Chapter Text
Signal disappeared first. Eyewitnesses claimed that there had been nothing out of the ordinary - no men in masks, no gunshots, nothing. Signal was there, and then he wasn’t.
The rest of them had been notified within mere minutes. Oracle had lost communications with his trackers, then his comm link. Even his phone line was disconnected.
Tim and Damian had been attending their respective after school classes. Jason himself had been out and about in Park Row, investigating a string of missing persons cases that the GCPD had been too busy with the recent robbery of the Mayor James Memorial Gala to deal with. He had been the one to pick the younger two up from school - it wasn’t exactly unusual that a fellow bat went missing, but it was certainly a concerning enough circumstance to warrant pulling them early, regardless of Damian’s grumblings.
The two fought on their way to the bike - who would sit in the sidecar, who got what helmet, who would hold the schoolbags. It was infuriating in a way that made Jason certain, deep down, that they would learn to like each other eventually.
Hopefully.
It had worked for him and Dick, at any rate.
This certainty wasn’t enough to quell his annoyance, though, and by the time that Damian extracted himself and both of their bookbags from Jason’s sidecar, he had snapped at them to for the love of god, shut up! several times.
He pulled up to the manor’s front entrance, dropping speed rapidly on his way up the drive, and followed the now silent boys up the front steps. Jason doubted that they had the chance to check their messages before he’d come to pick them up, considering how focused they both tended to become on their respective projects. Tim, a lead tutor in the club that his principal had practically begged him to be a part of, tended to get his electronics taken in school - often times he would neglect his classes to get information - and in the rare cases, gossip - to his teammates, and Bruce had taken to enlisting in Babs to cut him off from working on cases during school hours.
Damian’s obliviousness, on the other hand, likely came from a place of concentration, alongside a recently developed desire to show that he didn’t rely on electronics to get through his everyday life. Sure, he wanted his anatomical proportions to become more accurate, but Jason knew that recent teasing from Dick had left Damian desperate to show that he wasn’t “addicted to the blue light”, as Dick had put it.
Dick hadn’t meant anything by it, Jason knew. Hell, Dick relied more and more on Bruce’s gadgets every year, far more than Damian did. The comment had come from observation of Damian’s newfound interest in fast paced animated shows - a few that Jason recognized, many that he didn’t. But Dick’s statement had struck a nerve regardless, and had left the rest of the group far more inconvenienced in contacting the teen than they were before.
The doors to the manor opened without noise, the group’s footsteps loud in the near silence of the foyer. No Alfred.
Damian dropped the bookbags with a huff, and Tim squawked.
“My laptop is in there, you ass! Be careful!”
Damian only sighed disdainfully and turned away, moving to unlace his shoes. Jason cleared his throat.
“None of that, kid, there’s a situation.” Jason backed down the wide hallway leading to the library, boots thudding heavily with every step he took. “B needs us down in the cave.”
Eager eyes turned to face him, both teenagers scrambling to follow him down the hallway. They were excited, and Jason understood why. Bruce had only recently returned from his lovely vacation through the timestream, and Damian hadn’t yet had the chance to patrol as his Robin. Tim hadn’t had much of a chance to talk to Bruce either, despite his participation in Bruce’s recovery, and he was anxiously awaiting what sort of reaction to his actions. Jason wasn’t familiar with the details of Bruce’s rescue, but even he could acknowledge that it was an impressive task - after all, digging through the flow of time itself was no small problem.
The grandfather clock’s opening was seldom used, but that didn’t mean that it had deteriorated. Like every other hinge in the never ending maze that was Wayne Manor, it made barely a noise. The switch opened the doorway, which sat inconspicuously on the inside wall of the clock, had not even a speck of dust. It did, however, flick loudly when Jason pulled it, before a soft, near silent whirring sounded and the clock pulled back into the wall.
The steps were rickety, the only thing to reach such a state in the manor, and only because they were nearly as old as the manor itself and it was rather difficult to enlist carpenters to install new stairs for the Batman’s secret hideout.
When Jason had been younger, before he was Red Hood and even before he was allowed out as Robin, when all he did was laze around the grand house he had found himself in and followed the butler from room to room, he had discovered Alfred restoring them by himself. After great deliberation, and several seconds of guilt, Jason had offered to help the graying butler to restore the steps.
They had spent nearly a month restoring them, carefully prying up rotting boards and restoring the faded wood to its original stain. By the time the two had finished, Jason was exhausted - and so, so delighted. He found himself searching for other things to fix, to give new life - a hobby that he kept all the way up until he had died.
The stairs had held up, in the years since they had last been fixed. Despite the growing number of vigilantes in and out of the Batcave, this entrance was used only by Alfred, and he frequented the one nearer to the kitchen nowadays. The steps didn’t creak, didn’t bend under the weight of the three, and Jason was surprised to feel a streak of pride at how well they had performed in the near decade since his restoration.
The quiet of the manor was nothing to the suffocating silence of the cave. Despite the clicking of the keyboard on the Batcomputer, and the soft muttering between Dick and Bruce, the air was heavy in a way that made it difficult for Jason to get his words out. He stopped, a few feet short of the circle forming around the expansive, glowing monitor, and watched Damian tuck himself in next to Dick in a gesture that he was sure the boy thought was subtle. Tim stepped up next to Bruce, staring at the camera footage that was replaying on the screen.
It was insignificant if not for the figure swooping in and out of the corner of the frame, visible for only a couple of seconds before disappearing completely. This would be standard if not for the fact that the figure disappeared midway through his arc. His suit was bright even on the grainy, colorless CCTV, and Signal’s joy was apparent even through his nearly full face mask.
Jason understood. The feeling of flying was fucking electric, and Jason still feels that way sometimes, when he sticks the landing just right.
Safe to assume that Duke was not going to stick the landing right.
Clearing his throat softly, Dick beckoned Jason forward, pulling him closer to the monitor. He already had an arm around Damian’s shoulder, pulling him gently into his side, and he reached over as though to do the same to Jason. Jason allowed it, for a second, but pulled away as soon as he realized that Cass’s eyes were on him from above.
Cass - she made him uncomfortable. She was incredible, impressive to watch, and her work with martial arts was inspiring, but there was a shared tension between them, one that probably stemmed from their- moral disagreements. But she was impressive, and effective, and Jason respected that.
Stephanie, too, was there, although Jason was loath to admit that he had not seen her, as bright as she was. In his defense, he had been distracted.
After playing back the video once more, Bruce swiveled around in his chair the same way that he always had. His arms were crossed. When Jason was younger, he had laughed at the way that Bruce turned, slow and dramatic, and Bruce had laughed with him. Now, he was solemn. They were all solemn.
“Signal has disappeared.” Bruce said, terse. “ Duke has disappeared. We need to find him.” He stared each of them down, cowl on, eyes covered. There wasn't an ounce of empathy to be seen, but Jason knew - or rather, hoped - that the cowl was on only to preserve his stoic dignity. “We need patrols, effective immediately. Pair up, no one goes out alone. We need to find Duke.”
“Where did he disappear?” Tim asked, frantic but trying to hide it. “Where’s this footage from? How did they know -” He cut himself off, but the words had already left his mouth. It was a viable fear, far too realistic. Whoever had done this had to have known their patrol routes well enough to take advantage of them.
“He was coming around the corner of Park and Lowe Street,” Bruce said, whirling back around to pull up the map of the city. “The footage was borrowed from a corner store’s upper story. I don’t know how we were tracked. We need to fan out across the city, there are too many places to search, I don’t-”
“Wait a minute,” Jason interrupted, startling Bruce so badly that the entire chair twisted to the right. “I know that street. I know that neighborhood.” He shoved past Tim to reach the console, zooming out to see the larger part of the map. “I’ve had people disappearing all over there - some of them show signs of struggle, some of them have just disappeared.”
Tim sighed heavily, glaring at Jason from the corner of his eye. “There haven’t been any police reports about that for weeks. Wouldn’t the department know if a number of people were disappearing?”
“They didn’t tell the police,” Jason said, equally as annoyed. “They told me.”
“And what good did that do to them?” Tim asked, sharp, smug. “What did they gain from it?”
“ Nothing .” Jason gritted his teeth. “It didn’t do anything for them, because half of them disappeared without a fucking trace.”
“It sounds like you’re just shit at your job, then.” Tim said, eyes sharp, filled with glee. The little shit was enjoying it, enjoying the banter, but he didn’t seem to realize-
“These are people, do you know that?” Jason turned, grabbing at Tim’s shoulders as though to shake him. “These are people, and families, and now it’s Duke. They’re gone. I can’t find them.” Someone slapped his arm gently, and Jason looked down to see that his knuckles were white with how hard he was gripping Tim’s shirt. He dropped it, stepping back, inhaling angrily. “We can’t find them.”
“We will,” Dick said, in his I-need-to-comfort-someone voice. “We’ll get them back eventually. In the meantime, B, maybe Jason and I could lead the first patrol?”
Bruce stared at them, intimidating to anyone else, but wholly useless against his children. “Don’t turn off your comms. Don’t remove your trackers. Don’t leave the route. Don’t even leave each other’s sides. We need to be safe.” He stood, clicking out of the tab on his console before straightening up. “We can not lose anyone else.”
—
The patrol is nothing new for Jason. Bruce had allowed him to set up their patrol routes, attributing it to his familiarity with the area, but he didn’t have as much info on the cases as he would like. So now, he and Dick are marching down the streets just adjacent to the harbor, searching for leads and avoiding far-too-emotional small talk.
And Dick was really trying to start that small talk. He was trying really hard.
After another few of Dick’s attempts to get a conversation going, Jason snapped. He stopped, turned to Dick, and closed his eyes. A deep breath, a beat, then-
“Nightwing. Dick. Please, for the love of God, stop talking, okay?” Dick looked startled, but his expression quickly softened into a gentle smile once again. Jason ignored it, continuing on his rant. “You don’t- I don’t want to deal with any of this. The small talk, the chit-chat. I don’t need you to try to fucking therapize me, and I don’t exactly want you to, either. So just quit it, alright?”
Dick’s face dropped out of that stupid fucking expression, thank the lord. It was infuriating, a little bit, to see how Dick acted now, especially considering his initial reaction to Jason’s presence in Wayne Manor. Dick had despised him when they were younger, or at the very least, that’s what it had felt like. At any rate, he was no therapist.
They continued on in silence for a few minutes, walking sulkily down the crappy sidewalks, until Dick spoke again.
“Sorry. And- thanks, I guess. I didn’t really want to talk about it either.”
Jason snorted.
“It’s not that I mind helping everyone else, but it’s really tiring, sometimes, and so I really appreciate that I don’t-”
“Shh.” Jason cut him off, and Dick turned to him sharply, as though to reprimand him. Jason only pointed.
Across the street, just outside the warm ring of light shining off of the front porch of a bait shop, stood a shadowy figure, slumped against a wall. They were low to the ground, poised as though to lunge, and they seemed to be staring at Jason. A low noise was coming from their direction, but he couldn’t tell whether or not they were words.
Jason edged away from Dick, moving slowly to the left, and Dick mirrored his actions. They flanked the figure, not that it was difficult, approaching slowly. Jason flicked out his guns, Dick holding his sticks, but in the end, it was all for nothing.
The figure hadn’t lunged. As Jason got closer, it was apparent that they wouldn’t be able to if they had wanted it. The figure was curled against the wall, covering soft spots, and their face was tilted downwards, but Jason could see a matted section of hair, wet with a dark liquid. As they got closer, moving in from different directions, the person’s head tilted upwards, and Jason recognized her.
It was a teenage girl, one of the most recent disappearances that he had been presented with, only a few years younger than Jason himself. Her mouth was open, nearly slack-jawed, but he could hear a faint rasping coming from her throat. Her clothes were torn. There were cuts covering her body, bandages on some. One spanned the length of her throat, scabbed over and partially covered. The ones exposed were clean, sharp, as though cut with a scalpel. She was in rough shape. She was terrified.
“Nightwing?” He whispered out, reaching down a hand to help the girl to stand. “Call this in.” In his peripherals, he caught Dick nodding. The girl grabbed his hand tightly, surprisingly strong for someone in a state like hers, but she stumbled as she rose. He heard a crackle over the comm lines, Oracle speaking quietly in his ears.
He ignored it, instead focusing on the girl in front of him. “Hey,” he mutters to her, quiet, cautious. “Can you talk? We can get you out of here.”
Jason wasn’t the most comforting person, especially not in Gotham and especially not at night. But if this was the girl that he had been enlisted to find, she probably knew him. She knew him at least enough to trust him to get her to safety, which-
It was a comfort, a kindness that he didn’t deserve.
So Jason pulled her up, looping his arm under her shoulders, and she leaned into him. Nightwing slid under her other side, and together, the two of them led her slowly back down the sidewalk, towards a tiny sandwich shop that Jason knew would keep her safe.
It didn’t take them long to get her there, and they were back in action only a half hour or so later. After alerting Oracle of their location, they found themselves back where the girl had been crouched.
The nearest alleyway was a couple of buildings over, and there was no trail, blood or otherwise, leading from it. Most of the surrounding buildings were locked, which was nothing out of the ordinary, but there was one house, across the street from where the girl had been, where the locks were still shiny and new.
Dick had been the one to find the locks, but Jason had picked them. The door had been creaky, almost overly so, and Jason knew it was a silent alarm. Anyone inside would have known about the door - there was no more hiding their arrival.
But no attacks came. Jason entered first, guns raised, sweeping the corners and hiding in the shadows. Dick stuck to the slivers of moonlight shining through the windows, suit more adept to blending into the light, but it was useless, in the end. No one was there.
After a few minutes of searching the house, Jason straightened up.
“Nothing here,” he said, turning to Dick. “It looks like nothing ever was.”
“Just a minute.” And Dick slid past him to a table, tucked firmly against a wall, shoving it out of its spot. Behind it was a raised portion of siding, a thin line showing brightly against the moon lit white paint. “Secret door.”
Dick pried at the sides with his fingers, and it easily slid open. It was a tiny hole, the size of a cupboard, but when Jason dropped to his knees to peer through, he could see that it dropped downwards, a ladder leading into the darkness.
He sighed.
“Oracle, we found a passage. Heading down now.”
A crackle, then-
“ Got it. Comms are wack, careful that you don’t lose us.”
“You first, then, Dickhead.”
Dick groaned, but clambered down beside Jason, leveling his legs through the opening first.
“If I die, you’re out of the will. Trust fund goes to Robin.” After a few seconds, he signaled Jason to follow after him.
The ladder was new, metal and shiny and leaned precariously up against the opening. It was wholly out of place in the house, as weathered and decrepit as it was, and naturally, it meant that something would go wrong.
Jason stepped off of the ladder to find darkness staring back at him. Straightening up next to Dick, he fumbled into the pocket of his jacket to pull out a small, handheld flashlight. When he pointed it down the hall, he caught a glimpse of metal cabinets lining the walls of a dimly lit room, tiled floors, and-
A flash.
—
The flash faded quickly, and as it did, Jason decided that something horrible was going on. The flashlight that he held had flickered out, somehow, and when he turned it back on, it illuminated a very different scene than the one just moments before. The tiled floors were cracked, the walls much further apart, and scattered around the room were piles of shattered bricks.
Jason turned in the darkness, shining a light around, and to his relief, exposing Dick’s eyes, squinting against the light.
“ Hey!” Dick stage whispered. “Turn that thing off, you’re blinding me.”
“I’m not turning it off!” Jason straightened, indignant. “It’s pitch fucking black in here!”
“No it’s not!” Dick hissed, snaking his hand out and snatching the flashlight from Jason’s hand. “Look- there’s a tunnel, see?”
He was right, unfortunately. From behind the piles of rubble that Jason had spotted before was a faint light, stemming from what seemed to be a tiny hallway carved out through the walls. There was a quiet crackling echoing down it.
Jason sighed, reaching back to snag back his light, and walked grumpily towards the entrance. Light was a good sign, at least - and the noises meant that something alive was around the bend of the hallway.
“Hey,” he whisper-yelled back at Dick, now motionless in the dark. “Can you patch through to Oracle?”
He heard a shuffling, then footsteps following him. By the time he reached the mouth of the hallway, Dick was next to him, frowning.
“I can’t reach her. Maybe- she said comms were lagging, didn’t she?”
Jason shrugged, unwilling to reach under his helmet to flick on his microphone. He left it muted - if he needed to talk, he would find a way.
“Flag our location, then let’s go.”
“Why do I always do the tedious shit?” Dick complained, but turned on his tracker anyways. “You have all of these things too, you know.”
“Yeah, but I didn’t ask for them. They were a job requirement.” He started down the hallway, turning off his flashlight and storing it in his pocket as he moved along. “B wouldn’t have let it go, and I didn’t feel like fighting him on it.”
“You?” Dick asked, and his tone was so incredulous that Jason almost took offense. Almost.
“It’s not like it’s a bad idea to let someone know where I am if I were to disappear.”
Their conversation faded as the two made their way down the hall, entering into an equally decrepit room. The walls were crumbling, there were wires and pieces of shattered glass sprawled across the ground, and daylight shone in through a hole where the roof would have been.
There was another pile of shattered remains, lying in the middle of the room. The crackling was coming from it, noises faintly adjacent to words spilling from nearly destroyed speakers strewn across the cracked tile flooring. The evidently unplanned skylight opened up nearly directly above it, jagged around the edges, as though a hole had been blown through the roof.
Circling the wreck, Jason realized that there was a screen laying broken in the pile. It flashed green, flickering every couple of seconds, holding on to life. It felt ominous, but maybe that was just Jason.
Dick brushed past him, crouching beside the screen and pulling it up from the floor. There was a fractured computer monitor, inches away. Wires still led from the screen to the rest of the structure, sparking occasionally and looking only moments away from snapping. Dick looked at the screen, then looked up.
“This make any sense to you?”
On the screen, in white letters, read words - names. The same names that were being repeated, in a lightly German accent, by the speaker.
Rogers, Steven. B-_n nineteen eight-~-n. St-~_s: Active
Romanov, Nat-~-ha. Born nineteen eigh-~ four. Status: Ac_-v~
The names were foreign, and the dates didn't make sense. The words on the screen were scrambled, but the speakers were clean enough that he could make them out.
“Who the hell are these people?” Dick asked, and Jason was inclined to agree. “What significance do they have? What the hell is someone from 1918 doing with an active status? They should have been gone - like - a decade ago. At least.”
“I don’t know.” Jason mused, squinting at the scraped up screen. “The grungy ass building screams League, though.”
“Could be. Does seem to be something that Ra’s would have a hand in.”
“How’d we get here, though?” Jason asked, and looked up through the skylight. The land surrounding it sloped, like a missile had been fired and landed directly on top of the computer. A crater. “This is deeper underground than the ladder would have taken us, and I definitely don’t see a house anywhere around.”
“Portal, maybe?” Dick dropped the screen again, snatching his fingers back as the wires sparked more viciously and the screen shattered into pieces. “Maybe we could climb out, though.”
“Maybe,” Jason responded, sighing. “I don’t really want to, though. We should write down those names, though, B will want to hunt them down eventually.”
Dick sighed, dragged a hand through his hair, and reached back behind him to pull a notebook and stubby pencil from his pack. He scribbled the names down, then pulled a grapple from fucking nowhere and shot it upwards. It landed on loosely packed earth, falling for a moment until it found purchase. When he landed, he dropped to his knees, offering a hand down to Jason.
Jason took it, though not without some contemplation. They scrambled their way up the slope, shallow as it was, and ended at the top of a hill, facing back down a far steeper mound.
“Can we triangulate coordinates?” Jason asked, and Dick side-eyed him.
“ You have the pockets, you carry the GPS.”
Jason groaned. “No, mine broke, ages ago. It starts fizzing out whenever I move too fast.” He dug through his pants pocket for a minute, pulling out the tiny black device from the one dedicated to trashed Bat-gear
“Just try it, asshat.” Dick snatched it from his hands, smacking it a few times until it let out a little ping-ping-ping! and turned on. Jason peered over his shoulder at the screen, only to see it spasming again.
“You see?” He asked, and grabbed it back out of Dick’s hands. “It’s a mess, it doesn’t even work anymore.”
“Hold on - hold on, Jason, Jesus. Look, it’s zeroing in on something- look!”
And he was right, unfortunately. Again.
The GPS zoomed in on a pair of coordinates, but something was still off. Instead of a large, empty space, like the one that they were standing in, the GPS showed a department store, spanning city blocks, parking lots and restaurants surrounding it. The dot that represented them blinked softly, then fizzled out. The map, too, blinked away, refreshing, once, twice - then a blank space.
“What the fuck was that?” Dick asked, grabbing the GPS again. “Why did it refresh? Why is there nothing? ”
“There isn’t nothing,” Jason squinted at the screen, pinching his fingers and zooming out on the screen. “It’s just empty land. Look, we’re not in Gotham anymore.” He kept pinching, moving the box around and zooming the map out to see the entire east coast. “Gotham isn’t here. It should be a major city - it’s not even showing up.”
Dick groaned, turned around, and tilted his head up to stare at the sky. It was cloudy. “What the hell, Jay, I don’t want another fucking universe thing. I want - I hope to god I’m not a vampire in this one, I swear to god-”
“Let’s find those people,” Jason interrupted, before Dick could continue. “What were their names - Steve, and Natasha? The computer said they were active, we can still find them. Maybe they know something about this.”
“Yeah, okay,” Dick said, slow. “But maybe - maybe we find some civilization, first.”
Jason sighed, and stared down at the GPS. The next gas station wasn’t for nearly 20 miles.
This was gonna be a miserable walk.