Unraveling the World | Tim Drake

Well if you wanted honesty (that's all you had to say)

Red Robin would have been more lucky had he landed on your neighbor's apartment just next door instead of yours.

You are majoring in journalism at college, despite how much your mother would have wanted you to become a doctor, so you have few first aid knowledge or even the cool head to deal with the shock.

So really, he would have been better off slipping through her window and not yours, but it's a friday night and you declined her invitation to go out around an hour ago, so you know he would have just found an empty apartment.

He has you, and only you, for better or for worse.

It's a terrible, gruesome sight; a dark silhouette in the shape of a man slumped against the wall and a trail of blood following from the window.

You're alone in your apartment, clad on some old pajamas and a messy bun. There's an empty ramen cup on the coffee table leftover from your dinner and some trashy reality show playing in the background. You'd rather die a hundred times over before having a vigilante see you like this, uncared for and wide open, and the embarrassment still lingers even after the horror has long since settled in.

It's silly, and stupid, and so so inconsequential in the mortal scheme of the scene playing out right in the middle of your living room, but you've been infatuated with Red Robin since he was just Robin, and a decade worth of daydreams crashes hard against your predicament. You didn't want to meet him like this.

It takes you half a minute to adjust. Your hands are shaking when you lean against the sink of the bathroom, looking through your cupboard in search of your anxiety meds. If you're already barely useful to Red Robin as you are, you're definitely useless on the verge of a panic attack. By the time you are back to Red Robin's side it's easier to breathe and you bring a first aid kit with you. You hope you don't look as terrified as you feel.

Red Robin is breathing through his mouth, clutching both hands to a belt buckled around his hips. A big puddle of red has started pooling around him on the floor, and it takes you a minute to realize the red around his belly is darker than his suit. You grab at his hands and take a deep breath, thinking your words over.

"I need to see the wound." He is eerily quiet and tense to the touch. He doesn't trust you and you don't trust him either. Despite your fondness for him over other vigilantes you don't know him, he showed up uninvited and you are scared. This is a situation of wary hospitality, some sort of leap of faith between the both of you.

Slowly he relents, perhaps because he's too tired and hazy to put up a fight, or maybe because he sees good faith in your eyes. Whatever the case, you get to work.

The belt doesn't come off easily and at some point you just settle on cutting it off. Red Robin weakly gestures to one of the pockets, where you find more first aid supplies; a medical needle, stitches, painkillers and some sort of dark lump that reveals itself to be a retractable tourniquet when you accidentally press a bottom.

The implication that he has to carry around a travel sized tourniquet makes you dizzy, thinking about just what kind of job he expects to take on, but you don't dwell on it because you have already taken a dose of your meds and another one would be no use.

His suit is skin tight and he has to help you lift the shirt to see the wound. His body is sticky with sweat and the blood doesn't make it any better. For a fleeting moment you think about calling emergencies, what do heroes do when they get hurt? Surely you would have seen more of Batman's cryptic team during your childhood at the hospital if that were the case. Perhaps some sort of private clinic for vigilantes, paid for by the Justice League? Maybe they just dropped in unannounced at a stranger's house expecting patching up and it was like one of those things everyone knew but no one mentioned.