nearly too much to ponder.

Dev swallows around the lump in his throat and croaks. “I’ll need to inform security at the hospital about my passkey. And my bank. And—”

Just thinking about the many steps needed to reorder his life makes the ache in his head deepen, but Wayne’s hands tighten slightly around his, and Dev’s list retreats into his throat.

“We’ll take care of it,” Wayne promises. Dev didn’t doubt that he would.

Well. All that was left to do was rest, then.

“Alfie will be down later, you said?” Dev asks around a yawn.

“Yes.” One hand lifts long enough to brush hair back from Dev’s forehead, blunt fingertips drawing across his skin, before returning to the bedside.

Dev hums, eyes drifting shut. “And you’ll be here ‘til then?”

“Yes.”

Then that’s alright. There isn’t a bogey living or dead that can best Batman. Dev doesn’t realize he’s said so aloud until Bruce chuckles, a rich, dark sound from the back of his throat.

“Bugger concussion,” Dev mutters, embarrassed.

“Sleep, Kiran,” he’s told, and since Batman is the one telling, he does.

———

Whumptober prompts fulfilled: alt3 (dazed and confused), alt5 (ambushed), no.4 (hidden injury), no7. (silent panic attack), no8. (head trauma), no15. (new scars), no19. (repeatedly passing out), no20. (going into shock), no23. (tied to a table), no24. (blood-covered hands), no27. (stumbling), no28. (headache), no.31 (bedside vigil)

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