metalogs | all that's done and gone and passed tonight (mix of open and closed)

Entry tags:

all that's done and gone and passed tonight (mix of open and closed)

Who: Tim Drake

overlyprecocious and friends
What: Tim is Coping and it's fine
When: late January, after the Hunger Games mostly
Where: Central City mostly. and Sky High.
Content Warnings: a little trauma related to being kidnapped into space by aliens (twice!! thanks, canon), a lot of anxiety, some unhealthy coping mechanisms like food hoarding and vigilantism

It's not like Tim is traumatized by his experience in the survival games. If anything, he's relieved that he was snagged by the aliens and not, say, a hapless seven-year-old. He has survival training, he has a magic restocking utility belt, he has family he was able to meet up with and work with. It was easy for him, comparatively speaking. It just - being kidnapped to space made him even more aware of the metaphorical sword of Damocles already hanging over his head whenever a Confluence finally brings him back home again. There's an extra cruel sting to being reminded that he's not even safe from being randomly yanked from his home and sent back into danger outside of Confluences.

Being more active as Robin is a reasonable precaution. He was already caught off guard once, and thankfully he at least had a minimum of supplies on him and the utility belt even if he didn't have the benefit of the full Robin suit. What he has on him here won't do him much good when he's yanked back home, but at least he's more prepared for anything that happens in this reality when he's suited up.

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In the far corner of the gas station, hidden from those up at the cash by the position of the shelves, Nico was concentrating on loading up a slurpee cup with alternating layers of blue razzberry and cherry. He missed the people coming in, or rather didn’t care to look when he heard the door open.

But now that it’s lidded, he turns and stops, mouth half open around the straw. He can see three heads in ski masks and one hand sticks out past the aisle, a gun at a familiar red-and-black hero.

Um. No?!

Nico summons his sword to his left hand and hucks the slurpee at the tallest head before running into what is about to be the fray.

Robin has roughly less than a second to recognize that a slurpee and a sword have entered the scene, and both are being wielded by someone who Tim is absolutely not talking to again if he gets shot when Tim already had this. He'll yell at Nico later, though, because right now he's rushing into action to disarm everyone before someone gets shot or stabbed.

"Okay, this is all really unnecessary!" he calls out, hypothetically to the robbers still (like the one whose wrist might have just been broken in the process of removing his gun, but he should have thought about that being bringing a gun into this) but really to the demigod charging with a sword right now.

The robber at the end of the aisle - who isn’t the slurpee victim - has the sense to turn towards the slurpee machine with his gun drawn.

Nico drops to a knee slide as the gun goes off. RIP blue razzberry, which is now spraying half the store in neon sugar as the machine continues to churn despite the cracks in the casing.

The demigod punches Smart Guy in the nuts and melts into the shadow he casts. The second shot leaves a smoking bullet embedded in the linoleum where Nico just was.

Tim is absolutely going to have a heart attack as a result of this fight. He hates this, he hates having an armed but un-armored friend running rampant in the middle of a fight. And it's not like he and Nico have teamed up in a fight very often before, so his ability to predict what Nico's going to do is hampered. The sheer panic when the gun goes off and hits where Nico was just a second ago distracts him just long enough that he loses track of one of the guys, and another gun is fired.

It hits.

It takes Tim a moment to realize it hit him, and he honestly feels relief for a second that it wasn't one of the civilians who got hurt because he wasn't doing his job well enough, and it wasn't Nico being found at the other end of the shadow he traveled through. The body armor does what it's supposed to do, it stops the bullet from penetrating skin, and it's going to hurt later but for now he spins around to let the shooter know that wasn't very nice.

Nico’s gone for less than two seconds. He jumps out of the shadow a Doritos display, bringing the pommel of his sword down on Slurpee’s head so hard that the man instantly crumbles to the floor.

And somewhere in that moment, there’s another gunshot.

And Robin’s body jerks with the impact.

“Robin!” Nico doesn’t stop to think, only whirls with both hands guiding his blade. The wicked sharp sword lops the shooter’s forearm clean off, who screams in pain and tries to grab at Nico with his stump.

A black cacodemon jumps out of Nico’s and nips onto the man’s elbow. Screaming gives way to sobs like the flip of a switch, but the son of Hades is kicking the head of Smart Guy into one of the metal aisle shelves to make sure he stays down. “Robin?”

It's one thing to know that your friend is trained in wartime battle and his fighting experience is pretty much all life-or-death stakes.

It's another thing to watch him lop someone's arm off.

He's in the midst of calling out to Nico that he's okay when it actually hits that Nico cut a man's arm off. Luckily, the last guy standing with a gun is in shock, long enough that Tim's able to disarm him before he does something stupid like shoot at Nico, and then he's doing a quick scan of the surroundings for the nearest item that could be turned into a tourniquet before someone bleeds out.

Tim gets to the last one before Nico does, which is probably good for the thief. As it is, Nico hits him in the forehead with the flat of his blade, sending the guy staggering for the door.

And that’s all the time he wants to waste. Demigods don’t use guns - at least most don’t - but he’s still aware of how much damage they can do. He rushes over to the vigilante and pulls at his arm, although he’s not sure if he should get him moving or just teleport him out. He’s scared if he doesn’t land them in a hospital on the first try, he might not get his friend there. “C’mon, what are you doing? We need to go.”

Annoyingly, the simplest and fastest thing they can use as a tourniquet is Nico's belt, which is why Tim is just quickly stealing that and passing it to the person who looks least shell-shocked. "Make a tourniquet so he won't bleed out," he instructs, but something tells him Nico's not going to give him long enough to see through making sure it happens. They do need to get out of there before any serious authorities show up asking questions like what happened and how many arms did that man have a minute ago.

Nico’s had enough. Tim’s hurt, and he’s giving them first aid?! Hades no. He grabs Tim - Robin - whatever and hoists him into a fireman’s carry so he can’t offer anyone else a Band-aid. He takes the first shadow he finds to the place where he knows helll find backup: Jason, Dylan’s and Sleeper’s penthouse.

“JASON!” The shout is abrupt, loud, and on the verge of panic. Nico stumbles over to deposit Tim on the couch. Some of the arterial spray has transferred from Nico to Tim, but he hasn’t gotten a good look at himself to see the dark red blood across his black clothes. It’s only really visible on the white skull graphic and the yellow of Tim’s uniform. “JASON! Tim’s been shot!”

This is bad deja vu to a cold night last year. Another friend shot. Tim will be fine. He’s not going anywhere.

Jason was having a rare night of restfully sleeping early when he's jerked awake by Nico's yell. Upon hearing the teenager's panicked voice, Jason's training kicks in and he immediately gets up and runs to check.

He's shocked to see the bloodstains but maintains his cool. The boys need him and that's much more important than freaking out.

"How bad?" He asks as he reaches for a first-aid kit stashed in a cabinet.

"It's not that bad," Tim says, still kind of in shock from the whole. Everything. And being dragged out of the convenience store by Nico like he's a medical emergency. It didn't even occur to him what Nico was freaking out over until he started yelling for Jason.

He glances down at his own chest reflexively and is startled that there's blood there - did the bullet actually go through? It's starting to hurt, but not actually shot bad. He's pretty sure. "I don't think? I think it hit the armor."

“He got shot with a gun,” Nico interjects. The demigod is uncertain if the bullet is better or worse than an arrow, but it seems to carry more weight. And Tim isn’t allowed to downplay this when it is kinda that bad. “But I don’t sense death around him.”

Nico wipes some of the blood cooling on his face onto his sleeve. “A gang was robbing the convenience store near the bar.”

Jason sets the first aid kit to the side and goes to check Tim's armor. He knows that the types of body armor the BatFamily wear are meant to lessen gunshot wounds but it was still best to assess the damage first.

"How'd the fight go? This is a lot of blood but it's not either of yours," he says.

Mentally, he's relieved to see the bullet didn't go into Tim's flesh.

"Nico disarmed someone," Tim says because he's still kind of in shock, and there's only one true way for a Robin to deal with that. (Puns. The answer is puns.)

He starts carefully removing the upper portion of his uniform so they can both see what the damage is. At least Jason's confirming that it doesn't look like the bullet went through.

“They aren’t going to rob the store anymore,” Nico says flatly. He… actually isn’t sure about. The last one had looked spooked, and if he has any brains he’ll leave. “Tim gave them my belt for a tourniquet.”

Jason furrows his brow as he looks over where the bullet landed. Judging by the bloodstains and knowing how different Tim and Nico are when it comes to self-defense and fighting, he's starting to get a mental picture of what really happened.

"Yeah, limb loss usually does that to a goon," he says. "I'm glad you two aren't more seriously hurt."

Jason's sympathy for robbers is very limited, especially when kids could've gotten hurt.

"Likely there's gonna be a bruise but the armor did its job."

"It's not that bad," Tim repeats. Okay, it's probably going to be a bad bruise because bullets do hurt even when they don't get through the skin. "No one needed to lose an arm."

That stung. Nico hadn’t set about to cause permanent damage, but guns kill faster and more dispassionately than swords.

“He already shot you once,” Nico says icily. If the man did it once, he’d do it again. And next time he’d have aimed for the head. “I knocked the other two out. I had to make sure I could get you here. You wanted me to skeletons and crack open pits or spear him on a stalagmite? With what time?! - he was between me and you and he had a gun. I had an opening, and I didn’t kill him! I could have judged him for my father and I didn’t. I’m sorry he lost a hand, but I’m not sorry he didn’t shoot you again.”

“What’s done is done,” Jason adds. “It sounds like there was only a moment to decide before someone else got hurt.”

He understands why Tim is upset but he also understands where Nico is coming from. Jason and Nico were both present when Hunter got shot and he wouldn’t be surprised if tonight reminded Nico too much of that incident.

“What’s more important is that neither of you are hurt.”

He thinks about saying you didn't need to run in with a sword, but that's just needlessly accusatory, and really? It's not like he can blame Nico for running into the situation with the weapon he was trained with.

He can blame himself instead. "I should have controlled the situation better."

A demigod with a three foot hand-and-half sword is usually enough to make people reconsider their choices. Not change what they’re doing, but at least think about it.

Nico sits on the arm of the couch and digs his hands into the his thighs. “The situation was controlled, and you’re not dead. You didn’t hurt anyone. I did, and I’m okay with that because you’re still here to lecture me about it, Drake.”

“Tim, you know as well as I do that you can’t control everything all the time,” Jason says patiently. As far as he’s concerned, there’s no one to blame except the people who were dumb enough to think it was a good idea to try to rob a place. “Sometimes, things just happen despite all the preparations and training.”

Jason hopes that the Bruce from Tim’s world was decent enough to tell the teenager that much at least.

"I still could have handled it better," he mutters. Because that's what's really important here, maybe. (There's a lot of things he should have handled better. The fact that he's not sure how he could have managed it is not the point.)

“Then next time you can handle it, and if you die, I’ll make you miserable as long as I am!”

Nico’s on his feet again, shouting and waving his hands inches away from Tim’s face. “I’ll drag your spirit up every night and not let you leave until I say and you won’t be able to do anything about it because you’re an imbecile! And your ghost will be even dumber!”

"Nico, we were taught to be prepared for anything at all times," Jason says, standing up. He's ready get in between the boys if needed. "Realistically, that's not possible but it's a mentality we all wound up with and it's hard to ignore sometimes. But thank you for helping tonight."

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