Chapter Text
He remembers waking up in the dark, the walls closing in on him and pushing him to get out get out get out.
He remembers clawing through the satin above him, unraveling his belt and tearing at the wood until it gave way, dumping icy cold mud onto his body.
He remembers digging his way out, flopping to the side on the ground and gasping for air, laying on the grass as the rain viciously pelted his shivering body.
He remembers reaching out for his pack bonds inside his head, desperately searching for familiarity and warmth and safety, following the strands of consciousness that should have taken him right to his Father and his Brother, and finding nothing. They’d been torn away from him.
He remembers curling up and clutching at his head as agony ripped through him, screaming and screaming and screaming.
And then there’s nothing. Nothing at all, until the moment he wakes up once again, choking on green water as he thrashes his way to the surface and crawls out, something between a snarl and whine ripping its way out of his chest, alone as scared and angry. He launches himself at the nearest figure, uncaring of his nudity or his lack of weapons, and tears into them. Blood splatters on his face, pieces of flesh in his mouth, and he bares his teeth and snarls his victory.
Something cracks against the side of his skull, sending him reeling, but he shakes it off and focuses on his next target, and then the next, and the one after. They try to overwhelm him with numbers, but his body is fast and his instincts sing with vicious pleasure at the taste of their blood on his tongue, each wound he sustains only egging him on further.
He doesn’t slow his massacre until something catches him in the neck, and then in quick succession he is struck by a second projectile as well. He whirls in a crouch, snarling, but can’t spot his newest attacker.
He goes to stand, tipping his head back and opening his mouth to better scent the air and locate his remaining enemies, but he stumbles, suddenly off balance.
He slides into a kneel, whining in confusion, and then tips over and collides with the stone floor beneath him, unable to move or think, only able to watch as a pair of feet step closer and closer to him, and then crouches down next to him.
She says something in a quiet voice, and reaches out as if to touch his face, or perhaps to brush her wrist against him, to scent him. He bares his teeth and manages to jerk away from the hand as he slips into unconsciousness. The last thing he sees is the woman’s face, frowning and brow furrowed in confusion.
*********
The first room he wakes up in reeks of the scent of an unknown alpha, and he spends the next hour ripping every single piece of furniture in it apart in his rage. Once he’s dismantled the room and rubbed his own scent across everything left intact in order to cover the smell of the unfamiliar alpha, he realizes he is trapped, and starts to throw himself at the doors until he’s hit with a dart and sedated once again.
The second room he wakes up in is much more minimalistic. There’s a cot with a blanket, a toilet, a dresser, a mirror, a thick rug on the floor, and a heavy wooden door that he immediately launches himself at, clawing and tearing at the wood as he feels terror at the confinement coursing through his veins. The door opens and a stranger steps in, and his instincts scream at him to get the stranger out. He keeps tearing at them with a vicious snarl until there’s the prick of a needle in his thigh. They sedate him again and he slumps, fingers bloody and torn, next to the crying form of the injured servant and the spilled tray of food he had brought in.
The third time he wakes up, he’s in a cell. It’s entirely enclosed, a heavy door at the front, no windows, the floor clean white tile and slightly sloped towards a drain along one edge. There’s a cot and a toilet, and nothing else. He has a heavy iron collar clasped around his neck, with a length of chain leading back to an anchor point in the wall. It restricts him to the back half of the cell, leaving a space of about five feet between his reach and the door. Unable to reach the door of the cell without choking himself, he paces the room, back and forth and back and forth.
They bring him meals and water, standing a couple feet inside the doorway and away from his reach and sliding the tray forward until it’s within the perimeter of his chain, and he ravenously consumes it. There’s a dim, flickering light bulb in his cell that never entirely shuts off.
And every day, the female alpha comes by. She speaks to him for hours, she tries to present him with cloth she’s scented, and he snarls and shreds it all before kicking it out of his cell — out of his den.
With each rejection, the alpha’s scent grows sharper and more distressed, and in response, he gets more agitated each time she arrives until her presence immediately triggers him to launch at her, choking and snarling at the end of his chain.
They sedate him and fasten a metal muzzle over the bottom half of his face. When he wakes up, the female alpha is there, within his reach. He instinctively attacks her, but is quickly taken down and pinned on his stomach. She growls in his ear, a deep, dominating rumble, and his instincts scream at him to submit.
Instead, he fights and thrashes and shrieks, smashing the metal of the muzzle into the side of her face when she attempts to sink her teeth into the back of his neck in a submission bite. His broken bonds ache and burn and he feels so, so alone. But she is not his alpha, she is not pack.
She stands, wiping blood off her face with the back of her hand, and says something to the guards on either side of the door. Before he can finish scrambling up to his feet, he’s sedated once again.
They leave the muzzle on.
He spends most of the first day clawing at it, ripping marks into his own skin in his desperation to remove it, to no avail. There’s a gap big enough for him to stuff food through, and he can tip his head back to pour water in.
Eventually, over the next several weeks, he adjusts to the muzzle and stops trying to rip it off.
The alpha doesn’t come back.
He paces his cage day after day, wearing a furrow into the ground in the exact radius of his chain’s reach. His bare feet crack and blister, and eventually harden with new calluses.
He grows. The collar fits tighter on his neck over time, to the point that it digs in painfully and if he turns his head wrong, cuts into his skin. They don’t replace it.
Emboldened by his muzzling, some of the guards torment him when they get bored.
They’re careful, coming in pairs, beating him down and making sure he’s stopped twitching before they drag him to his knees. He is an omega alone, an omega who’s pack bonds are broken. And so he suffers, and he seethes.
But he is patient. He lets himself be beaten down faster, lets them think he’s given up fighting back.
One pair of guards drops their vigilance for a second too long and he strikes, an elbow to the throat of the bigger of the two to send him choking and gasping to the floor, and then spins and wraps the chain around the other’s neck. He curls in on himself and yanks the trailing ends of the chain hard, and feels his very blood hum in satisfaction at the crack of bone behind him. He drops the body, lets the chain go slack, and his attention flickers back to the second guard where he lays on the floor, scrabbling at his collapsed trachea.
The guard on the ground can’t scream, but he doesn’t need to in order to suffer.
When shift change comes and they discover the bodies, they sedate him and drag the bodies out. The other guards don’t enter his cell any more, and he purrs in satisfaction at having protected himself and his den.
Months later, the light bulb in his cell flickers for the last time and shuts off. No one replaces it, and his routine continues in the dark.
**********
Tim hadn’t really been expecting to wake up after being stabbed by the Widower and bleeding out in the desert. But now he was with the League of Assassins, and he’d pissed off Ra’s at some point after he woke up by refusing his offer, so they were dragging him to the cells to “think about his choices and come to the right decision”.
Tim is pretty sure that means torture.
He’s had some interrogation training with Batman — with Bruce. But that training relied entirely upon the idea that someone was coming to rescue him.
Kon and Bart are dead, Steph is dead, his parents are dead, Bruce is — Bruce is missing, not dead, and he has proof of that now.
But that proof is going to rot with him in a cell in the League of Assassins, because no one knows he’s here. He’s not in contact with anyone right now, hasn’t really bothered to check in with anyone since he left Gotham.
Dick had reached out a few times, trying to touch base when Tim had been frazzled enough to let emotions spill through their pack bond.
He’d asked Tim to call him, had told him that he wanted to explain his reasoning behind giving Robin to Damian, but Tim had ignored it. He didn’t want to hear Dick reiterate all the reasons he didn’t think Tim was good enough. Instead, Tim had blocked off their bond and ignored his calls, and had been making due by wearing Dick’s old hoodie that he’d stolen when he’d fled, pretending that the warm scent of his brother lingering on the fabric was from a more recent scenting.
The black cape he’d stolen from the display of Bruce’s Batman suit to add to his Red Robin costume and the handkerchief from Alfred that he tucked into the pocket of the hoodie filled much the same purpose. Little pieces of his pack he was carrying along with him even while he was on the outs.
The League had changed him out of his Red Robin suit when they’d performed surgery on him, removing his damaged spleen, and he was changed into his own clothes — probably another attempt at manipulating him, surrounding him with the lingering scents of his pack to relax him and make him more amenable to Ra’s schemes.
He stumbles over his own feet as they drag him along, and winces at the pull on his stitches. He’d ended up too lost in his own head, still in a bit of a daze from the last of the painkillers in his system.
Tim is dumped in a cell at the very end of the hallway, and the door slammed shut. He sits down against the wall and buries his head in his arms, sighing.
He has to get out of here and make sure his research on what happened to Bruce gets back to the Justice League, or else everything he did was for nothing.
But first, he needs to heal from his surgery, and listen to every bit of intel he can gather in the meantime.
The guards bring food down a few hours later. They make him stand up and face the far wall with his hands behind his back, and then open his cell and set the tray down, backing out carefully. He turns back around as they close the door and grabs his tray. There’s a long moment of quiet, after which he hears another door open, a vicious snarl, and the rattle of chains, and the clang of metal on stone. Moments later, the door slams shut and footsteps echo back down the hallway.
One of the guards mentions something in League dialect as they leave. Tim had still been learning from Owens, Z, and Pru. He isn’t quite fluent yet, but he catches mentions of Talia, and something about a pet, and then the voices are gone and Tim is alone.
He knows now that there’s another prisoner across the hall from him. He wonders if he can make contact with them through the doors. If they’re someone who’s defected from the League, they might have more intel for him that could help with an escape plan.
“Hello? My name is…Tim. What’s your name?” He tries, sitting by the door and projecting his voice enough to carry across.
The only response he gets is a low growl echoing across the empty hallway. Tim curses himself for having gotten his hopes up of finding an ally here — it doesn’t sound like the occupant of the other cell is even human, let alone interested in making friends.
“Nevermind, I guess,” He mutters to himself. He picks at his food, and then curls up on the cot to sleep.
The next day, Ra’s visits him. He must be impatient if he’s coming down so soon.
Tim feels more clear-headed now that the pain medication has worn off, but the surgery site throbbing in pain and the constant flickering and buzzing of the overhead light has put him in a foul mood.
“Hello, Detective. Have you reconsidered my offer?” Ra’s says as he stands in the doorway of the cell.
Tim scowls at him. He doesn’t have the patience to play games today.
“Fuck off, Ra’s. I’m not helping you. I’ll get out of here and get the information about Batman into the right hands without your help.”
Ra’s hums, and then nods.
“Very well, Timothy. Perhaps spending a few days with a cellmate will help you change your mind. Do be careful, he has somehow gotten even more vicious of late. If he kills you, I can always use the pit to bring you back and hope you come out more… stable… than he did.”
Tim feels a surge of unease. He’s heard rumors about the pit, of the madness and rage that haunt its users. Tim’s strength is in his mind, his reasoning and his problem solving abilities. He can’t lose that.
He resolves to protect himself by whatever means necessary, if he’s unable to reason with his new cellmate. Batman… Batman isn’t here to judge if he has to kill to protect himself.
Ra’s leaves.
The two guards enter, dragging Tim up to his feet. He offers a token struggle, throwing himself to one side to disguise the motion of his hand as he slips a small knife from the other guard and drops it into his hoodie pocket, and then they’re dragging him across the hall. They open the other door and dump him in just across the threshold of the room, and slam the door shut behind him.
Immediately, something shifts in the darkness, a slow clink of the chain moving and dragging across the floor.
Tim refuses to back himself up against the door. As much as he wants to make space, he can’t block himself off like that. He pulls out the knife and settles into a crouch. He can’t see anything, so he holds his breath and closes his eyes, focusing his senses. He trained with Lady Shiva, and part of that training was learning to rely on his other senses by fighting blindfolded. He wishes he had his bō — up against an unknown enemy, the small knife feels insufficient.
He doesn’t talk or taunt. He just listens, tracking the clink of the chain growing closer. He takes a deep breath, trying to figure out if he can catch the scent of whatever is in the cell with him. The overwhelming scent of years worth of old sweat and dried blood hits him first, making him want to gag, followed by the tang of stress hormones, fear and distress and rage, and finally, under all of that… oh fuck, that’s the smell of an omega — an omega in heat, he realizes.
The second that realization clicks, the figure in the dark — the omega — lunges forward, a guttural snarl echoing in the constraints of the cell. Tim feels his instincts push him to go still and limp and non-threatening at the angry omega who’s space he’s invaded, but his other instincts, the ones honed by years of training, bring his arm up to block the hands reaching to grab him.
Tim is expecting someone about his size, based on their dynamic, but instead, he yelps as he’s bowled over by what has to be close to 250lbs of weight, bringing him into the ground. A huge hand closes around his neck, gripping and squeezing. He swings his other arm up with the knife, sinking it deep into the closest part of his attacker he can reach.
The omega howls in rage, yanking him up and shaking him hard, then slamming him back down against the ground viciously, knocking the breath out of him in a wheeze and striking his head against the tile.
He’s disoriented and dizzy, pinned on the ground by a much bigger opponent whose hand is wrapped around his throat, his knife having bounced off somewhere else in the darkness when he was shaken. The hand releases his neck and shifts up, gripping his hair and dragging his head back to expose his throat. Something cold and metal presses against his neck, and Tim feels a high, terrified noise tear from his chest, the whine of a puppy who is sorry-so sorry-please-sorry.
The terrible snarl that had been filling the room quiets, but the press of metal against his throat doesn’t go away. If anything, the metal presses harder against his neck, right on his primary scent glands. It’s almost as effective as a scruffing, and between the pressure against his glands and the hand in his hair forcing him to bare his throat, it’s sending Tim into a submissive haze.
He realizes after a long moment that the omega is smelling him, inhaling deeply at the junction of his neck and shoulder right at his scent glands, and letting out a soft hum of confusion. Tim can’t even move, his every instinct screaming at him to hold still and submit and hope he’s forgiven for his transgression. Which pisses him off, because it’s not like it’s his fault that he got thrown into this omega’s den.
And then the omega rumbles at him, the call of an older packmate to check on a puppy, and Tim doesn’t know what to think of that. It’s a familiar noise, one used between close family, and certainly not towards strangers. Dick is really the only one who ever uses that call towards him, and Dick is an alpha who is definitely not in a cell with the League of Assassins. Bruce has rumbled at him once or twice, when he’s been tired and hazy or injured or just waking up, before he’d stiffen and draw back once he realized it wasn’t Jason he was seeing. Alfred isn’t particularly instinct-driven and is also a beta, not a giant of an omega. So that’s all Tim’s packmates ruled out.
But if it’ll get him out of having his throat torn out as an intruder of a feral omega’s den space while they’re in heat, Tim will roll with the punches. He tucks away all his fear and uncertainty, and chirps back, soft and appeasing, announcing himself as just a puppy who needs reassurance, not a threat.
The metal rubs against his neck again — maybe something the omega is wearing on its face? The omega’s hand comes up and pets through his hair, scrubbing a wrist across Tim’s cheeks and face and coating him in the omega’s scent. The omega hums in satisfaction after, and Tim’s stomach swoops as he’s picked up and carried, and then dumped onto something soft. He feels around to situate himself, and realizes that he’s laying on a mattress in the corner, the cot itself tipped onto its side as a wall to block in a third side, a pile of blankets on the mattress arranged into a surprisingly neat nest.
Tim’s too deep in a haze to say anything as the omega settles and tucks Tim up against its — his? Chest, and then burrows his face into the fabric of Tim’s hoodie at his shoulder, purring so hard that Tim feels his entire body rumbling with it until he finds himself responding in kind. He dozes off, his instincts telling him he’s safe and warm and protected even as his conscious mind wonders what the fuck is going on.