Work Text:
THEN
Caller ID says unknown. Bruce knows exactly who it is.
Damn the greater good, and damn God’s plan for humanity. The dirt on the grave is still fresh. There’s no paradise without Jason; let everyone who thinks they need his blood to water the flowers in Eden be damned.
A younger Bruce might’ve been more starstruck at the idea that he could take calls from angels. Bruce now, jaded and cynical, lets it ring through.
Minutes later, his phone lights up again.
He could let it drop again, but the caller would take it upon himself to show up in Bruce’s house and…
Tim is here.
Tim’s at the table, flipping through a tome with a serious expression on his face. He’s trying not to look excited; he’s doing a pretty good job of it, but Bruce is Bruce.
There’s the crux of it.
He picks up the phone.
Dick suffers from a healthy amount of vigilantism; if not brought on by his parents’ untimely death, certainly by Bruce Wayne’s unfortunate… lifestyle, which he’d passed onto Dick when he adopted him at the age of 8. Dick could load and cock a gun faster than he could tie his shoelaces, and he’d had to do the former in a rush much more often than the latter.
Which means it was entirely reasonable for him to do that very thing when the twelve year-old had broken into his apartment through the window - it was actually very kind of him not to shoot on sight, which was really for the best, because otherwise the twelve year-old would not have gotten the chance to explain that he knew Bruce.
“I’m seventeen, ” is all said twelve year-old deigns to respond with when Dick voices all this out loud.
Dick tosses the gun onto his bed, but hands the kid a silver knife, blade first. “To be fair,” he continues, “knowing Bruce doesn’t mean much in terms of whether or not I should shoot you.”
“Please don’t shoot me,” the kid says, eyes going all wide like he’s scared. Something about it is familiar, but he doesn’t really look the part - his mouth is too even, and when he takes the knife, he runs the flat of it against his bare arm almost mockingly. Dick shrugs. Sue him, he’s doing his checks like a good little hunter.
It’s when the kid goes to hand the knife back, fingers casually comfortable around the hilt, that the pieces click into place.
Oh, shit.
Dick stares at the kid - the kid, seventeen, the kid, who knows Bruce - in front of him, and feels his own face fall with the realization. “You’re Tim Drake.”
Tim shifts his weight nervously. “You seem… less than happy about that information.”
‘Less than happy’ is a way to put it.
Dick knows Tim Drake. Not personally, not until now, but he knows Tim Drake. Everyone in Gotham knows the Drakes, sure - not so many know about their prodigious son, though Dick’s never been just anyone. Tim genuinely was twelve the last time they saw each other - armed with that knowledge, Dick can grudgingly admit that maybe he really is a seventeen-year-old, albeit a bit of a baby-faced one - and he’d been sitting at a piano, back perfectly straight and fingers perfectly plunking out Liszt’s Étude No. 3.
Five years ago, Tim was just another Gotham kid playing piano in the corner of a party. Dick might’ve thought of his music fondly, but largely would not have thought of him at all.
Then, two years ago.
Jason died. Dick and Bruce had their last, big, blowout fight.
And, six months later, Dick had heard through the Jim Gordon-grapevine that Tim Drake was running around Gotham with rock salt bullets and a silver knife.
Looking at Tim now, Dick almost feels queasy. He really is just a kid, for all his bravado and apparent skill at breaking into other people’s apartments. Sure, Dick had gotten started as a kid, because that had ended so well for him. Jason was just a kid too.
“Bruce is missing,” Tim says after minutes of letting the silence drag on, like Dick has it in him to give a singular fuck about Bruce right now.
He doesn’t say that. He sits down on the bed, knife abandoned next to the gun, and lets a breath out.
“Kate’s in DC right now,” he says. “You didn’t have to come all the way out to California for help on this. Anyone who’s known Bruce for a couple years could do it.”
Tim raises an eyebrow. “You’re helping now, aren’t you?”
Dick doesn’t have an argument for that, because damnit, he totally is. It’d probably be rude to just send the kid packing at this point. “Bruce goes missing all the time,” he continues flippantly. “He probably just forgot to tell you about some job or the other that he’s disappeared off on. He’ll be back in a few days.”
“It’s not the same,” Tim insists. He looks around him and drags Dick’s desk chair over, settling down into it backwards. “I can track him when he does that. But my trackers aren’t showing anything this time.”
“You track Bruce.”
“Well, yeah.” Tim frowns. “Didn’t you?”
“That kind of tech’s a bit recent for my time,” Dick says. He doesn’t add that it never would’ve occurred to him, as a kid or pre-teen or teen, to track Bruce. Either that says something about his naivety or something about Tim’s trust issues.
“Whatever,” Tim responds dismissively. “On Monday he took a phone call from someone called Kal, and then he just - left. Just like that. He probably wouldn’t have even remembered to tell me he was going out if I weren’t sitting at the dining table at the time.”
Kal. Dick knows that name - he can’t remember why he knows it, but it’s on the tip of his tongue, a brushed-aside memory from however many years ago…
“- and you know, it’s like you said, B goes off on trips all the time, but yesterday he called me and said something about Jason -”
Dick snaps to attention. “Jason? What the hell did he have to say to you about Jason ?”
It’s hard not to feel angry, thinking about Jason and all the ways Bruce failed him. All the ways Dick failed him. Harder, still, when Tim is standing in front of him, seventeen all the same and rambling the way that kids do.
“He said -” Tim’s mask drops here, for the first time, easy confidence giving way to something hesitant and nervous, “- well, it’s not that important, but I think the fact that B said it is a bit concerning, I didn’t really think he’d fall for something like that.”
Dick bravely resists the urge to slam his head into the wall; Bruce’s ability to sidestep and evade the relevant parts of conversations is contagious, apparently. “What did he say ?”
“He said,” Tim starts slowly, testing each word like he’s learning to speak for the first time, “he said that Jason is coming back.”
NOW
The girl with hair like fire, hair like the blood around him, is standing over Jason’s headstone, a mighty axe held loosely in one hand. When Bruce blinks, her image flickers, and she turns her head to look down at him. Lying prone on the ground as he is, she towers over him. She says nothing; just stands and waits.
He thinks the dirt is shifting.
Out of the tree line in the distance, two boys with black hair burst out. Boys, really. Just kids. Surely Bruce is dreaming now; dreaming of seeing Dick and Tim with matching horrified expressions, dreaming of seeing the dirt over Jason’s grave move.
The earth does not rumble, but the girl - angel, angel, he remembers now - kneels and places her palm on it.
Callused fingers, smudged with dirt and blood, break through the dirt to grasp her hand.