'I love you!'
'I really don't care, Grayson.'
'I love you!'
'I really don't care, Grayson."
'I love you!'
'I really don't care...'
Damian snapped awake from an imageless nightmare in which elements of the last conversationhe'dheld with his eldest brother had replayed themselves over and over in his head. Just a few hours earlier he had felt entirely justified in having stomped away while firing cutting remarks over his shoulder. Now that there was a very real chance that those were the final moments he would ever spend with Dick, however, the memory forced him to suppress a shudder. Yes, he'd been upset, and righteously so, but he might have at least let the man finish his sentence before he turned his back on him.
"How close are we?" he blurted out in aneffortto distract himself from the mixture of guilt and regret that was making the backs of his eyes annoyingly hot.
Batman tore his stare from the controls long enough to glance at him. "Approximately thirty minutes out."
"Tsk." Stupid plane should be faster, he griped to himself.
"I've pushed it to the limit already. It can't go any faster without undue risk," a mutter reached his ears.
"I didn't say anything!" he glared.What are you, a mind reader now? That's just fucking great.
"...I wasn't speaking to you, Robin."
The urge to ask if his mentor was growing senile already swelled up in his throat, then receded. He knew that the threat that had been made back at the cave had been legitimate; if he misbehaved, he would be confined to the plane. That would make him useless, and would steal valuable time from the cause of Grayson's rescue besides, so he held his tongue.
Still, he had to wonder who Batman had been talking to if not to him.It must have been Pennyworth,he decided after a moment's consideration. Alfred had insisted on staying behind despite the possibility of a quake spawning beneath Gotham, stating that he wanted to begin contacting the civilian authorities in regards to the missing pair. While Damian couldn't fathom how some measly park rangers were going to be better searchers than he and Batman, he could imagine the butler reading his monitors and asking if the plane couldn't go just a littlebit faster.
His stomach rumbled at the thought of Alfred, reminding him that there had been no opportunity for him to eat lunch. Clark had shown up just before he was usually called to his mid-day meal, and by the time the Kryptonian had finished telling his news Damian's appetite had fled. It had returned, evidently, but he wished it would go away again. If he ate now and they found something awful on the ground, he knew he would vomit, and he didn't want to risk it.
His body disagreed with him, and voiced its dissent louder than before. "...Robin," Batman spoke his name.
Damn it. "What?"
"There are energy bars back in medical."
"...I'm not hungry."
"Mm." The tone of that hummed syllable told the boy that he hadn't been convincing enough. Instead of ordering him to go ingest something, however, the elder vigilante's voice softened. "You'll want to have plenty of energy available once we're on the ground. We may have to do much of our searching on foot, and if you eat now we'll be able to cover more territory without stopping for food."
I don't want to cover any territory,he rebelled in his head. I want us to see Grayson jumping up and down like his usual over-energetic self to get our attention before we even land. He wouldn't even complain more than a moderate amount if Drake was at his side, since Dick would be inconsolable if something had happened to his hiking partner. If he ate now, wouldn't that be like giving in to the idea that it was going to take hours and hours to find their quarry?It can't, he grimaced. It just can't take that long.
If the search didtake them into the night, though, each passing minute would increase exponentially in value. 'Time is life,' Alfred had muttered irritably when they'd hit a string of red lights on their way to pick up Bruce, and Damian had believed him. As little as he wanted to admit to the amount of effort that they might have to expend to find the missing duo, it would be far worse to have to delegate even a few seconds to caring for his own bodily needs down the line. "...Fine," he grumbled finally and slid from his seat.
A minute later he stood motionless in the entrance of the plane's compact surgical bay. He had intended to grab a few of the better-tasting bars and return to the cockpit, but his imagination had taken over and welded his feet in place as soon as he'd opened the door. In his mind the spotless exam table before him was occupied by his agony-ridden brother, whose dozen injuries kept taking on more and more horrific forms. Dick's begging eyes bulged, pleading without words for him to make the pain stop; his gasping inhalations came back out as shrill, wretched screams that faded into wheezes; his clever hands, their slim fingers bent and broken, clawed at the bare metal beneath them in an attempt to hold on to this world. Then he went still, horridly, hellishly still, and the only sound Damian heard was his father's banshee wail of denial.
Tearing his gaze away, he emitted an angry hiss. It won't be like that,he half-swore, half-prayed. If he's hurt, it will be something he can laugh off like he always does. Grayson's first intelligible words following the operation on his wrist had been some jape about milk making his bones so strong that something else had had to break instead, he remembered suddenly. It'll be like that. He's okay. And Drake...He frowned.Well, if Grayson's okay, he'll make sure Drake is, too. Not...not that I care about Drake's well being, he reminded himself.That was merely an...an observation. Anyway, they're fine.
He went about his task without daring another look at the equipment secured to the walls and floor. Retreating to the hall, he slammed the door shut and made his way back towards the front of the aircraft. "Here," he shoved two foil-wrapped rectangles at the figure in the pilot's seat. "I brought you some, too."
Batman seemed to hesitate, but he took the offerings without too awkward of a pause. "Good. It won't hurt anything for us both to be fed before we land."
The boy barely heard him. "Is that...below?" he asked, staring at a display.
"...Yes. We're descending now, and I thought it best to see what we have to deal with before we're in the middle of it."
It was far worse than he had imagined. The photos of destroyed roads and buildings from other quake zones that he had seen in the past had done next to nothing to prepare him for the savage rape of the wildlands beneath them, and he had to swallow hard to keep from shivering. Even from several thousand feet up he could see where huge chunks of mountainside had sloughed off and succumbed to gravity. Entire forests lay like spilled toothpicks. They passed over a river that had shifted course ninety degrees to flow across what had once been grassland, its diversion so recent that the mud of its old bed still gleamed in the slanting late-afternoon light. How are we supposed to find anything in that?he boggled. Jesus christ, Grayson...why did you have to go and put yourself in the middle of such a clusterfuck?
Batman's grip landed on his elbow and turned him away from the screen. "Sit down and eat, Robin," he urged. "We'll be on the ground soon. It won't look as bad then."
He opened his mouth to argue, then shut it and obeyed. Once he thought about it, he realized that he didn't want to watch and see how much worse everything looked as their altitude dropped. It was going to be bad enough to actually step into the alien world they were approaching and be forced to admit that it was real, and until that became a necessity he was happy to live in a state of denial.
Curling up in his chair, he nibbled nauseously at one of his energy bars and counted down the feet along with the altimeter. The steady pace at which the number on the display grew smaller was comforting despite what the end of the count portended, and he was almost able to pretend that he hadn't seen anything on the monitor that was now turned away from him. 2700...2500...He unwrapped his second snack. 2300...2100...
At 1000, there was a thud. The impact bounced him so hard in his seat that he would have choked if he'd had a mouthful. Fortunately he was between bites, and as such could launch an immediate accusation at the craft's controller. "Why did you stop?!"
"I didn't," Batman answered, sounding just as perplexed as Damian felt. "We seem to have hit something."
"What the hell could we have hit a thousand feet in the air?! Besides," he added, "it was more like we landed on something than hit it."
The cowl swiveled towards him slightly, then faced forward again. "Look out the window. Tell me what you see."
The window. Gee, thanks.Crumpling what was left of his food into its packaging, he chucked it onto the floor and stood. "I see a shit hole," he snapped. Although it was pointless from this height, he scanned the earth for signs of life. A promising flash of red or yellow would have made his day, but none appeared. Just an empty, lifeless shit shook his head.No. Not lifeless. Not yet. Not him. Not...not them, but especially not him.
"Are there any obstructions?"
"No. There's nothing. Why can't we go any lower?"
"...I don't know. Hold on." A few buttons were pressed, and a second later a pingfilled the cockpit. "What the hell?"
"What?" He scrambled to the man's side. "What is it?"
"The lidar says we're sitting on something. Look."
The display that had tried to puncture his hope a short while before with its live feed of despair now showed the map that the returning lidar signal had built. It should have shown the hills and fissures in a one mile radius of them to an accuracy of within six inches; instead it showed a flat plane, the only discerning feature of which was the slight curve its edges took on towards the horizon. "It must be broken," Damian ruled. "Try something else."
Another button was pushed, and a second pingsounded. The screen blinked, then came back with the same image. "That's...not possible," Batman breathed slowly.
"What was that one?"
"Radar. It would be one thing if nothing was pinging back, but this..." A black-clad digit tapped the blank, mocking map. "This says it's hitting something between us and the ground."
"That's impossible!"
"I would tend to agree with you." He paused. "The only thing I can think of is a massive force field."
Damian scoffed. "They can barely make one big enough to surround a few atoms at the Watchtower. Who could do something like this? If the scans are right, that thing is huge!"
"It's unbelievable, but...it's there. More importantly," the man shifted in his seat, "someone put it there. This isn't a natural phenomenon. You were right about that, Robin."
He was too caught up in the implications of their discovery to be pleased with the acknowledgment. A force field would explain why there had been transmission disruptions at the sites Clark had mentioned, although he hadn't the slightest clue what good one was for causing an earthquake. It would also account for the lack of response from either the tracking devices or the emergency locators that Dick and Tim were carrying. More important than any of that, though, he thought as he slumped back into his chair, was the fact that the force field – if that was in fact what it was, the skeptical part of himself butted in – was delaying their rescue mission.
"If we can't get through it..." They'll be stuck down there all night, and maybe even longer if we can't figure out how to break in fast,he ground his teeth. And if there are other quakes in the meantime... "Batman, what do we do?" We have to get in there!
He expected a solid answer, some brilliant proposal worthy of the man whose blood ran in his veins. Instead he got to see his father wilt against the back of his seat, his arms falling limply to their rests as their owner stared at the vexing picture on the screen.
"...I don't know, Robin. I just...don't know."
Author's Note: I promise you'll have answers regarding Dick day after tomorrow. :D