Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

There is sand, dull-golden stones, and vast blue sky as far as the eye can see, and really not much else. Behind him, the tracks of an old, beaten-down vehicle are slowly disappearing as the breeze kicks up the dusty earth. The man Tim had paid to bring him out here had looked at him awfully funny, but had finally left at Tim’s insistence. Who would want to be left all the way out here, after all? Luckily, the money had been enough; Tim hadn’t also needed to lie about his intentions here.

He’d been following Bruce’s trail for over a month now, and it had led him here. Ethiopia, but not terribly near where Jason had died. Tim thanks the universe for small mercies.

He hikes up the legs of his cargo pants just a little (he’d forgone the suit for this particular excursion—hitching a ride out here had been difficult enough as it was) to keep them from dragging in the dust as he makes his way forward. The earth crunches beneath his feet every time his weight shifts. It isn’t like Gotham. He hasn’t been anywhere like Gotham in a long time. Some part of him misses it, and that part wars constantly with the taste of bile in the back of his throat whenever he thinks of his hometown. Gotham is a cold city; she always has been. Chilly to strangers and residents alike, even at the best of times.

Recently, the chill has become a full-blown frostbite. A squall, loud and roaring and fucking freezing . Damian’s sneer, the way Jason’s nose scrunches up, like he’s smelled something foul, any time Tim enters the room, and the way Dick would see, then look deliberately away, awkward and purposeful. The way that Bruce wouldn’t even notice. He has (or, had, now) eyes only for those three. Something deep in Tim’s stomach would twist every time Bruce would ease at the sight of Damian, Jason, and Dick, how those tense shoulders would drop, half-an-inch or less but enough to notice, no matter how much he insisted to himself that he was nothing but happy (no, thrilled ) for all of them.

There’s no chill here. Just sky and sand, and only a light breeze to cut through the oppressive heat of the sunny summer day. Tim makes his way along, following his mental map, the physical version still folded up in a pocket of his cargo pants. With his back turned to the sun, he makes a decent pace.

With his back turned to the sun, he has no way of seeing the murky tan cloud of dust rapidly approaching from the horizon behind him.

The storm seems to come in all at once—before he has the chance to form even a basic plan, it’s whipping around him, seeming to come from every direction at once, and with a force that threatens to sweep him off his feet and knocks the breath from his lungs almost instantly. He stays upright, but it’s a near thing.

He’s been trying to block his face from the storm, but the pouring rain of sand breaks through his defense without any trouble at all—it’s crusting around his eyes almost immediately, and, with every gasp, he draws the tiny shards into his lungs. Coughing is more painful still. When he moves his arms to grasp at the new tightness in his chest, the sand finds its way into his eyes, and he gasps again. Shit, that hurts . Each grain is a little dagger, scraping harshly against his cornea, and hopefully no deeper. Tears well up—a grainy, salty sludge begins to drip down his chin as they mix with the grit now caked on his face.

He’s disoriented now, all turned around from trying to find an angle, any angle, where he isn’t facing the onslaught of wind directly. He wouldn’t know what way was up, but gravity guides him as he drops to his knees, couching down to protect his face in his lap. The wind is howling, and it seems to only pick up speed.

How long do sandstorms last? Even low-to-the-ground as he is now, the wind sways him this way and that, and Tim’s eyes and lungs sting horribly. Dully, he wonders if the sand has made its way under the bandage on his abdomen and reached the still-fresh speelectomy wound there, and how ironic and fitting it would be that a splenectomy infection would be the thing to kill him.

Finally, the wind blows hard enough that even Tim’s smallest, most protective, curled-up position is broken—he sways forward, eyes screwed shut, and goes light-headed and dizzy for just a moment–

–and when his hands hit the ground in front of him, it’s not the slippery, sliding surface of a sandy desert. That’s concrete under his palms.

He freezes for a moment, confused, and even more disoriented than before. The air is still, and the sand seems to be gone, but when he scrunches up his forehead in confusion, he feels the crusty particles scatter down his face.  Then his eyes are burning again, and the tears are welling up to try and dispel the grains in them, and the scratchy feeling in his throat and lungs (and maybe stomach, too) is giving him the intense desire to cough, vomit, do whatever it takes to expel the weathered stone inside him. It can’t be that much, he’d been covering his face, but his entire body feels weighed down with it.

He does cough, and he heaves with a retch, too, though nothing comes up just yet.

Tim tries to open his eyes, and he only manages it for long enough to register how blurry and distant everything looks, before the sharp stinging drives them closed again. Of course, having them closed doesn’t feel any good, either; it takes all of his willpower not to rub at them and grind the sand in deeper. The tears well again, and he lets them, hoping desperately that they’ll do their job, even with so much material to remove. Even more desperately, he hopes that the blurriness won’t be permanent.

He retches again, and this time something comes up. He doesn’t open his eyes to inspect it, and tries very hard not to collapse forward into it. He’s suddenly so, so tired.

The queasiness subsides, and Tim, eyes still closed and tears still flowing, takes a moment to take stock of his situation. It’s definitely concrete under his hands. The wind is no longer howling around him. And he’s cold , as if the sun had suddenly just… gone out. He hopes it isn’t shock. And it very well could be, but that, at least, wouldn’t explain the concrete beneath him.

He gives opening his eyes another shot. It feels awful. Every instinct wants him to close them again, but he powers through. ‘ C’mon, Tim ,’ he coached himself. Little blinks only, when the feeling gets too strong; he wouldn’t ever be able to figure this out if he couldn’t get himself to just open his damn eyes. The blurriness never passes, not completely. And the pain never wanes, but eventually the work-oriented part of his brain catches up with his “oh shit, this hurts” part, and the cogs begin to turn again.

Even without the kind of vision clarity he’s used to, Tim can immediately tell two things:

1. He’s up high. A rooftop for sure.
2. This is Gotham. No mistaking it.

Panic wants him to retch again. Shock just feels numb. Eventually, panic wins out, but the cogs never stop turning, even as he hunches once again over the puddle of bile he’d brought up before. How had Tim ended up in Gotham? He’d been halfway across the planet , in the middle of nowhere , having told absolutely no one from Gotham where he’d be (and why would he?).

Explanation one was brain damage. He’d lost time somewhere, and, he supposes, never had a shower between then and making his way to Gotham. Or seen a doctor, he thinks, as more tears slip down his cheeks, taking glistening sand particles with them. It’s unusually cold in Gotham for summer, too, but the sun is setting already, and Gotham has her cold days pretty much year-round; it’s nothing totally unheard of.

Explanation two: some kind of teleportation? Even then, he has to be missing time; he’d been alone in the desert, and there hadn’t been any tech of that caliber (or at all, really, except his own) within view, and he’d been able to see for miles.

Neither were a good option, but when he tries to come up with anything better, he draws a complete blank.

That would be the brain damage, probably.

Just as Tim is reaching up to palpate his scalp for lumps, there’s the dull thud of heavy boots slamming into concrete behind him. Tim turns, and the moonlight behind the figure hurts to look at, and squinting hurts just as much. Tim’s vision is blurry enough that looking hardly does him any favors anyway, but he knows that silhouette.
“Hey, kid. You good?” The voice modulator confirms it. Tim scrambles back, narrowly avoiding his own puddle of vomit. Oh, shit. He hadn’t been able to tell at first—this is definitely Jason’s territory. Even with the helmet on, Tim knows the Red Hood is looking him up and down, like prey. The last time he and Jason Todd had been alone together, Jason had carved him a happy little extra mouth, gaping right across his throat. He suppresses the automatic instinct to slap his hand over the scar protectively.

When Tim doesn’t respond, Jason keeps approaching, and Tim keeps retreating. Before long, he feels the edge of the roof digging into his shin. Jason sighs, and Tim’s heart beats faster in his chest. “Look, kid,” he begins, and Tim doesn’t know where this is going, but he’s absolutely sure that he doesn’t want to find out. Jason seems surprised to see him here, but the hesitance won’t last. Tim’s vision isn’t clearing anyway; it’s time to get out, now .

He takes the opportunity. Through half adrenaline and half muscle memory, Tim springs away from Jason, over the edge of the building. He lets himself fall for a moment, then catches himself on the fire escape and scrambles down the side. Above him, Jason rushes toward the edge of the roof. “Hey, wait!” Tim can hear the annoyance in his voice, and the adrenaline jumps again. He darts away, a little stiff-legged, but certainly determined, following Jason’s movements to the best of his ability by the sound of his heavy footfalls. He still can’t see very well, but, before this part of Gotham belonged to Jason, it belonged to Tim. Muscle memory alone is enough. It’ll have to be,

He rounds as many corners as he can. He can hear Jason grunting and calling out behind him, increasingly irritated with every stride Tim gains on him, but it only drives him to move faster.

There! He knows this street. There’s a back alleyway here, where he’d been fooled once before. He ducks into the side street and behind the dumpster waiting for him there, making as little noise as possible, except to clip his shoulder against the chain-link fence that splits the alley in two. When Jason rounds the corner, the fence is still rattling, and the Red Hood takes the bait—he launches himself over the fence without thought, and hits the ground running on the other side, leaving Tim, huddled up behind the dumpster, to catch his breath at last.

After several minutes, his heart begins to slow, and the worst of the nausea abates. He takes stock of his situation again. He knows where he is now, and his eyes, though still stinging and certainly scratched up, judging by his vision, seem mostly free of sand by now; the situation is much improved, in any case. His stomach is sore, and his breathing feels scratchy, but he seems to be in no immediate danger, or at least not any danger that he can do anything about.

When he pats his cargo pants’ pockets, he has exactly what he remembers having last—a few whirlybirds, several small smoke pellets, one canister of tear gas, the physical version of his map, and about $90 in emergency funds.

No keys, not to any of his Gotham safe houses. Not enough money for a hotel room, even one of the dingy ones downtown. And he was not going back to the manor. Absolutely not .

When Damian had shown up in Gotham, Tim had taken the hint, okay? He’d gotten it. And when he’d packed up his things at Wayne Manor and left, and Commissioner Gordon had pulled him aside, not two nights later, and gently asked him if he intended to keep going by “Robin” even with Batman’s new partner of the same name, Tim had been downright gracious about it. He’d told Gordon, no, just figuring out something new still . And he’d left, and he hadn’t looked back. No hard feelings for any of them, except, of course, for him.

Besides, he can only imagine how Jason would greet him now, after having just escaped him in his own territory. Tim shudders, blames it on the cold, and ultimately decides not to think about it.

He’s too tired, too frazzled, to deal with this, he decides. His brain feels as fuzzy as his vision, and his heart, though not as erratic now, doesn’t seem to want to slow to a normal rate. He should sort himself out now. He should . But.. No one’s looking. There’s no one to be strong for. And he’s tired .

The best he can do is brush the sand off of himself to the best of his ability, curl up tighter against the building at his back, settle his face between his knees, and wish for more answers tomorrow. Perhaps to not freeze to death overnight, too. That might be nice.

Chapter Text

When Tim wakes, there’s the familiar feeling of liquid dripping down his nose. This time, it’s not salty, sandy lacrimal fluid (not tears , he wasn’t crying )—it’s rain. Cold rain. The sky is a stormy gray—Gotham’s sunrise. It’s early yet.

The bleary feeling dissipates as he blinks, but the blurriness is still there—he can’t tell if it’s just wishful thinking, but he thinks it may be a little bit clearer than yesterday. As the feeling of lingering sleep begins to lift, Tim can feel the cold puddle of water beneath him that has seeped through his boots to saturate his socks. His toes feel numb. His sodden long-sleeve shirt (designed to protect from the sand, originally) covers his arms, but he can feel the chills that run along them, leaving raised gooseflesh in their wake.

Right. No more cowering behind a dumpster. Tim has work to do.

The storm isn’t terrible now, but it’s Gotham—there’s always, always , the potential for things to get worse. As much as Tim wants answers, wants information, priority one is shelter. At least until this storm passes. He can’t stay here either way—this is where Jason had lost him, and, assuming Jason had told the rest of the Bats (and Tim will work off of the assumption that he had, to cover all of his bases), they could be back at any time. Daylight is a relatively reliable deterrent for now, but he can’t be here when night falls again. He hasn’t been in Gotham in almost six months, and he’d left on awful terms—if it isn’t Jason or Damian that find him here and kill him, it would be Dick. Tim doesn’t want to see Dick; he can’t . And he can’t imagine Dick would take too kindly to seeing Tim again either. Words like crazy and grieving and lost it appear in his head, repeated back to him in Dick’s voice, and it’s time to shut down that line of thinking.

His mind made up, Tim pushes himself to his feet, bracing himself against the dumpster when his sore legs protest. Pins and needles spark up, rippling through his nerve endings as his body finally unfolds, and he shuffles out from the tight space. Habit has him scanning the alleyway for movement, but there is none. Hood is long gone, and, though he can hear the beginnings of people moving about in the buildings on either side of him, the street itself is empty. He takes the opportunity to slip away and into the main street.

Tim’s first thought is the manor, but it’s fleeting; as soon as it comes, he chastises himself internally for even thinking of it. He had already checked his pockets for any of his safehouse keys, and no dice there. He could take refuge in one of the more run-down buildings in Park Row—the street is so riddled with crime that it’s unlikely to have the police (or the bats) called on him, but he doesn’t have his suit, and he’s low on supplies. Plus, what he does have would look awfully suspicious on what looks to be, right now, an ordinary street kid. If that all weren’t enough, Park Row belongs to Jason, and Tim has had very much enough with the close calls for a while. So when Tim comes across the eventual T in the street, he goes left; no Crime Alley for him for now.

There’s only one other place he can think to go. It’s farther than he’d like, a few miles out from the city, like Wayne Manor, but it’ll still be empty; Tim had never sold the property. He’s soaked down to the bone and shivering by the time he reaches Drake Manor, chafing from sand in places he hadn’t even known he has, but in relatively decent spirits. Even without the utilities on anymore, Tim longs for the sturdy four-walls (and stocked blanket closet) of his childhood home, unhappy memories aside.

Drake manor appears as Tim leaves the city behind, and he lengthens his stride, ignoring the ache in his muscles and the scraping of sand stuck in his clothes against his skin. He skirts the edge of the manor—he doesn’t have his keys, but there’s a loose window latch on the backside of the house that he can finagle open, even from the outside. But he has to stop not even halfway from the street to the house. That’s… not right. The lights are on, for one. And the garden, that garden that he’d let grow untamed, is perfectly landscaped and groomed. It can’t be squatters. Squatters don’t garden, and squatters can’t just return electricity to a house without utilities.

Anger surges up. Dick, that asshole ! He doesn’t know how the fuck Dick got ahold of his father’s entire house ( Tim’s inheritance, thank you very much) and sold it, but what other explanation is there? What, so Tim had gone missing, and Dick had swooped in to take everything , even the things he didn’t have any fucking right to ? He’d hated it when Dick and Bruce had given Robin to Damian, but, his father’s house? Tim’s house? How had he even managed that? And why?

He’s not sure what to do now. He stands dumbly in his late father’s driveway. It’s not fair , of course it’s not, but he can’t just kick someone out of a house they thought they were buying rightfully, no matter how much he wants to. Eventually, he decides, not everyone in Gotham is a psycho—maybe if he just explains, they’ll let him crash (and maybe even have a shower), just for the night, at least.

He feels like a kid again, toddling up to the manor in the rain. Except, when he was a kid, the manor was always empty—now, when it’s supposed to be empty, it’s not. Go figure

Just as he’s approaching the front of the house, shadows move in the windows on either side of the door; the blinds are drawn (pale blue ones that Tim doesn’t recognize), but the silhouettes are clear enough for even his damaged eyes to make out. Tim straightens his back (a habit of being on this property), but the door cracks open, pauses there, and he can hear the voices coming from inside, and—

—that’s not right. That’s really not right. Tim’s blood runs cold, and as the door begins to widen further, and Tim’s nerve crumbles, he dives for the bushes. He presses his back flat against the stone exterior of Drake Manor, and hears the tell-tale click-clacking of Janet Drake’s favorite pair of heels against the doorstep.

“What’s this new restaurant supposed to be again, dear?”

“It’s Italian, Janet.” His father lifts an aim, waving at a car that’s appearing up the driveway.

“Italian? Hm.” His mother’s delicate laugh chills him to the bone. But this time, there’s no cold words to follow. “Are you looking to compare them when we’re in Italy next month?” His father’s returning chuckle muffles midway through as they both step into the car and it pulls away from the house.
Tim stays squeezed between the house and the rose bushes, waiting for his heart to stop pounding in his chest.

What the fuck.

What that fuck .

Every assumption Tim had made about his situation crumbles into dust. Suddenly, the necessity of shelter becomes an optional luxury. Information is the new necessity. He has to figure out what the fuck is going on. For the second time that day, Tim shimmies out from a wall, ignoring the thorns that snag in his clothes. His hands are shaking again; his whole body is shaking. His leg feels weak, and he braces a hand against the wall. He hasn’t heard his parents in years , let alone seen them up, walking around and talking to each other amicably. He’s not sure if he’s ever heard Jack and Janet banter with each other like that, like it was actually real, and they were doing it for genuine enjoyment and not for show.

Tim looks back up at the house, but it’s dark and quiet now. If this is actual time travel and not just lost time from brain damage or what have you, this Tim isn’t home. He’s not sure what this Tim would do if an older version of himself came crawling through a window, or was sleeping in his guest room when he came home; Drake Manor is probably not an option. He’s not sure he really wants to confront those demons anyway (he definitely doesn’t).

Jack and Janet car has long since disappeared down the road. It’s still drizzling, but the rain is clearing up. Tim wants information desperately, but it’s been at least 24 hours since he’s eaten anything, and he’s pretty sure any libraries, even Gotham libraries, would want to turn away a drenched, dripping, half-blind kid who will stumble around and track clumps of wet sand and mud into their establishment. So, that’s another problem.

Before anything else, Tim has to get back into town. Eager to get away from this old house, and what he just witnessed (but less thrilled for the trek back into Gotham proper), Tim turns on his heel and gets the hell out of dodge.

-------

There’s a convenience store on the outskirts of the city. It’s one that Dick and Tim used to come by, every so often, at the end of patrols that ended in this segment of the city. It’s a small convenience store, but they always stocked Dick’s favorite (godawful) Jolly Rancher popsicles. He can’t tell if the memory of that makes him feel warm or hollow, but it’s the closest store to Drake Manor, and Tim’s pretty exhausted by the time he reaches it; it’s been a rough couple of days. He all but stumbles through the door. The teenager at the cash register barely looks up.

It’s getting late, fast. Tim doesn’t really have time to hang around, so he makes a beeline for the small collection of clothing at the back of the store. There’s a Gotham Academy sweatshirt (a dark maroon) that he grabs (a size too large, but it should do). There’s also a few pairs of sweatpants— he deliberates on that for a few minutes. Most of the sand and muck has fallen or been washed out of his current pair of pants, but they’re still completely soaked through. On the other hand, his cargo pants have enough pockets to carry almost everything he has on him. The sweatshirt on its own is more than he’d ideally like to spend ($25, almost a third of what he has on him), but he’s freezing, He grabs the $15 sweatpants reluctantly.

His stomach growls as he passes the food aisles, but he can’t . With the clothes, he’ll only have $50 left, and that goes quick in a city like Gotham. Still, he stops to stare longingly at the small refrigerated rack of deli sandwiches.

The teenager manning the store clears his throat. “Hey, man, we’re closing up soon.” Tim nods at him, riffling through his pockets for his small roll of bills as he makes his way up to the register, leaving the sandwiches behind. Worst part is, he knows some of those will be tossed, pretty much as soon as the store closes down. He doesn’t even try to convince the teenager, though; the poor kid probably gets enough shit from people in Tim’s situation, and it’s not like it’s in his control what happens to the food that’s going bad.

The kid rings him up, and Tim forks over his cash. $42.68 later, Tim’s got the sweatshirt and sweatpants in a crinkly plastic bag. He knows this convenience store doesn’t have a restroom open to customers, but he asks anyway. Worth a shot, even when the cashier shakes his head.

Tim heads for the exit. The rain has stopped, which is an appreciated mercy. It’s probably around 6:30 now, which gives him at least a couple hours until most things close down. There’s a community center not too far from this part of the city. When the gym had a backed-up sewage pipe that burst, his school had used it for Homecoming during Tim’s freshman year. If he’s lucky, he’ll be able to get a hold of one of the computers there, and maybe he’ll finally be able to figure out what the hell is going on here.

-------

The community center looks the same as it always has—in light of recent events, Tim is immensely grateful for this. The trek here took up another 30 minutes, but it’s still open. And the small computer lab at the back of the main space is completely empty except for him. He settles in the hard-backed chair, is delighted to find the computer already logged in and connected to WiFi, and begins to look around (with his face about half an inch from the screen to make out the words through his blurry vision).

There’s a lot to find. For one, he was right—”this Tim” really wasn’t home, because “this Tim” doesn’t appear to exist at all. He’s got up the Jack and Janet Drake Wikipedia page (which is unnerving enough on its own, no matter that it also exists back home), and there’s a chilling “0” listed under the Children category. He skims the article itself, then keyword searches the webpage for any appearances of his name, but no dice. The only “Tims” and “Timothys” that appear are just listed in the “references” and “other articles” sections. Tim isn’t there.

He scrolls to the bottom and clicks through the references listed, articles about his parents (that aren’t his parents, really). They still travel, apparently, and why not? Not even a kid at home had stopped them before. They’re listed as part of numerous impressive archaeological digs, smiling broad smiles with their teams,  and Drake Industries seems to be prospering, too. They seem.. Accomplished. He can’t tell how much of it is just for show (Jannet had always believed so strongly in putting on a show), but they seem happy, too. There’s an ugly twist of grief and disgust in his stomach, and he’s immediately ashamed of himself. He should be happy for them. He isn’t. And he just can’t seem to force it.

He closes all of the articles, and sets down a different path. Bruce Wayne’s public figure seems much the same, at first. He’s alive, for one. Tim is hopeful, for just a second, that this Bruce Wayne never disappeared at all. “ Bruce Wayne’s Miraculous Recovery” squashes all of that hope all at once. He clicks on that article.

The official story told to the press was a plane crash… A private jet trip (presumably so it couldn’t be tracked by the general public). Tim has no idea how Bruce and the others managed to convince the world of that excuse, but Tim doesn’t hardly care—Tim isn’t going to look a gift horse in the mouth. This is just more proof that Tim is right , back home. Bruce is alive .

Tim collapses back in his chair, his eyes freshly sore and strained from the screen (he takes a moment to silently thank the universe that no one else is in the computer lab with him; he must have looked like a full-on psycho). They feel almost swollen when he closes them, but he hardly feels it. This Bruce is alive, and he’s surer than ever that means that his Bruce must be, too.

He supposes this means that he’s coming around to the whole “alternate universe” theory of it all, then. He’s a little familiar, but he (luckily) hasn’t had much experience himself. He’ll come back to that topic, he decides, maybe another day. His eyes are starting to seriously bother him by now, and he doesn’t have access to the kind of tech (or magic, as much as he dreads to admit that) to change his situation on that front just yet.

There’s only one last thing he looks for. Prying his tired eyes back open, he types “Jason Todd” into the search bar.

-------

Fifteen minutes into an equally remarkable (and fake) article about Jason Todd’s reappearance after a several year absence from the press, Tim hears a knock on the computer lab doorway. He scrambles to adjust his position to something less absolutely fucking off-his-rocker crazy, but it’s too late. The middle-aged woman closing up tonight is looking at him extremely uncomfortably. Suddenly, Tim remembers he’s still sitting in sandy, damp clothing, with a completely dry and clean outfit sitting right beside him in a plastic bag (as if being so close to the screen and text adjusted up so large hadn’t been bad enough), and, yeah, he’s a pretty decent reason to look uncomfortable.

She clears her throat, and awkwardly, apologetically tells him, “I’m sorry, young man, but you need to start heading out soon. I have to lock the door at eleven.”

Tim scrambles for his stuff. “Can I, uh, can I use the restroom real quick? She nods at him, and, thank god, takes her leave. He makes a beeline to the restroom and shucks off his wet clothing as quickly as possible. His skin is cold to the touch as he brushes the remaining grit off of himself to the best of his ability. The new sweatpants and sweatshirt (though a bit thin, and fraying in places, in typical convenience store fashion) are blessedly cozy, after the day Tim has had. He hopes it’s not still raining.

He shoves his wet clothes back in the plastic bag, books it out of the Community Center, and it’s not. The sky is dark, but dry. The bats will be out by now, and Tim doesn’t fancy a run-in with them, so he decides to just settle down someplace close by. He can’t afford a hotel room (nothing new there), so the streets will have to do for another night. It’s nothing Tim’s not used to, anyway.

Chapter Text

There’s a row of four tall apartment buildings, two on each side of the community center; they aren’t like the ones in Park Row; these ones are inhabited (officially and legally, anyway). Tim had instead huddled up against the side of one, in an exterior basement stairwell that protects him decently well from the Gotham autumn wind. When he wakes up, hunched almost completely in half on the concrete, it’s still dark out, and Tim’s eyes are absolutely killing him.

It’s not that they hurt , exactly (though they are definitely aching). More than anything, they just feel extremely uncomfortable . They’re swollen, and tired, and he can feel his heart beating right behind them. Or rather, it’s either his heart beating, or his head throbbing; a pounding and persistent migraine has blossomed overnight (and it certainly isn’t improving his vision any).

He can’t tell if the temperature outside has improved or only gotten worse since last night. There are goosebumps on his arms when he rolls up his sweatshirt sleeves to rub at them, but the chill feels distant, somehow. Until, suddenly, it doesn’t. A violent shiver wracks Tim’s entire body, so forceful that his knee knocks painfully against the bottom step. A minute later, the cold feeling recedes back into confusing, muddied numbness.

All in all, Tim’s had better mornings.

The chills come again, and Tim decides it’s time to stop sitting here being pathetic, because the more he wakes up, the more shitty he feels. First and foremost, Tim…unfortunately, Tim probably needs medical attention. He knows a fever when he feels one, and he knows what causes fevers. It’s not something he even wants to think about, but it’s not something he can just ignore. Tim’s a practiced master at ignoring things that bother him these days, but this one doesn’t apply. If he doesn’t take care of this, he might not be here tomorrow to regret that decision.

Well. No need to be that dramatic just yet. But it is time to get moving, for sure.

Bracing himself against the concrete at his side, Tim pushes himself to his feet. Black spots flit over his blurry vision just briefly (ah, so that hollow feeling must be his stomach eating itself), but after a few seconds, he feels steady enough on his feet. He can’t afford a hospital (and he essentially doesn’t even exist here, so that definitely throws any kind of insurance out the window), and he can’t just do nothing, so that leaves him with only one option.

Thank god for Leslie Thompkins , he thinks, not for the first time.

There’s the problem of all of his things. Leslie doesn’t tolerate weapons, for one, (she makes exceptions for the Bats, but, well, Tim isn’t exactly a Bat anymore, now is he?)  and Tim’s old clothes, the still-damp ones, are starting to smell suspiciously musty and moldy. He eventually decides to leave them. Having a change of clothes is a luxury he’s not thrilled to give up, but can’t properly get them clean anyway. He does stuff the contents of the cargo pants’ pockets into his new sweatpants pockets, though. They sort of bulge strangely, since he’s down to two pockets from an original four, but the black, plush fabric does a decent enough job of concealing the worst of it. Leslie isn’t going to like the whirlybird and smoke bombs if she finds them, especially since he can only assume he’ll be a stranger to her, but Tim can’t give those up. If he gets in a pinch (and he already almost did), they could very well save his skin.

He leaves the clothes in the plastic bag, and climbs out of the stairwell on tired legs. Leslie’s is a farther walk than he’d really like, but any walk is farther than he’d like to go right now. Nothing to do but get going.

Leslie Thompkins, as it turns out, is as much of an absolute godsend here as back home. It must be early yet, 2:00 or 3:00 AM, but the lights are on in the clinic, and he can see someone bustling around (in a very familiar fashion) in Leslie’s office window. His legs already feel like jelly, but they become weaker still with relief that the clinic is even open. The pounding in his head has graduated into an absolute roaring, and the hot-and-cold flashes have increased in frequency. There’s a muddied sense of nausea too, but he’s trying awfully hard to pretend it's not there. He takes the steps two at a time, and ignores the way the world sways around him.

Leslie’s receptionist for tonight waves at him as soon as he pulls open the door. He thinks she looks tired, but she’s definitely smiling, too. He can’t read her name tag; the letters are too small, and his vision is too blurry. He can see that the waiting room is empty, though. Tim can’t believe his luck—on bad days, he’s seen this clinic with a line going all the way around the block. Tim supposes the Bats here must be doing an impressive job keeping violence off the streets. For some reason, the thought aches. Maybe they are really more efficient without him around.

“Hello there!” The receptionist looks him clinically up and down, most likely assessing what he’s in for. Tim supposes that she can see him sort of swaying (oh..yeah, he’s definitely swaying), because she directs him immediately to one of the worn but plush chairs. “Dr. Thompson is with a patient right now, but she’ll be out as soon as she can.”

Tim nods, and then stills as pain blooms in his skull. He plops down in the nearest chair, the one indicated to him, and leans back, closing his sore eyes. The warmth of the clinic is a nice change. He’s basking in it, trying to ignore his trembling fingers and worsening fever.

Then the door opens with a creak, letting in the cold Gotham draft, and Tim cracks open a swollen eye grumpily–

–and freezes.

The Red Hood has his helmet tucked under his arm. He doesn’t move his head, but Tim knows he’s scanning the room (a reflex trained into all of them, one of Batman’s first lessons: know your surroundings ) underneath the domino. Tim sees him blink, surprised, and his hand makes an aborted movement at his side; he could have been lifting it to give a friendly wave, sure, (and Tim almost laughs out loud at the absurd visual), but it’s Jason Todd . Tim’s putting his money on reaching for his pistol on this one. Drawing a pistol in an emergency clinic seems pretty in-character for him, Tim thinks, a little hysterically.

He doesn’t stick around to find out, anyway. The adrenaline cuts through the muddiness of his fever with rapid and thorough efficiency. Tim can’t think about how shitty he felt only a moment ago, or how things like infections require treatment, and how that’s why he came here in the first place. All he can think about is bloody hands framing their handiwork on his throat, and a cool barrel of a gun on his forehead, and cold, cruel laughter–

He moves on pure instinct. Jason is covering the door, but Tim needs to get out . He rushes Hood (and distantly registers the widening of the white eye lenses of his domino mask) and shoves a pointy elbow under his ribcage. There’s body armor there, and Tim definitely isn’t at 100%, but the surprise is enough to have Jason grunting and moving away a few steps. He leaves just enough of a sliver in the doorway for Tim to squeeze through.

As he stumbles down the stairs and into the street, Jason and the receptionist both call after him (“Hey! Cool it!” and “Please wait, sir!” together at once), but he doesn’t stop. There are footsteps pounding behind him, but he’s gotten away before, and he’ll just have to get away again.

-

Jason’s not even breaking a sweat this time, catching up to this kid. He’s on his toes now (damn kid had basically evaporated into thin air last time, and Jason isn’t keen on letting him do that again), and there’s clearly something up. He’d seemed disoriented before, but he’s straight up staggering along now. Jason expects to make short work of this chase, and maybe he’ll finally get some fucking answers . But then a voice sounds in his ear, passive aggressive and demanding attention.

“You’re sure taking your sweet time getting here.” Jason stops with a swear. This kid is cause for concern, but that tone from Leslie (still using Damian’s comm) takes priority. Not even Jason fucks with Leslie.

“Cool it,” he says, with no real heat behind the words. “I was already there, yeah? Just got distracted.”

“Get undistracted,” she replies curtly. “I’m finished with Damian.”

“Done,” he mutters, too low for the comm, and backtracks back down the street toward the clinic. The kid’s gone by now, anyway. And Leslie doesn’t like to leave Bats in her waiting room (they’ve had incidents of people running away and not receiving care once they spot a Bat in the waiting room, much to Leslie's annoyance), so it probably really is best if he gets Damian home.

He jogs up the steps, and the kid is waiting in his Robin uniform, standing in the center of the waiting room. Leslie is nowhere to be seen–either she took another patient back, or she’s tidying up after Damian’s sudden visit. Jason claps his brother on the back, and is relieved when he seems steady on his feet. It was only a few cuts, but, well.. Blood loss is a bitch. “Time to go, R.”

He leads Damian out to the car—a discreet, run-down looking Ford that blends right in against the dirty street backdrop. Damian slides into the passenger’s seat, and Jason takes the wheel.

“To where did you disappear?”

Jason hums. “Ah. How pissed was Leslie?” Damian breathes out a laugh through his nose, and the side of Jason’s mouth quirks up. He makes sure Damian can see it; his brother smirks back.

When the two of them first met, Damian had hated Jason for his crude sense of humor (and reckless behavior, the hypocrite), and Jason had hated the stuck-up brat for being a stuck-up brat (duh). But Damian had mellowed out some (though Jason would never tell him that), and they had learned to get along. 

“She was not pleased.”

“Well, I’ll be sure to tell her I’m sorry,” Jason says, but they both know he won’t. And they both know Leslie already knows that. And also that Leslie is too busy to even care if Jason is sorry.

“What kept you?” Damian asks again.

Jason sighs. He rests his forehead on the steering wheel for a moment while they’re stopped at a red light. “There’s this kid,” he starts, and Damian’s eyebrows furrow.  “Don’t know ‘im. Just some kid. Met him last night, too. It’s just… he was acting kind of funny, you know? Both times.”

“Funny?”  Damian echos. Jason can see the cogs turning already. He’s a Bat through and through already.

“Stumbling. Looked lost. And fucking terrified .”

“Unfortunate drug reaction? Perhaps a hallucinogenic?” Damian guesses.

Jason hums again. It’s not a bad guess, but.. “I dunno. It’s like.. It’s like he recognized me. Me specifically.” Jason frowns, his nose scrunching up. “Gave me a real bad feeling. Can’t be sure, but he seemed like he was in some kinda trouble.”

Damian is looking concerned now, in that dumb, scrunched-up, emotionally-stunted way of his, and Jason reaches over to noogie his scalp one-handed (with…limited success). “Probably nothing to worry about,”  he insists.

Damian shakes his head. When he speaks, he sounds absolutely certain (and a little mocking, if Jason is being honest, as if all of this is obvious ). “If you are concerned, then there is reason to be concerned.”

Jason is quiet, focusing on the road for a few minutes as they begin to near the cave. He can feel Damian watching him. He really didn’t want to dump this on the kid; Bruce’ll kill him (or at least lecture him severely) if Damian dozes off in math again because Jason’s suspicious character story keeps him up working the case all night. None of them (Not Dick, Jason, or Damian, or any of the girls) are as detective work-inclined as Bruce, but none of them can resist brooding over a suspicious character, either. Bruce included, of course.

On second thought, maybe Bruce won’t throw so big of a fit. And if he does, at least Jason has a defense: like father, like son. That’s on you, old man, sorry .

“If you continue to be concerned over this, perhaps you should consider calling in a favor from Barbara.” Damian pipes up again, and Jason nods along. That’s… not a terrible idea. Babs could at least check up on the kid (she’s the best CCTV stalker Jason’s ever met), and Jason won’t have to waste brainpower while out in the field keeping an eye out ( “No daydreaming on patrol,” says Bruce’s voice in his head).

“Thanks, kid.” Damian nods, and seems put at ease. Jason, in turn, also relaxes; looks like Dami is gonna let him handle this one after all.

They pull into the cave, and Damian is adamant about walking like normal, so Jason pulls the Ford into the discreet car garage rather than driving up to meet Alfred. He takes the closet space to the main platform of the Batcave and turns off the ignition (but leaves the keys in). Damian climbs out, and, to his credit, seems to be walking just fine. Alfred raises an eyebrow when they appear on foot, but he doesn’t say anything about it.

“Eventful night, sirs?”

Jason smiles, one side of his mouth quirking up more than the other. Damian is starting to look tired now, so Jason answers for the both of them. “Nah. Not so bad—all fixed up now. Sorry Leslie stole your thunder.”

Alfred smiles. “Dear boy, I count it a blessing any day where I don’t have to stitch any of you back together. Dr. Thompkins is welcome to any “thunder” she wishes to take.”

Jason laughs. “Yeah, yeah. Sorry Alfie.” Alfred only smiles, so Jason looks back to Damian. He reaches out and knocks gently on the side of his brother’s head. “Hey, Dami, why don’t you grab a shower and hit the hay, yeah? I’ll handle the report writing tonight. And be careful with those stitches.”

Damian mumbles a thank-you, and an “I’m not an imbecile, Todd,” and wanders away in the direction of the showers. Alfred follows—most likely also concerned about the stitches. Contrary to what he told Alfred, it was kind of a long night for the kid. Injuries are injuries, even ones without complications (luckily) like tonight.

Jason makes a mental note to ask Bruce to give the kid a day off tomorrow.

With a weary grunt, Jason takes a seat at his work space next to the batcomputer, pulling up his records on his Red Hood-designated laptop to write one for tonight. Writing reports always sucks, but they’re a necessary evil. Before he can start, though, there’s one more thing he’s decided he wants to do.

He taps the side of his comm. “Hey, Babs. Can I call in a favor?”

Chapter Text

There’s just barely sunlight filtering through the drawn blinds around the window (left purposely open for this very reason); it’s still enough to rouse Bruce. He grunts, lifting a hand to flop over his eyes, but he really should get up. He’s almost made a full week of coming into work on time (or nearly on time), and Lucius had been distinctly impressed. To break that streak now, on a Friday, would be disappointing for both of them.

Bruce swings his legs over the edge of the mattress, blinks the grogginess of a late night out of his eyes, and heads for the bathroom to brush his teeth.

-----

Automatically, as he steps out from his bedroom into the hall, Bruce catalogs where everyone should be, taking mental stock of all of his children. He can’t help it, now. Ever since Jason had gone missing, had been just about killed …it comes as naturally as breathing. Sometimes it feels even more vital.

He peeks into Damian’s room as he passes. He winces when the lump beneath the covers begins to stir only from the soft sound of the door clicking open. 

“Go back to sleep,” he assures before Damian can wake enough to begin cataloging his surroundings, assessing them for threats, taking stock of his own condition… all of those Robin things that are absolutely not conducive to a good night’s sleep. It’s early yet, and his youngest was injured last night; he’s earned himself at least that. No school for him today.

Only a few years ago, Damian would have responded with hostility, or indignance, or contempt. Now, he just relaxes again with a long sigh, and a mumble that might have been words in another circumstance. Bruce stands in the doorway for a long minute, until the boy’s breathing evens all the way out again, and Bruce turns back into the hall on silent feet. He leaves the door open a crack; all of the other doors in the corridor are open, and rooms vacant; there’s no one here to wake Damian, and the click of the door could do it all over again, if Bruce isn’t lucky.

Dick is just where Bruce expects him to be, but Jason isn’t. His oldest is at the breakfast nook, wolfing down a bowl of sugary cereal (the box says “Magical Forest.” It looks like Lucky Charms, except there’s a dragon on the front, not a Leprechaun). On an ordinary Friday, Dick would be in Blüdhaven, and most likely already at work by now. But he’d come home yesterday at Jason’s request (for help on a case he’s working, a new one Jason hasn’t yet told Bruce about. He knows a little, from Jason’s nightly reports, but he’ll have to talk to his son about it to figure out what Jason’s hunch exactly is.), and stayed on account of Damian.

Dick smiles up at him as he crosses into the kitchen, waving a spoon. Alfred looks over too, from where he’s making breakfast for the rest of them (those of them who want to eat anything other than pure sugar and dairy for a meal).

“Good morning, Master Bruce.”

“Hey, B. Have you seen Dami yet today?”

Bruce hums, sinking down into the chair next to his eldest son. “Still asleep.”

“Good, glad to hear that. He’s had a rough couple of days.” Dick pauses, spooning some milk (that has turned an awful shade of greenish-bluish-brown) into his mouth. Bruce can barely keep from scrunching up his nose, but Dick doesn’t even blink. “Does he know he’s benched?”

Bruce snorts. “It’s implied.”

Dick laughs. “He’s not gonna love that.”

“None of you ever do,” Bruce points out dryly.

“None of you indeed, sir,” Alfred says, moving over to the table to set Bruce’s breakfast in front of him. His eyebrow raises as he says it, and Bruce keeps a stoic expression behind a long, sheepish sip of coffee. It’s a fair point, at least. (And there goes Dick, grinning at him from across the table.)

“You’d best eat quickly, Master Bruce. That is, if you intend to be on time this morning.”

Bruce begins shoveling eggs into his mouth without a word. Dick is still grinning away, the traitor.

Alfred disappears back into the kitchen, but he’s back by the time Bruce is downing the last of his coffee.

“Telephone for you, sir.”

He gets up, plate in hand, and Alfred trades the plate for the landline phone. Bruce leans against the buffet table and lifts the handset to his ear. “Bruce Wayne.”

“Hello Bruce,” comes icily from the other line. He straightens his back, eyebrows furrowing; Dick looks up from his own breakfast, peeking at him through the open doorway. He watches as Nightwing descends over his son’s expression, and shakes his head when Dick moves to stand up.

“Leslie. To what do I owe the pleasure?”

Dr. Thompkins makes an annoying huffing sound. “Your son scared away one of my patients last night. We waited for him this morning, but he hasn’t come back yet.”

Bruce glances at his watch. It’s still early yet, but the clinic is open 24/7, and Leslie’s official shift started two hours ago (though he suspects that she’s been there all night now, fretting). He opens his mouth to suggest that this patient could still be on their way, but she cuts him off.

“I agreed to keep you and your childrens’ care under the radar on the condition that it would not interfere with my other patients. This is your problem now, Bruce. Get him back here.”

The phone hangs up with a click , before Bruce can even say ‘I’ll be there in twenty .’ He places the handset back on the hook, lifting his other hand to massage the headache from behind his brow. Dick’s wandered over now, leaning around Bruce, one arm braced on the buffet table, to look his father in the eye. His own eyebrows are drawn up together, and Bruce has the sudden (but less unfamiliar, these days) paternal urge to soothe the wrinkles from his forehead.

“Everything alright?”

Bruce grunts. “Looks like Jason or Damian caused some trouble at the clinic,” he gripes, and Dick laughs, a little nervously.

“I guess you’d better break the news to Lucius.”

Grumbling, Bruce begins to punch in the number. Dick laughs again, slapping him on the shoulder.

-----

Lucius hadn’t been pleased, but he’d agreed to cover for Bruce. He makes a mental note to give him a raise and he heads down to the cave, two steps at a time. Leslie has a patient now (he’d called her back, and she’d promptly told him to stop bothering her), so maybe he can kill the time getting a jump on this new missing patient case. With luck, by the time he’s done, this would-be patient of hers will be back at the clinic.

Jason is sitting hunched at the batcomputer as his feet hit the bottom step. His second eldest lifts a cursory hand, but does not look up from what he’s doing. Bruce heads straight for him, the new mystery momentarily forgotten in favor of massaging the tension out of his son’s shoulders. “Hey, Jaylad. Have you been here all night?”

Jason makes a noncommittal noise that Bruce knows means yes , and keepings typing away. He looks up at what Jason’s combing through. It looks like missing persons reports, but Jason must be looking for something specific; he flips through the pages after only a glance at each.

He knows it’ll just annoy his son, but he has to say it anyway. “You should have gotten some sleep. I thought you were patrolling with Dick tonight.”

Sure enough, Jason makes a frustrated noise. “If you’re that worried about people not getting enough rest around here, take a look in the mirror, yeah?” Which Bruce thinks is unfair—he had gotten a few hours of sleep last night—but he doesn’t pipe up with this information. “Or, better yet, be worried about this damn kid .”

Bruce connects the dots on that one pretty easily. He braces his hands on the desk and joins his son, analyzing the missing persons reports more closely (not that he really knows what he’s looking for). “Leslie’s missing patient?”

Jason does look up at that. “What, did she chew you out about me?”

The corner of Bruce’s mouth quirks up. “A little, maybe. What happened?”

Jason leans back in his chair, reaching up to scratch at his scalp, frustrated or confused, probably both. “Hell if I know. Kid just freaked , I wasn’t even doing anything, I swear, B–”

“I know,” Bruce soothes. “You don’t have to justify yourself to me, Jaylad. I know.” Jason finally relaxes into Bruce’s touch, and his heart aches. “Just tell me what happened.”

“I don’t know. Never seen the guy around at all, till a couple of nights ago. Found ‘im staggering around on a rooftop, puking his guts up and climbing down fire escapes with his eyes screwed shut. Then, when I went after him, he just straight up disappeared .” Jason slams his hands down on the desk, clearly extremely frustrated. “I’m the goddamn Red Hood and this fucking kid got away from me.”

“What would you have done if you’d caught him?”

“That’s the thing.” Jason leans forward again. Back to hunching and scrolling through databases. “I was just gonna let him know about Leslie’s. He seemed pretty…sick, or hurt, maybe. And like I said, I’ve never seen him around.” Jason shrugged. “Just figured he might not know.”

“I’m sorry, Jaylad,” Bruce says. Jason just shrugs. No heart-to-heart this morning, then. That’s just fine. Bruce pulls up his own chair and settles next to his son. He’s still in Bruce Wayne’s suit, and there’s no cowl in sight, but he sets his jaw like Batman, and that’s enough of a signal to Jason for him to offer all of the facts.

“Shorter male, maybe 5-foot-3, skinny. Real skinny. 120 lbs tops, maybe. Black hair. Not showing up in any missing persons database in Gotham, and nothing so far for the whole state of New Jersey, either.” Jason jabs at a key on the keyboard forcefully a few times, flipping through the next three reports. “Nothing.”

“So either he has no one to miss him, or he’s not missing,” Bruce says. “You said he seemed to know you?”

“He reacted strangely,” Jason admits. “To me in particular. I didn’t hear any sprinting away or screaming or freaking out coming from the waiting room, so I guess he reacted to everyone there just fine.” Bruce watches as something like grief flashes across his son’s face. He’d spent almost a year, a long, bloody, terrible year making mistakes, stuck in a mental state he could hardly control, and another bleak year and a half afterward working extremely hard to redeem himself and his reputation on the streets. He’d never forgiven himself, not really, Bruce knows, but civilians have begun to regard the Red Hood in a similar light as Batman, Nightwing, Robin, and the others; a mysterious and potentially dangerous vigilante, but a benevolent one. He knows how proud Jason is of that, how much the fresh fear must hurt.

Enough of Jason falling down that rabbit hole. “What else? Any other theories?” Bruce has his own ideas, of course, but this is Jason’s case and he won’t involve himself until Jason invites him.

Jason shakes his head, but in frustration, not as an answer. “Drugs, of course. That’s always a possibility in this damn city. Trafficking victim,” he also says, a scowl appearing on his face. Bruce grimances too, but, unfortunately, it is a possibility. “Or abuse. You know, ran away from a parent or partner or something.” the –and they didn't give enough of a damn to report him missing is left unsaid.

Bruce hums thoughtfully. “Do we know how long he’s been in Gotham?”

“I had Babs rifle through the CCTV footage. Nothing before Tuesday, apparently. I mean, a bunch’a them were all down during that massive thunderstorm on Wednesday, and I saw him that night, so Babs thinks he might’ve shown up then. Or,” Jason continues with a shrug, “he’s just that good. Apparently Babs thinks he’s been dodging cameras.” The missing persons page minimizes, and Jason pulls up the CCTV footage behind it. There’s a scrawny dark-haired boy staring directly back at them. “He looks at almost all of them,” Jason says. “Gave up trying to avoid them last night trying to get to the clinic, we think, but he still always watches them.” He plays the footage clip, and, sure enough, as the boy staggers and shambles along, he attempts to keep eye contact with at least one camera, often looking around to each within his field of vision.

“If he knows where the cameras are, he most likely has been here more than two days,” Bruce points out.

Jason nods. “Either way, Babs can’t find him on any sorta facial recognition, and we’re no damn closer to figuring out where he’d be now .”

“Keep looking,” Bruce urges. “We’ll find him, Jaylad.” Jason sighs harshly, and begins flipping painstakingly through missing persons reports again. It’s futile, and they both know it—Barabara’s facial recognition would have already gone through this database—but he knows Jason feels helpless right now, and he isn’t going to contribute to that even more. “I’m going to pay Leslie a visit, gather some information for you.” The question is implied— is that alright? Can I help you with this case? —and Jason nods immediately.

It’s still daylight hours, but when Bruce gets up, he heads for the changing rooms; this is a Batman problem, after all, and it’s somehow still easier to be Batman in daylight than it is to be Bruce Wayne and not draw attention.

-----

When Leslie’s office door finally opens, Batman raps on the glass of her window with a knuckle. She opens the window with an exasperated sigh. “Took you long enough,” she snaps, even though she’d been with a patient and told him to wait. Either way, he doesn’t comment; he knows how passionate she is about caring for the less fortunate in this city, and knows that, inadvertently or not, this is their problem as much as it is hers.

“What happened?” he asks immediately.

“One of your Robins went and chased out one of my patients yesterday!”

Bruce pushes down his indignance. It wasn’t Jason’s intention to cause harm. It hadn’t been Jason’s intention to cause harm in almost three whole years. But Leslie knows that; she seems to regret her phrasing as soon as the words are spoken.

“Only my receptionist saw him—it was Jamie that night.” One of Leslie’s volunteers; they’d met on a few occasions. “Young man, about 5-foot-4. He looked ill, he was swaying, and Jamie said his eyes were extremely red.”

“Drugs?” Batman guesses.

“It seems the most likely,” she agrees. “But it’s not the only explanation. Jamie said he didn’t seem to be able to read her name tag, despite only being a few feet away. And they were swollen, too, not just red. It could be an eye injury, as well.”

Batman considers this information. “Red Hood recounted something similar,” he offers. “He wanted to keep his eyes shut when they first met.”

Leslie shakes her head. “Either way, it’s not enough information to diagnose him. And Jamie insisted that he looked like he needed medical attention. And you need to get him back here .”

“We’re working on it,” he tells her. “Do you have any idea where he might have gone? Did he say anything else to your receptionist?”

“Nothing. Just sat down.”

Batman grunts, filing all of this information away. So far, he can only assume that it’s drugs. Despite the police’s best efforts (and Red Hood’s, more than any of the rest of them), Gotham’s drug rings are as prolific as ever, if a little more hidden under the surface than they used to be. Information like that can travel through the underground grapevine, and he’s seen erratic behavior from addicts before. Wandering into new cities to find a fix is far from unheard of.

But Jason had seemed a little skeptical about the drug theory, and Jason had been the one to meet him in person. Best to operate from this point forward without only one theory in mind.

“We’ll find him,” Batman assures, heading back for the window. She follows to close it behind him.

“You better,” she says coldly. Then, warmer, “Good luck.”

-----

When the haze begins to lift (momentarily, he knows, just for a little while), it’s late again. Tim has somehow lost an entire eleven hours of daylight to the persistent fog in his brain. There’s cold concrete at his back, and a plastic bag rattles at his side.

Oh.

He’s back at the stairwell next to the community center. His old clothes (now smelling rather more musty than the last time he remembers seeing them) are in the plastic bag next to his shin. And it’s fucking cold , might he add. He’s shivering, he thinks, but everything feels dizzy and distant and fuzzy.

But the sunset is pretty.

Boots slam into the pavement behind him, on the ground level asphalt above his head. It must be Red Hood, he thinks, a little deliriously. Red Hood’s got the heaviest goddamn boots of anyone he’s ever met (especially when Jason had been so kind as to introduce them to his ribs ). But when a voice sounds above him, it’s not the Red Hood’s voice (which Tim thinks is odd—he’s pretty sure he only heard the one set of heavy boots).

“Hey, B,” Dick Grayson says. (Joke’s on him , Tim’s not happy to hear his voice either ). “Yeah, I think I found him.”

Large hands (two blue fingers, three black, Tim registers deliriously) hoist him up from his armpits. He can hear someone whining, and he thinks his legs are kicking ( good, because he actually does want them to do that), but the grip doesn’t let up. “It’s alright,” Dick’s voice is saying, which Tim thinks is rude and awfully assuming of him. “Just relax. You’re safe.”

“Hey, Hood,” Dick says, but further away. “You got my location? Do me a favor and pull the car around, alright? I’m not taking him all the way on my bike.” Then the whole world is shaking as Nightwing backs away from the stairs, and Tim has to grip onto his forearms with feeble fingers.

Tim begins to black out right around the time he hurls over Dick’s shoulder.

-----

When Tim begins to tune back into the world this time, he decides it’s been one time too many. His eyes are still sore (not to mention the headache that’s joined them), and his side is burning. He tips his head back with a groan, and makes the executive decision not to open his eyes.

Until the door opens with a click.

His sore eyes shoot open and he lurches upward. The world swims, and he can feel the blood draining from his face as his mouth fills with saliva. He has to swallow back the vomit that surges up his throat—not a very pleasant awakening at all, really. When he finally feels stable enough to look back up, it’s Leslie Thompkins staring back at him. There’s a dark shape behind her, a shape Tim definitely recognizes (and one that makes his heart drop ), but she closes the door directly behind her, leaving the nightmares (the memories that Tim’s really not ready to confront right now) out in the hall.

“Good evening,” she greets him, which he thinks was nice of her, because she also sounds extremely irritated in that professional way of hers. She bustles around him for a moment, checking up on his IV (ah, so that was that strange tugging feeling), then looking directly into his eyes for a long moment. “I’m glad to see you back here again. We missed you last night.”

“Sorry,” Tim says, dumbly, because he can’t quite figure out what she wants.. His tongue feels thick and stupid in his mouth. 

“My name is Dr. Leslie Thompkins. You were found unconscious and brought in to my free clinic, Thompkins Medical Clinic, on Park Row. It’s currently about 9:45pm. I need to know your name, please, and if there’s anyone I can call for you. Any allergies or past medical history that you can think of would also be appreciated.”

 “Tim.” Tim says, before he can stop to think if he should lie about that. “Tim Drake. Uh, no. There’s no one. And no, uh, allergies. I’m fine.”

Leslie hovers over a dial behind him, and, once he confirms about the allergies, she adjusts it. It’s painkillers, like he thought. They work fast.

She fiddles with his sheet, flipping it up to check a bandage on his side. “No medical history to note? Didn’t you know you were missing your spleen?” she asks as she prods at the wound, and, ow , that hurts like a bitch . He winces away after several seconds, and she lets him.

“I knew,” he admits.

“Not taking any antibiotics?”

“Can’t exactly get a prescription,” he replies, a little snappily.

“Sure you can. I’m writing you one, aren’t I?”

He blinks. His hand instinctively goes for his upper thigh, looking for his pockets (and the depressingly small quantity of money that should be within), but there’s no pocket at all; he’s in his boxers and an inpatient gown.

“Your belongings are just over there,” she assures, catching on. His fuzzy vision follows her pointing finger, and, sure enough, his sweatshirt and sweatpants are folded neatly on a chair. He can’t tell exactly, but it looks like his pockets (and the smoke pellets and whirlybird within) have been left undisturbed—another small mercy. “And don’t worry about the cost; the clinic will cover it.”

“Now,” she says, pulling up a rolling chair. “Let’s get down to it. You have an infection. There was grit inside of your speelectomy laceration, and the bandage hadn’t been changed for some time. But things really aren’t as bad as they could have been.” She reaches up, and lets her hands hover near his temples. “May I?”

Bewildered, he nods, and she guides his head around, looking intently in his eye (or rather, at his eyes).

“If these had gotten infected, I would have expected to see more complications.” Dr. Thompkins sits back down, her hands clasped in her lap, meeting his eye (this time not to inspect them). “How has your vision been?”

He stares at the blurred image of her for half a second. The fever is distant, now, but the painkillers are making him foggy all over again. “It’s..it’s gotten better, I think. Since when it first…started. Happened.”

“When were your eyes injured?”

Tim stops to think. The past several days have been little more than a blur. “Three..? Three, I think.”

Dr. Thompkins hums thoughtfully. “They’re just scratched,” she says, as though that’s supposed to be reassuring. “Mostly superficial. I don’t expect them to require any medical intervention beyond some antibiotic eye drops.” She gestures toward a small white bottle on his side table. “Those are free of charge, too,” she assures breezily.

“Do you have any further concerns, or anything you wish to discuss with me?” She asks as she gets up, guiding the rolling chair back over to the wall with one hand. “I have other patients, but I understand that you may be confused.” Tim hates the way she’s looking at him. As Robin, then Red Robin, she’d always been kind to him, but she’d never pitied him like this. The closest to pity she’d ever gotten was exasperation, and right now, Tim sorely misses that.

“I’m fine,” he says. It’ll be better, once she leaves. He can slip out undetected and–

–well, he’s not quite sure what he’ll do. He is tired though, and he knows Leslie will offer free care to those who really need it… He really shouldn’t take up a bed, though.

Leslie watches him while he clearly deliberates, but she doesn’t pry into exactly what he’s deliberating. “You have visitors,” she says after a while. “It’s after visiting hours, but they were adamant, and at least wanted to be here in case you felt up to it.”

She’s giving him an out. It’s kind of her, but Tim already knows who’s here to see him. Batman’s silhouette is not an easy one to mistake. Nor is it one he can avoid without suspicion. It’s probably better to get this over and done with, anyway.

“Sure,” he says, before he can chicken out. “I don’t mind.” He doesn’t ask who it is. He already knows. Leslie seems a little surprised at his immediate acceptance (maybe he ought to have asked anyway?), but she doesn’t comment on that, either.

When she opens the door, both Nightwing and Batman step through. She exchanges a glance with each of them (one that Tim knows, but has never witnessed as a third party—it’s her favorite glare to use: don’t screw this up, capiche? ), then disappears down the hall. The door clicks softly closed behind her.

“Hey,” Nightwing says, gently. It’s his civilian voice, Or, one of them. It’s his traumatized child voice. Tim can hardly keep from scowling. “You know, my pal Red Hood has been seeing you around lately.” He pulls Leslie’s abandoned rolling chair back closer to Tim’s bedside and sits down, assuming a remarkably similar pose to Leslie’s. Batman remains standing, as Tim expected him to. “We’re a little concerned about you.”

Tim does scowl, then. He might be scrawny compared to the rest of the Bats (always has been, much to his own chagrin), but he’s not a child . And he’s not goddamn traumatized, and if he was, it’d be Dick’s (among others) goddamn fault anyway, so cut that shit out, Dickface .

Nightwing carries on, unperturbed. Batman’s frowning though. His face doesn’t look that different (does it ever?), and it’s still pretty blurry, but Tim’s been on the receiving end of that frown far too many times not to recognize it. “Things have been pretty quiet around here for the last few nights, luckily, but it’s really not safe for anyone to be spending so much out on the streets like that.” He pauses to exchange a glance with Batman. Or, rather, Nightwing looks up at Batman, and Batman keeps glaring at Tim. “Do you have anywhere to go?”

Which… is kind of a weird thing to say. Come to think of it, it’s really strange that any of them are following up like this at all . It’s not unusual for people to be living on the streets of Gotham.

…But Tim hasn’t seen them either. Tim’s been on the streets, and he’s been the only one.

Dick must see the confused furrow in his eyebrows, but he interprets it instead as a no . “You know about the Wayne Foundation Community Housing Project? There’s city-funded housing available to anyone who needs it. We could try to send someone by once you’re discharged to escort you there, if you need it.”

…That’s not right. That’s really not right.

The Wayne Foundation Community Housing Project is Tim’s project. He’d started planning it only a few months before Bruce had gone missing, and it had never even gotten off the ground…

But Batman is nodding along, and Nightwing is looking at him expectantly. This isn’t a joke.

They really hadn’t needed him at all, had they?

“I’m not looking for charity,” Tim finally says. Even through his fuzzy vision, even behind the mask, he can see Dick’s face fall. Goddamn manipulative bastard.

“There’s no shame in accepting help,” Batman finally speaks. He’s not sparing a use of his traumatized civilian voice on Tim, at least. Tim thinks he’s grateful, anyway.

“Not whatsoever,” Nightwing chimes in. “That’s what the foundation is there for. It was built to help people.”

Tim grits his teeth. He knows that. He’s opening his mouth to decline again when knuckles rap on the doorframe of the inpatient room.

“Then howsa’bout you you come and work for me. I’ll let’cha live in my apartment building here in Park Row as payment. No charity involved,” the Red Hood says, standing in the threshold of the room.

Chapter Text

Jason doesn’t cross the threshold of the room. When he’d first appeared around the bend, he’d eyed Tim up and down. Tim had only caught it at the last moment (too slow, too damn slow , Drake) and the nature of the glance had been lost on him. But all he can think is, dog .

And all he can assume is that Jason sure seems to be thinking fresh meat .

He’s looking right at Tim, now. At his face, in his eyes. He’s still got the domino on, of course, but Tim knows. His face is relaxed and open, and Tim can’t tell if it’s meant to be reassuring. It’s not. It feels like a challenge– look how calm I am as you fall apart at the seams . Tim stays coiled tight with stress, and Jason stays on his side of the doorway, his shoulders a casual and stooping arch against the plain white door frame.

Needless to say, that is not happening. Tim would rather bite the bullet, quite literally, and do the deed himself than live under Jason’s roof. Maybe it’s possible that this Jason really doesn’t know him, maybe it’s possible that the entire universe isn’t gaslighting him or that his brain actually is still intact, and that all of this is reality now, but, frankly, he isn’t sure it would matter. It’s a fact of the universe, any universe, that Jason Todd hates Tim Drake. And if not now, then eventually for sure.

But as Jason continues to watch him intently, Tim knows to refuse is as much of a death sentence as to accept. The last time he’d tried to tell Jason no, he’d had a steel-toed boot digging a bruise into his throat. Batman had looked on, vaguely exasperated at the both of them, as Tim had choked and gasped on the ground. It left no permanent physical mark, luckily, but it was a lesson Tim hadn’t yet forgotten. One way or another, Jason will get what he wants. And in the meantime, he’s only testing Jason’s fractured patience by keeping quiet.

“What kind of work?” he asks, stalling for time.

Jason shrugs, which is a complete dead giveaway that this “job” is nothing more than a shallow excuse. To his credit, he does come up with a response: “There’s people I care about in this building,” he says, which Tim knows. Jason hates Tim, but that doesn’t make him some heartless monster; he’d housed people in the Park Row apartment buildings back home, too. Mostly homeless people, street kids, and that one old woman who lost her source of income when the GCPD had discovered she’d been operating her soup stand without a permit. It had been..sweet, when Tim found out about it. Jason knew everyone by name, and he was gentle with them, especially with the kids, in a way Tim hadn’t seen him be since his Robin days. He’d been absolutely enraged to find Tim there when he returned, though, of course.

“I’m gone a lotta the time. There’s not always somebody lookin’ out.” He eyes Tim up and down again, considering. A cold feeling runs up Tim’s spine, and he barely represses a shiver. Then Jason cracks a smile and steps over the threshold, which does not help. The heart monitor behind him stays relatively steady, but it’s a near thing. “You’re a sneaky little shit,” he says, as though he’s not probably seething that Tim already escaped him twice now. “You should do. I mean, you’ve gotten away from me.”

He sounds like he’s trying to be casual, but there’s some hurt pride leaking into his tone. Individually, both are terrifying. Together? They’re another nail in Tim’s coffin if he can’t figure out a graceful way out of this situation.

Tim’s eyes flicker to Batman, who finds it in himself and his dark and brooding exterior to nod encouragingly. Yikes. “Can’t you get cameras?” He says, then stops himself from bringing up the billions of dollars that fund their little hobby . “I feel like cameras aren’t that hard to come by,” he says instead.

“Cameras can be destroyed,” Red Hood points out. “Or interfered with.”

“So can people,” Tim says, lifting his eyes to Jason again. He tries to stare challengingly, but his headache is coming back, and his eyes feel strange and swollen, and he’s pretty sure it’s not very effective.

Jason lifts up both hands, palms up toward Tim, acquiescing. “Sure, kid. That’s true, I guess. But I won’t let that happen.”

‘ No ,’ Tim thinks bitterly.’ You’d rather do it yourself. ’ 

Something must cross his face, because Jason gets closer. He crouches next to where Nightwing is still sitting in the chair. “Listen, kid. I get your concerns, okay? But it’s still gonna be better than sleepin’ in the streets, huh?”

Tim can see his face more clearly now, from this distance. He still can’t seem to read it. “What if I say no?”

Jason scoffs openly. “We aren’t threatening you, you know. You’re not causing any trouble. We’ll leave you alone if that’s what you really want. But I think we could help both of us out with this arrangement. I mean, what are you gonna go back to?”

His instincts still urge him to immediately decline, but a logical side of his brain has him pause. He’s feeling marginally better now, but… It had been bad, these last few days. Even infection aside, the winter cold had almost been enough to do him in, and in another week or so, as the month progresses and the weather inevitably gets worse, that’s a death sentence all on its own.

He weighs his options, and decides the naseauting stress in the back of his throat is no less frightening than the bitter cold, but for now, it’s probably less deadly. He inhales deeply and meets Jason’s eye. “So how’s this gonna work, exactly?”

-------

Tim feels just as much like shit when he’s discharged as he did on the very first day of his stay. He knows it’s only because Leslie has been weaning him off of the narcotics and he’s bound to feel shitty with less painkillers in his system, but somehow it just feels like he didn’t heal at all. It’s not true, of course. It’s been so long that he’s not sure he remembers what normal vision looks like, but this is definitely as close as he’s been to it in almost a week.

Leslie had kept a close eye on him all throughout the day as she’d gradually disconnected all of her monitors from him. He had probably looked awful, but at some point she needed that bed back. Better sooner rather than later. He’s not worried about healing on his own. Actually, he’s not worried about anything on his own. He’s worried about all the times that Jason might be there.

Before he knows it, he’s sitting in the passenger’s seat of Jason’s big black pickup truck. It’s not Jason’s favorite car, he knows, but his brain automatically catalogs the advantages of it: it’s discreet, it blends in to just about any average Gotham street, and it’s fairly standard for the area; a very middle-of-the-road car for a place like Park Row. For a place like Gotham, really.

The Red Hood helmet is wedged between them on the tray. It makes Tim feel outnumbered, somehow. Jason must notice, because he sends Tim a tight-lipped (and frankly, chilling) smile. “Sorry ‘bout the whole secret identity thing. Just safer for everyone this way.”

“I get it,” Tim says immediately, trying not to sound too understanding.

“Oh yeah?” Jason says mildly, apparently catching on anyway. “You hidin’ from someone too, kid?”

“..No,” Tim decides. “Not anymore.” Jason’s eyebrow twitches beneath the domino, and Tim immediately curses himself. (Not anymore ? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?). “Not really ever,” he adds hastily, but the damage is as good as done.

“It’s not a great apartment,” Jason says. “But you’ll be safe there.” It seems like a subject change, but Tim knows it’s not. Still, he’ll gladly treat it as one.

“What does ‘not great’ mean?”

Jason chuckles. “It’s old, man.” Tim knows that. Everything in Park Row is old, falling apart, and probably riddled with bullet holes. “A bit, uh, crumbly, ‘round the edges. But it’s intact, and it’s free, so. Best I can do for now.”

“Sounds fine,” Tim says. Jason’s told on himself a bit there; if the apartment is free, it doesn’t look like Jason’s interested in seriously quantifying the work Tim will be doing to earn it. That raises the question of exactly what his end goal is here, which is something Tim definitely doesn’t enjoy thinking about. Bottom line, Jason clearly doesn’t care about working with Tim, which is something he should have expected by now. But the hurt is just as stinging as it was the first time, on the floor of Titan’s Tower, bleeding out, his predecessor's name scrawled above him, and Tim’s childhood dream of working with his hero crushed into dust under Jason’s steel-toed boot.

This Jason keeps up the attempts at conversation, even when Tim goes quiet. He’s very casual about it, casual in a way that feels uncanny, that runs a shiver up Tim’s spine. He’s trying to pry more information out of Tim. He’s easy about it, but the attempt is still pretty transparent. And Tim doesn’t want to talk himself into a corner. He’s not sure what theories they have about him. He’s still not even really sure all of this is real, that they really don’t know him, that this really is some other universe.

If he wakes up alive tomorrow morning, he supposes that might be some indicator that it is.

Eventually, Jason gives up. He’s still watching Tim out of the corner of his eye. Tim’s keeping an eye on Jason, too. They watch each other the rest of the way, and after a while neither puts very much effort into hiding it. Jason’s probably afraid Tim will bolt, which, to his credit, Tim definitely feels like doing.

But he doesn’t, and a few minutes later, Jason is pulling into the parking lot behind one of the apartment buildings. Tim slides out of the passenger’s seat, stretching out his stiff legs and trying to ignore the immediate pounding in his head that follows. Jason takes the stairs two at a time, and Tim tries his best to keep up, which is embarrassing.

Tim knows this building. Jason owns a few of the buildings on Park Row, but he’s visited this one personally before. For the most part, after he’d gotten his chest caved in the first time, survival instinct had kept him away from Jason’s territory. He’d stayed away from all of them, actually. But he’d kept his comm, for emergencies, and kept up with what they were all doing.

Jason groans from where he’s propped up on the front of Tim’s bike. “Easy, Hood,” Tim says cautiously. He’d found the vigilante at the piers during his own rounds. Tim had known Jason’s business had started bleeding into other parts of the city, and that a deal he’d been keeping an eye on would be going down at the docks sometime within the next few weeks, but it had still scared him half to hell, stumbling across him there.

At first, Jason had been…cross, to say the least. Warned Tim to keep his nose out of other people’s business, threatened his life, then promptly slumped against the shipping container at his back, eyelids fluttering dangerously. Tim had leaned forward without a word, catching Jason by his armpits.

“I’ve got Hood,” he’d said into his comm, the one that he hadn’t spoken to in almost eight months. “I’ll bring him in.” And then he’d muted it before anyone had a chance to reply.

Now, he’s on the way back to the cave. They’ll deal with Jason, and he’ll get to disappear back into the outskirts of the city, and they’ll probably never speak of this again. Fine by him. That way, Jason might just forget about this whole thing, and Tim won’t lose any vital organs after all.

The universe doesn’t seem thrilled with that prospect, though (is it ever?) because Jason is stirring in front of him. “Relax,” Tim says. He’s not ecstatic to be clueing Jason in to who he is, but probably better than have him believe he’s being kidnapped or something. Maybe. “I’m just taking you to the cave, and then I’ll get out of your hair, okay?”

“No,” Jason snaps, without very much force, but probably as much as he can muster. “‘M busy.” He lifts his head vaguely. “Turn here.”

Tim thinks about arguing, thinks about the lecture that's sure to await him if anyone else were to find out, and then he decides to just turn anyway. It's not worth the headache. Listens to Jason mumble swears and “fuckin’ replacement"s under his breath. Then he turns again, onto Park Row, stops as directed, and watches Jason shamble up the steps into the apartment building. Somehow, he thinks, this is probably the most positive interaction he’s ever had with him, even when Jason flips the bird and a “fuck off” at him as the door begins to close.

“You’re on the second floor,” Jason says. It cuts through the memory, and Tim is grateful for that. He presses a key into the palm of Tim’s hand. “203.” Jason points down the hallway, and Tim feels dizzy with relief. He’s not coming with. Tim will get to lick his wounds in peace, at least for a little while. It’s only marginally safer, with Jason presumably hanging out in the same building, but better building than room . “I’ll be around,” Jason says. “Don’t worry about work for now; I’ll come find you after you’re feeling better.” The taller man eyes him up and down again, assessing, but ultimately must decide not to stick around, because he turns and disappears around the bend, back into the stairwell.

The hallway is deserted as Tim wanders down it. He can’t hear anything coming from the rooms, either. There’s probably not even anyone living here on this floor, besides him. Jason provides housing really to anyone who needs it here, but Park Row is hardly a walk in the park; an apartment is better than the streets, but anywhere else in Gotham is better than Park Row. If you can afford to live elsewhere, anywhere else, then typically you do. Plus, assuming this Jason really doesn’t know him, he probably wants to keep Tim away from the other residents for now. Just in case. Hell, he'd probably want to do that regardless.

The 203 door is already open when he reaches it, and he locks it behind him. A standard lock like this won’t buy him much time against the Red Hood, but it’s better than nothing.

The apartment is small and run-down. The door opens into a small living space. There’s a couch and a table, and both appear to have either been thrifted recently or to have never left from this spot since the heyday of this apartment building. They’re old, in any case. There’s a tiny kitchen, maybe five square feet total, shoved in the corner. When he peeks in the door across the way, it’s a bedroom, with another door off to the side (probably the bathroom), containing only a bed and an oddly placed calendar from almost a decade ago Tim’s time (so even older in this universe).

The hole hidden behind the calendar is so expected that it’s surprising all over again. Regardless, it could be a good place to stow the contents of his pockets. As his fingers close around the smoke pellets and birdarang, a glint of metal catches his eye. It’s impeded into the side of an exposed wooden stud, but easy enough to pry out. With a scoff, he places the bug on the ground and crushes it under his shoe. He’ll have to do a sweep for them soon. He should’ve known.

-------

“All good?”

“Sure,” Jason says, pulling himself the rest of the way up the fire escape. Dick offers a hand and Jason takes it, and together they pull him up onto the roof.

“You sure we should’ve just left him alone after all of that?”

Jason snorts. “Don’t be such a mother hen, we don’t even know the kid. But, yeah. I’m sure. He’s a street kid, Big bird. We don’t like people watchin’ us over our shoulders. Kid’s probably just about suffocated as it is.”

Dick lifts both hands placatingly. “Okay. Did you bug his room?”

Jason grimances. “Yeah, just as a precaution. Just audio ones, and a couple cameras in the kitchen. Plus the ones in the hallway.” As he’s speaking, his phone beeps an alert in his pocket. Dick watches his eyebrow furrow as he checks the screen.

“All good?” He asks again, less sure this time.

“Little shit already found one.”

Dick laughs, and Jason scowls at him. “Was it the one behind the calendar?”

“...Yeah.”

Dick slaps him on the shoulder, grinning from ear to ear. “Don’t know how he could’ve found it.”

“I was on short notice and it was convenient, alright? Get off my back.”

“Short notice? You had four days.”

“Been a busy four days,” Jason snaps, as Dick continues to laugh. “Come on,” he gripes, ambling over to the far side of the roof and fishing his grapple from his belt. Dick is doubled over, and Jason steadfastly ignores him. “Let’s just get going, Dickface.”

Chapter Text

So. Jason’s pretty sure it’s trafficking.

Strange kid? Out of the blue? Infuriating paranoia for bugs and cameras? Looks like a deer in headlights every time a big guy like Jason’s within eyeshot?

Well, sure, anybody else’d tell you that it could still be a lot of things, but not here. Not Gotham. Jason’s lived and breathed this city from all angles, street kid to silver spoon, drug lord to vigilante. There ain’t one spot on the spectrum of Gotham that Jason isn’t familiar with.

Best case scenario it’s just one-off abuse and not true trafficking, but Jason’s pretty sure. Kid’s too strange, appeared too many damn nights in a row in places where a kid, even a kid of abuse, shouldn’t be. Jason would’ve noticed. Barabara would’ve noticed, or Alfred, or Bruce, or any other one of ‘em who regularly stalks CCTV.  He’d have records of some kind, any kind.

No. No normal average joe motherfucker would be so completely invisible and know the city like the back of his hand. Something is going on.

There’s a shuffle of fabric, and a rough hand arches over his shoulder to lean against the Batcomputer desk. Bruce is silent for a long moment, appraising the contents of the screen. It’s a sparse report, not much to see just yet, Jason’s working off of a serious hunch, but his father, ever the detective, pieces together the line of thinking in record time.

“Trafficking, then?”

“I think so,” Jason says, a little defensively, despite himself.

“Not drugs?” Well, that had been the working theory, but…

“No drugs in his system,” Jason argues. Leslie had checked. Nothing weird with his blood work at all, ‘cept his abysmal white blood cell count, of course.

“You don’t need to be doing drugs to be involved in them,” Bruce points out mildly.

Jason tries not to pull a scowl. “Sure, but actin’ that strange?”

He twists around in his seat, and Bruce has this pinched expression on his face, at the very corners of his eyes, that Jason has come to recognize as concern. Bruce quickly schools his expression (he’s gotten in the habit of dropping some of his defenses while at home, even in the Cave, when it’s just his kids around, but that practiced Batman exterior will always exist in him).

Jason knows how happy it makes him that Jason is here, doing his casework in the Cave again, within reach of help, within reach of Bruce. Knows how careful he is about the balance they’ve struck here, how much attention he pays to not overstep Jason’s boundaries, to not encroach on his cases. It’s the only reason for Bruce’s thoughtful pause, weighing the pros and cons of chiming in his own input.

“I know this is important to you, Jaylad,” Bruce says, and Jason fights not to roll his eyes. He can hear the family therapy cogs turning in Bruce’s head.

He’s right, though. Trafficking rings are Jason’s turf, have been for almost three years. When Jason was at his lowest, almost nothing could get through to him. He was ruthless and angry and deadly, killed almost indiscriminately, a foaming rabid dog with the capacity for hate, fear, and rage and nothing else.

It had been the trafficking rings that pulled him out. Sure, he’d killed plenty clearing up his first one, but…not everyone.

It had been like surfacing from a murky lake. It had been clarity, finally. Innocent, not innocent: the distinction could exist again. It has existed ever since.

When Jason and Bruce reconnected, Bruce had willingly deferred all trafficking ring break-ups to Jason. There hadn’t been a new one in Gotham for a long time.

Not until now.

“I don’t want you to operate on assumption,” Bruce said. I don’t want you to kill yourself over something that may not be there, he meant.

“I won’t,” Jason snaps. “I’m just… looking into it.”

“Fine,” Bruce agrees passively. It still ticks Jason off, no matter how non-judgemental Bruce tries to keep his tone. “Did you ask him?”

“Who, Tim?” Jason looks back at the screen, halfheartedly tapping a few more values into boxes. “Nah. He’s healing; been leaving him alone. And fighting for my fuckin’ life trying to get a bug to stick.”

Bruce doesn’t smile, but there’s an amused little lilt to his words when he speaks, “I thought you were supposed to be the best in the business.”

Jason snarls wordlessly at him, but there’s no real heat behind it. Not for Bruce, anyway. He’s just frustrated.

“Does he still have a sixth sense for cameras?” Bruce had seen the CCTV footage too, a sopping-wet five-foot-three scrap of a man staring straight and unblinking at his viewer. Well, Jason knew from experience that it was just as creepy in the hallways of his own apartment buildings.

“Yeah,” he gripes. “He leaves my hallway ones alone, at least. And the ones out front.” Tim had only gone after bugs and cameras in his own room, and in great volumes. If Jason still relied on Bruce’s tech supply, he’d probably be pissed about the cost. Well, fair. Jason’s pissed too, even if his are mostly stolen from less-than-reputable sources.

“Is he any good at monitoring them?”

“I haven’t put him to work yet,” Jason admits. He doesn’t really need him to, in actuality; he just saw the trafficking signs and panicked, wanted the kid someplace safe where Jason would have people to look out for him, and hopefully someplace Jason could reach him, to coax some information out of him if it is trafficking. Plus, Jason’s kind of too busy to be teaching some random guy his camera system, as concerned as he is about that guy’s situation.

“Waiting until he’s healed?”

“Something like that.”

Bruce hums to himself, thoughtful. His eyes are flicking over the meager report again, assessing. “He’s certainly a puzzle,” he offers.

“You think I’m spending too much time?”

“It’s your case,” Bruce says, which means yes, I do.

Jason sighs, long and low. Then he pushes himself back from the desk, swiveling the chair to face his father. “You got something else I should work on?”

“The work never stops,” says Bruce, which means sure do, pick up the slack already, bucko, but in the gentle sort of way he likes to put it. Jason rolls his eyes fondly.

“Has anyone looked into that string of blackouts? I could poke into that for a little while.”

Bruce claps him on the shoulder, and shoos him away from the computer, claiming the chair for himself. It’s just as well; Jason’s getting a little antsy sifting through records he already knows won’t contain what he’s looking for, and they’ve got the blackout data on a separate drive anyway.

When Jason returns from the workout mats after a quick stretch, he notices his report on Tim is still pulled up on the screen. Bruce is half-hunched over, his chin resting on his folded hands, a distinct furrow to his brow.

Tim hasn’t seen hide nor hair of Jason in almost a week. Which is fine by him, mostly. It’s getting to a point where he’s getting ready to blow this joint anyhow. He’s almost healed and he’s not gaining as much information here as he’d hoped for, and he’s not too keen on hanging out in the lion’s den if he won’t even have anything to show for it.

He spent the first day sluggish and in pain, deliberately ignoring his prescribed painkillers in some misguided desire to “stay sharp,” which hadn’t mattered, because Jason had gone and not come back. A nice old lady had come by, shoved a tupperware of lentil soup at him, welcomed him emphatically, and disappeared herself.

So Jason really had liberated a soup woman without a food permit from the streets.

Tim had wondered briefly if that should concern him, that she never had a permit for her food, but he’d been too tired and too hungry and just too short of desire to function or advocate for his own well-being to care. The soup had been good, and it had lasted him almost all week.

He’d ventured out on day two, stumbled into some of the residents here. They were how he expected: a little rough around the edges, a little hardened, a little frozen by Gotham’s constant chill, but not bad people. Friendly enough, once Tim had been friendly to them.

No Jason, no primary source, but he’d been able to do some secondary information-gathering from them.

First impressions? They were all rather fond of Jason. Tim couldn’t see it himself, but from them, it wasn’t too much of a deviation from Tim’s baseline of Jason, based on his own version. Jason didn’t feel much fondness for anyone, but he’d always had a bit of a protective streak for the people under his care in Park Row. That, apparently, had not changed.

But not all was the same.

The Park Row residents at home liked Jason fine; he kept them safe, provided them with a roof over their heads (not a particularly structurally sound roof, but a roof nonetheless), and otherwise largely left them alone. The best you could ask for, as far as Tim’s concerned.

But it kind of sounds like Jason… hangs out with some of the people here. Checks up on them. Brings them food, or blankets, or supplies. Soup Lady had a potluck last summer and he attended and brought a spinach and mushroom quiche, apparently.

Freaky.

He also apparently has no idea who Tim is. Which makes sense, if Tim never existed here, but it still soothes the frayed nerves at his core, the flayed-alive and broken thing that wants to freeze up like a piece of prey when he thinks of Jason, that expects hatred and blood and the business end of a steel–toed boot or a brass knuckle.

No one here knows who Tim is, but Tim has the itching, squeamish feeling under his skin that they know Jason has some kind of interest in him, as a case at least, if not an eventual punching bag. They look at him with open pity, like Leslie looked at him, like Dick looked at him. He feels gross and picked apart, and he starts avoiding the halls during busy hours.

He doesn’t know if they pity him because Jason’s told them he’s a victim of something, or if it’s because they know Jason plans to make him one somehow eventually. And it’s freaking him the fuck out.

“It’s okay, honey,” Soup Lady had said on the third day, interrupting Tim’s thoughtful staring into a hidden camera in the hallway, trying to decide if it’s close enough to his own quarters to be worth extracting from its hiding place. “It’s gonna be okay.”

Well, gee, thanks. Tim still has no idea what that means.

“Where’s, uh, where’s the Red Hood?” He had asked, still on-edge, still expecting to see Jason around every corner, and barely catching himself on the correct alias.

“He’s busy,” she’d said soothingly, which, great. Either she was soothing him because Jason was gone so he didn’t need to worry about running into him, or she was soothing him because she thought Tim was worried about him.

“What does he want with me?” He’d cut to the chase, and she just looked sadder, pushing another container of soup into his hands (some kind of chowder, maybe) and bustling down the hall, shouting after him to “Eat, honey, you need it!”

Sometimes he could coax a vague story about Jason out of the residents, but nothing he could use, nothing about his intentions with Tim. Sure, Jason was kind to all these people, but Jason was kind to them at home, or as kind as Jason ever got. That tells him nothing about how he plans to treat Tim.

After a week, though, Tim is starting to think Jason has no plans for him at all. He’s gone completely AWOL.

He doesn’t know if the nausea is from relief or just a continued symptom of his infection.

His eyes heal, he gets in the steady habit of taking his antibiotics, and he’s left completely alone all the while.

Freaky.

It’s time to move on, he thinks. For as terrified as he'd been to be coaxed into a temporary residence under Jason’s control, the whole event had been completely unremarkable.

…This whole universe is a fucking fever dream. Tim’s Jason wouldn’t be cause dead having given up a chance to hand his own ass to him.

No time to look that gift horse in the mouth. It’s time to go. He doesn’t have a bag, but he doesn’t really have much to pack, either.

He glances around the run-down apartment, chipping beige paint and half-upholstered furniture, and finds he has nothing to take with him. His birdarangs and smoke pellets and roughly $45 remain safe in his pockets, where he’d kept them, checking obsessively for them every few minutes, for days on end now.

He heads for the door. Time to reassess, find someplace to lie low and figure things out.

He doesn’t get that far.

The door clicks, the knob squeaks, it swings open, and there’s Jason.

He’s got a domino mask stretched over his eyes, and that, thank god, triggers the automatic little flag in his brain that says no names in the field in Batman’s low voice. “H-Hood,” Tim stammers out by way of greeting, instead of Jason.

“Hey, man,” the Red Hood says, cool and casual and either not noticing the sweat beading on Tim’s brow or choosing to ignore it. “Sorry, I didn’t mean to abandon you here.”

Well, that’s not what Tim wants to hear. He would actually really rather if Jason abandoned him permanently. And as soon as possible, please.

He swallows, hears his own throat click, and tries to get ahold of himself. He can’t help it. Jason’s attack in the tower is the most afraid that Tim has ever been, and it doesn’t matter that the walls are peeling beige instead of clean steel, or that Tim’s in sweatpants and not his suit, or even that Tim’s not even really fucking real, his body sees Jason and it floods his system with adrenaline. Survive, it gasps. Run.

But Tim doesn’t. He knows this song and dance. If Tim is the rabbit, Jason is the dog; running will only make him chase.

“You finally here to put me to work?” He says, trying for witty to cover the rapid pulse of his heart, and falling somewhere in the vicinity, he thinks. Hopes. Maybe.

Jason considers him for a long moment. “Sure, kid,” he finally says. He’s got a bag slung around his shoulder, and he loops his back over his head, then holds it out flat for Tim to take.

It’s a laptop back. Jason is giving him access to a laptop.

This is… definitely not Tim’s Jason. Tim’s paled in comparison to Jason in every single aspect except one. Tim’s a menace with a computer.

He had no idea what he just handed Tim.

“Thanks,” Tim says, careful not to let the uncertainty bleed into his voice.

Jason nods. “Come sit,” he says, pushing his way into the apartment and taking a seat on the sofa. Tim scrunches his nose; he’d been avoiding the furniture (who knows what those stains are?), catching his Zs mostly curled up on the floor in the kitchen where there’s tile he can disinfect, but he knows an order when he hears one.

Jason opens the laptop. It looks relatively bat-standard, but scrubbed of all associated branding (WayneTech or BatTech or otherwise), which surprises Tim. Doesn’t this Jason think he’s a drug mule, or something? A little gang errand boy? What’s to stop him from stealing this laptop and pawning it for cash?

“Not to make assumption about’cha,” Jason says passively, maybe following Tim’s line of thinking. “But there’s a tiny little tracker in this baby, in a pretty tricky spot. Not someplace you can pick it out.”

Jason shoots him a raised eyebrow, which, yeah, Jason would know about all the picking out of technology Tim’s been doing while he’s been here. Doesn’t look like he’s gonna beat him over it yet though, so, that’s something. “So don’t try, okay kid? I ain’t interested in replacing more tech, and you won’t be able to get at it without destroying the machine, yeah? You hear me? You won’t.”

Tim could. He’s sure of that. He’s cracked trackers before, Oracle’s work, and others. Expert work. But he’s not gonna tell Jason that. “I hear you,” he mutters instead.

“Then let me show you the feeds.”

Jason pulls it up, tries to walk Tim through it, but Tim’s only half-listening. He doesn’t need the explanation. It doesn’t look how he expected, but it’s not any less familiar.

It’s Bruce’s program. Bruce’s setup. Not Jason’s, not Red Hood’s. Not the program he’d hacked into to make himself an early warning system, to keep an eye on Jason out of terror and the desperate need to survive, to be more aware of his enemy than his enemy was of him.

He hasn’t seen this setup in quite a long time. Not since he’d migrated to his own, not since he’d been Robin.

“Got it?” Jason asks, done with his spiel.

“Yes,” Tim replies immediately. He does. He knows this system like the back of his hand.

It won’t be connected to the Batcomputer servers. It may not even be connected to any of Jason’s servers. But you can bet your ass Tim will be looking.

“Good,” Jason says, sounding carefully unsurprised at Tim’s immediate confidence, but Tim knows he’s cognizant of it. Tim knows he noticed. Damn.

There’s silence for a long moment, and Tim finds himself stiffening on the couch, waiting with increasing desperation for Jason to kindly get the fuck out.

“Tim,” Jason says instead

  No! He wants a conversation?

“I don’t wanna bother ya, but I need to know what’s going on here, kid.”

Tim doesn’t reply, muscles coiled tight with renewed tension, eyes carefully fixed on the blank streets in the camera feed.

“Let’s start easy, huh? Where are you from?”

“Nowhere.”

“Everyone’s from somewhere. C’mon, it’s okay, yeah? Don’t need your whole street address or nothing, just.. What city, okay?”

Tim thinks carefully for a second, wrestling with the roaring in his ears for some goddamn peace for a second, just enough to think.

They must know.

But they can’t know. No records of him exist, he looked! He’s not real!

They won’t ever find him. He’s not real, he doesn’t exist. Maybe it doesn’t even matter.

But better safe than sorry. “Blüdhaven.” Sure, fine. That’ll work. Dick has ties there, but Dick’s a busy guy who doesn’t care about Tim normally (and probably cares even less here, where Tim was never even born). And by Tim’s (increasingly unreliable, unfortunately) knowledge of his own world, Jason’s almost as pissed off by Dick as Tim is, so maybe he won’t even ask about this.

“Okay,” the Red Hood accepts. Maybe he believes him, maybe he doesn’t. He’s not raising a hand to Tim’s throat, so who cares? “Why did you come here?” He leans forward, a furrow to his brow that Tim does not like at all. “Did you choose to come here? Did you come by yourself?”

Tim shakes his head, backpedaling, scrambling to his feet and backing away from Jason. No, no, this has already gone too far. Tim has no fucking idea what kind of crime Jason’s trying to implicate him for right now, or why he’s taking this stupid, backwards, goddamn bureaucratic approach instead of just wringing Tim’s neck and sparing them all the small talk.

Jason’s got his hands up, outstretched, like he’s trying to soothe a wild animal. “Hey, man, it’s okay. It’s okay.”

Tim snarls wordlessly, shuffling backward on the filthy carpet, angling his back toward the open window.

“Easy,” Jason says, a little sharply, like one might command a horse, or snap at a disobedient dog. His next words come out quiet all over again. “Second floor, kid, yeah? Just be careful.”

Second floor? Easy. Tim can handle that fall, any Robin could, how to fall is the first goddamn lesson B drilled into all of them, ‘cept maybe Dick, who already knew.

But Jason is getting up, and instead of approaching, he’s backing off, palms still outstretched. “Just chill, Tim,” he says. He’s doing something funny with his voice, something low and quiet and– and–

He’s trying to do Bruce’s scared small child voice. Or maybe it’s his own one, but Tim’s never heard that shit in his entire life.

What the fuck.

“I’ll leave it, okay? Let you get used to the cameras, take it easy for a minute, yeah? Easy, okay? Just, sit down.”

The laptop is still sitting, open-faced, on the water-stained coffee table. Jason’s all the way across the room, no helmet, no rage on his face, no gun barrel pointed between Tim’s eyes.

It’s clear Jason’s not going to leave him alone. He’s digging around. He won’t find anything, but Tim’s not looking to risk it.

He takes a half breath, then moves.

He darts forward to snatch the laptop. It snaps closed in his grip, heavy and solid and a high quality piece of tech in his hands. There’s a half-beat of silence, where Jason must take this as a sign that Tim’s decided to chill out after all, because he relaxes just barely —

Tim vaults the table, laptop clutched desperately in one hand, and lifts it to strike hard and practiced across Jason’s unprotected temple.

Chapter Text

Jason swears, a low snarly thing, staggering back from the blow. One hand is moving on instinct to brush fingertips against the new blunt-force trauma of his temple, dabbing at the shallow cut from the square corner of the laptop. He’s got his back against the door now, still swearing lowly, blinking twice then looking up at Tim through squinting eyes, all in a fraction of a second.

(If Tim had a death wish, this would be the perfect opportunity to snark at him about vigilance. If Tim had ever reacted like that, ever stumbled or sacrificed precious milliseconds to blink the blood from his eyes, at any point in his training or career, he’d be benched til he turned forty.)

Jason’s expression is guarded, as one might expect, but he’s also not the only expert in the room. There’s a squint to his eyes that Tim recognizes; he’s affronted, like Tim is some foul thing he’s finally seeing in clarity and he can’t quite comprehend. Can’t hurt that Tim’s been on this end of that expression before, of course.

The expression is twisting further. Tim caught him off guard, but he’ll recover quickly, and he’s armed somewhere.

The window is open. It’s only two stories (and Jason helpfully reminds him again with a frustrated shout, “ second floor apartment, you idiot!”), and Tim vaults himself right over the edge. He can hear Jason swearing, right behind him, then fainter, then fainter still, as he falls and Jason doesn’t, yet.

He hits the ground rolling, then running, operating on yesterday’s chowder now instead of fumes alone and all the more quick on his feet for it. He listens for the thump of Jason’s boots but it never comes. There’s a crashing sound from above and behind him instead, the splintering of wood and the crunch of crumbling drywall, several dull thuds, and a myriad of shouted choice words.

Tim’s heart leaps into his throat, thudding against the base of his esophagus in a nauseating rhythm. Well. He can say this feels the most like home since Ethiopia, if that counts for anything. This is the most normal Jason’s been yet. This is how Jason’s always been with Tim.

He’s perching on a gable end when Batman’s voice crackles to life in his comm. He listens to them sometimes, and keeps the emergency alerts on 24/7. He doesn’t know why; he rarely finds the nerve to show up, unless it really is an emergency. They don’t really need him, and they’ve made that perfectly clear, but it’s been his job to look out for the Bats for so long that it’s no longer something that he can just turn off. It’s a tense relationship that the lot of them have these days. Tim no longer lives at the manor and hasn’t in years. He no longer patrols with anyone that he used to. He no longer frequents the cave, and in fact, these last six months or so, he’s actively avoided it. Just like he’s avoided them. Still, for whatever reason, he holds his breath as he waits for Jason to respond.

But he doesn’t. Not with words, anyway. Jason’s comm is still transmitting; he hasn’t muted yet tonight, probably by B’s request. He’s been listening in the past few nights, and it sounds like Jason’s been running point on something big down by the piers. There’s a strangled kind of cough from Jason’s end, then a groan.

“Hood.” B repeats. There’s more urgency in his tone, as urgent as Batman gets. Tim’s not paying attention to the street corner beneath him anymore; it’s been a really slow night anyway. Instead, he’s mentally plotting a route to Jason’s approximate location. Sure, Jason hates his guts, and he’ll definitely incur his wrath for this, but he’s a good guy now, mostly, with kids and the homeless and even the street dogs, with all kinds of victims, all people more important than Tim, and Tim doesn’t let the good guys die.

“Jason,” Bruce says, louder. His voice is urgent, which means Bruce is scared. Tim thinks that’s understandable, of course. Ever since the Joker, Jason’s safety has been something of a touchy subject.

“Yeah, yeah,” comes a slurring voice from Jason’s end.”’M good.” He doesn’t sound good.

“We cannot get to you,” comes Damian’s voice. Tim grimaces despite himself. Damian and Jason had had their own little feud for a while, but somehow whatever it was, they’ve now decided it’s water under the bridge. Damian’s voice is the same tight urgency as Bruce’s.

“Get out of there,” Bruce snaps. Tim’s already moving, expecting the incomprehensible response from Jason. He’s not far from the pier; with luck, he should be just in time.

He is in time.

When he arrives, Jason is better off than he initially expected. He’s actually on his feet, stumbling around a little and leaning heavily on the shipping containers scattered around the docks, helmet missing and domino mask in his own hand, but not in immediate danger. There’s no one else here. Tim takes almost a whole minute sweeping the area from his vantage point for any other movement or signs of life, but it’s just Jason. They must’ve spared him. Either that, or he got far enough away and they didn’t bother looking. He doesn’t seem urgent, about his naked eyes or his disoriented state.

Cautiously, he drops down onto the concrete near Jason. “Hey, Hood,” he says as casually as he can muster. “Listen, man, I’m just here to help.”

Jason’s stumbling, half out of his mind with something , drugs or blood loss or what have you. His eyes and blue and cloudy and perfectly reflecting Gotham’s smoggy sky—

—and then they find Tim. His dazed expression refocuses, mouth twisting into a scowl. Absinthe green washes over his irises, hatred sparking up in from depths of him that will never become untouched by the Pit, that will never feel anything but disgust and contempt and hatred of Tim.

He straightens, suddenly steady and solid and sure on his feet again, as if the heat of his rage alone was enough to burn away whatever had addled him. He’s looking at Tim with near-perfect clarity, near-perfect dislike.

“You should put that back on,” Tim tells him about the mask, wincing at how bossy it comes out. But it is important. “They could come back.”

Jason spits onto the ground, a wicked grin splitting the bottom half of his face, leering and toothy. “They ain’t coming back,” He says, then levels the barrel of his pistol between Tim’s eyes. “And if you don’t fuck off out of my sight right now, neither are you. ‘Cept yours’ll be permanent.”

He’s lucky to have gotten away. Very lucky. Luckier still to have done it more than once, in the past several days. Astronomically lucky. Otherworldly lucky, which, well… exactly.

He’s getting really tired of this routine, but better tired than dead, probably.

It’ll catch up with him, he knows. He can’t keep slipping Jason, can’t keep racking up such a steep debt of luck to the universe. This entire city is the lion’s den, and he’s seriously on borrowed time here.

He twists and turns down alleyways, panting tiredly in the cold evening air; each draw hurts his lungs and drives up the nausea in his throat, but his best bet now is to put as much distance between him and Jason as possible.

He took a gamble on this arrangement, hoped it might give him a relatively safe position to passively observe Jason, but Hood’s digging for answers Tim doesn’t want to give up, and now he’s probably also digging for Tim’s head on a platter, so that doesn’t really seem ideal, either. No, he got too close, dreamed too big, and he’s not going to make that mistake again.

No more Leslie, no Red Hood apartment, no strings attached from anywhere. Just Tim and his case. The old dynamic duo. The status quo.

His case is solidly based in Gotham, he’s pretty sure. His sandstorm in the desert, the crazy electrical storm here, and the fact that he just showed up here. The rolling blackouts that are still happening ever since the storm, apparently, according to Soup Lady and her presumably reliable contact of her son (the Park Row apartments had had their fair share of blackouts, of course, but that was also all of Park Row all the time.), who presumably lived a far more normal life than either Tim or Soup Lady.

The problem is, he can’t stay. Not really.

There’s always the possibility that the Bats will be fed up with his latest disappearance and decide to cut their losses, but Tim isn’t counting on it. He’s not causing harm (except to Jason’s temple, he supposes) but he’s a mystery, even to himself, and the fun is in the chase, even if Tim knows himself to be a rather disappointing reward at the end of the journey.

It’s safer to operate under the assumption they’ll be looking for him.Which means it’s time to get lost. Disappear for a while.

For such a large city, Gotham’s got shitty public transport. Dangerous, limited in routes, and largely within city limits, loops you could take around and around as much as you wanted but no way to actually get out. But there’s a bus stop in the Financial District that’ll take you to the mainland if you’re up early enough to catch it, and from there he can catch the main trainline, go all the way up to Boston if he wants.

It’s not too far, and he’s got all night to get there; that bus won’t be around till 5:30 am, 6:00 if the roads are running slow. He thinks it might be somewhere around 8:00 pm now. Not fully dark out yet, but it will be soon.

He pivots, veering down a perpendicular alleyway to stop moving deeper along Park Row and towards Old Gotham. Alley cats yowl and long-abandoned posters rattle in the wind, but Tim is silent. He’ll find someplace to buckle down, and with luck he’ll be gone before daylight.

Jason had left Tim’s loaned apartment in rather more disrepair than it had been before tonight, and he thinks Tim should be fucking grateful for it. Jason needed to put his fists through something, and the kid’s pretty damn fortunate that it ended up being the drywall and not anyone’s face.

Tim had swung that laptop at him and the impact had sent a flash of green across Jason’s vision. Then Tim had fucking launched himself out a goddamn window and the frustration had overtaken any surprise, and the Pit had latched happily onto the opportunity.

Jason felt it. The air felt like water in his lungs, or gasoline, fueling green fire that licked at the edges of his self-control. It had taken everything to channel it into the wooden bookshelf beside the window instead of vaulting over it after the source of his frustration.

But Jason’s better, now. More practiced. More constructive, more controlled. The Pit won’t ever leave him, but Jason’s become the master of it, as much as anyone ever could be (except, perhaps, Ra’s Al Ghul himself, the bastard).

He crushes particle board furniture with his hands and punches holes in the walls until the flames recede, finally convinced they won’t be fed. And only Jason’s own frustration is left.

He lifts a hand back to his temple, reassessing how he feels. No concussion, he thinks. He’s not woozy. It’s not too swollen, no distinctive lump or anything. Not much to show for Tim’s little stunt except a shallow cut of broken skin, feebly bleeding. And a missing kid, of course. Again.

He hooks a leg over the window, peering down at the street below. No kid. Naturally.

His other leg follows, and then he drops from the windowsill with a grunt of annoyance. It’s still light out, and he doesn’t like to be out here during the day, and especially not without his helmet. But he prowls up and down the street for a few minutes in the domino mask and body armor, more and more pissed off with every lap that yields jack fucking squat.  

This shit? Seriously getting old.

The Pit is stirring again and Jason knows he needs to stop. There’s a better, more strategic way to approach this.

His comm is in his helmet, and he’s been walking around with mostly civilian equipment ( this was actually not on the docket for tonight, at least not yet) but he’s got Bruce on speed-dial. He fishes out his cellphone, ambling back toward the building where his bike waits belowground.

His father picks up in one ring. He prompts Jason with a grunt of acknowledgement that might’ve been “What?”

“Hey, B. Got bad news.”

There’s a pause; maybe Bruce is relocating, or maybe just thinking, predicting. “Report,” he says, catching on that this is a nightlife issue. He can probably hear the frustration from Jason; it’s still hard to tamp down on sometimes, even three years later.

“Kid’s gone, but it’s not just that. I’m heading to the Cave. Now a good time?”

There’s another pause. Finally, “That’s fine, Jaylad. I’ll meet you.”

Perfect. Jason throws a leg over his bike, engaging the engine. “World’s Greatest Detective, right?” Batman grunts in reply, which is probably an exasperated agreement. He’s never been too fond of those kinds of little pet names. “Good. I think I’m gonna need ‘im.”

True to his word, Batman is standing patiently by the main console by the time Jason prowls up from the garage where he’d left his bike. Blue eyes, unobstructed by the cowl current pulled down off his face, flick to the left of Jason’s, where the cut has probably started to bruise, but he says nothing.

Bruce offers no pleasantries, and Jason’s still too pissed off to toss him any of his own, but something softens just a fraction in his father’s face. A welcome as warm as they come.

“I was real sure about trafficking victim,” Jason says, hunching over the Batcomputer to pull up Tim’s meager file. “But I was wrong.”

“Did he tell you something?”

“Nope,” Jason growls, forcefully backspacing what little is there in Tim’s file, leaving even more boxes blank in his wake.

Tim Drake , it reads. Male. Black hair, blue eyes. Skinny build. 5’4”. Missing spleen, eye infection, circumstances unknown. Every other box is made blank.

Family & Connections: unknown

Current Residence: unknown

Birth City: unknown

Background: unknown

One unknown after another, all down the line.

Jason irritatedly types slippery bastard into the Other Notes section, all the way at the bottom.

“I know you think I’m spending too much time on this,” Jason says. Bruce is silent, waiting patiently, trusting Jason to find his point. “And I was startin’ to agree. But there’s something here, B, I swear.”

“Walk me through it,” Bruce allows him.

“He’s trained.” Bruce is silent behind him, but Jason’s too busy furiously erasing his old theories to twist around and find out if it’s doubt silence or surprise silence, or maybe it’s just go on silence. “Like, trained trained. This ain’t no silver spoon trust fund kid who took karate lessons in middle school. I mean trained.”

Jason knows the type. He knows most of the types really. He’s fought entitled boarding school brats who took self-defense lessons and decided that would be enough protection in Gotham’s underbelly. He’s also fought the street kids, scrappy and lean and desperate but still untrained, he’s been that kid himself, and this? This is neither.

To his credit, Bruce doesn’t question Jason’s conviction. There’s an innate protectiveness in him, Jason knows, that makes him want to take charge of everyone’s cases, handle every stakeout and deduction and fight, and handle them all with kid gloves. But he’s gotten better at putting it aside and trusting them all; he’ll let Jason run point on this.

“What’s your new theory?”

Jason sighs, running a hand over his face and squinting his eyes against the sting from his temple. “Dunno. Child soldier? Brand-spankin’-new Ra’s Al Ghul assassin?”

Bruce shifts his weight behind him. “A replacement for Damian?”

Jason sighs again, more frustrated this time. “Nah. He’s not angry enough.” From what Jason saw, Tim had been jaded plenty, bitter as anything, but far more reserved than angry. “He’d be on a murderous rampage if he were. He’d’ve been raised in it.” And he would’ve stopped to kill Jason with that laptop, not go diving out the nearest unblocked exit.

Batman hums thoughtfully, relaxing minutely at Jason’s back. He still carries some guilt for the circumstances of Damian’s upbringing, even if the kid has long since forgiven him. “If he’s a League assassin, he’d be a recruit.”

“Not in Damian’s position,” Jason agrees. “But I don’t know.”

“Not League material,” Bruce says, voicing Jason’s thoughts. A hand comes up to brace on Jason’s shoulder. His father’s face is turned up at the screen, searching for answers that won’t be there. “Not devout enough.” And he’s right, those were Jason’s thoughts exactly. Ra’s would sooner kill a recruit as an example than let them escape, and Tim doesn’t exactly exude the typical League of Assassins devotion to the cause.

“It could be meta trafficking,” Bruce suggests gently. Jason closes his eyes against implication.

It’s a new… industry. Very new, a handful of operations uncovered by the Justice League only in the last six months, and apparently rapidly becoming more popular. Kids, goddamn actual kids, shipped around to the highest bidder, with all kinds of abilities, and trained into the ground.

It hasn’t been pretty. They’ve lost people, trying to get them out, and the kids are never really the same. It’s not like they’ve got the resources or facilities to rehabilitate dozens of kidnapped, traumatized, and superpowered children and teenagers back to a relatively normal baseline of living.

But there’s never been one in Gotham before. Never been one in the Bats’ jurisdiction.

Batman doesn’t like metas in his city, never really has, and he’s so anal about being its watchful eye that he can sniff them out like a bloodhound. But this kid so far hasn’t ticked those boxes.

“He has no powers,” Jason says. Bruce is silent, but that’s as much a nail in the coffin as the implied most metas can hide powers beneath it.

Jason closes his eyes again, biting back a swear. “So. We’re back to trafficking.”

Bruce squeezes his shoulder, approval or support, Jason doesn’t know. “A working theory,” he finally says, when his son only continues to stare listlessly at the screen.

“We gotta get ‘im back,” Jason says. “He could hurt somebody.”

“I sent Dick out when you called,” Bruce says. Jason feels eyes on his tense shoulders, assessing. “Once you feel calm enough to join him, we will. We’ll find him, Jaylad.”

“Again.”

“Again. And we’ll be more careful with him, this time.”

It’s a long night for Tim.

He’s dodging bats till daylight, can hear combat-reinforced boots on metal plating, the scrape of kevlar on concrete, but only briefly each time; they all move on quickly. They’re combing the city, but they have no reason to believe he’s in the Financial District.

He’s squeezed himself between a dumpster and a wall, the windowsill blocking him from above, garbage bins on every side; Tim can barely even see the curve of the bus stop lamppost between the dark-green bins, where he’d strategically placed himself in preparation for morning. He’s tucked behind a dumpster in a city of dumpsters, in an alley lined on both sides with them. They search all night, but they don’t find him.

Dawn is just barely beginning to light the sky, and Tim’s blinking a little sluggishly, now. He’d left his antibiotics, painkillers, and caffeine pills on the counter in the Park Row apartment bathroom, and his eyes are stinging, a fresh headache pulsing dull against his skull.

But it’s morning. The bus’ll be here soon, and he can blow this joint and regroup someplace safer.

If he were in his right head, if he were paying attention, Tim would’ve noticed that no buses came that night. No 9 pm downtown loop, no midnight bar pickup, no neighborhood bus on its regular 30-minute intervals. No 6 am mainland commute bus.

He’d already wriggled out from his hiding place, stark in the morning sun, standing like an idiot and clutching at the laptop against his chest, while the realization slowly dawns over him.

It’s 5:30. Then 6:00. 6:15.

Nothing.

A shadow crosses his, on the sidewalk.

“There’s no bus stop here anymore,” comes Dick’s voice, gently. Tim looks on instinct, and there’s Nightwing, his brow creased above the domino, open pity on his face. Open pity, and a new hardness, a new wariness about Tim. New awareness that Tim knows how to use the laptop bag still looped around his shoulder if push comes to shove.

And, of course, the impassiveness of a stranger.

Tim shouldn’t be here.

He’s right though, of course. There’s no Bus Stop sign bolted lopsidedly to the streetlamp. Tim hadn’t even noticed, too deep in autopilot, too dependent on old knowledge, old expertise, that obviously could no longer serve him here.

No bus will come for him.

“How do you get out?” he asks, sounding lost even to his own ear.

The pity on Dick’s face surges, overtaking the wariness for a moment. “We have passenger trains now,” he says. “Electric, efficient, more accessible. All across the East Coast.” He points a thumb back over his shoulder, down the street. “There’s a station just that way, so the bus doesn’t need to stop here anymore. People like the trains better.”

And doesn’t that one hurt. Because those are Tim’s trains. Tim’s public transport project, Tim’s concern over the amount of bus robberies and sabotages on the bus lines and even the things like delays for the common working man and carbon emissions and air quality and the children who have nowhere to play but the street. Another Tim project that never made it off the ground, never left the planning stages, never left his own careful hands, and exists in perfect reality here, without him.

He closes his eyes. The adrenaline over getting out has evaporated all at once, leaving him shaky and a little sick and bone-tired. The night’s catching up with him. It’s all catching up with him.

“What do you want?” Tim asks Dick, because he doesn’t know anymore. It’s certainly not to offer him an apartment, not at this juncture. That’s for sure.

There’s silence for a long moment. Tim doesn’t open his eyes. They’re sore, and he’ll hear if Dick moves to deck him, and maybe if that happens Tim’ll move too. Maybe.

“We’re worried about you,” Dick finally says, which could mean anything. Worried for him and his certifiably deranged behavior, or perhaps worried he’ll have a mental break and kill someone. Maybe worried he already has.

“I decked your colleague.”

“Yes, you did. It was a little impressive, I think; it’s tricky to catch the Red Hood off guard, you know?”

Tim doesn’t say anything. Just breathes, eyes closed. When he finally blinks them open, Dick hasn’t moved. The pity’s still there, but the wariness is back in spades.

“Thank you for the tip about the trains,” he says. This entire conversation has been extremely awkward and depressing, he leaves out.

Dick bobs his head a couple times, an awkward little nod, and Tim knows the sentiment is true for both of them.

Well. No time like the present.

Tim lifts a hand in a two-fingered salute and moves to awkwardly brush past Dick, down the street toward the station that Tim had designed with his own two hands but apparently exists here, in the flesh, bearing no influence of his whatsoever.

But Dick’s hands snag his shoulders, and Tim’s easy gait freezes, tense under the hold. “Wait,” Dick says. “It’s okay,” he reassures hastily, probably feeling the tightly wound muscles beneath his palms. “It’s okay, but we need to chat, kiddo, okay? Just to iron a few things out.”

A muscle in Tim’s face twitches involuntarily at the pet name. He’s not a kid and he’s no one’s kiddo. Not here, not at home.

“I need you to come with me.”

Well, no, absolutely not. Tim yanks back his own arms, but Dick holds firm, following the movement. “You’ll be safe,” he implores. “I promise.”

Tim snarls wordlessly, twisting back, but Dick doesn’t let up. Tim twists harder, yanking at his own arms, bringing up his hands to claw at Dick’s grip but Dick only captures his smaller hands in Nightwing's own, holding fast and not letting go.

Tim thrashes back and forth, snarling in higher and higher pitch, panic spiking further for every moment Dick remains calm and steady at his back.

“Get away from me,” he spits, furious and frightened.

Tim knows how to break this hold, but Dick also knows how someone hypothetically would break it, and he can’t get the leverage. He’s not as strong as he was six months ago, run ragged after Bruce’s disappearance, and more ragged still after those several days here, and Dick is the picture of perfect health.

He shrieks, whining high like a dog, spitting expletives to depressingly little result. Dick remains patient, waiting him out, and Tim’s energy begins to flag after embarrassingly few minutes.

“You’ll be safe,” Dick promises again when Tim sags exhaustedly against him, quiet against the top of his head. “You’re fine. Listen. I can’t let you see on the way there,” he continues, and Tim can’t help but groan in pure annoyance. He knows about the goddamn Batcave, okay?

“Hey,” Dick says, sharper. “Pay attention, okay? This is important.”

But Tim doesn’t care. He knows this offer. He’s given it out before.

“I’ve got a sedative on me, nice and easy, just one tiny needle, okay? It’ll keep you out until we get there. Or I can blindfold you. I’m sorry, but this is important. That’s the best I can do.”

Tim snarls, low in his throat. He’s tired, he’s hungry, frankly he stinks like garbage and asphalt, and he doesn’t want to deal with fucking Dick Grayson. But he’s not being drugged and he’s not submitting to a blindfold.

He’s just fucking not.

Would Tim love to have access to all the resources in the Cave? Absolutely. But not at the cost of Nightwing. Not at the cost of the Red Hood, and whatever goddamn murder plot he’ll have planned the second Tim shows his face around him again. Who the hell knows if Damian even exists around here, but the possibility alone spells just as much trouble as Hood.

Tim redoubles his efforts, yanking with reckless abandon against Nightwing’s iron grip.

“Stop fighting me,” Nightwing growls. Any gentleness is quickly evaporating the more frustrated he gets. But he still sounds like he means it when he says, “I don’t want to hurt you.” He takes a step forward, trying to wrangle Tim’s arms against his own chest. Tim doesn’t make it easy, clawing at Dick’s hands until his fingernails tear, half a second from risking his goddamn teeth against the kevlar.

Tim’s chest feels tight. There’s ragged, rasping breathing coming from someplace, but Tim keeps thrashing. He… thinks he’s thrashing.

Is he moving? The world is moving, spinning wildly, so Tim must be moving.

Nightwing readjusts his grip, Tim can feel hands moving, looping around him to press his own arms against his body. An elbow digs into his splenectomy wound, still tender, and pure white noise washed over Tim’s vision. He’s either whining like a dog or making no noise at all, all he can hear is terrible, awful ringing.

Tim fights, but Dick doesn’t. Dick just stands, his hands so loose around Tim now that Tim could pull them free if only he could just focus—

His vision is tunneled from adrenaline, but it keeps tunneling.

Further and further down, smaller a smaller, a windshield then a lens cap then the head of a pin—

—then nothing.

Chapter Text

Tim’s mouth is really dry.

—Also, he’s pretty sure he doesn’t know what’s going on.

So that’s no good.

He works his jaw, sluggish. His throat feels like sandpaper; it clicks audibly when he swallows, so dry the flesh is sticking to itself.

He floats for what must be only a second but feels like minutes, or longer. Then survival instinct kicks in, the Robin training installed in him since he was a child reboots itself, and he knows to take stock.

He feels bad, somewhere between ill and injured, but that’s something to analyze later. He’s not immediately dying, so physical comfort takes a backseat. He needs to know what’s going on. It's a conscious effort to drag an eyelid open.

Memory rushes back just as the bright white light above him stabs an ice pick directly into Tim’s brain. Tim grunts quietly, only able to bite back the sound when it’s already halfway out. Not the most elegant wakeup in uncertain circumstances he’s ever managed, but. Ow. Hopefully no one heard.

This time, Tim flops his head over to one side before trying to open his eyes. His vision is blurry, he can’t seem to focus his gaze; his surrounding pulse dizzyingly in and out of clarity. But there’s a white line curving its way across his vision, and he follows it up to an IV bag hanging innocently on its pole.

Oh, fuck no.

No wonder he feels so much like shit, who knows what hell is in that thing.

The jolt of panic is enough to clear some of the haze. The pain in Tim’s side and the swollen, itchy feeling in his eyes sharpen more concretely into reality, but so too does Tim’s ability to think.

He stumbles himself vertical, and realizes abruptly he’s in a holding cell.

He was on a cot… in a holding cell.

Well, that’s a new one.

Makes sense, though. Does not calm any of his nerves, but it makes sense. Tim did deck the Red Hood with a laptop.

There’s a fresh rush of panic, but Tim tries to compartmentalize it to a tucked-away piece of his brain. Stay in control.

Immediate observations? Tim’s shirt has been changed. It’s plain black cotton. Clean. It feels big on him, but that doesn’t tell him much, The laptop bag is gone. Tim’s pockets have been emptied. He has nothing but the clothes on his back, and half of those clothes aren’t even his.

Nothing to be done about that now.

He shuffles unsteadily to the head of the cot, keeping a hand on the thin mattress to combat the wave of dizziness that washed over him with increasing intensity the longer he’s upright. His hand is uncoordinated as he embarrassingly paws in the general direction of the IV bag until he can finally hook his fingers on it.

He squints with swollen eyes.

0.9% Sodium Chloride Injection.

It’s saline. Normal saline.

Or it’s tampered with. Tim slips the port from the back of his hand. Hopefully the damage isn’t already  done. The bag’s already half empty.

Dizzily, he assesses the rest of the room. Standard Cave holding cell, complete with every indicator of every failsafe from back home, all the bells and whistles, some of which Tim designed himself. Wires along the ceiling that he recognizes, remembers drawing up the plans for, double-reinforced and blocked off with a pane of bulletproof glass. Alarms and surveillance triggers and knockout gas, as a last resort.

You shouldn’t be here, Tim thinks, a little hysterically. But I shouldn’t, either. And here I am.

His eyes flick to the bulletproof glass he knows he’ll find replacing one concrete wall. It’s not tinted like he expects. And there’s a young man standing on the other side of it.

It’s…Robin.

But it’s not Dick. It’s not Jason. Tim doesn’t exist, so it’s not Tim.

…Damian?

He’s big, though. Tall. Tall as Dick had gotten in the role, tall enough it’s almost baffling. Jason had never gotten that tall while wearing the R. He came back tall, mayhem in his eyes and a red helmet tucked under one arm, but never in that suit.

It’s a different suit, darker, red and black and a jagged edge at the end of the cape, but it’s Robin all the same.

It must be Damian. It looks a little like Damian, with the smattering of dark hair on his head and the tanned skin under his domino. But he’s taller than Tim, and broader too, in Tim’s current state. Older and more stoic and not currently hurtling insults or weapons at Tim.

He’s just standing there, with his hands up placatingly, assessing Tim as much as Tim is assessing him.

The working theory is Damian, though, and that does not calm Tim’s perception of his situation. The panic flares up again, and Tim has to really wrestle with it this time.

Before Robin can speak, Tim shoves at the cot, keeping a wild eye on the stranger (who may or may not be someone far more dangerous than any stranger, and almost certainly is) as he pushes it, the legs of the cot screeching unpleasantly against the concrete. He shoves it up against the glass, an extra barrier between him and Damian(?), and simultaneously frees up space in the center of the cell to pace, to try and wake himself up.

“Please, be careful,” Robin says, Damian says, because yeah, that’s Damian. His voice is deeper. He sounds like Bruce, a little bit, with just a hint of an accent from his first ten years of life with Talia. But it’s Damian.

Tim paces in a tight circle, keeping a frantic eye on Robin as he does, breath catching anxiously in his chest. He turns his gaze from Damian only to trace along the wiring, inspect the integrity of the walls, combing the cell for weaknesses.

But there won’t be any. There won’t be anything Tim can do without any goddamn resources, he knows how these things go.

Tim was taught everything there was to know about these cells during his training. When Bruce overhauled the Batcave security, Tim drew up the plans for those improvements, the same ones that mock him from the ceiling, even though Tim wasn't goddamn here to implement them.

His eyes flicker diligently back to Damian after every fruitless corner he checks, every empty nook, every inaccessible connection.

He’s got a flimsy aluminum cot, a thin mattress, an IV pole, an IV bag of god knows what, and the needleless IV catheter he tore from his own hand. And Damian Wayne, a boy who had never quite stopped trying to kill him, a foot and a half taller and separated from Tim only by a pane of glass and a door Damian can open but Tim cannot.

“You do not need to panic,” Damian is saying, apparently fed up with Tim’s pacing and frantic running of hands over the walls and floor. “No one is going to hurt you. Are you aware of what happened? Can you recall it?”

Yes, Tim can goddamn recall it. He wants to check the back wall, just in case, every opportunity is worth it, no stone unturned, nothing is more important than this. But he doesn’t want to turn his back on Damian. He paces in a tighter circle; halfway around he can watch Damian, and the other half he can investigate, can check for any single solitary thing out of place.

There’s nothing.

Nothing.

“My name is Robin,” Robin says. Obviously! Look at you!

Tim snarls wordlessly, crossing to the other side of the room to begin his inspection all over again, because what the fuck else is there?

“The IV contained only saline. Salt and water. Do you understand?”

“How stupid do you think I am?” Tim snaps, shoving at the medical cot again, making sure it’s snug against the glass, then retreating again to the back wall, as far from massive-motherfucking-tall-ass-Damain Wayne as he can get.

“I noticed you have removed it. It was there only for rehydration.”

Tim ignores the words; they aren’t giving him any new information. His precious little focus is better spent watching for signs of aggression and inspecting his cell.

“Now that you are conscious, I can bring you water instead. Are you hungry?”

The longer Damian stays, the more Tim has to consciously force his blood pressure from rising. They put him in a cage and now they want him to chitchat? With Damian? Probably the worst chitchatter Tim has ever met, save for Jason on a pit day?

He finishes another lap of the cell. Nothing. Of course.

Damian has gone quiet. Tim whips around to take stock, but he’s just…standing there. Tim reminds himself not to fidget with his hands and stares right back.

He has to look up at Damian. Not very far up, but he’s not looking down, and that’s probably seriously bad news for Tim. The last time he’d seen Damian back home, the kid had tried to drive a katana through his eye. He’d gotten pretty close, too, which was embarrassing. Tim can only imagine the additional force with which that’ll happen if this version of Damian is struck by the same fancy.

Which is only a matter of time, if he’s not already got a comparable plan at this exact moment.

Tim stops pacing. There’s nothing to find, and he tiring quickly. He wants to sit down, the world is going just vaguely fuzzy at the edges. He feels awful. But he has to be awake. He has to be alert. He has to tense his muscles til they tremble to stay upright, but he is upright.

Robin sits down.

Right on the ground. Cross-legged, empty palms laying open on his knees.

“You are not injured,” he says, matter-of-factly. “Or, rather, you sustained no new injuries in your scuffle with Nightwing. No popped stitches, and no sign of new infection. But you are dehydrated and malnourished. You must rest. If you do not wish to have an IV, I will bring you food and water. But know you are safe. The holding cell is only a precaution. It is for your safety.”

That’s a bunch of bull. Tim keeps standing.

Damian keeps sitting.

Tim’s muscles are trembling. They don’t hurt, no more than his typical ache, but they’re as tired as he are, and they’re not far from giving up on him.

Damian keeps sitting.

Tim— Tim can’t. Damian is just sitting there, watching him through the bars of the cot.. He’s probably waiting for Tim to let his guard down, but Tim can’t. He’s no good standing here shaking like a leaf either, he’ll be no more fierce against an attack than a day-old kitten if he doesn’t get some rest.

He gives in. His back hits the far wall and he slides down, legs collapsing and sending him down to the floor. The unfamiliar black t-shirt catches on the concrete and he scrapes his back all the way down, but he doesn’t have the motor control right now to correct it.

He feels awful.

Robin looks satisfied, nodding once to himself, but he doesn’t jump up, doesn’t brandish a sword at Tim, doesn’t kick through the glass and wring Tim’s neck, so who cares. Who cares.

Robin scoots backward. Across the ground.

Damian, who is currently taller than Tim and wearing kevlar body armor, is scooting across the ground toward the exit of the wing on his ass. Like a toddler. It’s so bizarre that it passes nonthreatening and finds its way all the way back to concerning; Tim tenses up all over again.

“I am just going for some water for you,” Robin says, finally rising to his feet and taking several immediate steps backward, away from Tim. He keeps going, the door swings open, Tim gets a second’s glance at the section of the Cave beyond, and then he’s gone.

In his absence, Tim’s gaze drifts lazily to the holding cell camera, blinking a steady red light back at him.

There it is again. That uncanny ability of this boy to pick out any camera in his vicinity, no matter how discreet they’re placed. Batman watches the young man in his holding cell, and Tim watches the camera right back.

Jason makes a thoughtful noise to his left, perhaps considering a similar train of thought.

“How’s he doing?” Dick trots down the stairs, crossing the floor to the main console in a few broad strides. Bruce greets his son with the silent press of a hand to the back of his neck as comes to lean on the desk on Bruce’s other side, but Jason’s welcome is less warm.

“Would’a been better if you hadn’t attacked him,” he gripes, annoyed but probably no more seriously angry than that. Tim is uninjured, and now he’s someplace safe, and that had cooled a lot of the fire Jason had come home harboring.

“I didn’t attack him,” Dick shoots back. “I tried to stop him, like you asked us to.”

“Would it’a killed you just to talk to the damn kid?” Jason rolls his eyes. “I thought you were suppose’ta be good at that.”

“He wasn’t really interested in talking.”

Jason throws his hands up. “Well, forgive me if I’m not thrilled your second course of action was to physically restrain the spleenless, injured stranger. I told you he wasn’t dangerous.”

“He hit you with a laptop!” Dick counters. “He was a flight risk! I was being careful.”

“You panicked,” Jason says, rounding on his brother from around Bruce. “You panicked and you pulled a stupid stunt, that wasn’t careful.”

Bruce would rather not be having this discussion right now. On the video feed, Tim is still watching the camera sluggishly. The space between his blinks is getting slower and slower. Damian crossed through this section of the cave several minutes ago; he’ll be back with Tim’s food and water soon. Bruce hopes the boy will accept them.

Without taking his eyes from the screen, he finally says, “Your approach in this scenario was inelegant and ill-advised. You put him at risk and you put yourself at risk. We have no idea what he is capable of, or what reaction he might have to a trigger like that. We’re lucky he only wore himself out. We had no idea what he could have been concealing on his person from the Red Hood’s apartment, or anywhere on the street along the way.”

The logical approach functions a little better than Jason’s. Bruce’s admonishment deflates some of the fight in his eldest son.

“I was watching for that, I swear,” he defends himself. “He wasn’t reaching for anything, he could barely keep himself upright. I was just holding onto him.”

Jason shakes his head, leaning on the Batcomputer console on Bruce’s other side. His eyes flick periodically to the video feed, but largely he trusts Bruce to keep an eye on it; instead, he’s watching Dick. “Yeah, but who knows how he’s gonna react to it now. You could’a blown our shot at trust-building. Chirst knows if any of us are ever gonna get through to him again.” Jason gestures vaguely toward the screen. “From his perspective, all we did was kidnap him.”

Dick closes his eyes, looking frustrated.

“I know you were trying to help, chum,” Bruce cuts in. “And you were right to bring him in once he collapsed. His medical history is still missing pieces, and he’s yet to heal from any of the complications Leslie diagnosed. We can better monitor him here.” Dick nods along with him, reassured by the praise, even after all these years.

There was a time, for a long time, where Dick had rejected every good word Bruce had offered his way, in a desperate wish for independence. Bruce had been protective, and Dick had wanted out from under Batman’s cape, so he had denied himself every facet of their relationship, cut Bruce off entirely. But that was years ago now; they had healed past it. Nightwing no longer always deferred to Batman in the field as he had as Robin, but he had come to accept the praise as good-natured again, as indeed it was.

“It was a risk, to him and to you, and I wish you had proceeded more carefully,” Bruce continues. “But it was a difficult situation. All things considered, we were very lucky.”

“You’re right,” Dick says. “I panicked. I knew he’d be impossible to track down if he got out when we have no record of him to work off of.” He looks at Jason, something pained in his expression. “I knew this was important to you.”

“Not more important than your safety,” Jason gripes  immediately back, loath as he must be to admit it. Bruce tamps down on the rush of affection for both his sons. “Who knows who this fuckin’ guy is? He kept tearing out all my cameras, you could’a swiped anything in that fuckin’ decrepit apartment building. Could’a pulled a whole lead pipe from the drywall, clobbered you over the head.”

“I thought you thought he wasn’t dangerous,” says Dick, smoothly glossing over the moment of emotional vulnerability, for Jason’s sake.

“Doesn’t mean you should go losin’ your head and being stupid,” Jason grumbles, but all the heat is gone from it. His second eldest looks over at Bruce, eyes assessing. Bruce turns his head to meet them. “What do you think, old man? Victim or villain?” He nods his head once toward the video feed.

Bruce considers for a moment, watching the stranger through the screen, sitting, blinking slower and slower. His head has lolled away from the camera, hanging down toward his chest, but he’s still aware of it; his eyes travel, sluggish and slow, back up to the camera every so often.

“I reserve judgment,” he finally says. Jason nods, like he was expecting that.

“Sorry for setting us back,” Dick says quietly, but he’s already forgiven.

“He’s intelligent,” Bruce dismisses. “He’s worn down now, but he’s still plenty capable, from what we know. He would have found the trains, and you’re right: once he got on one, we would have lost him.” And, despite the less-than-ideal execution, Bruce is glad to have him here, where he can be kept an eye on. For somebody without a spleen, no infection can become deadly infection startlingly quickly. Plus, Bruce will be interested to see if anyone comes forward about the boy, if anyone is missing him.

“Maybe we should’a let him go,” Jason points out. “Whatever he went through, we’re not exactly helpin’ him with it.” His heart’s not in it, though. Jason wants to figure out all the why s of this situation just as much as Bruce. Likely moreso.

“He’s caught up in something,” Dick insists. “We don’t know in what capacity yet, but that at least is a reasonable assumption, almost a surefire assumption. We need to find out what, and how he’s involved.”

“Well,” Jason says, leaning more heavily against the console and closing his eyes. “Damage is already done. Might as well dig around in the kid’s personal business while we’re at it.”

Bruce wonders, not for the first time, what Jason’s exact personal interest in this case is. He knows what Jason’s told him: Tim is a young man on the streets who reacted badly to Jason, and it triggered protective instincts that Jason had cultivated in the wake of the Pit. But that explains why Jason would take Tim to Leslie’s free clinic, or even why he’d offered one of his free Park Row apartments, but not this level of…hovering. Not offering him work doing surveillance when Jason already had free access to some of the best and most skilled people (namely Oracle) in the country, and not to mention perfectly competent skills himself. Not calling in favors from every single one of them when Tim had disappeared once again to the streets of Gotham.

Not that any of them minded. Not that Bruce wouldn’t happily sacrifice any amount of hours in the day for favors for Jason, or any of his boys. Not that he wouldn’t sacrifice anything of his for Jason’s mere peace of mind.

But the point stands.

Maybe it’s how Tim looks. Scrawny, black hair, blue eyes, wandering around on the streets of Gotham.

Bruce wasn’t there, that first day, or any of the other times Tim had been collected from the street. But he can imagine it must have been like looking in a mirror.

Whatever Jason’s interest is, there’s merit to support it, and Bruce intends to do so until every fraction of that merit disappears.

“What’s our current working theory?” Dick asks.

Jason is silent for a long second. He’s forgiven Dick too, and he probably wants to spare his feelings. “B and I were thinkin’ maybe meta trafficking,” he finally says, and Dick winces, swearing under his breath.

“Oh,” he says, his voice small. “So he must think– waking up here– I really didn’t mean to–” Dick cuts himself off. He’s gone a little pale; Bruce steers him to sit in the chair in front of the Batcomputer.

“I should have briefed you,” Jason says. “My fault.”

“My fault too,” Dick says miserably. He lets Bruce push him down, immediately leaning his elbows on the console so he can press his face into his hands. “I just thought—if he was from Gotham, he would know us. Batman’s been on the streets since before he’d be able to remember, every kid on these streets knows about us, knows we’re safe. I didn’t expect him to fight so hard, and I didn’t know what to do when he did.”

“We could be wrong about that,” Bruce says. Then he lays a heavy hand on Dick’s shoulder, gentle pressure between his nape and deltoid. “We could be wrong about the trafficking too.”

Bruce can hear the click of his throat as Dick swallows, visibly wrangling himself away from the emotions of Dick Grayson and back toward a logical Nightwing. “If we’re thinking meta trafficking, do we have any idea what kind of meta he is?”

“Not much sign yet, of anythin,” Jason admits. “But if he’s been trafficked, they would’a been training him, too. He’d have a handle on it.” Jason’s eyes flick back to the camera feed. There’s suspicion there, but not enough to throw the idea into the discussion just yet.

Dick nods, lifting his head from his hands to watch the video feed himself. Tim is still sitting on the floor. “Should we really let Dami take this one alone?”

“Robin is plenty capable,” Bruce says. And the holding cells have every failsafe conceivable. Including ones Alfred had insisted on. The Batcave would sooner kill its holding cell occupant than let harm befall Batman or his boys.

“You sure he’s our best bet?”

“For now,” Bruce says firmly. “I have less relatability than Robin.” Too old, too potentially similar to a figure of authority who may have been involved with whatever Tim had been subject to, trafficking or no. “And his reactions to you are too inconsistent, Hood.” And there was little need to mention the bridge Dick had recently burned. “We’ll all work on trust-building as needed, but for now, Robin is our best choice.”

“You think any of us are the right choice?” Dick says. “What about a telepath? We could bring him to the Justice League.”

Bruce chews on the suggestion for a second. “No. I don’t think so. Tim may become a necessary contact point for whatever it is he’s involved in, depending on how extensive it turns out to be. We need him to trust us.”

“So no pokin’ around in his brain,” Jason says, nodding along.

“No poking around in his brain.” Bruce shifts his weight, eyes still fixed on the screen. “We’ll see what Robin is able to figure out, and work from there.”

True to his word, when Robin reappears, he’s got two water bottles clutched by the caps in one hand, and three packaged protein bars in the other. Tim tries to scramble back to his feet, bracing against the wall, as Robin approaches the door to the cell, but Robin has already deposited the bars and water and is retreating again by the time he gets halfway there. The bottles and protein bars fall from the slot to the cot where it’s jimmied haphazardly against the door; the bottles bounce to the ground, and one rolls right next to Tim.

Robin sits back down on the ground. He produces a third water bottle from behind his back, stored probably in the depths of his utility belt, and cracks the seal.

Tim lets himself slide back down to the ground. The brief rest didn’t really help; it just made him sleepy and sluggish. It won’t go away until he’s got fuel in he engine, food and water, but he’s wary to trust anything that just falls into his lap like this.

Robin takes a sip from his own bottle, but Tim ignores him. He’s busy inspecting the plastic bottle for any  sign of tampering. He runs his fingers along every centimeter of it, and comes up empty. No injection holes, no suspicious deformation of the plastic, and the seal is still intact.

He settles the bottle in his lap between his thighs and drifts his gaze to the protein bars lying inconspicuously on the cot mattress beneath the door slot. They’re the same packaging Batman kept around the cave in Tim’s own universe. Tim knows from experience that they’re not particularly good-tasting, but they’re filling and more nutrient-dense than a more palatable protein bar would be.

He could really use those calories right now.

His eyes flick to Robin, but he’s still sitting impassively on the floor, not even looking at Tim, sipping on his water and holding his own protein bar loosely in his free hand. It could be a trap, but not a great one. Tim doesn’t see the point of luring him with food if Damian just intends to pull a blade on him, which is really more his style. Unless the point is to humiliate Tim, luring him like a rat to a mouse trap, or a dog, performing tricks for bacon, but that’s fine. Tim can handle humiliation. Humiliation isn't much to risk.

He shuffles forward, wary, crouched low to the ground. Robin doesn’t look up. Tim snatches up the protein bars and the other water bottle, and retreats back to the far wall. The extra half-dozen feet distance doesn’t offer much protection, really, but Tim feels better with the feeling of a solid wall against his back. It soothes that little paranoid corner of his mind that wants to be coiled like a snake at all times, ready for an attack from behind, no matter where he is.

As soon as he settles, Damian produces a protein bar for himself too, right on cue, casual as anything, the little bastard. Well. The big bastard, here.

“How old are you?” Tim asks abruptly. Tim wants to know how many years he’s got til the Robin at home is this tall.

Damian doesn’t answer, of course. That’s classified information, secret-identity stuff, and Tim is a stranger. And to his credit, it is a weird start to an interrogation. Tim’s kidnapped (or, rather, detained villains, people who actually should be detained) and been kidnapped plenty, and it’s a new one for him too.

“You should eat and drink,” Damian says instead. He sinks his teeth into his own bar, and takes another sip of his water. Tim feels like a dog being taught a new trick, like being shown what he’s supposed to do will make him do it.

But it reminds him he needs to inspect the protein bars and the other water bottle for tampering, so he starts on that. As he’s running his fingers over smooth plastic, feeling for tears or holes, Robin keeps talking.

“You’ve been to Gotham before.” It’s not a question. Which, fair. Tim knows this city like the back of his hand. No true transient could navigate Gotham like Tim can. He’s not a stranger to this city, and they would have noticed. Clearly, they have.

So Tim doesn’t answer that. Why should he? Instead, he takes advantage of the undivided attention of someone who would know, and asks about the one thing that’s been bugging him more than anything else since coming here. “You put in the trains.”

Those were Tim’s trains. They have no business being here. So many things have no business being here, but Tim can’t ask about the makeup of the cell they’ve got him locked in. He can’t ask about Jason’s security system, or if the BatComputer runs on the same code Tim had developed back home. He can only ask about the trains.

Robin is quiet for a long moment. It’s confirmation of his own statement, by implication, but that’s confirmation enough. But it’s also a demand for elaboration, and apparently Robin is feeling generous, because he says anything in reciprocation at all. Unusual of him. “Yes. Gotham City has a train system now.”

Tim’s eyes flick up from the second protein bar; the first is set in his lap beside the water bottle, deemed as clean as he can ensure. “Where did you get the idea?” He demands. “Why those stops? Why electric? Why now? Which of you decided to do it? Was it Batman?”

Robin goes quiet again. He’s stopped eating and drinking, attention wholly focused on Tim’s interrogation. If only Tim felt like being interrogated. No, Tim has other things to talk about. “Batman is not involved in city infrastructure,” Robin says.

That is a lie. But it was foolish to imply that Tim knows better. It would be even more foolish to confirm that implication now. The less they have to suspect about Tim, the safer he is. He stays quiet.

“Why did you seek out the trains?” Robin says after a minute of silence. “Is there something in Gotham City you need to escape?”

Tim’s eyes wander pointedly to Damian. He rolls them exaggeratedly around the cell they put him in. “I’m starting to think so,” he slurs, a little too tired to be properly snarky, but it’s the thought that counts.

Robin pauses. When he starts up his questions again, he shifts gears, goes a little more neutral.

“Who are you?”

All things considered, Robin is handling things well. He’s got a number of years of experience under his belt as a vigilante by now, but interpersonal skills have always been a little bit more of a struggle for Bruce’s youngest, even more so than Jason. Empathy had been trained out of him since he could comprehend speech, but he improves every day now that he’s under Bruce’s roof. His efforts are paying off, evidently.

He’s gotten Tim to accept the water bottles and protein bars, even if the boy is yet to actually break any of them open. Robin keeps nibbling away casually at his own snack, probably in hopes Tim will follow suit without thinking. It’s yet to work, but maybe it still will. So far, he seems to have deemed one of the bottles of water and two of the protein bars as safe, collected protectively in his lap. Perhaps his priority is to hoard them for later, but so long as he trusts the food source, Bruce is sure they’ll be able to coax him into eating, as long as they provide enough for him to hang onto at the same time.

Bruce leans back in his chair, considering the video feed thoughtfully. Dick and Jason, on his left and right, are watching just as intently.

They haven't learned much so far. Tim seems rather fixated on the trains, but Bruce can’t place quite why just yet. He seems almost accusatory, and he hits the nail right on the head—a little worryingly so—about Batman’s own involvement. Yes, he’d been involved, of course. Not many major changes took place in Gotham without Bruce Wayne’s financial endorsement.

But it hadn’t just been the money. They’d all been involved in the idea generation part of it, too. It had come to all of them rather abruptly. It was not a problem Bruce had been overtly aware of; none of the Waynes were particularly accustomed to using Gotham’s public transport, and all the problems the buses had were not problems they faced very often. But one morning they’d woken up and decided the buses weren’t working. And somehow, in a family that thrived on arguing over the correct solution, they’d come up with this one together rather quickly and easily.

Luckily, Robin had glossed over the question smoothly and unequivocally. Of course they can’t tell Tim the hand they had in the train system. It’s too intrinsically linked to who they really are. And it gives them too much power; they want Tim to open up. Lording their position of influence over him will only make them more distant, more suspicious.

“Who are you?” Robin pivots, his voice tinny over the Batcomputer speakers.

Tim is quiet. His eyes are half closed, annoyed or tired, but too tired to be panicking anymore, which is both good and bad. “Nobody,” he finally breathes out.

“Who trained you?”

“No one in particular.” That’s an interesting answer. Maybe he’s been trained by multiple mentors. Maybe he just doesn’t know who it was. People who run rings in this city, especially trafficking rings, hold their identities often almost as close as the Bats do.

“Why are you here?”

The boy hums, his eyes blinking slowly once, twice. His throat works, probably dry, probably hurting him. His fingers skim over the water bottle’s cap, but he doesn’t snap the seal just yet. “Don’t want to be,” comes his voice through the speakers. “Just trying to get home.” His eyebrow furrows momentarily. “If I recall, your colleague was the one to derail all that.”

Robin glosses over the dig at his brother. He’s quite the professional these days. Bruce is very proud of him. “Home. Where is that?”

Tim sighs, clears his throat roughly, palms the water bottle, and sighs again. “In relation to here? I don’t know. Far, I think.” He clears his throat again. Robin drinks casually from his own water bottle, but Tim isn’t coaxed into taking the bait. He only furrows his eyebrows.

Robin drinks again, but he’s thinking, this time. Bruce knows that expression, as minute as it is. “Your name is Tim Drake,” he finally says.

“It is.”

“You are not from here.”

“Guess not.”

“But you’ve been here.”

Tim only grunts noncommittally.

“What is your business here?”

Tim’s forehead wrinkles again, then smooths over just a fast. “Uh, no business of yours.”

Robin leans forward, and Tim straightens too in response, wary. “You are in our city. So you are our business.”

Tim snorts, unimpressed and dismissive. “No, thanks. Not seeking any business partners right now. This one’s all mine.” Well, that’s something at least. There is something here, something Tim’s after, or something Tim’s running from that he’s not ready to disclose.

Tim’s foot is bouncing, just a little, just enough to betray his restlessness. But Robin is the perfect picture of calm, sitting casually on the floor; he’s eased himself back again, sitting straight instead of forward. He’s quiet, letting Tim rest his throat for a second; it’s getting rougher and raspier with every reply. But Tim looks unnerved by the silence, no matter if his throat needs it.

“We want to know what happened to you,” Robin finally says, after several minutes.

Annoyance bursts across Tim’s face, only heightened by his growing restlessness. “Well, pick your poison,” he snaps, then coughs into his elbow.

“You should drink the water,” Robin says. “You can have as much as you wish. But you should drink some now.”

Tim doesn’t, for a long minute. He’s running his fingers over it again, nervous, but Bruce already knows he won’t find anything. Soft, rasping coughs riddle the audio feed until Tim reluctantly cracks the seal.

He drains the water bottle almost in one go. Then he begins to fiddle with the second one.

“Are you hungry?”

Tim blinks. “What?”

“Are you hungry? You should eat, as well.”

Tim flips a protein bar over in his other hand. He’s thinking, eyebrows furrowed together, forehead wrinkled. Robin waits him out patiently, hands resting impassively on his knees.

Tim doesn’t open the protein bar. Instead, he looks up at Robin and says something that makes Bruce’s blood run cold.

“What year is it?”

Chapter Text

Damian takes his leave quickly after that. Shoves two more protein bars and two more water bottles through the slot of Tim’s cell door and disappears back toward the main cavern of the Cave.

In hindsight, that’s kind of fair. “What year is it?” is not really what you’re most expecting (or hoping) to hear your prisoner ask. That’ll be a red flag Tim will have to smooth over at some point, probably. But Tim needed to know.

He refuses to spill when Damian asks what yeah he thinks it is. Tim doesn’t quite know yet what the working theory is, but absolutely off-his-rocker bonkers is not really a diagnosis he wishes to revisit from the Bats. It’s been bad enough already these past six months, back home.

Six years, though. Six years.

Damian’s not older than him, barely. But he is taller. Who knows when that happens. Tim almost asks, but Damian looks a little stricken all of a sudden, so Tim lets him go without further comment. Good riddance, really; Tim is tired.

He scoots forward, scraping together the little pile of supplies and pulling them down off the cot where they landed from the door slot and into his lap. He shuffles backward into his place against the back wall and sorts his pile into clean and unchecked, and picks up an unchecked water bottle to begin running his fingers of the seams in the plastic.

Something to do with his hands while he thinks.

Six years later. A new system of support for the unhoused, and new electric train system. And six years.

…Maybe, well… maybe it’s not such a surprise this version of Gotham is so advanced without him, then. Maybe Gotham always reaches this point, figures out these problems, with or without him. Sure, is it a little odd that both solutions are exactly, eerily the same to both of Tim’s proposed solutions? Maybe, but then again, Tim had worked his ass off on them, put countless hours of his off-duty time into drawing and redrawing plans, comparing options, calculating and recalculating cost and benefit analyses. They had been the best solutions, Tim had made sure of it.

And, well. Batman is a genius. Oracle is a genius, assuming she’s here. And truthfully Jason and Dick and Damian are geniuses in their own right. Of course they’d land on Tim’s perfect solution even without Tim here. Jason cares about the homeless, and Dick used to take the buses out of the city, so they’d know about the problems personally, if vaguely. And they’re in contact here, it seems, enough for the two of them to raise concerns.

Really, it’s a no-brainer that they figured it out. Maybe it’s even fate, if such a thing even exists. Maybe Gotham always fixes herself.

Maybe Tim’s Gotham will get there too, if Tim kicks the bucket before he can find his way back.

It’s a nice thought. This means ultimately, he won’t be missed at home. All who were left to miss him were the civilians, the people Tim swore to protect and aid at any cost to himself; Dick had already written him off, Damian and Jason both wanted him dead, Bruce was gone. There’s no one to miss him there. And now he knows that the city herself won’t miss him either.

It stings in the same vein that it comforts him.

So maybe they weren’t really Tim’s projects, but fate’s projects, dropped into Tim’s lap by mere coincidence. Sure, that means all he’s ever worked for was fake, not really the product of any of his own value. Maybe those countless hours could’ve been anyone’s countless hours. Maybe Gotham wanted trains and support systems and aid programs and all the little passion projects Tim thought were his, and she could have had anyone bring them to fruition, and Tim won that lottery. Maybe he brings nothing in particular to the table, and that’s why it makes no difference whether he’s born or not. And maybe that does sting. But that also gives him hope the projects will still exist back home if he’s not there to build them, and that those people they were created to help will someday still receive it.

Maybe everything will work out either way. Maybe it doesn’t matter.

Maybe Bruce will come home.

Maybe Tim doesn’t need to fight so hard.

His hands have gone limp in his lap, fingers half-curled around a water bottle he’s given up examining. He sags against the wall, suddenly exhausted.

It hurts as much as it comforts. But it does comfort.

Nobody speaks for a long time.

The boy is lying on the floor, curled against the back wall, a collection of protein bars and plastic bottles spilling onto the floor from his lap. Batman will need to have a proper cot and mattress set up for him, if he continues to refuse the one from the med bay. They should at least unhook the IV pole from it. Perhaps it will make it more welcoming.

An oversight to remedy later. Batman doesn’t wish to risk waking him, not when he’s finally resting.

Robin is pacing behind him, crossing the length of the floor before the console, then spinning on his heel and stalking back the other way. Red Hood leans against the console on Batman’s other side. Nightwing sits in the chair. 

It had taken almost three years to implement the trains. Batman had been sure of the plans as soon as he’d decided it was a problem he wanted to fix, almost strangely so, but it had been a perfectly sound plan, so Batman had gone ahead and implemented it.

But even with the speed at which the project had taken off, and the soundness of its financial backing, with Bruce Wayne involved, it took time to fundamentally overhaul the infrastructure of an entire major city. Three years in progress, and completed about a year ago.

Everyone had heard about it. Everyone. The trains ran at all hours, all throughout the city; there was not a singular neighborhood untouched by them. This boy could not have been here at all within the last four years. Not substantially, anyway. That made at least four years of lost time for Tim, or four years in some situation where he did not have the freedom or the ability to keep up with the passage of time. Potentially more than four.

They don’t know yet. The boy wouldn’t tell Robin what year he thought he was in.

“We’ll have to expand the search parameters,” Nightwing finally says bleakly. “To have lost so much time…there’s no way it was only six months ago.”

Meta trafficking had been the working theory, and the Justice League and its associates had only picked up any trace of that specific type of trafficking as far as six months ago. Four years or more is unprecedented. And it means one of two things:

One. Whatever Tim had been involved in, it wasn’t meta trafficking. Truthfully, the boy had shown almost no signs of meta abilities  (but that meant very little, really; anyone of his age in such a system had likely learned quickly how to hide what made them different). Batman had begun to wonder about his uncanny knack for cameras, but this time discrepancy is decently compelling evidence that they’d been barking up the wrong tree.

Two. Meta trafficking had been occurring for far longer than the Justice League could find any evidence for. They’d missed something, or maybe the traffickers were far more successful at covering their tracks than one would hope. It would be an unusual pattern, to be very adept at staying hidden at the beginning and suddenly dropping that ball, but power shifts occurred in criminal organizations all the time; there was no reason that one group had not suddenly taken over another and been simply poorer at covering for themselves.

Either way, that leaves them with more unanswered questions, and only an uncooperative, injured, malnourished, potentially memory-impaired teenager to answer them.

“We will,” Batman assures his first son. It’ll be tricky; a timeframe of four years or more is not very specific, and will be more difficult to handle than the last six months, but they will look. “But for now, I think our time is better spent pursuing Tim himself as a lead.”

“He does not trust us,” Robin says, half-annoyed; he’s used to being trusted, he’s a face of hope in this city, and he clearly does not like this particular treatment from a civilian (assuming, of course, that is what Tim is). He likely feels sour over the associations Tim must be projecting on him because of his brothers, despite never having made the mistakes Red Hood and Nightwing had. Robin had always wanted to be his own hero, to shine apart from his predecessors. “We must show him we can be trusted.”

Batman nods along. Everything they had assumed about this case was crumbling further and further apart the longer they looked into it. They could spend countless hours and resources searching with incredibly broad parameters, or they could work to trust-build for now, and resume the search once they had sufficient information to do so.

To his left, Red Hood is quiet. He watches the video feed with his expression carefully blank. Batman…has never seen him this way.

He knows his son cares. He cares deeply, passionately, about his work as a vigilante in this city. But there’s something about this case that’s especially affecting him. He worries it may be affecting all of them. And he doesn’t yet know why.

“We’ll let him sleep,” he says instead of voicing any of these quiet concerns. “Then someone needs to get him to eat. We start there.”

Tim stirs to the sound of the cell door beeping as someone on the other side punches in its open code. He blinks, brain logging online enough for him to sit up straight and brace himself. The door slides open, and the Red Hood steps in, nudging the cot diagonally away from the door with his foot, carrying a bright orange pill bottle in one hand and another water bottle in the other.

As if Tim doesn’t have three already. Not that he’s complaining; free resources are free resources. Unless it’s for Jason, but Tim’s hoping he won’t stick around.

“Got your antibiotics,” Jason says. He’s forgone the helmet for a simple domino, but the relative bareness of his face does little to clue Tim in to how he’s feeling. There’s just too much there, and too much of an effort to conceal it. And Tim feels too lousy. “Gonna toss ‘em, okay? Heads up.”

The bottle arcs through the air; Tim catches it in one hand without breaking his wary gaze, fixed on the Red Hood. He just holds it for a long time, at least a minute, sitting stiffly and ready to scramble up if Jason advances. But he doesn’t.

He just fucking stands there.

“Please just take ‘em,” Jason says after an awkward minute. “They’re the exact same ones Leslie prescribed ‘ya, scout’s honor, okay?” He backs off a couple steps until his back is against the door, and Tim risks a quick glance at the bottle.

Tim Drake stares impassively back at him from the label. Antibiotics. The same dosage, the same treatment length.

Tim’s head hurts. His side hurts, his eyes are feeling itchier the longer he has them open, and these are just the healing side effects. He doesn’t want to deal with the infection ones. It’s a risk, but doing nothing is also a risk, and doing nothing might also provoke Jason.

He pops the cap and swallows the dosage dry. Then he stows the bottle away in his pocket.

Jason doesn’t look thrilled about that, but he doesn’t look angry, either. It’s not like Tim can kill himself with a few extra doses of antibiotics, so it looks like he’s gonna let it slide.

Then Jason sits down, right on the ground, like Robin did, except Hood is inside Tim’s cell. “Mind if I hang for a minute?” he asks, but Tim knows an empty question when he hears it. Jason already sat down. He’s not taking no for an answer, and Tim’s not going to provoke whatever other reaction will come.

He nods stiffly. Hey man, it’s your interrogation cell.

“Listen,” he says, because apparently he just can’t leave Tim alone. “We’ll do the hanging part in a sec, have a more fun chat, but I gotta get a look at your wound first, yeah?” He holds up his hands placatingly, palms up toward Tim, before Tim can even start freaking out. “You can stay right there, I’ll stay right here, I just wanna make sure it ain’t infected already. You just gotta lift your shirt a little.”

Tim stares, and thinks.

It’s weird, to be on this end of a medical check from Jason, of all people. It makes sense only in the way that nothing has been making sense, but at a certain point, Tim just has to suspend his disbelief. Between this, the IV, the food and water—they’ve been too consistent for him to come to any other conclusion: whatever plan they have for him, whatever they suspect him of, whatever the game is, it doesn’t involve leaving him to rot in this cell and succumb to starvation or infection.

To be fair, that’s not usually Batman’s prerogative, and despite having not seen him, Tim has to assume he’s the one running this whole thing. His revenge is usually far less physical; he’ll leave someone to suffer in other ways. Tim’s been on the receiving end of Batman’s rage, his brutality, especially in those early days, and he’s witnessed it toward others. None of those times had his retribution manifested as locking someone in his own personal holding cell and intentionally leaving them to die.

Now, Tim doesn’t love the implications that has for his future (because if this isn’t the retribution, what will be?), but it does likely mean Jason’s request is genuine.

And why should it not be? He could just as easily put a bullet in Tim through a shirt as he could without.

With all of that established: it’s a kindness Tim would never have expected to examine his wound this way. It’s not exactly ideal, to squint at a stab wound from a dozen feet away and try to determine how it’s healing. Even suspending his disbelief that Jason wants to check up on it at all, Tim had no idea why he would extend this additional kindness.

Maybe Jason’s not too fond of being near Tim, either. Maybe he doesn’t actually give a shit if Tim’s got an infection and he’s just following orders.

Either way, Tim lifts the hem of his shirt and peels back the bandage. To his own eye, the wound looks, remarkably, just fine. A little swollen, a little puffy around the stitches, but no discoloration besides the expected bruising, no weird smell, no fluid.

Jason shifts his weight and Tim’s eyes snap back up; Jason’s lifted himself into a crouch; he’s leaning forward a little, trying to get a clear view. Nervously, Tim lifts his shirt just a little higher so he doesn’t have to contort himself so much.

After a long moment, Jason shrugs, then falls back down onto his ass, getting comfortable on the ground again with his legs outstretched. Apparently that was not the end of him ‘ hanging out’ here. “Looks fine,” he says, waving a hand. Tim immediately presses the bandage back down and drops the hem of his shirt.

Jason sighs, shuffling backward to lean his shoulders against the cell door. He’s quiet for a beat, eyes half-lidded and casual even as Tim watches him with open apprehension. Finally, he says, “I ain’t mad at’cha for the laptop.”

Tim doesn’t say anything, suddenly even more instinctively uncomfortable that Jason is blocking the door, regardless of the fact that it’s locked anyway.

“I hope you weren’t thinking I was.” Jason’s still talking. “But, to cover all my bases, there it is: I ain’t mad, I’ve had worse, no harm done. If it’s still rattlin’ around in there,'' Jason taps his own temple. “Put it outta your mind, yeah?”

The lenses of his domino are wide, eyebrows furrowed, like he’s trying to pry a reply out of Tim with eye contact alone, even through his mask. Distinctly unnerved by this whole interaction, Tim nods a little. Sure, whatever Jason wants. If Tim wants him to agree Jason isn’t mad, then Tim will agree. But Tim was there. Tim heard Jason’s rage, heard the havoc he wrecked on his own apartment building when Tim had flown the coop.

Jason leans back again, satisfied with the answer. Okay, sure. Great. Whatever Jason wants. Whatever keeps Jason on his own side of the cell.

…Tim has questions now though. The detective in him wars with self-preservation, the same way it did when Tim sought out Batman after Jason had died. He just can’t seem to help himself.

“What do you think I am?”

Jason makes an aborted movement, jerking his shoulders just a little up from the door before he settles again. Instead, he crosses his feet at the ankles, feigning ease and casualness. “What do you mean?”

Tim gestures vaguely at his surroundings, by way of explanation: what do they suspect him of that would warrant a holding cell? He then subsequently hopes it doesn’t come across as flippant enough for Jason to rip him a new one.

Jason is quiet for a moment, but he’s not seething, just thoughtful. “A kid caught up in somethin’ we should be dealin’ with,” he finally says. “Not you.”

“How do you know what I should and shouldn’t be dealing with?” And what do you think I’m ‘caught up’ in?

“How long’s it been since you’ve last been in Gotham?” Jason asks instead of answering.

Tim falters. Six years, but also sort of never, and also maybe only six months. Jason takes his silence as distress, because he leans forward, raising his hands up placatingly, and apparently decides to shift gears again.

“Okay. Listen. Now I ain’t mad,” he says again, like a reminder. “You were scared, anybody would’a been able to see that. But I thought we were cool about the apartments. I thought you were settling in there. So what happened?” Tim can’t see his eyes past the domino’s white lenses, but there’s a weird furrow to his brow that distorts the shape of them. Call him crazy, but it looks like concern.

Probably fake, of course. Acting is just part of the vigilante gig. But Tim’ll hand it to him. It’s pretty convincing.

“Was I askin’ things you weren’t looking to share?” The curve of his brow becomes even more severe. “Something that scared you? Hurt you? Is that what’s going on here?”

And it all clicks into place, this strategy. The open concern, the gentle tone of voice…it’s a tactic Tim wouldn’t have expected from Jason, who’s generally more likely to shoot or threaten an enemy than manipulate them, but it’s demeaning all the same. And worst of all, it’s working. Tim feels suitably backed into a corner, his bizarre behavior thrown out into the open, and Jason has made himself the only sympathetic path forward, as far from reality as that actually is.

He scowls.

Yeah, the last several years of Tim’s life haven’t been some peachy walk in the park, but he’s handling the scared and hurt part of that just fine; his behavior is perfectly sound! His reactions, all his dodgy answers, been purely and downright strategic. Yeah, on a bad day he’s scared almost out of his mind of Jason, and he’s man enough to admit that in his own head, but it’s an asshole move of Jason to ask him to spill his guts about it.

“Don’t talk to me about that,” he snaps, panic flaring at being backed into a corner again, literal or not. He doesn’t want to justify himself to Jason, Jason has no right when it’s him that did the scaring and hurting.

“Okay,” Jason says immediately as the tone shifts sharply from awkward but civil to charged with tension. He lifts his hands a fraction higher, palms still outstretched reassuringly toward Tim. “Okay. We don’t gotta cover that just yet. I’m sorry for pushing.”

“Are you hungry for some real food yet?” Jason moves smoothly into the next topic, an easier topic, but Tim doesn’t relax yet. He scrapes his little pile of protein bars off the floor, hiding them in his lap because no one offers ‘real food’ to a prisoner without a catch.

“No, yeah, you keep those,” Jason says. He shifts his weight again, then rises off the floor. Tim very strategically shrinks back further against the wall. Jason just lifts his hands again, like it’s okay. “I can bring you something else too, is all. A real meal, actually warm ‘n shit. We got a pretty good setup going, so whatever you want. Sky’s the limit.”

…Sky’s the limit. Even for a vigilante rather than a villain, this is a fucking weird way to treat a prisoner.

Except that it keeps up.

So far, it’s not a long-winded cruelty, or a trick. When Tim is hungry, they feed him. He never quite asks for anything specific, not willing to tempt whatever adverse reaction he’s sure is coming as soon as he lets his guard down, but they make it so easy on him anyway.

Sometimes Tim wonders if they pay attention to what and how he eats, because as the days pass, the food gets closer and closer to his ideal meal, containing more of the foods he really likes and less of the ones he cares less for. Which is super creepy if true, for the record, but…been really nice, to eat Alfred’s food again. He hasn’t in a long time, not since Damian arrived and Tim was pushed out. Alfred’s cooking must be a multi-universal truth, though, because it’s just as good as he remembers. He almost cries when Jason brings down chicken and rice for him on that first night, once Jason’s left and Tim gets to savor the warm meal in relative peace. He doesn’t, but it’s a near thing.

He’s in no shortage of water, either. Usually as soon as Tim makes his way through one bottle, someone will wander by within the hour to drop off a replacement. It makes his skin crawl, to be so constantly reminded how watched he is, but the water store is good to have. He feels less shaky and sick by the day, now that he’s got a consistent food and water source.

The second night (judging by Tim’s internal clock, but who knows how much reliability that still has by now), Nightwing comes by and crouches down by the medical cot. “I think we should get you something more comfortable to sleep on,” he says, mischievously, like he’s conspiring against Batman to do this for Tim even though he probably isn’t; anything in the holding cells here is Batman’s case to deal with, and Dick’s involvement is likely on his behalf.

But it makes him want to smile anyway, makes him want to pretend he’s still Robin, still making trouble with Dick Grayson, his brand new big brother who he’d thought would be his family forever. It reminds him of train-surfing, and ditching patrol every once in a blue moon on a winter weekend night to sled down the hill to the side of Wayne Manor, wearing kevlar and with emergency comms in their ears, in case Batman really did need them.

It reminds him of stopping at that ice cream place on Main street, the nameless one with just a big worn sign proclaiming “Ice Cream” in all capital letters. Owned by an older couple who were snappish with most people but loved Dick, because everyone loved Dick. Tim had been nursing a bum leg and a sore hip, pushed too far during one of Bruce’s training sessions, and Dick had taken pity. When they’d gotten there, Dick had spun a whole story , slipped on the ice trying to catch the bus, can you believe it? You’d think the city would know by now to start salting the roads in December, charming as ever, and they’d gotten a second scoop for free. And Dick had turned and winked at Tim, mint chocolate chip ice cream already dripping down his hand.

Dick winks at him now and drags the cot out of the room. Before Tim can really begin to flounder at the loss of a resource, as little as he’d been using it, Dick reappears, a more standard cot with more support and a thicker mattress in tow. He’s got a real pillow tucked under one arm, and a thick gray blanket. Dick sets it up for him along the far wall so he can sit on the cot instead of the floor, and then doesn’t get upset when Tim moves it to cover the door as soon as he’s left.

At least one of them comes by every day. Jason or Dick or Damian, not usually more than one at once, but sometimes two or even all three. Sometimes they transparently interrogate him, pushing for information about Tim and where he came from, and always asking when he came from, which Tim doesn’t know how to answer. But they never torture him, and usually they even follow Tim’s lead when he’s had enough and he shuts down that particular activity.

It’s easier with Dick, because this version of Dick is kind to him and has none of the history, and it’s easy in the moment just to pretend everything hadn’t gone so deeply to shit. But the consequences of Dick’s visits are the worst of all, too; when Jason and Damian leave, Tim can cling to the relief that blooms up (though, strangely, there is less and less relief each time). But with Dick, it just reminds him of reality a little too hard.

Eventually he comes to..tolerate, and then maybe appreciate visits from Damian and Jason. Damian is second easiest after Dick, in an interesting twist. This Damian is so different from home, even just in appearance alone. Tim has an easier time separating them, which is not to say that he automatically trusts Damian, just because this Damian looks different from his own. But he can look at this version of Robin and not flash involuntarily back to a katana against his throat, or a birdarang cutting his line sixteen stories above the ground.

Jason is more difficult. Sometimes he’ll come by and Tim will fight and snarl against Jason’s questions one second, and then retreat and try to hide behind his new cot, suddenly panic-stricken and sick with stress the next.

So Jason stops trying to interrogate him at all. Instead, when he comes by, he only does what they all do, sometimes, which is simply, purely hanging out.

He brings Tim a sketchbook and a flimsy mechanical pencil, and brings his own artist pencils down too, and tries to draw with him instead.

Tim’s not much of an artist, but it doesn’t seem like Jason cares. He doesn’t even look over at Tim’s amateur rendering of a beetle, and Tim breathes a little easier.

Then he brings a pack of cards, and when Uno proves a little lackluster with only two players, he ropes in Dick and Damian too. The three of them sit on the floor and let Tim sit on his cot, so Tim can keep a better eye on them and get up quicker if he feels threatened. He could win every time, because he can see all their cards, but he doesn’t; he doesn’t know what they would do, and the Bats probably have bigger concerns than needing to win in Uno, but to be safe, Tim only wins once.

Damian tries to teach him how to play chess. He comes in the room with a lovely wooden box, a paler panel on the top that lifts to reveal a modestly carved but beautiful little chess set, and he explains each piece as he sets the board. He seems very convinced that Tim would not know how to play, so Tim doesn’t tell him that he can, that he loves chess, that he hasn’t played in years, because who would ever play with him?

Dick watches Spirit with him on an old laptop, the screen small and occasionally buggy. He doesn’t even try to have them sit side-by-side, instead contentedly following Tim’s precedent and settling on the far end of the cell, passing off the laptop for Tim to hold himself. Tim’s sure Dick can’t really see from that far away, but Dick doesn’t seem to care. When it ends, he eagerly engages Tim in a discussion about its merit. They criticize the concept of manifest destiny, and then Dick gives Tim whiplash when he abruptly asks where Tim stands on the debate over whether the horse is hot. (Tim finally concedes that the horse would be hot if he were a person and not a horse, but Dick assures him that goes without saying.)

Occasionally Bruce comes by, too.

He doesn’t usually stay as long as the others, which Tim understands. He’s Batman, and Batman has always had bigger fish to fry than Tim. But sometimes he appears to make sure Tim is eating and taking his antibiotics, and gently ( gently! Batman doesn’t do anything gently)  coaxes Tim into letting him examine his eyes and abdomen wound.

And it’s not like Jason, or Dick, or Damian. It’s so easy to trust Bruce, even if he knows Bruce is running this whole shindig, that he has the power to inflict whatever damage he wants on Tim. Even knowing what that damage looks like, even being on the receiving end of it so many times when he first took up the cape. It doesn’t matter.

Fuck, he missed Bruce.

Tim knows how pathetic he is. He knows how starved for Batman’s affections he was as Robin, and he thinks maybe that will never go away. He soaked up whatever scraps of affection were thrown his way in those early days with incredible gratitude, because he knows it was a profound kindness to be offered any at all. It was rare, even between the bouts of grief, but none of it was ever really meant for Tim. It should have been Jason’s, or Dick’s, or Damian’s. Any that Tim received was an incredible gift that Tim did not take lightly.

There had been no affection from Bruce immediately following Jason’s death, which had been what Tim expected, of course. The man had been cold and often violent even without the cowl, and Tim had known exactly what he was signing up for. Tim had borne the brunt of all of it for years. Bruce never recovered after Jason, not completely, but at some point cold shoulders and clipped words turned into silent nods and even the occasional pat on the shoulder, and Tim had savored every moment.

It hadn’t lasted, of course. Jason came back, and Bruce was overcome with hope, and Tim had told him everything he knew just as soon as his throat had healed enough from Jason’s blade.

Then Bruce was gone.

But he’s here now, or a version of him, taking Tim’s face carefully between two hands and tilting his head toward the light, so he can see how Tim’s eyes are healing. And it’s easy. Tim defers so easily to Batman, always has. He was Robin, once, after all.

It’s only by pure luck that Batman does none of the actual interrogating himself, because Tim would be sure to spill his guts if it meant Bruce would keep treating him as gently as he has been.

…lately it’s felt less and less like a bad idea. To tell them.

No one has hurt him yet, not really, bar Dick accidentally elbowing him in the splenectomy wound on the street.

And Tim is bored.

He’s been trained against boredom, but it’s worse, somehow, when the periods of empty solitude are broken up by honest-to-god pleasant company. Usually pleasant company, anyway. As pleasant as anything gets in this situation.

He knows it’s what they’re waiting for. And god knows what they’ll do once he does tell them anything. The Multiverse is perfectly sound as theory, but that it would actually happen, show itself tangibly? They might just throw him right in Arkham.

But Tim needs help. Not Arkham-help, no thank you, but Batcave and Batcomputer help. Batman help. He has nothing on his own. No way home. Not even a real identity.

There’s a knock on his door, and Jason saunters in, a bright orange food tray held in one hand like Alfred, because they won’t let him have a metal cloche and tray like they usually use. “Got your dinner,” he singsongs, and Tim takes a deep breath.

…God help him, he thinks he’s really gonna do this.

“Can we talk?”

Chapter Text

Two weeks with a strange teenager in his basement, and no closer to any concrete answers. World’s Greatest Detective indeed.

The more they feed him and the more he fills out, the more Bruce considers he may lean closer to “young man” than proper teenager, so not even that feels certain anymore. He’s still scrawny, but young men can be scrawny, too. He won’t tell them his birth year. He won’t tell them much of anything.

But they’ve made progress in other areas. He flinches less at the sight of them, is adapting well to the meal plan Alfred drew up for him, will tolerate a medical check even when they have to get close, and even seems to enjoy the company at times.

It’s far from an ideal situation, of course. They mean him no harm, but that’s a claim so common it may as well not be made at all. He’s still a boy in a cell, being held by four men he doesn’t know, all hiding behind masks. They’re doing damage to him, even as they try to help him. He ought to be terrified.

It keeps Bruce awake at night, more so than his carefully curated circadian rhythms, more so than The Bat; it keeps him awake into the early morning, past dawn, past his normal sleeping hours.

But he still doesn’t see another way.

Dick and Jason are restless too. Both have individually questioned him about the plan, the big picture. Neither are used to the holding cells having an occupant for quite so long, and especially not one like this.

Even Damian’s behavior has shifted. The cool professionalism remains but fondness breaks through the mask, at times. The boy is charming, in his bullheaded, stubborn kind of way, and Damian connects perhaps most easily with bullheadedness. The fondness comes easy, but it’s brought its fair share of guilt. For all of them. And for no one more than Bruce.

He’d had Alfred prepare a room for Tim in the guest wing early on. Whatever their theories, he was innocent until proven guilty and Batman preferred not to keep even his proven enemies in a cell if they could be better helped somewhere else. Then shortly after he’d requested one in their own family hall, struck again by a familiarity: of course he belongs in our wing. Any other thought had been, however briefly, inconceivable.

Then he’d snapped back to reality and known better of both of them. A stranger in the manor is a threat to Bruce and his family, full stop. Nothing good has ever come of blurring those lines except behind closed and locked doors, and Bruce is very selective about who is given entry. A boy who feels familiar but is not does not pass those strict qualifications. The familiar feeling could be anything, a trick borne of any number of abilities, and none that they’ve been able to definitively rule out.

It would fit with the trafficking theory, in any case.

So he’d asked Dick to vet one of his safe houses, one of the quieter ones, closer to the suburbs, for that purpose instead. Tim hadn’t stayed put very long in Park Row, but he had also been under observation and had known it. Perhaps a space more his own, better upkept and more private, would keep him longer. Perhaps the display of trust would be worth the loss of some control. If he bolted, they could find him again. Maybe do better than pseudo-kidnapping with good intent. Maybe foster something more mutual. Bruce had been hopeful.

Then the suburbs began calling in reports of “gargoyles come to life,” moving in from the city, and Dick had been forced to switch from double-checking window locks to tailing Langstrom to find his nest, and the whole thing had taken a backseat. It’s still there, somewhere in the list of priorities, but Bruce won’t send a kid into Man-Bat-infested waters.

Not for the first time, he wishes Gotham would pull her punches, just a little. Send one thing at a time. He’s getting too old for this.

He’s sitting in his office, mulling over his remaining list of safehouses, scattered in mostly dangerous (the preferred company of the Bat, but nowhere to be placing a boy on his own) parts of the city, when Dick, Nightwing , broad-and-kevlar shouldered but bare-faced, ducks his head into the open doorway.

He looks nervous. Bruce doesn’t dare get his hopes up.

But, indeed: “He says he’s ready.”

Once he’s changed, Nightwing leads him down to the main console. Red Hood is sitting in the chair, hands laced loosely together in his lap, probably trying to make himself appear smaller. It isn’t working. Typically, it does not. Robin leans against the desk, as casual as he can be now that he’s shot up to Batman’s height, but still undoubtedly towering over Tim, who stands in the center of the room, looking distinctly pale. He watches Batman’s sons as a defendant, half-circled by the curve of the computer console, a steel-gray jury.’s stand. The computer is powered completely off; the only light comes from the hanging lights above. The spotlight makes Tim look even more pallid.

Nightwing peels off on Batman’s right, circling in half-shadow to stand next to Robin, trying not to draw attention to himself, trying to allow Tim to keep the floor. Batman wonders if he wants that. If he wants the floor. If he regrets submitting to it. Tim’s eyes flick to him anyway, alert, nervous. Batman’s first son settles next to Robin against the console desk, arms crossed loosely over his chest, both hands hanging empty and visible beneath either arm. He’s unarmed, and he wants Tim to know it.

Batman moves to cross the floor, too. With Batman here and his boys across the room, they’re forcing Tim to turn his back to at least one of them. Something loosens in Tim’s posture, even though the feeling in the room switches only from cornered on both sides to intervention, which is probably not very much better.

Batman thinks for a moment, then he moves to the desk on Red Hood’s other side. He presses the backs of his thighs to the edge of the table, hoists himself up, and sits cross-legged atop the desk. His hands mirror Red Hood’s; loose and empty in his lap.

Tim blinks. To his credit, Batman doesn’t typically sit cross-legged. It feels strange even to himself. He could pull up another chair alongside Hood’s; they keep at least four in this section of the Cave, each an addition that came alongside Batman’s expanding family, but this is less formal.

Nightwing and Robin follow his lead. Robin sits on the other side of the desk, one leg pulled up to his chest and one left swinging, and Nightwing sits right on the floor.

Now sufficiently nonthreatening, Batman gives them all a second to breathe. Then: “Nightwing told me you felt ready to talk.”

Tim nods, incredulity melding seamlessly back into seriousness, then nervousness. He fidgets, frowns deeply, visibly expels effort to stop fidgeting, opens and closes his mouth a few times, and takes several beginning inhales before he cuts himself off each time.

Batman lets him ruminate. This will be difficult for him. After a minute, Red Hood shifts his weight restlessly, and Batman tilts his head pointedly in his son’s peripheral while Tim, now turning in a tight circle as if navigating for the words he’s seeking in his head, is turned away: easy. Give him some time.

“You’re going to think I’m crazy,” Tim finally says. He doesn’t blurt it out; it’s measured, it sounds steady as anything, and perfectly genuine. He’s calm, as calm as he’s ever been. He believes this. “Like, honest-to-god, genuinely touched in the head.”

It’s a possibility, certainly. But that doesn’t mean they won’t still help him. “Try us,” Batman says.

“Okay. I’m not from here.” He shakes his head as soon as he says it, face screwed up in some combination of confusion and frustration. “I’m not– I’m not from here. I’m not from here.”

“But you’ve been here,” Nightwing prompts, calling up from the floor. “We know you know this city, kiddo.” He sounds almost apologetic to be poking holes in this assertion Tim seems so certain of.

Tim makes a face, either at the pet name or the words preceding it. “No, not here.” He throws up his right hand, palm out, placating, reassuring them of a point that’s coming but he can’t quite pin down. Then he runs a skinny hand through his long hair, breathing a strained sigh through his nose. “Sorry,” he says, curt  and stressed.

Batman doesn’t say anything, so neither do his children. No apology needed. If he needs time, he can have time. They’re walking a line and Batman doesn’t want to drive Tim back to silence. He can have as long as he wants.

Tim breathes again, in, out, and once more, a little less strained each time. “I’m from Gotham. But not this Gotham. My name is Tim Drake. I’m the son of Jack and Janet Drake. I was…” He stops, a fleeting emotion contorting his face for half a second and then it’s gone. “You all existed back home, in my Gotham, but I don’t exist here. I checked.”

Batman keeps careful control over his expression, watches the pronounced furrow of Robin’s brow, the morph of Nightwing’s domino as his eyes blink beneath it, the subtle squeak of leather as Red Hood’s shoulders tighten just so, and wishes very suddenly that his children had sat this one out.

He keeps such careful watch on his own emotional projection that he retroactively has to assess how he feels about that assertion. There’s a new nervous energy in the room, held first and foremost by Tim, who is watching Batman with rapt attention, eyes tracing every visible detail of his face. His children are similarly quiet; they’re watching and waiting as well. In that case, Batman will take his time.

Firstly: it is possible.

But it sends up alternate alarm bells in Batman’s mind.Things to consider before considering that this may be truth, if only to negate the risk of ignoring them.

Wayne Manor is so isolated that none of them really consider themselves as neighbors to anyone, but the Drakes are as close as, by definition. Decent people, nice enough. Drake Industries is flourishing as a child company under Wayne Industries, existing mostly in name only, really; the Drakes had been happy to part with primary control over it. Their cut of the deal had been plenty generous. Batman rarely sees them, they spend much of each year abroad using the profit they received from the arrangement. And they have no son, that’s true. At least, no legitimate son by any legal definition. But it’s notable that, of every childless couple who lives in Gotham, Bruce Wayne’s closest neighbors would be the ones in question.

Still, it would be an awfully convoluted plot, even if this was the work of someone privy to Batman’s daylight life. It would be quite a gamble, to send an injured teenager to wander the streets and hope he struck their attention before he struck anyone else’s. And just as likely in such a case for Tim to be a victim, used and manipulated or perhaps psychically altered to believe what he was saying.

Conclusion? No need yet to go on any offensive. Perhaps a more careful approach.

“I see,” Batman says lightly. Tim’s frown only deepens at the passive tone, though.

“Don’t patronize me,” he snaps, turning again in a tight, anxious circle, perhaps only for the purpose of rounding on Batman. “I told you it’s crazy, and you wanted to know anyway, didn’t you?” Okay, a different approach then.

“You’re asking a lot of us, to believe you without question,” Batman reminds him evenly, appealing to logic instead.

“Can you tell us anything else? How you think you got here, maybe?” Nightwing pipes up again, shooting Batman a concerned glance from beside the console desk. He’s dubious too, probably, but perhaps following a similar line of thinking as Batman is. There are numerous other explanations that Batman would consider before a true, genuine case of universe-hopping, but most of them preserve Tim’s innocence as a victim of it. And they have no proof of any ones that don’t.

Tim is shaking his head. There’s a distressed glint in his eye, something wild in the curve of his eyebrow, something desperate; Batman isn’t sure how far they’ll be able to take this line of questioning. “I don’t know. I don’t– I don’t know. I just showed up.” He scoffs, but it’s shaky, anxious. He’s swaying a little. “I didn’t even do anything, didn’t touch anything, I was just walking.”

“Walkin’ down the street? Same one you showed up on? In, uh, your Gotham?” Red Hood drawls with forced calmness, hands remaining carefully still in his lap.

Tim shakes his head again. “No, I wasn’t in Gotham. Uh, Middle East. No, wait, East Africa. Ethiopia.” He says it dismissively, like it doesn’t matter, like there’s nothing to question in that.

“What for? Are you from there?” Robin asks, one leg still swinging off the edge of the table. There’s no accent, and he doesn’t quite look the part, but if he had come to Gotham young enough, it was possible he was fully fluent in both English and Amharic, or another. He could have been born there to an immigrant family, emigrated there, been taken there. Or he could have been lied to about the whole thing: where he was included. Or, simply confused.

But he frowns, and says, “No, I’m from here. I’m the son of Jack and Janet Drake.”

Batman frowns right back. “Were you with your parents?” The Drakes were businessmen by trade, but archaeologists by heart; they spent much of their time abroad visiting digs or even organizing ones of their own, and Batman suspects that remains true to this day. Perhaps Tim believes to have been accompanying them. Perhaps they had even been there within the time frame of whatever happened to Tim that caused him so much confusion.

Tim makes a face. “No, of course not. They’re dead.”

Batman’s veins turn icy. “Tim–”

“Mine were!” He hastily rectifies. “Mine were dead, back home. I know yours are alive.” He makes an aborted move as if to wring his hands, then instead keeps them stiffly at his sides. “I saw them. Looked them up, too, just to make sure. I know they’re fine. Happy.” He clears his throat. “Another difference, I guess.”

“So why were you there?” Red Hood breaks in, as gentle as he gets with a domino across his brow.

“Uhm,” Tim says, a cautious inhale of breath that catches on his vocal chords more than any intentional word. He’s quiet for a long half-second, side-eyeing Batman warily. Finally: “I’m like you,” he finally says, slow, cautious.

Batman connects the dots and hazards a guess. “A vigilante?”

Tim  hesitates, then nods jerkily, and Batman considers. It’s a point, at first glance, in favor of the meta theory. Most vigilantes (in the superhero community, anyway) are metas. Batman and his children are an exception to that rule. But there are vigilantes that operate outside of that community. Normal people who find a mission and will work outside the law to achieve it. It doesn’t prove anything yet. Nor does it prove that Tim isn’t just caught in a false reality, trauma-related or perhaps intentionally placed in his mind maliciously. But Batman will still pursue this line of questioning. He has no intention of violently bursting Tim’s reality bubble, especially not before he’s sure of what kind of reaction it might prompt. He can play along and still gather information. “Self-taught?”

Tim shifts his weight back and forth, thinking. “No. Trained by a few different masters, actually.”

“Do you have names?” They might be able to cross-check his story, in any case. Look into individuals who may be involved, on the chance that Tim was mistaken about his origins.

“I’d rather not,” Tim says, though.

Red Hood leans forward. “It might help us figure out what’s going on with you. If you can tell us who you’re connected to”

It’s the wrong thing to say. Annoyance crosses Tim’s face, and something else, something more frightened. “I know what’s going on with me,” he returns shortly. “And even if my trainers exist here, they won’t be able to tell you anything.” He paces a skittish figure-eight, jamming a thumb in his own direction. “ I don’t exist here. They’ll have never known me.”

“Fine,” Batman says, shutting down that line of questioning before Tim can wind himself up any tighter. “No people, then. What about locations? Where were you based?”

Tim pauses his pacing, face turning toward Batman. He looks awful in the harsh overhead light, washed-out, hollow. Thin. Batman can’t tell what he’s thinking. He looks like a ghost. Or a corpse. Empty, or at least missing something essential.

“...San Francisco,” he finally says, breaking eye-contact and resuming his pacing. “With a couple other—well. San Francisco.”

“And what business does a vigilante from California have in East Africa? Or the Middle East?” Robin asks again.

Tim falters. He makes an aborted move, like he was planning to turn and look at Robin but had thought better of it. The next step of his pacing wobbles as a result, overbalancing, but he continues on undeterred. He’s silent for a full minute, eyebrows twitching as he forces them not to furrow, but the effect is the same.

Finally, he stops short. He looks over at Batman and holds his eye with grim determination. “I was looking for you.”

Batman leans forward toward him. “For me?”

Tim works his jaw. “For my version of you,” he amends with annoyance. “But, yes. For you.”

“You know me, then? Do you know them?”

Tim’s gaze wanders from Batman to his sons, lingering on each one in turn. His expression is guarded, but distinctly unhappy. He nods.

Nightwing shifts a little on the floor; he’s turned his head toward the Red Hood in the chair, but Batman’s second son won’t return his gaze. Hood is looking at Tim, stiff, shoulders hitched infinitesimally higher. Even so, Nightwing gathers his own courage on his own. “How… How well did you know us?”

And there it is. The ultimate proof of something, knowledge no one should have. Batman still doesn’t know what it will mean if Tim does have it, but the situation will inevitably become far more complicated.

“Dick Grayson,” Tim addresses him easily. His eyes flick to Robin. “Damian Wayne.” The Red Hood: “Jason Todd.” And finally, Tim meets his own eye. “Bruce Wayne.”

“I hope you’ll find your new quarters suitable,” Alfred is saying, opening a door in the guest wing for Tim and ushering him inside. Bruce leans against the doorway at the mouth of the hall, suit and cowl left behind in the cave. There’s no point in it now.

Tim keeps looking back at him, sneaking glances from around Alfred. He is difficult to read, as he usually is, but there’s wariness there. And hope and misery, but never at the same time. Disbelief. More, things less clear to place. He could use a rest; it’s been a difficult day for him.

For all of them.

Alfred closes the door behind Tim. Hopefully he’ll be able to get some sleep.

He’ll have Alfred keep watch in this wing for a while under the guise of housekeeping (he is already slipping away into the room adjacent to Tim’s, as close as he can get without occupying the same room), and one of the boys will keep an eye on the hallway cameras, and the one outside the windows. Whatever his intentions, whether anything else has been true or not, Tim has revealed incredibly dangerous information today. There’s no point in keeping him in the Cave, and a room will be more comfortable, but he still can’t leave. For his safety, and now theirs.

“Do you think he is telling the truth?” Damian says quietly, slinking through the doorway to stand at Bruce’s side.

Bruce doesn’t say anything on that, eyes fixed thoughtfully on the closed door of Tim’s new room. “Is someone downstairs supervising him?” He asks instead.

“Red Hood remained behind,” Damian says.

Bruce hums thoughtfully.

“Do you believe him?” Damian insists on an answer.

“He has shown skills in line with the rest of you, ill and injured as he has been. Intellectually, he has impressed me. He has been receptive to me and my efforts with him, beyond what I would expect from a stranger with his level of distrust in the world. There was evidence even early on that he knew the Red Hood,” though the implications of that evidence spell nothing good for the relationship Tim once had with, supposedly, his own version of Jason. “He knows his way around the city, but imperfectly, like he recalls another version of it.”

“You do believe him,” Damian surmises.

“No,” Bruce says easily. “But I am inclined to put it, for now, among the list of theories.”

Out of his peripheral, Bruce catches the upward quirk of Damian’s eyebrows.

“You don’t think he has simply been manipulated to believe this?”

“It’s possible.” Another theory, placed equally on the list.

“That would mean someone else would need to know who we are,” Damian presses. “Whoever manipulated Tim. It could mean bigger problems.”

“I think he believes what he told us,” Bruce muses. “If there is someone else involved, they fed Tim this lie well. Their identity will be buried.”

“Are we setting aside the theory of meta trafficking?”

“I see no reason to spend the resources. Jason never turned up any new leads.”

Damian’s gaze flicks over from Tim’s closed door to Bruce’s face. “No. He did. He followed up on some unusual transient behavior patterns, unknowns passing through the lower city, reported by his Park Row…network… and,” the set of his jaw went distinctly grim. “I believe he found merit in them.”

“And the noise complaints?”

Damian nods. “The same.”

“Physical evidence?”

“None yet. Nor any sightings of his own. A plethora of rumors, however. He says he is inclined to believe them.”

Bruce hums. “We’ve kept vigilant on less.”

“We seem never to be in want of something to be vigilant about.”

“No,” Bruce agrees. “You should get some sleep, Damian.”

Damian doesn’t say anything. He looks at Tim’s door, still closed, still quiet beyond it. “He may have heard you,” he says finally, lowly.

“It doesn’t matter now.”

“I know,” Damian says. “It is merely strange.”

Bruce smiles, a subtle upward quirk at the corners of his lips. Bruce is getting old. He’s been in the game for a long time; this is far from his first identity scare. But this is Damian’s first.

“If he is listening, he knows now that you do not believe him,” Damian points out, deflecting. Bruce lets him.

“I don’t not believe him,” Bruce counters mildly. “I’ll require a little more evidence, that’s all. Surely, if he’s aware of me, he will have expected that.”

Damian is silent. He’s watching the door, pensive. “Do you wish Jason to continue his search?” Bruce sees the question as it truly is: are we still running with the theory of meta trafficking? Are we even entertaining that Tim is telling the truth?

“I’ll discuss it with Jason.” They’ll decide together what is of merit and what is not. It’s been Jason’s case since Tim first appeared, half out of his mind in fear of Jason, who had worked so very hard to redeem himself to the city who had raised him in her cold belly. He will have a better idea of the situation. He will be more able to understand the nuances of his network’s concerns, as well. “You should go to bed.”

There had been a time when Damian would have reacted indignantly to the dismissal. Now, he only nods, secure in the fact that Bruce will come to him when he is needed, and that his ability to be needed has absolutely no bearing on being wanted. “I hope he is well,” Damian says in lieu of a goodbye, still watching the door. Then he turns on his heel and disappears out of the guest wing.

The room beyond the closed door is still quiet. Bruce wonders if it would be better or worse to check on him so soon.

It’s several minutes before Bruce’s feet follow Damian’s, half-shuffling on the carpet and away down the hall. Tim can still hear Alfred, fake-cleaning the next room over. He’s making himself known; Alfred can be quiet as a mouse when he wants to be. But he isn’t sure for who’s sake Alfred is being noisy.

He’s in a room now, not a cell, with a bed and dresser half-filled with what looks like clothes from when Bruce’s sons were younger, and a lamp with a cord so short it can barely reach the wall even with its stand pressed right against the baseboard. But he’s still on lockdown. The window has no latch at all; it’s not even locked, it’s just designed not to open. It may as well be a continuation of the wall. And it’ll be reinforced glass, of course. All the Manor’s windows are.

Someone will be watching him. Beyond Alfred, that is. Maybe there’s a camera in this room, maybe just the hallways. Maybe the landing outside. Tim should do a sweep. Maybe in a minute.

They needn’t bother. Tim’s not going anywhere. Where would he go?

He’ll split once they start threatening Arkham. He trusts he’ll recognize the signs. It wouldn’t be the first time. But he needs their help. He needs to convince them he’s telling the truth, the real truth, not the trauma-baked invented memories Bruce is probably running his theories on. And he needs to do it before they pull out the straightjacket and the shrink.

Same old problems, new coat of paint. At least he has a real four-poster now. Height of luxury here, really.

He should sleep. He’s tired, hollowed out, and he’ll need to be sharp if he wants to get ahead of this new problem. But his skin crawls, being in the manor again. It smells the same. Alfred’s detergent must be multi-universal. Back in his own world, he hadn’t lived in the manor for almost seven months. It’s strange, to breathe it in again. He had been worried it would still feel like home, would break down that feeble little wall he’d built for himself when he was chased out the first time, but it doesn’t.

It doesn’t feel like home at all.

Just as well. Ultimately he’s here only so that he can leave. He has work to do. He’s here to work, and that’s all. And that work will carry him far, far away from this house. Maybe for the last time.

On the other side of the wall, Alfred begins whistling. Something old, repetitive. An old marching song, a work song, a war song, maybe.

Tim lays down, starfished supine on the bed, traces the textured shadows of the high popcorn ceiling with his eyes, and tries to breathe.

Chapter Text

The room Tim had spent last night in had been an unfamiliar one, one of infinite that existed in the manor, lined up in identical rows and left empty in perpetuity, cleaned for god knows what reason, and stacked away like last year’s case files. White walls and unused linens. A perfect, easy, clean slate. A game of pretend.

But the kitchen is sunshine yellow and a sink of dirty dishes. Bacon grease cooling opaque in a jar. Bickering, and a confiscated batarang, tucked hidden on the highest shelf to be returned another time. As if someone took the vacant blueprint in Tim’s memory and injected life into it. A sickly mirror, mocking him.

Tim just pushes his scrambled eggs around in pieces, because his heart is too stuck in his damn throat to even think about eating them. The Cave was weird enough, but this is a whole other beast. He’d spent only limited mornings in this kitchen, but it was mornings all the same. Good mornings. Long gone mornings.

They’re all lined up at the bar, which is a piece of what’s different. He’s only ever been alone here. Jason has been tailing him all morning. He’d woken up and left his room (unlocked, shockingly) and found Jason coincidentally wandering through that obscure hallway. There’s Damian to his left, Jason to his right, and Dick beyond him. Bruce must’ve been the one to send Jason down the hallway on time, because he isn’t here, and Alfred had already whisked himself away. Everyone is eating, but they’re also watching him.

He did threaten them last night. All’s fair. But it’s still making his skin crawl.

“Oh, almost forgot.” There’s the creak of thick plastic and a little bicolored capsule clatters onto the side of his plate. His antibiotics. Jason shoulders him boisterously, and Tim has to cling to the counter to stay perched on his stupid dinky rich-person barstool. “I’d eat the eggs first though, yeah? Less nausea.”

Tim blinks. “Why do you care?” He asks, then winces. It doesn’t matter if he means it genuinely, no version of Jason should put up with that kind of lip. But Jason only shrugs.

“No one likes nausea. First-hand or not.”

Tim dry swallows the capsule. Jason snorts, but it sounds amused. “Well, whatever.”

“We’ll want to take another look at you sometime today too, if that’s alright, kiddo,” Dick says, and Tim hunches his shoulders. Kiddo. What a joke. Which a sick fucking joke. “Just a cursory medical check,” Dick amends quickly, leaning forward to try and catch Tim’s eye. “Nothing new or scary.”

“I know,” Tim snaps. “And I can handle ‘new and scary.’”

“Someone’s cranky,” Jason drawls, pushing Tim’s plate closer toward him. The raw ceramic foot scrapes with a high squeak against the granite, and there’s a flash of white in his peripheral–the rim of the plate skidding closer–that makes him brace for impact automatically. Tim can’t tell if Jason’s pissed off or not, but blood is roaring in his ears automatically, as if the rush to his head will actually help him goddamn defend himself.

A hand suddenly cups the nape of his neck; he flinches, but it doesn’t remove itself, gripping more firmly to keep him steady on the barstool. “Cool it,” Jason’s voice rumbles next to his ear. “It’s all good, kid.”

His tunnel vision retreats just enough for Jason’s lopsided grin to come swimming into view. “S’all good, right? C’mon back.”

His vision levels. The plate is nowhere near hitting him. His face heats in embarrassment.

“You shouldn’t touch him,” Damian says from Tim’s other side. He’s diligently making his way through his own breakfast with unnecessary precision, and doesn’t look up even as he speaks. “It is rude, you know.”

Jason throws up both hands, removing the one at the base of Tim’s skull in the process. “What, you want me to let him go careening into the tile, s’that it? This is Batman’s kitchen, Dami, Batman’s tiles, you know how paranoid that freak is? It’d brain him.”

…Why are they talking about Batman in front of him? He isn’t supposed to know. He knows they already know, but why are they just bringing it up so casually?

“It’s also Bruce Wayne’s tile,” Dick chimes in. “It’s probably, like, lined with diamonds.” Jason points emphatically in Dick’s direction, and–

–oh. They’re just… joking around?

“Damn straight, Dickie bird, you get it! Hardest mineral on Earth, and you’re gonna let people go fallin’ into it?” Jason shakes his head, clicking his tongue in mock disapproval. “Dispicable.”

Damian looks away, turning up his nose, but Tim catches his reflection in the glass of the china cabinet: he’s smiling. Jason sees it too. His face breaks into a wide grin, unguarded.

“Can we avoid braining anybody? Just for the morning?” Bruce is finally strolling in, a World’s Best Dad mug in one hand that Tim can’t even begin to guess who bought for him, dark circles under his eyes but a looseness in his posture that Tim has never seen on him before (not while conscious and sober, anyway). There’s no more stools available at the island, so he parks himself on the end of the bar, leaning one hip against the countertop and taking a long sip of coffee. He’s in pajamas, flannel and striped white and blue and Tim feels crazy. Why is no one taking anything seriously?

“Are you going to the office like that?” Dick asks, all toothy grins and mischief.

“What are they going to do, fire me?” Bruce intones right back. Then he smiles into his coffee, like a real person or something. “No, I called out for today. We have some more important things to attend to.”

Guilt roils in Tim’s stomach. “It’s fine,” he says, even though he knows it’s useless. “I mean, I know you’re talking about me. And I know I threatened you. But I’m not dangerous. Or, I don’t have to be. You could just put me back in the cell.”

“No one’s putin’ you in a cell,” Jason snaps, early-morning short-tempered. His grin has evaporated. He paws Bruce’s mug away and takes a long drag himself. “Did that long enough.”

“But it makes sense,” Tim insists. “You don’t know who I am, not really, but I know who you are. It’s dangerous.”

“Tim,” Bruce interjects mildly. He reaches for his mug, but Jason pulls it away, downing it in a few short gulps. Bruce looks at him with purely fondness, not even feigning crossness, but schools his expression back to neutral as he looks back over at Tim. Familiar. “Do you have intentions to use this information against us?”

“No.”

“Then stop asking us to lock you up over it.”

“What, so you honestly just believe me?” How had this Batman not lost his secret to the entire world by now? “Just like that?”

“No, of course not.”

“No offense,” Dick chimes in. “But we have the entirety of Bruce Wayne’s assets, wealth, and influence at our disposal. You don’t even have a driver’s license."

“Or an identity,” Damian points out.

“There can be a gray area, kid. It doesn’t have to be ‘prison or bust,’ y’know.” Jason slides the newly empty mug back over to Bruce with an unapologetic grin. Bruce sighs.

Bruce stays home. Dick coaxes Tim down to the medbay, tilts his head toward the light and looks at his eyes and slathers antibacterial goop across his now mostly-closed splenectomy wound. Jason and Bruce speak in low voices, backs to Tim so he can’t read their lips, standing over the Batcompter console together. But the screen is blank and Jason waves a hand toward Tim when they make eye contact. Alfred brings down replacement coffee for Bruce and cucumber sandwiches for everyone else, and Dick helps him hide the evidence as he picks his own share apart, eyes bright with laughter as he eats exactly twice the amount of cucumber that Tim does. Tim’s heart feels like it’s eating itself.

Tim gets a clean bill of health and Damian says, “You were a vigilante, yes?” He’s standing, back straight, hands clasped behind himself, head tilted just so as he looks down at Tim. “Let us see what you can do.”

“Not mandatorily,” Bruce calls, lifting his head from his hushed conversation with Jason on the other side of the cave. “Give him a choice, boys.” There’s pity in his gaze and it sets Tim’s blood boiling. No one had pity for him against Damian at home, and he pulled himself out of that shit just fine. He slides off the medbay bench and steps up to the mats.

Tim doesn’t want to fight Damian, is the thing. At home, he doesn’t want to interact with the little demon in any capacity, but he doesn’t want to fight this Damian either. He’s six-foot-ridiculous like everyone else in this goddamn profession, and half as broad as Bruce already. And Tim’s body aches. Like, all the time now. But he was challenged, and he can recognize this as what it ultimately is: evidence for his trail. Proof for his claims. You’re a vigilante? Prove it.

“Weapon of choice?” His opponent has dropped into a loose crouch as they begin to circle each other. His hands are empty, but his eyes flick toward the weapons rack consideringly.

“No weapons,” interrupts Bruce. He and Jason have looked up and are watching the sparring match with open interest.

“For the sake of curiosity alone, then,” Damian agrees at once.

“Best trained with a bo-staff,” Tim allows him. Not a big secret anyway, and his beloved, handbuilt, perfectly balanced bo is lost somewhere in the goddamn multiverse anyway. “Are you still mostly stabby?”

Damian’s lip quirks in amusement. “I am trained to handle bladed weapons. I used to favor the katana, when I was younger.” His opponent darts forward, nimble feet kicking out to try to trip Tim, but Tim is quicker, leaping backward out of his way.

“Not anymore?” Tim asks, surprised. Back home, no one seemed to be able to pry that thing away from him. Except Tim’s abdomen, that one time.

“It was… stylistically dissonant." A jab to his shoulder that forces Tim to readjust his balance.

“Stylistically dissonant?” He kicks out himself, trying to force Damian back, but he’s just too heavy. His old tactics won’t work, it’s not Damian as he knows him, and he’s being foolish to treat him that way. He switches his approach, keeping lighter on his feet and trying to stay where he can see every movement coming. Tim’s panting already, unusually worn out, but still holding his own for now. His heart crawls higher and higher in his throat, blood roaring louder and louder. Damnit, he needs to chill out, but his body’s stress response urges him to keep an eye out for the glint of metal. It doesn’t care that this is a different Damian.

His opponent goes back on the defensive and they circle for a moment more. When he lunges, Tim is ready for him. They trade blows in silence while Damian chews on his response. Damian is swift and smooth, and Tim can feel his own lack of finesse. He keeps expecting brutality where there is none, and it’s throwing him off.

Tim grunts as he twists away from a flying steel-toed boot. “I use it where I have control enough of the situation to do so,” Damian finally answers, spinning to land another kick. “Often I find it too dangerous.”

Tim laughs breathlessly, anxious lightheadedness swelling into full-blown nausea for a second. Too dangerous? “Never thought I’d see the day,” he dodges a forearm and aims one of his own. “That you would call a weapon too dangerous.”

Damian freezes, and Dick stands up in his peripheral vision, and Tim knows they’ve picked up on something he probably didn’t want to let slip. He flinches back, stumbling off of the mat. It’s an automatic forfeit where he comes from (and doesn’t that sting), but he keeps his guard up anyway.

“What did you know of me?” Damian asks him softly. “What have I done back where you are from?”

“I don’t know,” Tim lies automatically, still panting. “Nothing.” He winces. It’s not his finest bluff, he’ll admit. He must’ve lost his touch somewhere in the desert; he’s shaking a little, fine muscle tremors that he can’t stop, and he’s saying goddamn stupid things that are gonna get him into some deep shit pretty soon here.

“Yes, you do,” Damian says, a little more sharply. “This is your story, is it not? That you know us in another world? So then tell me what you know.”

“Okay, that’s enough,” Dick says, stepping onto the mat. “A little too soon to be sparring, okay, bud?” He’s steering Damian off the mat, treating this nearly fully grown version with the tenderness that Tim has seen Dick treat Damian back home, more than a foot shorter and thrice as angry. “We’ll give it a try another time.”

“You fought well,” Damian calls to him, the temper gone from his voice. He pulls out of Dick’s loose grip to face Tim. “You are injured and you held your own. But Dick is right. I was hasty. We will have a rematch another day.”

Tim only nods, standing at the edge of the mat, tracing the stitch lines with his eyes.

There’s a stain missing.

There are a few missing, actually. Huh.

The mats are vinyl-covered, easy to clean, but the stitching is cotton, it holds the blood. Tim remembers it vividly, little dark lines, cotton-candy stripes of stitching where blood had touched and where it had not.

A bloody nose from Batman’s right-hook that had sent him sprawling on the mat (and later searching the web for how to set it), the pool that had seeped permanently even into the vinyl from Damian’s sword, a neat line of dashes where an injury he’d hidden had drip, drip, dripped, unwilling to mention it when Bruce was devolving into guilt and shame and depression for the night, watching the blank Batcomputer screen listlessly, calling the reflection of Tim “Jason” and then realizing all over again.

They’re all missing. The mats are worn but pristine. There’s been no bloodshed here.

“Come on,” Dick calls. When Tim looks back up, Damian has disappeared, but Tim can hear the showers running. “You look beat. Maybe a shower and some downtime.”

Tim trails after Dick up the stairs, but Jason stays behind with Bruce, leaning back on the Batcomputer console. “Surprised you let ‘em do that,” he says. Bruce doesn’t reply, deep in thought. He’s watching the mats, eyes tracing their outlines, trying to piece together whatever it was that Tim saw in them.

“I knew Damian would be careful,” Bruce finally says, still not looking at Jason. “I was curious too.”

“Guilty,” Jason agrees. “So what’s the verdict?”

“He’s trained.”

“Sure. But we knew that.”

Bruce hums noncommittally. “Every data point is useful, Jaylad.”

Jason rolls his eyes. “If you say so, old man. I think we should’a let him answer Dami’s question. That’s the whole meat and potatoes of the thing, right?” Jason shrugs, hauling himself up to sit on the console. “He knows somethin,’ great! We can believe him and it can be over.”

“He was terrified of you,” Bruce says, pulling no punches. “Do you really want to know the reasons why?” He doesn’t wait for an answer, turning back to the Batcomputer and finally powering it on. “Damian told me you had new information for me, regarding the meta trafficking.”

Jason scoffs. “Okay, case closed on Tim. Let’s just talk about that now.”

“If you’re ready,” Bruce offers mildly.

Jason scoffs again, but he shoulders Bruce out of the way and begins pulling up files. “I had Oracle keepin’ an eye out. My network, too. We turned up some surveillance. Not all of it directly incriminating, but weird, y’know?”

“Damian said you didn’t have any footage,” Bruce muses, flipping through recordings of nondescript vans without plates, barred windows in an abandoned building flashing with light, and one particularly grim streetcorner where a hooded man is leading two cuffed children at gunpoint, carefully turned away from the camera.

“No identity on them yet,” Jason answers without prompting, watching over Bruce’s shoulder. “And yeah, we didn’t think so. I mean, this is nothin’ out of the ordinary for Gotham.”

“No,” Bruce agrees. “It’s not. Do you have other reason to believe these are related?”

“One of my guys had a run-in with one of the vans.” Jason flips to a related surveillance clip. “Noticed it because of the missin’ plate, right? Thought maybe it was drugs, or weapons dealing. But there were people inside. He could hear ‘em crying.

“He chased ‘em, but,” Jason shakes his head. “Had a few more guys followin’ trucks after that, but they’re tricky bastards. And the ones we caught actually were weapons trafficking.” He growls to himself, pinching the bridge of his nose. “Too many damn unmarked trucks in this fuckin’ town.”

“What about this one?” Bruce flips to the footage of the warehouse. Light flickers on and off between the bars on the windows with long pauses between each burst.

“The light,” Jason nods toward the screen as the flickering starts once more. “It happened on the truck too. Just once, little flickerin’ of light in the crack between the doors, easy to miss but he swore it happened.”

“I assume you went to scope things out,” Bruce presses mildly, and Jason scowls.

“I ain’t stupid, old man. ‘Course I went to check it out.”

“They were gone,” Bruce surmises.

“Warehouse was spoken for,” Jason says, pulling up some business records. “Original company sold walk-in freezers. They got bought out, were gutted by the new parent company, declared bankruptcy, and sold off everything, includin’ that warehouse. It’s been sittin’ empty, owned by the bank, but it just got bought.”

“So we don’t know if they left because they knew you found them, or if they were forced out from the sale.”

“They’ll split if they know we’re onto ‘em.” Jason glances back to the stairs up to the manor, but the two of them are still alone. Even Damian has left; the showers are quiet. “Listen B, I like Tim, and I care about what we’re tryin’a do here, but I can’t sit around and babysit forever.”

“I know, Jaylad.” Bruce is still watching the footage, a knuckle rubbing his stubble thoughtfully. “You should get back out there. This could help him more than anything else.”

Everyone hovers that first day. But the second morning, it’s only Tim and Alfred.

It’s funny. He’s been miserable for the last two and a half weeks, and in completely quantifiable ways. He was dying in a desert in a foreign country, then was freezing and hurting on the streets, then he was locked in a cell by a bizarro version of his former colleagues, but all of that, somehow all of that is better than how he feels now.

Alfred is keeping tabs on him, but even if he were alone, Tim doesn’t know what to do. Safely off the streets? Check. Aware he’s in the wrong goddamn Gotham? Check. But then where? Then what?

What is he supposed to do?

“Please do eat, sir,” Alfred says, wandering back in from the next room. “I don’t know why everyone under this roof insists on taking such poor care of themselves.”

“Manor’s cursed?” Tim says, obediently spearing a breakfast potato with his fork. Alfred offers him a wry smile.

“Well, I would appreciate it if you would try resisting such a curse. Nobody else seems to, and I have my hands full enough around here.” Alfred tidies up the chairs around the table while Tim shovels down a few more forkfuls. “I don’t mean to impose, sir, but I wonder if you might like to share what’s on your mind.”

Tim laughs. “What, they have you doing reconnaissance now too?”

“I’m afraid this is my own rogue vigilante mission,” Alfred says dryly, now stacking cups from the drying rack into the cabinets. With nothing else to do, Tim brings his plate to the sink and helps him.

“Finally taking up the cowl?”

“Yes,” Alfred remarks. “In a sense.” He takes a plate from the rack, squints at it disapprovingly, and places it down in the sink. “Though I don’t require a multi-billion-dollar animal costume for my undertakings, personally.”

Tim laughs again, and Alfred lets them ruminate in companionable silence while he ruminates.

“I have to prove who I am,” Tim finally starts. “I have to find out where I am, compared to where I was. And I have to somehow find my way back there. And I have no idea how I’m going to do any of that. Dick was right, I have nothing at my disposal here.”

“You have us,” Alfred comments mildly.

Tim nods distractedly. “Potentially. Once I prove myself, maybe Bruce will be willing to lend me a safehouse to work out of, and maybe some gear.”

“I believe you misunderstand my meaning, sir.” Alfred slides a stack of plates into place and pauses to catch Tim’s eye. “I do not know much of the Gotham you came from.” He pauses and clears his throat, looking a little sheepish, but he doesn’t verbally add the caveat that he absolutely does not believe Tim. “But I do know those boys, and I know them very well. They are bleeding hearts and your situation scares them.”

“I’m not going to give up their–”

Alfred holds up a hand. “I understand. That is not what I mean. They are scared for you, and they wish to help you. In whatever… form that takes.”

Tim stills, saucer-laden arms halfway up to cabinet level. He’s heard this threat before.

“It’s for your own good, Tim. You’re not well. They’ll help you, okay? I’m just going to help you.”

He should have been expecting it. He places the saucers as inconspicuously into the cabinet as he can, but files this tidbit of information into the back of his brain. He needs to speed up his timeline. Just a hiccup; he knew this could be a possibility, and it’s good to have confirmation.

Alfred clears his throat. It was only half a second that Tim was caught off-guard, but the old butler noticed it. “What I mean to say, sir, is they trust your good intentions, and they only wish to help you.” The final stack of silverware is ushered into a drawer, and the task is over. “And if you require proof, consider that Master Bruce and his charges are showing substantial trust in allowing you to be alone with me.”

Tim snorts. “You have an emergency beacon straight to Batman, and one to the Justice League," he points out. “I guarantee they haven’t gone far, at least someone is in the cave, at the furthest. Plus, you keep a shotgun in that broom closet," he adds, jamming a thumb toward the hallway. “You’re not helpless.”

Alfred looks at him for a long moment, eyebrows furrowed. “Yes, well,” he finally says, with new thoughtfulness in his tone. “Then consider Master Bruce’s paranoia about the subject. Surely that must be universal.”

“Now that is a point in your favor,” Tim acquiesces. Alfred begins wiping down countertops, and he stands by awkwardly. “Can I help?”

“Of course, dear boy,” Alfred says. He pauses, standing straight to arch his eyebrow at Tim. “You ought to know where I keep the rags, yes?”

And Tim does know. It’s not muscle memory, reaching for the correct drawers; he’d spent precious little time in the manor, at the end of the day. He existed primarily as a feature of the cave, and only rarely set foot in the manor above it. But many of those evenings were spent just like this. Bruce was grieving or angry or both, nursing an injury or a bottle, and some nights Tim would go upstairs alone to offer Alfred some company and to get himself out of harm’s way. More selfish than not, but Alfred had seemed to appreciate it too, and he clung to the excuse.

He slides the drawer open and retrieves his own rag. Alfred tackles the counters and Tim takes the table. The room already looks pristine to Tim, but when Alfred asks if he’ll please wipe the cabinet doors, Tim retrieves the furniture polish without question. He’s deeply relieved every time he opens a drawer and finds what he’s looking for. He knows Alfred is testing him, though his motive seems more rooted in curiosity than suspicion.

Soon, Tim stops holding his breath when he goes searching for something. Soon, it feels just like it felt back in his own world, including the prickling discomfort of being somewhere he doesn’t belong, though in a slightly different flavor.

“Can I ask you something?” Tim finally interjects. They’re dusting the china cabinets, full of useless artifacts that Bruce has probably never looked at in his life. Alfred thanked him for his help twenty minutes ago, but Tim didn’t take the hint. He’s stuck here, he has no leads, he’s getting increasingly restless, and he may as well be useful.

“Of course.”

“What would you do if I asked to leave?”

Tim watches Alfred’s expression falter through the glass of the china cabinet. “Ah.” He puts down his rag and rolls down his sleeves, then looks Tim in the eye. “I had hoped you were beginning to feel more welcome here in Master Bruce’s care, but I do understand your position. Only two days ago, you were held against your will, regardless of our intentions in doing so.” Alfred pauses, then sighs. “We wish to help you,” he insists again. “However, your knowledge puts Master Bruce and his associates in a difficult spot.”

“So I can’t leave,” Tim surmises.

Alfred shakes his head. “No, and please listen. If you have your heart set on attempting this alone, then Master Bruce only asks for you to allow him to put some precautions in place.”

“I know how to keep a secret,” Tim insists, temper flaring in a surge that feels like fear.

“I understand,” Alfred placates. “However, even with the best of intentions, you pose a danger.”

“You don’t understand. I’m not a threat.”

“We don’t yet know how you happened upon this information or who–”

“I was goddamn Robin,” Tim snaps. “I’m no more a threat than anyone else under this roof.” The regret washes over him as an afterthought, but grim determination follows right on after. Fine. Just one more thing to prove. Alfred is silent, eyes wide. It’s the least composed Tim has ever seen him. Even in the wake of Jason’s death, Alfred had never let anything slip.

Tim inhales a deep breath through his nose. “I understand how critical it is. Trust me. I know. I’ll keep this secret to my grave. It’s my secret too.”

“...Well,” Alfred says. “I see.” There’s something new in his voice, something distant. He’d warmed up to Tim this morning. He’d sent Tim traipsing around the house, collecting supplies and watching as each place was correct, and maybe he’d even begun to believe him a little. Now, all of that is gone. Tim had gained one step and lost a mile.

“I still believe Master Bruce would prefer to speak with you before you go,” Alfred continues stiffly.

“God,” Tim sighs with a surge of tired frustration, running a hand through his hair. Why had he even brought it up? “I need your resources. I can’t go. I just wanted to know.”

“Of course, sir.”

The rest of the dusting is a painful, silent affair. Tim feels miserable. Alfred deserves an apology, but the words just die on his tongue.

There’s two more china cabinets in this room, but Alfred sends him away after the first is barely finished. “I believe Master Jason is working in the cave today,” he mentions pointedly. “He might like to see you.”

Tim doesn’t dare disobey.

Jason is waiting for him, sitting in the Batcomputer’s chair and grinning lopsidedly (but sitting stiffly) as Tim shuffles down the stone staircase. “So. Robin, huh?”

There’s a live feed of the den up on the screen. Alfred is silently and efficiently running a feather duster between vases and sets of delicate teacups, whisking away dust with only the slightest furrow to his brow. It’s only surprising in that Alfred hates to be recorded, but otherwise it’s completely, entirely typical. Tim is shocked Jason didn’t come storming up sooner.

But he doesn’t sound pissed when he says, “Hey, ignore Alfie.” He stands up and ushers Tim over to his seat, pushing down on his shoulders until Tim folds, then sits up on the console himself. He seems to like it up there. Tim wonders if his own Jason does that, or if he ever did, before it all. “He already doesn’t like any of us doin’ this. And you’re, y’know,” he holds out a hand and gestures vaguely. “Y’know. He just needs to chew on it awhile.”

Tim is stiff in the seat, watching the screen. Alfred makes brief eye-contact with the camera and offers a tight smile. “Not you though?” He asks numbly. He keeps himself poised to dart back should this Jason react how his own did, but the words come out thick and stupid and he knows he’s pretty much fucked. All that frustrated determination drops like a brick in his stomach. He just can’t do this again. He’s so fucking stupid.

Jason shakes his head, but Tim can barely see it through the edge of his tunneling vision. When he speaks, his voice sounds underwater, but it’s still present enough to hear: “I mean, if it were true, I wouldn’t be thrilled.”

“You think I’m full of it,” Tim says, half-dizzy with relief. Fine, he’ll be crazy. He’ll happily be crazy, he’ll be crazy if Jason just won’t hate him over it.

“Sure, prob’ly. I mean, you don’t pass the Jason Test.”

The what? “Huh?”

“You look a hundred pounds soakin’ wet,” Jason says, as if that clears anything up. “B would’a never let ya outta here.”

Tim stares. “What are you talking about?”

Jason squints at him. “I guess you could predate the Jason Rule,” he muses, bringing a broad hand to his chin. “But you’d be older, yeah? At least Dickie’s age. You knew all of us, you would’a had to have come after me sometime.”

“I don’t understand what you’re saying.”

“No shrimps in the field,” Jason clarifies impatiently. “There’s no way B’d ignore it for you, I can’t even begin to imagi–” Then he stills. Tim’s heart is in his throat. “Unless, I mean… It still happened, right?” He asks, suddenly looking a little pale.

Tim looks away, shame and fear vying for attention in the turn of his stomach. Answer enough. They both know what he’s talking about now. Same page at last.

Jason swallows, an audible click in his throat. Tim stands up abruptly and braces for violence, a cool line of metal meeting the scar in his throat, the steel kiss of a barrel to his temple. His heart flutters like a bird in his ribcage, but he’s trained enough to be light on his feet and violently aware of Jason’s every move.

But Jason doesn’t follow him up. “Yeah,” he grunts. Then he shudders, pauses, and clears his throat, trying to get a handle on himself. “Then,” he clears his throat again. “Then you can’t’ve been Robin, kid. Breaks the Jason Rule.” Jason reaches over the console to decisively close the camera feed, as if shutting the book on this topic. “B didn’t let Dami out ‘til he was nearly as tall as him, and he’s still benched doing comms ‘cept for a couple days a week. You’re a shrimp, so you can’t be Robin. Simple as that. Try again.

“Good story, though.” Jason’s grinning again, but there’s an unmistakable waver in it. “Very convincing. Might’a worked, too, if it weren’t so fucking unbelievable.”

Tim just stares.

Jason clears his throat again. “Listen, kid. I know it’s fun gettin’ in the last word ‘n all. But it’s kinda a touchy subject ‘round here. Plus, Alfie doesn’t deserve that. It ain’t nice, you understand?”

“I don’t–” understand. I don’t understand.

“Don’t go callin’ yourself that,” Jason reiterates firmly. “‘Specially not around B. I get that you can keep a secret, sure, fine. But you don’t gotta go pullin’ out the big guns on us, makin’ things up, capiche? Alfie’s right, we wanna help ya. No need for it."

“Fine,” Tim agrees hollowly. A hand curls its fingers around Tim’s upper arm to corral him back toward the console, but it releases when Tim flinches away.

“Good. Water under the bridge, then.” Jason kicks the batcomputer chair and it goes rolling across the floor toward Tim. “C’mere, sit. You said you need our resources, right? I got a case I’m working on. I’ll show you the ropes of the system if you sit there and lemme bounce ideas off ya.”

Tim swallows his trepidation and sits. Jason’s already looking at the computer, though the screen is now blank, valiantly avoiding Tim’s eye. He’s definitely upset. Tim definitely upset him. It’s not good news.

He makes a mental note to speed up his timeline even more. Now he just needs to figure out what that timeline exactly entails.

“C’mere,” Jason says again, impatiently.

Tim snaps back into action. Right, right, Jason wants his help with a case.

What a bizarre concept.

He rolls the chair as close as he can get to the keyboard while still staying out of arm’s reach, just in case. He starts pulling up files before he even really has the thought of what he’s doing, or whether he should. It’s all instinct, a reflex. Sit at the batcomputer. Work. Two sides of the same coin.

Cleaning with Alfred had been somewhat familiar but not automatic, but this is. He’d been a sucker for the computer stuff since the get go, this is muscle memory, plain and simple.

Or, maybe not that simple. It’s an older organizational system, one he recognizes as primarily Oracle’s design, but it has a few amalgamated features of his own making. Though, he supposes, they must be of Oracle’s making here.

Add those to the list of things you needn’t ever have touched. There’s really not much left with which to justify his existence.

It’s a unique sort of weird, a version of the operating system that he’s never encountered, some kind of halfway between several of them, so it takes him a moment to get his bearings. Still, he makes quick work of locating Jason’s most recent case. Huh. Trafficking, but sparse evidence so far. Not many files here yet.

Tim leans back to turn to Jason, and finds Jason already looking at him, eyebrows furrowed. Tim tenses. There’s something frustrated in Jason’s expression. There’s doubt, too. Suspicion. Dread.

“Pretty good with computers,” Jason comments, tone perfectly neutral.

“Yeah,” Tim agrees as smoothly as he can manage, though his heart is fluttering like a cornered sparrow. He’s pushed his luck enough today, he really needs to smooth this one over. “I just always really liked them.”

Jason tilts his head just so, a fraction of a degree, but it communicates everything. Tim has piqued his interest, and that has never been a very fun position to hold.

“Well,” Jason says, something hidden under his guarded tone. “Let’s hope you’re just as good with trafficking cases.”