grasp of ice
A/N:
kuppatan asked on tumblr:
"for the platonic prompts, holding hands unironically. tim drake and damian wayne. dw can be subbed with dick grayson if damian and tim are too much like a dumpster fire."
I committed to the dumpster fire.
"Drake." The hand in his was cold. Not because it belonged to a corpse, but because the night was cold. Cold and bright and pitiless, fresh snow glittering perfect under the waning gibbous moon like diamond sand. "Drake. Stay awake."
Drake, because he was insane, smiled before he said, "I don't want your pity, Robin."
It was a very familiar sort of smile. A League smile. Untouchable with cold, rather than warmth. This struck Damian as an entirely unproductive attitude under the circumstances.
"It's not pity," he scoffed. "Grayson would never forgive me if you died on my watch."
"Mm. Of course." Red Robin's eyelids flickered, and it was difficult to be sure whether that was sleepiness or derision. The cold hand gripped his for a moment. "Self-preservation."
Damian couldn't tell whether Drake was mocking the idea that Damian was being selfish in this moment, or the idea that he might not be, and felt absurdly defensive of both possibilities. He chafed his hands together around the one impersonating part of the frozen landscape. Was Drake's skin always this disgustingly pale?
"If you had more of it, we wouldn't be in this situation," he muttered.
"Is this a we situation now." Asked the vigilante with 80% of his body frozen into the surface of a lake full of tiny bombs.
"Since I'm as liable to be blown up as you, yes, you useless sentimental garden ornament."
"Pfff." That sound…wasn't actually derision, and when Damian looked up from ice-white fingertips in time to see a smile that was less League and more Titans fading from slightly grey lips. "Nice one. No swearing or death threats even. Just a tasteful allusion to my imminent transformation into sculpture."
"Tt." This didn't rate verbal acknowledgment.
"Dick'll have you making with the puns any day now I bet."
Damian brought their linked hands to his mouth and puffed air over them, blood-hot from deep inside his lungs. Unlike Drake, he still had every layer of his insulated winter uniform on, besides the gloves he'd taken off to enable this half-assed attempt at sharing body heat. In comparison to Drake he felt like a human furnace.
A dragon, even. Hah. There, a pun. He refused to share it.
Red Robin of course continued to be an ass, though at least this latest suggestion of a smile wasn't cold again. "Damian, I don't think it's going to help much to keep just my right hand alive."
Drake's teeth had still been chattering when Damian caught up. He hadn't paid as much attention as he should have to his cold-weather survival protocols, but that stopping was a bad sign, he was fairly sure. If only because it could hardly be a good one, since nothing about the situation had improved.
"Shut up," he said, glaring at the line of chemical heaters melting their way through the ice in a staggered ring around Red Robin's chest. They were barely two inches in. Drake reported the solid layer went at least seven inches down. He couldn't move his left hand at all. "The blood in your hand circulates, ignoramus. Putting some heat into it is putting heat into all of you." Not enough to make any kind of difference, and he knew it, but Drake didn't challenge the argument.
At least the micro-mines weren't, according to Red Robin's research before getting himself taken captive, heat-activated. Just impact. They were meant to go off when struck by boats or particularly vigorous swimmers. Why they'd been dumped in this lake was unclear, possibly as a demo.
If the chemical heat-packs from his belt ran out of juice before they made it through, he was going to have to start chipping at the ice anyway, and hope they didn't die. And somehow keep Drake anchored enough that when the ice around him gave, he wasn't immediately yanked to the bottom of the lake by the cement block chained to one ankle.
That was why Damian was holding onto him, obviously. And why he couldn't simply construct a large bonfire on the surface of the ice to speed the melting and dump some heat into Drake; he needed somewhere secure to stand, to lift two hundred pounds of block and blockhead without going through the ice himself. Unfortunately proper rope was too bulky to carry in a utility belt, and if he tried to anchor Drake to the shore with monofilament it would just cut off his hand if he sank. Not helpful.
Rebelliously, Damian blew on their hands again. Drake's was still just as cold. "Only you would stumble over a break in the arms case when we're supposed to be scouting out what Freeze has been plotting up here. And miscalculate and let them get a hostage. And surrender and get yourself stripped and thrown in a booby-trapped lake just in time for dueling supervillains to freeze it solid."
The flash-freeze might have saved his life, considering it had happened in time to keep his head from going underwater, but in all honesty Damian had more faith in Drake's ability to get his ankle out of a chain before he could drown than in their combined ability to get him out of this accidental deathtrap—suspected Red Robin had been counting on doing just that, and had let himself be thrown with that intent.
Drake pulled a doubtful face. "…I mean, I find whenever I want to say 'this could only happen to me' I have to admit this kind of thing happens to everyone I know."
Damian did not like this new, easy-tempered Drake. Usually, even if the idiot restrained himself from losing his temper, Damian could put it under strain in a few words, but now it was like fighting smoke. Like Grayson in a good mood. Nothing seemed to connect.
Maybe he was too tired to be angry. Maybe he had decided he was dying today, and didn't want to waste his last moments on being angry with Damian.
Maybe Damian wasn't trying as hard to provoke as he might have done.
"No, it's just you," Damian said decisively. "You are the biggest loser in this business. I don't know how you've managed not to notice this long."
"Obviously I've been living in denial. Ngh."
"What?"
"Nothing."
The number of possible sources of sudden spikes of pain was too high for Damian to bother trying to figure it out. "Father may have gotten my message." This was scrupulously not a lie, which made it very poor comfort.
"I'm sure he did," said Drake, which was probably a lie but didn't sound like one. "I calculate he should be here within forty minutes."
It had taken nearly thirty minutes for Damian to find the idiot and several more to assess the situation now that he had. Drake was still conscious. He claimed the liquid water under the ice had still been detectably above freezing at first, before the ice started melting into it, and he had part of himself dry. It was perfectly likely he would still be alive in forty minutes.
Assuming Father was really on his way with additional supplies necessary to safely rescue his most useless and pathetic foundling.
Damian had been Robin long enough to have a basic grasp of hypothermia mechanics, though he could not fact-check the numbers Drake had rattled off with such confidence. He did know the people Freeze froze were very often recovered alive, because the usual freeze-gun didn't freeze the actual things it shot, merely coated them in ice. If they didn't suffocate due to the placement of the ice, and were extracted within a few hours, this generally caused only treatable levels of hypothermia.
Unless the weather was particularly harsh, or they had existing health problems, or…well, there were plenty of exceptions, but they were often recovered alive, and because cold retarded entropy rather than accelerating it the damage (other than any loss of extremities) was usually fully recoverable.
But whatever feud Freeze was having with Killer Frost in this nowhere mountain town had turned the sort of early December weather that hovered just above zero (Celsius, Damian wasn't a barbarian) without ever hitting a hard freeze into this. Killer Frost had actual ice powers. She pulled the heat directly out of matter, didn't just impose ice on its surface. She was much more dangerous than Freeze could manage without extensive preparation, and neither Damian nor Drake knew which of them was responsible for this.
It was difficult to perform any hypothermia mitigation procedures on someone embedded in a lake.
He stood abruptly, taking only the care to drop Drake's hand onto his exposed chest rather than the ice. Pulled his gloves back on, took his grapple-gun from his belt, and shot a singing dart across the expanse of the lake surface into the bole of a tall long-needled softwood tree of some sort, standing at the nearest edge. "Take this," he ordered Drake, handing over the device.
Red Robin complied, but not as though he thought it was going to be helpful. Damian couldn't find it in himself to be smug about the weakness that betrayed. He swept his cape from his shoulders, instead, and dropped it over Drake. Put a little twist in to bring the edges in against skin all the way down to the lake surface, but didn't bother to wrap it around him in the usual way one wore a cloak. Covering over his head was good, it would hold in a little of the heat he lost by breathing.
"Damian," Drake said, slightly muffled.
"No names in the field," Damian replied, and walked very smoothly away, off the ice.
Once there was no more risk of blowing off his own leg with a careless step, he stomped his way up the stone and gravel beach and into the tree cover. Who cared if it made him noticeable? He would love to have something to take his mood out on. Just try him.
Besides, he was going to make noise anyway, digging around in the brush. The sudden snowfall had limited his options, but there were enough evergreens closely packed around the lakeshore to leave large patches of dry underbrush and dead lower branches for him to harvest. It didn't seem that many people had been here before him. Presumably the vacationers whose summer homes ringed the lake relied on commercial firewood rather than local gleanings for their insipid marshmallow festivities.
…now there was an idea.
Damian returned to his ludicrously entombed comrade dragging a bright red child's sled piled high with supplies. The place was easier to find the second time, not only because he knew where he was going but because the large black lump of his cape showed up better against the ice in the moonlight than had Drake's pallid skin and the single dark spot of his hair.
"D'm'n?" mumbled the lump as he drew near.
Damn. The slurring had set in already. "Yes, it is I, 'Demon,'" he said flatly. "Would you like to buy a vowel?"
The lump quivered. It was probably laughter. Damian sat down on the ice and set to work.
The vacation house he'd broken into had yielded a box of matches, seven candles of reasonable sizes and a packet of birthday candles, a mostly-empty bottle of lighter fluid, and a ball of cotton string. The rest of the sled was full of dry sticks of varying sizes. Damian lit several candles, first, for light, then fished the chemical heaters out of their melted trench and shoved them one by one under the edge of his cape, rather than waste the rest of their output entirely.
The reaction to this was somewhat belated. "What're you doing out there 'nyway?" Drake's hand let go the handle of the grapple gun to lift the cape, and his eyes blinked out at the low wall of bundled sticks with tiny pink candles tied to the top, even as Damian drizzled accelerant over the top, like syrup on a bizarre sort of cake. "…oh."
"Yes, 'oh.' Drop that, it's not warm enough out here yet to help you." Damian struck a match and dropped it onto one end of his little bonfire, and the flame raced along the carefully piled fuel, twigs crackling to life. Pink wax dripped in the heat, encouraging the lower levels to catch.
It wasn't a complete circle, because Damian wasn't an idiot, but it encircled Drake on three sides, a patch at his back left open. Damian added twigs steadily, shuffling around the ring of fire, and increasing the size of the wood until broken branches half as thick as his wrist were beginning to burn down, then went into the circle of fire to rearrange the way his cape wrapped around Red Robin, so there was a little more layering, and a small window near the bottom on one side for the heat from the fire to get in.
He left the face covered, which Drake incredibly did not complain about. "You dropped the grapple gun," Damian scolded him.
"I can't feel my fingers," Drake replied, as if this was some excuse. Things went numb well before you actually lost all control of them.
The line for the grapple gun was steel. Damian didn't have the supplies to make a fire hot enough to damage it, and so hadn't worried about that, but had built the fire under the line rather than over the top, so that emergency use of it would not throw fire in all directions. He tied Drake's wrist to the device with a loop of cotton cord.
"Safety first," he said.
Drake didn't laugh at that, but possibly inside the layers of cape he smiled. Or maybe he was thinking of broken safety lines from years ago.
Or maybe he was just humoring Damian, and didn't think there was any real chance that he would be conscious to save himself, if Damian was off fighting more arms traffickers or ice villains when the lake gave him up. "Safety first," he echoed, several seconds late. The slurring was getting worse again.
It was increasingly obvious that Batman had not gotten Damian's message at all. Red Robin had now been trapped in the lake for over two hours. Damian had made expeditions into several other empty houses around the lake, discovering a great deal more lighter fluid (with which he nearly set Drake on fire due to an overenthusiastic bottle-squeeze), and two emergency flares, and a hooded sweatshirt Damian had taken for himself and pulled on over his costume because his ears were freezing, but no working telephone or other communications device. The communications blackout they had been investigating was very thorough, and still ongoing. Possibly it had escalated.
He still had not found any rope. Civilians were so useless, even when they were trying to be prepared.
"Now maybe Father will listen next time I request a miniature flamethrower attachment for my gauntlets," he said, as he used the last of the hoarded magnesium-based fire-starting capsules from his utility belt to get the latest round of fire going. The design he'd proposed was actually more of a blowtorch, that having broader utility, but it was more entertaining to call it a flamethrower, and not actually wrong. The device would have made this situation so much easier.
He had, on Drake's bleary suggestion, managed to get a gas-burning stove lit in one of the houses he'd burgled, and brought out a steaming pot of hot water, which he'd administered by the mugful. Unfortunately Drake's fingers really were almost completely unresponsive, and they couldn't risk his getting himself wet by fumbling with the cup, so Damian had to kneel in the gap he'd left in the fire and carefully tilt it to the idiot's lips. He wasn't sure which of them found the exercise more mortifying.
Not that Drake complained, so Damian couldn't either.
Unfortunately Damian couldn't afford much time away from the lake to do things like heat water. As the trench grew deeper, it had been repeatedly necessary to bail it out, dry the bottom, and start the fire over again. This had involved an assortment of stolen cups and towels, which Drake had too-cheerfully described as the final piece in transforming this into a perfect atrocious inversion of a family beach vacation.
"For an atrocious inversion of family I think I'm trying awfully hard to save your sorry ass, Drake!" Damian had snapped, up to his elbows in blackened slush.
Drake hadn't laughed at him, this time, but flinched a little from the rage. His level of consciousness was coming and going, in a pattern Damian couldn't entirely link to the amount of heat available. Even if Damian had been an expert on the science of hypothermia he was fairly sure there was no data available for how much it might help to be surrounded by heat sources, or fed warm liquids, while most of you was entombed in freezing water or ice.
For one thing, it wasn't normally possible to have ice freeze solid around you in the same moment you entered cold water. Normally someone in Drake's position would have to have been halfway into the lake for several days, and either a very well-equipped performance artist or a corpse. Damian normally liked an absence of precedent. It suggested originality. He was not enjoying it tonight.
The fire trench was now half a foot deep, and Damian shook the last bottle of accelerant to assess its contents—very low—and went to hold the pot of water over the emergency flare in hopes of getting it hot again.
"Almost through," he murmured. It was going to take a bit more time to fully detach Drake from the lake surface, but he was nearly through to the water most of the way around, and now the trick would be keeping his rescuee from sinking to the bottom immediately, as soon as he was no longer part of a continuous sheet of ice.
The ice frozen directly around him would probably have been a sufficient flotation device for his body alone, at least briefly, but the thirty pounds of dead weight on his ankle were another matter altogether. Damian tested the isthmus of ice he'd kept intact for his own use. He'd been crawling back and forth across it this whole time, and considering the sheer thickness of the ice had faith in it, but if it gave Damian might go under along with Drake, and at this point he'd be hard-pressed to save himself at that point, let alone Red Robin.
The small amount of water left in the pot was warm, getting toward hot. He dumped it into the only mug he hadn't used to shovel ash-slush, which was blue and had a fairly realistic picture of a rooster on it.
Damian sank onto one knee with the rooster mug, leaned forward and peeled the hood back from Red Robin's face. "Tea time, maggot."
Eyelashes didn't even flutter. The glare of the emergency flare was dyeing Drake's pasty countenance sunset-red, which was no more accurate than his earlier moon-bleached pallor, but less biased lighting wouldn't have yielded more useful information; Damian was fairly sure it wasn't possible to go any paler than the patient in question already had. He slapped one cheek lightly with his knuckles. "Right, you don't drink tea, fine, it's coffee, I'm your coffee boy now, all your dreams have come true. Drake."
He leaned a little further forward. The mug in his left hand was cooling rapidly. He got a grip on Drake's shoulder and gave him a shake. "Wake up. I am at most fifteen minutes from achieving your rescue, you are absolutely forbidden from dying."
Drake's head lolled. Damian hissed between his teeth, tucked the cape in around Drake's chin again and, because he was leaning forward so far, and not for the first time tonight, used Red Robin's shoulder to shove himself to his feet. And then the whole plan fell apart.
The rotten bottom of the melted ring gave all at once in a sharp crack.
Drake's elbow slammed against the icy isthmus at the same time as Damian's knee, just in case the force of the breaking ice hadn't been enough to seal their doom, and a crack shuddered out from that point across the surface of the lake.
For a split second it seemed the worst case had been averted after all, that perhaps the concussion-activated bombs had been a myth, or thinly spaced, or had frozen to death. And then the ice at the far end of the fissure blasted itself apart in a fireball twice the size of the Batmobile.
"No!" Damian shouted.
He might as well have shouted down the tide. That explosion set off two others, and the daisy-chain was coming back toward them, and the only sensible thing for Damian to do would have been to run, flat out, trusting his speed and the grip of his boot-soles, ahead of fiery dismemberment.
Instead, he grabbed for his least favorite sibling. "Come on," he snarled, squinting against needles of ice and sudden brightness, heaving against the weight of Drake and ice and concrete and knowing he had no chance, none at all, and he turned to show his defiant face to uncaring fire even as he stood his ground before it, because he was just as much a fool as Drake or because he was the son of Batman, or maybe there wasn't as much space between these reasons as he'd like.
And then suddenly with a lurch, he was yanked away. He watched the place where he had spent hours working be torn apart as he sailed backward—but Drake was no longer there, the circle of exposed water lay empty but for broken ice fragments, and he couldn't have slipped under the water so fast, not when Damian was…still holding onto him?
Just as he processed that the arm across his chest and black cape flying into his face did not belong to his father—impact, like the Batmobile had been driven into the back of his shoulder, and he identified the culprit as a tree even as it sent them both spilling and tumbling wildly across the snow-covered rocky beach.
Damian sat up at once, before he had even entirely spent his momentum, spat out a mouthful of snow and a small stone and got to his feet to survey the beach by the light of the exploding lake.
It took only about six steps to inspect Drake, splayed out entirely naked and still in the snow, moon-bleached again but for the dark mottling of bruises he must have gotten from his captors. His right arm lay outstretched the way they'd come, along the shoreline, toward where Damian's cape lay in a welter of yellow and black.
Damian stooped half-automatically to take a pulse, had to stop and strip a gauntlet before he found one faint in a cool throat. It took him two attempts to get his glove back on.
The outstretched hand was locked into a grasping claw.
Damian began to have an idea what had happened, but he was too tired to pursue the theory. It didn't matter. What mattered was the task in front of him.
Which was, firstly, kneeling on the least hospitable beach empty of actual enemies he had ever seen, to haul Drake up into a fireman's carry over his back.
It was less than twenty feet to Damian's cape, and the broken length of chain hanging from Red Robin's ankle dragged with every step over the snow-covered stones—each one of which seemed to have taken it as a personal mission to trip Robin up by rolling under his feet—the sound just audible in between bursts of the ongoing pyrotechnic contagion across the lake. It felt longer. He lowered Drake onto the cape, not very gently, and wrapped him up again, and…yes. There.
The grapple-gun he'd tied to the fool's wrist an hour ago and half-forgotten about lay under a fold of the cape. The cotton cord was nowhere to be seen, probably lost in the snow after snapping during their incredibly botched landing, but the evidence was clear.
Whatever sliver of consciousness Drake had managed to scrounge up had reacted to explosions and screaming by grabbing the nearest person, hitting the retraction switch on the grapple gun under his hand, and hanging on for dear life as his equipment hauled him to safety.
It seemed there was something to be said for Father's avoidance of changing the kinesthetic layout of their most essential gear if it could possibly be avoided.
"Always have to be the hero, don't you Drake," Damian muttered. "When I tell this story, I'm leaving out that part. I did all the rescuing tonight."
He'd get away with it, too. There was no way Drake was going to remember this. Damian was certainly doing all the work, he deserved the credit.
Next step. Drag Drake up under the trees and toward the nearest vacation home, where he would bed his unconscious moron down in whatever linens he could pirate and then set the dining table on fire, if necessary, to get a little heat.
…he would have to go out again to get matches, of course, since he'd cleaned that place out and used up the firestarting caps from his belt, and all his stolen supplies had gone up with the lake.
Solve that problem when he got to it. For now, get through this underbrush to the road and then get Red Robin inside a building. And put him down. Drake was a puny weakling, but he was still tall enough to outweigh Damian considerably, and an unwieldy burden to get through snowy woodland. So far he'd avoided catching any thorns, at least. Visibility would be better when he got out into the road, under the moon.
The ongoing noise of explosions would have limited the usefulness of hearing even if he hadn't still been slightly deafened by being nearly in the middle of the first round.
Which was Damian's excuse for not noticing he was no longer alone until he stopped dead in the center of a blinding floodlight. A voice said,
"Whoa!"
The flood turned out to be a very powerful flashlight, and the man holding it angled it up again so it wasn't shining quite so directly in Damian's eyes. "…kid?" By the tone, he was lucky to be young and short, or they might have shot him already, just to be safe.
Damian squinted. He seemed to have missed an entire group of people wading through the snow. If these were the arms traffickers who had thrown Drake into the lake in the first place, he…wasn't sure he could get them out of this without killing anyone, at this point. "Who are you?"
"Emergency services," said somebody behind the man with the excessive flashlight.
Damian squinted harder. He did seem to see at least one fire helmet, but overall this crew was not in uniform. "Emergency services walks through the woods with flashlights?"
"None of the cars are starting," said yet a third member of the crew, and,
"But the lake is blowing up," said a fourth, presumably the explanation for why they were walking toward it in the dark.
Probably the only reason they'd stopped to talk to him on the way to investigate that situation was how incredibly suspicious he was, carrying a shrouded body out of an exploding body of water.
"What have you got there?" asked the first one. And they were such…normal-sounding people. A little bravado. A little bit harassed. A little spooked. Just very normal. When had he even learned what normal sounded like? Grayson would trust them, Damian decided. The arms dealers wouldn't go to this much effort to trick him.
"My brother," he said. Playing the terrified young boy as best he could, without straining credulity with the contrast to his previous suspicion. "The…criminals threw him into the lake, before it froze. I just got him out before the bombs went off." He caught his breath a little, purely because of the hitch in his lungs from how hard he'd hit the tree. "I think he's dying."
The way the crowd of very normal people exploded into action at this revelation leant credence to the claim that they were EMS. The ambulance company had apparently brought a variety of first aid supplies and Damian nearly strangled the person who wanted to unwrap him to look for burns. "He's hypothermic," he snarled, and they unrolled a stretcher and laid him on it and pulled the cape open only enough to lift an eyelid and check his reactivity.
Having passed the low bar of not being an actual corpse, Drake was whisked rapidly away through the dark by two large medical technicians, Damian jogging alongside, opposite a woman charged with lighting their way with what was apparently one of only four working flashlights so far discovered in town.
Drake would probably have cared about that, but Damian would make time for evidence when the current issue was resolved.
As they drew near what was apparently the town fire hall—the light flashed across a large sign reading SILVER LAKE VOLUNTEER FIRE DEPARTMENT—its windows lit from within by what looked like the flicker of oil lamps, Damian made a rapid decision and peeled the mask off his face under cover of his stolen hood. Shoved it into the pocket across the front of the sweatshirt.
The flashlight woman gave him an odd look as they passed into full if low light, but as he'd hoped the blackness they'd seen across his eyes could be dismissed as the shadow of his hood, and she turned to go rejoin whatever ongoing rescue operations were, and return to her fellows their borrowed torch, without comment.
Inside was a large, busy space full of folding cots and the smells of coffee, people, and various types of smoke.
"Oh God," said what appeared to be the chief matron of this impromptu emergency ward, on taking in Drake's condition. "I expected to be treating hypothermia tonight, but this is…."
Damian's belly cramped with the renewed knowledge that Red Robin might yet die. "Well do what you can!" he snapped.
"We will," one of the stretcher-bearers reassured him, like the child he had to pretend to be, while the matron ignored him entirely in favor issuing demands for various supplies and unwrapping Drake carefully at a medical cot set up nearer some sort of oil-burning radiator than the iron woodstove that seemed to have been part of the firehall all along, its stovepipe vanishing through the ceiling through a neat hole left in the plaster. Reverence for the past, or precaution against just this sort of event, or visual irony?
The room was almost oppressively warm, and Damian found himself shivering violently a few times as his body re-acclimated. His gauntlets with their wrist-spikes would draw comment, so he slipped them off inside the kangaroo-pouch pocket with his mask, and held his bare hands out toward the fire.
"I never actually thought I was going to have to treat hypothermia with fluids heated over an actual fire," one of the medics was saying. They'd poured water out of a kettle keeping warm beside the stove into hot water bottles and placed these strategically over the patient's body before piling an assortment of blankets—also towels and at least one tablecloth, they weren't being picky—over him. Someone was doing something complicated with an IV bag, which was both reassuring and alarming, but Damian's effort to go investigate was blocked.
With hot chocolate, but it was clearly an intentional interception, and Damian glowered at the interfering party for his presumption.
"Your brother's going to be fine," said the fat ruddy man with a piebald moustache, continuing to hold out the mug into Damian's face. "You won't help by getting underfoot, son. Get yourself warmed up, okay?"
Damian scowled harder, but took the cocoa, because he could use both heat and sugar applied internally.
The quality of the beverage was unspeakably inferior to that provided by Pennyworth, but it served its medical purpose while he sat on a folding chair against one wall and studied the room. Once the mug was empty he took the excuse of wanting to put it wherever used dishes went to investigate the space more generally, eavesdropping and asking the occasional question.
It turned out he was expected to keep track of the mug, which was now his, because they couldn't afford to be washing dishes. His brother was the second person who'd come in after a run-in with those criminals; Damian assumed the first was the hostage Drake had traded himself for. These people had spent the last few hours seeking out neighbors stranded in untenable circumstances by the sudden freeze and bringing them together in two centralized locations, this fire hall and the elementary school across the street, to which Damian refused to be removed. The reason they'd ignored the lake until it started exploding was that no one lived out there year round.
Apparently this community was very used to fending for itself outside vacation season, as their main access road was often snowed out, and while they'd never seen anything like this before, they were more prepared than Damian would have credited a bunch of civilians. Father would approve.
Some of their preparations had been made over the last few weeks, as persistent failure of both landlines and always-unreliable cell phone service combined with the presence of suspicious characters made everyone nervous. The electrical grid had gone down at the same time the flash-freeze hit.
That was the point at which Damian had radioed out to his father for backup, a call that had not received any response before his comm, along with every other powered object on his person, shut down.
With the larger sample here he was now able to observe the pattern: electrical devices were not necessarily disabled, if they had an internal power source. Electronic ones were, uniformly, even ones like his that were shielded against EMP pulses. This was not as useful an observation as Damian would have liked.
At this point he noticed that the crowd around Drake's bed had thinned out. He helped himself to another mug of disappointing cocoa and took up a station beside the cot. One of Drake's arms was lying outside the covers, a cannula draining into it. He seemed slightly less pale, though that could be the light.
Damian should go. Continue pursuing the case. Freeze and Frost and the gunrunners were all still out there, and he'd done all he feasibly could for Drake. But he found he didn't want to.
Not because he was tired and sore, of course; he could and had worked through far worse physical distress than this. But considering the time elapsed and the resources available to him, running off into the dark hunting villains wasn't terribly likely to turn out productive—indeed, as this was the nerve center of local operations he was most likely to get useful news by staying put.
So it was perfectly justifiable to stay here and await developments, at least until Red Robin's condition was stable. Grayson would be comforted to know someone had stayed with the fool to the end, if they did lose him. And angry with Damian for leaving him, if he did. Father too, probably, although Father was unpredictable. Also Pennyworth.
He wrapped his warm hand around Drake's slack, still-cool one, fingertips against the sluggish pulse point in the wrist. "Don't you dare embarrass us all by dying now," he murmured, too quietly for the medics to hear. "Drake. Tim."
The cool hand in his did not move.