Jason flopped down on the hard mattress with a grunt and a heavy thud. The impact rattled his teeth in his head, but it was better than no mattress at all. While Jason stretched his limbs out, Tim stood uncomfortably by the door.
Jason threw his arms up in the air with a flourish. "Welcome, to my humble abode." He said to the ceiling.
"This place is, uhhh…" Tim's words faded out at the end as he looked around the cramped room.
Jason waved one of his hands in a circular motion. "I'm not here for a leisure trip Tim. I'm not wasting my money on five stars." He sat up, propping his body up on his elbows and smiling devilishly. "What, has life in casa de Wayne spoiled you or something?"
Tim swung his backpack off his shoulder and dropped it onto the spindly looking desk, at the same time spinning the chair around and taking a seat. "I'm afraid to touch anything in here." He said as he sat.
Outside, fat raindrops began to beat against the one, tiny window. Jason sat up on the bed and tucked his feet underneath himself. Tim watched him, and after a minute Jason gestured for the younger boy to continue speaking.
"I guess I'll start from the beginning." Tim said. He held out his hands and began to tick things off on his fingers. "I've tried his regular cell and both normal emails, I tried his business email, his business cell, all the normal satellite radio frequencies, all of Bruce's private channels that I could get into, I've monitored chatter on police and underground frequencies, I've checked with every contact Bruce has in as many cities as I could…and I talked to you." Tim dropped his hands down into his lap. "You were the only person left to talk to, but we hadn't heard from you in months either. I threw a hail-mary even reaching out to you. I just, didn't know what else to do."
Jason leaned forward and balanced his head on his palm and his elbow on his knee, tapping the finger of his other hand on the edge of his sneaker. A tiny twist of guilt was brewing in his stomach, the longer Tim spoke. It was true that he hadn't exactly stayed in contact with Tim or Bruce, or any of them for that matter. There were a whole lot of bad memories waiting for him in Gotham, grudges and enemies and old emotional scars. He had left quickly in an effort to get away from them, and had absolutely no desire to come back, for any reason.
But, even so… What little Tim had told him in his initial contact was that it had something to do with Dick. As much as he hated to admit it, Dick had always been kind to him, the type of kindness one would expect from an annoying, overbearing older brother. While Jason might have held a grudge against many people in Gotham, Dick wasn't one of them. Tim wasn't either, for that matter. And so, that little message had been enough to drag him out of his hidey-hole in his own city and make the motorcycle ride up.
"He didn't tell you anything before he left about what he was doing? Or where he was going?" Jason moved the finger that was tapping his shoe to tap his temple.
Tim shook his head no.
"Was he working anything specific before he left? Any big cases?"
Tim shook his head again. "He's been working mostly independently." He said. "I had only seen him coming and going from the manor every now and then, so I hadn't talked to him much before he left. I can't say what he was working on, but he seemed busy."
"Got a laptop?"
"Uhh, yeah. Right here." Tim dug into his backpack and pulled out the heavy looking computer. Jason reached out for it and Tim passed it to him.
"Jesus, you carry this brick around?" Jason flipped the device open and started the boot up.
Tim shrugged. "Anything smaller doesn't have the power I need. The weight doesn't bug me."
Jason shook his head with a smirk and kept typing rapidly, his fingers flying across the keys. Tim craned his neck, then stood from his chair and came around to peek over Jason's shoulder.
"What are you doing?" He asked.
"Watch the master work kiddo." Jason responded. "This is the shit big daddy bats doesn't teach you."
"Big daddy bats?"
Jason ignored Tim and pointed at the screen, now all black with many boxes of tiny white text scrolling rapidly past.
"This is my territory bucko. This is the dark web right here. If anything devious is going on, you'll find out about it here."
The mattress creaked and rocked as Tim climbed onboard, sitting with his knees folded beneath him as he peered over Jason's shoulder.
"So, you're looking for the something Dick was working on?"
"Bingo." Jason held up his pointer finger. "I'm checking the chatter for any mention of Nightwing, or a scrawny asshole with black hair, blue eyes, and terrible acting skills. Meanwhile, I need you to rack your brain for any little thing that might clue us into what he was getting involved in. That'll help me narrow the search here."
Jason heard Tim swallow thickly, but the boy didn't say anything. Instead, he chewed his lip again and watched silently while Jason began typing again.
The two of them sat silently for at least twenty minutes, the only sounds in the room the clicking of the computer keys and the pattering of rain against the window. Jason poured through forums and chatlogs, searching for anything that was suspicious or any mention of outside interference. He found everything as it usually was, depraved and very illegal, but not out of the ordinary.
"Oh! Wait I remember something!" Tim blurted out, his head popping up.
Jason's fingers paused over the keyboard. "Spill."
"A couple months ago I couldn't sleep, so I wandered downstairs to get some water. Dick was sitting at the table with a bunch of papers all spread out, and he covered them all up when I walked in. But, I remember there were two missing posters on top of the pile." Tim squinted his eyes shut and pressed a finger into his temple. "If I remember correctly, the names were, Ashley Capri and…Marcy Daniels!"
"Ok, that's a good start. Do you remember what they looked like?" Jason pounded the names into the system and watched the information scroll past.
Tim squinted even harder. "Ummmm… One was a redhead, and the other had really curly brown hair. "
"Are they Caucasian, black, Asian, latino, you gotta give me more to work with here."
"They were both white, that much I remember."
"Roger, let's see what we get here." Jason finished typing and bounced down into a menu tap, opening up a gallery of small, square images. He was very familiar with this part of the web, it was one of the databases he often poured through when looking for problems to solve. Tim, as it sounded, was not so experienced with it.
"What, is this?" Tim's voice was weighted by disgust and discomfort as he leaned further over Jason's shoulder.
"It's a human trafficking portal. One of many, and not a place you want to hang around in for very long. If those girls are still alive, its very possible we might find them here."
Tim let out another uncomfortable sounding gurgle as Jason scrolled through wall after wall of pictures.
"Would Dick know?" Tim said after a while.
"Know what?"
"About this site. Would he know to look here?"
Jason clicked to the next page and shrugged. "Maybe, maybe not. He's a resourceful guy. But, even if he was looking for them through a different outlet, we might be able to intersect with him through a different approach."
"If we find the girls…"
"We find Dick."
Tim clicked his tongue unhappily. "Why didn't I think of this?" He said under his breath.
"Because it's not your style." Jason answered. "Bruce teaches you old fashioned gumshoe methods, but he keeps the heavy stuff to himself." Jason paused, swallowed a dry lump that had crawled up his throat. "For better or worse, he shields you from all the dark stuff. Until he can't anymore."
Tim's hand suddenly shot out past Jason's face, jabbing at a particular region of the laptop screen. "There! Right there!"
Jason blinked at the screen, then pushed his hand aside.
"I can't see through your damn hand."
"There, that's her. That's Marcy."
Jason moused over the image, enlarging it. The girl was sitting on an obnoxiously colored couch with her arms folded across her stomach and her knees tucked tightly together. Her hair was unkempt, and though the photo quality was low, she appeared to be wearing heavy makeup. The lower bodies of a few other people could be seen in the background behind the couch.
"Look, that's her." Tim held out his phone in his other hand, displaying the girls photo from the missing poster.
"MmmHmm. It does look like her." Jason nodded, and clicked on the image. Another scroll of miniscule text rolled across the screen and Jason followed it with his eyes, committing the information to memory. He clicked to an attached page, and Tim jabbed another finger at the screen.
"Look! There's the other one, there's Marcy." He said, pointing at another image of a girl sitting with her knees clutched against her chest and her hair loose over her shoulders.
Jason leaned in close to the screen as he enlarged the image. "Am I crazy or is that the same ugly ass couch?"
Tim leaned closer as well. By now his chest was pressed against Jason's back.
"It…is? Yeah, you're right."
"Interesting." Jason slapped down a few more keystrokes and navigated into a new window before inputting a flurry of text. As he did so, he raised his elbow and gave Tim a shove to the center of his chest. The younger boy tumbled back with a startled yelp and landed on his knees on the floor. His head popped up over the edge of the bed with an incredulous expression. Jason waved the back of his hand at him without turning around.
"Get out of here. I'm assuming you're sneaking around because you don't want Bruce to know about this, so go do some homework or something and keep your head down. I'll dig some more and see what holes I can crawl down on my own. See you tomorrow."
Tim stood up and brushed the dust from his knees. He looked down at Jason hunched over the computer and furrowed his brow. "That's my laptop." He said flatly.
"And it'll still be yours when I see you tomorrow. Scram."
Tim picked his bag up off of the desk again and stood awkwardly by the door, staring at Jason with an annoyed look. In his peripheral view Jason watched him open his mouth, then think better of it and close it again.
"I'll go back through things on our end and see if I can find anything helpful. Umm, see you tomorrow then?"
Jason gave a little salute with two fingers and returned to typing.
Tim blinked at him a few times, then nodded and shut the door behind him.