Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Batman’s slipping.

Batman’s slipping, and that terrifies Tim.

Not for himself, obviously – Batman could never hurt him. Wouldn’t, even if he noticed Tim’s existence.

And it's understandable – of course it's understandable, because Jason is dead, but…

It's not good for Bruce, which means it's not good for Batman, which isn't good for Gotham, which isn't good for Bruce again  – the cycle goes on and on and on until Gotham ends up a smoggy crater where the city used to be.

Tim can't let that happen.

Batman needs something to help him break the cycle, and Tim knows he can help, but he isn't quite sure what to do.

He defaults to following Batman on his patrols, snapping pictures when he goes too far or when he gets hurt or when he slumps down on top of a building, and looks out onto Gotham and stays there until he can force himself to get up.

On good days, that takes a few minutes. 

On bad days, well, it takes hours.

And Tim– 

Tim wants to help, but he doesn't know how .

Bruce misses Jason, but it's not like Tim can bring Jason back from the dead. He can't even find Jason's ghost – and believe him, he has tried. His friend Martha hasn’t been able to find him either, and she's way more connected in the spirit world than he is (although that's not exactly hard considering Martha is pretty much the only person he talks to these days).

Batman lands heavily on a rooftop, clearly favoring one leg over the other, and Tim snaps another picture.

Batman stalks forward, ignoring the pain even as moonlight glints off the blood trickling down his leg, and Tim snaps another picture.

Batman's head twitches slightly in the direction of a distant scream, stumbling when he switches directions, and Tim snaps another picture.

Batman leaps to the next building, only reaching for his grappling gun when he's in mid-air – when it’s almost too late – and Tim snaps another picture.

Batman jumps from the top of the building, inserting himself between a woman and the person mugging her, not bothering to reduce the velocity of his landing with a line or a roll or anything, and Tim takes another picture. 

Batman doesn't notice when the woman runs away, as scared of him as she is the mugger, and Tim takes another picture.

Batman leaves the mugger with three broken limbs and some heavily bruised ribs, and Tim takes another picture, wishing that he had a working phone so he could call the poor man an ambulance.

But he doesn't, so all he can do is cast a regretful glance over his shoulder and continue ghosting after Batman, watching and documenting his downward spiral of mental health.

(It’s not like he has anything better to do. Teachers can’t exactly give him homework.)

He watches as Batman takes down Ravager, how he punches and grapples easily but barely bothers with dodging, how he kicks the serial killer’s hand to make him loosen his grip on the only thing keeping him from falling over the dam. Tim watches as Ravager tumbles down into the churning water below and how Batman doesn’t bother to catch him much less leave him tied up for the police. Batman just watches his opponent struggle to keep his head above water, clawing at the surface as he tries desperately to tread brackish water. He disappears beneath the waves, and Batman– Batman just looks away.

Tim snaps another picture. 

He can’t exactly do much else.

Batman picks himself up off the concrete, visibly struggling to pull himself to his feet. Ravager had apparently managed to get in a lucky slash on Batman's good leg, so Tim is certain that it must hurt to move, much less half-heartedly pretend he doesn't feel the pain.

Tim follows Batman as he slowly makes his way back to the Batmobile. He wishes he could offer Batman help. He wishes that he could slip into Batman's personal space and silently offer himself up as a crutch, maybe. But even if Tim did somehow manage to work up the courage, he's absolutely sure Batman wouldn't accept the help, even though it would be the objectively correct choice given the current state of his current physical health and psyche.

Or maybe, he thinks, maybe Batman wouldn’t accept him because it would be an objectively good choice.

Batman doesn't really seem to be making good choices nowadays. In fact, he seems to be going out of his way to avoid good choices, especially ones that would have a positive impact (or at least not a negative impact) on his body. 

Tim can't help but think it has something to do with Jason's death. Like, yeah obviously, Tim has never lost a son, y’know, personally, and he hasn't exactly seen his parents in a minute, so it's not like he can ask them about it. But it's not exactly a hard logical leap to make.

Anyway . 

Tim is pretty much certain that Batman is depressed. Maybe even clinically, borderline suicidally so. But it's not like Tim can drag Bruce Wayne – let alone the freaking Batman – to a therapist to work through his emotions. And that's assuming he could even find anyone in Gotham who both had a psych doctorate and wasn't disposed towards megalomania and/or had homicidal tendencies.

Batman glances over his shoulder, eyes narrowed, like he can sense that someone's thinking about sending him to therapy.

(Or maybe Tim's just projecting.)

Tim freezes though, stilling his breathing, even though Batman's never spotted him before and it's not like he's about to start seeing him now.

Batman doesn't shake his head and mutter to himself that it must have been his imagination, because he's a Gothamite born and bred and there's always something out to get you – even if it's not you specifically. But Batman is a symbol as much as a suit, which makes him a target for every two-bit thug who wants to make a name for themselves. No one's caught him off guard yet – other than maybe Jason Todd himself – although Tim's pretty sure at this point a pickpocketer would be able to knock Batman out in a couple months if he goes on like this. 

Batman heaves himself into the Batmobile wordlessly, even though he probably shouldn't be driving with two injured legs. And usually he'd put some amount of effort into making his movements look effortless, but he…

He doesn't seem to care about maintaining the fiction that he's superhuman, that he's as invincible as Superman or Wonder Woman.

He just seem like he doesn't care.

About…anything. At all.

That's the crux of the matter, Tim thinks. Batman doesn't care about his own safety anymore. He barely cares about the safety of Gotham. He's only continuing his crusade out of a sense of duty. Maybe a desire to make Jason's death mean something, to make sure he didn't die for some defunct mission.

Tim doesn't exactly know how Jason died, obviously, but he can guess. He's read the press release Bruce Wayne sent to the Gotham Gazette, and he's almost positive it's complete fiction. He'd be surprised if it had a grain of truth at all. 

All Tim knows is that Jason Todd died in Ethiopia, more than likely wearing his Robin suit, considering what happened with Batman and the Joker…after.

It's not a lot, and while Tim probably could find out more. But Martha says that people are entitled to their privacy, even celebrities like the Waynes. 

That's why Tim only sometimes follows the Batmobile back to Wayne Manor. Usually he goes and tells Martha about what Batman's doing instead, because she always likes to hear Tim talk and doesn't even care if he accidentally starts a fifth tangent in the middle of his story.

(He likes Martha. She's patient with him. She never snaps at him to shut up when he starts rambling like some of his old friends used to do. She just smiles at him, indulgent, a glint of fondness in her eyes, and it makes Tim float with joy.)

But today– today, Tim ignores all of Martha's lectures about privacy and slips into the back seat of the Batmobile.

He doesn't make a sound – he is sure of it – but Batman stiffens in his seat anyway. 

“…Robin?” he asks quietly, disbelievingly. His voice is a gritty, painful rasp,like he hasn’t spoken to anyone in weeks.

Tim winces.

Batman takes a deep breath, then twists in his seat to look over his shoulder in a way that probably puts too much strain on the gunshot wound on his left side. 

For a moment, he seems to look straight at Tim, eyes boring into his soul, and Tim can’t quite contain a quiet gasp.

Batman doesn't see him, of course. 

He can’t see him. 

Batman narrows his eyes, but the security system in the dashboard confirms that no one has opened any doors other than Batman himself, so he turns back to face the road and guns it.

The ride back to the Batcave is quick, but Tim feels some of his anxieties melt away into the wind as Gotham zooms past around him. It’s…peaceful, almost. Nothing but the roar of the engines reaching speeds that no normal car should, and even that starts to fade to background noise as he gets used to it. There’s nothing outside but streaks of light, there and gone before he can fully process them.

His worries come back full-force as soon as the cliff side comes into view. Batman doesn’t slow down, like, at all. Tim can’t see his foot on the gas pedal from where he’s sitting, but he’s pretty sure it’s flat against the floor, given the way G-force is rippling Batman’s cheeks. Hell, he thinks Batman might even be speeding up.

Tim’s eyes screw shut involuntarily as they hurtle through the cave wall and into the tunnel that leads to the Batcave. He knows, intellectually, that it’s just a projection covering the entrance, but it looks exactly like a solid rock wall. Which means it’s doing its job, which is good, but also Tim personally thinks it’s terrifying to drive straight at a cliffside without fear of crashing and getting crumpled up into a tiny ball like tinfoil.

And, like, sure, he knows that wouldn’t happen, that he wouldn’t get hurt, but that doesn’t stop his reflexive bracing for impact.

The Batmobile skids to a stop inside the Batcave, tires squeaking against the cave floor in a way that makes Tim worry for their integrity. 

Mr. Pennyworth appears not a moment later, descending the staircase with a bowl of what Tim thinks might be hot soup on a tray.

Tim’s absolutely positive that it must taste great. Too bad Batman’s not going to get to have any until it’s stone cold, given the way Mr. Pennyworth’s mouth is twitching downward at the sight of his employer.

Batman staggers out of the Batmobile, and Mr. Pennyworth’s nostrils flare for a moment before he very deliberately sets the tray down next to the Batcomputer.

“Welcome home, Master Bruce,” he says drily, though Tim can see one of his eyebrows twitching slightly as he looks Batman up and down, cataloging his injuries with that air of stoicism. “Had a nice drive, did we?”

Batman doesn’t respond beyond a terse grunt as he hauls himself towards the medical station in the corner. Mr. Pennyworth sighs deeply at the dismissal of his question.

“This boy will be the death of me,” he mutters under his breath, low enough that Batman can’t hear him, then practically teleports to his side to keep him from aggravating his injuries too much.

“You do realize, Master Bruce,” Mr. Pennyworth says, looking down resolutely to where he’s working a sterilized needle out of its packaging, “that if this trend continues, one of these days I will be incapable of patching you up?”

Batman just grunts, not even twitching as Mr. Pennyworth slathers his wounds with antiseptics.

“I know that Master Jason’s death has been hard on us all, and perhaps you especially, but this is not helping,” Mr. Pennyworth continues, as if talking to himself, which he probably mostly is because Batman doesn't show any indication that he’s paying attention. “Not even a year ago, you used to be able to dance around mobsters and muggers alike with nary a care and hardly any injuries, and now you come home with what were very nearly fatal stab wounds solely because you didn’t bother with field dressings.”

Tim abruptly realizes that he probably shouldn’t be listening to this lecture, and drifts away from the scene, heading over towards the Batcomputer. 

And wow, look at all those screens! That sure is interesting! He definitely can’t hear Mr. Pennyworth passive-aggressively ripping Batman a new one across the room!

Mr. Pennyworth finishes his stitches wordlessly, brow furrowed, and then hooks a bag of what looks like blood to the y-site of Batman’s IV. He puts his medical supplies away neatly, then sighs again, turning back to Bruce. 

Batman, cowl off and his bullheadedness now on full display, refuses to look at him and chooses instead to stare straight ahead into the middle distance.

Mr. Pennyworth rises to his feet, suddenly looking much older than he looked earlier. “Nothing I say will convince you, I’m sure,” he mutters, then heads towards the Batcomputer.

Tim jumps out of his way with an undignified squeak, moving backwards until his back is pressing against something solid and hopefully not in Mr. Pennyworth’s way. 

Then he remembers that it doesn’t actually matter, because Mr. Pennyworth can’t see him, and would probably just walk through him even if he hadn’t moved out of the way. It would've been uncomfortable for everyone involved.

(Tim speaks from experience.)

Mr. Pennyworth pauses for a moment when he reaches the Batcomputer.

“I have already lost one of my boys,” he says, back to Batman. “Do not make me lose another.”

He picks up the tray and heads up the staircase.

Batman doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t even turn to watch Alfred leave, as silently and swiftly and impersonally as a butler should, which is just— wrong.

Bruce just stares into the middle distance, and at first Tim thinks that maybe he’s looking at him, which isn’t possible. Then he turns and looks over his shoulder and–

Ah.

That makes more sense.

There’s a glass case to the side of the Batcomputer, positioned so that anyone sitting in the chair (the Batchair?) glanced away from the screen for even a moment, their eyes would land on it. The lights inside the case are turned off right now, which is probably why Tim hadn’t noticed it before – but it’s hard to ignore when the only man in the room looks like he’s trying to reach it with his eyes.

Tim peers into the case, wondering what could be inside. It’s vaguely human-shaped, and it’s red and yellow and green so it has to be–

Oh.

Of course.

Robin.

Batman needs a Robin.

Bruce needs someone to remind him how to care again.

He needs to know that he still has family left. 

He needs to know that pushing them away in his grief won’t help. 

He needs someone to remind him that he is still capable of love, that Jason’s death didn’t take that from him. 

He needs someone to tell him that love isn’t always hard, that it doesn’t always have to hurt, that the way he loves Gotham doesn’t need to be the way that he loves his family. 

He needs someone to be the beam of light to cut through his darkness.

He needs Robin.

He needs Dick Grayson.

And that? That's just about the only thing Tim can maybe do something about.

…Right after he shows Martha tonight’s photos and tells her he’s going to be out of town for a while, because she’d be very incredibly disappointed in him if he didn’t check in.

Chapter Text

Dick isn't in Titans Tower.

Tim knows this, because he's checked every single room.

He's probably going to be getting an earful from Martha later about how he needs to "respect people's privacy" and "stop breaking into people's homes just because you're curious." 

Tim would like to point out that he did not actually have to break anything, so technically it's just entering. 

And besides, this is an emergency.

Tim would also like to make it known that Titans Tower has a really weird set-up. Like, not even counting the fact that it's a giant, T-shaped building that’s as much of an architectural feat as it is an engineer’s worst nightmare. The top of the tower, the horizontal part, seems to be mostly used for vehicle storage and repair work (because apparently they have both a helicopter and a jet? ). Tim supposes that makes sense, considering the landing and space constraints of said vehicles. 

The bedrooms, though.

The bedrooms.

The bedrooms are in the middle of the Tower, on the third and fourth floors, which is exactly where anyone attacking the Tower would aim, seeing as it should be the weakest point of the structure. Unless it's reinforced somehow…? Raven is on the team, so maybe she’s protecting it somehow with her magic. That seems like it would be draining, though, and kind of pointless when it wouldn’t actually be necessary if they’d just changed the shape of the building a little.

(And it’s probably not reinforced enough to withstand a rocket launcher from a short distance. Someone should probably do something about that.)

Also, the rooms themselves seem pretty small. There's four on each floor, for some reason, and only one guest room. 

Tim can’t help wondering, what would happen if they add another member to the team? Or what if someone leaves the team but keeps their room? There are a bunch of scenarios where this whole T-shaped tower thing doesn’t make any sense, not least of which is what if they need more space?  

Like, they can’t exactly start building more bedrooms on the third and fourth floors, or even underground, not without throwing off the balance of the entire structure or disrupting its foundation. And building more rooms on the ground floor around the base of the tower would throw off its silhouette and – look, Tim just thinks that maybe they should’ve thought the design through a little more, okay? 

But that’s none of his business, really.

Tim’s just glad most of the Titans have left for the weekend, because otherwise poking his head into their rooms could've been really awkward. There's barely anyone in the Tower, which means that he doesn't get an eyeful of anything he shouldn't, confidential or otherwise. 

That, however, also means that it isn't too much of a surprise when he discovers Dick Grayson is not in the building.

Tim checks all the rooms again just in case, including the ones that are underground. But yeah, no dice.

Well. Crap.

Tim wanders back to Dick Grayson’s ( Robin’s! ) room, hoping for some kind of clue to his whereabouts. 

(Tim is doing his best not to fanboy. He’s on a mission. There’s no time to geek out about standing in Dick Grayson’s room, holy shit– )

Dick is dating Starfire. Tim’s pretty sure about that part, at least. It’s all over their social media pages.

So maybe she knows where he is? Though it’s not like he can really ask her, not with…well, the way he is now.

(He resolutely ignores the fact that his entire plan hinges on being able to communicate with Dick Grayson, which is kind of an issue. He’ll burn that bridge when he comes to it, he supposes.)

So, instead, he starts an in-depth search of the room, looking into every nook and cranny for anything that might be relevant. It takes him almost twenty minutes to find anything remotely usable, when a locked (and booby trapped) drawer in his desk reveals some mail, all sent to the same address. It isn’t the address for Titans Tower, as evidenced by the fact that it does not say Titans Tower (you know the one) on the front. 

Assuming they even get mail here. Actually, come to think of it, they probably have a P.O. Box or something, for security reasons. 

Maybe Batman screens their mail.

Tim shakes his head abruptly, forcing himself to focus on the task at hand.

This address is connected to Dick Grayson in some way. Maybe a safe house or an apartment? It doesn’t really matter what, he supposes. It’s not just a lead – it’s his only lead, so obviously it’s going to be his next stop, regardless of what kind of building it ends up being.

The address is a ways away, though, so Tim sighs and crawls out from under the desk. He’s not looking forward to the trip, mostly because he has no idea how he’s going to actually get there.

Then his eyes land on a newspaper sitting innocuously on one of Dick Grayson’s chairs. It’s folded neatly, so Tim can’t exactly read the article, but the title is Haly’s Circus Closing Down and– oh.

Oh.

Tim is an idiot.

—

In the entire decade and a half or so that Tim has been on this earth, he has been to the circus exactly once.

It had been…a pretty memorable experience.

(They’re falling– oh, god, they’re falling– )

And, understandably, he hadn’t been too keen on going again.

But Dick Grayson is here, which means he doesn't have a choice. Not if he wants to save Batman, and maybe all of Gotham too.

And like, sure, Tim doesn’t exactly know what he’s going to do once he actually finds Dick, since it’s not like he can just roll up to him and show him the photos he’s taken. Even if Dick notices him, the pictures aren’t going to make a whole lot of difference if Tim’s too busy fan-boying over Robin noticing him to let him know that they actually exist. 

And that’s not even counting the existential levels of embarrassment Tim’s going to feel if he does manage to show them to him and Dick asks a single reasonable question like, for example: how did you get this picture? Because then Tim’s going to end up saying something truthful like yeah, you and Batman have been my life for the past couple years and I’ve kind of been following you around on patrol so I can take pictures to show my friend Martha when she asks about how my life – well, your life, technically – is going and Tim is pretty sure that if that came out of his mouth he would instantly evaporate into nothingness.

But, again, that’s a problem for future Tim.

Present Tim’s problem is finding Dick Grayson in the middle of a circus, which is honestly harder than Tim was expecting, and it wasn’t like he was expecting it to be easy. He’d kind of figured that Dick would stick out like a sore thumb, but apparently… not? Almost everyone is wearing normal clothes, which makes it harder to pick him out. 

Tim feels pretty dumb for assuming that circus performers just always wear their costumes, even when they’re not on stage. He’s getting flashbacks to third grade when he thought his teachers slept in their classrooms and never left the school, right up until he saw his home room teacher in a grocery store and freaked out about it internally for twenty minutes.

But, yeah, most people aren’t wearing their costumes yet, and Tim can’t even discount the people who are wearing costumes because Dick Grayson is a master of disguise and Tim has no idea how long he’s been here.

So Tim just sort of…drifts around the tents and caravans, peering in if they’re open and skipping them if they aren’t, because he’s already getting a lecture from Martha when he gets back and he doesn’t want to give her more ammunition.

His resolve lasts for about fifteen minutes, because that’s how long it takes him to come across a very loud argument; and, well, Tim’s always been too curious for his own good, even if it’s none of his business.

Maybe especially if it’s none of his business. 

So he slips his head though the flap of the tent so he can eavesdrop on the conversation better.

And immediately comes face-to-face with a hungry-looking lion.

Tim squeaks and steps back, tumbling backwards through the tent and falling to the ground. 

Well. Maybe the universe is trying to tell him something.

Tim ignores whatever the universe is trying to scream at him and takes three huge, stretching steps to the right and then peeks into the tent again. Luckily for him, this particular entrance point is outside the lion’s cage, although its eyes seem to follow him as he slips a little further inside. 

Tim resists the urge to shudder. He’s– he’s not used to being seen by anyone but Martha, and it’s just…a lot, even if it’s just a giant cat with its eyes locked firmly onto him. Its hind legs are solid muscle even though Tim’s pretty sure he can see the faint outline of its ribs, coiled like it’s ready to pounce. The look in its eyes makes him think that it hasn’t decided whether it wanted to take a closer look or scuttle backwards like it wanted nothing to do with him.

Tim comes to the conclusion that relocating was the right call. 

He’s pretty sure the lion wouldn’t actually try to, like, eat him or anything, since it had to have been trained or at least tamed in order to be safe enough for performance, but he also doesn’t want to tempt fate, so he does his best to shift out of the lion’s direct line of sight.

If the lion can see him, would it be able to eat him too? Tim wonders morbidly. How much nutrition could it even get from munching on him? Given that he’s a bit over a hundred pounds soaking wet, he doesn’t imagine that it would be a lot.

He ducks behind some bags of almost empty feed and releases a shaky breath. That had not been on his to-do list for today.

(Although it’ll make a great story to tell Martha later.)

Tim can hear the raised voices – it’s an argument, it’s definitely an argument – much better from his position half-crouched behind bags of feed. He’s close enough now that he can actually make out what they’re saying.

" – you can't just barge into someone's home and take your anger out on them!"

"I can– in fact, I should, especially if he is the reason that this circus is failing!"

Tim's eyebrows shoot up. He'd assumed the circus was going out of business because of, like, the economy or something. He's pretty sure he's heard his parents talking about it going downhill relatively recently. It's kind of hard to keep track of time like this, though…

Well, shows what he knows.

The first speaker sighs, seeming to gather himself, before he continues more calmly: “Look, I know tensions are high right now, but I really need you to hold it together, at least through tonight’s performance.”

The other man scoffs. 

“Your clown is a drunk, ” he spits. “He does not know his mouth from his ass unless there is a bottle sticking out of one of them. And do you know where it is that he gets all the money for liquor, Mr. Haly?”

The newly named Mr. Haly sighs again, heavy and tired. “No, Wilhelm, I don’t know for sure, but believe me, his paycheck looks about the same as yours right now.”

Wilhelm hmphs. “I have said it once, and I will say it again: I would not be surprised if he were the one taking money to sabotage the circus.”

Tim’s breath catches in his throat. The circus is being sabotaged? Is that why Dick showed up? Had he somehow been able to figure that out from just one article in a newspaper?

Dick Grayson is incredible. 

“Wilhelm, please ,” Mr. Haly says, and he sounds like he’s on the verge of begging. “Don’t talk about him like that. We’re all family here, and that includes both of you. I can’t believe that anyone here would want this circus to fail.”

“You truly believe that, don’t you?” Wilhelm laughs derisively. “I had not thought you so naive.”

“I would not call myself naive," Mr. Haly says evenly.

“No, you would call yourself an optimist.” Wilhelm sighs, and the fight seems to drain out of his voice. “Mr. Haly, I wish that I could believe the way that you can, but I am a pragmatist at heart. I see the writing on the wall. This circus will fail this year - and if not this year, then the next. I am young, and I am strong. I will be able to make it to the big time. But not here.”

“You’re– you’re quitting, Wilhelm?”

“I am asking you to release me from my contract, Mr. Haly. I must take my cats somewhere they can be fed properly, and that is not here.”

Tim can't move from his hiding place without the lion seeing him, but he hears a faint rustle of cloth that he thinks probably means that Mr. Haly is shrugging resignedly. "I understand. Will you stay until the end of the season? That will give me the time to…figure something out."

Wilhelm huffs. "I will stay until then, but then I will be leaving with or without your permission. I hope it will be with ."

"…I only want the best for you and yours, Wilhelm. It is your decision, and I will gladly do my best to make it happen as easily as possible."

Something in Wilhelm's voice softens. "Thank you, Mr. Haly. For what it's worth, I do regret having to leave. I just… I can't continue this way."

There's a muted thud, like Mr. Haly is clapping him on the shoulder. "I understand, Wilhelm. I do. I'm sorry it has to be this way."

There's a long moment of silence, then Mr. Haly claps his hands together. "I'll start the paperwork tonight, but for now, it's twenty minutes to curtain! We'd best get to it."

Wilhelm hums in apparent agreement, then he and Mr. Haly exit the tent.

Tim sighs and leans back against the bags of feed. 

Shit. That means he only has twenty minutes to find Dick Grayson. Less, if he wants to actually be able to speak to him before the performance. 

…which brings him back to the problem he'd put out of his mind when he'd first headed for Titans Tower. Guess he's Future Tim now.

Tim is not currently visible or audible or even tangible to any living being except maybe cats, and it's not like Dick Grayson is part cat or anything, so how is Tim supposed to persuade him to go back to Gotham and be Robin?

…Maybe he can somehow make Dick Grayson part cat? With the power of his mind? 

Yeah, no. In what world was that ever going to work?

Tim's pretty sure that Robin had briefly been a dog for a week or so a few years ago, so it wasn't exactly out of the realm of possibility, but that was because he and Batman had run into a magic user.

Tim, unfortunately, is not a magic user, and thus unable to make people turn into cats with his mind.

There aren't even any magic users around - well, any real ones, anyway, because he'd seen a few stage magicians in top hats near where he'd come in - so he couldn't even depend on a magic accident or anything. Maybe something that would cause Dick Grayson to get stuck between the planes of existence? Then Tim could potentially actually talk to him.

Initiatially, Tim had been holding out for the hope that vigilantes, with their uncanny perceptiveness and excessive hypervigilance, might've been able to notice his existence, but, well, Batman hadn't, so it was highly unlikely Dick Grayson would.

…Unless Dick had psychic meta powers or something? He probably didn't, though, since metas weren't allowed in Gotham.

Unless that was why he'd left Gotham for Bludhaven? He was a late bloomer?

Tim shakes his head. He can't depend on something happening out of the blue that would make them aware of his presence. He needs to come up with some way to communicate with them himself -

A gong sounds in the distance, accompanied by the sound of raucous applause. 

…There goes his twenty minutes.

Well, he's already here. He may as well try going to a circus that isn't massively traumatizing.

Chapter Text

Unfortunately for Tim, he does not get to have a non-traumatizing circus experience. He doesn’t even get to have an experience where none of the performers die in front of him. 

Tim has rotten luck when it comes to circuses, apparently.

On the bright side, he does figure out that Dick Grayson’s disguised himself as a clown approximately twenty seconds before the lion-tamer, Wilhelm, gets his throat ripped out by one of his tigers. He also gets to watch Dick Grayson do his signature quadruple somersault live and in person!

He watches, heart in his throat and half-giddy with excitement, as Dick throws a net onto the lion from the height of his arc on the trapeze, trapping it before it can escape or hurt anyone else. He isn’t quite quick enough to save Wilhelm, though. The scene is…graphic, to say the least.

Also someone had sat down in the spot that Tim had already (invisibly) sitting in right after the show began, which had been uncomfortable for everyone involved.

All in all, it’s not the worst experience Tim has ever had at a circus. Only one person died! Although his mother hadn't been there to cover his eyes this time, so he'd seen the whole, gory thing…

Well! It's a net positive, probably!

If he goes to the circus again maybe there'll be no murders next time! 

Because that had been so completely obviously a murder. Tim might not have much experience with, like, giant cats, but he’d met his fair share of strays and pet cats, and it wasn’t like they acted that differently. They were all felines, right? And although Tim has definitely met some cats that would rather hiss and scratch than let him get near them, he’d never met any that would eat his face off unprovoked. 

So, murder. Obviously.

Maybe one of the performers is secretly a meta who can mind-control cats?

Tim doesn't know much about the circus or its performers - though, to be fair, he's only been here, what, an hour or two? - but he knows at least two people who might have a grudge against Wilhelm. There's the drunken clown, obviously, because Wilhelm had purportedly attacked him in his tent earlier that day, accusing him of sabotaging the circus. That's probably enough to incite someone to kill - because the clown would be super offended if he isn't the saboteur, and he'd probably want to keep the whole thing quiet if he were. The only other suspect (that Tim knows of) would be Mr. Haly himself. He'd given in to Wilhelm's departure notice pretty quickly (maybe too quickly?) and hadn't seemed all that down about Wilhelm potentially going straight to one of his competitors. So maybe Mr. Haly had been planning to kill him the moment he said he was going to quit…

Except Dick Grayson trusts Mr. Haly, so that probably isn't it.

Tim trails after Dick Grayson as he and the ringmaster head for Mr. Haly's trailer. He doesn't want to let Dick out of his sight for even a second, because that's plenty of time for him to change his appearance entirely, and then Tim will have to spend hours or even days trying to find him again.

And Batman…might not have that, if he's gone put on patrol with two unhealed stab wounds and a death wish.

The ringmaster, who Tim belatedly recognizes as Mr. Haly, ushers Dick Grayson into his trailer, closing the door behind them. Tim tries to slip through on their heels, but something blocks his way and he gets a door slammed through him for his troubles.

Tim blinks, stunned. He takes a step back, so the door isn't actually inside him anymore, then reaches out one hand to press against it.

To his immense surprise, he can actually feel it, though it doesn't really feel the way a metal door should. It's weirdly spongey, and every time he pokes a finger into it, it pushes back and almost seems to repel him.

He can't even hear voices from inside the trailer, and he really should be able to, since the walls are not thick.

This has never happened before. What the hell?

Well. He hadn’t been planning on listening in on their conversation anyway, because he doesn't want to give Martha more ammunition for her upcoming "people are entitled to privacy even if you think you aren't hurting anyone" lecture, so this is…

It's fine.

Probably. 

Tim circles the trailer twice, reassuring himself that there is, in fact, only one exit. There's a window on the other side of the trailer, but the blinds are pulled down so Tim can't see inside, and it's too small for anyone bigger than him to wiggle through, so he figures it probably doesn't count. So as long as he keeps an eye on the door, he'll be able to latch onto Dick Grayson before he disappears into the crowd again.

…Hopefully.

Anyway, he should probably use this time to brainstorm ways to communicate with Dick even when they aren't even on the same plane of existence. It's probably going to become relevant in the next, oh, ten or fifteen minutes.

Tim’s always been great at procrastinating things, especially mental breakdowns and end-of-term essays, but this seems like something he maybe should’ve started working on earlier.

Well, no time like the present, he thinks, then immediately gets distracted by movement in his peripheral vision. A pair of sanitation workers are working on moving garbage bags from an overflowing dumpster to their truck a few feet away, and one of them’s just broken open.

“Ah, shit,” says the man who’d been holding it, taking a pair of thick rubber gloves from his belt and bending down to start scooping the popcorn boxes and candy wrappers back into the ripped bag. Tim immediately ducks down to help him because, well, it’s not like he can get any worse. Even if he touches a needle or something he won’t get any diseases or infections, so he might as well help. 

His hand passes right through the first empty water bottle he tries to pick up.

Ah. Right.

Part of being intangible is the whole ‘not being able to pick up objects’ thing. 

Tim tries to get out of his way, backing away from the garbage man, who appears to be muttering curses under his breath as he does his best to get everything back to where it’s supposed to be and then trying to figure out how to hold the bag so that it doesn’t spill right back out again. He doesn’t want to accidentally make the garbage man’s day worse by standing close enough that he has to step through him. It would be a bad time all around.

Tim steps backwards until one of his feet sinks ankle-deep into an as yet unremoved garbage bag, which is something he never wants to replicate ever again. Sure, he can’t actually feel whatever’s inside the bag, and it’s not as if it’s going to, like, get on him or anything, but it is distinctly uncomfortable in a slimy and squishy way (but also nothing like that at all) and Tim is very much not a fan of this whole experience.

He jumps away from the weird feeling, lifting his foot out of the bag. As expected, there’s nothing actually on his pants or his shoe to justify the creeping, crawling feeling that’s making its way up his leg. It’s just… there, and it’s probably not going away for a few minutes.

Tim sighs, disappointed in himself. He should really be more aware of his surroundings.

Something glints at the back of the pile of garbage bags that don’t quite fit in the dumpster, almost hidden from sight.

Tim skirts around the edge of the pile, careful to not accidentally step into any of the garbage bags. He crouches down to get a closer look, getting as close as possible without actively being inside the garbage bag it appears to have fallen out of, and he peers at it like it’s the answer to all his problems.

It is not the answer to all his problems.

It’s a silver flask, the kind that his dad sometimes tucked into the inner pocket of his tuxedo with a wink when he and Tim’s mom went to the boring type of charity galas that they didn’t actually care about. The gala part, not the charity - they were happy to give a thousand dollars to buy a couple plates at a table, but they would’ve preferred to not have to actually show up whenever they were in Gotham. They’d have preferred to be digging in sand or discovering lost temples or whatever self-funded archeologists did on their trips. But they came home whenever Tim was on break from school, and part of that meant showing their faces and networking at whatever shindig the Wayne Foundation was hosting that month. They didn’t really like it that much, but they went.

Maybe they still do. Tim doesn’t know.

The flask smells like alcohol (no surprises there) and looks like it has something smeared on the lip at the top. Tim can’t tell what it is - or even what color it is, exactly, since it’s shadowed and half-hidden under one of the bags - and he can’t exactly move the trash bags out of the way and get a closer look.

A loud creaking sound echoes across the clearing, and Tim's head jolts up just in time to see Dick Grayson stepping out of Mr. Haly's trailer.

Perfect timing. 

If anyone can figure out the flask, it's Dick Grayson. 

Tim jumps to his feet, waving at him frantically to get his attention. Dick's eyes seem to lock on him for a split second, but it's only a second, and it doesn't really feel like he's looking at Tim, exactly, because -

Right.

Because Tim is currently invisible.

Tim resists the urge to slap himself on the forehead, instead diving behind the dumpster where he can curl up in a little tiny ball of pure embarrassment. He's been...like this for  almost a year at this point. You'd think he'd have stopped mistaking people looking into the middle distance for people looking at him.

But, unfortunately for Tim, he has not.

(He doesn't see the way that Dick goes pale as a sheet behind him, or the way he mouths, “Jason?” like the word has been stolen from his mouth by the flash of red and black ducking behind the dumpster before he can voice it.)

He does, however, see Dick round the pile of trash bags overflowing from the dumpster not two seconds later, and has to scramble out of the way.

Dick stares at the back of the dumpster for a long moment, brow furrowed. Tim takes the opportunity to skirt around him, moving quickly so that he's out of the way if Dick decides to make any other movements.

He probably should've expected Robin to move that fast, honestly, though he's not really sure what had caused Dick to come rushing over here in the first place.

Then Dick abruptly drops into a crouch, in almost exactly the same spot that Tim was a few moments ago, pulling a pair of rubber gloves and a plastic bag from his pocket, and then Tim gets it.

Dick must have spotted the glint of the flask in the mid-afternoon sun and come rushing over to find out what it is.

That makes way more sense.

“Oh, of course…” Dick breathes, gingerly picking up the flask with one gloved hand and turning it so he can take a closer look at the smear.

Tim peers over his shoulder, curious despite himself. This close, he can tell that the smear is white, or maybe off-white like the walls in the hallways of the house he used to live in, and he’s pretty sure that it’s some sort of make-up. It doesn’t really look like the type his mother wears, but she mostly uses powders and inks. It looks familiar, though. Like he’s seen it somewhere before…

It comes to him in a flash. It’s face paint - the kind that they use at fairs or the farmer’s market, that washes off with a bit of soap and water if you scrub at it long enough. Of course! It must be the clown’s!

Tim watches as Dick’s eyes narrow and he glances around, making sure no one’s there, before he rips open the bag resting on top of the flask.

Tim’s mouth drops open. Rude! The poor garbage man would have to clear that up later!

Then he realizes that, oh, actually the bag had been ripped a little already - that must be how the flask had fallen out –  but it’s still pretty rude to make a mess for someone else to clean up!

Tim watches, incredulous, as Dick scoops up some of the stuff that had fallen out of the bag - it’s brownish pink and looks kind of like a weird mix between wet and dry cat food, with some steak tartare thrown in for kicks - and then he sniffs it.

Tim gapes. What the hell, Dick?

“Laced,” Dick says under his breath. He nods to himself, like whatever he’d smelled had confirmed his suspicions, then takes a plastic bag from his pocket and plops a few scoops of the…substance inside. 

Oh, duh. The reason it looks so much like cat food…is because it’s cat food. Lion food, to be more exact.

…Why does Dick Grayson know what laced lion food smells like, though?

Oh! Wait a second!

During the conversation Tim had overheard in the tent where they’d kept the lions, Wilhelm had mentioned something about a drunken clown sabotaging the circus. Mr. Haly hadn’t wanted to believe it, but this was definitive proof!

What other reason could there be for a drunken clown’s flask to be in amongst apparently drugged lion food?

Dick gets to his feet abruptly, and Tim stumbles backwards out of the way, barely managing to avoid the unpleasant sensation of someone going through him. It's like a million little sparks hitting his nervous system at exactly the same time, but also wet. It's weird and Tim hates it. Judging by the shudder that usually runs through whoever is unlucky enough to step into him, Tim's pretty sure being on the other side isn't much better.

He manages to get out of Dick's way in time, though, even if it isn't the most graceful movement he's ever made. So at least neither of them have to deal with that on top of the murder case.

Tim wonders how Dick is going to catch the killer. He isn't Nightwing right now, and he probably didn't bring his costume with him. And even I'd he had, how was he going to explain Nightwing showing up at the circus just as Dick Grayson vanished from sight? Surely someone would notice.

So Dick is probably going to have to solve this in his civilian identity.

…And Tim is going to need to learn how to force his brain to stay on topic long enough to figure out how to communicate with him!

Ugh, if only Dick could see him!

Tim yanks his hood down in frustration, and to his surprise Dick's eyes seem to follow the movement for a split second before they seem to lose focus, like he's reading a book and he's lost his place.

Tim takes a deep breath, a small smile stealing onto his face.

Okay.

Okay, he can work with this.

Chapter Text

Tim cannot work with this.

About ten minutes ago, he'd watched, bewildered, as Dick Grayson had ignored all his wild gesticulating and stormed into Harry the Drunken Clown's tent (because apparently the clown's name is Harry) and ushered him out the back. And now, for some reason, he's staring into a mirror as he carefully puts on his clown makeup. Well, Harry's clown makeup, technically. 

Tim has no idea what's going on anymore. Isn't Harry the clown the murderer? 

Also, Dick has not looked his way once since he'd made his way into the tent.

Tim's starting to think the whole thing from earlier was a fluke.

He does the robot dance behind Dick's head, staring straight at his reflection in the mirror, because if anything is going to get Dick to quit it with the stoic expression, it's that. Tim has no idea why Dick might be pretending not to notice his antics, but it's pretty annoying if he is.

Dick's eyes occasionally seem to follow his movements, but it's not often, and Dick doesn't even pause in painting on his clown makeup, so Tim figures whatever he's doing is just not working.

(This is not the first time Dick has hallucinated his dead brother. It's a little vaguer than usual - just occasional flashes of a red jacket and black hair - but maybe that talk with Donna had helped a bit. Maybe he’s starting to move forward.)

(He thinks he might miss the hallucinations if they disappear, though. Just a little bit.)

Dick squeezes his clown nose once to make sure it's on properly, and it honks.

Tim wishes it didn't feel like Dick was making a comment about his life choices.

The cloth of the tent flap rustles as someone lifts it up. Tim watches Dick watch the two figures enter the tent in the mirror. Dick's eyes narrow, shrewd and calculating, and Tim realizes with a start that this must be what Nightwing looks like when he's in his element.

Tim slowly lifts his camera and takes a picture, zooming in on the way his eyes seem to darken the moment the men step into the tent, the way that the corner of his lip twitches down. Tim's never been this close to Robin when he's on a case.

The size difference between the two figures is almost comical - one is over six feet tall, while the other is maybe about three. The taller one has big bulging muscles and an impressive handlebar mustache, and is still wearing the old-fashioned leopard print singlet that looks like it was probably his costume for the performance earlier, so Tim figures he's the strong man.

(At least, he hopes it's a costume. For all he knows, this guy just likes wearing something that is basically a speedo with suspenders. More power to him if so, Tim guesses. He certainly has no room to complain, considering he's worn the exact same outfit every day for months. Even if it's not exactly his choice to wear it.)

The shorter one has a slightly grown out bowl cut and is also still wearing his costume. It's nothing particularly noteworthy - just a white sleeveless top and colorful pants - so Tim can't tell what his job at the circus is just by looking at him.

He seems to be in charge, though, going by the careless flick of his hand he directs towards the strong man, causing him to stop in his tracks, blocking the exit.

It's probably meant to be intimidating, but Dick doesn't flinch.

Instead, his posture sort of…melts into something that clearly radiates melancholy, and Tim is once again filled with awe at the mastery Dick has over his own body. It's incredible, the way that he can change his apparent mood with just a shift of his shoulders, the way that he can slip seamlessly into a role with the same ease he displays on the trapeze. 

"What're you two doing here," Dick slurs, wrapping his hand carelessly around the neck of a half-full bottle of bourbon. He lifts it, ham-fisted, to his mouth and spills most of it over his shirt when he tries to take a chug. 

Tim frowns. Dick is clearly pretending to be Harry the Drunken Clown, but what's the point? Harry is obviously the reason Wilhelm's dead, and probably why the circus is failing, so why bother impersonating him?

Maybe he had co-conspirators and Dick's trying to catch them too? 

Tim settles back to watch the show. He's sure Dick Grayson’s got a good reason for this seemingly unnecessary charade.

"Harry, are you okay?" the strong man asks, and he does a pretty good job of pasting a concerned look on his face. If Tim hadn't been analyzing his body language as well, he might've been fooled.

The short guy snorts, not even bothering to try matching his companion's fake concern. "Look at him, Samson. He's drunk as a skunk. At least this time he has a half-decent reason for it."

He squares his shoulders and places his hands firmly on his hips, and Samson follows suit. "You killed him, didn't you, Harry? You doped up Wilhelm's lion and caused it to kill him."

"Stupid drunken clown," Samson mutters, though he doesn't bother lowering his voice enough that the words don't reach Harry's - well, Dick's, but they don't know that - ears.

Dick lets his head fall down onto Harry's vanity table with a thunk, smearing white makeup onto the surface. "I - Heaven, help me, I just might be."

"Might be what?" the short guy prompts.

"Might be responsible, Pedro," Dick snaps, though he seems to lose energy halfway through. He picks up the flask that Tim had found half-buried beneath the pile of trash bags, dangling it so that Pedro and Samson can see. "I don't remember, but… Dick found this, my flask, and my makeup's all over it, so who knows… Maybe I am the one who got Wilhelm killed..." He trails off, shoulders still slumped morosely, but Tim can see the way that Dick has his eyes fixed on Pedro and Samson in the mirror, keen and calculating. 

"You've got to do what's right, Harry," Pedro urges. "Turn yourself in, and maybe you won't take the rest of the circus down with you."

Dick chuckles, the sound watery, though Tim can't see any tears in his eyes. They look - icy. Cold. Shrewd. 

Tim zooms in on them and snaps another picture.

"Dick said the same thing," Dick-as-Harry says, absently tracing meaningless patterns on the table with his free hand. "He's a good kid. Also said something about getting tests done on it for - for skin cells in the makeup or something, to make sure it was really me and not someone just wearing my stuff…"

Pedro scoffs. "We both know that's not going to work, especially not if it was buried in lion feed. Do us all a favor, Harry, and just turn yourself in."

Tim can't help but gasp. Oh, no way…

Dick jolts upright abruptly, a few seconds late, like his reaction time is delayed. "I never said anything about that…" he says, swaying slightly. 

"About what?" Pedro asks, playing dumb. 

"The feed…" Dick says, voice going sharp. "No one knew about the feed, except the person who put it there."

Pedro's expression shifts into a mask of fury and he gives up the charade completely. "Samson, kill him. Make it look like suicide."

Tim quickly takes a few steps backwards so Samson doesn't end up lunging through him, then proverbially sits back to watch the show. Dick Grayson is incredible and has maybe fifteen years of vigilanteism under his belt, so even though Samson has almost a foot and probably a hundred pounds on him, he doesn't stand a chance.

"Sorry about this," Samson says, and to his credit he does seem genuinely apologetic about having to kill Harry. 

Unfortunately for him, it's Dick under the face paint, not Harry.

Tim gets a great photo set of Dick judo-flipping Samson over his head, finishing with a close-up of the utterly flabbergasted expression that crosses Samson's face when his back hits the ground, and Tim resolves to show them all to Martha later. 

Samson struggles to his feet before Dick can pin him down completely, and Tim abruptly realizes that Pedro is nowhere to be seen. 

Dick hasn't noticed yet, but, to be fair, Dick is also in the middle of dealing with Samson the strong man trying to kill him, so he's got bigger things to worry about.

(Tim snickers internally at his pun.)

There's a tear in the back of the tent, small enough that Harry hadn't bothered patching it up yet, but big enough that Pedro could probably have wriggled through it. Tim phases through the tent wall next to it instead of doing the same, in the interest of speed.

Pedro is nearly fifty feet away already, near the end of the first block of tents, so Tim runs after him. 

He's not entirely sure what he's going to, like, do once he catches up to him, but it's not like anyone else has noticed Pedro escaping yet. That's one of the pros of existing beneath most people's eyelines. Tim's only just hit his growth spurt, so he can attest to that. 

And, well, if no one else has noticed Pedro trying to escape, it falls to Tim to do something about it.

…Even if he's not exactly sure how he's supposed to be very useful in this situation. 

Tim sprints after Pedro, who's apparently really fast when he wants to be, especially considering that he's shorter than Tim. If Tim actually needed oxygen, he's sure he'd be panting for breath already. Luckily for him, he doesn't, which means that he manages to catch up to Pedro within a hundred feet of the tent.

…Okay, but now what? Tim asks himself, running alongside Pedro as Pedro attempts to make his escape.

If Tim were solid and could, like, actually have a noticeable effect on the things around him, he could maybe just tackle Pedro to the ground and sit on top of him. But given his current situation, that’s obviously out.

His next thought involves a tent pole and some minor stabbing, but he doesn't have enough time to stop and untangle one from the fabric it's supporting. Also he's not quite confident enough in his javelin throwing skills that he thinks he'll both actually hit Pedro and miss most of his vital organs, so that idea's also out.

His last plan (possibly a bit of a strong word) involves the brightly colored bucket-shaped podium teetering on the edge of a roller cart at the edge of the path a ways in front of him. It also assumes that the podium is hollow, which it might not be.

Then he realizes that brainstorming is pretty much useless considering that his frame of reference still involves being able to affect the world around him, which he can't, so all his plans are kind of moot.

Also, Pedro has sped up and is now ten feet in front of him.

So he just goes for it.

(Tim recognizes that it's a dumb plan.

He also recognizes that he doesn't have time to come up with a better one.)

Someone has to do something, and it's not like there's anyone else around who can stop Pedro from getting away, so that someone is going to have to be Tim. And even though he knows that this something is more than likely going to end up a nothing, since his ability-to-interact-with-the-physical-world card has been revoked, but at least he'll have tried to do something.

God, I hope this works, Tim thinks, and then he wishes really, really hard.

Then he puts on a burst of speed and plows shoulder first into the ringmaster’s podium.

He's half resigned to the fact that he's just going to sail straight through it, except that's not what happens.

Because to his complete and utter surprise, it moves.

It moves like someone Tim's size has just rammed into it, even.

Tim watches, astonished, as the podium tumbles over and lands on top of Pedro. He's trapped like a bug under a glass.

Unlike most bugs, however, Pedro is smart enough to try to lift the container trapping him. He's too short to reach the top of the podium, even from the inside, so instead he tries cramming the tips of his fingers between the podium and the soil beneath him and then trying to lift it off of himself.

It's not exactly inconspicuous.

Tim obviously can't let Pedro escape, considering that he's guilty of at least being an accessory to murder, and also Tim's newfound ability to interact with the physical world means that he can actively do something to stop Pedro from escaping.

(It's a great feeling, he's not gonna lie. Although he's kind of confused about how it happened. But, well, he's not going to look the gift horse in the mouth just yet.)

So Tim scrambles to climb onto the podium, putting his full weight (which he apparently has now???) on top of Pedro's fingers.

"Ouch!" yelps Pedro.

What the hell? thinks Tim, semi-hysterically.

Because right up until a few minutes ago, he was under the impression that he was not actually tangible.

———

“Also, Harry doesn’t actually wear white paint on his lips,” Dick says casually, standing over Samson's still form. "You've performed with him for months - you should know that by now."

He's unconscious at this point, thanks to an elbow strike to the back of his head, but Dick feels like it still warrants saying.

Harry and Mr. Haly rush into the tent moments later, followed by what looks like half the circus. "Dick, are you all right?" Jaque asks, and Dick waves him off. He's barely even winded.

"I can't believe it… To think that Samson and Pedro would do something like this…" Mr. Haly says faintly, face pale. "How…?"

"How did I figure it out?" Dick finishes for him when he trails off. "It was the flask." 

He holds it up with one hand, keeping a close eye on Samson in case he wakes up too early. "I tossed it out before Wilhelm was murdered, so Harry couldn't have had it. And when I found it in the garbage later, my prints weren't on it anymore, so someone must have wiped them off, which meant that they must have seen me throw it out and then retrieved it."

He takes a breath, putting the flask down again. "Pedro was the only one around, so I did a quick background check on him, and it looks like he was last employed by the company that's been trying to buy you out, Mr. Haly. Probably still is - more than likely, they hired him to drive down the price of the circus so they could buy it cheap."

Mr. Haly mouths wordlessly, struck speechless.

"...But where is Pedro?" Harry asks, glancing around.

Dick bites back a curse. He'd been so focused on Samson that he'd forgotten he didn't have any backup - no one to go after the other opponent if he tried to escape.

(Jason's - gone. A couple flickers of red in the mirror behind him as he'd put on Harry's face doesn't mean that he has backup.)

"Jaque, sit on Samson until the police get here," Dick orders, spotting a rip in the back of the tent that must have been Pedro's escape route. It's too small for Dick to fit through, though, so he runs outside the tent and around to the back, inwardly groaning at the thought of a chase after Pedro through tents too unstable to use as anchors, and -

He stops in his tracks.

There’s a kid in a red hoodie with a camera hanging from his neck. He's sitting on top of one of the ringmaster’s podiums, trapping Pedro in the hollow beneath it. His eyes are wide above his well cared for but slightly dated Gotham gas mask, like he’s almost as surprised to see Dick as Dick is to see him.

…What the fuck?

Dick approaches him cautiously, keeping his hands where the kid can see them. He seems jumpy, like he’s not used to being seen, and Dick doesn’t want to spook him. “Nice job, kid,” he says, modulating his voice so that he sounds sincere but soothing.

The kid blinks rapidly, eyes glazed over, then his sharp gaze zeros in on Dick, and it’s like he’s caught in a tractor beam.

(Ask him how he knows.)

“Dick Grayson,” the kid breathes after a long moment of silence, his voice filled with a hoarse awe that makes Dick uncomfortable.

"That's me!" he agrees to defuse the situation, a wide grin that's only a little performative spreading across his face. "Normally I wouldn't condone a kid trapping someone under the ringmaster’s podium - " Dick swears the kid cracks a smirk behind his gas mask, but he can’t be certain since he can't actually see his mouth. " - but that guy just confessed to sabotage and possibly murder, so I can't be too mad about it." 

"I know he did," the kid says, and apparently his voice is just like that. Hoarse, scratchy, and barely audible, like he can't - or won't - speak above a whisper. 

Dick's not quite sure what to make of it. Maybe the kid is sick, or maybe he's had a recent tracheotomy, or maybe his gas mask doubles as a voice changer. It's hard to tell. There could be a reasonable explanation, or a sinister one, or it could be because of - well, anything, really. Dick met the kid five minutes ago. He doesn't have enough to go on to make a firm conclusion. 

He keeps his guard up, though. If one of the more sinister explanations is the correct one, he doesn't want to be caught flat-footed. Jason would never let him hear the end of -

Right.

Nevermind.

"I was watching," the kid continues, uncaring for Dick’s internal monologue and - wait.

The kid had been watching? Like, he'd been in the tent or peeking through the flaps or something and Dick hadn't noticed?

…That’s actually kind of terrifying because Dick hadn't seen him. Like, at all.

Sure, it’s been a while since he’d been back to Haly’s Circus, so there are a bunch of new faces that he hadn’t quite got around to seeing yet, but he’s pretty sure he would’ve noticed some random child poking his nose in, if only because of the freaking gas mask he’s wearing.

(He's lived most of his life in Gotham. He knows how to spot one person wearing a gas mask in a crowd of people who aren't wearing them. It's practically How to Survive Gorham 101, right up there with avoid banks on Tuesdays and don't use weed killer.)

Either Dick is slipping, or the kid has been trained by someone better than Batman.

That doesn't bode well.

“…Well,” Dick says after a moment, “we really appreciate your help catching Pedro before he could get away, but you’re really not supposed to be back here. Unless you’re part of the circus…?” 

He’s not - it’s pretty obvious he’s not, but Dick wants to see if he’ll try to pretend otherwise, even surrounded by a group of carnies.

The kid shakes his head. “No. No, I came here to talk to you.”

Interesting.

Dick raises an eyebrow. “Me?” he asks guilelessly. “What about?”

The kid’s eyes seem to bore into him for a long moment, trying to gauge - something about him, or maybe their surroundings, but Dick can’t quite tell what, mostly because he's not actually a mind reader, no matter what Roy says.

Then the kid opens his mouth behind the gas mask, and his words come out croaky and hoarse and maybe a little breathless.

“About…bats,” he says finally, and Dick’s blood runs cold.

Chapter Text

Tim is twelve when his parents bring him back a souvenir from one of their digs. 

Tim is absolutely over the moon about it, because usually they just get him something from the Duty Free at the airport. Usually he gets standard, touristy souvenirs, things like magnets or post cards or stuffed animals wearing dumb t-shirts. He's nearly a teenager at this point and he's never really liked stuffed animals all that much in the first place, so getting one is always a bit of a letdown. He should probably let his parents know that he's grown out of having stuffed animals, but he's not really sure how to casually slip that into conversation yet.

But this– this thing, this artifact , it's a sign that his parents had been thinking about him the whole time they'd been away, and not just while they'd been waiting for their plane to depart.

He doesn't even really mind that they go to bed right after giving it to him. He gets it – they're tired from traveling, from the dig, from the time change. Of course they're tired. He probably should wait until morning to open it, so they could see his reaction. Maybe while they eat breakfast?

Tim stares at the soft linen wrapping on the table in front of him. He can’t figure out what’s inside from its shape alone – it’s small, so maybe it’s jewelry or something? But his dad isn’t the kind of person who gives jewelry to little boys, and especially not to his son. It’d be 'too girly.'

So what, then?

Tim kind of hopes it isn’t some ancient Arabian keychain or something. He’d love it all the same, he's sure, because it'd been his parents who had given it to him, but he’d be lying if he said it wouldn’t be a little disappointing.

...Actually, that’s a good argument for opening it now, when his parents aren’t around to see his reaction. 

If it is a keychain, he doesn’t want to risk them seeing a– a flash of disappointment or something, because then they might never bring him anything cool ever again.

Tim studies the package closely. He’s pretty sure he can manage to rewrap it almost exactly the same way if he opens it.

He glances at the clock on the oven.

The red numbers blink back at him – 10:13 PM. His parents aren’t coming out of their room for another six hours at the very least. Maybe more, if they’d taken their sleeping meds, which they usually did after long flights and that many time zone changes.

Tim contemplates waiting for six hours – or, more realistically, eight to twelve hours – and finds that, if he does, he’s not going to be able to sleep tonight, like, at all. And he doesn’t want to be tired tomorrow, just in case his parents decide that they want to take him to the zoo or something. They probably won’t, since the day after they get back into the country is usually what they call their ‘Quiet Day,’ when Tim is allowed to do anything he wants as long as it’s on their property and not too loud. Nothing short of a level three evacuation alert will get them to move from their armchairs on a Quiet Day, but they’ll usually do something together as a family the day afterwards, or the next weekend if Quiet Day is a Sunday. 

But occasionally – not often, but sometimes – his parents will skip Quiet Day and go straight to a family outing instead, and Tim doesn’t want to be dead on his feet just in case that happens.

So Tim makes his decision.

He very carefully peels back the tape holding the wrapping paper together, doing his best to prevent it from tearing. It’s not technically wrapping paper, not really, because it doesn’t have any patterns or anything on it and it’s too waxy to truly be what he recognizes as wrapping paper, but he doesn’t know what else to call it and it is paper wrapping something, so…

Tim holds his breath as he very carefully lifts the top layer of paper from the package, revealing what’s inside.

It’s an amulet, with a gold setting framing a foggy green stone. Or maybe it’s gold? It’s hard to tell, even in the harsh fluorescent lights of the kitchen, and the colors seem to shift whenever he tilts it slightly, swirling and twisting like they’re fighting against both an invisible current and each other. It kind of reminds him of the way motor oil glistens on blacktop after it rains, iridescent and impossible to fully grasp. 

Tim spends a long minute tilting the amulet, watching the colors as they mix and swirl and dance together.

There are pretty designs engraved on the setting. Or maybe it’s Arabic? Tim doesn’t really know what Arabic looks like – they’ve only just started teaching him Spanish at school, and Arabic isn’t even offered until freshman year.

It looks really cool, though, and Tim grins widely at the thought of hearing his parents tell him all about it when they wake up. How they found it, maybe, or even what it means. Maybe it’s supposed to protect him from something? There’s bound to be loads of stories, and he can’t wait to hear all of them.

Except his parents have to leave before breakfast the next morning – apparently there's a problem at the Tokyo branch or something – so he doesn't get to learn anything about the amulet.

Right.

He does get a kiss on the forehead from his mom and a pat on the back from his dad, so he doesn't mind all that much. 

He attaches the amulet very carefully by the leather loop at the top of the setting to his camera strap – because he feels like wearing it as an accessory just screams 'beat me up' and also he'd get mugged in about two seconds if he ever stepped into Gotham City proper. 

His camera is probably the best cared for thing in his room, if only because it was so expensive that he doesn't really use it that much. His parents had bought it for him a year ago when they’d sent him to a photography camp because one of their trips ran long and they weren’t about to leave him in the house alone, but he’s never really had anything good to take pictures of since then. 

So instead, he keeps it on a shelf above his desk, just in case he does find something interesting to photograph one day, and so he can stare at it whenever he starts to feel a bit lonely.

He doesn’t learn what the amulet does until he figures out what he wants to photograph.

———

So, the thing is, Tim doesn’t actually have a lot of opportunities to sneak out at night and take photos of the Dynamic Duo. 

(The thought hadn't even occurred to him until his parents sent him to a photography summer camp while they were out of the country during break.)

Like, sure, he totally pieced together all their patrol routes (mostly) (well, some of them) from social media posts and newspapers because it turns out that it really helps if you know the start and end points (because they have to go back across the bridge to Wayne Manor at some point, right?), and he’s got his own camera and everything, but...

He goes to boarding school. And it’s, like, a super bougie one too, one where they hire guards to patrol the dorm hallways just to make sure that no one gets kidnapped in the middle of the night or anything. Tim supposes it’s a reasonable precaution, given that they’ve already foiled three separate attempts in the two weeks since the semester began, but it also makes it really difficult to sneak out after curfew, which is two or three hours before Batman and Robin start patrolling.

He manages it, though. 

He'd spent a couple days watching their patrol patterns and a few more finding every single camera in the building. There weren't any in the communal bathrooms at the end of each hall - the school would probably get sued by concerned parents if there were - and the guards aren’t allowed to use them, probably for the same reason. 

So Tim turns off his lights when he’s supposed to and shucks his uniform in favor of clothes that won’t stick out all that much in Gotham. 

(Well, less than his uniform would, in any case.)

His mother wrinkles his nose whenever he wears anything that isn’t khakis or slacks, so he doesn’t really have much else in his closet, and neither of those are going to be great for blending in in Gotham proper. 

Tim does, however, have access to a laundry room, even if his parents pay for dry cleaning so that he doesn’t actually have to use it, which means he can sneak in after hours and raid the lost and found for anything that wasn’t picked up at the end of last semester. Like, for example, a pair of jeans.

They’re kind of greenish, which he’s pretty sure jeans usually aren’t, and they’re a little too tight and kinda long at the same time, but they’ll work for his purposes.

There’s also a big zip-up sweatshirt in a vibrant red that Tim hesitates for a long moment before grabbing. He’s going to have to hide it in the bottom of his bag whenever he goes home at the end of the semester because his parents definitely wouldn’t approve, but it’s Robin red and Tim is a sucker for all things Robin.

It’s why he very carefully hand-sews a homemade Robin patch to the back of the sweatshirt and puts a Robin pin of the same design on the front in about the same place the school crest is on his uniform blazer.

He’d bought them on a whim when his parents had taken him downtown over summer break and let him explore. There had been a college-age kid on the side of the street in between two food carts, and the bat symbol on their sign had caught Tim’s eye, so he’d taken a closer look. They’d had an array of products, clearly hand drawn if not handmade, and Tim’d had to resist the urge to buy out the entire stand. He probably could’ve afforded it, since he never really spent his allowance on anything, but he’d never have been able to hide all the superhero merch from his parents, so he’d only bought what he’d been able to fit into his pockets. That had ended up being a Robin patch, a Robin pin, a Nightwing keychain, and a grey tie patterned with repeating bat symbols in black, which was ambiguous enough that he thought his parents probably won’t notice. He might even be able to get away with wearing it at their next charity event.

It’s definitely self-indulgent to attach his Robin merch to a Robin red sweatshirt, but, well, he’s going to have to hide the sweatshirt anyway, so why not? It’s not like Robin or Nightwing are ever going to see it.

He keeps on the white t-shirt he wears underneath his uniform shirt and zips his homemade Robin sweatshirt overtop, then yanks on his weird kind-of-green jeans. His parents, luckily, do actually believe in sneakers, so he doesn’t have to steal them from the lost and found as well.

He also hangs a gas mask around his neck, because this is Gotham. He's young and maybe a little reckless, but he's not stupid. All Gothamites older than the age of three knew to keep a gas mask on their person at all times in case of villain-of-the-week's chemical attack.

The gas mask clinks a little against his camera, which is annoying, but there’s not much he can do about it with the stuff he has in his dorm room.

Instead he stands by his door and holds himself very, very still so that they won’t clink together. He barely breathes, waiting for the security guards to start their rounds.

He stands there, unmoving, for nearly half an hour before the first set of footsteps sounds outside his door. They’re solid, measured, and Tim shudders to think what that kind of guy might do if he discovered what Tim was about to do. He’d probably have no qualms waking up the principal . And then the principal would probably call his parents .

Tim would like to avoid that as much as possible, thanks!

He holds his breath until the shadows obscuring the light from the hallway that usually comes through the crack under his door disappear. It should take the guard about sixty-five seconds to reach the end of the hallway and start climbing the stairs to the next floor.

Tim counts to a hundred, just in case.

Then he takes a deep breath, flips up his hood, and heads towards the communal bathroom at the end of the hall. He does his best to skirt the cameras, sticking to the blind spots he's pretty sure exist at the edges of the hallway, and when he slips inside the bathroom he’s pretty sure he’s managed to remain unseen. He closes the door behind him, breathing a silent sigh of relief. 

He allows himself a moment to revel in his accomplishment. His blood is buzzing in his veins, and he’s giddy with excitement. Sure, it’s not all that impressive that he’s managed to go thirty feet down a hallway without being seen - especially not compared to Batman and Robin - but for a teenager with no training? He’s pretty proud of himself, actually.

Only for a moment, though, because then he’s back on his mission.

Tim climbs up onto one of the toilets and carefully inches open the tiny window at the top that the cleaners leave unlatched for their smoke breaks. He's lucky he's small for his age, even after his growth spurt, because otherwise he wouldn't be able to fit through - probably the only reason the window had been unlocked was because the security guards thought no one would be able to get in.

He wiggles himself through, camera and gas mask first, then drops down onto the ground below with a soft thump . 

He's also lucky that his room's on the ground floor, because he would've twisted an ankle or broken a bone or something if he'd jumped from the second or third.

Tim picks up his camera again and puts his gas mask on properly now that he’s actually outside. Better safe then sorry.

After that, it’s pretty simple to just walk off campus and take a bus out to downtown Gotham. There’s admittedly a few dicey moments - at one point he’d had to climb a tree in order to get enough height to jump a metal fence - but it goes smoothly enough that he figures he can probably get back in the same way.

He gets off the bus in Robbinsville near the Gotham Library, mostly because three out of five of Batman’s and Robin’s main patrol routes pass by Noonan’s Tavern in The Cauldron to check up on it for some reason (probably mob-related, since this is Gotham), but Tim can’t say that it’s the only reason. 

(He likes the name, so sue him.)

Noonan's Tavern is only a few blocks from the Gotham Library, and Tim figures he can probably walk it in maybe fifteen minutes. 

That's only if he takes the sidewalk, though.

It's almost eleven o'clock, which is about half an hour before the earliest of Batman and Robin's stops by the tavern. 

So there's plenty of time for Tim to get creative with his route.

Because, see, Tim's pretty new to the whole photography thing - like, he's definitely an amateur, and probably no one's going to pay for his photos or anything - but his parents had said they looked nice and the teacher from that summer camp he'd gone to a few years ago had said he had an eye for composition. So Tim had taken that and internalized it and now he likes to get creative, make his shots look kind of artsy. He takes photos from interesting angles, plays with filters, puts the focus on different parts of the photo than he usually would. It's fun.

Which means that he's got his heart on getting a picture of Batman and Robin from above. 

Tim's already got the framing in his head. He'll stake out the building Batman and Robin usually land on (the diner across the street that is probably also a front for one of the various mobs of Gotham) from the building next door, which is two stories taller. Then, when Batman and Robin show up (usually somewhere between 11:30 and 12:30), he'll peek his camera out over the building, and if he's really, really lucky, he might just be able to get a shot of them just as they're landing on the roof. 

He's really hoping he'll be lucky, because that is his dream shot. The dynamics of their movements, the lighting of the full moon, the bird's eye view angle…

He'd be willing to risk his life to get it. And that's exactly what he's doing, pretty much, because a kid going out alone into Gotham at night is just…a recipe for disaster.

Tim's doing his best to be cautious, though. Hence the gas mask.

He's also careful to stick to the shadows as he skirts around the library, heading for the fire escape on the side of the building. The red of his hoodie is not exactly the most conducive to staying out of sight, and Tim is once more filled with admiration for Dick Grayson's ability to melt into the shadows as well as Batman, even while dressing as brightly as a poisonous butterfly.

Tim's not that good, obviously, but he also doesn't pass anyone in the five minutes it takes to circle around the side of the library, so it doesn't really matter.

The fire escape is rusty with disuse and shudders under his weight when he steps onto it, but it holds steady. That's not great for, like, the actual purpose of a fire escape, but it looks like it'll hold Tim's weight well enough to get him to the roof. He should probably call someone about it later, though. It seems…hazardous. What if there's an actual fire in the library? It's Gotham - arson happens all the time. Someone could get hurt!

He resolves to look up who he should call once he gets back to his dorm room, where his computer is.

In the meantime, he scales the fire escape, climbing the many, many stairs to the top of the building. It's a long climb, and Tim's panting when he gets to the roof. He allows himself a few minutes to catch his breath, mostly because he's afraid he might pass out otherwise. He really should've brought a water bottle or something.

Well, that's a great idea for next time, assuming he can get back to his dorm room without getting caught.

Tim glances down at the next building over. It's an apartment complex, he's pretty sure. It's built flush to the library, which is kind of weird, but it means that he doesn't run the risk of falling down in between the two buildings, so that's good. It's a couple storeys shorter than the library, so there's a bit of a drop, which he's not super psyched about. He doesn't have a grappling hook like Batman or Robin, so if he falls, he's breaking at least one bone, and then some poor library employee will find him and (hopefully) take him to the hospital,  and then someone will call his parents, and he'll be grounded for literally ever.

…He's procrastinating.

Tim takes a deep breath, rolls his shoulders, then leaps down onto the apartment complex. He rolls when he hits the roof to redistribute his momentum, like his sensei taught him in karate class, and while he doesn't quite manage to end up on his feet in the effortless style of Dick Grayson, he does manage to not break anything, including his camera. He takes that as a win.

Tim scrambles to his feet, bouncing on the tips of his toes. He can feel a grin spreading across his face, hidden by his gas mask. He's doing it! He's really doing it!

Sure, obviously he's not as graceful as Robin, but he thinks he's doing pretty well for a kid with virtually no parkour training.

The next building is a little further away, and it's the same height as the one he's standing on. It'll be a bit of a jump, but Tim thinks he can probably make it.

He backs up to the opposite side of the roof and takes a running start, sprinting for the edge, and then he jumps.

For a moment he's weightless, and Tim gets a momentary glimpse of Gotham the way that Batman and Robin must see it.

Then the roof of the other building appears and it's coming up quick and it's too far away so he reaches out for it, the tips of his fingers just barely brushing the lip of the roof, and he claws at it, nails cracking and breaking as they scrabble at the brick and he’s falling - oh, god, he’s falling -

Except instead of going splat like the Flying Graysons, he goes shlunk.

Tim lifts his head and stares down at the dark spike of the wrought-iron fence emerging from his chest. Blood wells around the wound, staining the white of his t-shirt. It’s piercing right through him - he’s about eighty percent sure it hit his heart - and straight through the lens of his camera. The film is ruined, not that he’d been able to get any decent shots of Batman and Robin anyway since he’d never completely made it onto the roof, and it’s completely useless now.

Tim really isn’t looking forward to explaining how he managed to practically obliterate his very expensive camera to his parents. There’s no way they’re going to buy him another one after this.

Assuming he gets out of this alive, of course.

Tim fingers the amulet hanging from his camera strap, the one that his parents had given him a few years back. It slips through his fingers, the metal slick with blood. The stone in the center hits the corner of his camera in just the wrong way and it shatters,  the pieces falling and digging in to his open chest wound.

Tim doesn’t know whether he should laugh or cry.

Maybe he should just start screaming.

Robin will hear him if he screams. Tim’s sure of it.

He inhales deeply, trying to fill his lungs with enough air to make himself heard, but something thick and metallic rises in his throat and he coughs, coughs, coughs, and he tries to keep his torso still but he can’t stop his chest from spasming and jarring the spike and he can’t breath -

And that’s how Tim dies.

Not with a bang or a whimper, but with a tiny, pathetic cry for Robin.

Chapter Text

Tim is not at all freaking out right now. He's reacting very normally, actually. Because it's totally normal to find out everything your trusted friend has told you about the way you interact with reality is a lie. And, like, he's pretty sure Martha didn't know that she and Tim apparently interact with the world differently, but it's still kind of jarring.

Maybe they should've guessed that they're different, though. Martha's stuck either at the graveyard or in Crime Alley, where she died, and Tim can wander all over Gotham - there's obviously some differences going on there. They really should've figured out that, apparently, not all ghosts are the same.

Dick has disappeared into Mr. Haly's trailer again, but before he did he'd told Tim to stay put because they needed to talk.

So Tim is doing his best to stay put. 

In fact, he's doing his best not to even breathe too hard, just in case he somehow manages to stop being visible before Dick re-emerges. Considering he doesn't actually know how he became visible in the first place, it's a relevant concern.

But hey! At least now he can show Dick his pictures!

…Oh, god. He's about to show Dick Grayson his pictures.

Tim scrambles for his camera frantically, bringing it close enough for him to be able to look at the screen. He has to figure out which ones to show Dick, and he needs to do it quickly. Which photos are the best? Which ones will tell the right story? Which ones will persuade Dick to come back to Gotham and be the Robin that Batman needs?

Especially since Tim has the sneaking suspicion that Dick had gone into Mr. Haly’s trailer in order to sign on with the circus. Why wouldn't he? The circus is family to him, they're in trouble, and Dick has the ability to help. It's obvious what his next move will be, unless Tim can somehow figure out a way to circumvent it.

He eventually settles on a set of six photos, starting a few weeks after Jason Todd’s death and Batman’s subsequent return from Ethiopia after Superman stopped him from killing the Joker for political reasons. They show Batman’s sharply declining mental health, mostly depicted through the increasing amount of rips and tears and blood on the Batsuit and the number and severity of injuries on his opponents. There’s one that Tim finds particularly poignant, taken less than a week ago - it shows Batman looming over someone on the ground, their face so swollen and bruised that their own mother probably wouldn’t recognize them. One of their legs is bent in a way that it really shouldn’t be able to, obviously broken and possibly broken so badly that it needs to be amputated. Tim’s not exactly well-versed in medical training, but it looks bad.

In the foreground, there’s a small handbag with a cut strap. 

Tim wavers on placing that picture at the end of the sequence, but ultimately decides that there’s a better one that will drive his point home.

It’s of Batman sitting on the ledge of a building, looking out over Gotham. He’s slumped, his body language tired and defeated, and it’s from one of the days where he doesn’t move unless a bomb goes off or someone screams nearby. He’s removed his mask, likely having removed or disabled any security cameras on the roof - except Tim’s, obviously, because Batman can’t see him and doesn’t know he exists.

(At the time, at least. Tim's learnt a lot about himself today so who knows? Maybe he does exist to Batman now.)

With the mask off, he doesn’t - he doesn’t look like Batman anymore. He looks - small. Worn out. There are lines on his face that Tim hasn’t seen before, and the black makeup around his eyes is smudged and smeared from where he’s pressed his palms into them, hard, before dropping them back into his lap. His gaze is blank and distant, like he’s not really seeing anything in front of him.

(Sometimes, Bruce takes a small picture of Jason out of his utility belt, and Tim disappears whenever that happens because, well - none of this is his business, not really, but that is especially not his business, and it's not Martha’s either.)

Tim figures that if that picture doesn’t convince Dick he needs to go back, nothing will.

The door to Mr. Haly’s trailer opens, and Tim’s head jerks up. He tries to make it look casual, but he’s pretty sure he’s failed when Dick glances at him curiously. 

Dick looks…lighter, somehow, and Tim’s heart sinks to somewhere near the center of the earth. He’s signed on to the circus, following in his parents’ footsteps. He has to have - that’s the only thing that might potentially be able to save Haly’s, and he wouldn’t look so content if he hadn’t managed that.

Crap.

Then Mr. Haly comes out and shakes Dick’s hand, clapping him on the shoulder saying, “I hope you’ll come around more often now, Dick!”

Dick laughs, clasping Mr. Haly’s hand in his. “You know I will. We’re family - you couldn’t keep me away if you tried.”

What the hell? Does that mean - Dick’s not rejoining the circus?

Tim…doesn’t really understand what’s going on right now, but it means that he has more of a chance to persuade Dick back to Gotham than he did five minutes ago, so he’s not going to look a gift horse in the mouth.

Dick exchanges a couple more pleasantries with Mr. Haly, says something about his lawyers being in touch about co-ownership, then starts herding Tim away from the trailer and towards somewhere more secluded and private. If it had been anyone but Dick, Tim might’ve been worried that he was about to get brutally murdered, or at least robbed or, like, maimed or something.

But it’s Dick Grayson, and Tim’s had something of a fanboy obsession with him since he was five years old, and he’s a vigilante that explicitly doesn’t kill, so Tim figures there’s probably nowhere safer for him to be.

(He’s careful to stay a step ahead of Dick, though, making sure that he doesn’t accidentally brush against him. Tim’s not entirely sure whether or not he’s solid right now, but Dick thinks he is, and he doesn’t want to disabuse him of that notion. It’s going to make this a lot easier.)

Once they’ve made it to where Dick’s parked his car in the public parking lot, somewhere he must deem sufficiently secluded despite the fact that there’s no cover because all the other cars have left at this point, he whirls around to face Tim. 

“Who the hell are you?” he half-growls, and there’s something so distinctly Nightwing about the sound that Tim has to bite down on an ill-timed burst of excitement because, well, he’s talking to Nightwing.

“That’s not important,” Tim dismisses, once he’s got his fanboying tendencies locked down. It’s probably a bit too delayed to be natural, since Dick’s brows furrow in the beginning of a frown, so Tim thrusts his camera into his hands as a distraction.

(He doesn’t let go of it, even once Dick’s got a good hold on it, because he doesn’t know what will happen if he does. Will it stop being solid and slip right through Dick’s fingers? If it doesn’t, will it become…real? Not ghostly? Would he be able to pick it back up again? Or will it just…stop existing? He doesn’t know, and he’s not about to test it in the middle of something this important.)

The distraction works, possibly only because Dick is used to people throwing things at him and telling him to hold this.

Tim opens the album of carefully selected photos on his viewfinder, working the controls upside down so Dick doesn’t have a chance to regain his bearings. It had taken a bit of practice to get decent at using the controls this way, but Tim hasn’t exactly had a lot to do with his time lately. He no longer needs to sleep, can't hang around Martha all the time, and he doesn't like most of the other ghosts he's met or they don't like him, so he’d had to do something to stave off the mind-numbing boredom.

And up until now he’d thought he could only affect what he'd had with him when he died, which had been three things - his clothing (including his gas mask), his camera (which seems to have unlimited memory now), and his cell (always and forever on 33% battery and refusing to show any version of any website published or updated after the date of his death). So, like, he didn’t have a whole lot to do once he got tired of wikipedia spirals, and since Martha had drilled a sense of privacy into him, he usually refrained from just drifting through the walls and people-watching.

At this point, he knows his camera inside and out, and could probably rebuild it from scratch if he were capable of holding a screwdriver.

…which he is, apparently, so he’ll have to try that out at some point. 

Would a physical screwdriver even work on a ghostly camera? Something to look into.

Dick’s eyes widen almost imperceptibly as Tim flips through the photos. If Tim hadn’t been standing about six inches away from him, he probably wouldn’t have noticed the tiny movement. 

Dick stops breathing when Tim flicks to the last picture, the one of Batman with his cowl off and staring sightlessly out over Gotham, looking like…well, a tired, depressed man, more than an urban legend that strikes fear into the hearts of petty criminals. Tim doesn’t look at him, attention fixed on his camera, so that Dick has a chance to regain his composure.

“…How did you get these?” Dick asks finally.

…Tim probably should’ve thought up a better explanation than his current one, which is just uh…  

Five of the six pictures in the album that he’d shown Dick were taken from less than six feet away - Batman should’ve noticed his presence. But he hadn’t, obviously, because Tim wasn’t - well, hadn’t been at the time, apparently - actually visible to him.

“…That’s not important,” Tim says, a beat too late to sound convincing. He makes up for it by starting the speech he’s been working on ever since Batman had started…declining. “Batman…he needs you, Dick. I know you’re Nightwing, that you used to be Robin, so it has to be you. He’s…ever since Jason died, he’s been out of control. He’s been - reckless, with his own life as well as others’. If he didn’t have Mr. Pennyworth, I don’t think he’d still be alive.”

Dick eyes him warily. “…You know about Jason?”

Tim hesitates. “…I don’t know how he died, exactly, but I know that it was in Ethiopia, while he was Robin, and that the Joker was involved.”

Dick sighs, running one hand through his hair. Tim takes the opportunity to take his camera back, looping it around his neck. Dick lets him do it - Tim has no illusions that if Dick had wanted to keep the camera, Tim wouldn’t have been able to make it move at all. 

Tim continues his speech: “Yesterday, he drove back to the Batcave with two open stab wounds - he didn’t even put any field dressings on them before he left. He’s…he’s falling apart, Dick, and I think you’re the only one who can save him. It - I think it has to be you. He won’t accept help from anyone else.”

He realizes that he’s probably pushing his luck, but he doesn’t know what else he can do.

Dick doesn’t look at him, instead focusing his gaze somewhere around the zipper of Tim’s sweatshirt. Tim realizes with a start that he’s probably looking at the Robin pin he’d stuck there before he died, and he hopes that his gas mask hides the violent flush creeping onto his cheeks.

“…Two Face is back in town, huh?” Dick says after a long moment, not addressing anything in Tim’s speech at all.

Tim blinks rapidly, taking a second to wrap his mind around the topic change. “You could tell that just from a couple of photos?”

He’s said it before, and he’ll say it again: Dick Grayson is the most incredible person he’s ever met.

Dick snorts. “It’s not that hard once you’ve had some practice,” he demeures. “Speaking of which, how did you get - ”

“Not important.” Tim interrupts him before he can finish asking about the photos again. He - really doesn’t have an explanation, and it’s not like Dick will believe him if he says oh, yeah, sorry, I should’ve mentioned that I’m a ghost and up until half an hour ago people couldn’t see me. Any explanation he gives now is going to be paper thin and not well thought out, so he’s just going to…not give one.

Clearly this plan is foolproof.

Dick sighs heavily. “Look, kid, I don’t know how you figured it out, but - ”

“I’ll tell you when we get back to Gotham,” Tim breaks in firmly. 

Oh, god, he’s just interrupted Dick Freaking Grayson. Again. For the second time. 

Tim’s gonna just. Spontaneously combust himself out of existence now, thanks.

Christ on a cracker.

“I never said I was going back to Gotham,” Dick says blandly, and something in his posture tells Tim that he should probably be treading carefully.

Unfortunately, all this time he’s spent talking to no one but Martha has kind of done a number on his social skills, so he doesn’t really remember…how that works.

“Then I’m not telling you how I know everything,” Tim says bluntly, clutching his camera so tightly that his knuckles are turning white. “Look, I don’t know what went down between you and Batman, and I’m assuming it was bad if you don’t even want to be in the same city, but he’s going to get himself killed if you don’t go back. He needs you, Dick - Robin. ”

Dick says nothing. He doesn’t even look Tim in the eyes, and Tim’s heart sinks a little further.

“Don’t you owe him something for taking you in?” he tries desperately, then immediately winces because that sure is something he just said. Wow.

Dick looks balefully at him for a long moment, then sighs, scraping a hand through his hair. “I’ll give you a ride back to Gotham, but I’m not promising you anything.”

“Oh, that’s fine!” Tim says, backtracking quickly. “I can just meet you at Wayne Manor. You don’t have to put yourself out - ”

“Just get in the car, kid,” he says wearily, and Tim does.

———

The car ride is silent, for the most part. Tim should probably be using the time to persuade Dick into being Robin again, but he is also very aware that the last time he’d opened his mouth in Dick’s presence, he’d ended up jamming his foot into it, and Tim’s not super keen on repeating that gymnastic feat.

At least Dick is heading back to Gotham, despite Tim’s chronic foot-in-mouth syndrome.

It’s probably best that he just stays silent for the time being.

Tim fingers the amulet hanging from his camera strap, rubbing the pad of his thumb over the smooth surface of the embedded stone. His dad had called it a "life and luck" charm of some sort, but either hadn’t known what kind or hadn’t bothered telling Tim before -

Well, before.

The stone’s colors shift in the flashes of city lights as the Batmobile zooms past - green, gold, green again. He’s never been able to quite figure out which it is, if it’s green with gold shot through or gold with green, just like he’s never quite figured out whether it’s a good luck charm or a bad luck charm.

Also, the "life" part seems to be a whole lot of bull, because Tim is, y’know, very emphatically dead.

Who knows? It could just be some random hunk of rock that some jeweler hundreds or thousands of years ago thought looked pretty. No magical properties at all.

…That doesn't seem all that likely at this point, given everything that's happened.

Dick pulls up to the front doors of his house - well, it’s technically classified as a mansion, Tim’s pretty sure - and Tim takes a moment just to appreciate the architecture of Wayne Manor.

It's the kind of place that has five rooms for every single person who walks through the door, complete with high arching windows and little turrets. It's the house in the background of every low budget horror movie ever filmed in Gotham.

Tim has no idea how people don't get lost everyday in there, but he supposes it must start making sense eventually because Mr. Wayne always seems to walk confidently,  self-assured, from point A to point B, never faltering. At least when Tim’s watching, in any case, though that isn’t usually very often.

There’s a small Erte sculpture in the front hallway, directly across from the door. It’s the kind of piece that goes for ten thousand dollars minimum, the kind that could very easily be the centerpiece of a collection, and the Waynes have placed it like a knick-knack in their front hall.

There’s rich, and then there’s Wayne rich, apparently.

A tall, thin man with grey hair appears noiselessly the moment that Dick takes a step into the house. He’s wearing a three-piece suit, as he always seems to, and Tim abruptly feels underdressed in his jeans and sweatshirt. Before, it had been fine, because Mr. Pennyworth couldn’t see him and didn’t know he was there, but now Tim’s starting to hear his mother’s voice in the back of his head telling him that he should dress better if he wants to make a good impression, that he should’ve changed before he got to the Manor. Never mind the fact that he’s not certain he can change out of the clothes he’d died in or not - that was irrelevant to the itch in the back of his mind.

Excellent. That’s exactly what he needs right now. Ugh.

Dick greets Mr. Pennyworth warmly, and Mr. Pennyworth graces him with a small, fond smile in return. Then his eyes drift pointedly over Tim, wordlessly encouraging Dick to explain his presence.

Tim does his best to resist the urge to stand up straighter.

“Alfred, this is a bit awkward, but I’d like you to meet - ” Dick turns to Tim, faintly apologetic. “Sorry, what did you say your name was, kid?”

Tim realizes abruptly that he hasn’t actually told Dick his name. And he’s still wearing the sweatshirt that he’d died in, hood pulled up over his head and leaving his face shadowed, so Dick doesn’t even know what he looks like. Not really.

And, actually, that might be for the best. It’s not like he’s going to be sticking around much longer in the grand scheme of things anyway, not once Dick agrees to be Robin again.

So he ignores the question.

“Mr. Pennyworth!” he says - well, rasps. He hasn’t spoken this much since he was alive, and now he has to put even more effort into making himself heard, especially by the living. “I was really hoping I’d get to meet you. You’re Batman’s confidant - you must have so many stories!”

Mr. Pennyworth blinks rapidly. “Are you quite all right, young man?”

Dick sighs. “He knows, Alf. Don’t ask me how, but he knows.”

“I was rather referring to the young man’s cold, sir,” Mr. Pennyworth says dryly.

Dick winces at the slight chastisement.

“I’m fine, thank you, Mr. Pennyworth,” Tim says, finally remembering to turn down his fanboy side. They’re not going to take him seriously if he spends most of the conversation gushing about how cool they are.

Well, it’s better than sticking his foot in his mouth again.

“Sir, might I inquire as to his purpose here?” Mr. Pennyworth murmurs, meant for Dick’s ears only. 

Dick runs his fingers through his hair. “You know just about as much as I do, Alf. He showed up at the circus, helped me catch a murderer, then told me he knew that Bruce is Batman and begged me to come back to the Manor. Obviously I couldn’t just leave him there, so I took him with me.” He hesitates for a moment. “I’m still not sure how he figured it out, but he’s got photographic evidence and it doesn’t look faked.”

The statement is clearly directed at Mr. Pennyworth, though Tim can feel Dick’s eyes scanning him carefully, looking for - something. Tim can’t tell what.

He takes a deep breath, then finally takes a step forwards, into the Manor.

“I could tell you, if you want,” he says softly, forcing himself to make eye contact with Dick. “It might hurt, though. I don’t want to bring up any bad memories, but I’ll have to in order to explain.”

Dick nods shortly, letting the door fall closed behind him. He gestures for Tim to continue.

Tim has to bite his lip behind his gas mask so that he doesn’t end up blurting, promise you won’t get sad?

“When I was younger,” Tim says, trying to pick his words carefully, “I went to the circus. Haly’s Circus. On the night that the Flying Graysons fell.”

Dick’s eyes widen and his posture goes stiff.

Tim winces. Yeah, he could’ve chosen his words a little better.

“You did a quadruple somersault that night,” he continues, and he doesn’t mention that they met before the show, or that they’d taken a photo together, or the way that Batman had shifted from a monster from the shadows to a dark knight when he knelt down to comfort a crying child. He’s caused Dick enough pain tonight.

It’s not important to the story anyway, and it’s not like Tim has the photo anymore - he’s pretty sure his parents threw it away when he died, not that he’s been back to the house to check. Maybe he should do that while he’s in the area - he can drift through the walls and see how it’s changed. It could be fun, and he might as well.

Tim takes a breath, pulling himself away from that particular tangent. “Less than half a dozen people in the world can do a quadruple somersault, and Robin’s been shown live on TV doing it more than once. You’re the only one capable of it who’s young enough to make sense, and Robin appeared six months after you were made Bruce Wayne’s ward, so if you were Robin then Mr. Wayne had to be Batman. After that, well… You covered your tracks extremely well, but if you go in knowing who Batman and Robin are, the rest is simple enough to put together.”

Tim clasps his hands behind his back and leans forward onto his toes, then rocks back onto his heels. “Robin disappears from Gotham, then another vigilante with a similar skill set appears in a different city,” he recites. “He wears a different costume, but it’s not hard to tell that he used to be Robin, if you look closely enough. A few months later, Mr. Wayne adopts Jason Todd, then suddenly a new, younger Robin appears. And…after Jason’s death,” - here, he glances towards Dick and Mr. Pennyworth apologetically - “Robin disappears again, and Batman starts to get more violent. 

“It’s…really concerning,” he adds after a moment, when neither of them move to speak. “I - look, I get that you don’t trust me. Why would you? But I’ve been following Batman and Robin online and in the papers for over a decade at this point, and it’s clear that Batman without Robin is - dangerous. To everyone - civilians, teammates, himself. 

Tim takes a deep breath, steadying himself, then turns to face Dick. “So I went and found you, Dick. You’re the only person I could think of that might be able to help. He needs you - not as Nightwing, but as Robin.”

Something flashes across Dick’s face faster than Tim can identify whether it’s a good expression or a bad one, but he doesn’t say anything.

“…I never planned on telling anyone,” Tim rasps quietly, a little awkward. “And once I help Batman…once you help him, I’ll disappear. You’ll never have to see or hear from me again. It’ll go back to how it was before.”

Dick leans back against the wall behind him, crossing his arms over his chest. He sighs deeply, before finally responding. “You’re not wrong,” he admits. “It’s clear that something’s going on with B, even if I disregard the photos you showed me and rely solely on the news. But I refuse to go back to being thirteen.”

Before Tim can really process that statement, Dick uses his elbows to lever himself off the wall, propelling himself a few steps forward before he turns sharply and heads further into the Manor.

“I’ll help him, if he’ll even accept the help,” he tosses over his shoulder. “But it’ll be as Nightwing, not as Robin.”

That’s -

That’s great and everything, but Tim’s pretty sure it’s not going to work.

Chapter Text

Tim is absolutely sure that he is not supposed to be in the actual literal Batcave, especially not while he’s still visible, but for some reason neither Dick nor Mr. Pennyworth had stopped him from following close behind Dick, almost stepping on his heels, as he’d headed for the old grandfather clock on the wall. 

So now he’s here.

…Honestly, he's just glad he got his fanboy freakout out of the way the first time he got into the cave, back when no one could see him, because otherwise this probably would've been pretty embarrassing. 

Even so, the fact that he's in the Batcave with Robin , plus the fact that Robin can see him and isn't throwing him out, is almost enough to get him to break his cool.

(Not that he's ever really been cool in the first place.)

Tim watches out of the corner of his eye as Dick studies his reaction. Or non-reaction , Tim supposes, though not reacting in and of itself is technically a reaction.

…He should probably stop being so pedantic and focus on something actually important. Like, y’know, getting Dick Grayson to be Robin again?

Because -

He’s glad that Dick’s agreed to help. He is ecstatic. Batman clearly needs the help - he needs someone to watch his back, to temper him when he’s on the verge of going too far.

But.

It’s just -

Batman needs a partner. Someone he can protect - someone he remembers he needs to protect. Someone he can show the ropes, teach. Someone to remind him that there’s more to vigilantism than punching people. There’s just…something about Robin that brings out the best in Batman, that makes him seem like a real person instead of a force of nature, a whirlwind of violence. 

And Nightwing…isn’t that.

Nightwing is a hero in his own right. He has his own city - a city under his protection that he can’t leave alone for too long. So if Dick is here as Nightwing, and not as Robin, the arrangement is very clearly temporary, and Tim’s worried - 

Tim’s worried that it might not be enough.

He steps deeper into the cave, passing Dick and the computers and all the trophies - the giant penny and the dinosaur and the fifteen foot tall playing card - without a second glance, only stopping when he’s right in front of the case that holds the empty Robin suit.

“It has to be Robin,” he breathes, bringing one hand up to brush against the glass.

Dick comes up behind him, staring into the case. Tim steps out of the way, so that Dick can see his face reflected in the glass, can see the image of himself wearing his old uniform.

Dick shakes his head once, firmly, then turns back to face Tim. There’s a look in his eyes that Tim can’t quite place - a mixture of anger and grief and frustration and maybe even resignation, but Tim’s not confident enough to say definitively whether he’s read Dick’s expression right or not.

“That might be true,” Dick says, voice hard. “But he’s getting Nightwing.”

Dick pulls off his shirt to reveal the top of his Nightwing costume and Tim’s train of thought derails because he has so many questions. How does the popped collar even fit under his clothing? It’s almost as tall as his head? Why is it a v-neck? Doesn’t that mean that there’s no kevlar or even any kind of protection over his heart? How did he fit his utility belt underneath his t-shirt?

Has Dick just been wearing his Nightwing costume this whole time? Does he always wear it under his clothing? Isn’t that uncomfortable? How -

Tim forces his brain back on track as Dick heads for his motorcycle (Does it have a name? A batbike? Or maybe a wingbike? No, those sound dumb.), leaving a trail of discarded clothing behind him. Personally, Tim thinks that’s a bit rude. Mr. Pennyworth’s going to have to pick them up later, unless there are some sort of cave-specific cleaning rules that Tim doesn’t know about, which is definitely possible.

But that’s not important right now.

“No,” Tim says, willing his voice not to waver. He doesn’t get why Dick doesn’t understand that Batman needs a Robin. Not Nightwing, not Mr. Pennyworth, not even Superman. No one is going to be able to save Batman from himself except for Robin.

How can he make Dick see? 

Tim’s eyes land on the case, and an idea springs to mind.

It’s a really dumb idea. It’s probably not going to work. It might even make things worse. But he doesn’t have any other ideas and Dick’s about to turn the ignition key in his motorcycle (wingcycle?) so -

Tim doesn’t think. He just acts.

He grabs the Robin suit from the glass case and steps in front of the bike, thrusting the uniform into Dick’s face. 

“Batman needs Robin. Not Nightwing.”

This proves immediately to be the wrong choice.

Something in Dick’s eyes goes hard and flat, flinty and shuttered. Every last trace of an expression is wiped from his face, and Tim can’t read him at all, but he can tell he’s messed up.

“Where did you get that,” Dick says, voice frosty. It’s not a question.

Tim’s limbs are frozen. He doesn’t think he could open his mouth to respond even if he could think of anything to say. 

It’s…it’s Dick’s uniform, isn’t it? Why is he reacting so - what’s - is something wrong with it?

Tim’s eyes flick over to the glass case for a split second, which is plenty of time for Dick to see the movement and track it. When he figures out where the uniform had come from, his mouth twists and he lets out an ugly laugh.

“You know nothing about us. Not about me, not about Bruce, not about Alfred, not about Jason, and you know nothing about our relationships.”

Tim knows more than they think, and certainly more than the average Gothamite, mostly by virtue of being able to get close enough to eavesdrop on them without being seen, but -

Okay, yeah, no, that’s fair. 

“I’ve been through hell with Bruce, and because of him. And do you know what that taught me?”

Tim doesn’t answer. He doesn’t think he can move. It’s like his limbs have turned to stone - which is really disconcerting, actually.

Dick looks directly at him, making aggressive eye contact. Tim hadn’t even been aware that was a thing until two seconds ago. He’s glad his hood shields him from the brunt of Dick’s gaze, even if it’s only a little bit.

“No matter how hard you try, you can’t go back in time. You can’t bring back the dead,” Dick says, then executes a hairpin turn around Tim and drives out of the cave.

Well.

That had gone great.

———

Batman leans back against the gargoyle that overlooks the intersection of Remsen and 3rd, the one that’s a five minute swing from the Park Row Clinic and six from the Batburger over on 11th Avenue. 

(This gargoyle used to be Jason’s favorite. He said he liked it because its face was ‘ugly like yours, old man!’ and then he’d laugh his head off and Bruce couldn’t even be offended because Jason’s laughter was like the solitary sunbeam piercing the darkness just before dawn, the herald of sunrise and the possibility - the inevitability of hope.)

He’s…tired.

He'd disarmed the bomb in time. (This time.) The twin child movie stars who Two Face had kidnapped and tied to a bridge - Alan and Richard Wright - are safe with Gordon. Two Face had taken the 22 million dollar bait at the casino, luring him away from the bridge long enough for Batman to save the kids. He’d even gotten back to the casino in time to stop Two Face from stealing the money, but…

Two Face had gotten away anyway.

There’s just…

Too much.

It’s physically impossible for a non-meta like Batman to be in two places at once. He can’t rescue children and prevent Hawk Bridge from exploding while simultaneously guarding the trap he’d set for Two Face at the casino on the other side of town, not even at his best.

Bruce sighs, reaching up to rub the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger.

He can admit that he’s not at his best right now.

Maybe Alfred is right - he can’t do this alone. Not without…

He needs…

(Help. He needs help, but he can’t admit it to himself, not even in his own head.)

(In the back of his mind, pushed away into the deepest, darkest corners, the ones that never see the light of day, a tiny voice says, you need Jason. )

(The voice is right, but if he acknowledges it, he’s certain he wouldn’t be able to go on.)

He could use some backup, Batman thinks.

Maybe it’s time to bring in Dick.

(Assuming Dick will take his calls.)

Chapter Text

Tim is not entirely sure what’s happening here.

Dick - Nightwing had left, zooming out of the cave on his motorcycle to go find Batman, leaving Tim behind in the Batcave with Alfred.

Tim can’t help but think it was something he said. 

Then he looks at the uniform in his hands and realizes that there’s something odd about it. Some of the red is darker than the rest, though there doesn't seem to be any pattern to it, as far as he can tell. Maybe it's meant to be, like, camouflage or something? Except that doesn't make any sense, since there isn't exactly a lot of red in Gotham to hide out in...

Tim frowns, rubbing his thumb over the fabric and - ah. There’s the slightest difference in texture, nearly invisible stitches holding the fabric together though they’re nowhere near the seams. It’s like the uniform had been torn apart and then sewed…back together…

Oh, god.

This must be the uniform Jason died in.

And Tim had just urged Dick to put it on.

He definitely could’ve handled that better.

Tim stares at the uniform in his hands for a long moment, horrified, and Mr. Pennyworth gives him a long look and invites him upstairs for a light snack.

At a loss, Tim carefully - reverently - folds up the uniform and sets it at the bottom of the case. The plaque in front of it catches his eye - A Good Soldier - and he feels sick to his stomach. He follows Mr. Pennyworth up the stairs and does his best not to look back at the case.

So now he’s sitting in the kitchen at the table while Mr. Pennyworth sets a plate of food in front of him. He…thinks they’re supposed to be pancakes.

It is four in the afternoon.

The pancakes are square, for some reason.

Tim’s still feeling sick to his stomach after his earlier mistakes, so he’s pretty sure he wouldn’t be able to eat even if the pancakes weren’t so…odd. He doesn’t even know if he can take off his gas mask, let alone pick up a fork or actually consume the meal at all, so he doesn’t even try.

“Thank you, Mr. Pennyworth,” Tim says politely, forcing the words from his throat.

He doesn’t move to pick up his cutlery.

He isn’t hungry. He hasn’t eaten anything since that protein bar he’d scarfed down on the bus down to the library the day he’d died. It had been a somewhat lackluster last meal, Tim could admit, but he wasn’t sure he could even eat anymore and he didn't really want to use weirdly square pancakes to test that.

“It’s no trouble at all, young sir,” Mr. Pennyworth says, a subtle emphasis on his last words that implies he would like to know Tim’s actual name, if he’d be so kind.

Tim ignores it, mostly because he’s not quite sure what Mr. Pennyworth would do with his name if he gave it. Run a background check, certainly, but he’s not sure what would happen if - who’s he kidding, when - he discovered that Tim was dead and had been for…quite some time. Even Tim’s not exactly sure how long he’s been like this, though he’s also not been trying too hard to keep track.

The weirdly square pancakes gradually go cold in front of him. Tim keeps his hands folded in front of him, not touching the cutlery or the glass of water Mr. Pennyworth had so thoughtfully set down in front of him. He hates the thought that Mr. Pennyworth’s hard work is going to waste, but he can’t really do much about that.

He can feel Mr. Pennyworth’s gaze settling on him heavily, watching him carefully as he does the dishes. Tim knows that if he looked up, Mr. Pennyworth would be facing away from him, perhaps holding a dish up to the light to inspect it for the tiniest speck of imperfection to scrub away. But the fact remains that he can feel Mr. Pennyworth’s eyes on him, and after being invisible to the entire living world for as long as he has, the sensation is discomforting. 

Tim holds himself very still, hardly daring to breathe. He doesn’t actually need to breathe, obviously, but the sensation is comforting, and it would look strange to Mr. Pennyworth if he didn’t.

The silence stretches on, and Tim’s starting to feel a bit awkward. What is he even doing here? He’s brought Dick back to the Manor, and even though Batman isn’t here he’s sure they’ll be able to work something out! Dick seems…angry at Batman, for some reason, but that doesn’t mean that he won’t agree to be Robin again. Sure, it’ll probably take some convincing, and Batman doesn’t exactly seem to be in a, uh, talkative mood, but if Tim can see that he’s falling apart at the seams, surely Dick will be willing to put aside their differences for a while and drag him out of the darkness?

There’s literally no reason for Tim to still be here.

…Except that Alfred’s settling himself into the chair across from him, and Tim’s not about to make him get up again so soon after sitting down, so he’s…hm. He’s stuck, trapped in place by social niceties. He’s almost positive it’s intentional.

The silence is starting to get to Tim, so he says, “Thank you for the food, Mr. Pennyworth. It was delicious.”

They both glance towards the square pancakes in the center of the table. It is extremely evident that Tim has not so much touched the silverware in front of him, much less taken a single bite out of the small stack of pancakes.

“I’m pleased to hear you enjoyed them,” Mr. Pennyworth says blandly, his expression unchanging. He does not speak again.

Tim is incredibly aware that he is not going to unless Tim says something first. He is almost certain that this is an interrogation tactic that Batman uses, taught to him by or at least learnt from Mr. Pennyworth himself. There is no way that Tim is going to beat a master at his own game.

So he bites the bullet and breaks the silence with: “Has their relationship always been like this?”

Mr. Pennyworth is too much of a professional to start or show any surprise aside from a slight rise of an eyebrow. He eyes Tim sharply, gaze boring into him, and Tim can almost see the thoughts run through his mind: Why do you care? Why do you deserve to know?

Before Mr. Pennyworth can decide on what kind of answer to give him - more silence, maybe, or an ‘I’m not sure what you’re referring to, young sir,’ or even a straight up lie though Tim’s not entirely sure he’d be able to recognize one as such - the old CB radio sitting next to the refrigerator crackles.

“Nightwing to Agent A, come in.”

It’s not just any old radio, then.

Mr. Pennyworth leaps to his feet, spry in a way that Tim wouldn’t have expected from any other man probably in his 50s, and rushes towards the radio. Tim follows him with his eyes, intrigued despite himself. He realizes that it’s not any of his business, not really - but he’s curious, so sue him.

Mr. Pennyworth taps an almost invisible button on the side of the radio and speaks: “Agent A to Nightwing, receiving.”

There’s another crackle of static before Nightwing responds, dropping the radio talk: “Is B back yet?”

Mr. Pennyworth’s eyes narrow. He presses the button again before responding. “He is not. I take it that you have not come across him?”

The next crackle of static sounds different somehow - maybe Nightwing is sighing? - and the ensuing response is: “No. He didn’t respond to the Batsignal. Raven showed up, though - she gave me a data disc and said that Joey told her to give it to me. Apparently B sent some information to me at the Tower, which is…unusual. Do you know what the hell is going on?”

“He has not exactly been the most communicative of late,” Mr. Pennyworth says blandly, which Tim knows is something of an understatement. “Though I believe this may be what one might call ‘a cry for help,’ sir.”

Nightwing laughs, and it only sounds a little forced. “That’s what I thought, too. Would it kill him to just ask me directly?”

“It just might,” Mr. Pennyworth says, words dry as the desert.

Nightwing laughs again, and this time it’s more of a cackle, which Tim thinks means it must be real. “Thanks, Agent A. My gauntlet just finished decoding the disc, so I’ve gotta go. I’ll let you know when I find him.”

“Drive safely, sir,” Mr. Pennyworth says, then the radio cuts out. He sighs, running a hand down his face, then turns around to lean against the counter. His entire form sags, and he seems to almost…deflate.

“No,” he says finally, and Tim is slightly startled to realize that Mr. Pennyworth is addressing him. Not that there’s anyone else in the room or anything, but still. “No, their relationship was not like this initially.”

Tim stays silent. He’d known that, of course - he hadn’t been paying all that much attention when Dick had first debuted as Robin, being in elementary school and all, but by the time he’d figured out who they were, Batman and Robin seemed to get on thicker than thieves.

Upon realizing that Tim doesn’t intend to respond, Mr. Pennyworth continues, “As Master Richard grew older, he began to chafe under Master Bruce’s strict control, and as such, they would fight more often than not. By the time he struck out on his own, in order to become a hero in his own right, they were not speaking. They continued that way until Master Bruce adopted Master Jason, at which point Master Richard returned, if only to better know his younger brother. And now…” He trails off, but Tim can fill in the blanks.

Dick had only made up with Bruce - to any extent - because he wanted to be there for Jason. And now that Jason, the only reason Dick and Bruce were willing to put aside their differences, is gone, well. There’s hardly any reason for Dick to play nice anymore, is there?

Mr. Pennyworth looks off into the middle distance, a fond smile creeping onto his face with a small quirk of the lips. He looks completely lost in memories of a better time, and if Tim had ever thought of him as a regular butler, he would’ve been fooled by the act. It’s a good act, sure - even excellent, because the Waynes did not hire substandard personnel - but Tim’s spent enough time around him invisibly to know that it is an act.

He’s just not entirely sure why Mr. Pennyworth is bothering with the act in the first place. Tim is wildly aware of the fact that he has no claim to this information, and Mr. Pennyworth has no reason to be telling him. Tim doubts he has need of an anonymous sounding board, one that will disappear at the end of the night like Cinderella into her pumpkin carriage, only the Waynes will actually never see him again even if they bother looking for him.

So what’s the point?

Mr. Pennyworth’s gaze never moves, but Tim can tell that he’s cataloguing Tim’s every movement, every micro expression that he can make out from behind the gas mask, and that’s when Tim gets it.

Mr. Pennyworth is telling him in order to see what his reaction will be.

Suddenly a lot of things start to make sense. Why Dick had let him, an unknown, into the secret cave beneath Wayne Manor, why Mr. Pennyworth had cornered into sticking around a while longer, why he’s being so free with information about the Waynes…

They have no idea who he is, and they want to change that.

It makes sense, Tim guesses, but he’s not about to let them. It would be a waste of their time to give them any leads to follow up on once Dick takes his rightful place as Robin once more and Tim disappears from their lives.

From life entirely, really. It's been more than a year since he died - maybe more; the passage of time is a fuzzy and vague concept now, even more than when he was alive - so all three of his friends have probably moved on already, and his parents…

Well. Assuming they're even in Gotham, he doesn't want to - he can't just show up in their house like hey, it's your son, I'm dead but you can still see me but you're not going crazy, I promise -

Yeah. He's not going to set back any progress they may or may not have made in moving past his death.

So, really, there's no point in being visible unless he wants to go back to school or something, which, ugh. No thanks.

Tim's going to disappear as soon as Dick agrees to be Robin. He won't leave any traces, or at least he'll try to leave as few as possible, so that the Bats won't have any leads, which means that they can throw whatever investigation they inevitably do into him onto the back burner pretty quickly, and then they can get back to focusing on more important cases, which is better for everyone.

So Tim stays silent, not moving a muscle, not giving Mr. Pennyworth anything.

They stay that way for a long time - Tim can’t exactly tell how long, since he’s not wearing a watch, but it’s a while. They only acknowledge it when the CB radio emits a short squeal of static, followed by two short blips.

Tim guesses that means that Dick had made contact with Batman.

His hypothesis is confirmed when Mr. Pennyworth glances towards the radio but otherwise makes no move towards it. If it had been a request for information, or anything requiring a response, then he would’ve been at the radio faster than the Flash himself, but he doesn’t move, so it can’t be that.

Mr. Pennyworth doesn't say anything, watching Tim out of the corner of his eye and waiting for him to make a move.

Tim says nothing in return, staring straight back at him and willing him to realize that he's willing to do this all night. Tim can be exceptionally stubborn once he digs his heels in, and while he has no doubt that Mr. Pennyworth more than likely could win in a battle of wills, there's no way he's going to win that battle and get anything useful out of Tim other than a demonstration of his bullheadedness.

Mr. Pennyworth seems to realize that eventually, because he reaches towards the radio after a few minutes. He angles his shoulders so that Tim can't see what he's doing exactly, but he can hear a couple clicks and a scraping sound.

When Mr. Pennyworth resumes his previous position leaning back gains the counter, the radio looks different. The antenna is a bit longer, and it seems like another dial had popped into existence - Tim honestly can't tell where they might've been hidden. It's an impressive piece of equipment, but he can't tell why Mr. Pennyworth had bothered to do…whatever he had done to it.

At least until he presses on the newly revealed dial, and radio crackles to life once more, Dick's voice coming through the speakers.

" - did you contact me?" he's asking, and though they didn't tune in in time to catch the beginning of the sentence, Tim's pretty sure he can guess. 

Dick sounds genuinely curious, and maybe a little concerned, which is better than combative. 

"I needed - I could use your help," Batman grits out, like it pains him physically. 

His voice comes through the speakers at the same volume Dick's does and with the same mediocre sound quality, which means that either Mr. Pennyworth has somehow hacked their comms with a CB radio, or he's somehow bugged them both without their noticing. Tim wouldn't put it past him, honestly.

There's a beat of silence before Dick says, "I'm here. Anytime." 

It's clear he's talking about more than his physical presence, as Nightwing or otherwise.

Batman doesn't respond verbally, but Tim hopes he's forcing the atrophied muscles around his mouth into a slight smile - or better yet, a pat to Dick's shoulder. It's probably a hope in vain, though, because Batman hasn't exactly been in a touchy feely sort of mood lately. Unless you count assault and battery touchy feely, which Tim does not. 

Dick's the one who continues the conversation a moment later: "We'll go into Two Face’s lair together, then?"

He's all business now, though his voice is still light, like his earlier words hadn't mattered at all.

Batman’s reply is immediate: "No. You take the back, and I'll take the front. We can't leave him an escape route."

Dick’s voice grows tight. "Why don't I go in through the front? He’s expecting you, not me."

Batman’s next words are irritated. "That's why you're going in through the back. He won't expect me to have back up. You're not with the Titans right now, Nightwing - if you're working with me, you need to follow my orders."

It's the most Tim's heard him say in months.

There's a thwip sound, like one of them's just shot their grapple towards a building, then Batman speaks again: "Do as I say."

His tone leaves no room for argument.

Dick repeats the words under his breath, high-pitched and mocking, then there's another thwip of a grappling hook as he presumably sets off to get in position.

Tim's starting to see why Dick was reluctant to come back.

A crash, followed by the shattering of what sounds like glass, is the next sound they hear through the speakers, and Tim's pretty sure that either Batman or Nightwing have just crashed through a window. He's also pretty sure that it was on purpose, since there aren't any grunts or thumps that he'd associate with sounds of a fight.

A moment of silence, then: "Upside down…?" Batman mutters under his breath. "This isn't your style, Harvey…"

His voice hardens abruptly, and there's a click as he turns on his comm link. "Rob- Nightwing, report. Where are you?"

"The basement," Dick replies almost immediately, though his words are clipped, annoyed at the slip. "The only way in from the back on the first floor was an old coal chute that I couldnt fit through, so I took what I could get. There's nothing here, and there aren't any stairs up to the first floor. What about you?"

"All of the furniture has been glued to the ceiling," Batman replies. "It's like he's turned the whole floor upside down, but I can't figure out why." A bit of frustration leaks into his voice, though he snuffs it out quickly.

"Two perspectives, two views, two sides of a coin…?" Dick suggests half-heartedly, like he doesn't expect Batman to take his suggestions seriously.

"I found one of Two Face's coins on my floor, but both sides are scarred."

It's neither agreement nor disagreement, but the hint of frustration in Batman’s tone makes a reappearance. He's actually acknowledging Dick's contributions, though, kind of, so that's…something, at least. 

There's a long moment of silence, then there's a burst of static as Dick sighs. "Look, we're both dead tired right now, so we're probably not going to be making any progress as long Two Face himself isn't here. Let's check out the rest of the building and regroup at home where we can think it over safely."

Tim thinks that sounds like a great idea, actually, and a quick glance towards Mr. Pennyworth reveals that he’s thinking something similar.

Batman scoffs. "I'm not going to leave this only half-finished."

Mr. Pennyworth doesn't do anything so gauche as make a face, especially not in front of company, but Tim's been around him long enough to recognize that the faint downturn of his lip means he's extremely disappointed.

Dick sighs deeply, sending a crackle of static through the radio. “Fine, we’ll do it your way.”

There’s a faint click, barely audible beneath the radio’s ambient background noise, then the top of the radio’s antenna begins to flash red. Tim blinks rapidly, hopefully veiling his surprise. He really should’ve expected that the CB radio wasn’t just a CB radio somewhere around the time Mr. Pennyworth had used it to hack into Batman’s and Nightwing’s comms unnoticed, but he’d just assumed that it was just some mysterious technique you learned when you were Batman’s butler.

Maybe it was. Maybe Mr. Pennyworth had been the one to build the device. Who knew? Certainly not Tim, though of all the people in Gotham he probably had the best chance of finding out. 

…Just as soon as he stopped being visible.

Mr. Pennyworth glances over at Tim, eyeing him consideringly for a long moment, then reaches over to the ‘radio,’ not bothering to block Tim’s view this time. As he turns the dial that had popped up the last time the device had been out of sight counterclockwise, a seam appears on the side and a panel retracts to reveal a small screen covered in black lines and one blinking blue dot.

Tim can feel his eyes widening at the sight.

It takes him a few seconds to figure out what the lines mean, and then he’s kicking himself for not seeing the obvious.

It’s a map of Gotham, and the flashing blue dot has to be Nightwing’s location. The click must have been him turning on a beacon or something, just in case.

That turns out to be the right call, because not two minutes later, Nightwing and Batman figure out Two Face’s game -

“The whole house is upside down, which means the basement is actually - ”

“The second floor.”

- and then there’s a vicious metal clang, the kind Tim hears if he wanders by the shopping district at closing time, like a big metal sheet being pulled down to the ground so that no thieves can get in…

…and no vigilantes can get out.

“Rob- Nightwing!” Batman yells, voice hoarse. “NIGHTWING!”

And then -

BOOM!

There’s an awful, gut-wrenching silence from the other end of the line, broken only with a soft but consistent crackling of static.

"You have to do something, Mr. Pennyworth," Tim says after a long moment, after he comes to the realization that the static is not, in fact, any type of morse code or other communication. He hadn’t held out much hope, considering the volume of the explosion, but, well, if anyone could survive that and then attempt to send a message through morse code, it would be Dick Grayson.

Mr. Pennyworth raises an eyebrow, but remains otherwise expressionless. "I was rather under the impression that you said you cared about the Wayne family."

"I do," Tim says cautiously, ruthlessly restraining himself from vibrating in place.

"Then why do you say I should do something, and not you?"

Tim pauses. There's no good answer to this, not really. He can't exactly say, Oops, sorry, I've spent a long time as a ghost and I only found out today that I can be tangible for short periods of time but I don't know if I can do it again or how to control it, so I'm probably not your best option, now, can he?

"...I just figured you would have a better idea of what could be done," is what he finally decides on, after spending far too long contemplating his answer. There are people trapped in an exploded building right now, which means every second is critical.

(Assuming they’re even still alive - )

(No. No, he can’t think like that. It’s Dick Grayson. Of course he survived.)

“Perhaps,” Mr. Pennyworth says noncommittally. “But I am an old man, and I cannot move quite as well as I used to.”

Tim resists the urge to look at him incredulously, keeping his eyes fixed on the radio. 

Like hell Mr. Pennyworth is as helpless as he's implying. The man can't be much older than fifty, and he's been assisting freaking Batman since he was, like, ten. There's no way he's not in good shape. He could probably take out The Riddler with one arm tied behind his back if he were so inclined.

Hm. That was maybe giving The Riddler a little too much credit. Mr. Pennyworth would probably only need to use his pinky finger to take him out.

Which means that Mr. Pennyworth has an angle here, and in order to figure out what, exactly, that angle is, Tim's going to have to play along for a while.

And usually he’d be willing to play a game of psychological warfare against Mr. Pennyworth. Honestly, he would love for them to match wits and strength of will, even if Mr. Pennyworth ended up going easy on him.

But.

They don’t have time for that, not if they want to be able to save Nightwing and Batman.

“Mr. Pennyworth,” Tim says, and the words sound frozen even to his own ears. “You and I both know that’s a steaming pile of bullshit.”

Tim doesn’t feel entirely in control of his body right now. He’s not entirely sure he’s breathing. It’s a good thing he doesn’t need air to survive.

“We are on a time limit,” he continues, each word emphasized like an icy knife to the heart. “The longer we spend dancing around each other, the longer it takes to get to them, and the more likely it is that they’ll die before we get there.”

(Tim died because no one found him before he bled out. He wouldn’t wish that on his worst enemy, let alone Dick Grayson.)

“It might have been an accident,” Mr. Pennyworth begins, and Tim can see in his eyes that even he doesn’t believe it, so why is he bothering -

Tim forces himself to take a deep breath, centering himself. Getting frantic - getting angry - is only going to waste more time they don’t have.

"You misunderstand me, young sir," Mr. Pennyworth says, eyeing him carefully. Tim doesn't know how much of what he'd been thinking had been written on his face (or even how Mr. Pennyworth could even read his expression given that he could only see about an inch of Tim's face), but it had apparently been enough for Mr. Pennyworth to get the gist. "I meant that it might be the case that they were in an accident."

"That was the sound of an explosion, Mr. Pennyworth," Tim points out, and Mr. Pennyworth cannot possibly be this obtuse. He works for Batman, for crying out loud. Why - 

Mr. Pennyworth just looks at him serenely.

It's a test. It's another stupid test so he can get more information to pass on to Batman once he comes back to the Manor, because Mr. Pennyworth is certain that's a when and not an if, only it won't be a when if they don't get there in time because - because -

(Because that's what happened to Tim.)

“THERE’S NO TIME!” Tim nearly screams, tears threatening to fall from the corners of his eyes, and he barely has time to take in Mr. Pennyworth’s taken aback expression before -

He blips. 

Chapter Text

One moment, he’s raising his voice at Mr. Pennyworth (oh, god, he’s going to have to apologize so much for that later), and then the next he’s at the intersection of Fourth Street and Fourth Avenue, Batman’s and Nightwing’s last known location.

Two Face is standing outside a mostly collapsed house, surveying the rubble, so Tim figures he’s in the right place.

He needs to get rid of Two Face, or at least keep him occupied, before he can try to find Nightwing and Batman. If he doesn’t, Two Face will probably notice the shifting rubble pretty quickly and then he’ll make everyone’s lives two times more difficult than they need to be. The last thing Tim needs is a firefight while he’s trying to get Nightwing and Batman out of the teetering mess that used to be a pretty nice townhouse. 

(Assuming can even do that, that is, but Tim can’t think about it right now.)

Two Face hasn’t seen him yet, mostly because Tim had blipped into existence behind him. Also he might be invisible again, so Tim has a couple seconds to plan - something. He hadn’t exactly expected to find himself here, but now that he is, he might as well do something useful. The only problem is…he doesn’t know all that much about fighting. A few years of aikido and karate do not a vigilante make.

So instead of lamenting his lack of tactical training, which would be both time-consuming and useless, he thinks, what would Dick Grayson do?

Probably something that depends on way more flipping than Tim is currently capable of doing.

Okay, if that’s out, then what would Batman do?

Maybe try to talk Two Face down? Tim hasn’t really seen a lot of their fights recently, since Two Face has spent most of the past six months either locked up in Arkham or out of the country. 

Tim doesn’t have any connection with Two Face or Harvey Dent. Two Face isn’t going to walk away just because Tim asks him to.

Okay, so what would Batgirl do?

…punch him in the face, probably.

Tim studies his fist. It looks solid enough.

He can probably make this work.

He'll have to be quick about it, though, because he has no illusions that Two Face is going to let him get in a second shot. He's used to fighting Robin, and Tim is just a poor man's substitute. All he has going for him is a couple years of martial arts classes and the inability to get hit.

Which isn't nothing, to be fair, but it's also nothing close to Robin training.

So, basically, Tim is going to have to one-shot Two Face if he wants to stand even a ghost (heh) of a chance.

Great.

Well, on the bright side, Tim's not gonna lie: he does kind of want to punch Two Face in the face.

Tim takes a deep breath - not that he actually needs to breathe, obviously; it's a psychological thing - and takes a running start, pulling back his right arm to put as much force behind the punch as he can.

His fist sails straight through Two Face's head. Tim overbalances, startled; he'd been expecting to actually, y'know, hit something, so when his fist doesn't meet any resistance, he can't stop himself from stumbling forwards, tripping right into Two Face.

Two Face gives a full body shudder. He twists his head around, eyes roaming the surrounding streets like he can feel someone watching him. 

There's no one there but Tim, who's fallen to his hands and knees at Two Face's feet, heaving.

On the bright side, Two Face can't see him.

On the not so bright side, Tim currently can't interact with the physical world, apparently. Also, Two Face is on his guard now, shoulders tense and keeping an eye on his surroundings.

Great.

Tim pulls himself to his feet and backs up, regrouping. He circles around Two Face, never turning his back so that he doesn't have to take his eyes off of him, until he's once again behind Two Face.

Okay.

Okay, so.

Apparently Tim is not currently visible. Fine, whatever, he's spent the past year or two being invisible to the living - it's not new. The problem is that he is not tangible, which - while also not exactly new - is the only way he's going to be able to get to Batman and Nightwing. It's the only way he's going to be useful. 

Tim does his best to ignore the low grade panic that's been churning in his stomach since the comm links cut out and asks himself, how did I make myself tangible last time?

Because he has proof that he can, in fact, be both visible and tangible, so it stands to reason that he is probably still capable of it.

(Unless it had just been a freak accident, but he’s just…not going to consider that right now. Because that would mean that Tim had brought Dick back to Gotham just in time for him to suffocate to death beneath an exploded building and that’s just - it’s not an option. It’s just not.)

Okay, so what had he done the last time he’d made himself tangible?

Tim thinks back to the circus, when he’d overturned the ringmaster’s podium onto Pedro’s head. What had he done differently?

He remembers…running. Sprinting after the man who was responsible for at least one death. He remembers wanting to be useful, wanting to stop Pedro from getting away with his crimes, desperately hoping to be able to do something.

Mainly, he remembers wishing really, really hard.

What the hell? thinks Tim, and wishes really, really hard, before socking Two Face right in the head. 

It’s not the best punch he’s ever thrown. In fact, it might not even be in the top 50%. He’s too busy focusing on (hopefully) making himself solid enough for the hit to actually land to worry too much about form or even the amount of strength he’s putting behind it.

But it lands.

(That’s the important part.)

Two Face stumbles forward, looking around wildly for the source of the blow. It doesn’t take long for his eyes to land on Tim, who is apparently visible once more. 

Does he need to be visible in order to be tangible? That would’ve been nice to know before he started whaling on Two Face, but beggars can't exactly be choosers.

Two Face zeroes in on the Robin pin attached to his hoodie, and his eyes narrow.

“Boy Wonder,” Two Face hisses. “I was wondering when you’d show up.”

He stalks forward, and Tim scrambles backwards automatically before remembering abruptly that he’s currently solid and doesn’t have to worry about the icky feeling of people walking through him.

He does probably have to worry about the piece of girder that Two Face is picking up from the rubble - or maybe it’s a crowbar? Tim’s not close enough to see it clearly, and he’s not exactly keen about getting any closer.

“You’ve been gone a few months, so rumor had it that you bit the dust,” Two Face says pleasantly, stalking forward. He taps one end of the length of metal against his open palm, tone shifting a little lower, a bit more gravely: “But I knew better. What, did you have detention?”

If Tim closes his eyes, Two Face would sound like any other adult politely (if condescendingly) inquiring about his studies. If he ignores the slap of metal on flesh, that is.

Two Face doesn’t wait for an answer, which is good, because Tim doesn’t have one. What’s he supposed to say? Yeah, no, up until like three hours ago I was invisible? Or maybe Oh, actually, you’re right! The real Boy Wonder is dead, and I’m just filling in for a minute. Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.

“What’s with the new costume, anyway?” Two Face asks, sounding half mildly curious and half like he couldn’t care less about the answer. 

Tim finds his voice: “It’s been in the wash for six months,” he rasps, which isn’t even remotely true but sounds like something Robin would say, then launches himself at Two Face once more.

Two Face’s expression twists with fury as he dodges Tim’s next punch easily. “You used to be better at quips,” he spits, swinging the metal bar at Tim’s kneecaps. “I’ll be the one to kill you, just like I killed Batman and Nightwing! The Joker can go suck an egg!”

Tim jumps on instinct, and the bent length of girder sails harmlessly beneath him. He makes the most of his newfound height and kicks his legs upwards, hoping against hope that they actually land and maybe even do some damage.

Luck must be with him, because the toe of his shoe connects solidly with Two Face’s chin, causing his head to snap backwards. Two Face stumbles backwards, tripping over a piece of rubble, then lands flat on his back. He grunts as his breath is knocked out of him, turning his head to the side to spit out a mouthful of blood.

He must have bitten his tongue, Tim thinks absently, then does his best to prevent himself from having the same fate. He’s off balance from the kick, hurtling towards the ground head first, so he stretches his arms above his head to break his fall, arching his back as much as he can so that they actually have a chance of hitting the ground before his face does. He’s never really been all that great at handstands, let alone ones where he’s already significantly off balance before he even starts, but his palms hit the ground and he maintains what could only very charitably be called a handstand for a split second before his feet hit the ground a moment later, resulting in an awkward back bend that collapses under its own weight.

(For the first time, Tim is glad he’s dead. If he weren’t, he’d have to deal with so much muscle strain in the morning.)

Tim scrambles to his feet. Batman and Nightwing are running out of time - he can’t let this fight drag on much longer.

The only problem is that, well, he has no clue how to end it. He’s used to spars from karate class - they’re either timed, or they go until someone taps out, neither of which are likely to happen in this fight.

A flash of light catches his eye from the remains of the exploded building. He uses a second that he doesn’t really have to take a closer look, keeping one eye on Two Face starting to struggle to his feet less than a yard away. It’s not working very well - Two Face must have twisted an ankle or something.

It’s sunlight glinting off a small metal handle, which normally wouldn’t be immediately helpful, except for the fact that the handle is attached to a small wooden door that seems to be untouched by the explosion. A coal chute, maybe? It’s big enough that he can probably slip through it into the building - wait.

He’s a ghost. He doesn’t need a way in.

He just needs Two Face to be too busy to stop him.

Two Face is still on the ground, struggling to get to his feet - maybe his ankle is broken instead of just sprained, or maybe he's hurt his wrist as well; Tim doesn't care what the problem is, as long as it's to his advantage - so that's an easy fix.

Tim takes two steps forwards, hopes really hard that he's solid, then steps onto Two Face's torso with extreme prejudice. Two Face makes a pained sound, and Tim lifts his other foot off the ground and stomps it down, putting all his weight behind it. Granted, 'all his weight' is maybe a bit over a hundred pounds, which isn't a whole lot (and that's assuming being a ghost doesn't affect that), but Tim feels something crack beneath his sneakers and smiles viciously.

That's what Two Face gets for hurting Dick Grayson.

Two Face goes limp beneath him, eyes rolling back in his head in a dead faint. He's probably faking it, honestly, because Tim's not that heavy.

It doesn't really matter if he is, though, because Tim only needs about five seconds to make his way into the building and out of sight before Two Face comes to. Or 'comes to,' as the case may be.

Whatever.

Tim sprints for the building, not bothering to look back. 

———

The inside of the lower floor of the collapsed townhouse on the corner of Fourth and Fourth is actually not as hard to navigate as Tim had expected it would be. Sure, he can mostly bypass all the rubble and the load bearing beams and the scaffolding by virtue of not being tangible unless he really wants to be, apparently. But based on his limited knowledge of collapsed buildings and retrieval (mostly accrued from hanging around that girl on 15th Street whenever she watches a new episode of that one firefighter show), it seems like it's pretty stable. Or like it won't fall over if someone accidentally brushes against it, at least. He'd like to have some way to secure some of the more wobbly parts, but, well. It's not like he has a utility belt or anything.

Maybe Nightwing will have something?

Tim'll have to ask, once he finds him.

"Nightwing?" he croaks, hoping they can hear him. He hasn't spoken this much in one day since…he honestly can't remember when. Probably before he went to boarding school, honestly.

There's no response.

"Batman?" he tries, attempting to force his voice to be a little louder.

There's still no answer.

God, he really hopes they're not dead. He's pretty much the only reason Dick is even in town in the first place, and Tim had upset him earlier by…by shoving his dead brother's uniform into his face. 

(Wow, Tim's a real class act.)

And maybe that had upset him enough that he'd made a mistake or something and now it's all Tim's fault that they're -

No. 

There's no way that can be true. If Dick made grevious or even fatal mistakes everytime he got pissed off, he'd never have become the leader of the Teen Titans. He probably wouldn't even have been able to become Nightwing in the first place. So that's probably not what happened.

It's still Tim's fault that he's in Gotham, though.

He really doesn't want to be the reason Dick Grayson dies.

(Even if it would be kind of neat if he became a ghost as well.)

Tim takes a deep breath before shouting, “NIGHTWING?” as loud as he can, which still isn’t very loud.

The whole breathing thing doesn’t actually help him physically, since it’s not like he actually needs air to breathe. Or to breathe at all, actually. It’s more psychological than anything - going through the motions of speech as if he’s alive helps with the whole focusing thing, which helps to make him audible to people who aren’t ghosts.

…At least, he thinks that’s how it works.

He’s finding out so many new things about himself today that at this point he probably shouldn’t take anything for granted.

Tim pauses his calls for a moment, listening. He can’t hear anything except a faint scratching that he thinks is coming from one of the piles of rubble near the center of the structure. He can’t tell if it’s Batman and Nightwing or not - it could be a trapped rat for all he knows - but it’s the best he has to go on right now so he carefully steps towards it.

As he gets closer to the center of the building, the scratching gets louder, so he chances another “Nightwing?” 

The scratching stops immediately, and Tim holds his breath until he hears Nightwing’s incredulous, if faint, response: “Kid?”

Tim bites back a hysterical laugh. “That’s me,” he agrees. “Is Batman with you?”

“He’s here. We’re fine, but we’re pinned down.” His voice is light and casual, like he’s talking about taking a walk in the garden and not the two hundred or so pounds of steel beams and various other debris on top of him. “Any chance you can give us a hand?”

Tim surveys the pile. It’s almost as tall as he is and maybe three times as wide. The beams seem to have come down first - they might be cross beams, actually, since they look like they might be x-shaped, but he doesn’t know enough about construction to say for sure - and then the plaster from the walls and the wood from the floors rained down on top. There are a few broken chair legs and scraps of fabric near the very top, for flavor - remnants of the furniture from the top floor, probably.

“I don’t have anything to secure the beams with,” he admits. “But I think…”

He tries to push one of the beams with his foot. It stays in place (and his foot doesn’t go through it), and there’s no pained sound from either of the vigilantes underneath it, so it’s probably pretty stable.

“If I can get the debris cleared off the beams…” he says slowly. “I think it’ll be stable enough that I can probably get you out of there.”

Well, he can probably clear the beams enough for Batman and Nightwing to get themselves out. He has no illusions that they’ll stay in a vulnerable position before an unknown (even a demonstrably helpful unknown) a moment later than they absolutely have to.

Also, despite going to karate three times a week, he still has noodle arms. He probably wouldn’t be able to lift the beams off them even if he had the chance to try.

(He could really use some super strength right about now.)

Instead of lamenting his lack of vigilante-level strength, Tim focuses really, really hard on wishing his hands into tangibility, because he’d be worse than useless otherwise.

The seconds stretch into minutes and then into tens of minutes, and Tim keeps shifting rubble. He really hopes it won’t take him more than half an hour to uncover the beams. The more time that passes, the more the atmosphere of the collapsed townhouse becomes charged. 

Tim can practically taste Batman’s antsiness growing.

Ultimately, it ends up taking him twenty minutes to shift the rubble enough that Dick - that Nightwing can wriggle his hands under the cross beams and lift them high enough to slip out from underneath. From his new vantage point, he can get a better grip on the beams, and starts hauling them up so that Batman (in his bulkier suit) can get out as well. Tim hurries to help him, grabbing the other side of the beam and tugging them upwards. Nightwing flashes him a quick, distracted smile in thanks, and Tim takes a mental screenshot of that expression to file away in the back of his mind for a rainy day. 

They slowly lever the beam off of Batman, though to be honest Dick is definitely doing more on that front than Tim. The instant that Batman has enough room to maneuver, he starts squirming out from under the beam. It’s not the most elegant movement Tim’s ever seen him do, but he supposes that elegance is not exactly at the forefront of Batman’s mind at present. Getting out from underneath the beam in case Dick drops it is more important, even if the event is incredibly unlikely.

It takes Batman less than a minute to worm his way out from under the beam. Dick waits an extra few seconds to make sure that he’s completely clear before gently setting the beam back down onto the foundation. Tim stands awkwardly to one side as Dick wordlessly offers Batman a hand, likely in deference to the darker splotches of fabric on Batman’s outer thigh where he must have burst some stitches.

Batman accepts the hand up as if it physically pains him to do so. He doesn’t even glance in Dick’s direction until he’s on his feet, and even then it’s only a split second once-over to make sure he’s not grievously injured. Tim frowns, confused, because this is definitely not the Batman-and-Robin dynamic he’s used to, and - 

Oh.

Tim gets it now, he thinks. He understands why Dick doesn’t want to go back to being Robin.

Dick has grown up, and Batman doesn’t want to see it. He still sees him as the kid he took in over a decade ago, and he can’t - or won’t - see that Dick has grown so far beyond that. Or maybe he has figured it out, but he just doesn’t know how to show it.

Tim can't help but think the whole being crushed under a building thing is a disturbingly apt comparison to how stifled Dick must feel working with Batman.

Dick has long outgrown the role of Robin, and trying to force him back into that role would be…inadvisable, especially considering the fact that Tim’s intention there had been to improve Batman’s mental health.

If Dick donned the Robin suit once more, he’d be…irritated. Resentful. And he more than likely wouldn’t be able to keep a lid on the emotion for more than a few weeks, especially not from someone who’d been dubbed ‘The World’s Greatest Detective.’

The resentment would fester and grow the longer it went on, and more than likely Batman would pick up on it and begin to mirror it and -

Yeah, Tim doesn’t blame Dick for refusing so definitively.

(It wasn’t really fair to put the responsibility for his dad’s mental health on Dick’s shoulders in the first place, anyway.)

There went his entire plan for getting Batman a Robin.

Well, shit. Looks like he needs a new one.

Tim’s frantic mental scrambling for a new plan to prevent Batman from getting himself killed and the entire city falling to ruin is broken, ironically, by the man in question:

“Who are you?” Batman growls, and normally Tim would probably find that intimidating, but, well, honestly? He’s kind of out of fucks to give at this point. His entire get-Batman-a-Robin-and-maybe-some-therapy plan had crashed down around his ears only a little after Two Face’s townhouse had, and he’s really not in the mood for an interrogation from the man that he’s spent the last few weeks actively trying to help.

“Nightwing’s been calling me kid, so I guess that’ll do for now,” Tim says, maybe a little flippantly. And then his mouth just keeps on running, because apparently lifting rubble for long enough means that he loses his filter: “You’re welcome, by the way. Y’know, for getting you out of there.”

Batman ignores that last part (and Tim is grateful for that because he just sassed Batman, which is not exactly his greatest life choice) and instead demands tersely, “How did you get in?”

“Coal chute,” Tim replies, matching Batman’s tone, maybe a little mockingly. He would say that he must have a death wish, if it weren’t for the fact that he’s, y’know, already dead.

Batman doesn’t seem to notice the faint mockery, or even the abrupt decrease in verbosity, glancing around the ruins of the house for said coal chute, because apparently he doesn’t believe Tim for some reason. 

(Tim doesn’t know why anyone would bother to lie about climbing through a coal chute.)

Nightwing’s taken a step back, watching the scene from a few feet away. He surveys them silently, apparently willing to allow Batman to take the lead for a few moments while he studies Tim, brow furrowed like there’s something that’s bugging him but he can’t quite put his finger on it.

(Tim is abruptly aware that he doesn’t have any coal dust on his clothes, despite having come in through a coal chute.)

Batman’s eyes finally land on the coal chute, and he nods to himself, apparently accepting and assimilating the knowledge, before he turns back to Tim. 

“Where is Two Face?” he growls, and Tim’s honestly starting to think that that’s his only setting today. Although Tim showing up out of nowhere and doing his best to save him when he doesn’t want to be saved and then being flippant about it probably isn’t helping.

“Up topside,” he replies, unfazed. Once you’ve seen Batman handing a kid a lollipop from his utility belt, or fighting crime while wearing a papoose, it’s impossible to both be a kid and be scared of him. And while Tim generally didn’t like to think of himself as a kid, it's kind of hard not to when Nightwing kept calling him one.

Batman nods tersely, then disappears in a whirlwind of cape.

Nightwing sighs behind him, then strides forward to clap a hand on Tim’s shoulder. “Good job, kid,” he says, and something about those simple words makes something inside of Tim’s heart start glowing with pride. 

“Don’t do it again,” Dick adds, then leaps up towards some of the exposed beams that used to support the first floor, using them as leap-off points as he heads towards the street above.

Dick’s discouragement does nothing to dim the warm glow in Tim’s chest, and he follows them up to ground level. What else is he going to do? Stay there for eternity? Not likely.

He finds Batman standing over Two Face, Nightwing standing a few feet away and looking down at Two Face with an expression that Tim can’t quite identify.

“What did you do to him,” Batman growls.

Tim takes the opportunity to glance down at Two Face, who’s apparently only managed to crawl a few feet away from the spot where he’d fallen. There’s a few splatters of blood around his mouth from where he’d bitten his tongue - or maybe the inside of his cheek? - earlier, and his ankle looks a bit swollen, but other than that he doesn’t look all that injured.

“Stepped on his ribs,” Tim says, unrepentantly. “The rest he did himself.”

Nightwing does his best to stifle a laugh, but a choked ha! leaks through anyway. Tim grins despite himself, even as Batman levels a Batglare at them both.

Look, Batman, Tim is just living his best life, okay? He’s helped out the two vigilantes who keep his city safe, he got a thank you from his idol, and he made Dick Grayson laugh. 

Best. Day. Ever.

He’s a little sad that he probably won’t interact with them again, but it’s all for the best. And, honestly, he couldn’t have asked for a better time.

Two Face groans, shifting his head to glare up at Batman. “Oh, you’re alive. How disappointing,” he spits.

“You should’ve known better, Harvey!” Dick says brightly, wiggling a finger in Two Face’s direction like he’s a teacher scolding a disobedient pupil. “You can’t kill off Batman and Nightwing that easily!”

Two Face rolls his eyes, catching sight of Tim halfway through. His gaze locks onto him and both sides of his face twist into an ugly sneer. 

“Or Robin, so it seems,” Two Face sneers, then his tone shifts into something darker. “I knew Joker was lying,” he mutters, half to himself.

Batman’s expression closes off, the minuscule amount of emotion he’d allowed to slip through disappearing instantly. Dick’s back straightens and he squares his shoulders, eyes growing hard and flinty. The ever-present grin he wears while in costume looks more like a gruesome slash carved into the side of a steep cliff, and Tim has to resist the urge to shudder.

Poor Two Face.

An ominous rumble sounds in the distance, getting closer by the second. Tim really hopes it's not Two Face's goons in a getaway van or something (who else would be brave enough to drive into an active villain fight?) because he is exhausted. Mentally, emotionally, and possibly even physically. He didn't even know he could get tired until today, and now he feels about ready to pass out on his own tombstone and sleep for a decade or two.

It's not Two Face's goons.

It's worse.

Mr. Pennyworth trundles into view in a discrete black town car, one that doesn't look particularly dirty or clean and shiny. It's nondescript, the kind that everyone and their mother buys because they're relatively cheap and pretty safe. 

(The Gotham model has a reinforced frame and a bulletproof windshield.)

There's something about the way that Mr. Pennyworth is driving that makes the car seem both dangerous and dignified, though Tim can't quite put his finger on what and honestly he doesn't have the mental bandwidth to think it through right now.

(He thinks his fingertips might be flickering in and out of the visible plane, which isn't great.)

Mr. Pennyworth executes a neat three point turn around one of the larger pieces of rubble that have fallen into the street so that he can come to a stop with the driver's side window right in front of Tim.

The window slowly rolls down, revealing Mr. Pennyworth. His brow is furrowed severely, and his mouth twitches downwards. The look in his eyes is hard, and they glint in the dying sunlight.

Tim gulps.

Batman and Nightwing take one look at the expression on Mr. Pennyworth's face and start slowly edging away towards where the police are just now pulling up, dragging Two Face with them.

Great.

"Mr. Pennyworth, I apologize for raising my voice earlier," Tim says preemptively, because he's had two separate mother figures succeed in drilling manners into him, and also Mr. Pennyworth kind of terrifies him.

Mr. Pennyworth eyes him for a long moment, and Tim holds his breath. 

"Water under the bridge, sir," he says finally, voice steady and unruffled. "I was rather surprised at your…abrupt departure, however."

Ah.

Yes, he probably would be, wouldn't he?

"It was unavoidable, considering the circumstances," Tim replies, because, well, it was. And also not completely voluntary. 

He doesn't want to think about what might have happened if he'd been even one minute slower, let alone the twenty minutes it had taken Mr. Pennyworth to drive to the scene.

"Why don't I give you a lift home, young sir, so that you might tell me about your journey?" Mr. Pennyworth’s inquiry is perfectly polite and courteous, but Tim just can't shake the feeling that it is not a request.

"No, thank you, Mr. Pennyworth," he replies anyway, just as politely. "I appreciate it, but it's not necessary."

"I beg to differ, sir," Mr. Pennyworth responds, and though his tone hasn't changed, there's something flinty underneath that makes Tim think that he probably won't be able to get away with demuring a second time.

"...That's very kind of you, Mr. Pennyworth," he says finally. "I wouldn't want to impose."

"Oh, it's not an imposition at all," Mr. Pennyworth says with a small, triumphant smile as he gets out of the car and ushers Tim towards the passenger side. Tim goes, if only to prevent Mr. Pennyworth from accidentally walking through him, since he can't really tell for sure whether or not he's tangible at present.

Mr. Pennyworth eyes Tim's hoodie and tuts disapprovingly. "Really, I don't know what you were thinking," he mutters under his breath. "Fighting crime in full body armor is dangerous enough, but in a sweater and jeans?"

It's clear that Tim is supposed to hear what he's saying and then feel guilty about it - or perhaps shocked that he'd forgotten any form of protection and vow to always wear body armor when fighting crime? - but instead he has to stifle an almost hysterical laugh.

"It's not like they can hurt me if I don't let them," Tim rasps under his breath. He runs his fingers through his hair frustratedly, and he doesn't notice when his hand nudges against his hood and it slips down off his head. He also doesn't notice Mr. Pennyworth's slight frown and the hand he extends to touch his shoulder that passes straight through him.

He does notice the wave of nausea that passes through him as a result, and also the way that Mr. Pennyworth gasps softly.

"Master...Jason?"

Tim winces internally.

Sure, he and Jason Todd look kind of vaguely similar - what with the similar build and the black hair and the genetically improbable blue eyes - but they’re not that similar. Tim's a lot less muscular, for one, and he thinks he's probably a little taller. Maybe it’s the colors he’s wearing, maybe the shadows are playing tricks on Mr. Pennyworth, or maybe the old butler’s eyes are finally giving out, but…

Tim is not Jason Todd.

"No," Tim rasps, voice hard. It's a pale imitation of the way Dick Grayson had sounded before leaving the Batcave - was it really only an hour ago? 

Mr. Pennyworth glances away to open the door, tutting like he doesn't believe him and Tim -

Tim cannot deal with this.

Not on top of everything else that's happened tonight.

So he waits until Mr. Pennyworth goes to open the passenger door for him, waits for the split second where Mr. Pennyworth’s eyes flick away from him, and then -

He blips back home.

Chapter Text

Tim’s best friend is called Martha, and she lives - well, lives is probably too strong a word - at the cemetery, mostly in the mausoleum where everyone thinks the Waynes are entombed. She’s actually buried on the grounds of Wayne Manor in a pine box with a simple headstone, along with the rest of her family.

Tim doesn’t know why she has two separate burial places. Something to do with grave robbers, maybe? Or so that people who aren’t allowed to go to Wayne Manor, since it’s private property, can visit her? He doesn’t know, and he doesn’t ask, because it would probably be rude, and he likes talking to her.

Their first meeting goes a little like this:

"Hi," Tim says to the person standing next to him, because his mother once smiled and called him a polite young man so he'd internalized it and made it part of his personality. 

The woman raises her eyebrows. "Hello," she replies. "You seem...different."

"Well, I am dead," Tim points out calmly. They're standing in front of his gravestone, so there's not really any point in denying it.

"I'm dead, too," the woman replies dryly.

Tim processes that for a moment. "Oh," he says. “Have you been dead long?”

He realizes an instant after the words leave his mouth that it’s probably not polite to ask someone that particular question, but before he can try to take it back, the woman throws her head back and laughs.

“Sorry, you don’t have to answer that,” Tim says sheepishly, even though she doesn’t seem mad.

The woman’s laughter dies down, and she tilts her head back down to look at him. Tim does his best not to stare at the sluggishly bleeding gunshot wound in the center of her forehead, but it’s, uh, really hard to look away. He imagines it’s about as hard not to stare at his chest wound, though, so they’re probably even. Still, he forces his eyes down and away from the bullet hole, and his gaze lands on her pearl necklace. There’s something weird about it…

Tim furrows his eyebrows subconsciously as he tries to figure out what, exactly, is niggling at him.

A moment later, he gasps and exclaims, “The pearls are fake! If they were real, they would have knots tied in between them so that they don’t rub together!”

In his excitement, he’d forgotten that the necklace is, in fact, actually attached to a person who might be insulted by his deduction. Tim tenses, preparing himself for a reprimand, but the woman just smiles. 

“You’re right, they are fake,” she says. “My husband gave them to me for our first anniversary. He couldn’t tell genuine pearls from fake ones if his life depended on it, but I loved them all the same because he was the one who’d given them to me.”

“Oh,” Tim says softly, and his hand drifts over to the pendant hanging from his camera strap, taking it in hand as his fingers ghost over it without his consent.

The woman’s smile grows a bit sad. “I’m Martha,” she introduces herself. “What’s your name, dear?”

Tim stares at her suspiciously for a long moment, then decides to tell her. What could possibly be the harm? It isn’t as if she can do anything to him at this point. And besides, his parents’ lectures on stranger danger probably don’t apply if he’s already dead. 

“I’m Tim,” he says, then holds out his hand for a handshake, because that’s what you do when you introduce yourself.

Martha laughs slightly, charmed, and shakes his hand. Her eyes still look sad, though, and Tim kind of wants to know why. He keeps his mouth shut, though. It’s none of his business.

“It’s lovely to meet you, Tim,” she says. “What do you like to do for fun?”

“I take pictures!” Tim tells her, holding up his camera.

Martha’s smile widens. “I’d love to see them, if you don’t mind showing me. I haven’t been able to leave here in…well, it’s been a long time.”

Tim wastes no time turning his camera on and scrolling through his photos to find a good one to show her. Unfortunately, he hadn’t managed to take any of Batman and Robin before his untimely demise, but he’s got a couple nice ones of the Gotham skyline and a few more of Robinson Park, so those are what he shows her. Her eyes sparkle, and she asks him more about how he took them, and Tim beams up at her like she’s the best person he’s ever met.

It had been the beginning of a beautiful friendship.

Which makes what Tim is about to tell her just that much worse.

"Martha," he says, coming into existence in front of her tombstone. "I think I fucked up."

Martha doesn’t look surprised at his sudden appearance. "Tim, you know how I feel about swearing," she says, faintly chiding.

Tim rolls his eyes. "That it's fine if you do it, but I shouldn't until I'm older or it's warranted, yes, I know, but I think that it's definitely warranted this time."

"Oh?" Martha raises an eyebrow. "What, did you somehow manage to get into contact with my son or his ward, revealing a hitherto unknown talent for communicating beyond the veil?"

Tim winces.

Martha sits down abruptly on her own tombstone. "No," she breathes. "Really, Tim?"

"Yeah, um, so apparently I can make myself visible to them? And even tangible, briefly. Apparently."

Martha leans forward, rapt. "Tell me everything."

So Tim does. It takes a while, so much so that the sun sets while they're talking, but it's not like he and Martha have any real need or even ability to sleep.

…Probably.

Can he sleep? It's been at least a year since he was alive and actually, y'know, slept, and he hasn't passed out or anything since then, so he assumes he doesn't actually need to. What's not sleeping going to do? Kill him? It's a little late for that. 

Martha blinks rapidly, taking in Tim's day. It's been a long day. 

"Wow," she says. "That's… a lot."

Tim nods miserably. His favorite people in the world (other than Martha, of course) don’t trust him and possibly hate his guts. Understandable, really. He would hate someone too, if that person took the clothes his brother had died in out of his memorial and threw them in his face, urging him to regress ten years and wear them like they hadn't cost his brother his life.

Tim doesn't have any brothers, but he gets it, now that he takes a minute and looks back on his actions.

He’s really fucked up.

(The last time he’d felt this much pain in his chest, he had been impaled on a spike and actively dying.)

“Okay,” Martha says, massaging her temples and blinking rapidly, trying to wrap her head around the events of Tim’s past thirty-sixish hours. “Okay, so, Bruce got himself stabbed twice on patrol and dragged himself home instead of getting medical attention, and you decided that was the last straw and went to go find Dick, despite not being able to communicate with him.”

Tim nods wordlessly.

“And then you found him at the circus - his circus - and discovered that you can make yourself not only visible and audible but tangible as well by knocking over an oversized bucket onto a murderer.”

Tim nods again, though it had been a podium, not a bucket, not that the distinction mattered all that much.

“And then Dick drove you back to the Manor and let you into the… Batcave just long enough for you to insult his dead brother and then he stormed off to help Bruce."

Tim winces. Not his finest hour.

"Which left you with Alfred, who offered to make you some food, and you accepted, despite the fact that you can't actually eat - "

"We don't know that for sure - " Tim feels compelled to point out, but he quails at the look Martha gives him.

"Despite the fact that you can't actually eat," she repeats, and Tim shuts his mouth. "And then you heard a house explode with Bruce and Dick still inside, so you headed over to help them out, despite not being sure whether or not you could actually be helpful, since you’d only just figured out you’re capable of existing on the living plane, and somehow you were corporeal long enough to sock Two Face right in the kisser - ”

“Apparently I just have to wish really, really hard,” Tim says, because he’s kind of morbidly enjoying Martha’s reactions to his mess of a day.

Martha stops, blinking rapidly for several long seconds. “What.”

“Yeah.”

“You’ve got to be kidding.”

Tim shrugs, smirking behind his mask.

Martha pinches the bridge of her nose and sighs for about a minute straight, then collects herself.

“We will circle back around to that,” she promises grimly. “You somehow managed to incapacitate Two Face long enough to get several hundred pounds of debris off of Bruce and Dick - ”

“To be fair, he mostly did that to himself,” Tim puts in, and Martha waves her hand dismissively.

“Bruce and Dick handed Two Face off to the police, and then Alfred offered to give you a lift home - ”

“I wouldn’t exactly call it offering, Mrs. Wayne. It was more like…a demand thinly veiled with civility.”

Martha frowns, exasperated. “Tim, I’ve told you a hundred times, you can just call me Martha. You’ve managed it before - there’s no need to regress back into politeness when you start feeling uncomfortable, not with me.”

Tim winces at the frank assessment of his character.

“Also, stop interrupting, or this will take an eternity longer than it has to.”

Tim notices that she does not refute the part about Mr. Pennyworth’s mildly terrifying ability to sound impeccably polite while simultaneously blocking any option other than doing as he says.

“Alfred said he was going to give you a lift home and wouldn’t take no for an answer,” she revises, “then when he started to scold you lightly for getting involved, you told him that Two Face couldn’t have hurt you even if he’d tried, despite not knowing that for sure - ”

Tim bites his lip to keep himself from interrupting. He’s dead - what’s getting punched going to do to him?

“And then he tried to reach out to you to stop you from leaving, and his hand went right through you, and now he thinks you’re the ghost of Jason Todd - ”

Tim scowls, shoving his hands into his sweatshirt pocket. He is not Jason Todd.

Martha eyes him curiously. “…then you decided you’d had enough and you came here. Is that about the size of it?”

Tim nods a bit sullenly. That about sums it up.

Martha sighs. “Okay. Okay, I need a second.”

She mulls his story over for a lot longer than a second, but Tim figures she’s allowed the extra time. He certainly needs the time to wrap his head around it, and he’d been there for the whole thing.

“So…” Martha says finally. “Dick doesn’t want to be Robin again. That’s fair enough.”

Tim nods, a little ashamed at himself for trying to force him to be.

“Does Bruce absolutely need a Robin?” she asks frankly. “No,” she says, raising a hand to stop Tim from speaking. “Think about it objectively. Is Nightwing not enough? Does Bruce absolutely need a Robin, or are you just used to him having one and want it to go back to the way it was?”

Tim forces himself to think it over, even though he’s pretty sure he’s right. He thinks about how Batman actually smiled when Jason was around, about how Bruce’s interactions with Dick were strained but mostly cordial, about how he seemed lighter. 

He thinks about how Batman’s sense of self preservation decreased almost exponentially after he came back from Ethiopia. He thinks about how the wounds on the criminals he’d fought increased in severity almost proportionally, to the point where even Jim Gordon wasn’t entirely sure whether or not they were perpetrator or victim. He thinks about the hours Batman spends on rooftops staring out into the distance, like he’s longing to become a gargoyle himself, so he no longer has to deal with the pain of losing one of his sons. 

He thinks about the way Nightwing and Batman had worked together earlier. The relationship had been… functional , if strained. But the tension had increased the longer they’d worked together, and Tim wouldn’t be surprised if there ended up being a screaming fight later in the evening.

He comes to a decision.

“He needs Robin,” Tim says, absolutely certain of his answer. “Dick… He can’t stick around forever. He has his own city, and they start to… chafe if they’re in the same place for too long. It wouldn’t work.”

“Then why not you?” Martha asks, like the question doesn’t bring his entire world down around his ears.

Tim splutters for a solid minute before he manages to pull himself together enough to reply. “Me?!”

He’s - 

He’s not Robin material. He wouldn’t be good at it - he’s had, like, five years of standard martial arts training, which is good enough for self defense but not nearly enough for going up against the villains that Batman and Nightwing face every week. Honestly, it’s probably barely enough to fend off a low-ranking goon. And there’s no way he’s smart enough to solve the kinds of cases that vigilantes do - he has no background in detective work, except for maybe the crappy true crime shows he used to watch when he was supposed to be doing his homework, and there’s probably no chance of Batman or Nightwing sitting down to teach him, not when they’re so suspicious of him, and -

He can’t believe he’s even considering this.

“Yes, you,” Martha says, unrepentant. "Who else?"

"Oh, I don't know, maybe someone who’s actually visible?!" Tim regrets his words as soon as he says them. Well, maybe not the words, because they’re correct - what use is Robin if Batman can’t see him? - but the way that he said them.

Martha gives him a Look, and he quails. She may not be his mother, but she’s still a Mom, with all the superpowers that entails.

"Tim," she says evenly, "you can be visible. You can even be tangible. You just told me you discovered this."

"I don't know how to control it, though," Tim argues, though he’s pretty sure he’s fighting a losing battle.

"That is something you can learn," Martha says, unconcerned. "We can test the limits together, if you like."

"Martha," Tim says heavily. He doesn’t really want to dwell on it too much or even say it out loud, because it hurts, but there’s one more problem with her plan: "He doesn't want me there. I'm just a kid who showed up on his doorstep one day with everything short of a PowerPoint presentation on why he needs Dick back in his life as Robin. Which failed. He doesn't know me, and he definitely doesn't trust me."

Martha’s eyes soften slightly, but they remain fixed on him, stubborn and self-assured. "Well, I want you there. I know you, and I trust you. I'm his mother, and I know what's best for my son. And that is you, Timothy Jackson Drake."

Tim swallows, shaking his head mutely. Even disregarding the logistical concerns -

Martha levels her gaze at him. “Tim. You’ve always said that Batman needs a Robin.”

“Yeah,” Tim says, finding his voice. “And it should be - ”

“Jason is dead,” Martha says gently. “Dick refused. Which means…”

“…All that’s left is me,” Tim finishes. “If they can’t, and no one else can see the way Batman’s slipping, that leaves me. Even if he hates me for it.” The words come out barely louder than a whisper, but Martha still hears him.

“He won’t,” Martha says resolutely. “I - well, Alfred, mostly, I suppose - raised him better than that. It may take him a while, but Bruce will realize that you only have his best wishes at heart, and he will not hate you for it.”

Personally, Tim thinks that’s a bit optimistic.

Martha looks at him for a long moment, then sighs, slumping like all the fight’s rushed out of her, even though they don’t actually need to breathe. 

“It’s up to you, Tim,” she says finally. “You don’t have to be Robin. No one can force you to be. I would like it if you could keep an eye on my son, but he isn’t your responsibility. If you decide you don’t want to do it, just say so, and we never have to speak of it again. It’s your choice.”

Tim fixes his eyes on his shoes, deliberately avoiding making eye contact. 

Because it’s not a choice. Not really.

Batman needs a Robin. If Dick and Jason won’t, or can’t, take on the mantle again…

If there’s no other option, then it’s going to have to be Tim.

“…I’ll do it,” he says finally, fingering the Robin pin on his sweatshirt.

(Someone has to. And, well, what better for a Batman that’s terrified of losing another Robin than a Robin incapable of dying?)

Martha smiles at him, placing a comforting hand on his shoulder.

And thus begins Tim’s guerilla warfare against Batman’s sanity.