Night Rider

33: When All is Said and Done

There was light... soft light, like a filtered morning through half shaded windows. It was like waking up from a long fever dream. The world was too loud with its beeps and ticking noises, each sound making no sense.
What day was it? Where was this? I blinked, cleared my eyes, and realized I was on my bed back in Wayne Manor. The beeping still didn't make any sense but... Tuffy was standing by the foot of my bed. Her tail swished and her ears flicked at me.

Maybe I was unconscious still?

She nickered at me. Something to my left shifted at the noise. I glanced over to find Jason stretched out on the other half of my bed, dressed in regular clothes and sacked out as if he had been keeping an eye on me but fell asleep.

Yeah, definitely unconscious.

I blinked blearily and followed the overloud beeping to my right. Machines. Lots of machines, running tubing under the blankets and blinking to the beat of my pulse. My right hand twitched and I could feel the ache of the attachments.
My eyes flicked back to Tuffy. If this was a dream...

"Tuff," I whispered. She nickered at me again and reached her nose to snuffle my blankets. I wiggled my untubed arm out of the blankets slowly and stretched it out to for her.

A hand grabbed mine. I blinked at it. The hand pulled mine back gently, tucking it down again. I looked over to Jason.

He was watching me intently, as if he'd never been asleep at all. I took in a breath and realized something with that same sleep fog. Part of the living scent that had woken me was Tuffy... and the other part was Jason.
"You smell nice." I said. His eyes widened a little.

But then I was in darkness again.

...

I opened my eyes, and this time, even with Tuffy staring at me from the foot of the bed, I knew I was awake and alive. Dreams didn't hurt this much.
"Good lord," I groaned- and immediately regretted it. My ribs shrieked. "Ow.."

Tuffy shuffled closer and snuffled her nose over my face. She breathed out a couple of huffs, as if to say "you are alright, correct?", before tilting her head towards the door. She whinnied softly and returned to inspecting me.
"Tuff, what're you doing inside-"

The fight on the watchtower came rushing back to me. Oh.
What happened? What happened that Tuffy would be indoors? And that I would suddenly be tubed up in my room, back in the manor, what... what would have...
I was dizzy for a moment and focused on Tuffy's soft nose and my own sharp painful breaths.

Footsteps echoed from my door and I heard it creak as someone entered.
"You're awake," came Bruce Wayne's voice.

"Why am I so dizzy?" I wasn't so sure I wanted to talk to him after everything I'd done, but the sudden brain swimming? "I feel like jello."

His weight settled onto the bed. I looked over slowly.
"Three broken ribs, two more cracked, internal bleeding and a concussion that's had you in an incoherent, incognizant state for a week. You should have stayed put like I told you," he started and my brain started to hurt- "but without you, we wouldn't have succeeded."

I blinked at Damian's father, seeing more of him than I ever had before. Tuffy nudged his shoulder and he reached up a hand to pet her face absently. Had she found Batman when I sent her away? Had she protected him like she'd done for his son? And was Bruce Wayne...

"Thank you."

He was.

"If you ever do something like that again-"

"Damian will kill me first," I whispered. His faint smile was unexpected.

"Yes, I'm fairly certain he would."

We didn't talk much past that, save for a more in depth exploration of my injuries and brief details on what had happened after I plunged the injector. Granted, this being Bruce Wayne, Batman, the details weren't the ones I really wanted to hear. Cadmus was still out there, though we'd neutralized the main threat of its plans. I supposed I'd have to get the happier, less important details from someone else (like how I'd gotten out of the watchtower and what Alfred's wrath had been like). Though Bruce did mention Superman (who felt terrible about the whole mess, which I gathered from a later conversation with Dick) wanted to meet me sometime when he wasn't being Cadmus controlled.

By that point in our talk I was feeling pretty well out of it and he left me to rest. Damian slipped in after he left, perching himself atop Tuffy with a book even as my eyelids drooped again. He was... safe. I was alive... things were going to be alright.

"You're okay," I croaked.

"-tt- Of course I am Walker," but there was no real snark in his tone, just poorly hidden warmth. "You need to sleep."
I nodded and closed my eyes with a half smile.

Not one word was said about the fact that my horse was in the house... and that was fine by me.