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Tim Drake was having an extraordinarily average day in his extraordinarily average life. Sure, when he first woke up, his body was strangely sore and stiff, but he chalked it up to having started a weight training unit in gym class that week, popped an ibuprofen to take the edge off, and called it good. When he was packing his school bag, he realized that for some reason he’d only completed about half his assignments, but luckily he was able to speed through the rest on the long bus ride from Bristol to Gotham Academy. And once he got to school, he had a perfectly normal time of it for eight periods in a row. Then it was a quiet bus ride back to the Manor, idly working his way through his new assignments while contemplating potential plans for the evening. There was a new true crime documentary that had come out recently he’d been wanting to watch. Alternatively, he could spend some time looking at the Teen Titans fan message boards to see if anyone had news about exciting missions they’d been on lately. He knew it was kind of cringe to visit those sites so often, but he couldn’t help but admire the teen heroes. Superboy and Wonder Girl and Impulse and all of them just seemed so cool…
It didn’t hurt that Superboy was just so goddamn cute.
The walk back to his house went fine. He didn’t see anything or anyone of note, unless he counted Mr. Wayne’s elderly butler, who was out working in the gardens and waved at Tim when he noticed him passing by. Tim, not wanting to be rude, waved back, but he quickly hurried on towards his own driveway, lest the kindly old man try talking to him. Not that Tim himself would really mind, but his mother barely tolerated it when Tim conversed with their own housekeeper, he shuddered to think what she’d say if it somehow got back to her that he had been seen chatting with their neighbor’s butler!
When he got inside, he ditched his uniform in his room and took the rest of his unfinished homework downstairs in the living room. This he finished completely in an hour. Seriously, what was Tim-of-yesterday’s problem? It’s not like any of his work was actually hard… With all his obligations squared away, he turned on the television to catch the evening news while pulling up a food delivery service on his phone. He didn’t really feel like cooking for himself—but that was totally normal, for him.
It was as he was debating the merits of getting Thai versus Indian that his completely average and typical Tim Drake evening took an abrupt turn.
“Well, well. What do we have here?” There was a clicking sound next to his ear, followed by something hard and circular being pressed into his temple. “One little birdy, all alone in his big empty nest.”
Tim stiffened and tried to look out of the corner of his eyes at the intruder. Whoever it was, they were standing behind the couch, so he couldn’t get them in view. After another beat of heavy silence, Tim forced himself to speak, and was proud that he was able to keep most of his fear out of his voice. “If this is a robbery, you should know that all the artifacts in the display cases are reproductions. You could sell them for about as much as a souvenir from a museum. All the real shit is in safety deposit boxes in a bank, so maybe you should go rob that instead.”
“I’m not here for your grave robbing parents’ knick knacks! ” The intruder snapped. “I’m—oh, just turn around!”
The pressure on his temple disappeared, and Tim hastened to comply with the command, both out of a sense of self preservation and a morbid curiosity about who would have decided to break into his house. The intruder was a large, bulky fellow, dressed in a leather jacket and carrying a frankly ridiculous number of guns. Also, he had a really weird, bright red helmet obscuring his face.
Tim stared up at him, waiting for him to speak and reveal just what exactly was going on. After a few moments of silence, he finally did.
“Surprised to see me, Replacement?” The person bit out. Their voice sounded odd, actually; Tim wondered if they’d tried to put something in the helmet to make them sound like Darth Vader, or something. It was kind of weird, and maybe kind of cool. More weird than cool, though.
“I mean. You did just break into my house, so yeah,” Tim said, blinking up at him. “Wait, is this a kidnapping?”
“Why would I want to kidnap you? Then I’d be stuck with you! Nah, I’m just here to pick off where we were so rudely interrupted last time.”
Tim stared at him, furrowing his brow. “Um. Last time?”
The intruder scoffed. “Yeah, when I cornered you in your precious tower and told you I was going to clip your wings, but then your idiot teammates—”
“What’s with all the bird metaphors?” Tim interrupted, before realizing it was probably not a great idea to interrupt the guy holding a gun in one’s face. When the intruder froze, but fell silent, Tim decided to press his luck and get whatever information out of this guy that he could. “Like, is this a weird new villain schtick? You’re… the Bird… Helmet… Man?”
“What? No, I’m—Hood. I’m the Red Hood!”
Tim frowned. “Um, I hate to break it to you, but that name is sort of already taken? I mean, the guy who used to have it isn’t using it right now, but there’s already a sort of association with it here in Gotham, if you get my drift, so you might want to think of something different in order to avoid that—”
“I know exactly who used to use this name, fuck you very much!” The intruder hissed. To Tim’s surprise, he holstered his gun and reached up to yank off his helmet, revealing a head of dark hair with a white streak, a surprisingly youthful face, and a black domino mask covering his eyes and making him look like some sort of vigilante. “What the fuck is wrong with you today, Replacement?” Without the helmet, his voice was much less grating.
“It’s Timothy, actually,” Tim corrected. “Tim to my friends… Which, I guess you’re here to rob my parents or kidnap me or something so we probably aren’t friends—”
“No shit we aren’t friends,” the self-proclaimed Red Hood hissed at him, the lenses on his mask narrowing into a glare. “You replaced me! You stole my name, my family, my city—”
“Whoa, whoa, whoa, Mr. Hood. I’m not sure who you’re actually looking for, but I can say with quite certainty that I’ve never stolen anything from you,” Tim said quickly. “I’ve never stolen! I’ve never even shoplifted, not even when Mindy Morris dared me to in the fifth grade!” Was it possible that this was all just a big misunderstanding? God, he hoped so.
“You stole Robin,” Red Hood hissed.
Tim blinked. “I stole what now?”
Red Hood stared at him for a long moment before slamming his helmet onto the table next to the couch and pulling out his gun again. “Stop fucking with me, Replacement, I’m so not in the mood. I came here to make you pay—”
“I’ve got five hundred dollars in cash in my room,” Tim offered quickly. “I’ll go get it for you. Will that make up for uh… whatever it is that I did?”
“You know what you did!” Red Hood said, his voice starting to turn a little bit desperate now. “And I didn’t mean to make you pay with money. I don’t need your fucking money, you rich little fuck! I came to make you pay with tears, with blood, with agony—”
“Geez, what the fuck is wrong with you!” Tim sputtered. “I’m a goddamn high schooler! I can barely keep up in gym class, I’m not a threat to someone like you! Are you some sort of creep who just likes beating up skinny kids?”
Red Hood snarled. “When the kid’s gone and made himself Robin, then yeah, maybe I do!”
“I don’t know what the hell this robin of yours is!” Tim cried, starting to feel vaguely hysterical.
“Ha, ha, very funny. You’re Robin, you moron, and take it from me—Robin means you’re dead.”
“I am not a robin! I am a human!” Tim said as tears of fear and frustration sprung to his eyes. A burglary would be one thing to deal with. A kidnapping attempt would be another. But because he couldn’t get this asshole to give him a straight answer about what he was here to do, aside from beating Tim up for some unknown offense, he had no idea how he was supposed to handle this. Would his parents forgive him for his ineptitude?
Red Hood glowered at him for a minute longer before taking a step back. “Enough of this. I didn’t come here to play mind games—I came here to fight. And because I’m a reasonable guy, I’ll even give you a chance to arm yourself. Where’s your staff?”
Tim blinked at the non sequitur. “The housekeeper will be here… soon.” She actually wouldn’t, it was her day off (she had several of those), but he wasn’t about to admit that to the man who’d broken into his house and started spewing nonsense while waving a gun in his face.
“Oh my god, you rich, dense motherfucker—get up!” Hood punctuated his order with a flick of his gun, so Tim hastened to comply. “Where do you keep your gear? Gotta be your bedroom, right? Come on, lead the way.”
“What gear?” Tim muttered, but another dark look from the Hood had him shutting up and hurrying up in the direction of his bedroom. Why exactly they were doing it was still not clear to Tim—maybe he’d decided to go for the $500 after all?
Once they reached Tim’s bedroom, Hood stared at him expectantly for a long moment. “Well?”
“Well what?”
Hood threw the hand not busy pointing a gun at Tim up in the air. “I have to do fucking everything around here, apparently!” He then proceeded to kick his way around Tim’s bedroom, knocking over piles of clothes and yanking open drawers all the while keeping his gun trained on Tim. Tim just stood there, his emotions frozen somewhere between confusion and fear.
He honestly probably should be more afraid right now, but he was also just so goddamn lost.
Finally, a noise of triumph came from inside his closet and Hood popped out a moment later, holding a long metal rod that Tim had never seen before in his life. “Your weapon, Robin.”
Tim blinked. “That’s…. What? A weird pipe? What was it doing in my closet?”
“Oh, would you just—here. Cut the act already!” Hood stepped back over to him and thrust the pipe thingy towards him. Tim got the hint and took it, letting the unfamiliar weight sag in his palm. It was heavier than he expected, and he had to maneuver it carefully to avoid whacking the mirror on his wall and breaking it.
Tim looked between Hood and the pipe thingy a few times before screwing up his face in uncertainty. “You want me to, uh… hit you with this?”
Hood scoffed. “If you can. Come on now, Robin—stand up and fight me!”
Tim took a deep breath. Ok. There was a man with a gun demanding Tim hit him with a pipe from his closet. While Tim failed to see how this was going to benefit the other man in any way, it was also just about the first concrete thing Hood had demanded, so Tim was more than willing to comply. He lifted his arms back, and then swung the pipe towards Hood with all the force he could muster.
The force of it hitting Hood’s shoulder wrenched it from his hands and sent it clattering onto the floor. Hood didn’t even wince.
His lips curled in distaste. “Is that really all you’ve got? You’re pathetic. How can Batman stand the sight of you?”
Tim frowned, feeling a little more than insulted. Red Hood breaks into his house and terrorizes him just to insult Tim’s whacking abilities? “How should I know, I’ve never met the guy.”
Hood went still. “I thought I told you to cut the act.”
Tim crossed his arms, feeling himself prickle in defensive irritation. “What act? And how is Batman at all relevant to anything?”
“I—of course Batman is relevant. This is about Robin!”
“Birds and bats are different things,” Tim pointed out. Another furious sneer spasmed over Hood’s face, but surprisingly the man took a step back and looked Tim up and down as if reevaluating something.
“Yes, Robin and Batman are different. But—they go together. It would be hard for us to talk about one without bringing up the other,” Hood said slowly.
“Seriously, would you explain what’s up with these robins you keep mentioning?”
“It’s—Robin is Batman’s Partner. You are Batman’s partner.”
Tim frowned. Literally nothing Hood was saying was ringing a bell. First of all, Tim had never heard of Batman having a partner before—and Tim loved following the exploits of heroes by stalking them online, he definitely would have if such a person existed. Second of all, the suggestion that he, plain old Timothy Drake, could ever work with Batman was frankly ridiculous. “I think you might be confused,” Tim said haltingly. “Maybe you’re thinking of Batgirl? I wouldn’t exactly call them partners, but she does work with him from time to time.”
Hood was standing perfectly still and staring at him. His expression had started to shift from anger and malice towards confusion, which Tim definitely counted as a win. If he could somehow confuse this man enough to convince him to leave his house, maybe he could still make it out of this evening in one piece…
“Did you—do you have a head injury?” Hood said after a moment.
Tim furrowed his brow. “No. Do you?”
“No—I wear a helmet for a reason, numbskull. Well, you’re really not acting right. And if it’s not blunt force trauma, then it might be a drug, or some magical bullshit. And all of that is well above my paygrade, so I think it’s time for me to go. Have you heard from B today?”
“Now there are bees?”
“Motherfucker.”
“Jason.”
Tim nearly jumped out of his skin as a looming presence appeared behind him. A large hand closed around his shoulder and pulled him backwards. He stumbled, but managed to catch himself before ending up sprawled on the hallway floor. He looked up to see that another strange man had entered his house, but this one had apparently put himself between Tim and Hood’s guns, which was really rather nice of him, and—
Wait. Holy shit. “Oh my god, Bruce Wayne?”
What the everloving fuck was Bruce freaking Wayne doing in his house? This was awful! Horrifying! Mr. Wayne was one of the most powerful men in Gotham, and he was inside Drake Manor when it was not ready for important guests in the slightest! His mother was going to lecture him for days when she found out that this happened on his watch! Maybe he should actually get Hood to shoot him—just a little, like in the arm or something, something he could recover from but that would earn him some pity points when his parents found out.
“You seriously don’t even know Bruce?” Hood said, his voice pinched with an odd note that Tim might call concern on someone who hadn’t broken into his house. “What the hell is wrong with you?”
Bruce Wayne glanced over his shoulder at Tim, his thick brow furrowed in concentration. “Tim?”
Tim blinked several times before dragging his bland socialite smile up from the depths of his soul where he left it when his parents weren’t in town and fixing it in place. “Good afternoon, Mr. Wayne. It’s a pleasure to see you again, even under such odd circumstances.”
“He’s been off since I got here,” Hood said. Which, duh, of course Tim was off his game, Hood had broken into his house. “Did your new kid get replaced with some weird robot or something? An alien pod person body snatcher? Shit, was Replacement replaced?”
Bruce Wayne looked back over to Hood. “His bio trackers are all online, so I doubt it. What do you mean by ‘off’?”
“He doesn’t know he’s Robin!” Hood cried out, now sounding like he was the one on the verge of hysterics. “He doesn’t even know what Robin is! I don’t even know if he still knows you’re Batman!”
Tim felt his eyes grow so wide that they must resemble the size of dinner plates. Did he really hear that right? “Mr. Wayne, are you actually Batman?”
“It was a spell,” Tim said a few weeks later, leaning against one of the concrete pillars that ringed his favorite skatepark. Almost no one was close enough to hear him speak, but he kept his voice quiet anyway.
Jason, sans armor and helmet but still sporting his leather jacket, was sitting on an adjacent bench, leaning back with an air of faux casualness as he watched the skaters in the distance. “I know. Dickhead told me.”
Nightwing had shown up at Tim’s house, practically on a warpath after Tim had failed to respond to several Bat check-ins throughout the day, and had been just in time to foil Red Hood’s attempt at escaping the incredibly awkward situation that had developed (Tim may have accused Bruce of trying to kidnap him several times very loudly, but in his defense, a very large man he didn’t remember knowing was trying to convince him to go to the secret lair hidden in his basement, and deprived of context as he had been, it was very creepy). Given that the entire situation had thrown Jason off his game, Dick had managed to subdue Jason and taken him away to… somewhere. Tim hadn’t cared to ask at the time, and Bruce had been too busy trying to convince Tim that it was going to be ok, he just had to step into the secret tunnel behind the broken grandfather clock. Anyway, wherever they’d gone seemed to have been the right decision on Dick’s part because all of the sudden Jason was talking to Dick again and had even asked Dick to ask Tim if they could meet up briefly so he could apologize.
“Zatanna said it was really sloppy, though. The magician we fought had meant to destroy Robin, but she used the wrong kind of base for the spell, and it destroyed all memory of Robin instead. Not only did I not know about myself, but I didn’t remember you or Dick at all either. And since my knowledge of B’s identity originated with Robin, that was gone as well.”
“I know, Dick literally will not shut up about anything ever now that I’ve given him my number,” Jason said, his voice dripping with irritation, but with an unmistakable note of fondness as well. “But you’re good now, right?” he said, in that awkward gruff way of his that Dick said meant he secretly cared about him. Tim knew Dick was probably projecting his own desires, but it was a nice thing to tell himself. That Jason Todd might care about him, a little bit. “You know who you are?”
“Definitely,” Tim said with a smirk. “And I remember who you are now, too.”
“Good…” Jason’s voice trailed off as he watched one of the younger skaters trying to do a kickflip.
Tim pushed himself up off the pillar and tensed, readying himself to run because he knew Jason would most likely get pissed off and chase after him. “I remember that you’re Robin.”
Jason whipped around to glare at him. Tim just grinned and scooped up his skateboard before he bolted towards the main part of the park. Jason wasn’t going to attack him in front of a bunch of kids, and Alfred would be the one to pick Tim up, so he’d escape the older boy’s wrath for now. He knew he was playing with fire, poking Jason with the painful reminders he didn’t want to face when they’d just barely talked him past his vengeful rage on their family, but sue him. He was Robin, after all. If Tim could manage to remember it, then one day Jason could too.