Chapter Text
Tim gets up for the day. It doesn’t even matter what happened for the first part of it because something new happens on patrol. It’s been such a long time since he’s had something new.
He’s sitting on the edge of the top of a water tower. The metal is cold and rough beneath his palms. His legs swing off the edge. His eyes, distant, are fixed on the lights of the cars below. It’s a long way down. He’s thinking too much again.
Death.
He doesn’t have the courage. It won’t happen. Still, he thinks about it.
The night stretches on. He sits with it, waiting. His scanners aren’t going off, not for his patrol area. When it goes quiet like this, it usually means something big is going to happen. The street criminals will always know before him. He’s too tired to not be content to let literally anyone else deal with it. He wonders if death can possibly be any lonelier than life.
He doesn’t have anything better to do. And now – for some reason, he just wants to go home to his bed. So he carefully drops from the top of the water tower – he doesn’t leave room for slips, so the option doesn’t get too tempting – and prepares to head back to his apartment.
Someone yells his name when he zips over their head. A curiosity makes him stop – he keeps a cautious hand near his batarangs, ready for a trap.
Nothing happens when he drops down beside them. Her. She gives him a small smile. “Red Robin. Glad you stopped.”
“What’s up?” he asks.
“My girlfriend was walking home from work yesterday with her coworker, we live pretty close to him. She saw this huge storage truck turn down Miller Road – it only leads to a bunch of abandoned land. When she poked around, they were unloading shit into one a’ the buildings. She figured it was some supervillain shit and left. We tried the cops, but they haven’t done anything yet. She saw barrels, and I’m afraid they’re dumping shit in the pipes. Couldja check it out?”
“Yeah, of course,” Tim says. She doesn’t look like she’s lying. “I appreciate the tip. Have a good night.”
“Thank you!” she yells as he grapples away.
Miller Road isn’t that hard to find. The particular building is a little harder – there are a few, and no immediate signs. Still, he finds it.
The huge storage truck is still parked outside. No plates. A quick scan reveals no heat signatures inside the truck. There are some inside the building, and he doesn’t count them yet, instead turning to the back of the truck to poke around and get more information before he starts a fight. He needs to know what they’re transporting and why.
The doors aren’t locked or chained. It means there’s nothing important inside anymore, and he expects the emptiness long before he pries the rusty hinges open. He was kind of hoping to get a full truck, a loaded one, but all he gets are wall straps and stained floors.
Still, he’s nothing if not a detective. There are rings of liquid residue on the floors, sticky and thick, like dried soda syrup. Some is smeared in trails, wheel lines – likely from a folding lifting trolley – leading out the doors. Some is left in footprints, the press of a workboot, but he doesn’t need to examine those any further.
The residue is blue against the metal – bright blue. He pulls out a small sample kit to take some, given that most substances he can’t identify in Gotham are some sort of toxic. Judging by the diameter and number of circles, there were a lot of them. Obviously not contained very well, given the spillage. He’s not surprised by the quantity of spillage given the rough roads in.
He feeds one of the two samples he takes into his pocket analyzer, tucking the other into his belt. While he waits for the more complex analysis, he runs a scan over one of the bigger residue stains.
Out of the things he needs to know about substances, danger levels are one of the things he can get quickly. There are a few things that contribute to these levels. One of those things is radioactivity.
There is a staggeringly high amount coming off of a substance handled with such little care that it’s spilled all over the floor.
Obviously it’s not like, Elephant’s Foot levels, look-at-it-and-it-kills-you, but he still backs out of the truck because it’s not contained at all . He’s tempted to call radiation protection right this second, but the people inside would run and he’d have no information.
He’s dealt with this before – radiation isn’t uncommon in Gotham. It’s Gotham . Everything is some sort of toxic. Gotham doctors are actually trained to check for dangerous radiation exposure. Still, usually whoever’s using it knows how to keep it contained for their own safety at the very least. Either they’re stupid or they have no idea what they’re doing. Both are dangerous.
When his analyzer finishes, it gives him a compound he doesn’t recognize. He mentally moves the situation from the ‘danger’ category in his head to the ‘high danger’ one. He’ll call for backup if he needs to.
If they’ll even respond.
For now, he turns towards the building. It certainly looks abandoned – there's a torn part of the roof he scopes out for entry, silently grappling to it and dropping down onto the rafters.
There are more people in there than he thought. Eleven, if he’s counted correctly. Observing them, he counts five guns, three bats, two of them wrapped in barbed wire. Sometimes, it’s hard to tell if they’re working for someone, but with no gang affiliation to be seen and poorly supplied weapons, he can guess they’re not. It makes it harder for him, with no one to trace back a motive to, but that is solved by wringing information out of whoever put this together. He just has to pick the right one.
Some of them have to be hired men. It’s hard to split money between eleven people, easier if there’s a wage instead. He’s willing to bet they gave the guns to the hires, so it’s a safe bet to say that the three with bats and the remaining three are going to be the best targets. If he keeps two of them conscious enough to interrogate – he has a statistically high chance of getting all the information from the two of them.
With this plan, he starts dropping down on the gunmen. They don’t make it hard for him to silently take them out, standing in one place, never turning as they are. They must be waiting for something. That might be trouble later, but for now, he stays undetected, silently rendering them unconscious and then grappling up to the rafters to pick off someone else.
When someone does finally notice him, he only has one last gunman to take out. Then he just has fists and bat swings to dodge. And the barrels of radioactive blue sludge, but, you know. They’re also trying to avoid breaking them, so it’s not that hard.
He keeps track of his hits and his opponents, carefully making sure to keep two conscious. He hits one hard behind the knees, dropping them, gasping, to the floor. For the other, he sweeps his legs out from under him and jams the end of his bo staff into his throat.
“We should probably have a talk,” he says coldly, putting his boot on the guy’s chest and pushing a little harder.
The guy’s next quick intake of breath is a wheeze. His hands scrabble at the staff but can’t make it move much. “What- Whadaya want?” It’s a distinctly New York drawl, not something Tim had picked up on before.
“I want to know what’s in the barrels, where they came from, and why you brought them here .”
The guy won’t stop wriggling , and Tim grinds his boot further just to make sure it doesn’t work. “I- I don’t know ! Some kinda sludge they nicked offa some scientists, it- I don’t know what it is, the guys picked it up, I just offered my truck so I could get a cut of the money!”
“Sure?” Tim narrows his eyes, pressing a bit more.
“I’m sure, I’m sure!” The guy wriggles aggressively, eyes wild.
Tim’s not picking up any common tells, so he steps off. One hit and he’s out cold.
When he rounds on the other guy, they scramble back on the floor. “Wait, wait, please! I’ll talk, you seem like an understandin’ guy. Just- don't hit me again.”
Tim regards them carefully. He slams the end of his staff down, inches from their ankle, and leans on it as he crouches. “Fine,” he says. “Talk.”
“Alright, alright. Look, me ‘n’ the guys are based in New York, right? Well, there was this old scientist buildin’, somethin’ happened an’ it was abandoned for a while. Then the feds decided to clean it up – they were getting' rid a’ shit from some experiment they used on insects, a long time ago, so we hijacked the transport and took it all. We heard it could give ya superpowers , and they were jus’ gonna throw it away. Figured we could make some cash off it, you know?”
“You... took chemicals from a lab... and didn’t contain them properly.”
“They’re in barrels,” they point out, like that means anything.
“It’s leaking everywhere. Are you stupid, or ignorant? Did you even know it’s radioactive?”
The guy shrugs. “I mean, that sounds like exactly the kinda shit that’d give you superpowers.”
Tim has to pause for a second to just intake that stupidity. “Who were you selling to?”
“Whoever wanted it. We got an ask for the whole thing out here.”
“Who?”
“Dunno, didn’t get a name, they just said to- to bring it here, to Gotham, and they’d come get it.”
That’s not good. There are too many people in Gotham who would want superpower-giving radioactive sludge. But- who'd be gullible or desperate enough to believe that’s actually what it does? “How much did they offer you to get down here?”
“ Huge numbers. Jerry took the call, but it was in the millions.”
Tim files that away for later. “You haven’t sold it to anyone else? Is all of it here, in this building?”
“Yeah. We had a few other offers, but these guys wanted all of it.”
Tim stands up. That’s all he needs to know for now. The guy scrambles back again- “Hey, wait-” but Tim keeps his promise, just yanks their arms up to slap on a pair of handcuffs.
He takes care of the rest of the guys similarly, leaving one, and starts dragging them outside so cleanup and the cops can work at the same time. He drags the conscious one out last, intertwining their and the previous guy’s chains so they can’t run. Then he steps back in to count the barrels for his report to radiation protection.
Twenty barrels. Fifty gallons each. A lot of spillage. He includes his scan and sample results in his report. As he sends in the report, he alerts the police-
There’s a prick at his neck. A small pain.
He slaps his hand to the spot immediately, and he can feel something – it drops as he sweeps it away.
His heartbeat spikes. He puts his fingers back on the area – it's already a little itchy.
Tim scans the floor – there. There, curled up, is a small spider.
Fuck.
Long legs, green femurs, black-striped sections of yellow and blue on its abdomen – it's an orchard spider.
He can’t remember if it’s venomous or not. Fuck.
A bite from a spider crawling around in a nasty building- It broke skin . He doesn’t have a fucking spleen. If it gets infected or he contracts a disease-
The thought makes his skin crawl. There’s nothing else he can do here, he can log it all later- Leslie's should still be open.
He can’t afford to get sick. It’ll take him out of work, it’ll take him out of patrol – he can’t do it, that’s his routine, not because he’s sick . He doesn’t want to deal with this.
He feels like he can’t get to the clinic quick enough.
When he does, Leslie meets him, looks him in the eyes, and tells him he’s going to be fine.
“Orchard spiders aren’t venomous,” she says.
“Could you just look at it, please?” Tim asks. He feels a little weird, standing at her desk like he’s telling his mom he just threw up while she goes through documents.
She gives him an unimpressed look, but he doesn’t back down. With a sigh, she pushes to her feet – “Come here.”
Tim turns around in front of her, pointing to the spot on his neck. It’s burned into his brain. Into his skin.
Leslie pokes at it, humming. “Well, it’s a little inflamed, probably because you keep touching it. Otherwise, it’s fine.”
“I don’t have a spleen, L, is it going to get infected?”
“Have you been taking your antibiotics?”
Tim lets his eyes drift. He... doesn’t remember.
“Timothy Jackson.”
“I... didn’t realize.”
Leslie puts a finger in his face. “If I write you a prescription, I expect you to follow it.” She huffs. “ Now I have to ask if you’ve been taking care of your injuries.”
The laceration he didn’t have motivation to stitch last night and forgot about drifts to the front of his mind. “Uh...”
“That’s reassuring.” She glares at him. “Med room. Now.”
He gets a lengthy lecture about taking care of his body while she stitches him up and inspects his other, older wounds/ Several times, she threatens to handcuff him to a cot. A few more times, she says she’ll ground him herself. Says she’s going to illegally harvest his organs if he runs himself into the ground.
When she’s done – after he finishes securing his uniform again – she grabs his chin, eyebrow line set hard and a serious look to her eyes. “If you get hurt and can’t deal with it by yourself, you come to me. If I have to ask to get you to tell me about injuries before you do, we have a problem. Clear?”
“Clear.” Tim blinks, and he almost wants to follow through.
“Go home.” She leans back, crossing her arms. “You’re done tonight. That’s an order.”
“Yes, ma’am,” he says, finding he really has no intention of continuing patrol. He kind of just wants to sleep.
Fresh bandages hit his sheets. He can’t pull the comforter or the blankets onto his body – it's too hot. Anxiety about the stupid bug bite follows him into unconsciousness even after he’s taken the antibiotics Leslie gave him.
----------
Tim wakes up in sweat-soaked sheets and he feels awful .
Not even his usual, foggy, bland, life-sucks awful. No, he’s feeling every sharp sensation, yanked from his nice, half-gone usual state of being and thrown into a body of pure shit.
To start, he’s exhausted . Every muscle in his body is tired and worn and sore and aching , and every one makes sure he knows it. He has a migraine, a brick wall trying its very best to shove its way past his brain and through the front of his skull. He feels unfocused, and it’s hard to look at things. His head is too light. His joints are too heavy. His stomach feels wrong. It’s hard to swallow, throat too dry, burning- It's hard to breathe, pressure in his nose.
His skin burns all over his body. Every inch is way too hot. He doesn’t have any layers to take off.
He almost doesn’t move, but the heat is overwhelming and he- he has to do something about it, it’s agonizing just to lay here. Maybe- His bathroom has cold water, maybe that will help. Relieve the heat.
Rolling out of bed is hard – and when his feet hit the floor, the room spins around him until he’s on his knees and braced against the mattress. His stomach shifts and a violent wave of nausea crashes over him, room tipping until he leans over.
When the nausea finally passes, he thinks, fuck .
He’s sick .
God, he doesn’t even care about work right now, he just needs to get rid of the heat.
The room doesn’t stop spinning, but the nausea dies down. When he feels like he might not throw up, he pushes back up using his bed’s side table – or tries to, he’s not actually ready to put all his weight on his knees, and they buckle under him.
A second try has him shaking, but he manages to stand. His muscles burn unnecessarily, but it’s easy now to stumble to his bathroom on unsteady feet. The world tips again, but he braces against the doorframe and waits for it to pass.
His medicine cabinet was behind his mirror. He can’t even think about turning the light on. He just fumbles through the contents of the cabinet until he finds what feels like his bottle of ibuprofen. Then his antihistamines. They’ve been his go-to when he feels physically less-than. He’s never been this sick before, not in his life – maybe he needs a double dose?
He needs to...
Something. He needs to something.
What was he doing?
Heat washes over him, and he knows.
The water is freezing against his skin, lighting up his nerves like he’s been hit with Fries’ guns – and he needs more , more. Water slips through his fingers, rolling down the sink and dropping into the drain. Why won’t it stay ? Just stay. Stay there, he’s too hot .
Shower.
His breath is taken from him when the water hits, blazing against his skin like ice on fire and it feels so good . The heat very nearly recedes a little, and he can almost think again.
The fogginess in his head... it’s not... good. Resting his forehead against the tile of his shower walls is heaven and hell. There’s a limit to a fever... something- Too hot, and he dies. He doesn’t want to die. Not like this, not with heat, aching pain, too-heavy body floating- thoughts overlapping- no control-
Thermometer.
Tile is slick under his skin. Water pounds in his ears, he still can’t breathe. He has a thermometer, right?
It’s there. His head spins on his shoulders and he sinks to the ground, trying to remember how to use it.
One hundred and six.
What? That’s- no, no, too high, that’s too high.
He needs help.
His phone is on his bed.
His skin slides wet against the tile and his muscles shake and give out under him.
He tries. He tries to get to it. But then his arms don’t move and his legs ache and burn. Then cold crashes against him.
Then it’s suddenly not worth it, to fight his body and the exhaustion overtaking him. He wants to, but he can’t.
He’s left shaking on the floor, leaving his own mind to a delirious half-state.
----------
Tim wakes up, and he’s in such full-body agony that he succumbs again to unconsciousness gladly.
----------
Tim wakes up.
He’s not dead. He’s not dead- And his head is clearer than it’s ever been.
Oh, he really doesn’t like that.
The fog used to let him just roll with wherever he woke up. Now, though, now he’s acutely aware that he’s lying in only briefs on his cold and sticky bathroom floor. He’s also acutely aware of the dried sweat on his body, and how gross and greasy and stuffy and uncomfortable his skin feels.
Groaning, he slowly picks himself up from the floor. His arms are a little sore with the movement, the kind you get after you don’t move for a while. Everything is resoundingly clear to him – his head is free of pain, body of exhaustion, senses of the dull filter he usually has. He can feel the cracks in the tile beneath his skin.
The thermometer is on the ground next to him. He picks it up, washes it off, and sticks it under his tongue.
Ninety-seven point nine.
Fever’s gone. Lungs are clear, nothing hurts, he can still think. The sickness must’ve passed. That’s... odd, it’s gone and he didn’t even do anything about it.
Okay, well. He really wants a shower. Then some food. Then he’ll figure out what time it is. Hopefully it hasn’t been so long that he’s late for work.
The water pressure of his shower head hurts, drops hitting his skin like pebbles thrown by the wind. Also pretty weird. It’s never bothered him before.
His stomach yells at him while he’s toweling off, twisting and aching. He doesn’t remember the last time he registered hunger pains. Usually, he doesn’t even notice that he hasn’t eaten, or when he does remember he doesn’t have any motivation to find something. But now, right now, the pain is so sharp it’s distracting, and he throws on some sweatpants and ventures out to find something to eat, taking his phone with him.
HIs apartment is a mess. It’s not like he suddenly cares enough to clean – but every blood stain, dirty dish, wrinkled piece of clothing, and batarang that needs sharpened jumps out at him. He can see every one precisely in his vision. He ignores them still, beelining to his fridge.
There’s nothing in there.
Okay, emergency granola bar time.
Five left in the box – and he has a need to eat all of them, so he does, not even thinking about it.
Okay. Time next, so he can go back to his schedule and leave this weird, uncomfortable clarity behind.
He almost drops his phone when he turns it on.
Two days . The date is two days past where it should be. He puts in his password, searches frantically – it's not a fluke, it’s been two days . And eight hours. Fifty-six hours incapacitated with illness – how is he alive ? How is he not brain dead? He should be, at least . He’s never been that sick in his life, and he received no medical care – he should be dead.
The second surprise comes from his notifications. He didn’t expect them – hasn't for a long time – yet there’s still twenty-one missed calls and five voicemails, all from Tam.
God, he appreciates Tam.
The latest voicemail was from an hour ago, and Tim opens it to Tam’s raised voice.
“Timothy Drake, if you don’t call me back I’m going to order a welfare check on you And then I’m going to call Bruce.”
Something cloudy sets in his chest. He pushes it aside and hits the button.
Two rings.
“You got really lucky. You had about two more hours. What’s going on? Don’t tell me it was work stuff, you could’ve picked up your phone.”
“Not work stuff,” Tim says. “I... got sick. Like, really sick. I couldn’t answer. I’m sorry.”
“You were sick,” Tam says suspiciously. “For two days.”
“Yes.”
Tam sighs, but there aren’t any tells for her to pick up because he’s not lying. “Whatever, Drake. Do you have someone with you?”
“Yes,” Tim lies. Well. Most of his tells are physical.
“And you’re okay now?”
“Yeah, I feel fine.”
“Okay. I better see you here tomorrow. Not today, you’re probably still contagious. Understand, Drake? Stay home.”
She hangs up.
Okay. Well. That throws a wrench in his entire schedule. He can’t turn on work mode if there’s no work .
Maybe that’s not entirely true. She can’t ban him from patrolling. She won’t even know.
His underlayers are in a pile next to his suit. When he pulls them on, they’re... short.
“What the fuck?” he whispers to himself, peering down at the extra four inches of bare skin at his ankles. Did they shrink ? No, that doesn’t make sense. What happened, then?
Hm. It doesn’t really matter, his boots will cover it. He can fix the length later. He just- He needs out .
Gear on, uniform a little too tight, he heads out into the night.
He doesn’t really have a plan in mind, not without checking his scanners, but the radioactive warehouse suddenly shoves to the front of his mind, and he heads in its direction without even thinking about it too hard.
Two days, and the place has been cleared out sufficiently. There’s caution tape closing off the entire building, and the truck’s gone. It seems pretty standard to him, the cleanup, but he doesn’t know much about the procedure for Gotham’s radiation protection. He does know that the cleanup of the actual radiation – WayneTech, actually – isn’t here. Maybe they’re waiting on authorization? Tim can make that go faster. He makes a mental note.
Just to check – just to make sure – he drops back in from the roof to confirm they’ve actually done their jobs.
There are people in here.
Four of them, and they’re not what Tim would expect. Pristine white and light gray suits , one of them trimmed in gold. Round, white masks, almond-shaped slits in the eyes and hooked, protruding material where a nose would be. He can’t tell, exactly, what they’re supposed to be – and he would call them henchmen of an up-and-coming Gotham villain, if it weren’t for how expensive the suits look. He was raised by Jack and Janet Drake, he knows what expensive looks like. And the way they’re dressed is snobbish old money, the worst kind. Who are they?
The one in gold trim must be important. Their mask is more detailed, patterns carved into the surface. The four aren’t doing much, just standing. Gold trim pulls out a phone – speed-dials, raises the phone. They turn their face towards the ceiling, and Tim glimpses a better angle of the mask before he ducks closer to the shadows to avoid being spotted.
“There’s nothing here to test,” gold trim says. “It’s all gone. They cleaned all of it.”
Pause. “Yes. All physical residue has been wiped.”
Pause again. “We haven’t found the plate number yet. We’re looking, but there’s no surveillance out here. We may have to go through records, but it’s possible they haven’t logged it yet.”
Pause.
“Yes, ma’am.”
They hang up, the phone disappearing into their suit. “We’re going to go through records. They should at least have which driver they dispatched.”
They turn on their heel, stalking towards the door. The other three scurry behind them.
These guys definitely look like they’d buy radioactive superhero sludge. They must be trying to find it. Tim hops through the rafters after them. If he follows them, maybe they’ll lead him to wherever their boss is.
Gold trim snaps their head around, looking directly up at him, uncannily fast. Before Tim can even blink, there’s a flash of metal and a crack and something screaming at him and a tearing pain in his shoulder and then he’s falling.
He doesn’t fall far, he manages to catch himself against the rafters, but that and the spiking pain sends his heart into a flurry. Before they can take another shot, he backs into cover.
His shoulder grows warm and wet. He presses a hand to it – he must be imagining the small green sheen shining in the light against his blood.
“Wow, rude,” he calls, pulling out a sticky gauze bandage and slapping it onto the wound.
He’s answered with another crack.
Tim sighs, pulling out a batarang. “Can’t you guys read? You’re not supposed to be in here.”
When he tries to get down, he gets stuck . His hand meets resistance – he almost falls, but his hand won’t move from where it clutches the wood of the rafters.
What the fuck?
He takes his own arm and yanks , wood creaking and splintering against his palm. It finally releases with a snap, dropping him to the floor in an ungraceful manner that he barely recovers from.
He tosses the batarang, knocking the pistol out of gold trim’s hand.
There are still large wood chips on his hand. Stuck to his glove. Weird.
He can’t hold his staff like he needs to with the wood, but it won’t brush off; He switches to one hand instead when a fist comes flying at him.
These guys are fast . They can dodge his swings, his hits – he aims a kick at gold trim, and they catch his foot and twist , making him stumble. It’s a little concerning, the way they can read his movements, how quick they are, how they manage to land a few hits on him that aren’t his fault.
“I don’t suppose you’d tell me who you work for if I asked?” Tim grunts, knocking the first one out with a hit to the jaw.
Someone hits his shoulder. Pain flashes through him, and another finally knocks him over. Gold trim towers over him, a pristine white dress shoe descending onto his skull.
“You don’t know who you’re messing with,” they hiss. “You should’ve stayed out of this. Now you have to die. And I am going to enjoy killing you.”
Tim rolls his eyes. “That’s so cliché. Lame.” He wraps his hand around their ankle and yanks to the side. There’s a strange crack of bone, then they topple to the side, giving him enough time to get back on his feet and duck out of range of the other two.
Broken tibia.
Huh.
He wasn’t even trying.
Another punch comes and he doesn’t have time to think about it anymore. These two are easier to take down than gold trim, but it still takes longer than it should. Then he leaves them, white suits speckled with dark blood, to call the police again.
Fuck, the hole in his shoulder hurts .
He strips the sticky bandage while he calls it in. The wound is still bleeding sluggishly, and it hurts, but it feels like it just hit muscle, not bone. Nothing vital or something he needs to take care of immediately , except cleaning. He has to clean it one-handed, because there are still woodchips inexplicably stuck to his glove that he is choosing to ignore for the moment.
The police line is a little loud. It hurts his ear to listen to, and he can’t fix it without connecting it to his laptop. He very nearly takes it out entirely.
Only a few presses of gauze stems the bleeding enough for him to put a heavier temporary bandage on it. Then, he turns to his glove.
His first thought is to take it off, but his glove is stuck too. Still, he needs the wood off, so he worries at them and slowly pries them off. The wood pulls at his skin like it’s slathered in superglue, and it’s just as difficult to pull.
Weird.
He’s not going home because of a bullet wound. The night’s still young, and he still feels wrong . Besides, the pain is already ebbing.
The weird things keep happening after that.
A new one – he notices something that yells at him whenever someone attacks him, something that screams until he looks and finds something he couldn’t have known was there. All of his training over the years has led to a sort of sixth sense, knowing what someone’s going to do before they do it – but he can always pick out what led him to his conclusions. A twitch of a hand, the shifting of eyes. Whatever this is – he can’t. He shouldn’t know these things.
And he keeps sticking to stuff.
Why is he sticking ?
It becomes enough of a problem while he’s fighting that he takes a knife to the stomach because he can’t stop sticking to the assailant and he runs back to his apartment with torn fabric stuck to his forearm.
Tim pulls himself through his window, pain tearing through his stomach as he moves. He doesn’t know what he’ll do if it hit something other than muscle. His feet are surprisingly steady as they take his weight. Still, he nearly tips over, his hand sticking to the glass of the window.
No, no, no- Fuck, why is it doing that?
Stop sticking .
He gives a frustrated yank. The glass cracks around his fingers. It tears away in chunks against his glove. Some of his window falls in shards of jagged circles to shatter against the floor.
Sounds of the night seem too close, following him to his bathroom. Beeping – rubber – voices – clicking – doors – it's all so loud .
He can hear the lights in the bathroom buzzing when he turns them on. He flicks them off again, leaving the light draping through the cracked door to illuminate.
The glass cuts through his glove as he yanks it off. He peels his uniform off with bloody hands, leaving it on the floor. He washes his hands in the sink – the water is so loud , crashing against the porcelain like thunder. His towel is already stained with red-brown – it doesn’t matter that new red joins it.
His med kit isn’t under the sink.
I left it in the kitchen .
The lights in the rest of his apartment are suddenly blinding , loud for both his ears and his eyes, so he turns them off. He doesn’t think about how surely he finds his medkit in the dark.
He pulls himself up on the counter with a pained groan, sliced skin pulling at the movement. The wound has already clotted, so Tim moves to cleaning it, wiping it with a soaked rag. It’s about four inches long, angled to the right of his belly button.
Huh. Not as deep as he’d thought it was.
He takes a breath and proceeds with stitches more calmly. It couldn’t have hit anything important, not like that. The needle goes into his skin with more difficulty than it should – and it hurts more, like his sensitivity has spiked when it shouldn’t feel more than- well, a needle. Usually, he can just stop paying attention to the pain, but now it- it hurts .
Still, he pushes through it to finish the stitches. As he cuts the thread, he figures since he’s already here, he should take care of the bullet wound.
He peels the bandage from his shoulder.
Something falls, tinkling against the tile.
He should have to lean forward to be able to see it from here, but he doesn’t. It’s a bullet.
The bullet that he thought went all the way through.
His fingers shake as they slowly rise to meet his shoulder. All he touches is smooth skin and flaking, dried blood.
It’s a bit of a mess, the blood, yet it’s easy to wipe off to see behind. And what he sees is smooth skin .
There’s nothing there . There’s no hole, no torn skin, not even a scrape , the wound that he felt, that bled, under the hole in his uniform, is fucking gone.
The bullet is on the floor. He knows he was shot. Where did the wound go?
He can’t find any pain no matter how hard he pokes at it. Blood crusts his fingers. He wipes them off on a cloth.
The cuts on his palm start to seal as he watches them.
He sees his skin knit together, watches as the cuts heal over into-
Into smooth skin.
He fumbles for the stitches Leslie gave him. They're gone. It’s healed.
This isn’t normal.
This isn’t normal, and he can’t keep passing it off like it is. Rapid healing – sensitive senses – the sticking – whatever keeps yelling at him – something's wrong .
Something happened to him. What happened ?
Everything feels like too much , suddenly. The sounds rush in his ears. He can feel the air move. He can see every detail in his floor. He can smell his own dried blood, the cars outside, the concrete. It’s too much, it’s way too much, and it’s so overwhelming that it sends him sinking to the floor, desperately trying to block as much of it as he can.
Light from the window makes it past his eyelids. Beeping comes through his hands. Iron doesn’t leave his nose or his mouth, even when he stops breathing. The shifting of his stitches hurts him so bad .
He’s not sure how long he stays like that, overwhelmed, too overwhelmed to fix it. Too long. Still, eventually the flood of sensations trickles out. It doesn’t leave him, he still takes in every piece of data his brain is sending him. It just... stops feeling so intense.
Then, when he comes back, the first thing he really registers is the TV in someone else’s apartment.
“...Queens’ very own vigilante made an appearance at the celebration tonight...”
Who the hell watches New York news in Gotham?
“...for Alchemax’s new scientific breakthrough was interrupted by a group of assailants of unknown gang affiliation. The police aren’t sure yet what they wanted, and have not released much on the situation as of yet. They didn’t get the chance to make it clear themselves, Spider-man swooping in during geneticist Dr. Chikondi’s speech to apprehend the criminals in question...”
Spider-man.
Spider-man. What does he know about Spider-man?
New York vigilante. Meta, mutant, whatever. No one knows who he is. He’s actually one of the most popular heroes on the planet, even though he generally stays in New York.
Signature powers: Webs. Super strength. Sticking .
Spider-man. Orchard spider. Could’ve been affected by the radiation. Radioactive spider... That stuff was supposed to give people superpowers.
Where did they say they came from?
New York.
Tim pushes to his feet, head swimming, and then he’s suddenly pulling his laptop onto his legs and looking it up.
He feels like Reddit isn’t a reliable source, but, generally, nerds and conspirators online can get super close. He knows from experience. Besides, this post has links to news clips and videos as sources.
r/spiderman • 6 mo. Ago
by iliveinyourbasement
What powers does Spiderman have?
edit: it has now been confirmed that his webs are not organic https.youtube.com/watch?v=dQw4w9WgXcQ
What powers does Spider-man have? Here is my list, confirmed and speculation, of what powers Spider-man has, reasoning below.
Number one: The most obvious. He can stick to things. We’ve all seen it.
Number two: Super-strength.
Number three: Super-reflexes.
Number four: Super-senses.
Number five: Super-durability.
Number six: This one’s a little iffy. I’ve been criticized about this before, but I believe wholeheartedly that he has some sort of precognition.
Number seven: Super-healing.
Okay. Most of those check out.
The user actually has a decently strong, well-put-together argument for themself, but Tim doesn’t care about that. He heads straight for the links.
He watches Spider-man crawl a wall. Spider-man pulling a school bus back onto a bridge by himself. Dodging bullets. A personal video of someone being found recording him when he shouldn’t have known they were there. Comparison videos of his shoulder, his dislocated and nearly broken arm, and one dated two days later where he’s swinging fine.
Tim’s hand unconsciously touches his bare shoulder as he swallows.
Two Spider-men. There can’t be two Spider-men.
He’s Red Robin. He’s not Spider-man.
Patrol tonight was a disaster .
Whatever that spider did to him, whatever it gave him – he can’t control it. And it’s going to make his life hell until he can. He can’t go on patrol like this, not unless he wants a knife to his heart next time. He can’t go to work without making a mess. He has to get a grip on this, and he has to get it fast .
He doesn’t have time to learn how to control it.
Spider-man already knows .
And right then is when the idea plants in his head. He shakes it off, at first – he can’t just up and leave for New York. He has responsibilities. He’s a CEO. He has a city to take care of. He can’t just leave. He shouldn’t. Who knows how long he’d be away?
His fingers stick to his laptop when he puts it away. It takes him four minutes to pry them off.
Suddenly, Tim is exhausted .
Tomorrow. If he doesn’t have it under control by the end of tomorrow, he’ll book a hotel.
No more blood joins the sheets tonight. The covers feel like too much, so he leaves them off. He hears most of a conversation between two people outside his building as he drifts off.