“Let go of me!” The scream crackled through Red Hood’s comm, desperate and pleading.
“Quite!” Hood hissed. It wasn’t a sharp, angry word but one that wobbled with badly covered fear. Hood sounded young. “He’ll hear us! You have to be quite. He’ll hear us, can’t you hear him? He’s laughing.”
“Fear toxin,” Batman rumbled, as if any of them needed to be told that.
“I have anti-venom on me,” Red Robin responded quickly to the unvoiced question in Batman’s words.
Dick didn’t want to listen to the words from the warehouse, but he couldn’t not.
“Who’s laughing? Is it Dad? No, no, no! You have to let me go!”
“Hush up!”
“He can’t find me! Dad can’t— he’ll kill me if he finds me!”
“You’ll need to be prepared that Scarecrow has changed the formula,” Oracle advised. She was as calm seeming as ever, though Dick could hear her worry through in the frantic clack of her keys. “Now that I have an address, I’ve been able to track a few shipments. There’s at least one chemical that’s unusual for him.”
“Don’t give them the anti-venom different or it may not have full effect different?” Dick asked as planned out his next grapple.
“I don’t know.”
“Fuck,” Red cussed softly.
“I’ll keep you safe, okay? I promise,” Hood assured the other voice. “Robin will always keep you safe, right? We just have to be quiet and I can get us out of here.”
“I suggest you hurry before Hood does find a way out,” Robin (the current Robin), snapped across the comms. “We do not know where he will run in this state.”
“No one keeps me safe,” the voice said with a defeated certainty. “No one cares that I died.”
“We know, Robin, we’re almost there,” Red snapped back.
Dick didn’t have the focus to reprimand either of them, he just wanted to get to Jason. He just needed to get to his little brother who acted so tough and grown up that it was too easy to forget that he was still just nineteen.
He was still a kid.