#Last Pharaoh | Explore Tumblr posts and blogs

sagaduwyrm · 5 months ago

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On the Grounds Where We Feel Safe

When Tim gets a letter claiming to hold his soulmate, who he's never met, hostage, he's skeptical. It turns out pretty great though. Now if he can just make sure not to make a fool of himself.

We have your soulmate , the letter claimed. It seemed ludicrous. Tim hadn’t even met his soulmate yet, and it wasn’t like Red Robin’s mark had ever been exposed. There was no way some D-list villain could have found whoever it was. Really, he should only be going to this for the chance to catch the annoying asshole.

It just seemed like a weird lie, was the thing. If they just wanted to lure him out, there had to be more believable options. Claiming to have captured one of the other members of Young Justice or another bat would have made the most sense. His teammates went no-contact for various reasons all the time, so it’s not like he could double-check.

But no. They had his soulmate, apparently. It just seemed inane.

They were more competent than expected. Tim snuck into the facility with the ease of long practice, but they must have had magic wards because he tripped some kind of alarm barely a few minutes in. He would have noticed a technological system, but his abilities with magic were more limited, like most bats. In the immortal words of Jason Todd, ‘Just set it on fire and call Zatanna if that doesn’t work.’

Tim was eighty percent sure Jason was the only bat with any real degree of familiarity with magic, but that was neither here nor there. It just made the advice more accurate.

It was kicking his ass now though. Usually he’d be doing this with a team, hopefully with at least one person who could have noticed wards, but he had drastically underestimated the size and threat of this operation.

Generic security guards dragged him through the halls, and he did his best to memorize the layout. He’d taken out the first few thugs, but frankly, he was only human, and he needed to save his energy for something more useful. In the meantime, he pressed the only emergency beacon he had that would eventually worm through the wards to call his family and examined the halls they were dragging him through. The atrocious minimalism and poor layout design were making it irritatingly difficult to keep them straight in his head.

There were four villains in the room he was brought to, three more than he was expecting. One wore a thick cloak she’d probably bought off Etsy and a cheap Eye of Horus necklace, and Tim instantly pegged her as responsible for his magic problems.

“Woooow. You assholes know how to make a Robin feel loved. What’s the occasion? Is it Christmas? You shouldn’t have.” Tim bared his teeth in a smile that had his guards leaning away from him. If he could just get them talking, this would be a lot easier.

One, the leader, threw back her head and cackled. “What’s the occasion? What’s the occasion? Didn’t you read our note? Meeting your soulmate is the chance of a lifetime! We're doing you a favor, don’t you think?” She grinned down at him. He tilted his head, bird-like.

“You know, I’m pretty sure I could swing a better meeting than this. Get some candles, jazz up the place a little bit. Your interior decorating is kind of shit.” Tim channeled the robin spirit of his predecessors and took a shot at annoying them. Instead, the woman’s demented grin grew wider.

“But your blood will look so pretty on the floors! Do you think we’ll kill him or you first? I can’t decide!” Her teeth had red in them, Tim noticed. She turned to the guards at the door. “Bring him in!”

Fuck. So they did have a hostage. Probably some poor civilian who’d got dragged into these assholes' lark and was going to need years of therapy after this. Fuck his life.

A few tense minutes later the guards walked back in carrying a black teenager maybe a little taller than Tim between them. He was struggling, doing his level best to kick at their ankles and jab at their kidneys, but the mercs didn’t even shift. Tim was grateful the hostage was a fighter at least, that could make it easier to evacuate him.

The lead villain strolled over to the civilian. Honestly, Tim wasn’t sure why the rest were here. They practically faded into the walls. She seized the boy’s chin and he tried to spit at her. She laughed. “Our little witch spent months divining for this! Ready?” She cackled and dragged his face over to meet Tim’s eyes. They both froze.

His eyes were green, Tim noticed, and lined thickly in black, like kohl. They dug into Tim's chest like his heart was moving to make room for another, two hearts beating as one. Everything felt more vibrant and alive. Tim couldn’t breathe.

The leader was still laughing, he noticed distantly. She had slumped back against the wall to keep from falling over, and her entire body shook with contortions. Her eyes were bright with bloodlust.

Tim was fucked. He was so completely fucked. Not only because this guy was stupid pretty and he could practically feel his higher brain functions turning off, leaving him a steaming pile of bisexual goo, but because his soulmate was barely five feet from a villain who practically dripped insanity, and he still had thirty seconds to go before he got his hands untied. Absolutely, completely, and totally fucked.

The other boy had stilled when their eyes met, but he tensed again as one of the other villains stalked towards him.

“I knew it,” the man snarled. “I knew it. I wonder, if I hurt you, will Red Robin bleed?”

The boy's eyes widened before hardening. Tim desperately hoped he didn’t do anything stupid. His call signal still needed more time to get through to his family.

“Don’t damage him just yet!” the leader called out. “Start with his fingers and toes, we want this to last .” Her grin was alarmingly demented.

The other boy finally had enough. “Yeah, let’s not.” He kicked out at the ankle of the guard holding onto him, causing the man to release him. At the same time, Tim made his move. Fuck, civilians with no sense of self-preservation were the bane of any vigilante, but it being his soulmate was somehow worse. If he could just get over there in time—

A rush of sand curled up around the boy, as if from nowhere, and launched the villain near him into a wall. His eyes glowed golden, and his stance indicated some training. Not a civilian, then.

Tim kept moving. He dumped half a dozen taser bugs on anyone in reach, leaving them keeled over on the ground, and darted forward. The guards had left the door open when they brought the other boy in. Tim grabbed him and launched out the door, practically carrying him, while the boy did something over his shoulder to hold off pursuers. The way out was blocked, but the facility was huge. They eventually managed to lose the villains, tucked up in some kind of meat locker. They curled up against the walls, catching their breath.

“You know, this was not how I expected our first meeting to go,” the other boy said.

Tim laughed, “I’ll be honest, with my luck this isn’t really a surprise.” The other boy snorted. He was beautiful when he laughed. It was an ugly sort of giggle, the kind the media would mock a person for, the kind his parents trained out of him as their heir, but it lit up his face in a way that made Tim stare. He belatedly remembered to introduce himself. “Red Robin.”

“From Gotham, right? Call me Pharaoh.”

Tim squinted at him. He was putting on a good show of confidence, but there was a tenseness to his body that couldn’t be hidden, and some of the summoned sand floating near him was curling into tight knots. “Haven’t heard that code name before. You new?”

Pharaoh waved his hand in a so-so gesture. “It’s mostly just that I stick to my hometown. We’re tiny, so we stay off the radar. And I usually manage to stay out of the news anyway.”

Tim nodded, but his eyes sharpened. Deliberately keeping out of the news wasn’t exactly a red flag, but it usually indicated something about the person in question. If you had a code name that you were clearly used to, but didn’t use for the public… There weren’t exactly any conclusions he could draw yet, but he tucked the knowledge away into the back of his brain anyway. “Do you have anyone you can call?” he asked.

The boy grimaced. “Not really. Two are out of the country, one doesn’t carry a phone, and the other is the only person back home right now and I can’t ask her to leave.”

Reasonable. The bats refuse to leave Gotham without at least one of them too. “I sent out a call, but it’s going to take a bit for it to get past the wards.”

“Can I see? I might be able to speed it up.”

Tim handed over his beacon. “You’re a magic user?” He was guessing sand-manipulating meta, but magic made sense too.

“Uh-huh. I’m not the greatest with wards, but I am a dab hand at tech,” Pharaoh said while prying open the beacon. As he held it, golden light crept from his hands into the wires, forming shapes that looked like some of the hieroglyphics his parents used to obsess over. Tim was vaguely surprised. Constantine had once mentioned that there were only a few people in the world who could do any kind of technomagic. Even the magic on his gear was secondary to the tech rather than embedded in it.

Tim got up and started looking around the room as Pharaoh worked. They couldn’t stay here for long. He moved some furniture around to block the door. It should collapse on the head of anyone who tried to get in. He shifted one of the ceiling tiles around and found there was a good amount of space between the floors. Perfect.

Pharaoh shouted in delight and Tim turned to see the connection light on the beacon turn on. Assuming there wasn’t some kind of emergency, they should have backup reasonably soon. The other boy was still grinning, “Dude, I think I’m in love with your tech. This is amazing.”

“If you like that you should see the batcomputer.”

“Can I? I do most of my stuff on a PDA I retrofitted, this is so much better it’s not even funny.”

“A PDA?” Tim blinked in confusion. How would you even—? He shook his head and gestured at the ceiling. “We need to get moving. They’ll have an easier time finding us if we stay here.”

Pharaoh nodded, still smiling from his apparent enjoyment of working with basic tech with little to no computational abilities. He clambered his way up with apparent experience. Tim wondered what kind of problems his hometown had that they needed a magic user who could do parkour.

Where Pharaoh needed a lift Tim scampered up. The sorcerer whistled quietly. “What kind of training do you even have?”

“Assasination, mostly,” Tim said as he started leading the way through the crawl space, carefully showing Pharaoh where to put his feet to make the least amount of noise.

“I thought bats didn’t kill?”

“Knowing how to kill is actually more useful in not killing people than not knowing how to kill, believe it or not.” Lady Shiva hated that.

“Huh. That sounds useful. I have to use specific spells when I want to just knock someone out, and I’m not as good at them so it’s a bit of a pain.”

“You like magic?” Data gathering, data gathering, if he was asking questions he wasn’t thinking about how nice Pharaoh’s voice was or how pretty his eyes were.

“Yeah. It’s like a puzzle, you know? There’s a lot of similarities to coding if you had to argue with the computer the whole time.”

Tim snorted.

They stilled at the sound of someone passing under them, and when they were gone Tim turned around for a second. “Hey, what do you think about picking some of these guys off?” He’d originally planned to keep them out of the fight until backup arrived, but he was getting the impression more and more that Pharaoh was competent enough to keep up for a bit.

Pharaoh grinned, and it was a sharp, unkind thing. For a moment he looked as regal as a king about to declare war, and Tim wondered if there was more to the code name than he had assumed. “I thought you’d never ask.”

+++

“Where are they?!” the leader of the villains roared. “The facility is completely locked down, they couldn’t have gotten far!”

The guards winced and opened their mouths to explain when the door slammed open and one of the other villains ran in. He was bleeding, with weeping sores up and down his arms and crush damage on his fingers. “They’re picking off the guards!”

“What? What the fuck happened to you?” The leader screamed. The witch villain, who had been melting into the wall, ran over to attempt healing magic. The others barely noticed her.

“Three-quarters of our men are unconscious, and won’t wake up. And that little ‘civilian’ soulmate tried to crush me with sand!”

The witch spoke quietly. “He must have cursed you too. This isn’t healing.” The villain looked down at his wounded arms and screamed. Golden hieroglyphs climbed their way out of the blood and up his arm, and he felt his body go numb. Within thirty seconds he had keeled over unconscious except for the occasional scream, like he was struggling with nightmares wherever his mind had gone.

“No no no no no! This was supposed to be it! Our big break! You!” The leader turned to the witch. “You said he was a civilian! This was supposed to be easy!”

Out of nowhere the ceiling above them crumbled and down came several bats and members of Young Justice. When they finally got the beacon it took them almost an hour to get to the location, leaving them tense and ready to take it out on Tim's captors.

“I hope we aren’t interrupting anything!”

The door banged open again as they finished mopping up the remaining villains and mercenaries. Red Robin and a boy in civilian clothes tumbled through the door.

“Hey! You’re late!” Tim yelled.

Robin hissed at his older brother. “You needed help to save a single civilian then?”

Tim grinned an unholy grin. “Oh, right. This is Pharaoh. He’s my soulmate.”

The room burst into yelling.

#fandom #danny phantom #fandom stuff #dpxdc #batman #dp x dc #dc #tucker foley #tim drake #technogeek #soulmates #pharaoh tucker #meet cute #this is better than the last one I promise #happy pride 🌈

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