Chapter Text
Peter wasn’t a stranger to pain.
He’d had plenty of it over the years—little stuff, like scraped knuckles and bruised ribs from misjudging a swing, and big stuff, like getting slammed through walls or, you know, having an entire building dropped on him.
It only happened once, sure, but it was one time too many.
Pain, to Peter, existed on a spectrum. A deeply unfortunate scale that ranged from ouch, that’s gonna bruise to oh my god, I can’t feel my limbs and I think I’m about to meet my maker. He was very familiar with the upper end.
Tony had always been thorough about checking on him after patrols or big fights. Borderline neurotic, honestly.
The man could detect a papercut from across the room and would immediately launch into a rapid-fire interrogation—What hurts? How bad? On a scale of one to ten? Is it sharp or dull? Are you dizzy? Nauseous? Seeing stars?
Peter usually answered “three” just to make him calm down.
But Tony wasn’t here.
Wherever here was.
If he were, Peter would’ve very helpfully informed him that this was a solid twelve out of ten, possibly higher if the scale allowed for bonus suffering points, and that euthanasia was starting to sound like a really compassionate option.
The pain found him before consciousness did.
It crept in first—no, slammed in, actually—an overwhelming, invasive sensation like his body was being taken apart at the seams and reassembled by someone who’d never read the instructions.
Molecules shifting. Twisting. Pulling in directions they absolutely were not meant to go.
When awareness finally caught up and the two reached some horrifying equilibrium, Peter came to one very clear, very alarming conclusion:
He was drowning.
No—burning.
Somehow both?
His lungs screamed for air that didn’t exist, reflexively sucking in nothing but agony as his chest spasmed. Every breath was fire and absence all at once, like inhaling molten glass through a vacuum. His skin felt submerged in flame, nerves lighting up in panicked succession, while crushing pressure wrapped around him from every side.
It was like invisible hands were forcing him into a smaller mold—compressing bone, muscle, sinew—squeezing him down into something tighter. Narrower. Wrong.
Pressure bore down on his chest until it felt like his ribs might splinter inward. His spine screamed in protest, vertebrae grinding as if reality itself had decided he needed to fold a few inches shorter. His skull throbbed, an intense, internal ache that rattled his thoughts and made stars burst behind his closed eyes.
Okay, his brain supplied faintly, clinging to reality like it was a life raft. This is new.
Being dusted had been cold. Not painful—just empty. Like falling asleep halfway through a sentence and never getting the chance to finish the thought.
Being resurrected had been worse.
Wrong in a way he still didn’t have the vocabulary for. Like someone had dragged him backward through a door he’d already walked through, then shoved him back into a body that wasn’t done putting itself together.
This felt like both layered on top of each other. Dying and being dragged back at the same time, his body rewritten cell by cell without consent.
His heart stuttered.
Missed a beat.
Stopped.
Panic punched through him, blaring and immediate—and then his spider-sense went nuclear.
Wrongwrongwrongwrongwrong—!
Finally, he found the strength to pry his eyelids open.
Green flooded his vision.
Thick, luminous liquid pressed in on all sides, burning as his body instinctively gasped. He choked, convulsing, limbs thrashing as panic took over. His hands slammed into something solid inches from his face.
Glass.
A tank?
His thoughts fragmented. There was no time to understand, no time to ask how or why. Survival surged forward, ancient and automatic.
Peter reared back and punched sluggishly, the glass spiderwebbed—ha, pun—on impact.
Again! Danger. Pain!
He kicked—harder this time, more lucid and more wildly—and the curved wall cracked with a sharp, concussive snap.
The tank exploded outward.
Glass blew outward in a violent spray, fragments clattering across metal as the green liquid rushed free, dumping him onto the floor in a heap of limbs and momentum he hadn’t fully signed off on.
Air slammed into his lungs, harsh and burning.
Alarms erupted instantly, klaxons blaring so loud they vibrated through his skull. Red lights strobed through the chaos. Steam hissed where the liquid splashed across exposed wiring, sparks jumping wildly as something nearby caught with a hollow whoomph.
Peter barely registered any of it.
He collapsed onto his hands and knees and retched.
He coughed up glowing green fluid that burned like acid all the way up his throat. When his stomach finally rebelled, it did so viciously, spasming until he was gagging onto the floor, vision blurring with tears and heat and pain.
He couldn’t think.
His spider-sense was too loud—an unrelenting pressure that drowned out everything else.
Danger! Runrunrunrunrun—
He wiped at his eyes with shaking hands, smearing green across his face. His breaths came fast and shallow, every movement stabbing and eerily uncomfortable. He blinked hard, again and again, trying to force the world into focus.
Inhale. Focus. Just—focus. Exhale.
Alright. He was upright. Mostly. Existing still hurt, but it was happening, which felt like progress. He dropped his gaze and took inventory in a distant, almost robotic way—the same mental checklist he used after bad landings or worse fights.
Damage assessment. Prioritize.
Indicator number one was his hands were small.
Not distorted. Not an illusion.
Small.
Shorter fingers. Narrower palms. No familiar calluses where web-fluid had bitten into his skin a thousand times before. The veins he expected weren’t there, and his knuckles looked wrong. Too smooth and untouched, years of effort and hard-work simply erased.
He turned his hands over, flexed them slowly, as if motion alone might explain it away.
It didn’t.
He staggered toward a cracked metal panel, using it for balance more than intention, and then he caught his reflection.
A child stared back at him.
Dark hair plastered to his forehead, a strange white streak cutting through it near the widow’s peak. His cheeks were too soft, still rounded with baby fat he hadn’t seen in years, his jaw lacking the familiar angles time and trauma had carved into it.
His eyes looked too big for his face, set in features that hadn’t finished growing yet.
And the worst part?
The hazel was gone.
In its place was that same ominous green—the color of the liquid that had nearly deep fried him literally only seconds ago.
For a suspended, fragile second, his thoughts simply stalled.
The sound that tore out of him was thin and broken, hovering somewhere between a sob and a scream, as if unsure which one he needed more.
“No,” he rasped, his voice pitching too high, cracking with panic. “No—no, no, no—what—?”
The reflection didn’t answer.
Lights flickered violently overhead before dying altogether, the room plunging into a pulsing red emergency glow that painted everything in sharp angles and shadows. Something exploded deeper in the facility—a concussive boom that sent the floor jumping under his bare feet.
Dust rained from the ceiling and it was clear he had no time to process the impossible.
Runrunrun—out. Watching? Danger!
Peter tore his gaze away and forced himself upright, legs trembling as he staggered forward through smoke and glowing vapor. Every step felt wrong—his center of gravity off, his limbs not responding with their usual precision—but desperation shoved him onward anyway.
He was getting a sense of where he was, the setting familiar due to him working closely in one for years. He was in a lab, and all around him, it was utterly destroyed.
Not damaged—obliterated.
Containment pods lay shattered across the floor, thick glass blown outward as if whatever had been inside had escaped. Papers burned on overturned metal desks, curling into ash mid-sentence. Consoles sparked and screamed, alarms choking themselves out in bursts of static.
Bodies were slumped over workstations.
Peter skidded to a stop beside one, bile clawing up his throat.
A scientist. White coat soaked dark with blood, the fabric stiff and tacky. A half-melted badge was still clipped to his chest, the letters warped but readable.
CADMUS.
The only discernable feature on him was a black ring etched with an owl still clutched tightly in the corpse’s bloody fingers.
His spidey-senses hadn’t stopped tingling once, pressure building behind his eyes, the nape of his neck prickling cold.
Closer. Watching! Danger? Out!
Someone was coming.
Someone dangerous?
Dr. Veyl, his mind supplied shakily, even as his limbs refused to move the way they were supposed to. He might’ve followed me. I need to get out before he catches up.
He stumbled onward, bare feet slicing on glass and debris, the pain registering somewhere distant and unimportant. His body kept moving without consulting him, muscles firing on borrowed instinct, adrenaline dragging him forward by the collar.
Something snagged his ankle. He almost went down.
Didn’t.
Near a fallen chair—or maybe a table, who cared—there was clothing. Discarded. Abandoned. Left behind like whoever owned it had run and never looked back.
A lab jacket. A knit cap. A hoodie, half-burned but intact.
Peter grabbed everything.
The jacket swallowed his too-small frame, sleeves hanging past his fingers like he was playing dress-up in someone else’s life. He wrapped it tight around himself anyway, clutching it closed like it might hold him together if he squeezed hard enough.
The cap went on next—jammed low, pulled down too far, hiding the unnatural white streak in his hair, hiding his eyes that still glowed faintly green under the emergency lights.
Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.
The hoodie got knotted around his waist with clumsy fingers that didn’t quite feel like his own.
He didn’t look back.
He found an emergency exit through sheer, unearned dumb luck—because apparently Parker luck had decided to show up now, after ruining literally everything else today—and slammed into the broken push-bar with his shoulder.
The door blew open, the cold night air punching him in the face.
He stumbled out into it, gasping, face stinging as the temperature shock hit all at once. The world outside didn’t feel safer, it just felt bigger.
Sirens wailed from every direction, stacking over each other until they became noise instead of sound. Smoke rolled into the sky in thick, choking waves.
Flames clawed out of blown-out windows, orange and furious, while he could hear figures on the opposing side of the building shouting words Peter couldn’t make sense of.
Everything blurred together into color and motion and heat and sound, his spider-sense screaming nonstop like it was stuck on a feedback loop.
Move. Move. Move.
Peter ran.
He ran without direction, without thought, bare feet slapping against pavement that was too cold and too hard and too real. He ran because stopping felt impossible. Because standing still meant thinking. Because if he slowed down—
—well, he wasn’t sure if he was going to like what caught up with him.
Tim Drake was having a decent Thursday night.
Which, by Gotham standards, meant patrol had been quiet enough to qualify as suspicious.
Same routine offenders minus the typical rogue gallery, same tired excuses. A couple of new faces booked and escorted into GCPD holding cells, all of them predictable in the way crime liked to be when it thought it was winning.
Tim had wrapped things up efficiently—no unnecessary detours, no dramatic interruptions—and made it back to the Cave in record time.
He beat Robin.
He beat Batman.
That alone put the night solidly in the win column.
The Batcycle barely had time to cool before he was already stripping off gear, still half in his suit as he dropped into his chair and brought the BatComputer to life. Full, uninterrupted access, with no commentary, no looming presence behind his shoulder.
Just him, the data, and blissful, cavernous silence.
His hands hovered over the keyboard, fingers twitching with barely contained anticipation.
There were cases he wanted to revisit—loose threads that refused to stay loose, suspects who didn’t quite fit their alibis, timelines that almost made sense if you squinted at them long enough.
The city never slept, and honestly, neither did its crimes. Someone was always trying something, and if Tim didn’t keep up, the city had a nasty habit of punishing everyone else for it.
Sleep was negotiable.
His family disagreed, loudly and often, which was quite hypocritical if he really thought about it.
Apparently, eight uninterrupted hours was a requirement, not a suggestion. Tim maintained that he slept just fine—maybe not well, but efficiently. Besides, how was he supposed to turn his brain off when Gotham itself was one massive, unfinished puzzle?
He wasn’t obsessed.
He was dedicated.
There was a difference.
This—this was his domain.
The Batcomputer hummed softly beneath his hands, screens casting familiar blue light across the Cave. No commentary over his shoulder. No brooding presence looming just out of sight. Just him, the data, and the quiet promise that if he looked hard enough, the answers would line up.
The file had barely finished opening when the Batcave exploded into motion.
Alerts blared, screens flaring to life in overlapping windows, red warnings stacking so fast they blurred together. The sudden noise was sudden enough that Tim practically jumped out of his skin, instincts flaring as his chair jolted back a fraction.
He froze.
Then swore under his breath.
Barbara’s face snapped onto the primary screen, pinched with focus in a way Tim had learned to recognize as this is bad and getting worse.
The familiar whirring hum of the Clocktower bled through the audio feed, a constant mechanical counterpoint to the way her fingers flew through holographic displays.
Data streamed in faster than the systems could organize it—feeds stacking, maps overlaying, timestamps jittering as it caught up to whatever had just gone wrong.
“Fire in the Bowery industrial zone,” Barbara said, clipped and fast, skipping pleasantries entirely. “FDNY reports the structure was already collapsing when they arrived.”
Tim’s spine straightened, locked in like the rest of the team most likely was.
Already collapsing didn’t happen by accident, not without prior warning signs. Not without corners cut so recklessly it bordered on intentional.
That narrowed the list of possibilities in a way Tim didn’t like.
Barbara switched feeds mid-sentence, the abrupt change snapping Tim’s focus sideways.
Security footage—shaky, smoke-obscured, stuttering as the system struggled to make it discernable. Flames licked out of shattered windows. Emergency lights stuttered red and blue against the brick exterior as first responders flooded the scene.
Tim barely registered any of it.
His attention snagged on something else—movement at the edge of the frame. Wrong somehow. Not part of the frantic choreography of firefighters and fleeing bystanders.
Tim leaned forward automatically, instincts tightening his focus as the rest of the scene fell away.
A small figure burst from a side exit, stumbling into the chaos of the street. Too fast to be a bystander and too erratic to be a responder. His blue eyes locked pointedly on the bare feet that slapped against pavement in their haste to get away.
A kid.
Barbara’s breath hitched, clocking the detail wordlessly in tandem with him.
“Batman,” she said quietly, her voice threading through the comm link, suddenly stripped of its usual confidence. “There’s a child fleeing the scene.”
Tim’s fingers were already moving.
He froze the frame. Enhanced. Zoomed. Adjusted contrast.
The figure was slight—too slight. Swallowed by clothing that clearly hadn’t been meant for them. Sleeves hung past narrow hands, a lab jacket slipping off one shoulder as they ran. A knit cap was pulled low, hiding most of their face.
And still—
No shoes.
Tim’s jaw tightened.
Kids didn’t run from fires like that.
They ran toward people. Toward safety. Toward anyone who looked like help—which, in this case, was literally around the corner. The opposite direction of where this kid was going.
This one was running like something was chasing them.
There was a beat of silence on the comm.
The comm stayed quiet.
Not dead air—occupied air. Wind tore past the mic in harsh bursts, underscored by the deep, hollow crash of waves. Metal groaned somewhere in the background, stressed and protesting, followed by an impact that didn’t sound accidental.
“I’m tied up at the docks with Robin,” Bruce said at last, voice clipped and taut with focus. “Multiple armed suspects moving unauthorized cargo.”
The line crackled, cut briefly by another clang—Tim swore he could hear Robin shouting something threatening in the background.
He closed his eyes for half a second, kissing the last remnants of his quiet night goodbye.
Of course you are.
Tim didn’t dwell on it.
If Bruce was tied up, then this was his.
New case. His case.
“I’ve got eyes on the fire,” Tim said, already pulling the feeds back up, fingers flying as screens rearranged themselves around his focus. “Structure failure doesn’t match FDNY’s initial assessment—this wasn’t an accident.”
Patterns snapped into place with familiar ease. Stress points, collapse timing, the way the building had failed inward instead of out.
Someone had wanted it down.
Another channel crackled to life.
“—don’t run—!” Damian’s voice cut in furiously, breathless with exertion, followed by the unmistakable sound of something very solid being punched very hard. “I said stay down, criminal!”
“Confirmed Red Robin,” Bruce acknowledged, voice strained, a sigh threading through it as something far off exploded. “Dock situation is escalating. We can’t disengage yet.”
Tim didn’t hesitate.
“The kid’s barefoot,” he continued, speaking clearly into the open comm so everyone could hear. “Clothes don’t fit, and they’re running like they think something’s still after them.”
He paused, watching the footage loop again. The same stumble. The same headlong sprint away from light and help.
“Which means,” Tim deduced, voice steady, “either they escaped something—”
His fingers stilled.
“—Or something let them go.”
Neither option felt good.
“I’m rerouting,” Tim said immediately, already pushing back from the console. “Ten minutes out.”
“Red Robin—” Bruce started, that familiar undertone of concern threading through his voice. Tim already knew the rest of it. Wait for backup before engaging. Don’t rush in. Be careful.
Once again—hypocritical.
“I’ve got it,” Tim cut in, already moving. Grapple secured, mask still on, his ride already growling back to life. His heart rate was steady in the way it always was when things snapped into focus. “You’ve got the docks. I’ve got the kid.”
Barbara didn’t argue. She never did when Tim sounded like that.
Instead, another voice chimed in—bright, infuriatingly cheerful.
“Oh, please,” Stephanie drawled. “I’m literally three rooftops away. You are not stealing this one from me.”
Tim groaned as he kicked up the kickstand, the Cave’s exit lights flaring to life. “Spoiler, no.”
Barbara’s voice cut in gently, like she was already anticipating the argument. “Spoiler, I’ve got your location—”
“Already moving,” Steph shot back, breath light but footsteps unmistakably real. “And for the record? I am absolutely beating Red Robin’s slowpoke self to the scene.”
Tim rolled his eyes so hard it almost hurt. “I’m still clocking ten minutes,” he said flatly, launching the coordinates. “Try not to trip over your own cape before I get there.”
“Me?” Steph asked, tone cheeky as she flew from rooftop to rooftop. “Never.”
Another channel clicked open, seamless and familiar.
“Everyone be careful,” Dick said, voice calm but edged tight in the way it only ever was when kids were involved. “If there’s a child in the middle of a lab fire, this is already off the rails.”
“Copy that, ’Wing,” Tim said, fingers tightening as he adjusted the throttle.
He didn’t slow down.
If anything, he pushed harder, the Batcycle responding instantly, engine snarling as the Cave blurred into streaks of stone and shadow around him. Gotham was waiting above—wide, restless, and never patient—and Tim wasn’t about to make it wait any longer.
Static crackled suddenly—loud, annoying—followed by the unmistakable staccato of gunfire.
“—sayin’ I got eyes on—” Jason’s voice broke through, distorted, drowned out by a deafening bang and a shouted curse.
Tim winced. “Wow,” he muttered into the mic. “Crystal clear as always, Hood.”
There was no further response.
Just more gunfire—closer now, angrier—echoing through the comm like a reminder that Jason never did anything halfway, including getting himself shot at.
Tim filed that away for later. Worry was a luxury for after the crisis was contained.
Like predicted, he was the first one on scene.
Slowpoke my ass, he thought, already lining up the mental victory lap he fully intended to rub in Stephanie’s face when she showed up. Later. Preferably loudly. Possibly with charts.
The Bowery hit him like a wall.
Smoke clung to the air in thick, acrid layers, crawling into every seam of his suit as he stepped through what had once been a loading entrance.
His boots crunched over glass and ash, the sound unnervingly loud in the hollowed-out silence left behind by the fire crews.
His visor flickered, HUD cycling through thermal scans and structural readouts. Heat signatures were fading fast. Whatever had happened here hadn’t just burned—it had ended.
“Oracle,” Tim rasped—and hated the way his voice came out rougher than he meant it to. Clear, still, but thick with bubbling emotion. “This isn’t a warehouse.”
He knelt near a collapsed support beam, gloved hand brushing over warped steel. The metal had melted inward, warped like wax instead of buckled like it should’ve under heat alone.
Wrong failure pattern.
He swallowed.
“This is CADMUS.”
The word landed heavy.
Dead silence filled the comms—not even static. No one rushed to contradict him. No one asked how he knew.
They all knew.
Tim straightened slowly, eyes tracking across the devastation with new context snapping into place. The shattered containment pods. The scorched consoles. The way the destruction felt deliberate, surgical, like someone had wanted to erase something specific.
And had failed.
A shadow shifted at the edge of the wreckage.
Tim caught it instantly—movement where there shouldn’t have been any—and pivoted, body already angling toward defense before his brain caught up. Then a familiar silhouette slipped through the smoke, purple threading briefly through the red emergency glow.
She pushed past a collapsed beam, ducking under a hanging cable with more care than she usually bothered with, boots crunching softly over glass and debris.
Her head turned slowly as she took in the room, eyes tracking the same details Tim had already flagged—the shattered pods, the scorched consoles, the way the destruction felt aimed instead of chaotic.
They didn’t speak at first.
They didn’t need to.
Steph stopped short near the center of the chamber, her posture changing in a way Tim recognized instantly. The joking looseness vanished, shoulders squaring, breath going still.
“Dude,” she murmured quietly, gesturing with an incline of her chin toward something deeper into the room.
No humor. No snark. No commentary to soften the blow.
“You need to see this.”
Tim crossed the room, stepping carefully. His mind raced ahead of his body, slotting possibilities into place and discarding them just as quickly.
Whatever Steph had found, she hadn’t touched it.
That was another tell.
Stephanie Brown touched everything—unless she was afraid of what it meant.
Tim moved to her side, stopped cold at the sight.
For a split second, his brain recognized the shape before his eyes fully registered it. Pattern recognition firing ahead of conscious thought. A familiar outline pulled from too many case files, too many nightmares he’d sworn were behind them.
Oh.
He didn’t like that his first reaction wasn’t confusion.
He hated that it was recognition.
A shattered containment tank dominated the center of the room.
Thick glass lay blown outward in jagged arcs, fragments scattered across the floor like shrapnel. Metal restraints had been torn loose instead of melted, bent back with a kind of force heat alone couldn’t explain. Residual scorch marks radiated outward, not chaotic, but directional—like something had pushed its way free.
Tim felt it before he fully processed it.
The wrongness settled in his gut like a stone, heavy and unmoving.
This wasn’t equipment failure.
This wasn’t collateral damage.
This was a confirmed escape.
Lazarus-green fluid streaked across the floor in wide, uneven smears, steaming as it ate slowly into the metal plating beneath it. The liquid hissed softly, angrily, like it resented being exposed to the open air. Burn scars clawed up the walls, blackened lines reaching outward from the epicenter, as if the room itself had tried—and failed—to contain what happened here.
Machinery lay in ruin. Half-melted. Half-torn apart. Heat and brute force had both taken a swing at it, and neither had won cleanly.
Bodies were scattered where they’d fallen.
Tim’s gaze snagged on one gloved hand protruding from beneath a collapsed console.
Black.
Leather.
Etched with an owl.
His stomach flipped hard enough to make him sway. He dropped into a crouch beside the body, the world narrowing as his eyes caught on the name badge still clipped to the blood-soaked breast pocket.
Dr. Veyl.
The lettering was smeared and scorched, warped by whatever had killed him—but it was still legible.
Stephanie swallowed audibly beside him, her usual irreverence completely absent. She didn’t even bother with the No Names in the Field rule—shock overriding training.
“Tim,” she asked, voice thin and tipping towards mortified “You don’t think—?”
He closed his eyes for half a second.
Opened them.
Tim swallowed, forced himself to breathe through the metallic bite of smoke and melted plastic, and nodded once—more to convince his own body than Stephanie.
“I do,” he said quietly, reeling.
The admission sat heavy in his chest, the sheer amount of wrongness pressing in from every direction. CADMUS alone would’ve been bad enough. A secret facility, buried in Gotham, wiped almost clean.
But the Court of Owls?
A man-made Lazarus Pit?
That wasn’t just crossing a line. That was bulldozing straight through it and pretending it had never been there.
Tim lifted a hand and tapped the comm at his ear, grounding himself in the familiar motion before opening the channel—for the rest of the family who’d been impatiently waiting, tense and silent, on the other end.
“There are traces of Lazarus usage here,”
Jason Todd’s voice came through first—low and gruff, stripped of its usual bite. For once, the line was perfectly clear, and that alone set Tim’s teeth on edge.
“Hold up.”
There was a pause—the faint sound of wind brushed the mic, a distant echo of movement, like Jason had gone still wherever he was.
“Somebody tell me I’m hearing this wrong.”
The words weren’t loud. They didn’t need to be. There was something tightly coiled beneath them, something held in place by sheer force of will.
Another beat passed.
Then Jason spoke again, slower this time, each word measured like he was laying something dangerous down very carefully.
“Those sick fuckers had a Lazarus pit,” he seethed. “Here, in Gotham. Under our noses?”
“Looks like it,” Tim said, voice controlled by sheer force of will. He kept moving as he spoke—because if he stopped moving, his brain would start filling in blanks he didn’t want filled. “Containment tank in the center of the room. Fluid spread pattern suggests breach happened recently. Heat damage is secondary.”
Stephanie’s voice came after, almost distracted by what she was looking through. “And there’s a lot of it.”
Jason exhaled, rough and ugly, like it scraped his throat on the way out.
“Then that kid—” His voice sharpened, laced with something fierce and sick. “—that kid is in serious trouble.”
Dick’s voice cut in next, alarmed but trying to preserve neutrality so no one else panicked.
A little too late for that, Nightwing.
“CADMUS doesn’t do ‘oops,’” he theorized with a snark that didn’t come close to masking how unhappy he was about any of this. No one was. “If they had a child in there—Tim, what does your gut say they were doing?”
Tim grimaced despite himself.
He didn’t like questions that demanded feelings as answers.
Feelings were messy. Imprecise. Hard to chart or verify. He preferred facts—data points, timelines, proof you could lay out and dissect until the truth had nowhere left to hide.
But his gut?
His gut had a disturbingly solid track record.
Tim exhaled slowly, his gaze drifting back to the shattered tank—the scorched restraints, the empty space where something should have been.
“Experimenting,” he said. The word came out flat, stripped of emotion even to his own ears. “On something living. Or trying to make something living again.”
Oracle’s breath hitched over the line—small, almost imperceptible.
Tim heard it anyway.
“CADMUS has a history with cloning,” Barbara explained, though she didn’t need to, her voice tight and worried, “If they were combining that with Lazarus—”
“It never ends well,” Tim finished minutely.
He didn’t add we’ve seen this before.
Didn’t let his mind finish the thought already clawing its way forward—images of his best friend, of stolen DNA and broken beginnings, of fallout that had rippled outward and never quite stopped hurting. Some wounds didn’t scar over. They just learned how to ache quietly.
Batman’s voice cut through the comm next, cold and absolute, the Dark Knight distilled down to command and consequence.
“Recover everything. Files. Drives. Samples. Anything not destroyed.”
Tim was already moving.
He tore into a ruined console, fingers working on instinct as his suit’s scanner flared to life. Ports lit up and died. Corrupted drives resisted, then cracked open under pressure. Storage cores pinged weakly, heat-damaged but not completely gone—just enough left to be dangerous.
Good.
His hands didn’t shake. They never did when things crossed this line. Catalog damage. Isolate what survived. Pull what could still talk.
“On it.”
The words barely registered to him as sound—more like a promise, snapped tight and locked into place.
He dropped to one knee beside a scorched console, fingers already moving as he pried open what remained of the system housing. The casing protested before giving way, warped metal shrieking softly as it bent. The screen flickered to life in weak, uneven pulses, coughing up corrupted directories and dead-end file trees that collapsed the moment he tried to open them.
Whole drives were gone.
Not damaged. Not burned out by heat or impact.
Erased.
Data wiped so completely it bordered on obsessive, like someone had gone back again and again just to make sure nothing survived to talk.
His jaw tightened as he sifted through the wreckage, isolating what little metadata remained, tracing the shape of what had once been there by the dent it left behind.
“Most of the files are gone,” he reported into the open comm, voice even as his pulse ticked up. “Not burned. Purged. Someone didn’t want this recovered.”
Before Tim could respond, Stephanie cut in—clearly chasing the same missing pieces, trying to force the shape of the truth out of negative space.
“Whatever it was,” she started, eyes never leaving the shattered tank as she sifted through the debris nearby, careful but relentless, “it didn’t start tonight.”
Tim glanced up at her.
She gestured broadly at the room, the ruined infrastructure, the layers of damage that told a longer story than the fire ever could. “You don’t build something like this overnight. Not the containment. Not the redundancies. Not the fail-safes.”
Her mouth tightened, jaw setting as the implication settled in.
“And you don’t panic-purge data,” she continued, quieter now, sharper, “unless you’re scared someone’s about to find it.”
Tim looked back at the wreckage.
At the gaps where answers should’ve been.
He didn’t have a clean conclusion. No intact files. No smoking gun he could point to and say there. Just fragments. Impressions. Patterns that fit together too well in ways he’d sworn he was done recognizing.
Too-perfect DNA.
Growth accelerated beyond anything natural.
A boy engineered instead of born.
Tim exhaled slowly through his nose, grounding himself.
“I don’t know,” he admitted. “The data’s too damaged. But—” He hesitated, then forced himself to continue. “The framework matches projects meant to make something. Or remake it. Sustain it.”
“The priority is the child,” Batman reaffirmed. “Whoever escaped that lab witnessed something catastrophic. If Lazarus exposure is involved, they may be unstable.”
Tim’s gaze drifted back to the exit—the path the kid had taken, barefoot and terrified, out into Gotham.
Oracle’s interface expanded across Tim’s visor as Barbara overlaid Gotham’s map with blinking data points—street cameras, traffic feeds, thermal signatures. One dot pulsed weakly, then flickered as the trail thinned.
“Last confirmed sighting in the Lower East End,” Barbara relayed, the sound of her fingers flying across her keyboard as she tried to pinpoint what she could easily heard through the comm. “They’re moving fast—and slipping off-grid.”
Figures.
Damian’s voice snapped in, fierce and unyielding, a close imitation of the Bat himself despite him only being a pre-teen.
“Then that is where we will begin.”
“I’ll scope the Alley,” Jason added, his tone grim and controlled, already pulling away. The line went dead immediately after—radio silence. At least he’d bothered to confirm before disappearing, which, all things considered, counted as progress.
Then Dick’s voice slid in, lighter on the surface but edged with intent. “My old room still available, B? I’ll start making arrangements to head toward Gotham.”
“Always, chum,” Bruce answered without hesitation, the certainty there immediate and absolute.
Somewhere out there, a kid they couldn’t track—couldn’t even properly name yet—was sprinting through Gotham like the city itself was trying to swallow him whole.
Tim knew they were already on borrowed time.
He nodded once at Steph, the kind of silent acknowledgment that didn’t need words, and they moved in sync—collecting what they could, grabbing the last salvageable fragments they needed to get to the bottom of this nightmare.
Smoke burned his lungs as they headed back toward what passed for fresh air, the ruins of a mistake too big to hide smoldering behind them.
CADMUS didn’t lose assets.
They retrieved them.
And whoever had escaped that lab?
Tim had the sinking certainty that the hunt had already begun.