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Things are calm and everyone knows that it doesn’t last. Calm only leads to a larger fallout at a later time. Tim and Jason are in the midst of a sparring match down in the Cave.
“Is that all you’ve got, Replacement?” the former crime lord asks light heartedly as they offer a hand to Tim to help him to his feet. The use of that nickname has no heat behind it.
The third Robin doesn’t take their hand so they pull it back. Tim stays where he had tumbled onto the mats minutes ago. His face is stormy.
“‘Replacement’…it’s been a year, yet you still call me that,” Tim says, instead.
“I’ll stop if it—“
Tim cuts Jason off. “Just…stop,” he should be angry, if this conversation is going in the direction they think it is, Tim just sounds bored.
The seventeen-year-old gets to his feet without any help from them. Now the two were standing facing each other on the training mats in a now-eerily quiet Bat Cave.
Tim’s anger was controlled but they could feel it thrumming it just under his skin. It is only a matter of time until the flood hit.
“You go around like you’re the only Robin who was ‘replaced by a better, more efficient model’,” he says, tone stony. Quoting Jason word-for-word for what they had said barely a year ago.
“But you’re not. So stop talking to everyone — to me — like I don’t know what it feels like. I never replaced you, Jason. I was the Robin that got replaced, not you,” Tim stops to take an (albeit rather shaky) breath. “Dick took Robin from me and gave it to Damian not even a year after the kid’s arrival,” Tim tells them.
He doesn’t hate Damian, not really, not anymore. But that hatred had run strong a little more than a year ago.
All Jason can do is stand there and listen as Tim — their little brother — tells them about how they had been, rather alarmingly, incorrect in their initial assumption that Tim had replaced them.
They had come to accept that Tim was not their replacement. But they had not stopped to think about what it meant that Damian was now Robin.
“So yeah, I do know what it feels like,” he tells them. “I’ve known what it’s like to feel replaceable, to be threatened with being replaced by someone better or more efficient, I’ve known it since before I could walk.” Tim finishes.
At that very moment, Jason gets a very Dick-like urge to hug Tim. The teenager looks like he’s on the verge of tears after that particularly emotional moment. They listen to that urge for once.
Tim makes a small “oomph” of surprise but doesn’t pull away. They take it as a win.
Hours later when the rest of the family has finished their patrol reports and cleared out of the Cave, Jason accesses the security footage from ten months ago. Two particular videos leave a sour taste in the back of their throat.
Tim was right. They watch as Dick gives Damian the Robin mantle. And then they watch the recording of the moment when Tim finds out what his oldest brother had done.
If they stop Tim in the hallway later for another hug, that was neither here nor there.