Chapter Text
Chapter 1: Tim Drake
It all started when Tim Drake found out that he wasn’t really Robin. He couldn’t be, not with the previous Robin not actually dead.
Okay, so it probably started earlier than that. Like when the Joker realized he had a taste for birds, and finally managed to capture one. Jason was used to unfair fights and bad odds even before he tried to steal the batmobile’s tires and got himself a secret identity instead, but the odds this time were worse than bad, and when his luck ran out and the Joker’s luck waxed like a gibbous moon… At around the same time that Tim Drake was coming to the horrible but comparatively miniscule discovery that his parents didn’t love him so much as he’d always hoped, Bruce Wayne was discovering a video sent right to him, documenting the slow death of his latest protege. It was a bad day for everyone except the villains, but a worse day for Jason Todd.
Days later, Tim heard about it on the news. Robin was dead. Somehow that felt ten times more real than the reality that his parents would probably never see him as anything more than an accessory to show off to their friends and families. Considering that Tim might have… maybe… already deduced the identities of the legendary Bat and his first sidekick, it seemed natural to give up on his life in the opulent mansion with the silent, cold halls and take a leap of faith instead. After all, it was a leap of faith that had made him realize that Dick Grayson was Robin, right? A lunging jump on a flying trapeze - no safety net - and suddenly Tim Grayson had a hero who was human, and he surprisingly didn’t mind that.
Batman/Bruce Wayne was… more furious than Tim had expected, at the boy who turned up at his doorstep asking for Batman. In retrospect, maybe Tim should have realized that this was the only welcome he could get. He’d noted, in the weeks following Robin’s death (a Robin that Tim didn’t actually know the real face of, which irked the logical side of him), that the Batman was growing increasingly reckless, and he’d had high hopes of being helpful in that regard. Tim had taken lots of classes in martial arts and self-defense - anything to stave off the boredom and work off the frustration that came from distant parents and a social status that precluded most forms of easy friendship.
Believe it or not, he hadn’t actually hoped to become the next Robin.
Therefore, it was shocking that - after a lot of intimidating and some very ungentlemanly shouting on Mr. Wayne’s part - that was exactly what Tim became.
So maybe it started there. And by ‘it,’ Tim generally meant a sort of obsession with his predecessor. While he took well enough to the mask and the cape, he couldn’t help but feel that he was walking with graveyard dirt in his shoes, but after seeing what a furious wreck grief had made Bruce Wayne into, Tim wisely decided not to ask why he’d chosen a new Robin so soon. Walking in a dead-man’s shoes would have been easier if the man had actually… well, been dead awhile. Tim had always been quiet, though, so instead of trying to talk to Bruce about the last Robin - about Jason. Jason had been his name. Tim was glad to learn it, even if he grimaced uncomfortably at the title of ‘My Soldier’ engraved into the plaque in bigger letters than his name - he got accustomed to the workshop, and worked on making his cloak into something more than a ostentatious fashion statement. The rest of his time he spent training, because he hadn’t been born to this like acrobat-Greyson had, or street-scrapper-Todd.
Tim had just barely gotten used to the job, used to working as a vigilante right under his parents’ high noses, used to closing his teeth around the question, ‘How could you replace him so easily?’ (the third being tenfold harder than the second, which was so easy that it broke Tim’s heart a little where no one could see), when his whole world got turned upside down.
When Jason Todd came back from the dead.
Tim thought more in terms of logic and technology than magic, so even if the shock hadn’t been sending jagged fissures through him like thin ice under too much weight, he doubted that he’d have understood how in the world Todd was back. He heard something about a Lazarus Pit, about a painful revival and a memory that screwed up the details.
But mostly what he heard was that Jason Todd hadn’t died in that video.
He’d died weeks afterwards, with his own personal hell of torture in between.
Somewhere beneath the horrified shock, Tim realized that this was the most vicious blow to the Bat that the Joker had possibly ever conceived. Killing Robin was one thing - keeping him alive until Batman named his replacement was quite another.
“He showed me a video, you know?”
Tim had been at home, in his quiet, tomb-silent house, but he’d heard Jason’s rough, wry voice because Tim hacked things when he was upset - just like when he was bored. Or maybe the two had always been the same thing. So, hacked into the Batcave’s video feeds, Tim had watched his not-gone-predecessor lean against the wall with his shoulders bunched tight like he was holding a whole storm of lightning in between them, his eyes crackling with it beneath that streak of newly-white hair amidst the obsidian black. Tim looked at the older Robin and shivered, realizing that he was a usurper to Jason’s rightfully earned throne, and Jason didn’t look like the kind of guy you usurped with impunity.
Jason had continued quietly and lowly, talking to Bruce, just the barest scrape of his words betraying an ocean of nasty emotions beneath the surface, “The Joker showed me a video of you and the new kid, just to make the hurting worse.”
Tim had turned off the feed and slammed his laptop shut, but not before the words sewed themselves into his head, along with a technicolor mental image of Jason, already bloodied and wounded beyond imagining, but realizing that some knives cut beyond the flesh. Besides being quiet and logical, Tim regrettably had a fabulous imagination as well, making the scene easy to picture and impossible to forget, as if he’d been standing there himself.
“I stole the title,” Tim had said to himself as he stared at the wall of his bedroom from a foot away, seeing nothing. Seeing everything far too clearly. He’d braced his hands against the wallpaper that his mother liked but he hated, and had whispered again, getting used to the truth in the sound, “I stole it all.”
Usurper to the throne.
He’d run from one place where he wasn’t needed right into another.
Maybe that said something. Maybe that said, ‘This is what you’re destined for, Timmy. You can call anyplace you want ‘home,’ but it’ll never say it back to you.’
The only thing that kept Tim from curling up in the nest of his own self-pity right there and then, and possibly staying there until the world ended, was the deep realization that Jason had to be hurting worse than he was. Jason, who was remembered as a ‘soldier,’ but apparently not remembered enough for the Batman to question the lack of a body, to hunt him down, to find him. Jason, who’d probably been tortured until he couldn’t feel the pain anymore, right until a new kind of agony was introduced, a new kind of agony wearing Tim Drake’s face. Jason, who’d come back from the dead but couldn’t come home.
Yeah, that was when it started. That was when Tim’s allegiance somehow slipped and split, until he’d give his life for two things: for Batman… and for Jason Todd. And maybe a little bit more for Jason, because he was the betrayed party here, and Tim felt as guilty as fuck.
~^~
To be honest, Tim and Bruce had never developed a completely friendly relationship. Part of that Tim blamed on himself - he didn’t exactly have experience in making friends, so when he and the Bat reached equilibrium with a stubborn sort of cordialness, he didn’t question it or push further. He just did his job, learning to fight and chase and do his new tasks better, and at least Bruce’s occasional, close-lipped compliments were still worlds-away more common than Mr. and Mrs. Drake’s. So it was better, if not nice.
After Jason came back, ‘better’ got a little bit less appealing. Tim wasn’t the only one feeling guilty, but Bruce bottled his emotions up differently, and Tim wasn’t entirely sure he liked it. While Tim quietly hacked systems and built things and was arguably rather productive, there were a lot of nights where Wayne paced and paced and paced until Alfred had to come and get him to sleep. Which usually led to yelling. Tim wasn’t sure what he preferred: a Batman who locked up all of his emotions in a steel vault that Tim had no hope of ever getting to, or a Batman who let his emotions out in a vitriolic torrent, reminding Tim that Bruce was terrifyingly well-trained in multiple deadly arts, while both Alfred and Tim himself were novices in comparison.
Bruce did not deal with Jason’s return very well. And who could blame him?
It didn’t help that all three times that Jason met up with his old mentor, the two fought like big cats in a small sack. Tim tried to make himself scarce then. He had no more idea than Bruce did how to deal with a resurrected and vengeful Jason Todd, but Tim knew himself well enough to know that verbal confrontation wasn’t his strong point - he was the kind of person who planned things, made a speech beforehand and practiced it, and he could see how that would go right off the tracks as soon as Jason opened his mouth. Bruce wouldn’t talk about Jason before, but after the Lazarus Pit, Jason was chaos incarnate, which made the geometric cogs of Tim’s brain bolt like skittish horses.
And besides: What did one say to the guy they’d presumed dead, and then replaced? “Sorry this happened - I didn’t exactly plan it this way”? “If I’d known you were alive a little sooner, I’d have stopped making alterations to your cape before turning it into a set of electro-responsive wings”? “I feel really sorry for you, but it’s not pity, I swear, I just don’t have a better word to describe the kind of bad I feel for everything that you survived”?
Yeah, Tim was willing to bet that any of those options would earn him a punch in the nose before he even got to the third word.
It was a terribly long time before any sort of normalcy returned. Batman still hunted vigilantes and Tim still went with him, playing Robin even if he felt like a fraud now, and Jason Todd took up the title of the Red Hood, and etched out his own corner of the criminal world to beat up - or cozy up to, if Bruce’s frequent mutterings were to be believed. Tim tried not to take sides, but it was hard. At about this point, he started to wonder if he was a pacifist, and if this wasn’t the world he should ever had found himself in - he certainly wanted nothing more than for everyone to just get along.
Go figure Tim would manage to move from one dysfunctional family to an even more dysfunctional one. He’d made it work before, so he’d make it work again, though.
~^~
Tim and Jason met up very, very rarely, and Tim thought that some of that was a purposeful move by Bruce. As Jason and Bruce’s relationship managed to impossibly sour more, Bruce kept his new Robin apart from his old Robin, as if physically reinforcing the fact that he simply could not reconcile the new status quo. Still, it was inevitable that Tim and Jason ran into each other.
The first time it happened, Tim had been hanging out at Wayne Manor after school, his homework finished practically as soon as it was assigned and his parents unlikely to miss him for days, much less hours. It was still too early to do proper vigilante stuff, but apparently it hadn’t been too early for visiting hours with broody Bats and estranged ex-Robins - so when Tim turned a corner, a tablet balanced on one hand and a stylus in the other as he worked on weaponry designs, he nearly walked right into Jason.
Tim had definitely gotten lectures about getting distracted by his thoughts. Fortunately, it didn’t happen much in the field, but indoors, his brain worked too much, and basically became its own Gordian knot before long - and he missed all manner of things, from Alfred calling his name to broad-shouldered, leather-wearing Jason Todds rounding corners in his direction. Both of them were startled, and Jason stiffened in place while Tim physically jumped back a step.
Since Jason had ditched almost anything resembling a costume save that red helmet, he’d basically become equally intimidating both on and off the job. Bruce Wayne, while very capable of looking foreboding, could be differentiated from his dangerous alter-ego by his costume - but Jason took down bad guys and walked around town in basically the same thing: black under-armor shirt, collared leather jacket (tan or black, take your pick), and dark jeans that looked so tough that they may as well have been Kevlar. They probably had panels sewn in.
Jason’s eyes may as well have been made of blue-green chips of unimpressed glass, the way they stared at Tim without giving way. Never once had Tim seen Jason anything like relaxed, and he was tensed now, either from just exiting a squabble with Bruce or from walking into a kid who was probably his nemesis. “Drake,” Jason eventually rumbled by way of greeting. He sounded like a tiger growling.
Tim was awesome at a lot of things, things that his parents cooed and bragged about at parties before promptly forgetting about once returning home, but public speaking was most definitely not one of those things. Some equivalent of very real stage-fright seized his lungs, and for a good three seconds he just stood and blinked like a deer in the headlights, totally failing in his efforts not to stare at the slice of white hair that fell above Jason’s darkly lowered eyebrows. “Hood,” was what he finally managed to stutter back, and then mentally face-palmed, because a more appropriate answer would have been ‘Jason’ (if Tim wanted to show increased friendliness) or ‘Todd’ (if he wanted to simply return the stiff greeting in kind). But nope: he had to go for a shortened work-related title instead, the new vigilante name that signified Jason’s break with his former life.
Surprisingly, Jason’s reaction was a flash of surprise, followed by a gruff bark of noise that might have been laughter. The elder, ex-Robin turned his head abruptly as if to hide it, but Tim was still stunned to see a small smirk in profile even as Jason muttered with a gravedigger’s kind of humor, “Well, at least someone accepts that I’ve set up shop on my own.” With that, Jason detoured around Tim and continued on his way, prowling slow and easy. “See you around, Rin-Tim-Tim,” he called back over his shoulder, and by the time Tim realized that he was offended by that nickname (no one ever nicknamed him), Jason was beyond the reach of his retorts.
The nicknames became a thing (ranging from ‘Timmy’ to ‘Baby Bird’ with an endless plethora in between), and Tim resigned himself to them, deciding that passive-aggressive name-calling was better than getting into an actual fight with Jason Todd.
~^~
The day that everything finally came to a head (and by ‘everything,’ Tim probably meant his strange and guilt-driven loyalty to a predecessor who barely tolerated him) was the day that the Scarecrow escaped from Arkham Asylum, and despite his pacifist tendencies, Tim began to seriously reconsider Batman’s ‘no kill’ policy. He was tempted to ask Batman if Arkham had some sort of ‘catch and release’ program going on, but bit his tongue, because Batman still wasn’t very chatty with him. Oh, they talked, but it was all business, and sometimes Tim told himself that he liked it that way.
Sometimes he even believed himself.
“You take the east side,” Batman said, suited up and voice as rough as new gravel, “We need to track him down. He shouldn’t be as dangerous without access to his old labs, but we still want this contained.”
Tim stood a bit straighter, as he always did when attention was on him and he was treated like something important. He felt the buzz in his limbs that was not quite adrenalin, not quite excitement, not quite nerves, and yet all three - an effervescent fizzle in his veins. “Understood,” he said obediently.
Gazing off into the distance as if he could pin the Scarecrow down with his eagle gaze alone, Batman nodded once to accept the word, then added, “I’ve already alerted Nightwing, so he and his team will be coming in as back-up.”
Before Tim could think better of it, the question slipped out of his mouth, “Have you called up Jason, too?”
The second that Tim saw Batman’s mouth thin into a hard, bloodless line beneath the rim of his cowl, he realized that he’d made a mistake in speaking, and shrank in on himself a little. Batman didn’t turn, didn’t move, but something about him was perceptibly harder and more closed off as he replied after just a beat too long, “The Red Hood has made it very clear that he doesn’t play for our team. We’ll call him in only if absolutely necessary.”
On the occasions when Tim and Jason were in the same location, Tim called him ‘Hood’ a lot, but mostly because he couldn’t get out of the rut that he’d started himself on that day in the hallway. However, he never said it with the cold hardness that Batman did now, as if the name were a betrayal of some sort. Because apparently he was very empathetic as well as a secret-pacifist, Tim flinched a little to hear it, and sighed slowly in defeat as he realized that the chasm between Bruce and Jason was only getting wider, not smaller.
“I’ll do a sweep of the east side,” Tim repeated his duty solemnly, his words a quiet peace-offering as he changed the subject and subtly reaffirmed his willingness to do as he was told. In his life, he’d learned that people always liked that best.
Grunting affirmation with a stiff nod, Batman took that as the end of the conversation, and vaulted off into the night very much like his namesake.
Instead of following immediately, Tim turned deeper into the house. He was unsurprised when he was almost immediately met by Alfred, the man having a keen eye for things out of the ordinary. “Master Drake, I thought you were going out,” he said, with that careful tone that asked a question even when his words presumed nothing.
Glad that he had his mask on already, in the small hopes that it hid something of the naked emotions in his grey-blue eyes, Tim looked up at the old butler and picked his words slowly, carefully. Instead of answering the question, he said after he’d collected himself, “Alfred, do you think it would be possible for you to call Jas- I mean, the Red Hood? It would be impolite not to let him know that the Scarecrow is loose in Gotham.”
Something on Alfred’s face twitched, perhaps the stifled start of a knowing smile, but the elderly man had had many years to learn a good poker-face. There might have remained something fond in his eyes and tone, however, as he nodded and replied without hesitation, “I do believe you’re right, Master Drake. I think that that could be arranged. I’ll get to it presently.”
Feeling just a bit better, with both of his loyalties satisfied, the young man nodded, stood a bit easier, and turned to follow Bruce out into Gotham’s night.
~^~
Tim really was well-trained at this point, but the fact remained that he hadn’t been Robin as long as any of his predecessors had, and Jason Todd had been a sneaky, cunning sonofabitch even before Bruce Wayne had taken him in.
Being a detective at heart meant that Tim saw the little things, and translated them into a roadmap in his head - in this case, a roadmap of a particularly insane criminal making his way into the seedier parts of town, right into the thick of Jason’s territory. Unfortunately, Tim didn’t think too closely on what that meant until he heard a faint scuff behind him, and he was spinning and going into attack-mode without even thinking about it.
A flex of his hand was all it took to run low-voltage electricity through the material of his new cloak, turning supple material into stiff ‘feathers’ that were literally hard and sharp enough to cut flesh. He led with that, right ‘wing’ snapping out and giving him reach that his adolescent body didn’t quite have yet, even as his left hand went for the extendable staff at his belt. He wasn’t bad with the batarangs, but Nightwing he was not. The bo-staff was a safer bet in Tim’s hands.
All bets were off when your opponent was the Red Hood, however, and that was exactly who Tim found himself facing when he spun. Jason reacted immediately like a pit-bull tossed into a dog-fighting ring: all teeth, no rules. There was an offensive scritching noise as the leading edge of Tim’s wing hit Jason’s raised left forearm and was blocked by some kind of armor hidden beneath his leather jacket. While Tim was left shocked at the realization that he’d just attacked an ally - unsuccessfully - Jason’s right hand snapped forward, and Tim felt gloved fingers close around his throat. Jason let his momentum carry him forward, and a second later, Tim’s shoulder-blades thudded into the alley wall behind him. It only took a matter of seconds for Jason to subdue him, all told.
Jason had his helmet on, but the dark eye-sockets of the red dome were probably mimicking the glower behind quite effectively. “Didn’t B ever teach you not to attack what you can’t kill?” he growled, the mask giving the words a truly spine-chilling double-harmonic sound. At the same time, however, Jason’s hand loosened. Tim had already dropped both hands to his sides, as if it had never occurred to him to defend himself after he recognized his foe. Which it hadn’t.
“Sorry,” Tim puffed, heart hammering and breathing fast from just a few seconds of action. He now had a whole new appreciation for just how fast and strong Jason was, an appreciation that he could have honestly done without. Then, because Tim really didn’t do words all that well under surprise circumstances, he found himself blurting, “What are you doing here?”
“I live around here,” Jason retorted. He released Tim’s neck entirely to step back, but somehow never quite lost the bellicose posture. His tone sounded incredulous, and he cocked his head as if looking for signs that Tim had a concussion, or had just been dropped on his head too many times as a child. Before Tim could scowl back at him and come up with some sort of reply, Jason relented to add, “And Alfred called. Said something about that bastard Scarecrow. I’m honestly surprised B felt the urge to clue me in.”
Guilt wriggled in Tim’s gut, and he found his eyes dropping to look at his boots before he quickly corrected the gesture, but not before Jason had seen it. “I… uh…” he fumbled, but tried to do better this time at extemporizing. He went for the truth, if not all of it, “Well, it makes sense to tell you, right? I mean, you know this part of the city best.” Jason was watching him very closely right now, his mask giving away nothing, but his silence and his too-still posture was speaking wonders, so Tim hurried to distract from the fact that Batman hadn’t wanted to involve his old protege at all, “And I think that the Scarecrow is here, nearby. I tracked him this far.”
“You tracked him? What are you, some kind of bloodhound?” The incredulously arched eyebrow was invisible, but heavily implied.
Tim sighed and couldn’t resist the urge to roll his eyes skyward, because really, Jason Todd could be exasperating. “No, I followed clues. Probabilities. I figured that if the Scarecrow was back in town, he’d want to hide out somewhere he knew, or somewhere that he might have stashed something, and I looked it up: some of his old haunts are around here.”
Instead of further criticising Tim’s nerdy tracking abilities (something that Jason usually did with notable amusement), the Red Hood’s shoulders suddenly tensed, and he blurted, “The warehouse.”
Tim blinked. “Okay… that’s vague. But if you know of a place-”
“I do.” Jason was immediately heading off, very much like a hound on a scent himself, although he paused to look back a moment later, “You coming or going, Baby Bird? Because I ain’t gonna ask twice.”
It never even occurred to Tim to say no. The usurper feeling in his gut was still a black hole, as big as before, and he craved at all times to fill it up with something worthwhile - maybe with forgiveness, even though he hadn’t had the guts yet to ask for it. He and Jason had never once talked about their shared position as Robin.
“I’m coming with you,” Tim said immediately and stubbornly, because if he couldn’t ask Jason to forgive him for becoming Robin in his place, then he could maybe work off the debt a little, by providing whatever backup Jason might need.
~^~
It turned out that Jason needed back-up more than usual. In all honesty, they should have waited for Batman and Nightwing both, but no one could have predicted just how much trouble the Scarecrow could prepare in the half hour before he was found.
An entire hour later, so far on the outskirts of Gotham that Tim honestly didn’t even know where they were, the newest Robin sat back against the wall of an abandoned building, breathing heavily and tasting copper all over his tongue. He sniffed, then winced as pain radiated in an electric shock along his nose, and a bit more blood trickled down his the back of his throat and down to his lip. He licked it away on tired reflex, another reflex making him tighten his left hand in the material of Jason’s jacket, near his left knee with the rest of Jason Todd.
Things had not gone well.
Fear toxin. Batman had inoculated Tim for it just before they’d left, giving a quick rundown of how the stuff worked to make you see your worst nightmares if you weren’t prepared for it. There had always been a chance that the Scarecrow would have a bit of the stuff stashed away somewhere, and thanks to Tim’s detective skills, they’d found that stash - but not before the Scarecrow. Both Tim and Jason, prepared but nowhere near prepared enough, had been caught by surprise and had gotten whole lungfuls of the stuff before they realized that they’d walked into a carefully planned ambush.
Even with the antidote in his system, Tim had been able to feel the drug like corpse-cold fingers on his skin. Fortunately, Tim’s natural reaction to fear had always been the same and hadn’t changed since he’d become a vigilante’s sidekick: when afraid, Tim got quieter, smaller, wanting to huddle in on himself until his lungs creaked painfully and struggled to breath against the pressure of his legs tucked against his torso. He’d felt the urge powerfully when the fear toxin hit, but managed to push it down enough to function, thanks to the antitoxin.
Jason… Jason hadn’t been inoculated, because Batman hadn’t wanted him around in the first place, and Jason also reacted very, very differently to fear than Tim did. When Jason got scared, that was just the start: it was just a catalyst, and what it set off was the kind of wild fury that only an animal in a trap could know. Fearful dogs bit the fastest and the hardest. Tim was harmless when he was scared, but Jason most certainly was not.
The Scarecrow had gotten away, but not before Jason did a serious number on him, which would maybe be awesomely funny when they looked back on this. It had been a quick, wild fight, with fear pulling out all of Jason’s fight or flight responses - the Scarecrow simply hadn’t counted on the former being tenfold more powerful than the latter. When the Scarecrow finally bolted free, however, that left Tim with Jason, and suddenly ‘Fuck’ didn’t even begin to cover the situation. Jason had been breathing hard, swaying, and as wild as a wounded animal, and Tim realized that if he didn’t do something, the ‘flight’ part of Jason’s instincts just might take over, and then what would happen?
Sitting now with blood painting his lips and chin and an ache that had spread all through his ribcage from a dozen places, Tim admitted that Jason had the meanest right hook he’d ever experienced. But Jason had already suffered death once already, all alone with no allies in sight… and Tim couldn’t let that happen again, even if only psychologically. He couldn’t leave Jason alone with his worst nightmares twice, not when Tim was pretty sure what those nightmares were about: the Joker, torture, Jason’s own death and messy resurrection...
“It’s all right,” Tim whispered, a bit awkwardly but with great sincerity, as he stroked a sore hand over Jason’s arm. He didn’t have any antitoxin with him, but he did have knock-out darts, and after getting past Jason’s nastier fighting skills, he’d managed to stick him with one - so now, sans helmet and out cold, Jason was lying at Tim’s side. The soporific had had a hard time gaining purchase against the fear toxin, and Tim hadn’t been doing so well himself, so the two of them had stumbled like drunks away from that ill-fated warehouse to... wherever they were now... before Jason had collapsed. Tim couldn’t bring himself to let the other guy sprawl with his head on the dusty ground, so he’d dragged them both over to the nearest wall and had insinuated himself beneath Jason’s head. Despite being knocked out, Jason still twitched on occasion and snarled in his sleep, as if he were baring wolf-teeth at the monsters of his dreams.
Tim squeezed the man’s shoulder again, feeling like ten times a failure as he imagined just what those nightmares contained. Feeling raw from his own mitigated dose of the toxin, Tim’s eyes welled up without warning, and he sucked in another bloody breath before wiping at his eyes. He sighed raggedly, and pulled Jason a bit closer to him, unsure which of them he was comforting. “It’s all right. You’re not alone this time,” he said with quiet fervor, and wished that Jason hadn’t rung his bell so hard, or maybe he’d be able to figure out where they were, and what to do next. Right now, he still felt the urge to curl up tight, an instinct that made him intensely opposed to leaving the little, abandoned hidey-hole he’d found them in this empty building. He was safe here. He could keep Jason safe here. Fisting his hand in the thick, warm material over Jason’s ribs, Tim buried his other hand in Jason’s hair, feeling a ridiculous flicker of happiness when the older vigilante stilled a bit and stopped writhing in his sleep. He gave a gentle and tentative stroke, the white streak of hair slipping through his gloved fingers like a fish in dark waters.
“You should never have been alone like that,” Tim said, admitting something that he’d never said out loud. “Someone should have protected you.” His own protectiveness, impotent though it was, surged up in him, and Tim cast a paranoid glance to all of the room’s exits and all of the room’s shadows. It took him a second to settle again, and his hands never left Jason’s head and torso. He kept talking, aware that he was basically talking to himself, because Jason was presently beyond hearing, “I know… I know that the Joker tortured you with… well, with me. With my existence. I’m not supposed to know that, but I eavesdropped.” Lowering his eyes and feeling his lashes get hot and wet with tears he’d wanted to shed for a long time, Tim resisted the urge to scrub at his eyes only because that would make his nose hurt worse. “I think you broke my nose,” he said in a small pathetic voice that strove for humor and fell very, very short.
Tim seemed to have a knack for falling short.
“I’d have given you your place back, you know?” He didn’t know why he was confessing all of this - maybe it was a bad reaction to the fear toxin and the antitoxin, or maybe it was the knowledge that no one was listening to him. No one ever really listened to him, but this was the first time it paid dividends. “I still would, if you asked. This…” He shook his head, feeling sad to his very bones but still being utterly sincere as he went on, “This suit, this mask… they’re not really mine, so if you want them… Dammit.” He couldn't even find the right words when there was no audience to pressure him. When he took a deep breath, the focus of his pain transferred from his nose to his bruised and maybe cracked ribs, also courtesy of Jason as Tim had tried to subdue him. “I’m just saying that you never lost your home. I didn’t mean to take it. Okay?”
Somehow, he didn’t feel all that much better for having said it. In fact, all it did was make the tears slip down his cheek in earnest, and he squeezed his eyes shut, ashamed. He felt so lost, and in that moment, he wondered if Batman had lied and had never given him the antitoxin - and had instead just given him a placebo, in the hopes that he wouldn’t have to deal with Tim again, and would finally solve the ‘two-Robin problem’... “Dammit!” Tim snarled again with more feeling, realizing that he really wasn’t himself, as the paranoia slipped in around the defenses of the antitoxin - or perhaps it was just pulling to the surface things that Tim had been pretending not to think for a long time now. He thumped his head back against the wall, trying to ground himself, and found some meagre relief a few moments later, as his rioting emotions settled into an unsteady sea that he could just keep his head above.
He continued to find some small comfort in running one hand over Jason’s hair and fisting the other in his leather jacket like it was some sort of teddy-bear he could grab onto.
They stayed like that for over an hour - the amount of time it took for Batman and Nightwing to take down the Scarecrow, and then realize that Tim was missing. Thankfully, even if Tim was a bit too battered to realize it, he did have a tracking device on him, one that led Batman right to him, and to Jason, whom Tim was still defending like a badger by the time a familiar shadow filled the doorway. Sitting with one leg having fallen asleep beneath Jason’s head, Tim had stiffened and bared his teeth very much like a badger, at first not recognizing a friend instead of a foe, and very much preparing for a fight.
Something tired and sad filled Batman’s posture as he took in the scene of his latest sidekick playing guard-dog to the sidekick that he’d failed the most in this world. For a second, it was clear that Tim was prepared to take on the Batman himself in Jason’s defense, and in that moment before lucidity set in, it became clear to both Tim and Bruce that Robin had taken sides in the feud between Batman and the Red Hood. Tim immediately quailed and almost physically withdrew as he realized how transparent - and transparently aggressive - he was being, but not before recognition passed painfully between them. Even as Tim unfisted his hand, however, it was only to drop it back on Jason’s shoulder. It trembled a little but ultimately stayed firm.
There was no time for squabbles now, though. Stepping closer so that Tim could clearly see who he was, and that his hands were open and unthreatening, Bruce said exhaustedly, “Come on, Tim. Let’s go home. I’ll carry Jason.”
~^~