Work Text:
Lonnie knows, knows, viscerally that there is no such thing as too smart to drown. He knows it in the memory of foul water in his throat and the cough that followed him for weeks afterwards. He knows it in his frantic shedding of the dragging weight of his robe as it pulls him down. He knows it in the disorientation of tumbling underwater and not knowing which direction is up, let alone the way to shore.
Still, Lonnie jumped on purpose. He’s prepared for this, and he hits the water feet first. That’s an improvement over last time, and he doesn’t panic. His mouth is closed, so the water only goes up his nose instead of down his throat and he doesn’t panic. He has a breath and he’s trained since last time so that this wouldn’t happen again. He isn’t going into this expecting to die. He’s going to live. He’s not going to drown in the Potomac river, not if he survived Gotham Harbor.
He starts on the ropes immediately, almost glad his wrists are bound. It’s a difference he can focus on while he works. The stinging of dirty water in his cuts tells him that whatever little progress they’d made in clotting during the few moments of so called rest he’d had biding his time on the floor of the van have been ruined by his escape, but it still burns less than the chemicals in Gotham would have. He ignores it in favor of unbinding his wrists, keeping count of the time that passes.
Lonnie breaches the surface as late as possible and as far away from the bridge as he can manage, even as his lungs burn in his chest. Four minutes never sounds like a lot until his heartbeat is pounding overtime in his ears as he unravels the last of the rope and kicks off the silty riverbed towards air.
Bloody water drips from his body onto the coarse sand below him as he stands there, his teeth chattering, and thinks about how much he failed. A gust of wind cuts through the holes in his wet clothes and jolts him back into motion. He needs to get moving, or the cold will kill him. He raises a hand to the headset that connects him to Max and touches only his own wet hair, his hand presses against the bruising side of his face and he remembers his mask being torn from his face after his escape was foiled. There’s a cut there too, one he only notices after he accidentally presses clumsy gloved fingers into it and hisses at the ache. He’s alone then.
Lonnie’s hand slips as he swings his leg over the low wall separating the riverband from the road and his sliced open torso slams hard against the rough concrete. The impact drives the little air he has in his lungs out past his teeth with a sound he could only register in the aftermath of the blinding pain. He wants to curl up in a ball and protect the shredded skin of his torso but forces himself to place his hands back on the wall and push himself back up. The flex of his muscles aggravates the cut on his bicep but, between the cold and the rest of the damage, it’s ignorable. Moving hurts, breathing hurts, and once he manages to stumble over the last of the barrier, he looks down to check the damage. There’s grit and dirt ground into his wounds, sticking to the blood that still oozes thickly from the symbol carved into his chest, his symbol. Lonnie bites his numb lip at the reminder. Malochia’s mad laughter rings in his ears. He was wrong again, unprepared again, too sure of his own ability to manipulate the situation in his favor. Master Lo was only playing with him, he was never going to be able to win that fight.
Every step he takes pulls on the dozen stinging cuts across his body, and the cold he feels now can’t only be attributed to the temperature, or the wet clothes leaching body heat he’s ill prepared to lose, not when he’s still leaving red tinged drips and footprints behind him with every step of his soaked through boots. He’s lightheaded and his thoughts are starting to scatter alarmingly out of reach. The adrenaline has faded and Lonnie knows it's only his stubbornness that keeps him from collapsing. It is only momentum that keeps him moving instead of collapsing to the ground and dying, if the blood loss doesn’t get to him first, of exposure.
He puts a hand on the wall beside him and tips his head down out of instinct to curl around his injured chest as he focuses only on putting one foot in front of the other with a detached interest. Time starts to blur around him, marked only by pain and the squelch of his wet boots as moves. His wet hair falls forward in clumps around his face, cutting off his view of his periphery in a way that he knows should be making him more alarmed than it does. He can feel the cold and blood loss making him stupid as he stumbles the last few feet to the hidden entrance to his base. His exposed skin, the parts of it not being constantly rewet by still oozing blood, have gone from soaked to clammy and his fingertips have gone numb and clumsy in his gloves. It takes several shuddering breaths and three tries before he manages to enter the code into the keypad and finally unlock the door.
He stalls a second once he gets through, his blurring vision wandering aimlessly as he tries and fails to remember the next step now that he’s accomplished his goal of the last… of however long it had taken to get home. Most of the space was still cast in shadow by the few lights he kept on all the time and he took a step toward his computer chair only for the still audible squelching of his drenched boots to redirect him to the bathroom. He loses the tattered remains of his shirt somewhere between point A and B and doesn’t notice until he catches a glimpse of himself out of the corner of his eye as he passes the sink.
Lonnie avoids looking himself in the mirror and stutters in and out of motion as he fumbles with the shower taps on autopilot before finally remembering to try and take his gloves off. He drops them in the sink and watches as they leave spots of bloody brown water behind in the basin before stepping, still clothed, into the shower. The hot water burns where it hits his chilled skin and Lonnie shouts in surprise as the pain abruptly grounds him back into his aching body.
He stumbles back out of the still running shower as quickly as he entered. He sits on the floor of the bathroom, breath coming in ragged gasps that devolve into sobs as the horror of the last hours settles more fully into his overworked brain. Lonnie stretches his arm up into the shower and his blue tipped fingers barely reach the knob to turn the temperature down. Once it’s been set to just above cool, and most of the steam in the tiny bathroom has dissipated. He tries again, bracing himself against the painful pins and needles feeling as he crawls back under the spray and shudders as he watches red spiral down the drain from behind the curtain his wet hair has made between him and the rest of the world.
Once the warmth has cleared some of the fog clouding his thoughts and he can move his fingers without pain, he turns his back to the lukewarm water and breathes through the pain of bending his torso as he turns his attention to the laces of the boots he’s still wearing. With his shoes abandoned in the shower basin the last pieces of Anarky are easy to shed and join the pile at his feet. Finally, he turns his attention to reopening the cuts on his chest and arms.
Lonnie discovers, as he flushes dirt out of the cuts, that they are both better and worse than they seemed. He’s exhausted enough that even the pain of handling the cuts has stopped registering as anything more than a throbbing that matches the too fast beat of his heart. The depth of the cuts are uneven, deeper on one side or in the center, in line with the slashes that applied them. As he kneels in the shower basin and his fingers trace the lines left by Mater Lo’s poleaxe, he can’t help but think about the fight, about the moment that he realized that for all his preparation, he was never going to win. The moment where he’d tried to flee and been trapped again in an instant, about the condescending way that Ra’s al Ghul had spoken to him once he’d been defeated. The helplessness as he’d explained his plans for the codes Lonnie had given him. The codes.
Lonnie jolts and accidentally digs his fingers into the cut he’d been cleaning on his left arm, causing a new rush of blood to run down to his elbow. He lets his arm go and scrambles to his feet as quickly as he can, mind already rushing to what he needs to hack first to avert the plan. His hand thuds heavily against the wall of the shower as his vision blacks out for several seconds of terrifying vertigo. He turns off the shower and takes several deep breaths of steamy air as he blinks away he black spots in his vision. He takes his next steps slower, planning his next steps as quickly as he can think them while he pats himself dry as quickly as he can, leaving his hair to drip down his back.
He shuffles out of the bathroom once he’s dressed, only to almost immediately trip over the discarded scraps of what used to be his shirt. He drops his towel as he reaches for the wall and takes a real look at the main floor of his base for the first time since he got back. He spends a second staring at the mess, the trail of muddy water interspersed with the occasional drop of blood tracing a wobblier line than he remembers making to the bathroom. His eyebrows furrow as his gaze lingers on the dark red smears around the doorknob that imply he missed the handle, several times. He’ll need to clean that up later, he thinks nonsensically.
The cut on his bicep burns as he hauls on the handle of the suitcase sized box of medical supplies and half limps over to his computer chair, trying and failing to compensate for the way that any movement at all pulls at the cuts on his body. He collapses into his seat and realizes that he’s not going to be able to stand back up. The slashes on his thighs have already made a long dripping bloodstain down the legs of his pants. He pops the latches on the case and pulls out a mess of gauze and alcohol wipes, wiping probably too roughly at the blood as he digs around for the gloves and numbing cream he’s sure are included. He finds the suture kit first and pauses.
Just cleaning the cuts isn’t enough and he knows it. Even if none of them are really serious, they still gape wide in several places and leave trails down his stomach to a pair of sweatpants that will never recover from the blood seeping into the waistband. He’s going to need stitches. The thought makes him feel lightheaded in a way he chooses to attribute to the blood loss instead. He’s never done them before, never had to, before, when someone took care of him if he got hurt. Even the last time he drowned it was just burn cream, antibiotics for the pneumonia, making Max wake him up every couple hours for a concussion check, but not stitches.
“Max,” he calls automatically, and freezes at the realization that he hadn’t called out to Max before this. He’d lost the headset connection and just, forgotten that he could talk to him now that he was home. His ears are ringing. “Max,” he says again, his voice cracking around the force he puts behind the word.
“Boss?” Max says from a nearby speaker and it's such a relief to hear the synthetic voice that Lonnie shakes. “Boss, can you hear me?”
“Yeah,” He says, around the lump in his throat, and coughs to try and clear it. “I need you to pull up some instructions for me.”
The heat from his shower has faded, leaving his skin pale and cold as he closes the lid of the jar of numbing cream and changes his gloves. He threads the curved needle with shaking hands and looks up again at the monitor with the instructions on it. He’s sweating, he thinks, as he pinches the two sides of the gash in his right thigh closed with his fingers and positions the needle above it.
“Max,” He says, in a futile attempt to distract himself from the sensation of the needle piercing his skin. “Pull up all our research on the launch codes we found." There's a tugging sensation he can feel as the thread pulls through his flesh and he gasps. Tears return to his eyes and he has to squint at the screen to see how to tie off the stitch. He shouldn’t have to, he should remember. Still, Lonnie’s hands are clumsy with the scissors as he clips the thread and moves half a centimeter forward to start again. “Compile evidence of Senator Layne and his office selling information to- to Ra’s al Ghul.” He stumbles over the name as he starts another stitch. This time he anticipates the feeling of the thread pulling the gash closed and manages to hold back the shudder, at the sensation of something moving under his skin.
“Hack into the, hack the emails for WNN.” His third stitch is crooked, he moves on, dictates the cover letter and trusts Max to ignore the stutters in his speech as he starts on his other thigh. By the time he’s done with the worst of the cuts on his chest, he’s breathing unsteadily through the pain of the novocaine wearing off and the cut on his bicep that he didn’t tear open further in the shower has stopped bleeding on its own.
He reads through the email before he tries to wrap bandages around his newly stitched wounds and it takes him longer than he knows it should, his eyes drift off the line he’s reading and he has to start sentences, even paragraphs over. He removes the irrelevant parts where he’s delirious and begging people who aren’t there for help, and sends the email.
He’s not done yet, he needs to find the briefcase before it can be opened or people will die, but he allows his eyes to slip closed for a second, just one, to rest. He presses the point of the suture needle hard against the palm of his hand to keep himself from drifting off. Anarky never sleeps. In just a second he’ll get out of his chair and finish wrapping the bandages. He’ll stand up, pull out a spare suit, and begin his search of the city.