Chapter Eleven: Fideism

"What've you got for me, Oracle?"

The girl had been talking with this "Oracle" for the past fifteen minutes, too preoccupied with locating Batman to give her new friend much mind. Tim figured it beat the judgmental stares he'd received their first meeting, so he didn't complain. It was nice to have at least one unnerving thing going for him, and he tried to get lost instead in the heady breeze and the feeling of being suspended stories high.

On any other night, he figured that would've been enough to distract him, to reel his thoughts back in to the urge to keep steady against the overwhelming updraft of wind. But of course, his brain kept whirling, turning over the scraps of details he'd learned twenty minutes ago into any form that he could make sense of.

He shot another line, shaking off the numb, white eyes that were still burned into the back of his brain.

Red. What types of things are red? Tim's face twisted in thought. It had to be something important, valuable enough to voice as someone's dying words.

Blood, roses, fire, cardinals, the serum that's been circulating for nearly two months.

No. No, something about those didn't seem right—even though the last one was a definite possibility… Something about the words, though, about the intuition that the man had been talking to him and him alone, made Tim certain he'd been revealing something outside of the obvious or commonplace.

Maybe Tim was thinking about it all wrong: The man could've been talking about a place. A restaurant, a park, a street? There was a Krasnyj Boulevard in Little Odessa he'd seen a few days ago.*

Tim glanced over his shoulder in the direction of the Russian neighborhood, some primal part of him ever-attentive of the line in his hand and the threat of gravity dragging him down. But gravity wasn't affecting one thing that night, and that was the part of the sky that remained stained a smoky maroon, rising further and further into the air to the point where it practically curled above them. If that wasn't enough to be unsettling, the color reflected off the glass windows of every building they passed—like it was invading the structures, watching them from the inside and waiting to pounce.

It made it harder and harder for Tim to keep his mind off the one thing he didn't want to think about: that Nightwing was gone, having vanished somewhere in that direction and, more importantly, had left Batman to himself and the blonde leading the way in front of him.

There was only one reason Tim could accept for Nightwing having insisted so fiercely that he be the one to confront this new threat, and that was that this Red Hood figure was a strong opponent, bigger than what the police could handle and that—

Wait.

Red.

Red Hood.

Tim felt his breath hitch in his chest. Was that what the man had been trying to say? Had Tim simply been mistaken for someone else? The teenager hadn't seen this Red Hood for himself, and Tim did hide his hair with a hood...

He released the shaky breath. Maybe he was just being paranoid; maybe he'd simply been confused for someone else, and the whole thing hadn't been about him at all.

"Got it," the girl swinging beside him commented suddenly into her mic. "We're heading there now." Batgirl shifted her attention to Tim as she gestured for them to turn down a different street. They must've finally gotten a lock on where Batman was.

Tim swallowed down his nerves as he reminded himself to keep focused on where he was shooting his grapnel. He'd barely even realized they'd traveled so far, as they had somehow found their way to the Bowery, shoddy tenements and sketchy convenience stores lining the streets. Bold neon lights only served to emphasize the cracked sidewalks and splotchy pavement, the disarray having a monotony about it that made it all repetitive and easily forgettable.

Tim felt fortunate that the fractured window pane of his hideout seemed equally uninteresting to Batgirl as they swung past it, more of his tension easing when they turned north up another boulevard, leaving his secret home behind. But even then, he couldn't shake off the inner turmoil that was ripping at his chest.

Crime Alley's this way, Tim recalled tensely, slipping back behind Batgirl a fraction. He really wished Nightwing was with him instead. But he had his mission, and they…they had theirs.

It almost felt surreal: He was going to face Batman, the person he'd watched for days on end, admired but was also terrified of. He hoped it was a simple misunderstanding, that Batman had tried to kill someone who wasn't Timothy Wayne.

"What are you going to do when you confront him next? Attempt to kill him like you did the last time?"

Robin could've been talking about the Joker. Was that what Nightwing had asked Tim to do? To save Batman from making a mistake, keep the Joker from taking advantage of a momentary weakness that Tim still couldn't quite suss out.

"The Joker. He's the one who started all this."

"Batman just caught wind of where Joker is."

It was certainly where Tim and Batgirl were going now. But, then again…

"It's all just a big distraction from catching…"

"Who are you!?"

"You can't possibly understand; you're still just a child."

"But Robin's already said that…"

"Robin was wrong."

As if to save Tim from thinking himself to death, Batgirl recalled her line and slowed to a stop on the pavement. "Here," she announced despondently, sizing up the building in front of them with a grave countenance.

It seemed the home was recently-remodeled and hardly lived in—sticking out like a sore thumb as it sat tucked away inside the otherwise-impoverished heart of Crime Alley.* A few shrubs sat forlornly beneath a pair of bay windows, the red clouds meandering across the glass there as well. To a shallow observer, it may have even appeared the panes were dancing with fire.

Something about the thought made Tim's skin crawl, but Nightwing had asked him to do this, knew something Tim didn't but desperately wanted to find out. So, the teenager bit back the premonition and resigned himself to observing the blonde next to him. She steeled her face as she stepped closer to the building, noting the double-doored entrance like she was trying to keep herself from getting emotional. Tim surmised she knew the place.

"The alarm's been tripped just like you said," she muttered into her mic with a thick voice, the soles of her boots brushing over the cement stairs that led up to the doors.

Tim's eyes flickered between the entrance and Batgirl, whose halted footsteps echoed emptily in the alcove as she watched the door with a wary expression. She pulled out her staff, signaled for Tim to follow her lead, and pushed open the door with a silent exhale, the pair stepping into the sliver of light that fell on the dark entryway.

Once Batgirl switched on her flashlight, it immediately became apparent that they hadn't been the only visitors to the place that night. All the furniture was overturned, inky shadows cast on every piece as the circle of light glazed over them, catching in the bits of shattered picture frames on the floor and the splintered chandelier above. The edges of the light beam traced the walls, mourning the photos that had once hung there, when something else became visible, a speck of green on the fringes of the light that both of them knew didn't belong.

After a tense moment, the light swung over the wall to take in the rest of the message, a lunacy dangling off each letter where emerald paint ran down in thick drops.

IT'S A SURPRISE

Batgirl eventually lowered her flashlight with an irate snort and reported to Oracle that neither Batman nor the Joker were there. "But Joker definitely was here a little while ago. He messed with his stuff," the blonde growled, taking in the message that proved her hypothesis. She weaved through the maze of furniture to the other side of the room—disregarding the pieces of pottery and glass that were crackling under her feet—where she started analyzing a vacant aquarium. "That still doesn't explain why Batman's tracer's pinging here while Batman's not."

As she continued her search, Tim's attention was split between another clue the blonde hadn't seemed to notice yet: There was a faint odor that prowled the interior, more than just the smell of spray paint, the novel scent nipping at Tim's eyes and nose. He hesitantly breathed it in in short sniffs. The smell brought to mind cosmetics and cleaning supplies, things that normally wouldn't have caused him any concern, but the faint prickling sensation on his cornea told him to check it out regardless.

Tim took a tentative step forward followed by another and another. It's stronger closer to the ground, he noted from his crouched stance as he shuffled closer to the source. Denser than air.

Batgirl's voice drifted over through the pitch-black space, unaware that Tim had abandoned his spot in the entryway, "No. No, I don't think Joker found his cave. Nothing's been tampered with other than the furniture and wall." The blonde shifted something. "Doubt the creep even knew he had a hideout here."

Tim filed away the conversation as he followed the fetid trail into what he made out to be the kitchen, carefully stepping over the remains of silverware and mugs that littered the shadowed floors.

It was definitely nearby. The closer he came to the source, the more the smell reminded him of white lab coats and embalming fluid, IV bags and…

He closed his eyes for a moment, dimly curious as to why playing cards had come to mind.

Formaldehyde, his brain registered, the diagnosis tethering his thoughts back to reality. It was something that would diffuse into the air pretty quickly if it was only for household uses. But if it wasn't…maybe used as a preservative or…

A clock echoed from somewhere in the void, apathetically announcing the passage of each second. It made a phantom chill run down the teenager's spine: Being reminded of time was like being reminded of one's own mortality, own solitude. Batgirl's conversation with her teammate was so distant that it hardly breached the area in which Tim cautiously continued ahead alone.

Here.

His eyes had adjusted enough that he could tell it was a broom closet. Far away from prying eyes, it was tucked away in the farthest recesses of the flat, inconspicuous and innocent. The observation contrasted grossly with whatever he assumed he'd find behind it.

It's a surprise.

As Tim rested his hand on the doorknob, he noticed with a twinge of nausea that the space was large enough to fit a corpse—or multiple. Focus, he reprimanded himself, thumbing the knob as he coaxed himself into turning it.

It almost felt like the clock was getting louder with each passing moment, like the room was determined to emphasize that there was a lone teenager caught in the dark and about to find something that he'd never be able to un-see.

It wasn't until the door started to swing open, though, the hinges yawning slow and long, that Tim processed what the Joker had really been doing there, the glow of a timer in the single digits screaming out another attribute of formaldehyde's biproduct.

It's explosive.*

"Hey! What are you—"

Tim had barely managed to tackle Batgirl through a window as the bomb went off, the entire apartment up in flames not a moment later. He realized belatedly that he'd been too quick to get out, so much so that he didn't think of anything past breaking through the layer of glass, suddenly caught in the wave of the explosion. It sent them both crashing into the pavement hard enough that Tim's vision failed, descending into a wave of spots and white pain that he processed only vaguely.

He was acutely aware that he'd made contact with the ground, gravel biting into his clothes at his back, but for whatever reason, his senses were flooded with some kind of vertigo that said he was still airborne, trapped between scalding temperatures and the icy, November air.

A sharp inhale was all it took to bring the world back into focus.

At the very least, the act proved Tim was alive, and upon shifting his limbs, he realized he was in better shape than he'd been expecting—although that didn't mean he'd gotten out unscathed. A deep cut was evident on his shoulder that hissed for him to stop moving (a casualty of the broken window), and the clock's ticking was replaced with the buzzing of his eardrums, pulsing with the rush of blood that he swore he could hear slosh as he resituated himself on the pavement. Tim blinked a few times, struggling to adjust to the sudden brightness of the fire.

"No," Batgirl's voice echoed sadly against the crumbling embers. She was already on her feet (It seemed Tim had taken the brunt of the blast.), and her vision was stuck on the sight of the burning building. "Not his home too…"

Tim had meanwhile managed to pull himself up to a standing position. His nostrils and eyes were still stinging from the chemically fumes, but the ringing in his ears was ebbing away, a good sign. The shuffling caught the blonde's attention, who turned back to him with an expression of forced control. "You alright?"

Tim offered her a nod. The girl observed him for another moment, resting her staff on the ground for support. The cut on her abdomen must've started acting up again. "Thanks for the save, by the way." Tim gave a polite nod, the sentence coming to him sluggish and unclear, but he got the gist of it.

A span of silence slipped by before Batgirl was startled back onto her com link. "Oh, shoot! Yeah, yeah! Sorry! We're still in one piece, Oracle… Uh-huh. Uh-huh, but we still don't know where they are."

There was a long pause.

"…What do you mean the signal's moving nearby?"

Tim spared a look at the blonde, who was now much more flustered. "I'm telling you, the whole place is up in smoke! I don't think he'd…" Batgirl hesitated. Her attention was glued to a spot on the street. "Unless…" Tim followed her sight to a manhole cover. "Oracle, you don't think Bats chased him into the sewer system, do you? Please say no."

From the quick march the girl made over to the opening, Tim guessed the answer hadn't been what she'd wanted. He trailed behind wordlessly, glad that his legs still worked and that his hearing was clearing with time.

As always, there was that question rearing its head, asking him why on Earth he was out there, having almost gotten killed one minute prior. He shoved it back and reminded himself that it was his identity and past on the line and that he had to know, no matter how ugly it may have been.

In the time it took for Tim to reassert his resolve, Batgirl had made short work of the cover, shooting her new friend a conspiratorial look. "Well," she huffed, eyes darting over Tim in a way that said she was checking to see if he was really all right after the explosion. She must have been satisfied, as she offered an invitation, "You ready to smell like latrine for the next few weeks, cadet?"

Tim shook his head. Although it had initially been jarring, he gathered comedy was simply how the girl handled stress, not unlike Nightwing. The comparison made Tim feel a bit more at ease—if only a bit.

"Yeah, I'm not ready for it either," Batgirl rejoined as she slipped into the sewer, Tim following close behind.

"Latrine" was an understatement. The mildewy tunnels and nauseating smell made the place seem like a sadistic water park ride even rats wouldn't enjoy, each step through the waste uncovering new scents and debris of questionable origin.

The mire sloshed around their ankles as Batgirl slowly started to pick up speed, the watery din drumming around them. "This way," she explained, turning a corner. "There's an opening up here soon." A cluster of voices and metallic scratches bellowing from somewhere ahead carried the two into a dead sprint, the blonde giving her staff a trigger-happy twirl in anticipation.

"Stop!"

The pair instantly slid to a halt on a ledge.

Batgirl (or perhaps Oracle) had been right once again, the tunnel giving way to a fifty-foot drop where waste pooled on the bottom of the chamber. A few walkways crisscrossed between the walls and other tunnels, and the boom of rushing water was near-deafening.

"Over there!" A flicker of blonde hair shot into the air, and it told Tim to follow in the direction of another tunnel on the opposite side of the chamber. He swung off his grapnel into the entrance just in time to keep up. And, with that, it was back to maneuvering through a maze of sewer pipes until they reached a fork in the path, the noises having grown too distant to track.

"Which way, Oracle?" Batgirl spun around to take in both routes. "Oracle?" The sound of her voice and rushing water were amplified in the space, as if taunting the fact they'd hit a snag.

"I can't get through," she announced in frustration to Tim. "We must be under an electrical plant or something. It's messing with the signal." The blonde took in the divergence with a scowl. "There's not enough time: We'll need to split up if we're gonna stop Batman."

Stop Batman? Tim's eyes went wide.

("I'll go this way!")

Weren't we after…

("You go that way!")

…the Joker?

But Batgirl had already disappeared into the left tunnel before he could draw up the nerve to ask, leaving Tim to face the right path on his own as her footsteps faded away.

The teenager took a cautious step forward into the entrance, scrutinizing the brick-laid walls with newfound skepticism—like the tunnel might get even smaller if he turned his back, swallowing him whole in its molding maws. Tim was trapped between the desire to move quicker in hopes of finding Batman and getting out as fast as possible and the desire to move as carefully as his brain demanded. Eventually, he decided on the latter, shifting to the side of the tunnel where the waste was shallower and easier to wade through without making noise.

The hostile sounds he'd heard earlier had died down entirely by then: It left only the hissing of water in the channel, the moisture of it kissing his skin like a ghost. Tim shook off the feeling and that sneaking, stubborn realization that he was alone once again. It was like time had rewound five minutes back, and that sense coerced him into keeping a vigilant mental record of what street he was underneath, where sparse exits were located via storm drains, and the amount of time it would take to get to one; he didn't want anymore "surprises."

But it seemed circumstance didn't care much what Tim wanted right then, as the unsettling quiet was speared by a sharp clamor resounding somewhere behind him, the piercing scream of bullets ricocheting in the direction Batgirl had gone.

Before Tim had fully realized it, he'd whirled around in pursuit of the uproar, something that seemed to be moving further and further out of his reach the closer he came. He was so focused on the adrenaline, on absorbing every last detail of anything that could prove useful, that he almost misstepped, the eerie sensation of falling latching onto him before he hastily regained his footing.

Tim glanced down at the ground, the tunnel making it too dark to make out much, but he knew something was there that made him trip up. He hesitantly reaching down to grasp at whatever it'd been. When he withdrew his hand from the liquid, it dawned on him what he'd uncovered: the staff Batgirl had been carrying, a line of faint light shining along its metal surface.

He cast a look back on the tunnel and waited, staff in hand, as he anticipated something other than the white noise that greeted him. Tim wished lamely for gunshots, for shouting, a voice from beyond—anything other than the apathetic flow of diluted refuse, but that was all he got. That and silence.

In the next instant, he found himself racing forward once more, a desperation flooding him. Where that urgency was taking him, Tim wasn't sure, but he had to find Batgirl—if nothing more than to tell himself he hadn't failed Nightwing, hadn't failed himself, and that the girl was still alive.

It didn't take long.

A wave of relief swept over him when, by some stroke of luck, Tim turned a corner and noted the familiar points of a mask's ears lancing the air. Beams of light slipped through the slats of a storm drain up above, and the strips barely missed the crouched silhouette. It was taking time for Tim's eyes to adjust to the brightness, but the recognizable detail of the mask lured him into moving a step closer regardless, a thankful gust of air leaving his lungs—until it caught in his chest.

The figure had shifted at his arrival and showed Tim that…

No. Even in the dark, there was no way. Too tall. Too broad. Too familiar, calling up days of watching from distant rooftops and wondering how the past tied them together.

And with Batman looming ten feet in front of him, a pair of glowing, white eyes already fixed in his direction, fate must've decided that, ready or not, it was time for Tim to find out.

AN: I'm just Bill Nye-ing my way through all my fanfics at this point. Someone really needs to stop me...

*Krasnyj is the Romanized form of красный, which is "red" in Russian.

*In Red Robin #17, Tim decided to remodel the old theater in Crime Alley and then proceeded to live there. You can see the inside of his wicked apartment in issue #25. (And if you're curious, the aquarium was where he hid the switch to his little nerd lair, so that's why Steph was so interested in it.)

*The chemical referenced here is Formic Acid (HCOOH). It's usually not dangerous outside of respiratory/optical discomfort mimicking that of chloramine gases (If you've ever mixed ammonia and bleach on accident while cleaning like I have, then you know that stuff isn't fun.) and its low pH level (No touch!), but even then, Formic Acid is usually in its liquid state anyway and found naturally in our bodies as waste, so it's not too harmful. However, under the right conditions accounting for pressure and its combustibility (especially above 69 degrees Celsius), it can be explosive and very deadly. You can find more info on the CDC's website.