Chapter Text
Tim Drake was rescued by Batman. This is a fact, not an assumption, because every news source says that same thing, that Tim Drake was rescued by Batman.
Batman does not know that he is Joker Junior- that is an assumption, but Junior knows he is correct.
No one knows that he is Joker Junior.
He swallows the giggle that threatens to spill. Maybe, now, he could pretend he isn’t Junior. He could be Tim. Tim Drake.
Junior decides to go to school- the less suspicion there is around Tim the better.
He nearly turns around and leaves the moment he gets to Gotham Academy but he can’t go back to mom, not now, not when he knows the things he knows. School is everything all at once and it collides with him in a vicious wall of bright lights and talking and bells and being lost.
Very lost.
Gotham Academy is a big place, he learns and his timetable is hardly forgiving- the room numbers too, have for some reason decided to make little to no sense. But when he stumbles into class late doesn’t get him into trouble and neither does his lack of work- there are frowns from teachers it then they turn to sickening sympathy. Getting kidnapped is good for something, apparently. His peers too, stay away. Or maybe Tim Drake doesn’t have any friends- That would make sense.
He’s smart. Really smart. By juniors calculations he’s two years above his peers. It’s weird, this amnesia, because some of this work is easy as breathing- yet some is utterly alien.
There’s not much to note about Gotham Academy. It’s monotonous, lonely and painfully repetitive- well, except for Jason.
It’s second period, and near the end of the register, the teacher (substitute) says the name Jason. There’s a thrill of adrenaline that rushes through junior, and something that’s almost a memory nudges him- darkness, and the click of a camera.
He almost doesn’t notice the entire class simultaneously freeze.
The teacher freezes just a second later. A look of horror slowly dawns on her face. The entire class is dead silent.
His head splits with a blinding pain and he flinches- he can almost feel the electricity dancing underneath his skin.
He asks to be excused and promptly has a panic attack in the bathroom.
And then- he remembers- a boy. Two years older than him. He’s counting from one to four, over and over.
He has blue eyes- bright, bright blue soaring eyes the colour of flying and the colour of the sky.
When he comes to he’s sobbing. Curled up on the gross, dirty bathroom floor and sobbing. He feels sticky all over.
That headache isn’t leaving anytime soon.
He splashes water in his face and goes back to class and smiles, bright, bright, bright.
He thinks of mom. He wonders who Jason is (was?)