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A creak from down the hall. Bruce’s breath stills in his throat. The hallway light flickers on as the footsteps move. Bruce has enough wits about him to know the noise is purposeful. Damian always carries himself like a specter, but when he deigns to make noise, you can hear the way his feet drag across the floor. The brownstone, old as she is, makes enough noise for the two of them if you know how to listen. A shadow, ever so slowly, drags itself before Bruce’s door. It hovers there for a long moment. Bruce wills himself to turn the knob, an easy flick of his wrist, but finds himself stationary. A minute passes. Maybe two. Then the shadow moves back in the direction it came. Damian slinks back to his room much more quietly than he’d approached. “Fuck,” says Bruce, miserably. He leans his forehead against the door for the same amount of time Damian had hovered on the other side, then turns around, and subjects himself to bed.

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A band of kobolds has captured a bedraggled adventurer who has been separated from her party. She was smaller even than they, a gnome dressed in leather and fur and feathers. They quickly relieve her of her small daggers, and of the staff carved with the head of an animal the kobolds had never seen. They’ve feasted recently, so they decide to play a bit with their meal.

“I’ve eaten a lotta gnomes, girlie. Never seen one like you. Usually gnomes armor up to venture into the big, bad, dangerous wild. What are you supposed to be, then? Some kinda shaaaaman?” sneered their leader.

“No,” she said proudly, but almost crying, “I’m a druid.”

The kobolds let out hearty, taunting, but horribly frightening laughs. A second kobold, one-eyed, scarred and grizzled leered at her, inches from her face, with breath like a charnel house under a brewery. “I know about drooods. Lost this eye to an elf who shifted into a bear. Bear fat’s good eatin’.” The kobolds got another good laugh. “But there’s rules, girlie. Kobolds ain’t got druids, but even we know the rules. Droood can’t shift into something that much bigger than them. Whatcha gonna do, shift to a little bear cub and swat at us?”

He’s right, Shonna thought. I have no business being a druid. An orphan gnome, raised by elves, who through some miracle of the Goddess had a natural affinity with Nature herself. Almost a pet to the elves who nurtured her, they were startled by her growing affinity with Nature even as a tiny child. None thought to see such a thing in a gnome. She truly believed they intended to return her to birth people, but what is a momentary distraction to elves can be half a lifetime to mortal races. She left the Lady’s forests a fully-invested druid, more powerful than most. Never accepted by her gnome kin upon her return, she had fallen in with other outcasts, becoming an adventurer, finding comradeship and indeed... love. She lived a thrilling life and accomplished works in her Lady’s name that she hoped would leave the land greener than she found it.

But now she was here. Captured. Surrounded. About to be an after-dinner snack for stinking kobolds.

“You’re right. I don’t make an imposing bear. Raaaar!” She made little scratching gestures with her tiny bound hands. The kobolds all laughed at her. Inside her, she made the little mental flick that started her shift. Before even she felt her flesh transform, her senses heightened, and she heard a few faint rustles from outside the ring of kobolds, off in the dark. She smiled.

“What I’m really, really good as, though... is bait.” The laughing stopped. Her high-pitched gnomish voice dropped to a gutteral growl as striped fur sprouted from her face, and her transforming, now clawed hands tore from their bonds. “You boys ever seen a wolverine?” The one-eyed kobold’s throat tore with ease under her teeth and claws.

“So,” Tim says again. “Where to start.” Bruce’s voice is as terse as Damian’s had been when he speaks, no longer as exhausted as he’d sounded moments before. “Why didn’t you call me, Tim?” “To be honest, I didn’t even consider it.” That’s a lie. Tim just hopes that Bruce doesn’t pick up on that fact. The truth of it is that Tim cried for a solid twenty minutes about having to call his dad while he traversed the stairs, taking the steps one at a time. “You just… weren’t on my list of priorities at the time. I was a little more concerned with, I don’t know, the pain?” “Damian said you had friends with you,” Bruce stresses. “They didn’t think to call me, either?”

Bruce bows his head as his shoulders heave, ropes straining against his wrists. They’re tied up above his head in a way that makes everything from his shoulders up hurt - though that could also be the amount of time he’s been strung up for.

He looks up through his hair. It’s been a long, long few hours - maybe more. There’s no sense of time in this room; no windows, no dripping water, no nothing. There’s him, strung up like a hog, and there’s the captor, lazily walking around the room, and there’s his son.

His son- Damian, curled up on his side, one arm curled around his stomach. His eyes are screwed up and his body tries to shrink in on itself, to give their captor less area to hit. The other arm circles his head as though to protect it.