Stuck In The Mud

[bungakertas]

Rating: PG-13
Warning(s): minor language, graphic violence
Pairing(s): slight Tim Drake/OFC
Disclaimer: “Batman” and all related characters and concepts are the property of DC Comics, Warner Brothers, or both. No money changed hands and no copyright infringement is intended or implied.
Summary: Serial murders in Gotham are not unusual. Making friends during the investigation is a bit new. Whether you can keep them when the investigation is over? Tim isn’t sure he’s old enough to have figured that one out yet.
Spoilers: Everything is fair game.
Continuity: Direct references to the Batman: The Animated Series episode "Growing Pains." I am assuming you have watched it and know how it goes. I am assuming you will not be confused by references to that episode that don't rehash the whole plot of it as a refresher.
Series: The DC Stories
Author's Notes: Unlike Timm and Dini, I do not have to write the level of violence down for the children in the audience. Expect dead people.

*~*~*

Tim was in someone’s kitchen.

Her name was Ana Josephine Garcia, thirty-two years old. Single. Worked in a small advertising firm. She was very dead.

He was here as Robin, because he would hardly be standing in some random dead lady's kitchen as Tim Drake, while Bruce was in the room with the body—her living room/den, it looked like—looking over the scene. Tim had taken advantage of the, completely predictable, ensuing argument with the police to poke around the dead woman’s house. He’d looped around through her bedroom, then her office, and finally wound up in her kitchen.

Her kitchen was fascinating. It was full of top-of-the-line baking equipment, more cookie-cutters than he’d seen in his life, ever—including the kitchen at Wayne Manor—had two ovens, both 100% functional, and one cabinet with a shelf that had been modified to have, like, eight more shelves, full of nothing but decorating tips. He felt like he was learning how to bake like a genius just standing by her kitchen island. She had pictures of cookies she’d decorated all over the place and they were all amazing. And all looked delicious. He opened her fridge and found, unsurprisingly, bowls of sugar cookie dough and white icing. He snitched a taste of both and had to close his eyes.

He had been right. They were delicious.

Okay, so obviously her baking and decorating skills were amazing. If she’d been a baker, he might’ve thought that could be a motive. Bumping off competition, maybe. But she wasn’t a baker, she was a girl at an ad firm and there was no indication she’d ever wanted to bake professionally. So, probably no motive there.

How had she managed to do those cookies with the little bee-hives on them? So cute.

Focus. Do not be distracted by adorable cookies.

And now Garcia was dead, so he wouldn’t get the chance to ask her anyway.

He heard raised voices from the other room, so probably Batman’s argument was moving into the final phase. Either they would come to blows, or the other person would back down.

“That’s enough!” came a new voice, not part of the argument. Tim knew that voice. Commissioner Gordon. He made his way back towards the body.

“Commish, there is no reason for the Bat-freak to be here!” snarled another voice Tim recognized.

Harvey Bullock, everyone’s least favorite detective, his position on the force justified only by the fact that he could close cases, looked totally ready to aim a punch at Bruce’s face. Tim was half-hoping he’d do it anyway so that he could film Bruce turning that jerk into a human pretzel and put the footage on YouTube.

He, Dick, and Barbara had their own channel where they posted the good clips of the truly epic fight footage that they’d managed to gather. …Okay, Tim posted the fight footage. Dick was more likely to upload clips of their occasional sparring on a roof for fun or some particularly acrobatic feat that he or Tim—or Bruce, if they could catch it—pulled off. Barbara tended to upload safety tips, instructional videos on basic self-defense actions (with demonstrations by Bruce, Dick, and Tim, of course), and profiles of Gotham’s high profile criminals with suggestions on how to use these profiles to talk them out of killing you, if possible.

Really, Barbara was the reason their channel got so many hits.

Still, if Bullock threw that punch, he was going to be an internet celebrity when the whole world got to watch Batman hand him his ass on a plate with an artistic parsley garnish.

“I invited Batman and Robin in to this investigation,” Gordon replied. “They’re here on my authority.”

Bullock turned his anger towards Gordon and started arguing with him, his inclination to start a fight with Batman over.

Tim huffed out a disappointed breath as the two men argued.

“Robin,” Bruce said quietly.

“What? I was just standing here! His own dumb actions are his own dumb fault,” Tim replied.

Bruce’s mouth started twitching and Tim tried not to let on how pleased that made him. “We’re going to have to talk about that YouTube channel,” was all Bruce said out loud.

“Spoilsport,” Tim returned without any hesitation. There was something remarkably freeing in being able to verbally spar with Batman and have no fear in it.

“—And if you’ve got a problem with that, I can always find a different detective who won’t,” Gordon was saying.

Bullock glared, but he looked away. Which, to Tim’s disappointment, brought that argument to a close without Bullock getting beat up by anybody.

Well, there was always next time.

“I appreciate the vote of confidence,” Bruce said to the commissioner, “but why did you invite us in?”

Gordon handed Batman a copy of a casefile. “This woman is the fourth in a string of murders across the city. Other than the fact that we found an identical note at each of the scenes, we can’t find a thing the victims have in common.”

Bruce took the file, flicking through it with a frown. “Robin, what do we know about this victim?”

“Lady’s name was Garcia. She was thirty-two years old and worked as a pencil-pusher in a mid-level office downtown,” Bullock shrugged. “She’s nobody.”

Bruce glanced up. “Is your name ‘Robin?’”

“Ana Josephine Garcia,” Tim said, fighting off a smile. At least someone else was getting the “kid in the room” treatment this time. “Thirty-two, wrote copy for a reasonably successful ad firm in Gotham City, though she did occasional freelance work online, no pets, may or may not have had a boyfriend, regular and active church attendee, and a very talented hobby baker and cookie decorator.”

“‘Regular church attendee?’” Bullock asked.

“Bulletins on the coffee table for the last three weeks of services,” Tim shrugged.

“What about the maybe-boyfriend?” That one came from Bruce.

“Looked like they hadn’t even made the first date,” Tim replied, “judging by her texting history. Unless he’s some kind of stalker, I don’t think that’s why she’s dead.”

“Baking?” Gordon said, apparently unable to stop himself.

“Her kitchen is amazing.” Tim looked to Bruce curiously. “What does the note say, anyway?”

“‘You should’ve stayed quiet.’” Bruce slid the casefile somewhere into his cape. Where it actually stayed. Tim knew there were pockets and hideaways all through the fabric, but even he had to admire the smooth way Bruce had of making things look like they vanished into thin air.

“But she was nice!” Tim burst out as they left the house to the police.

The same thing baffled him all throughout their patrol that night, on the ride home, and in the wee smalls of the morning when he was puzzling through the casefile in the cave.

“Garcia was just…nice,” Tim said, scrolling through her Instagram account filled with videos of her cookie decorations. It was a little hypnotic, watching sugar cookies turn into flowers, macaroons become three-dimensional hearts, and gingerbread men get dressed in elaborate pin-stripe suits.

“Nice people do, sometimes, get murdered,” Bruce said mildly, going through the case at his workstation next to Tim.

“Yeah, but crooks get murdered, like, twice that often,” Tim said. He held up his hand when Bruce frowned. “Look, my dad was a jerk. You don’t have to remind me bad guys like to target innocent people. But usually people don’t kill people without a motive. Killing someone is a lot of work. Why bother with it for some random person off the street? She’s not rich, she’s not having an affair with anybody, she’s paid all her library fines, and she makes pretty cookies! She’s just nice! There’s nothing about this woman that would make anybody mad enough to kill her.”

“Obviously there was or she wouldn’t be dead,” Bruce replied, “but you do have a point. The other victims have the same story.”

“Not just the same,” came Oracle’s voice from a speaker near the computer, “the other victims are even more boring. Well, vic number two is only equally normal. The other two, though?”

Tim scowled. He was working on memorizing faster, but he hadn’t gotten there yet.

Bruce took pity on him and started flipping through the victims. “Elaine Lee. Twenty-five. Independently wealthy, though she also has an income from selling books of her travel anecdotes. Also blogs about her travels.

“Tiffany Wendland. Fourty-five. Wife and mother of three children, the oldest is twelve. Mostly a stay-at-home mom, though she does generate a small income with her blog, mostly about parenting and children.

“Dominic Little. Fourty-eight. Husband, no children. Works at a fairly large accounting firm as head of the public relations department.”

“And Ana Garcia. Thirty-two. The nice cookie lady,” Tim said, scowling at the information on the screen.

“So, what do these people have in common, Oracle?” Bruce said.

“Digitally? Nothing,” Barbara replied. “Lee and Little shopped at the same grocery store a lot, but that’s because they both lived within a reasonable distance to it, though in different neighborhoods. There’s nothing to indicate they ever interacted at all. Garcia has an ebook copy of a book that Little bought a physical copy of ten years prior. And Lee, Wendland, and Garcia all share the favorite color of yellow.”

Bruce frowned. “That’s it?”

“These people didn’t hang out, Bruce,” Barbara said. “They didn’t spend time together, ever, at all, for any reason. They just don’t have that much in common.”

Tim sighed. “It’s probably something bad, isn’t it? Some kind of criminal thing they were all doing secretly. I hate it when it’s that.” He laid his head on the console in front of him.

Bruce reached over and ruffled his hair absentmindedly. “Whatever it is, we’ll figure it out better with a few hours of sleep.”

“I’ll sleep when you do,” Tim replied.

For an answer, Bruce saved his work and shut down his workstation. He turned to Tim and arched a brow.

“Fine. I didn’t want to work on this case anymore, anyway,” Tim grumbled.

“Very convincing, Boy Wonder,” Barbara said.

It was highly unlikely anyone at school would connect Tim’s activity with local murders, particularly given that these ones had not made the news, so Tim spent his spare moments at school going through the social media accounts of all of the victims, trying to connect them up somehow. Granted, everyone at school looked at him a little weird for scrolling through Elaine Lee’s hipster travel blog with decent amateur photos of the various places she’d visited, but they thought he was weird anyway, so that was okay.

He really needed some new friends.

By the time he was back home from school, he’d worked his way through Wendland’s snoozefest of a mommy-blog (one of her articles was actually titled “The Bitterest Of Sweets” and he had forced himself to read the whole schmoopy thing about how angsty and hard it was that children actually accomplished the shocking task of growing up over time), and poked around through Little’s Facebook and LinkedIn accounts, and was able to move into Ana Garcia’s Instagram feed.

When Bruce got home from work that day, he found Tim seated at the Batcomputer, watching a video of Garcia decorating a cookie to look like a beach with white foam on the waves and a little crab and a sand-dollar on it.

“What is this?” Bruce asked, sounding like he was thinking about being upset.

“Garcia’s Instagram feed,” Tim replied. “She was amazing! Even better than I thought in her house. Watch this one!”

Tim pulled up a video he’d set aside in its own tab where Garcia started off with an oval-shaped cookie that she drew a black batsignal on the center of. She filled in the rest of the cookie with gray icing, then outlined the batsignal and the edge of the cookie with yellow icing. She followed this with an oval that she decorated with Nightwing’s blue raptor head. The last one was a circle with Robin’s yellow R, this one with black filled in for the background, with red borders added. Granted, the music for it was that super annoying fake Batman theme that somebody had started as a joke years ago. Tim never could remember who that was that came up with it.

Bruce stared. “Did she draw that batsignal freehand? Even I still need the stencils and I’ve had years of practice.”

“No, there were little score-marks in the cookie,” Tim said, “but she did Dick’s raptor and my R totally freehanded!”

Bruce blinked. “Well, she was good with cookies, but how does that help our case?”

Tim sighed. “I don’t know. All of the victims were active on social media, but there wasn’t a lot of overlap in how. Lee and Wendland were both on Wordpress but never shared any links, Little was mostly on Facebook and LinkedIn, and Garcia was the cookie-decorating Instagram girl. But there’s still no commonalities. They just…they’re not connected, Bruce.”

Bruce scowled. “I’ve been digging into their financials. There’s no odd movement, no sudden liquidations, no shifty accounting practices. Wendland had a pretty bad credit score, but all her debt was held by reputable agencies. All of the others were reasonably before-hand, financially speaking. Whatever the killer’s motive was, it doesn’t look like money was the reason.” He waved a hand. “And if they were involved in anything criminal, their spending habits don’t reflect it.”

Tim groaned.

“I thought you didn’t want them to be criminals?” Bruce replied mildly.

“Yeah, but that was before I thought it through,” Tim sighed. “I mean, even murderers have the right not to be murdered, but…I’m less sad when they are. This means a bunch of innocent bystanders died.”

Bruce nodded. He turned towards the mic that was their ever-present link to Barbara. “Oracle, are you online?”

“Always,” Barbara replied. “But I don’t have any helpful links with our victims, either. I’ve run analysis on their spending habits and online usage going back five years. As far as I can tell, the killer picked these people at random.”

Tim frowned. That wasn’t out of the question. A serial killer might have some kind of selection criteria that wasn’t apparent to anyone but themselves. Given that their victim pool already held a black man, a Latina woman, and two white women, all ranging in age from twenty-five to fourty-eight, and income from zero to six figures, he’d already known there were no obvious demographic patterns to the victims, aside from that they all lived in Gotham City. If the killer was picking them because of a specific kind of interaction, or worse, for no reason at all, it was going to make narrowing down a suspect much harder.

“So…social media,” Tim sighed. “That’s what we’ve got.”

“Pretty much. And no overlap in that, like you said,” Barbara sighed. “We’re gonna need more information, guys. There’s just not much to go on here.”

Tim groaned.

“If detective work were easy,” Bruce said, turning and heading towards the lockers, “everyone would do it.”

Tim sighed and went to suit up, himself. And soon he and Bruce were in the Batmobile, racing from the cave and into Gotham.

Tim sighed, pressing his nose to the window of the car.

“Everything all right?” Bruce asked after a few moments.

“I’m just thinking,” Tim said.

“About our victims?”

Tim frowned. Yes, that, too. But also how no one had noticed when he started poking around the victim’s house last night. How alone he’d felt at school. He fisted his hands in his cape, kind of annoyed that it only hung down to his waist. Finally, he said, “I’m thinking I want to change my costume design.”

“In the middle of the case?” Bruce asked.

“No, of course not. But after. I just…feel like it’d be nice to update it,” Tim replied.

Bruce looked over to him and there was a deep quiet for a long moment. Finally he said, “There’s no reason you shouldn’t, if that’s what you want to do.”

Tim nodded, silently. That reply felt like it was heavier than the subject needed, but then again, the subject was heavier than he’d initially stated it was. Which Bruce probably knew. He was the World’s Greatest Detective.

In a move that might be a little unusual for Batman, Bruce pulled the Batmobile into one of the parking spots of the city coroner’s building, not bothering to hide or be subtle about who they were or where they’d parked. Instead, they just waltzed in the front door.

Granted, it was way after-hours, so they did have to pick the lock a little bit, but even so.

Tim didn’t like the coroner’s office. It was actually the city’s third morgue. The other two were places where bodies were stored until families or funeral homes or whoever claimed them picked them up. Or until the clock ran out and they got cremated and scattered in the harbor on the city’s dime. But the one with coroner’s office in it had a pathology lab and this was where the murder victims went when an autopsy got ordered on them. Apparently the victims of this serial killer were getting some sort of rush put on the work on them, so Dr. Fields, the city’s Chief Medical Examiner, was working late to do the autopsy on Garcia.

Tim glanced into the room where Ana Garcia was lying. She was naked on a slab with Fields looking over her clinically, seemingly very confused about something to do with her lungs, which were totally visible because Garcia’s chest was cut down the middle and had been pulled open like french doors to expose the insides of her torso.

Tim looked at the hand that was lying underneath a huge slab of skin that had been cut away from Garcia’s rib cage. He’d watched that same hand this afternoon, icing cookies on Instagram.

Bruce looked curiously at him. “You okay?”

“I…think I want to look at the other victims. They’d be down the hall, right?” Tim said.

Bruce frowned, looking at him thoughtfully. “Robin…you’d tell me if you needed a break, wouldn’t you?”

Tim opened his mouth to argue, because what did that have to do with what he'd asked. And it didn't matter if Bruce was 100% correct in his suspicions, he shouldn't treat Tim like a kid. And then he froze. Because just twenty minutes ago in the car he was wishing people saw him as less of a kid, but now he was wimping out over an autopsy! How could he ask for a break if he really was trying not to be a kid? Or would that just mean he was being childish and trying to prove something?

Tim was really wishing being a teenager came with an instruction manual.

“I don’t know. I hope I would,” he finally said quietly.

Bruce frowned. But what he said out loud is, “It wouldn’t hurt for you to look over the other bodies. Go ahead.”

“Thank you, Batman.” He took the escape route Bruce offered and hurried down the hall to the room where bodies were stored post autopsy.

This room was basically like what you’d expect from the TV shows. It was cool, to keep the bodies from decaying, and the walls had a bunch of numbered cabinet doors built into them. Tim found the numbers of the other three victims marked on their files which were lying on the room’s only desk. He was about to open the first one when the door opened. Tim dropped back to the deepest shadow in the room (not very deep), did his best to minimize his outline, and went very, very still.

A girl walked in. He recognized her. They’d never met, but Tim had seen her around the morgues before. She looked to be around his age and Tim was desperately curious why a high school girl was hanging out with a bunch of corpses.

Looked like tonight was going to be his big chance to find out.

She flipped on the light, humming something under her breath that Tim couldn’t immediately place. She glanced at the desk, narrowed her eyes at the files and then whipped around and caught sight of Tim.

She jumped backwards with a startled—and very ungirlish—yell.

Tim offered her a slight smirk. “Hello.”

“Holy crap, you scared the life out of me,” the girl said.

“Good thing you’re already here, then,” Tim replied, waving his hand at the funereal surroundings.

“Oh, har-dee-har-har,” she snapped. “Why are you poking around these files anyway? What are you even doing here?”

Tim scowled. “You don’t know?”

“Know what?” The girl turned her back to him and started angrily snapping up the folders and stacking them in a huff. She looked much more annoyed than was justified even by the jump scare, or the fact that his question might have come off as a little too smug.

“Um…these bodies. You don’t know about them?” Tim asked, sincerely this time.

“I’m an intern. Fields wants the files pulled, I pull the files,” the girl snapped. “Explanations are for people who get paid, I guess.”

Tim blinked. “Why would you want to intern here?”

The girl turned, fixing him with a confused look. “Wha—oh, ‘cause of the dead people? Yeah, it’s creepy, I guess,” she shrugged, as if the thought just now occurred to her, “but I figure dead people aren’t going to bother me, so I don’t mind them so much. They pretty much just lay there.” There was a pause and then she added, “Unlike certain oversized birds who shall remain nameless.”

Tim grinned at her reply, taking a good look at her for the first time. She…wasn’t pretty. Not really. Her face was a little too narrow, and her skin was too pale and blotchy. She’d—probably accidentally—emphasized how angular her features were by pulling her blond hair back. The little wisps that had escaped looked frizzy, and did nothing to soften the sharpness of her face.

She looked smart. She was clearly used to working in the coroner’s office, and obviously responsible and intelligent enough to be assigned errands for the ME. She wasn’t afraid of him either. She seemed more annoyed by finding the city’s second-most-famous mask in the room than she did concerned. And she was very much glaring at him for assessing her like this.

Though he could see a tiny twinge of nervousness, too. Like she was bracing herself for whatever he said next. He wondered what they said about her at her school. The not-pretty girl who worked with all the dead people. People said some awful things about him, whispered some ugly things about why Bruce took him in.

“I’ll tell you, if you want,” Tim said.

She shook her head, slightly, as if to clear it. “Tell me what?”

“About these bodies. I can tell you what’s important about them. They were all killed by the same person.”

The girl rolled her eyes. “I knew that. They all died the same way.”

“How?”

“I’m not supposed to say,” she frowned.

Tim smirked. “Why? Not allowed to talk to strangers?”

“I swear, if you tell me your name—”

“Well, ‘Robin’ isn’t technically my actual name,” Tim told her, grinning now.

“—And then say that means we aren’t strangers—”

“No, I was figuring the flirting meant that.”

The girl flinched like he’d struck her. She stepped backwards and went dead quiet. Finally, she just said, “It’s against department policy.”

Tim cocked his head, trying to figure out where he’d gone wrong with her and then decided to just be friendly. “It’s against department policy to give information to law enforcement officers?”

“You’re not the police,” the girl said.

“I’m in the Justice League,” Tim replied.

Now she gave him a once-over. Tim just let her until she finally said, “Aren’t you a little short for the League?”

“I’m a junior member. Batman made sure all his teammates are members of the League. I’m authorized as a legal law enforcement officer in over a hundred and seventy-five countries in the world, including the United States. There’s an actual federal law about it and everything.”

Now it was her turn to blink. “There is?”

“There’s a framed copy on the Watchtower. Now tell. How’d they die?”

She scowled at him, but had obviously allowed herself to be convinced. “They were all asphyxiated. But not by anything.”

Tim frowned. “Okay…that doesn’t make any sense.”

“That’s what Dr. Fields said,” the girl agreed. “But I read her autopsy reports and these people were definitely asphyxiated. Eyes all bugged out and bloodshot, blood all runny and dark, lungs turned purple… The whole nine yards. But there wasn’t any evidence of what they were asphyxiated with. No fibers or water in the lungs, so pillows and drowning is probably out. No ligature marks or injuries to the neck, so they weren’t strangled. No ligature marks or injuries to the chest, so they weren’t crushed. No plastic bags or sheets around them, though the killer could’ve taken it, if they’d used one.”

Tim shook his head. “A bag would’ve left bruises on their necks.”

“I figured.” The girl shrugged. “So the killer is just dragging giant, industrial-sized plastic sheeting with them to all their crime scenes, just wandering around the street with a sheet big enough to wrap them in, and no one thought that was weird enough to mention to the police.”

Tim gave a short laugh. “To be fair, Gotham City has a pretty high bar for weird, but I feel like that’d be unusual even for here.”

The girl nodded.

For a moment they were quiet until Tim said, “Why do you think it’d be big enough to wrap the victims?”

The girl kicked the edge of the desk, looking shy. “Well, none of the victims had defensive wounds. Not really. I mean, the second one—Wendland—she had a few weird bruises that maybe she scored banging into stuff while trying to run away, but she really could’ve gotten them anywhere. But they do die trying to breathe, a lot harder than they'd struggle if they died in their sleep. I figure the killer wraps them up super fast and suffocates them some way where they can’t injure themselves much trying to fight back or escape.” She looked up quickly. “Not that that’s actually my job or anything!”

Tim gave her a reassuring smile. “It’s okay. Everybody wonders about things.”

She relaxed.

“What’s your name?”

“Cher McCarville.”

“I’m Robin.”

“I figured.”

Tim offered his hand. She shook it.

“Anything else I’ll need to know?” Tim asked, casually pickpocketing her phone as he pulled his hand back.

“Nothing I can think o—hey! Give me back my phone!”

Tim had made no effort to hide his theft, already having looked up her number and memorized it. He was now casually programming his number—his Robin number, anyway—into her cell. “If you do think of anything,” he told her, “call me. Leave a message if I don’t answer. And don’t let on you have this number.”

“No one would believe me, anyway,” she sighed.

Tim shook his head. “No, some people would. And trust me, the kinds of people who would believe you…aren’t nice people.”

“The Joker?” she asked, looking terrified.

“He’s not the only guy in Gotham who’d be more than thrilled to get a contact number for me or Batman. Seriously. Our secret.”

Cher nodded.

Tim handed her phone back. “It was nice meeting you, Cher.” And he meant it.

Tim wandered back towards the pathology lab, feeling like he ought to dread the moment he'd have to face that body but realizing that the thought was a little easier to bear now. Not that he was looking forward to seeing Garcia being dissected, but he felt a little more balanced about it.

Sure enough, when he entered the room and saw her laid out on the table, he felt the same sort of deliberate disconnection he usually did when looking at corpses. This wasn't really Garcia. The thing on the table was just where she used to live. She was gone now.

Bruce was shaking hands with Dr. Fields. Saying thank you. Tim squared his shoulders and affected his usual air of teenage I-am-always-having-fun distance that was an essential part of the "Robin" persona.

"It's definitely a tough—wait. You haven't been wandering around unsupervised, have you?" Fields asked, looking at Tim.

Tim gave her a grin as he thought it over before he said, "No, not really. No."

Considering Bruce had literally asked him to go wandering around unsupervised, Tim was impressed his partner restrained himself to narrowing his eyes silently.

"Okay. Well, just…I know you're in the Justice League, but we do have procedures for this sort of thing," Fields sighed. "Whatever. Good luck to you both."

Bruce started for the door. Tim followed him. Batman and Robin, out.

As soon as the roof closed over the Batmobile, the act dropped. "You weren't wandering around unsupervised?"

Tim took a moment to enjoy the fact that the responsible adult in his life was disappointed about that before saying, "I started to, but I found an intern."

"Trouble?" Bruce asked.

"Actually, I think we have a new friend in the coroner's office," Tim replied.

"Hm. That could be useful," Bruce said. There was a long pause before he added, "And it never hurts to have friends, generally."

Tim glanced at Bruce as they pulled out to the street. Bruce was a hard person to read under any circumstances at all, and he had opened his reply with their usual cold practicality, but his comment could almost be construed as encouragement to make some more friends outside of the "cape set" that they spent so much of their time around.

It was easy to think Bruce didn't really care about people. But that was just because Bruce had the emotional intelligence of a baked clam and no ability to explain himself at all. Tim had spotted it right off the bat (off the "bat," ha) when Bruce had so harshly informed him that yes, Jack Drake was gone for good, that's it, end of the sentence, period. He had pulled absolutely no punches, and Tim would never pretend that hadn't hurt. But Bruce knew that holding out false hope would've hurt worse in the long run, so he'd just gone straight for the truth and hadn't held back. He didn't know how to explain that, though, so he'd just spent ages hoping Tim would figure it out for himself. Which Tim eventually had figured out, but it had taken him forever.

Apparently he'd done something similar with Alfred once where he'd just added the man's name to all of the Wayne family accounts and simply stopped paying him. That was years before Tim had become Robin. He'd only heard about it because Alfred had told him to explain that Bruce couldn't explain things. After several days, and a lot of Very Civilized fighting (because when Alfred was mad at you, it made Mr. Freeze seem warm by comparison), Alfred had managed to extract that Bruce had been feeling guilty for paying Alfred a salary. Bruce felt that he was really family and basically the only parent Bruce had ever had and he didn't want to pay him any more when he honestly felt like the money was just as much Alfred's as it was his. Which not only made perfect sense, it was very sweet. But Bruce had never explained it, he'd just done it and assumed it explained itself.

Anyway, Tim had pretty easily put together that Bruce felt things very deeply, but had absolutely no idea how to handle that. (Except to women. He could totally emote for girls. But only, apparently, if they were supervillains, like Andrea Beaumont, Talia al Ghul, or Catwoman. And all of those situations had probably done Bruce's emotional health and well-being no favors at all.) So Bruce could care about Tim, probably, but would be 100% unable to express that in a decipherable way.

Well, that was okay. Nobody was good at everything. Bruce was amazing at enough things that it made sense he would be really, exceptionally bad at others.

Tim decided he would take this statement as an expression of Bruce caring about him, some, and said, "Yeah, it is nice."

Based on the grateful look he received, he figured he was on the right track. "And she did tell me about the other victims."

"Asphyxiated with no apparent cause?" Bruce said.

"Yep. She has this theory that the killer wraps them in a giant plastic sheet somehow," Tim added with a slight smile.

"There are a thousand things wrong with that theory," Bruce replied.

"If detective work were easy," Tim answered, "everyone would do it."

The corner of Bruce's mouth twitched. Tim was gonna call that a win.

Of course, he and Bruce didn't actually have any better theories, despite bouncing ideas back and forth all through their patrol that night. They were finally clambering into the Batmobile at the end of their patrol when Bruce finally said, "I don't know, maybe the killer does wrap them in plastic sheeting."

Tim grinned. "Even Cher wasn’t really sold on that theory and she came up with it."

"Unfortunately, it's making about as much sense as anything we've thought of," Bruce sighed. "We'll have to start going back further tomorrow."

Tim nodded and settled back, trying not to fall asleep before they returned back to the cave.

Tim drew the short straw the next day and found himself in the library with Bruce, Alfred, and Barbara, miserably working his way through Tiffany Wendland's blog going back even further than five years, reading backwards accounts of her angst over food scares and birthday parties and work-from-home pyramid scheme business models.

Alfred was poring over Dominic Little's Facebook and LinkedIn, looking for any clues to other websites he might've used. Bruce had taken Garcia's social media—mostly on the grounds that Tim would get distracted by her cookies. Which was probably correct, considering that Tim kind of wanted to try making little bee-hive pattern cookies himself now. And Barbara had come over and was picking through Elaine Lee's travel log, periodically commenting on how boring it was.

Everything was awful and boring and dull until Tim suddenly hit pay-dirt. "Oh, my gosh, Wendland blogged about RenuYu."

"She what?" demanded Bruce and Barbara in unison.

"RenuYu, Clayface's drug, she blogged about it!" Tim exclaimed. "It was about fifteen years ago, before she was married. She was still going on about how she wasn't sure the guy she ended up marrying was such a great boyfriend or not…"

"Master Tim, I sympathize with your boredom, but is that entirely relevant?"

"No, but I am not going to be the only one who suffers. Anyway, back when it was first released and still on the market, when Daggett Industries still existed, Wendland blogged about it! A lot. She even mentioned a radio interview with…WPRA? What's that? That's not a radio station."

Bruce and Alfred looked pained. "No, but it used to be," Bruce said. "Punk, Rock, and Alternative."

"Billed themselves as 'The Bolt,' of all things," Afred agreed.

"Ooh, Dick used to love that station!" Barbara said. "He was so mopey when they went off the air!"

"A dark day in American radio history, to be certain," Alfred agreed, in a tone that indicated he did not agree in any sense whatsoever.

"Oh, well, anyway, Wendland did an interview with them about how dangerous RenuYu was and how it could be addictive and all the major medical traumas it could cause… Basically, solid understanding of that stuff and how bad it was. Never mind, this may not be relevant, after all," Tim sighed, still going over the blog entries. "I mean, she's claiming a lot of people did listen to the interview, and apparently it got mentions in a few national new stories, but I'm not sure it's the break I was thinking it was."

"Quite the contrary, Master Tim, I believe it may be precisely what we have been searching for," Alfred replied. "Mister Little made mention in some of his early posts of having written several articles about RenuYu. I'm retrieving them now, and they are all quite scathing in their condemnation of Daggett Industries."

"Elaine Lee was that kid! The one whose mom died and she did that round of TV interviews, remember?" Barbara said, punching up a video on the computer.

"And Garcia wrote for The Herald when she was at GSU," Bruce added, tapping a few things on one of his tablets. "She wrote several articles condemning Daggett Industries and RenuYu as dangerous."

"So…four opponents of the RenuYu cream are all asphyxiated with no obvious cause," Tim said. He screwed up his face, remembering how Clayface had absorbed Annie. The way he'd pulled her inside his torso while she'd desperately reached out to try and escape. Maybe, technically, she had been part of Clayface, but as far as Tim was concerned, she had been murdered. And "You don't suppose Clayface… Erm… I don't know…smothered…"

"Suffocated them?" Alfred said. "He has done it before. He once attempted to murder Master Bruce in exactly that fashion."

"What?" Tim demanded, looking to Bruce in alarm.

"I did survive that," Bruce pointed out, knocking his knee just slightly against Tim's as he spoke.

"Only just, and only because Hagan was too surprised by your use of a grappling line to harden himself to the point you could not pull free," Alfred returned. "You were exceptionally fortunate."

Bruce sighed. "It would be consistent with the forensics for Hagan to have…enveloped these people until they died of suffocation."

"And now that he's able to hold his shape again, he would hardly leave pieces of himself behind," Barbara said.

Alfred made a revolted noise. Tim knew it was ridiculous, but the enormous library with vast windows and lots of sunshine suddenly felt too crowded.

“I’m gonna go get a snack!” he announced in a voice that was too bright and too enthusiastic to be believable. He hurried from the room before anyone could say anything to stop him.

It wasn’t that he was going to run far. But he needed a little space. Some air. Something to do with his hands. He needed to forget Annie. He needed to stop the horrifying visions of Bruce trapped inside of Clayface, struggling to get out and breathe. Even if he hadn't been there, after what happened with Annie, it was all too easy to picture what Clayface had done to these four people.

He hadn’t even realized he was in the kitchen until he smelled the cookies. Alfred had a batch in the oven. It was wonderfully grounding. He wasn’t on patrol. Awful things had happened but they weren’t happening now. Right now, he was only in the kitchen.

The kitchen was one of his favorite rooms in the house. It was big and roomy, of course, like everything else in the manor, but this was one room that was a little bit…worn. There were little tick marks on the doorframe (carefully documented and reapplied when they occasionally repainted) from when the Waynes, and then Alfred, had measured how tall Bruce was growing up. Another set for Dick. Now a third set for Tim. The floor was clean, but not quite as shiny as it was elsewhere in the Manor. There were big French doors on the far end that led to a small carport so it was easy to bring groceries straight inside. One of the tiles near the door had a spot where the color had worn completely bare and showed a smooth gray spot. Out the windows, he couldn’t see the city at all, just the grounds. He couldn’t even hear the road. Not even any other rich-people-houses in the Palisades were close enough to see from here.

He grabbed a stool and sat at the kitchen table, just to sit for a moment and tried not to picture a pretty girl with bright eyes and a scared expression and a sweet smile. Tried not to feel like he'd failed her.

He was startled out of his thoughts by his phone ringing. His Robin phone. Of course, Bruce would try that one first. He answered tiredly.

"Can't you just check the GPS tracker on me or something?" Tim demanded.

"Hello to you, too," said a voice. A girl's voice. Cher's voice.

Tim took a breath. "I…I'm sorry, Cher. I just got some bad news." Those cookies smelled about ready to come out. Tim went over to the oven and flipped on the interior light. Yup. They were ready. He pulled open a cabinet to grab some hot pads.

"Would it help if I said we'd learned something about the case?" she asked.

"Is it mud?" Tim asked. He tugged open the oven door and pulled out the cookie tray. Oh, yeah, these were perfect. Still gooey enough that when they set up as they cooled they’d be nice and soft. He set the tray on a rack on the counter.

"Uh, yeah, only the mud, like…moves like it's alive in response to electrical stimuli?" Cheryl replied. “It’s super weird.”

"Yep. It is alive. It's Clayface. Ditch that mud as soon as possible," Tim told her tiredly. "Mail it to the police or something."

"It's Clayface?" she said in alarm.

Tim hunted around for a spatula. "Yeah, it's Clayface. He's killing them. I don't know why yet, but it's something to do with the accident that made him Clayface. It's always something to do with the accident that made him Clayface."

There was a long pause until Cheryl finally said, "So, no giant plastic sheets, then?"

Tim snorted as he tugged a spatula from the caddy where they were kept. "No. No giant plastic sheets."

"Good. That was a dumb idea, anyway."

"Batman thought it was funny." He really shouldn’t eat a cookie this soon after they came out of the oven but he didn’t feel like waiting. He spatulaed it off the tray, still oven hot so it came off the tray a little gooey, and pulled a plate from the cabinet above his head to put it on.

"You don't need to be insulting," she said.

"No, I mean…he never laughs. But he smiled. In a good way. Like…happy funny." Tim ate part of his cookie. It was too hot, and sticky, and it very nearly burned his fingers, and it was great.

"Okay, okay, I get it," she grumbled, but Tim could hear her smiling a little herself. “Wait a minute, are you eating?”

“There are cookies!” Tim protested.

“Robin eats cookies. Weird.”

“Would you deny one of the heroes of Gotham City a simple pleasure like cookies?” He ate another bite and listened to her giggle. There was a moment of quiet and finally Tim said, "Clayface killed someone I…met. Once. She was lost. She was…dammit."

"Did you want to talk about it?"

So Tim poured out the whole story. Finding Annie, confused and on the run. Finding out she was on the run from her father. Finding out her father was Clayface. Then, the awful realization that he wasn't her father, but that she was a piece of him that he'd sent out to look around, who had managed to gain an independent mind of her own. Desperately trying to save her, then watching her get absorbed back into Clayface's body.

"She died?" Cheryl asked in horror.

"She wasn't technically alive to start off with," Tim replied tiredly.

"It sounds like she was alive enough."

Tim had finished his cookie by now and decided against eating another. "She was."

Cher was quiet for a moment. "Should I hang up now?"

"No!" Tim burst out. Then he sighed, as he loaded his plate into the dishwasher. He grabbed a plate to load the rest of the batch on. "No. Um…unless you need to?"

"No. I just…don't know what to say next."

"Where do you go to school?"

"East Park High," she answered.

"Tell me about it," Tim said.

So Cheryl started in with a litany of the usual high-schooler complaints. Teachers who didn't care, a library with an apparently randomized set of books, interpersonal drama, rivalries… It was all boring and ordinary and Tim hung on her every word, letting it chase away the bad memories until all he heard was the voice of a girl with a face made of sharp lines and intelligence.

When the call ended, Tim went back to the library. Alfred had left him a note saying they were in the Batcave.

Tim looped back to the kitchen before he took the elevator down to the cave. Bruce was putting together a map of patrol routes for the evening. Barbara and Alfred were looking over old newspaper reports related to RenuYu and Daggett Industries, and all of them were more than happy to munch on cookies while they worked. And Bruce was pleased to hear Tim’s news that the coroner had a sample of Clayface mud and would probably confirm that Matt Hagan was definitely involved.

Tim put his costume, minus the cape, and went to go warm up. He had a feeling he’d surprised everyone by being calmer than they’d expected. Bruce had seemed pretty pleased. It didn’t show on his face, but he’d eaten three cookies. He never did that when he was upset.

On Saturday nights, Tim and Bruce often split up their patrol routes. People were rowdier on the weekends, so they covered more ground that way. Bruce was on comms, but he’d told Tim to go straight to the coroner’s office and collect their Clayface sample. Tim hadn’t had any disagreements, so he put his cape on and took his motorcycle out. It made him a little more mobile then the Redbird, and he wanted to be able to get around quickly, if he was gonna carry this sample.

Hagan was known to be able to “sense” parts of himself that had been separated even over great distances, so as soon as they could, they needed to take the sample to Arkham where it could be stored until Hagan was brought back there and it could be reintegrated into him. (Why was everything about Clayface so freaking gross?)

The coroner’s office was, to his dismay, not entirely deserted. A light was on in the pathology lab, and when Tim slipped in the window, Doctor Fields and Cher were running some tests.

“What are you doing here?” Tim demanded.

Doctor Fields looked up in confusion. “Our jobs? What are you doing here?”

“My job,” Tim snapped. “Clayface can track that sample to this lab. He can sense where it is. There’s no knowing if he’ll come for it or not.”

Doctor Fields made a skeptical face. “How? That doesn’t make any sense.”

Cher did not look skeptical. She was frozen, staring at Tim, blood drained from her face.

“If I knew how he did it, Batman and I would make some gadget to stop him doing it. But we know that he can, we’ve seen it happen. Give me the sample. I’ll take it to Arkham where they can hold it until we catch him,” Tim returned. He held out his hand.

“That’s absolute nonsense! It’s not possible to know where your hand is if someone cuts it off,” Fields said. “This is just one of those stories that goes around about the supercriminals in this town. We are finishing the test, and then you can have the sample to take to Arkham.”

Tim was about to answer, but Cher interrupted. “Doctor Fields,” she said in a voice that was terrifyingly quiet and calm, “I think Robin is right.”

It was right about then that Tim realized she wasn’t staring at him, she was staring at the window behind him. He turned.

Clayface was in the room, clearly having oozed his way in through the open window. He was just forming up to his usual shape. Humanoid, but obviously not human, a good seven feet tall, and looking like he was made of mud. He had a horrible smile on his face.

“You should’ve listened to Robin,” Hagan said in an awful, grating voice.

Tim’s hand twitched for his bo-staff but it was an idiotic impulse. Traditional combat was useless against a person made of goo. Clayface’s defeats were usually the result of him being mixed with things. Bruce and Alfred had developed an additive that Tim had in his belt, but he didn’t have it loaded for delivery just yet.

Clayface pulled his arm back, forming it into a sharp scythe.

“Wait!” Tim yelled.

Hagan paused, looking at him.

“Why did you do this? Weren’t these people on your side?” Tim demanded. The truth was, he didn’t really care. There was no reason that could possibly be good enough for serial murder. But it gave him a little extra time to get his hand on the pocket of his belt with the Clayface additive.

“And what good did it do me?” Hagan demanded. “If RenuYu had had more victims, maybe by now there’d be a cure for me!” Hagan roared. He swung his arm/scythe around and Tim jumped out of the way as it buried itself into the floor.

“Run!” Tim ordered, grabbing a smokebomb from a different pouch on his belt and throwing it between them and Clayface. He grabbed Cher’s hand and dragged her to the door, pushing Doctor Fields out into the hall in front of him. He shut the door to the pathology lab behind him.

“Will that stop him?” Fields asked.

Clay-colored goo started oozing beneath the door.

“It’ll slow him down,” Tim replied. “Which way is out?”

Fields started down the hall at a dead run, Cher following, with Tim in the rear. He tapped his mask to activate the comm line.

“This is R. Clayface is at the coroner’s office,” Tim announced as he grabbed his grapple gun. “Fields and intern are here. I need backup.”

The guns were primarily used for firing grapple lines at tall things, but they were designed to work in combination with all sorts of other things the team used, including the occasional gas bomb or—in this case—the Clayface additive projectiles.

“Batman en route,” Bruce’s voice announced.

Tim loaded up a shot. If he could hit the mark, they still had a hope of getting away okay.

They made the front door and burst outside into the cool evening air. Doctor Fields turned to Tim. “Robin. What do I do with the sample?” She held out a small petri dish with some mud in it.

Tim restrained himself from shouting in frustration. People did weird things when they panicked and her brain had apparently linked the importance of the Clayface sample with the importance of running away. It wasn’t the dumbest thing he’d seen a civilian do.

He snatched the petri dish from her hand. Hagan started oozing underneath the front door. Tim threw the dish at the small mud puddle forming. “That! Where’s your car?”

“In the garage down the street,” Fields replied.

“Run! Run hard,” Tim told her. “Take Cher.”

Hagan was forming up again. Tim took his grapple gun and raised it to Clayface.

His aim was perfect. Center of the main mass. But Hagan shifted something and the shot seemed to be cushioned, and then fell off to the side. The shell didn’t even break.

“What’s in that thing?” he asked curiously.

“Caffeine,” Tim shot back. “You look like you could use a pick-me-up.” Mentally, he was cursing the man for having such precise control over his powers.

“How thoughtful,” Hagan said.

A…tentacle suddenly shot out from his shoulder and wrapped around the ankles of Fields and Cher, dragging them violently to the ground. Hagan hardened it and started pulling them closer.

Tim threw two batarangs and, in it’s hardened state, that was enough to sever the tentacle and allow…Fields to scramble up and get away. Cher’s foot was still caught in the part of Clayface that was around her ankle.

Tim ran after her and hauled her to her feet as the mud around her went lax and she pulled free. He dragged her around the side of the building to the back…

…Where his bike was waiting with two flat tires.

“Great,” he groaned. “Let’s go,” he announced, dragging her into a sprint as Hagan came around the corner.

“Where are we going?” she demanded, though she didn’t resist.

“Away,” Tim returned.

The truth was, there weren’t a lot of great options at the moment. Clayface was insanely fast, could only be kept in or out by watertight seals, and he could adjust not only his shape, but his physical hardness at will. If he felt like it, he could turn into a giant hammer and squish them. Or he could smother them like he had the four he’d already killed. Or he could push them underwater and turn into a tarp to keep them down…

He had a lot of creative options for murder. And he was not shy about exercising them.

Tim heard Hagan yelling behind them and tugged Cher into an alley.

“Get behind that dumpster!” Tim ordered her quietly, pointing at a handy hiding spot.

“It smells like pee back there,” she protested.

“You can shower later!” He pushed her towards the dumpster as he stripped off his cape. It was a shame to ditch it, but he was hoping to buy them a little time. He wrapped the neck of the cape around the grapple and fired it at a careful arc that would pull it up and over the edge of the high rise apartments on the side of the alley. Then he set the grapple gun to rewind and let it go, darting behind the dumpster himself.

Cher had been right about the smell, but Tim ignored it. He clamped a hand over her mouth. “Sorry. But you’re breathing really loudly. Use your nose. And focus on your breath. It’ll help us hide.”

She nodded, and Tim couldn’t help but feel a rush of pride at her. She was clearly scared, but not panicking. It was impressive for a civilian who’d probably never been in an emergency before.

Clayface entered the alley. Tim only saw a flash of him through a tiny gap. There was a quiet moment. Then Clayface made an understanding noise.

“Trying to fly away,” Hagan mused. There was an odd, squelching noise that traveled up the building. He’d seen the cape and bought the ruse. Thank goodness for that yellow lining being so famous, Tim thought.

Tim waited two seconds, and then grabbed Cher’s hand, tugging her from the alley back towards the street as quietly as he could. If Hagan looked down, they were screwed. But they made it to the street and around the corner, out of sight without being spotted.

“How long will that buy us?” Cher asked in a whisper.

An angry yell sounded above their heads.

“Not long,” Tim sighed. “Those bushes. Duck behind them. He’ll search the alley next.” He was tempted to try and run further away, but there was no knowing how long Hagan would stay in the alley, and if he spotted them, they’d be right back where they started. Maybe, if they were out of sight, he’d leave them alone.

They tucked themselves underneath the hedge at the front of the next highrise along the way, this time with no mention of the awful smell or the cigarette butts littered around. Tim tapped his mask again. “This is R,” he said in a whisper. “We’ve put some distance between ourselves and Clayface. Do not give away my position.”

“Understood,” Bruce said, and Tim knew he was probably watching him on the suit tracker in real time. “You still have the additive?”

“Four more shots. Hagan deflected my first shot at him. I only have my secondary grapple. I used the first to get distance between us and Clayface,” Tim reported.

There was a hard crash from the alley and Cher winced and pressed close to him in fear. Tim dropped his hand and gave her fingers a reassuring squeeze.

“GCPD unit Z07 has visual on Clayface. The nearest precinct is mobilizing a containment unit,” Barbara said, harsh tones of her Oracle voice encoding echoing in Tim’s ears.

Tim frowned. That could be good or bad, depending on which cops were on the call. He loaded up his secondary grappler with a Clayface shot.

A spotlight flared down through the darkness into the alley they’d just come from. No doubt from the police unit doing street surveillance from the zepplin—unit Z07 that Barbara had mentioned— above them.

No, no, no! Too confrontational. They’d spook Hagan!

“Is that bad?” Cher asked.

“We’re not caught yet,” Tim replied.

Her eyes went wide.

“Don’t run yet. I’ll say,” Tim told her. She nodded.

Clayface came surging out to the street, the spotlight staying with him. Another light started searching around nearby. Tim cursed their luck. From the street, the two of them were pretty well hidden. From above…

The light caught them. And didn’t move on. Cher looked at him in panic.

Tim saw Clayface’s head turn and his eyes narrowed at the light shining on something the police could see, but he couldn’t. They were busted.

Tim grabbed Cher’s hand and they burst from cover. “Which way is that containment unit?” he yelled as they sprinted down the street.

“Cross the street, down that alley” Oracle ordered. “I’ll guide you.”

They ran hard for a cut-through between two apartment buildings on the far side of the street. The spotlight, thankfully, didn’t follow them. A siren sounded in the distance, but still too far to help.

“Follow my directions,” Tim ordered Cher.

“I liked you better on the phone,” she replied, but she didn’t stop running.

The alley was short, and looked like it dead ended.

“Far end, go left. You’ll have to force the gate,” Oracle told him.

Tim crashed hard into the rustiest side of a chain-link gate, forcing it to break. They ran through.

“First right,” Oracle said.

They turned down an alley choked with trash. It was a bit like jumping hurdles. Cher was tired and not a runner. She was flagging, but she pressed on as hard as she could. Tim kept pace with her, hoping this maze would slow Clayface down.

“Left. Immediate right. Cross over. Right again, then immediate left.” Oracle ordered.

They dashed their way through the jog, across an alley wide enough for a single car to fit, then back through another quick jog to slightly further over than they just had been.

Tim realized what Barbara was doing. They were on a course mostly parallel to the main road on the other side of the buildings to their left, but by running them down these weird back alleys, where all the buildings backed on to each other at slightly different distances, she was making Clayface chase through multiple intersections without the helpful voice in his ear.

It wouldn’t work forever, but it would hopefully work long enough to get them to run straight into the teeth of that containment unit GCPD was setting up.

“This is Batman. I’m with GCPD at the containment unit,” Bruce said on the comms.

“Go left,” said Oracle.

Tim turned left. Cher was stumbling.

“Keep running,” Tim ordered her. “We’re close.”

She pushed forward, trying to keep a rhythm. Tim heard some banging behind them and could see when the surge of adrenaline hit her. They burst free of the alley with Cher actually in front of him, racing towards the police and behind the barriers. Tim glanced behind long enough to see Clayface come around the corner, and he ran harder.

Something snagged around his foot and he fell hard to the pavement.

“Robin!”

Tim didn’t spare a glance around to see what Bruce was doing. He grabbed his grapple gun and half-turned as Hagan began to pull him back. To be able to retract, Hagan would have to keep the area where this tentacle-thing was attached to the middle of his chest either soft, or constantly moving inwards. Tim aimed for the juncture between the tentacle and Hagan’s chest and fired off the round.

The shot went in.

Hagan stumbled back in surprise, dropping Tim. “Thought you didn’t use guns?”

Tim scrambled up and ran for Bruce. He wasn’t sure what to do after that, but he’d figure it out when he got there.

“Robin, are you okay?” Bruce asked.

“Why bother shooting me if it doesn’t even do anything?” Clayface shouted at them, not bothering to rush now. He started approaching the containment unit with a confident swagger.

“I’m fine but…the additive didn’t do anything,” he said.

Bruce scowled. “Those tests were conclusive, it should’ve worked.”

Clayface was approaching.

“We’ll need a new strategy,” Bruce said.

“Where’s Cher?” Tim asked.

Bruce looked around. “Go find her. We still don’t know why Clayface was chasing you.”

Tim nodded and dashed passed the cops, looking for Cher.

“That girl ran into the station,” one of the officers told him.

Tim frowned, but entered in after her.

Cher was talking with an officer at the desk. Two people in the waiting area gasped at seeing him. A kid with one arm in a sling and the other handcuffed to a chair—who Tim recognized as a mugger he’d beaten up last week—gave a dispirited groan.

“Not even a week!” Tim groaned back. “Your arm’s still broken!”

“Yeah, thanks for that,” the kid snapped.

“That girl you were hassling said ‘thank you’ for real,” Tim returned. “Drop it before I start remembering other things you don’t want the people in this room to know about.”

The kid lapsed into quiet.

Tim went over to Cher.

“I have to get into a bathroom!” she was shouting in frustration to the officer behind the window.

“Kid, this is not McDonald’s and there’s an emergency outside. We don’t have time for this,” the officer said.

Cher opened her mouth to argue and Tim said, “Wait! Cher, why do you need a bathroom?”

For an answer, she held up her hands. They were streaked with red, clay-y mud. “You said he can track this stuff, right? I handled the sample back in the pathology lab with bare hands. I can’t get it off.”

Tim felt his blood run cold. “That’s why he’s chasing us.”

“Get out of the station,” whispered the officer behind the desk.

“I need to wash it off!” Cher said, sounding panicky.

“We’re going out the back,” Tim said to the officer firmly. “I’m gonna stick with you Cher. We’ll get that off you once we leave the station.”

He grabbed her elbow and tugged her down the hall. No one moved to stop them. They left out a door on the far end of the building that put them in a parking lot, devoid of any cars.

“How do I get this off my hands, Robin?” she asked. She sounded calmer, which was good.

“Too late,” said a voice they hadn’t been expecting.

Tim turned to see Clayface coming around the edge of the building. Cher screamed as his arm shot out, impossibly long, and grabbed a section of the building over their heads. Though it seemed to be going slower than it should.

“What did you do to me?” Hagan shouted. Tim grabbed a batarang and flung it at Hagan’s arm entirely out of instinct. There was no point.

Except that a chunk of Clayface’s arm actually fell off of the main “trunk” of it, and then the whole limb dropped to the ground, prompting a frustrated roar from Hagan.

Tim blinked in shock. Then he grabbed his bo staff and used it to vault straight into Hagan’s face. Much to his surprise, the blow landed on something mostly solid, and Clayface actually stumbled back in pain.

The former arm piece began to slurp back into Clayface through his foot. Tim made a face at the frankly horrifying sound it made, but in the back of his mind he registered that it wasn’t going as fast as it should have.

“WHAT DID YOU DO TO ME?” Hagan screamed, voice loud enough that Tim felt the vibrations.

Or…no. That wasn’t sound vibrating. It was the police building. Tim looked up in time to see that Clayface had reached out with a new arm and he’d missed it. The side of the precinct was coming down towards his head.

“Run, quick!” He tried to pull Cher along, but she was already moving. He ran and he got clear of the falling bricks.

Cher didn’t. Tim looked around just in time to see her go under the falling rubble.

“What…did you…do?” Hagan demanded, swaying as his arm slowly retracted to its usual length. He pulled it back, probably to try and attack Tim, but overbalanced himself and fell straight over backwards with a dull splashing sound.

“Robin!” Bruce was coming around the building edge. He was muddy and bleeding from his chin and arm, moving slower than he should’ve, but alive.

“Don’t walk on this! Cher’s under here!” Tim shouted back.

Bruce’s mouth went thin. He grabbed something from out of his belt and scanned the mess of bricks. “Heat signature there,” Bruce said after a moment.

The two of them raced to the spot, thankfully not a place where unburying her would cause more trouble, and moved several bricks off the spot. Cher didn’t move, and her face was covered in blood, but she was still breathing.

“Oracle, EMTs to this location,” Batman said over the comms as they shifted the rubble off until they had Cher completely uncovered.

Tim wasn’t able to speak, staring at the girl he’d tried so hard to keep from getting hurt.

“Robin,” Bruce snapped.

Tim looked up in shock.

“You did everything you should.” That one wasn’t snappish. It was factual. “Hagan is to blame.”

“Hagan is to blame,” Tim agreed. He turned, to see Clayface was trying to get up and failing. “What happened to him?” He’d done so much damage only a moment ago, but now he seemed barely able to move.

“Our additive did work,” Bruce said. “Just not immediately. The samples we tested on were smaller. It took longer to cover all of him.”

“What does it do?” Tim asked.

“I’ll show you the formula later. But it forces him into the consistency of hardened glue. He’ll be immobilized in a single piece,” Bruce said.

“Handy,” Tim replied, looking back to Cher’s too-still form. She was still breathing, though.

An ambulance pulled up and some EMTs piled out, heading over to them. He and Bruce moved away.

“What’s her last name?” Bruce asked as they dropped into a shadow behind the station to watch the containment unit wrangling Hagan’s massive form around the building.

“McCarville,” Tim answered.

“I can get you her hospital updates, if you like? You can visit?” he offered.

“She knows Robin, not me,” Tim sighed. “And I think she’s mad at Robin.” His lips twitched. “She kept yelling at me.”

“Hnh. Could be a good sign.” It looked like the police had things covered, so the two of them made their way towards the Batmobile. “And we could always arrange for you to meet her. You-you, not Robin-you.”

Bruce slid the top back on the car and the two of them jumped in.

Tim frowned thoughtfully. “That…sounds a little too stalkery. Do you think she’d like me? Me-me, I mean?”

“If she doesn’t, she’s an idiot,” Bruce shrugged, “but you may have a point about stalking.”

Tim sighed. The curse of his double life was that Robin always got the girls. “Clayface slashed the bike tires,” Tim told him.

Bruce nodded. “I had wondered.” He tapped the comm button to relay the information to Alfred. Tim noted that Bruce was still moving his arm gingerly, and began mentally composing how he and Alfred would gang up on him in the near future.

Tim blinked when he saw the clock. “Holy smokes! It’s only 9:16?”

“Hagan put in his appearance early,” Bruce agreed. “Are you up to finishing the patrol?”

“May as well. It’ll give me something to do besides worry about Cher,” Tim sighed. “Oh! But I do need to go see her at the hospital. She had some mud on her hands that she thinks was Clayface.”

“Thinks?” Bruce said.

“Well…I’m not sure. If it were really him, it doesn’t make sense that he couldn’t find us in that alley,” Tim said. “Unless there were enough…bits of him around that area that he wasn’t sure which one was on her?” Tim made a face. “I swear, Clayface is the grossest bad guy ever. Why is he so disgusting?”

Bruce’s mouth twitched. “Oracle. Keep tabs on patient progress for Cher McCarville. Let us know when her condition stabilizes, and what room she’s put in.”

“McCarville. Got her. Currently en route to Mercy General. Stabilized in ambulance, but injuries are severe. They’ve got an OR cleared out for her already,” Barbara said nearly at once.

They drove back to the coroner’s office to replace the tires on Tim’s bike. As soon as Alfred pulled up in the van with the spare tires, Tim immediately moved to help Alfred load the tires out of the back.

“Batman is injured, Agent A. Severely enough that he can’t totally hide it,” Tim said as soon as he got close enough.

“Robin!” Bruce snapped in irritation.

“You wouldn’t let me patrol with an injury, what makes you think I’d let you do it?” Tim demanded as he and Alfred rolled the tires over to his bike.

“Let me?” Bruce said, and he made an irritated motion with his arm. Then he slumped onto the hood of the Batmobile and swore in pain. “Never mind. I don’t know who I’m trying to fool.”

Tim frowned. Bruce must be in a lot of pain. He usually put up more of a fuss than this. “Are you okay? Not the bravado bullshit. Are you?”

“Nothing life-threatening. But you’re right. I shouldn’t be out tonight.”

Tim glared at Bruce with narrow eyes, but was satisfied that he was telling the truth this time. “All right.” He and Alfred finished changing the tires, and then Tim resumed the patrol while Bruce went home with Alfred.

Things were busy enough that Tim was pretty distracted from worrying about Cher. He didn’t usually appreciate Gotham’s criminal element as much as he did tonight. It wasn’t until about 3 AM that Cher was moved out of surgery into a spot in the ICU, and Tim gave it about 45 more minutes before he snuck into the hospital.

They’d washed her hands off by now, but this was Gotham and everybody had been told she’d come in after an encounter with Clayface, so if her doctor had been even half-awake he would’ve ordered a test on that mud. Tim debated with himself about trying give one of the shadier staff members the third-degree about the test results, but in the end he decided to hack the computers himself. No reason to involve anyone else in his pretense that HIPPA didn’t exist.

Turned out the mud was just mud. At least there was that.

Tim started turning his vague ideas for a costume update into actual designs the next day while Bruce slept in. Actual production of the designs went up over the course of the following week. He had his first prototype on a dummy for a critical once-over the next Saturday when Bruce stepped up beside him. Tim wasn’t sure what to expect from Bruce’s assessment.

There was no denying the new version was darker. He’d lengthened the cape so it came down to his feet, and he’d added a scalloped edge, so that it mimicked the points on Batman’s cape. He’d made the utility belt pouches a little roomier too. But it was the cape that was the most noticeable change.

Bruce had an odd look on his face.

"Is it bad?" Tim asked.

"It's more intimidating," Bruce said, which was annoyingly ambiguous.

"Should I change it back?" Tim asked.

"Longer cape?"

"Better concealment."

"Points on the edges?"

"Goes to the theme."

There was a long quiet. Finally, Bruce said, "It's a solid design. And you don't need my approval. But, for what it's worth, you've got it."

Tim grinned. There was too much unspoken here for him to parse all of it, but Bruce wasn’t an idiot. He knew Tim was trying to assert himself a little, and giving approval instead of offering resistance was…amazing. Based on what had happened with Dick, Tim hadn’t been sure how this was gonna go, but apparently Bruce did learn from his mistakes.

“We just got an update from Oracle. McCarville’s condition is better. She’s still out, but they’re expecting her to make a full recovery. She’ll have a lot of rehab to do.”

Tim nodded. “Maybe I’ll see her at the science fair in the spring.” He’d decided that it was definitely too stalkery to go arranging a meeting with her. If he saw her at the science fair because she decided to go, he’d have a chance to talk to her then.

Robin really did always get in the way with girls.

Bruce put a hand on his shoulder and squeezed. “Her school does participate.”

Tim sighed.

“I’ve got the case report ready for you to review,” Bruce said.

Tim nodded. He still had to sign off on it before they put it in the file. He didn’t want to. “I hate Clayface. I still think he murdered Annie.”

“You don’t have to like him.”

Tim accepted this for the olive branch that it was and grudgingly dragged himself over to the computer to go over the case log. Bruce sat beside him, quietly going over some other notes. Alfred had left them each some sugar cookies, and Tim was about to start eating one of his when he noticed they were decorated.

Alfred had his own ways of paying homage to the people they couldn’t save. In this case, he’d decorated the cookies.

They had beehives on them.


THE END

*~*~*

Author's Notes: The cookie decorating is inspired by a number of videos I see around Tumblr. The beehive cookies in specific, you can find a tutorial on making here: https://www.sweetambs.com/tutorial/bee-cookie-tutorial/. The mommy blogger is inspired by a (very much alive) friend of mine whose entire Facebook feed is dedicated to her various MLM schemes and her three sons. And don’t misunderstand: I think it is fantastic that she is so proud of her kids and likes to show them off. However, at some point, being told over and over and over and over that it’s impossible to understand the ~*HEART OF A MOTHER*~ gets to be off-putting, no matter how sincere the intent of the message. If you constantly bang on and on about how special and impossible to understand you are, I will eventually decide two things are true about you: one, that I no longer want understand you anymore, and that two, you don't really want anyone to understand you anyway. (MLMs, on the other hand, are scams. You will loose money if you join one.)

Nora Fields is connected somehow to the ME/coroner’s office in Gotham in the comics. I wasn’t really concerned enough to want to figure out how, or all that much about her besides that she exists. But I didn't pull her out of thin air, anyway. (For all I know, she's evil, or something.)

In Batman: the Animated Series, which is the primary source material for my vision of the Batman world, the GCPD routinely operates zepplins for some crazed reason that was never justified in the show beyond the aesthetic. Which is fine, they do look really cool, but when you’re sitting down to write stuff and that’s in the source, but there’s no practical reason… So, anyway, I figure, the zepplins can function as spotters and mini-precincts to deploy rapid responses. It’s the only practical use for them I can think of, anyhow.