Chapter Text
“Wayne, I’m going in.”
Terry could almost hear Wayne frown through his receiver. But, to be fair, he was always frowning. And it wasn’t a frown because he thought Terry would screw up, like in the early days. These days, it was a frown because he was worried about him.
In the early days, Bruce would sometimes get an absent look in his eyes, staring in between the old Robin suit in the corner, the plaque under it, and Terry. Even when he had faced off with the Joker during that whole fiasco with Tim Drake, Bruce had told him he wasn’t fit for the suit because he was “too much like him. Too reckless,” while giving the case that same empty stare. The commissioner had mentioned that Tim wasn’t the first tragedy that the Joker had caused the family. But she had never given any details about what else had happened.
Terry had pulled through and beat the Joker in the end, and Bruce had stopped comparing him to whoever had worn the suit in the corner.
And now, he was staking out some crazy in an abandoned warehouse, who had been stealing large and very dangerous parts from Wayne-Powers and Foxteca.
“Be careful, Terry,” Old Man Wayne said, “We still don’t know what he’s building.”
“Yeah, but we do have some educated guesses,” Terry responded, “World’s greatest detectives, remember?”
Wayne grunted, and Terry activated his jet boots, gliding down to the building’s doorway.
He landed silently, and turned on the suit’s camouflage feature, getting ready to figure out just what this crazy dude was building, and how to get the parts back.
He made sure to have a clear view of the inside of the warehouse, zooming in his video feed so Wayne could see it better.
Wayne was silent on the other end, analyzing the footage.
“Go closer, McGinnis,” he ordered, “I have a basic idea of what he needs the parts for, but I need to see the machine up close to confirm my suspicions.”
Terry walked closer to the machine.
“What’s it for?” he whispered into the radio, walking around the machine slowly.
“It’s a-” Wayne started, but the audio feed cut off, replacing itself with static.
“Old Man? Old Man, come in!” Terry whisper-called. He knew better than to actually call out for Wayne by name. And he wasn’t going to call him “Oracle,” no matter what the Old Man wanted. What a dumb codename.
He turned around just in time to notice the man swinging a crowbar at the back of his head, ducking away and flipping back upright.
“I should have expected this,” the man with the Crowbar fumed, his face covered by a mask with a purple target on it. “Of course you’d be here to catch me! You always are, aren’t you?”
Terry was confused.
“Sorry, psycho,” he retorted, “But I’ve never met you in my life. I think I’d remember your face, don’t you think?”
The man looked at him, and started laughing.
“I should have guessed,” he said, “The other one would have gotten old by now, huh?”
Terry paled. This guy must have been one of Wayne’s old villains. But weren’t most of them old, too? This guy was standing tall and proud, not hunched over by age.
To be fair, it could be another Joker situation. Or this guy could just be an android sent by this villain to mess with him in his place. Or maybe a villain’s apprentice?
Terry would need to prove conclusively whether this guy was flesh and blood, and he knew the best way to do just that.
He ran up to the villain, and threw a right hook straight at his face, meeting flesh underneath.
Well, that proved that.
The man straightened up from his hunched position, and lunged at Terry, trying to catch him around the middle.
Terry jumped straight up, turning around in midair and doing a flip over the other guy’s head.
They continued fighting, and Terry pushed the man closer and closer towards the machine, intending to corner the man against his own handiwork.
But he didn’t know that was exactly what the man wanted.
The man flipped a switch on the machine’s side, and the machine turned on, a glowing hole forming in between the two pillars by the front.
Terry tried to get as far away from it as possible, but it seemed intent on sucking him and everything around him in.
“Blast!” the man said, somehow staying stuck to the floor “It seems as if I’m going to have to alter the algorithm against this again. Oh well, it’ll do exactly what it needs to do, in this case.”
Terry growled, and continued holding on to the side of the machine, hoping it wouldn’t suck him in.
“What. Have. You. Done?” he yelled, straining against the force of the portal.
“Oh no,” he asked, starting to pry Terry’s hand off of the metal supports with his crowbar. “It’s more about ‘what will you do?’ than what I’ve done. What I did is already in the past. And soon, what you will do…"
He hit Terry’s hand with the crowbar, one, two, three times, hard enough for him to have to let go of what he was holding.
“Will soon be in the past, as well.”
Terry got sucked into the portal, screaming as it took him in.