Chapter Text
Tim’s parents lasted through a week of his night terrors before hiring a child psychologist.
“Witnessing what your son did at such a young age can be incredibly traumatizing.” The portly man explained slowly, Tim by his feet and fiddling with the soft, rounded edge blocks.
Because apparently sharp corners were not encouraged within the ‘safe space’ crafted by his therapist. So that meant foam mats that Tim’s little socked feet sunk into slightly. Cloth dolls with cotton stuffing that couldn’t bruise for shit no matter how hard you threw them. Toys that were stored in cloth woven baskets.
Even the furniture was soft with bean bag chairs and leather couch cushions littering the room.
“When children encounter a situation like this, they may not be able to fully process what it is they’ve witnessed or experienced-”
Tim shifted his attention to the gummy toys, probably meant for the chubby fists of children still struggling with their hand-eye coordination.
“-To the point where it puts the child in a state of delusion, confusion, unable to comprehend that the world may not be a safe place, that they may not be safe.”
Tim’s mother crouched down by his side, the soft fabric of her skirt half-covering Tim like a blanket as she lifted him up by his armpits and to her arms. Tim could hear the low murmuring tones of his father and therapist making rough appointment schedules, discussing things like ‘progress’ and ‘support’.
Tim clenched a lock of his mother’s hair into his small fist.
“Oh, Timothy…” His mother whispered against his forehead, he could feel her form slouch slightly over him, the days of no-sleep finally catching up with them.
Him and her.
Tim used to be able to go days without sleep. Either through chemical means or his own body’s internal clock wired for short bursts of rest.
But not anymore.
Nothing was really much the same anymore.
Not his sleep, or his body, hair, or eyes.
Not his parents, his friends, or his home.
Not even his name.
Timothy .
That was his new name. Gift wrapped and presented together along with his new life.
Sasuke thought briefly back to the sight of two acrobats crumpled out on the floor of a circus, their blood and tears staining the ground. Their son’s screams still echoing in his ears.
Tim screwed his eyes shut, burying his face into the soft neck of his mother, mouth catching on her necklace as his nose filled with the scent of flowery perfume.
Sasuke clenched his jaw, milk teeth digging into his soft lip as he tried his best to rid the image of a man with red eyes, standing over the corpses of his parents. His ears ringing with his own screams of terror.
----
Timothy Jackson Drake was born two weeks early, late at night during a thunderstorm. A sharp contrast to Sasuke’s birth.
In the morning and directly on time, to the hour that the family doctor had predicted.
Tim was still unsure about whether that was just by chance or if medical-nins had some formula or jutsu worked out for timing labor.
Tim didn’t think so.
Both Sakura and Karin had been surprised at the sudden appearance of Sarada, to the point that they’d scrambled for all the proper supplies, going as far as to even forget to banish Sasuke from the room when the time came.
Not that he’d been much help, his body frozen as he listened to Sakura’s pained grunts, the metallic smell of blood filling the air and his nose. All broken by the sounds of Sarada’s cries.
Sarada.
Gone. Her along with her mother.
Sasuke wondered if they’d receive the news immediately. He’d died in the mountains in the dead of winter. Naruto would probably send teams out the minute Sasuke didn’t check in, but it’d be months before they could bring his body back to be laid down beside all his kin.
He’d be devastated. Probably find some way to blame himself when it, like everything, had been Sasuke’s fault.
An injury he hadn’t let heal long enough, the slow growth of a fever he hadn’t caught. The neglect towards his medical supplies. His stubbornness in maintaining people at a distance, even his family.
His family who would move on. Sakura was strong, raising their daughter with all the careful attention and love that Sasuke wished he was capable of. Sarada took more after her than she did him. Something he was always quietly grateful for.
Even if they crumbled, buckled under his demise- Sasuke knew they were in good hands. Naruto would care for them. Kind and always willing to extend a hand no matter how many times he may get bitten.
It’s a hand that Sasuke will never get extended to him again.
----
Tim was not a social child.
Shy , his mother always called him. In the same soft and lightly teasing way that Mikoto always did.
But that was where their similarities ended.
Mikoto was a housewife through and through. Though her hands were rough with all the experience of a former career-ninja, she always knew exactly how to be gentle when handling Sasuke. Gripping his little hand in the market, cleaning his scrapes and cuts with the fragility of a butterfly.
But not Janet. Janet was busy. Because Janet worked.
Long hours at a computer in the little office of their apartment alongside her husband. Because the two of them were partners in more than just the romantic sense.
Business partners.
And the thing about high stakes, resource flowing entrepreneurship- it didn’t leave much time for your son.
Sure there were the ‘playdates’ Tim occasionally attended with the children of steel manufacturers, financers, and executives. But to Tim they always felt too much like those multi-clan meetings with them using their children’s playtime as their buffer.
Not that Tim had a problem with that. He’d spent one too many times playing with Hinata Hyuuga’s kendama to hold anything against adults trying to get one over each other and strategize for political, financial, or social gain.
Tim even thought he was doing his parents a favor by behaving himself, tucking his feet under his thighs and quietly playing beside a shipping manager’s son who was trying to stuff a lego up his nose. All while their parents argued, negotiated, and signed million dollar contracts in the next room.
Tim had stolen the pages of one off his father’s desk once, sitting down beside the TV and working out the words on it. It’s something he was still disapproving of.
Neither Sasuke or Itachi had ever been able to get their hands on any of their father’s sensitive documents, especially not of the ones with open cases going on in the village. For clan children it was a game, trying to sneak your ninja-parents’ things without them noticing. Stealing sweets before dinner. Slipping into rooms that were sealed closed.
Tim had been able to steal and read several pieces of sensitive material belonging to his parents and return them without even raising the slightest shred of suspicion.
Tim’s not sure why that bothers him so much. Fugaku had never showered him in praise or adoration for simply existing and neither did Jack. In many ways both his fathers did the bare minimum with him.
Only this time there was no Itachi to fill in the gaps. For a moment, Tim’s heart aches.
It sings with such desperate loneliness and yearning he’s nearly sick on what’s surely a very expensive rug.
“Hey,” the blonde boy with the chubby face of an Akimichi nudges Tim, “wanna go eat cake?”
Tim stares at him for a moment, his eyes wet with unshed tears because he has as much control over his emotions as..well...a child.
“Okay.”
The two of them toddle to the kitchen and beg the boy’s nursemaid for slices of cake. It only half works. They get a single slice and two child sized forks.
Tim is more than content to let the other boy have most of his share.
He was never particularly fond of sweets.
----
Tim’s parents start signing contracts worth more money than the entire compound earned in a year.
They start working more hours.
They start working in an actual office space.
They move into a larger house.
They start assigning people to look after him.
Sasuke doesn’t know what to do.
----
Ninja had only three loyalties. Village. Family. Friends.
All were in order of importance. All were unanimously agreed upon, silently or otherwise. There was no village asking him to swear fealty. No dark puppetmaster in the shadows that required exposing. No family to avenge. No person to hunt down. No God to kill.
No one to protect.
Sasuke is lost.
Lost in the same way he’d been months after Itachi’s death. Mind fuzzy and unable to make connections like he’d suffered a concussion.
No home. No friends. No family. No purpose. It’d been the one time he’d felt he’d truly understood loneliness. True loneliness.
Like a pitaya, that’s had everything that mattered scooped out of it and the rest was just discarded.
In that time Sasuke had returned to the familiar ground of his burning anger. His righteous need for revenge.
On the village, then the Kages, then the ninja world as a whole.
An injustice had been committed against him and someone had needed to pay.
There is no conquest for Sasuke to stand behind any longer.
All he is is a little boy. Powerless, weak, and small. All the things he swore to himself he’d never be again.
Damaged goods.
That lasts all the way up until he watches the mayor get saved on live TV alongside millions of other Gothamites.
Tim watches a man dressed in black tactical armor and a bastardized version of a black ops mask skirt away a frightened man that Tim knew for an absolute fact was corrupt enough to not deserve it.
Batman.
Tim knew about him, recognized him even; as the figure that descended that day at Haly’s Circus. But he was too caught up in the sudden panic and labored breathing at the startlingly familiar sight of a slain couple to take note. It’s something he beat himself up about later that night when his parents put him to bed.
There’s fluidity in his movements, precision in his actions that immediately pegs him as someone who’s had rigorous training. Jonin level. Easily.
Tim watches. Watches in stupefaction as he stops a high level threat (one that Tim and every citizen was made aware of only through a cable broadcast network). Watches as he grapples away without a moment spared beyond his use.
Tim is speechless.
----
Tim knows about heroes, knows all about Superman, Green Lantern, Wonder Woman, and the rest of the JLA.
He knows that they’re the ‘pillars of justice’, the ‘champions of mankind against the unknown and oppressive forces on earth and beyond’.
Tim knows because he’s watched all the commercials about them and owns all their action figures (because every children’s meal from the fast food vendors included them and sometimes Tim’s parents just didn’t have time to make him dinner).
But mostly he knows about them because he has handwritten files on each of them with all the information he’s been able to gather listed on several pieces of computer paper he squirreled away from his parent’s office supply closet.
Why?
There’s no point. Who is the information going to get reported to- there’s no intel to deliver-
Batman’s is short. A single page with a few paragraphs of analysis. Most is dismissing the outlandish and wild theories Tim’s managed to gather by surfing the internet on his father’s computer.
Tim’s files are as meticulous and diligent as the mission reports he used to turn in. It’s better to have a paper trail, something physical to tie specific information to someone.
In Konohagakure, it was always paperwork that caught 85% of the traitors (It’s what would’ve stopped Danzo if-).
Not that Sasuke would be able to do something if it turned out someone like Superman wasn’t actually the ‘boyscout’ the media wrote him out to be.
A decent amount of media were pro-superman while the anti-superman media tended to be owned in full or part by one Alexander Luthor.
But the Justice League was its own organization, that had its own set of guidelines that held its members accountable.
Similar to the Shinobi Court System Fugaku occasionally testified in.
Batman was a figure staunchly situated in Gotham. As the sky was blue and grass was green- Gotham belonged to Batman.
Gotham City was one of the few cities that Superman didn’t do flyovers on, out of his respect for his comrade if Tim’s research was to be believed.
It’s information that took longer than he’d like to admit to gather.
Tim was a field ninja, his strengths lay in performing active fieldwork. As much as he tried to be the spymaster for the village, Jiraiya had left a great legacy to live up to. One he knew he still fell short of at times.
And Gotham...it was no Konoha.
Konoha was not perfect, for a time Tim’s loyalty had been...absent.
But Gotham City was every dirty, messy, maggot infested problem the village had ever faced turned up to the max.
Kirigakure was among the worst of the hidden villages, poverty and crime were rampant. Corruption was just another day there. Seeing scenes like the ones Sasuke had witnessed in Wave were just all too common in a place like that.
Gotham’s problems were deeper, infested into it’s very soil. Tim was sure that even the water in the harbor was sour with infestation.
Tim had the fortune of good birth. Parents that were already in good standing clawing their way up to the golden pedestals of the elite of the city.
The wealth disparity had disgusted Tim at first.
Because never, not in Konoha would people be forced on the streets while Clans stayed locked away in their compounds. The money shinobi made by risking their lives outside of the village- it’s entire purpose was in service of the village.
Killing the people within served no purpose but to harm the entire system as a whole. It’s something the five great shinobi nations witnessed at Kirigakure’s inability to pull itself out of their economic pit (the absence of a workforce). It’s something Konohagakure witnessed at the death of the Uchiha clan (a recession that cost several civilian and ninja clans their savings along with a resurgence of crime with the absence of the military police force).
Gotham is nothing but a city sitting on a blanket of black tar, sucking it and all it’s people in.
Yet.
Tim’s eyes washed over the newspaper cut outs, interviews with people saved by Batman. The way that children in his playgroup always loudly demanded to be ‘Batman’.
People followed Batman, believed in him. With all the reverence and faith that someone would give a Kage.
It’s…
Not something Tim could understand. Kage’s were a beacon, a pillar of strength that held up all their people.
The fourth with his dignity. The fifth with her strength. The sixth with his power. The seventh with his will.
Sasuke...didn’t have that. He didn’t have the charisma, the ability to back up his words.
It’s actions that proved the validity of every Kage that had ever been.
And Sasuke fell short in that.
Even with all his attempts at redemption he knew, deep inside- there was still the part of him that turned his back on a village for power.
Tim curled tightly around the soft fleece of his blankets, tucking his head into his pillow as he stared at the clipping on his nightstand.
A black and white print of the brand new installation of the aptly named ‘Bat-Signal’ on the roof of the Gotham Police Department.
Gotham’s beacon.
Tim closes his eyes and thinks of a beacon with hair like the sun and a smile that made his heart ache.
----
Timothy is a creature of obsession.
It is not something that goes away the older he grows.
In many ways, he’s pretty sure he’s utterly incapable of not being sucked into hyper focusing on one thing.
It’s how he ends up crouched on rooftops in the middle of the night, wrapped in a puffer jacket with a digital camera in his hands.
It takes every bit of skill and muscle memory to be able to scale the residential areas of Gotham and cross-reference the maps he’s drawn of Batman’s broken down patrol route.
It bothers him that he was able. Patrol routes should not be predictable; they should be separated by quadrant and divided based on seniority, skill level, and welfare needed in the area.
Logically, Batman should altogether avoid areas with households containing an average income of more than $50K and focus on the more impoverished areas where crime is expected to be higher, more violent, and lethal.
But Batman served all of Gotham, and no one got skipped. Which meant that Tim spent most of his nights settling into barely detectable grooves and waiting before running down a firescape and catching a cab before proceeding to do it all over again.
It was exhausting work for a body so small and still growing.
Tim could only be thankful that no one in Gotham wondered what a little boy was doing out by himself. In Metropolis it got you all kinds of looks and resulted in hiding in dumpsters from police who were called by ‘concerned citizens’.
Tim would call them something else . But he supposed it was just a cultural difference.
This was what he got for ditching school and taking a day trip to Metropolis in an effort to thicken his Superman folder. At least no one on the train home had given him much of a second look.
But still. Ditching school. Is that what Tim had become?
What was it Jack would call him?
A degenerate?
Yeah that sounds about right.
Tim could still hear the bellowed reprimands of a certain academy teacher still ringing in his ear every time he caught a student for truancy.
Thankfully Tim’s private school didn’t look into things like that. More concerned with the check Jack and Janet wrote them every month than whether Tim’s claims of being sick with the flu in his dorm room were true.
But he supposed that was life.
A pair of dark shadows passed over the rooftop nearby and Tim buckled down tighter into the crack he shoved himself in, raising his camera to his face and feeling the button click under his finger.
Tim’s viewfinder locked on the pair leaping onto another roof. The smaller one flipping 1..2..3….4.
Tim’s finger froze.
----
Batman’s file gets another few pages written in.
----
Robin disappears and Nightwing emerges.
Tim starts a new file.
----
A new Robin appears and Batman’s file gets even more pages added in.
----
The second Robin disappears and Batman begins behaving erratically.
Tim half expects for the Justice League to pull him off their roster and put him into Psych Eval as per protocol in the Anbu handbook.
Batman breaks three arms and one nose in a purse robbery and lands someone in the hospital on a ventilator over a gram of cocaine.
Tim realizes that’s not going to happen.
----
Tim was a silent observer.
A loner, as some of his teachers might note in his report card.
Unwilling to reach out to others. Private. Does not engage with his classmates.
In another life such critiques would earn him remedial bookwork on ‘Teamwork in a 3-Man Squad’.
In this life it earns him a recommendation to the guidance counselor.
It takes Tim two weeks to get the person behind the desk to believe he’s fine, he’s just ‘shy’.
It takes four days to find a group of boys in his English class to eat with at lunch to solidify that claim.
It takes six hours to find Dick Grayson’s address. All seven of them. The three in Gotham. Three in Bludhaven. And the one in San Francisco.
It costs $15.75 to fill up his bus pass to visit each of the locations nearby only to find them vacant.
It costs $350 (roundtrip) for the plane ticket and another $175 to the Gotham TSA agent to shut up about his age.
It’s $80 dollars for the night at a hotel that won’t ask questions.
And it ends up costing absolutely nothing for Tim to walk next door and knock on the door when he comes home empty handed.
----
“You need a Robin.”
Tim explains it simply. Concisely.
If that doesn’t work he has graphs in his backpack. Shikamaru always said that ‘thick-headed’ people needed visual material to supplement his words.
Tim’s pretty sure he was just insulting people in general but it was better than nothing.
“No.”
“Yes.” Tim replies. If Batman thought he could outmatch Tim he was dead wrong. Tim has been told he was the ‘most stubborn fucking bastard I ever met-’.
Of course Naruto had been drunk when he said that but the point stood.
Batman glared down at him, using every inch of his height to his advantage to loom over Tim. Tim craned his neck back but held his gaze, lips pursed down into the same sour look Janet tried to smooth away with her fingers whenever she returned for the holidays.
“Leave.”
“No.” Tim stepped closer, his tiny shoes almost comical beside Batman’s thick soled boots. Tim’s chin nearly brushed against Batman’s armor coated abdomen, his blue eyes narrowed on the whites of the cowl.
Tim’s mouth twitched at the sight.
‘Take off the mask, bastard! I’m talking to you’
“Take off the mask, I’m talking to you.” Sasuke says, brows deepening into a furrow.
The cowl twitched with movement, mouth moving in displeasure.
“No.”
‘I’m not looking to talk to Anbu, I’m talking to you!’
“I’m not talking to Batman, I’m talking to you.”
The cowl comes off, but the expression on Bruce Wayne’s face is no less forgiving.
“Whatever you came here to say, you’re wasting your time. Dick already filled Alfred in.”
Tim tries to not let the surprise show on his face. Their meeting had gone pretty poorly and resulted in Tim returning to Gotham empty handed.
Which made sense. Sasuke wasn’t the best speaker and even less so when talking to people blinded by anger and hurt.
He hadn't thought the other man would remain unblinded by his anger long enough to call.
“I won’t make you Robin.” The words are spoken with a deep enunciation, almost a growl.
Tim stared.
“I don’t care.”
Bruce’s brow twitched. To the untrained eye it would’ve slipped past. But Tim always had good eyes.
“Batman belongs to Gotham,” Tim continued. “He is not yours .”
‘A Kage protects the village and their people! That’s why they have to be the strongest shinobi!’
“You can be angry all you want but you don’t get to make Batman look bad.”
‘A Kage needs to stand up for what’s right! For what’s just!’
“I don’t get to be Robin, fine. But you don’t get to be Batman, either if that’s the case.”
Bruce stared at him, expression incomprehensible.
“Are you saying you’ll take the cape away from me?”
The way he says it is neutral, zero indication of intent. But Tim can read the slightest lilt when addressing him, intended to be mocking. He wants to goad Tim. Wants him to prove that he’s nothing but an emotional, over-invested kid.
Tim calls his bluff.
“If I don’t call and cancel my delivery of a package to the GCPD, Gotham News Network, and Gotham Globe by midnight tonight, all of Gotham will know who you are by morning.”
Tim’s cellphone is in his hand, and has been the whole time. Bruce’s eyes drift down to it.
Tim can see the moment he realizes Tim means business.
Tim has seen what a world imposed with someone else’s vision of justice and peace would look like. He knows exactly what Batman is capable of, has studied and documented enough to know him as intimately as Tim knew anyone.
“I would rather see Batman die than see him become what you are becoming.”
Tim knows all too well what grief can do to a person. What it can push them to do.
He thinks of a boy watching someone he loves die and trying to make the world pay for it. He thinks of his family rubbed raw and hurt, being pushed to their breaking point and being slaughtered like animals over a fight they were just pawns in.
Tim straightened his back, glaring up at Bruce.
He knows what men who have been hurt and traumatized are capable of.
Little boys who train until their bones break, who attack and betray their home all for the gratification of revenge.
Gotham is delightfully imperfect, just short of good in every single way.
It’s exactly the place Sasuke belongs with it’s mean people, drooping buildings, smog, and all it’s pollution.
There is nowhere else in the world for him.
Bruce stares at him, eyes locking onto every wrinkles, hair, and spec of dirt on Tim’s face.
“Understood. Robin.”