Work Text:
“Tim,” Dick calls out from across the dinner table. Tim looks up from where he’d been attempting to clear his plate from the last helping Alfred had placed on it, saying something about ‘underweight’ and ‘unhealthy lifestyles’ that he’d already filtered out. “You’ve been quiet lately, are you okay?”
[Do it, JJ’s voice tells him, as he glances at the butter knife that is oh, so close to Dick’s hand. Pick it up and stab it through his hand and pin him to the table so he can never leave us again.]
Tim smiles, the twinge of the scars beneath the heavy layers of make-up along with the burns at his temple that are more often than not covered with his hair the only physical reminder of his time with the Joker. “I’m fine, Dick,” he lies. [Always, always lying, right Timmy?] “Could you please pass the potatoes?”
***
Tim loves Steph. He loved her before he even knew what love meant, and he loves her now that he does, but it’s different. He loves her like he loves Dick, like he loves Cass and Jason and Duke and Damian.
Tim loves Steph, but he swears if she wears that shade of purple one more time, he’s going to lose it. Unfortunately, she doesn’t hear his unspoken threat and instead picks up another purse from the new all purple section of the clothing-store that had originally been Tim’s idea to bring her to, which in hindsight was not a good idea. Holding it up against her purple coat, purple suit, and purple shoes, she tilts her head at him and asks, “What do you think?”
[Oh, if only Daddy Dearest could see us now, he would be so jealous. Too bad we ruined his last suit, red doesn’t match with purple, Momma’s rule number one. Ahaha, get it, Timmy? Because we killed him? Ahahahahahah!]
Tim can’t stop the quiet snicker that slips past his lips, but Steph looks pleased anyway. “Maybe I’ll wear it to Brucie’s gala the next time Cass invites me,” she jokes.
“I wonder what he’ll have to say to that.”
[I know the answer to this! Nothing, because he’ll be dead! Ahaha, Momma’s rule number two; red matches perfectly with black. Remember, Timmy?]
“Nothing, as long as the threat of me wearing this with the Batgirl suit still hangs over him,” Steph laughs, and he joins her. If she notices that his voice is a bit too high, a bit too screechy, she doesn’t mention it, but she does put the bag back down again.
***
Cass knows. He’s never told her, but he knows she does.
She knows in the furtive glances the others make when Bruce silently takes Tim and Jason off any and all Joker-related cases, despite the latter’s hot-headed protests, she knows in the slight tenseness in his body at the sound of nursery rhymes.
She knows and she cares. Although she doesn’t quite understand, she helps, pulling him into her room and wrapping him with every heavy-duty blanket they own whenever the laughter feels like it’s itching beneath his skin, no matter how far he is from the Joker’s cold operating table. When he muffles his hysterics in the folds of the fabric, Cass never says anything, just holds him a little tighter.
One of those nights, when the flash of Damian’s Lazarus eyes had only pushed him closer to the precipice, after the laughter and subsequent tears have subsided, Cass stays sitting next to him, tracing patterns on his face with her index finger.
It’s a peaceful moment until he realizes she’s tracing the all too familiar line of the smile the Joker had scarred him with. Immediately, his hand shoots out from under the blanket, fingers wrapped around her wrist in barely a moment.
She could have gotten out of it. Hell, she could have dodged the hold all together. But she doesn’t, just tilts her head to the side and studies him curiously with her warm brown eyes.
“What,” he rasps, wincing at the scrape in his throat.
Cass doesn’t answer for a few minutes, pondering and looking at him. It makes him shift a little, uneasy, but then she asks, “The scar. It hurts?”
Tim swallows and tries to look away so it doesn’t feel like she’s reading his every secret in his wet, reddened eyes, but the hand on his face keeps him there. Nodding slowly, he replies, “Yes, sometimes.”
Her hand moves from his mouth to knock lightly against his left breastbone. He nods, head hanging a little lower.
Holding his gaze, Cass brushes a light kiss to the side of his forehead, nothing like the big, red lipsticky-kisses Mama Harley used to give him. “Better,” she whispers like the word is something sacred that should be kept between just the two of them.
But there’s no doubt that in her loose warm arms, he does feel better.
***
Tim’s having a slightly off-day, and every little thing is setting him off. His room is too cold for starters, and when he reaches under his pillow to make sure the knife is still there, the warm metal slides against his skin, almost taunting him to take it against his own flesh. The thought startles him, he usually doesn’t get those except for the really bad days, and so he quickly sets the blade in the no-contingency safe Bruce makes him keep in his room.
The light from what little sunshine manages to fall through his window is too gray, making him feel pallid and washed out. He can’t bring himself to put on the heavy-duty skin-tone makeup, covering up the evidence of bleach on his face, his hands. Instead, he texts Dick, asking him to cover for his absence that day at WE.
Dick is, as always, understanding, but Tim can’t imagine he’s not tired [And not very happy with you either, huh Timmy? Always needing someone to pick up the slack for you, JJ tsks. Let me out, we both know I’m the better one of us two]. Tim had been feeling the same way, last night, and the man had covered Red Robin’s patrol route as well as his own. Tim had blearily heard him slipping into the Manor, only just as morning had broken. But Tim would rather feel guilty than like ripping his own skin off the second he hears someone laugh.
His brother promises him that he’ll visit once he gets off, and Tim thanks him, before burying himself back into the cavernous mound of blankets once called his bed.
It was a bad idea to end his conversation with Dick, because the second Tim doesn’t have a real person to talk to, JJ comes out of the shadows of his closet, like a monster from a children’s book.
The humor isn’t lost on Junior, and he gives a maniacal laugh. Tim scoots back on his bed, hitting the wall as the other boy comes closer. His eyes are a bit like Harley’s: wide and curious, but the type of curious that makes Tim think he’d cut a person’s rib cage open just to see their heart beat in their chest.
“What are you doing here?” Tim asks, trying not to sound like a scared little kid.
Junior crawls onto the bed with him, magenta suit jacket wrinkling. “I never left, Timmy. I’m not like the Drakes,” he spat out Tim’s surname with disgust.
“I’m you,” the mad boy continues, a deathly pale hand reaching up to tap a finger against Tim’s shaking head. Immediately, the vision disappears and JJ opens his eyes.
The bright blues are more shrewd than before, taking after his daddy as he looks around the room, orienting himself. After a quick search, he’s disappointed to find that there are no sharp objects for him to play with; Timmy’s family must’ve taken ‘em all the last time the poor little boy had an ‘episode’.
Then Junior remembers one of his daddy’s lessons. ‘If you can’t find the right tool, then ya gotta make it yourself, Junior!’ the man had cackled, before showing him how to make a timebomb out of that week’s groceries. Quickly hurrying to the bathroom, JJ’s mouth curls in a wide smile at the large mirror affixed to the wall.
But the grin almost immediately falls off, the second he realizes that his daddy’s bright green hair had been dyed over. Rifling through the drawers, he’s incensed at finding a black hair color bottle, throwing it across the room at the glass shower wall. Unfortunately, it doesn’t break, and JJ’s turning back to the cabinets before the bottle can hit the floor.
He’s delighted when he finds a bright red lipstick, deep in the bottom of a bag titled ‘undercover duds’, whatever that means. Smearing it across the fading scars on his cheeks, Junior smiles even bigger when he finds the stash he’d placed beneath the sink cupboard, the only one that Timmy hasn’t found yet.
Pulling on the too-big purple suit takes less than a moment, with how eager JJ is. It fits perfectly, and he admires his appearance for a few minutes before pushing the door open quietly, hoping to find some sharp instrument or another before he’s found out.
His mind is set on the kitchen or some other mundane place that would have knives, but an idea sparks in his mind as he crosses Timmy’s little brother’s room. Delighted, JJ quickly disables the clever little traps the boy had rigged up, excitement only growing at the sound of light violin music. The littlest bird must have stayed home from school, and Junior was sure he’d be able to convince him to play with him.
The birdy doesn’t look up when JJ slips into the room, focused on the paper he was scribbling on, assuming that whoever was able to get past his defenses was someone he could trust. Well, that just wouldn’t do…
“Drake, get out of my room before I show you the consequences of messing with a Wayne,” the boy iterates calmly, trading a pencil out for an eraser. Junior frowns behind him; Drake? He’s not related to those old cankers, the ones that had left Timmy all by his lonesome when he was little, without even JJ to keep him company.
Walking up behind the boy, his red grin grows at the sight of an ornamental dagger hanging on the wall, polished till it’s sparkling prettily in the light of the room. Oh, his entrance was going to be spectacular. “Tut, tut, tut, baby bat. Surely you must know that’s not my name?” Junior practically cackles at the speed that the little boy spins around, weapon already drawn. He’s disappointed to see that it’s not sharp, just a blunt instrument (escrima, a voice in the back of his mind supplies). Still, he won’t let that ruin his fun.
JJ plucks the shiny knife off the wall just as the bat makes his first strike with the electrified sticks. The lightning is oh so pretty, fizzing and sparking so fascinatingly, but Junior doesn’t want all the fun to be over just yet, so he dodges.
The kid’s eyes widen as he takes in what he’s got on. “What-”
JJ swipes at the baby bat’s arm, barely grazing his shirt before he’s stumbling back, having been shoved back by the non-sparky ends of the escrima.
“This isn’t you,” the boy observes, making JJ snort. If he wasn’t him, then who could he be? “There’s something wrong.”
He says more things, but Junior isn’t paying attention, too distracted by the row of paints at the edge of the expensive wooden desk Dami had been working on. The green is bright, lurid, and alluring. Barely a second goes by before he’s made his decision, and Junior’s hand shoots out, grabbing the paint can and gleefully dumping it on his head.
Baby bat shouts, startled as he moves again, knocking the paint can from his hands even as JJ shrieks with laughter, feeling more right than he has in three years with the thick, tacky green paint dripping from his eyelashes.
Dami’s face is even funnier, his horrified eyes as comical as the cartoons that he and Daddy Dearest would watch in the mornings, while Momma made them breakfast in the next room. Next thing, the boy’s eyes would bulge and burst and scream and bleed as JJ and the Joker and Harley laugh and laugh and laugh, a happy little family—
Junior’s light headed from the lack of oxygen with how hard he’s laughing, rolling on the ground where the boy had thrown him down. Dami must have had enough of him wheezing and cough-laughing because next thing he knows the escrimas are on his skin and they’re buzzing lightly. But instead of shocking him, all it does is remind him of the operating table and the burning and the wires taped on his head and JJ screams, convulses with laughter as tears run down his face.
It takes a long moment before he realizes that Dami is gone, and when he pats the ground around him with dying chuckles, he realizes the boy had taken the knife with him. He’d left him. They always did. How could Timmy have left Momma and Pops for people who always, always left them?
Tears turning mournful, Junior slumps against the wreckage of the desk (he can’t remember when he’d broken it) and his breath hitches with soft sobs. His eyes are red and wet with chemicals still smeared around them, and they land on a piece of paper lying in the middle of the splintered wood. Reaching out with green-stained fingers, JJ picks it up, looking at it curiously.
It’s a pretty picture, with neat dark lines and soft shadows. He recognizes the figure, tall and dark, with a fluttering cape to match. It’s Batman—no, there’s a smile on that cowled face, bright and cheery that Junior finds himself tracing. Batman didn’t smile, did he? No, he didn’t, and the proportions were all off, the imposter leaner, stance looser, this was—
Dick Grayson walks cautiously into the room, wearing a stiff-looking suit, like the kind that Timmy sometimes wears, the ones that are always just a bit too tight.
Junior looks up forlornly as the man crouches in front of him, deceptively casual as the door clicks shut behind him. He looks back just as quick, childishly refusing to look at him as he grips the crumpled paper in his wet hands.
“Hey, Junior. You were feeling a bit too cooped up today, huh?” Dick says, voice soothing, like his Momma’s, prompting JJ to turn back.
“Uh-huh. Timmy never lets me out anymore,” Junior says, angrily. The boy never played fair, no matter how much JJ begged, threatened, or bribed him.
“Hm,” Dick says, looking over the mess he’d made, which makes him feel a little embarrassed. “Is that why you broke Dami’s desk?”
The question brings his attention back to the paper in his hands, and Junior shakes his head.
“No? Wanna tell me?”
JJ frowns. “Batman’s wrong.”
Dick raises a brow. “Yeah? Wrong about what?”
Shaking his head again, Junior smooths the paper out, streaking it with green. “No, he’s wrong. You’re wrong.”
There’s a beat of silence from the man, so Junior focuses on the picture again, until he quietly pipes up next to him, “Can you explain that for me?”
“Batman isn’t supposed to smile. It’s wrong.”
“Really? I thought you liked smiling.”
Frustrated, he turns to face Dick again, crumpling the paper again. Before he can say anything, though, the man just pushes on, paying no heed to how much it’s upsetting him. “In fact, Timmy likes smiling, too. He likes it when I smile. Especially in the Batman suit. Dad would just look funny smiling in it, wouldn’t he, Tim?”
T-Junior frowns again, scars tugging as he protests, “Daddy hasn’t worn the Batsuit-”
There’s a warm hand covering his own, the room around him practically freezing in comparison. “Not the Joker, Timmy. Bruce. He adopted you, remember? Just like me, your big brother. Just like Jason, Cass. And I’m pretty sure Steph’s pseudo-adopted by now.”
“Damian.”
The hands start rubbing, moving in slow, methodical circles on his forearm. It’s rubbing off the green paint that’s been dripping from his too-long hair, flaking pieces falling to the floor. “Damian. We can’t forget about him, not our little gremlin brother, Timmy. Thanks for reminding me, little brother. You always do remember everything, Mr. Smartypants-”
And Dick keeps talking, keeps filling the empty room with the sound of his cheerful voice, talking about Tim, calling him Tim, talking about their family, about their lives and every little thing that crosses his mind.
It doesn’t cease when he starts twitching and his breath starts coming faster. His big brother’s arms just wrap around him as he breaks down. Tim can’t help it. He can’t help it despite knowing Damian’s probably right behind the door, can’t help it despite knowing he’s probably getting Dick’s expensive-looking suit wet with tears and green paint—oh god, what had he done.
Dick only stops talking when Tim finally calms down, pushing his face into the man’s shoulder to try and hide from the inevitable humiliation. All Dick does is move his hand to start rubbing his back, instead.
“Are you back now, Tim?” Dick asks softly.
Tim waits a minute to let the warm feeling of his brother’s arms distract him from the tackiness in his hair before replying scratchily, “Yeah.”
Dick’s hold on him tightens, hugging him despite the mess he is as he murmurs, “I’m glad.”
[All the king’s horses and all the king’s men, a voice sing-song-whispers in his head, couldn’t put Humpty together again.]
If a few more tears end up joining the rest, well, neither of them mention it.
***
The first thing that Jason hears when he rides into the Cave that night is high-pitched laughter. The Joker’s laughter.
His guard immediately goes up. There hasn’t been a break-out as far as he’s concerned, and Babs definitely would have tried to deter him from going out if the Joker had been out. But he hadn’t been notified about any Joker venom incidents either, so he keeps one hand on his holstered gun as he silently gets off his bike.
His fears are quelled when he sneaks into the Medbay to find the Replacement and Blondie strapped down to their cots. Dick and Alfred are administering antidotes as Bruce broods in the corner, watching over them. The relief quickly abandons him when he realizes that they must've been drugged for at least twenty minutes since they have already synthesized an antidote to the altered strain of Joker venom the pair had been trying to crack down on together. Meaning no one had told him of the situation, not even Bruce, for all his talk about ‘teamwork,’ had informed him when he’d asked him to come in to discuss his report on an old cold case of his that had been picking up leads again over comms hardly five minutes ago.
So, naturally, his next course of action is to punch Bruce in the face. The Joker-like laughs have not been helping any, and so it’s a little bit harder than he’d intended it to be (though Bruce manages to easily dodge it). He decides to roll with it, though. “Why wasn’t I notified?” he demands, not throwing another solely because of the side-eye Alfred was giving him that reminded him that they were in the Medbay and not in any designated sparring areas.
Bruce gives him a blank look, one Jason knows he adopts when he doesn’t know what emotion to express. “You didn’t need to be. Nightwing was already on sight, and the perpetrators were apprehended. Evac was already on its way.”
Jason shoves down the too-familiar feeling in his chest as he snarls, turning around to face the two. Or the four, rather, but given that one of them’s passed out cold from the antidote Jason’s pretty sure he’s okay. But… Why hadn’t Tim?
Frowning, he watches as Bruce turns away from him to shadow Dick at the Replacement’s side, Cass darting in to help Alfred move Blondie. The two whisper at each other, words rising as they argue and Jason can make out bare snippets of Bruce overriding Dick.
He’s about to ask over what, when Tim’s hand shoots out. Jason immediately jerks forward to try and stop the kid from burying a scalpel into his dad’s neck. Dick seems to have the same idea, but Bruce moves fast enough to grab Tim’s hand before it can do any real damage. They both move in tandem, Dick holding Tim’s arms to his chest while Bruce disarms him.
Seemingly forgetting Jason is mad at him, Bruce looks up at him from where he’s helping restrain Tim, who’s added thrashing to his mixing pot of crazy. “Hold him down.”
Jason would argue, but it’d have to be saved for later once the Replacement stopped making those horrible grating-screeching noises. “Fine.” Taking over Bruce’s place at Tim’s side, he helps Dick restrain the kid from where he’s clawing at his face. The action makes an alarm go off in the back of his mind, but Jason dismisses it. Everyone reacts to Joker venom differently, and maybe Tim had just gotten a higher dose.
Dick makes a small noise of protest when Bruce comes back with a sedative, but he’s quelled by the glare Bruce sends his way. It pisses Jason off, and he puts a little more effort into holding the Replacement down than he really needs to, as Bruce administers the sedative.
“Can’t ya just give him some more of the antidote? Instead of sticking something else in his system?” Dick shakes his head, which surprises Jason a little. Hadn’t that been what they were arguing about?
“The antidote worked, Little Wing. Bruce just wants to try and subdue the aftereffects instead of actually taking care of the problem.” The last line is accompanied by a hard look in Bruce’s direction, who’s pointedly ignoring both of them as he walks out of the room, the ass.
“I thought the new antidote had gotten all of those wiped out. And why didn’t Blondie react like him, then?” The sedative has begun taking effect, and Jason lets go of Tim’s shoulders as they go slack, letting Dick gently ease the kid back down to the bed.
“Tim, uh,” Dick purses his lips, not looking at him and instead fussing at Tim’s unconscious side like a mother hen. And Jason is starting to get really frustrated with people ignoring him.
“Tim, what?”
Finally, Dick walks away from the bed, looking up at him. Jason wonders if he’s preparing himself for a fight, moving away from Tim and all, and he tenses up just in case. But all Dick does is shake his head. “Sorry, Little Wing. But it’s not for me to tell, you’ll have to ask Tim when he’s conscious again.”
Jason holds back the words, before thinking, you know what, fuck it. It’s not like he’s at the seventeen-year-old’s sickbed anymore. “Right. Well, I think I’m just about finished with everyone’s cryptic ass bullshit, so I’m going to head out.” Stalking out of the room with Dick following him, Jason pulls his helmet back on.
“Littl—”
Jason straddles his bike. “Don’t call me for anything short of a breakout. And don’t try following me.”
“Jas—”
Jason leaves, and Dick doesn’t try and stop him.
______
Tim watches Jason smoking on the adjacent rooftop for a solid twenty minutes before the whispers of ‘stalker’ catch up to him, and he pulls out his grapple.
The man doesn’t move at the sound Tim makes when he lands, which confirms his doubt that he’d known he was there for at least the past five minutes, just taps the cigarette out against his gauntlet before letting it fall and crushing it under his boot. Tim walks up to him. Jason takes his helmet off.
Tim debates taking off his cowl too; they’re high enough that no civilians should see them, and Oracle had cams covered. Besides, it’ll make the conversation they were bound to have a bit easier.
Before Jason could open his mouth and make whatever awkward small-talk that was bound to come after the revelation in a poor attempt to segue into an interrogation, Tim juts his chin out. Eyes everywhere but the un-masked man next to him, he says, like the world’s worst pick-up artist, “So, I heard you were asking about me.”
Jason turns to face him, brow furrowed as he considers Tim, before his eyes widen. “Rep-”
But Tim’s already pushing off the cowl, they’re high up enough that it doesn’t matter, pulling out the bat-grade make-up wipes, and rubbing at his face. Jason watches with muted horror as bone-white bleached skin is revealed beneath the heavy concealer. The scar tissue is heavier, though, running up the sides of his cheeks in a mock smile. Jason looks like he’s going to be sick.
Tim can’t look at Jason’s not-grimaces for any longer, so he turns to the city’s skyline to offer him some privacy as he went through the process of repressing his own memories that must have surfaced at the smile. And maybe Tim needs a moment for himself, too. He sits down on the edge of the rooftop and Jason follows him after a moment of hesitation.
Jason’s next words come a minute later, low like its a secret. Like most of the caped community hadn’t found out that the reason why Robin was benched for almost eight months was because he’d gone batshit insane and tried to kill the Joker. But then again, it makes sense, with how out of the loop Jason used to be, that he hadn’t known about it before. It makes him wonder why Talia hadn’t told him as another form of manipulation, before dismissing it at her fearing that it would make Jason sympathize with him too much, and focusing on Jason’s question. “He got you too.”
Well, it’s not much of a question. Tim answers it anyway. “Yeah.”
Tim expects Jason to ask about the torture, the electrocution, the brainwashing, but all he asks is, “How old were you?”
Looking down the edge, down at the vacant sidewalks and empty streets, Tim answers, “Fourteen.” Just a year younger than the elder.
Jason practically explodes, jumping up and hand going to his gun (and Tim only relaxes when he realizes it’s just his grapple), as he snarls, “B should have killed that fucker when he had the chance! Hell, the psycho takes two Robins and he still doesn’t give a damn—”
“I shot him.”
Jason sits back down. “Explain,” he says quietly, the anger from earlier still simmering beneath his adopted calm he was trying so desperately to cling to. For Tim’s sake.
“You don’t—he—,” Tim cuts himself, taking a deep breath before starting again. “I wasn’t thinking,” and that one draws a totally passable laugh from him, “I was certifiably insane at that point, but the Joker told me to shoot B and I just, I couldn’t. So I shot him instead.” Tim looks up, square at Jason for the first time that night as he admits, “Almost killed him, too, you know.” Another thing to add to the list of reasons why Bruce can’t even look him in the face the same way as before.
Jason’s eyes are sincere when they look into his, but Tim’s not sure if it’s meant for himself or Tim when he says, “I wish you had.”
Tim swallows, gaze swinging back over to the lights of the city he was so long deprived of, trapped in that comical, horrifying parody of a ‘home’ that was the Joker’s warehouse.
“Yeah,” he almost whispers. “So do I.”