Chapter Text
Tim just stared at the paper’s headline in disbelief for a good five minutes. He was trying to find more articles on Batman, Robin, Batgirl, and Nightwing, but the front cover spread took his breath away. There… there was no way. No way.
No way.
No way.
No way.
No way.
No way.
No way.
No way.
No way.
No way.
No way.
No way.
No way.
No way.
No way in HELL!
Did… did he…
Without a thought, he ran back to his dorm room and booted up his computer, completely ignoring any monitors or teachers who could have stopped him. He bolted his door shut, gasping for breath. He really needed to build up his endurance again. This sucked. The second he had his breath back, he typed in his password and worked his way through his programs and setup to find what he was looking for.
His stomach dropped into his shoes.
No way…
He did this.
Not on purpose! Well, not on purpose for this effect at least. He was just… he just wanted…
Hands flew through his hair as he tried to figure this out. There was a possibility it wasn’t him, at which point it was his fault still, but…
There were safeguards, right? Ways to prevent this from happening specifically, right?
Dammit, he just wanted Joker turned into a quadriplegic or vegetable!
Not dead!
“Medical malpractice?” Jason looked over the chair Bruce sat in as he read through the medical report. Joker’s death hit the papers that morning and people had mix feelings about it. There would be further investigation, naturally, and so far they could only say Joker received an accidental overdose while in Arkham and died when no one was looking.
“It appears so.” Bruce’s eyes narrowed in thought. Joker was a two-bit costumed criminal who made near-deadly jokes at the people’s expense. He seemed to think himself Batman’s equal and was slowly upping the stakes between them, but he wasn’t much more than a chemist who thought he was funny. He had no known family, barely an identity outside the suit, and was mildly successful as a criminal. Dick took him down a time or two as Robin before becoming Nightwing, but he was still a clever bastard who slipped away more times than Batman liked. “I’ll take a closer look -”
The entire screen blinked before them before a new window opened up, front and center. An email? No address.
Make sure Joker’s actually dead and it isn’t a fake-out.
“WHAT THE HELL?!” Jason and Bruce leapt to their feet, seeing the words forced on the screen. How? How did -
Another line appeared.
For Jason and Barbara’s sakes, you have to make certain he’s dead
“Who?! HOW! What?! Bruce! What’s going on?!” Jason gaped at his father, completely in the dark as Bruce started piecing the messages together. For their sakes. Jason and Barbara. Random message.
The letter writer…
It wasn’t quite a year since the last one.
An email… no… they were using one of his report-writing programs.
They were in the batcomputer.
Fingers flew across the board, searching through his programs to find the person who apparently had enough knowledge of his systems to remotely hack into it and send an urgent message without tripping any of his security protocols. Time traveler possibility now at 90% if they knew his systems well enough to do this. They likely had to build their own computer from scratch to manage this and a series of algorithms to make it through his firewalls. They gave themselves a backdoor because they knew exactly where to cut. He had to -
B, please! You’re wasting time! If he’s not actually dead, millions could die.
The third message gave him pause. Just enough to hesitate and give the hacker time to log out without a trace. Mentally, he cursed, hating to lose to anyone. They probably knew that too. They were playing a very dangerous game, and he was just a pawn in it. When he found out who this person was, he was going to ground them for the rest of their life!
“Bruce, what’s going on?!” Jason stood nearby, very confused and super concerned for his dad and the computer. Bruce tore away from the screen and looked at him, wondering why things were happening. “Who hacked the Batcomputer? What was that about my sake? What does Joker have to do with me? Or Babs? Or… or anyone?!”
The father looked down on his son, wondering how to explain this. He had a pretty good idea who sent the messages, in a way, but hadn’t talked to Jason about the letters for even a second. He and Dick were keeping this from him on purpose so he didn’t have to think about this conundrum, but it looked like they had to talk now. “It’s… a bit of a story.”
Tim’s day dragged on, his insides oscillating from deep guilt to anxiety, to a small bit of relief that Joker could actually be dead. Dead. Joker. Dead. No more laughing gas. No warehouses. No dead Robins. No paralyzed Oracle. No tortured Gordon. No Thomas’ psychosis. No Harley Quinn. No Punchline. No Joker’s Daughter. A lot less people dying. No…
But is he dead?
Did he get him killed?
What would his father think?
‘I didn’t want him dead.’ His twisting thoughts and stomach kept repeating that. He didn’t want this. He just wanted him unable to do anything. Dead… Dead did the same thing. But he didn’t want to…
“Sooo…” Jason perched on his chair, watching the Batmobile and a violet Batbike park and empty. Batgirl took off her helmet and set it down, shaking out her hair while Batman came in with a file, pulling down his cowl as he joined Jason at the evidence table. “Was it Joker?”
“It was.”
“Joker’s dead,” Babs confirmed, rubbing out her shoulders as she joined them. “Deader than dead. We watched them cremate him as soon as the positive identification was verified. They’re spreading his ashes in the bay as we speak. Dad’s overseeing it.”
“What about the autopsy?” Jason looked between them, a little confused. “Didn’t they call it medical malpractice?”
“It was a double dose of his medication due to a computer error no one caught between shifts.” Babs looked away, thinking carefully. “I want to take a look at the program. Maybe someone hacked it and made the error happen. Joker wasn’t well liked.”
“Hacked it, huh?” Jason looked over to the Batcomputer, and the window dragged to the side with the messages still waiting. “Think your penpal did it?”
“Yeah… what’s with that?” Barbara looked over to Bruce, who wasn’t enthused to go over this a second time in 24 hours.
“It’s a theory…” He sighed and rubbed his neck. “About two years ago, I received a letter with no way to identify the sender, demanding I give Dick the adoption papers I was too hesitant to give him before. A second letter was sent to Dick two days later and… Well, the sender is the reason I finally adopted Dick. They forced us to talk to get to the bottom of their message.
“Shortly after we met,” he pointed between himself and Jason, “they sent two more messages. One to me to tell Dick about Jason, and the other to inform Dick about a spy in the Teen Titans. With all four letters, I have come to a theory that the sender is a time traveler who is familiar with our family. Possibly someone we have yet to meet who wants us to have a better relationship.
“That,” he pointed to the messages on the screen, “appeared this morning. If the existing theory is to be believed, it is likely the sender of those letters, likely panicking because Joker’s death was… unexpected.”
“Think they caused it?” Barb wasn’t entirely on board with the time traveler theory, but a hacker? If this shortened story was to be believed, they had to be an amazing hacker to pull that off at the very least. Hacking a medical program would probably be child’s play after Bruce’s computer.
“If they did, it wasn’t deliberate.” He had to adjust the parameters of his investigation. Isolate his files concerning it to a system separate from the main computer. They could adjust their files at any moment, delete his investigation entirely. Best to keep it completely separate. “They’re panicking. I doubt they wanted to show their skills this soon. Letters take planning, care, time. They didn’t believe they had any time when they did this. Joker… might have become something catastrophic in their mind.”
“Well, if that’s the case,” Barbara went to the computer and started typing in the message, “this is probably a two-way street.”
“Barbara -”
He ded. Fr.
She smiled back at him, ready for anything. “Guy’s probably lurking in the mainframe, waiting for a response. Let’s leave some bait, and he’ll probably check to reassure himself.”
“Your grammar’s terrible.” Jason glared at the screen, wishing he sent the message instead. Bruce took off his gloves and started on another screen, ready to track the next attempt.
“It’s so he knows someone’s responding and not mocking him.” She was ready to chat with their ‘PenPal’. Hopefully they were willing to talk. “I mean, if this person really does know us, like Bruce thinks, then they’ll even know who’s talking to them.”
“Hm.” Grammar. So far, the sender had very good grammar but occasionally missed a period. They didn’t rely on text speak or abbreviations, but they did call him B while in a panic. People were calling him that lately. Not that he objected, but to know that nickname was acceptable was a sign they knew him better than he knew them. 92% likely time traveler.
Jason was getting bored, going off to practice with batarangs by the time a response appeared on the screen, and Bruce furiously tried to trace the connection. He ignored the sharp gasp and focused on finding the IP at the very least. The connection bounced around Gotham, then Metropolis, then Star City, then… The Watchtower? They bounced it off the Watchtower? Also several LexCorp satellites, Kord Industries, and… every one of his satellites. Every. One. Then…
Vanished.
Bruce bit back a curse, trying to set a good example for Jason, but he hated how this person was able to get past all his firewalls and even use his own systems against him! How did they -
“Holy crap…”
Slightly annoyed, he turned to see what the reply was, and froze.
3,782,139 lives saved
Jason Todd, Saved
Sarah Essen, Saved
10,281,873 victims saved
Barbara Gordon, Saved
Jim Gordon, Saved
Alfred Pennyworth, Saved
Sorry. Was trying to paralyze him. Burn the body. Make sure Ra’s can’t raise him back from the dead.
Possibility of time travel, if this was accurate, 100%.
Tim leaned back in his desk chair, exhausted and shaky. One change in computer code and Joker was a goner. Why didn’t anyone do that before? Literally anyone who had to treat him medically could have killed Joker. Anyone. And he did it by accident.
The numbers were for him.
The names were for him.
He didn’t know how this would affect that, or if it would at all, but Joker no longer being a factor completely changed the future for Gotham, if not the world. He tried to remember if Joker ever did anything that was necessary. Was he ever a positive influence for anyone? He couldn’t remember. He really couldn’t.
He pushed away from the computer and buried his head in his vibrating hands. His actions had… led… to others dying before. He got close with Boomerang once. Bruce was so angry at him…
Then there was…
He pushed that thought aside to focus on the other facts.
Over 10 million victims.
Joker’s victims…
So many lives saved.
Duke would have no reason to join the family now.
Barbara could be Batgirl forever.
The Gordons could be happy.
Harley could be a normal therapist.
Creeper would never happen.
Jason wouldn’t be killed.
He took several shaky breaths before finally straightening. Tim wasn’t Robin. He wasn’t Red Robin. He wasn’t a hero. He was just a guy trying to save his family before they could fall apart.
One life saved millions.
And he just moved a few bits of code around.
Well, at least that was one thing off his list of plans.
Tim left his chair, still shaking, and went to the hallway bathroom to wash up. He had to get some sleep, read over his plan, recalculate, then move on. Tomorrow was another day, and he was just eleven.