No Nuance November

Helpless

 Alright, the next four stories are all connected to the same event. They can be read independently or together.

Do you ever have one of those days where no matter what you do, no matter how much you plan, or what you try, nothing seems to go your way? Ever?

Well Tim felt he was having one of those months.

It'd started with a failed op in Gotham. He was staking out a possible hideout for Victor Zsasz. He'd been searching for weeks prior and finally had a breakthrough. He'd been beginning to doubt himself. Unfortunately Zsasz had gotten spooked and didn't show. On top of every other lead of Tim's running cold.

Then there was a mission with the Titans, it was going to be easy stuff. Just gathering some intel on the Cult of the Cobra. They'd been making some moves that several of them found concerning. They'd been caught and been forced to retreat. More embarrassingly the League had to step in and clean the whole situation up.

More recently he'd been on the chase with Spoiler and Signal. They cornered Riddler, restrained him and left him to the GCPD. Tim had stupidly thought that was going to be the end of it. He'd gone back with Signal and went to sweep the building for anything that might've gotten left. It was a rookie mistake. Always, always, always look for trip wires. Nygma loved riddles and tricks. Making you think one thing and doing another. He'd caught Tim with a trip wire.

Fortunately he'd been opening the door slowly so they'd avoided the brunt of the blast and had gotten away with only minor injuries and the building had taken the explosion well. It wasn't even in danger of collapsing.

In between it had been one failed thing after another. A total loss in confidence in himself. He didn't trust himself to spar with his peers without messing something up anymore with how things were going recently.

Kon had convinced him to come back to the tower. Saying their system needed maintenance and he was the best at keeping their security up to date. He'd also kept saying he missed Tim and wanted to hang out. They all did. So, begrudgingly, Tim joined them at the tower to make sure their software was still good and had no bugs and also to just take some time to see his friends.

Cassie had even gone so far as to turn his phone off for an hour, repeatedly telling him that if he wanted to get out of this funk he needed to take a break. Tim had agreed to an hour. Too many things could go wrong and, break or not, he needed to be available if something happened.

They had no way of knowing.

After some time decompressing and recognizing that sometimes you get in slumps and it was okay they went over some of the details of their last failed mission.

Failure can be an excellent teacher when viewed from the right perspective.

Tim doesn't hear the phone the first few times. What catches his attention is that his phone had fully vibrated itself off the table onto the floor.

The notification tells him Jason had tried five consecutive times to get a hold of Tim. Before he even has a chance to register what this could mean, to acknowledge the pit growing deep in his stomach, the phone lights up again.

"What?"

"You need to get to Gotham General. Now!" Jason's tone is completely off. He sounds frazzled. Jason is never like that. Always cool and annoyingly confident no matter the situation.

Gotham General was a hospital. Someone was hurt, someone they both knew, and they were obviously hurt bad.

He went through a mental list of different possibilities. Duke was the first to come to mind. He patrolled in the day, he was newer and theoretically more prone to mistakes that could hurt him. But, that didn't feel right. Duke didn't have those kinds of enemies. Not that you always needed them to get hurt. None of the rest of them had any active cases. The girls weren't even in Gotham.