Chapter 1
Thea Drake was not suicidal. She loved living. She loved being Robin. She loved saving people, she loved solving cases, she loved her family.
But she doesn’t feel like Thea Drake right now. Thea Drake isn't here. Thea Drake had been chipped and chiseled away. Features that defined who she once was, sanded down smooth.
She stares at the walls of her cell, made from crumbling stone. In front, her hands are linked in unforgiving cuffs.
She isn’t sure how long it’s been since her last escape attempt. She had no way of counting the days, the months. Whatever food she got was delivered to her on a random schedule, as an afterthought.
Maybe that’s what she had always been.
This time would be different.
Thea Drake wasn’t suicidal, but she sure as hell was pragmatic. Machiavellian to the nth degree. And when weighing the scales of possibility, there was really only ever one real path.
She wanted out, and she didn’t particularly care how. If that meant dying, so what? Death was something she’d been expecting for the beginning, lately she’d even been praying for it.
But no matter how much she hoped, it never.
So, fuck it. She won’t spend one more day in this goddamn room. She won’t hope for an escape. That was the flaw in her original plans, at the very beginning of this waking nightmare. She wanted to make it out, and do it alive.
In the beginning, she tried to escape 17 times. Almost made it too.
When every attempt ended in failure, she didn’t let it bother her. Batman would come. She could wait. She was tough, she was smart, she was Robin .
She really had been naïve.
The man would never save her. No, he had his new Robin, bright and shiny. His pictures had been shoved in her face by pale and gleeful hands. She wasn’t sure how long ago that was. Black hair, eyes covered by a domino mask that were surely blue. A boy. A pattern she had broken. But with her out of the way, the status quo was reset. As if she had never even existed.
The boy also appeared in photos with Nightwing, and later on, Red Hood. They looked happier than they ever did with her.
She had shoved it to the back of her mind, and waited.
And waited.
And waited.
And waited.
The realization was painful, and slow. Her mother always said she had a silver tongue. She put it to use. She spent hours in a cold empty room, talking herself in circles, convincing herself that they would come. That they cared.
But empirical evidence trumps even the greatest hypothesis. Time crept by, photographs piled up. There was only one conclusion to draw.
And it hurt.
God, it hurt.
More than any physical pain she could experience, more than anything the Joker could ever do to her.
It was the reopening of a congenital wound.
It was her parents leaving her for months at a time, jetting off to some obscure archaeological site for artifacts more precious than her.
It was the loneliness that had settled into her bones when she was just six years old, so profound that it had driven her out into Gotham’s night with nothing but a camera, trying so desperately to capture the warmth of the heroes she saw.
It was the way that Bruce made her Robin, the way he held her when she cried, the way he promised he would never leave, and the way he did.
So yeah.
She wasn’t waiting for Nightwing or Red Hood anymore, and she certainly wasn’t waiting for Batman. He would never come.
Even after she discovered the obvious, she kept waiting. It took her a little while to figure out what for.
The police?
The police only cared as far as they could spit.
The Justice League?
Batman’s closest friends wouldn’t give a shit about her.
…An angel?
Eureka. That was it. She had stumbled upon Schrödinger’s gold mine of hope for delusional prisoners.
She spent forever telling herself that she was waiting for an angel. Someone to fly down from above, gather her in their arms. Take her somewhere safe. Make her better.
But her luck had always been shit, and Thea had always been impatient. Her angel had plenty of time. So she was done.
When she was Robin, when she used to fly, she thought she was smart. She knows better now. But that doesn’t mean she’s dumb. She has a plan.
The guards don’t bother with caution anymore, not since she stopped fighting. Grabbing a gun would be laughably easy. It’s almost time now. She estimates another half hour before the guard comes in with her “meal” of bread and water.
She took in her home cell one last time. Her blood covering the decrepit walls, enough for a death blow three times over. The flimsy mattress in the corner of her cell, stained long before she arrived. It’s within the reach of her chains. But she never went there voluntarily.
The tattered clothes that did nothing to protect her from the cold. From the monsters.
The ring of iron encircling her neck. Chains on the wall connected to the cuffs on her wrists.
Her hands are scarred and bony, and she stares at them. Everything they were, everything they became, and everything they will never be.
She had stopped tracking her injuries after her arm broke for the second time. Pain was her only constant, and she became accustomed. It was normal. Nothing worth noting.
So when she dislocates her right thumb, already bent from an old unhealed injury, she hardly blinks. Escape attempts #12 and #16, a tried and true strategy.
A single second and she has one hand free from the cuffs. A soft exhale escaped her lips, but nothing else.
And suddenly she was desperate. She used her free hand, aching and red in the chill air, and grabbed a jagged rock from the crumbling stone walls around her.
She brought it down hard, uncaring if it hit chain, cuff, or bone.
A loud crack sounded, and she pulled up her shaking hand. The hand with the cuff, a broken bind lying on the ground.
She stood with trembling legs, bile building in her throat.
Her heart pounds in her chest, and she doesn’t know if it’s from fear or adrenaline or anticipation. Probably some depressing cocktail of all three.
She walks. Towards the door. Phantoms of iron and chain pull her back, making her stumble. Laughter rings in her ears.
Her hand shakes as she reaches for the door. It’s unlocked, she knows it is. She hasn’t tried to escape in a long, long time. She has trust. She’s trusted by a monster. What a lovely thought.
Thea Drake sets a ruined hand on the door handle, and pulls.