Chapter Text
The situation is, put lightly, a fucking mess. That much is obvious from the moment he arrives at the fight.
It’s Red Robin who puts in the distress call, and Dick is the one who’s closest, so he’s the one racing over as soon as Oracle relays the info over comms.
When he busts onto the scene, things are already in shambles, Tim is dodging and moving from one piece of cover to the next in quick succession. He’s fighting some sort of magician. A tall thin man is floating in the air, his bright purple cap flapping around him from the imaginary night wind. Bright white sparks are zapping in his hands, bolts of electricity escaping his grasp and smashing things nearby.
The street they are fighting in is torn to shreds. Cars are overturned, wires were torn, and on the fritz, not to mention the fact that the whole street was flooded.
It’s not the usual Gotham M.O., usually big battles in the middle of a street like this are saved for the full world stage or Metropolis. Dick personally welcomes the variety from overly complicated schemes and bomb threats. Tim however, does not seem to be appreciating it from the look of frustration on his face.
Dick catches a flash of Tim’s dark cape when he grapples out from behind a car and up onto a roof. Nightwing lands behind the younger vigilante silently.
“So, what’s the situation?” Dick asks causing Tim to start slightly. He mentally gives himself a tally for managing to startle Tim. It’s a bit of a game between them all, who can sneak up on everyone else the most. Although now it’s more of a contest for second place since Cass is winning by so much.
“Magic user,” Tim states, “He’s doing some sort of duplication/transmutation spells, things appearing out of thin air and turning into other things, there was an unfortunate incident with a fire hydrant turning into wood and not being able to hold in the water,”
“Sounds fun,”
“It’s not actually,” Tim said, “The problem is I can’t even get close to him before he starts zapping at me and trying to turn me into a toad, I need someone else to divide his attention,”
“So you need bait?” Dick grinned. Tim scowled.
“I wouldn’t put it like that,”
“Don’t worry Baby Bird- I’ve always been a showman,” This point was proven when Dick flipped off the side of the building. This guy didn’t seem to be particularly dangerous, or at least, not more dangerous than normal. It was just that Tim couldn’t take him down alone, so that meant Dick coming and prancing around to throw him off while Tim whacked him on the back of the head.
Unfortunately, Dick didn’t account for the fact that police would show up and start spraying bullets everywhere and make everything ten times more complicated. He’d been in the middle of a particularly showy handspring when the sirens finally screeched into their lane of destruction here. The magician was obviously already very frustrated with trying to zap at a cartwheeling and quipping Nightwing and the police showing up in their perfect little semicircle formation made a perfect target for his anger.
Generally, it was good practice to not get up close to magic users, it was much harder to dodge bursts of magic from two feet away than it was from ten, but Dick didn’t really have a choice in this case. Out of the corner of his eye, Dick could see Tim creeping closer from behind the floating man, so Dick decided to take the risk. It was a gut decision, a split-second decision.
He flung himself at the magician, aiming a kick right for the man’s solar plexus. It took quite the leap to make it connect since the magic user was still in the air but Dick was nothing if not incredibly acrobatic.
The magician barreled backward with an oof and hit a car, the previously aimed zap of electricity hurtling up into the sky uselessly. Dick laughed.
“Looks like someone needs to work on their hand-to-hand,” Dick said, throwing out a birdarang at the man’s hands when they came up to shoot another bolt of light. However, it seems that lady luck was not on his side, because the birdarang hit the man’s hand at exactly the wrong angle and simply caused the bolt to shoot at him a bit earlier than it would’ve. Dick immediately went to dodge, but bursts of magic weren’t easy to predict like a bullet or a grenade, they wavered in the air and crackled in ebbs and flows of energy.
The bolt hit Dick hard in the shoulder and Dick immediately dropped to the ground like a bag of rocks. Tim gasped and jumped into action: he bashed his bo-staff over the head of the magician, the CRACK of it sounding through the air. Yet, it didn’t knock the man out as Tim had hoped, instead, the magician disappeared entirely into nothingness. Tim growled in anger as he ducked behind a car, bullets were still ricocheting through the street and blowing his eardrums out.
Tim quickly tapped into the police walkies.
“Hold your fucking fire! He’s gone now!” Tim yelled and after a couple of minutes, the loud sound of gunpowder exploding ceased. Tim hurried over to Dick’s prone body on the ground a few feet away. Luckily half in an alleyway out of the line of fire.
However, his problems multiplied when he finally reached Dick. Literally. Because instead of one Dick Grayson lying on the ground knocked out, there were two. Tim balked.
“Oracle, we have a problem,” Tim said into his comm.