Archive of Our Own ^beta

Despite all the complaints he’s received on the matter, Bruce has learned over the years that sometimes it is in fact better to hide things from the people you love when you are certain, without a shadow of a doubt, that doing so serves in their best interest. People don’t always know what they need, and they don’t always have to know. That’s what Bruce is here for. That is what a father does.

“The Olsen case is wrapped up, and I forwarded all the info on the perp to your tablet,” Tim informs Bruce a quarter past eleven. “You can pick him up while he’s working his shift at the factory tomorrow night to keep the element of surprise.” Tim rubs his eyes with a drawn-out yawn. “Oh, and that stuck ‘S’ key on the keyboard? All fixed. You must’ve spilled coffee on it or something.”

Bruce looks up from the files he’s organizing to nod. “Thank you, Tim.”

“Also, don’t delete any of the tabs I left open because I’m using them all for research, and bookmarking sites is a waste of time because it’s not scrolled to the specific part of the page that I need—”

“Tim.” At Tim’s startled blink, Bruce says, “This is all a long-winded way of telling me you’re going to bed, correct?”

“Uh, correct.”

“Good. I’ll be up in a few hours.”

Tim snorts as he rises from his desk chair, cracking his stiff back. “Right. Try to catch some sleep before breakfast at least, or Alfred’ll dye all your shirts pink again.”

“Hn.” Bruce doesn’t need to be told twice; he still lives in fear after the last time. Before Tim can make it more than a few steps away from the Batcomputer, Bruce checks, “Have you taken your meds?” It’s like pulling teeth to get the kid to take the damn things on time. Take them too early and he’ll fall asleep in the middle of dinner; too late, and he’s up all night.

He can’t see Tim as he passes behind Bruce’s station to the stairs, but he knows the boy is rolling his eyes. “Yes, Dad.”

“And don’t forget about your meeting tomorrow morning. It’s at nine-thirty, so set an alarm.”

“In another life you were a helicopter mom, you know that?”

“Goodnight, Tim.”

Tim laughs. “Night, Bruce.”

After Tim has disappeared up the stairs to the manor, Bruce checks the time again. It takes approximately twenty minutes for Tim to complete his bedtime routine and fall asleep. Bruce will head up after that.

It took a few weeks of trial and error for Bruce to perfect his own bedtime routine without Tim getting wise, and he is determined to keep that streak going indefinitely.

“He’s going to find out eventually,” Dick warned Bruce that first week of his new strategy. “He’s too much like you. He’ll sense we’re hiding something from him, and he won’t stop until he finds out what.”

Bruce waved it off. “I’ll figure it out.”

“This isn’t something you can just figure out,” Dick insisted, aggravated. Bruce respected his skepticism, but not his anger. They both knew this was the best thing for Tim—the only thing. “He doesn’t even know half the things he’s done. It’s not fair to keep him in the dark about his own life.”

“If it were you, could you live with it?” Bruce countered. Dick didn’t answer, but his fallen expression said it all. “That’s why I do this. He can’t handle knowing the truth. You know that as well as I do. I will do whatever it takes to keep my son safe, do you understand me? No one is telling him anything.”

After the night the Joker died, Tim hasn’t been the same—not that anyone thought he ever would be back to the way he was before. It took months alone just to bring him back to sanity, let alone his old self. The scars inflicted on Tim during those three weeks in captivity were permanent, mentally and physically.

Leslie has looked into plastic surgeons who could potentially repair the smile-scars carved into Tim’s face, but it’s unlikely that Tim will ever be rid of them completely. The wounds were too jagged and healed too poorly. Tim wears concealer to cover them up, but the shape and texture are still plain to see.

Even after leaving psychiatric care, Tim had night terrors every night. He would wake up two to three times a night screaming, laughing, fighting off anyone who was near him or tried to help him. Bruce didn’t think it was even possible for Tim to get any less sleep than he already did. He wouldn’t talk about the nightmares, but it didn’t take a genius to figure out what they were about. Bruce is still affected to this day by the horrors he witnessed in the Joker’s video recordings.

Tim isolated himself as soon as he was recovered enough to be allowed out of 24/7 supervision again. He rented his own apartment on the upper west side and rarely spent time with the family anymore apart from patrol. He didn’t want to face them, and none of them knew how to comfort him, which allowed Tim to get lost in the shuffle somewhere along the way.

Bruce will never forgive himself for not stepping in when Tim needed him. Maybe if he had, he could have prevented all this from happening.

No one understood what was going on at first. When the Joker reappeared in the headlines nine months after his death, Bruce was certain that the clown had been resurrected—that even the gates of Hell turned away such a monster and sent him back to the land of the living. How else could there be Joker sightings and crimes committed nightly that matched his MO perfectly? Even a copycat killer couldn’t be so skilled. They couldn’t know the things the Joker knew. Even Harley had no idea how or when he came back, but she and Ivy left Gotham immediately after to avoid getting caught up in it.

Bodies started turning up left and right, all butchered in terrible ways, and always at night. The only people who actually saw the Joker during this time ended up dead, which gave Batman little to go on.

It was weeks of this before things changed. Bruce received a call from Tim at five in the morning on his personal cell phone—the emergency one that only his family members know the number of. He’d never heard Tim so panicked before, even when on the brink of death.

Tim had woken up in a warehouse on the opposite side of town. He was still in his pajamas, except now they were soaked in blood that wasn’t his own. “I—I don’t—” Tim was hyperventilating too much to get out anything that made sense. “There’s bodies, Bruce. I think…I think I killed them? Th-there are knives. I don’t remember anything. I don’t know how I got here, Bruce, please—h-help me.”

It wasn’t Tim. Bruce knew that. Tim would never do that to someone. But it was Tim’s body that carried the tasks out, and that made things complicated.

Once the gaps were filled in and Bruce realized what was happening to Tim, it made sense, in hindsight. Why Tim couldn’t remember a good deal of the Joker’s torture, why he lost time sometimes even during the day, the terrible nightmares of himself performing gleeful atrocities as if he was watching it happen through a camera lens.

The nightmares were real, but it was Joker Junior doing all of it. Tim was just the captive audience.

Tim slept in the holding cell in the Batcave for two weeks after that, by his own decision. He refused to let it happen again, refused to let the monster inside of him get anyone else, and every night Bruce would watch over him so he wouldn’t have to be alone.

It wasn’t a constant occurrence. Most nights passed without an incident as Tim slept soundly until morning. Other nights, however, the night terrors would strike and JJ came out to play. He couldn’t get out of the cell, but it didn’t take a detective to guess what would happen if he were released on the world. If Tim were released.

“I don’t know how to stop him,” Tim cried to Bruce once during those stressful weeks, exhausted after keeping himself awake so many nights, terrified to fall asleep. “I can’t make it go away. I just want it all to stop.”

Tim went through multiple treatments to try and suppress this alternate identity of his. All sorts of different drugs and psychotherapies were inflicted on him—everything short of electroshock treatment, which Bruce refused to allow. It got to the point where Tim was begging his family to lock him up in Arkham Asylum and throw away the key. Bruce couldn’t stand it.

It was a combination of four different drugs that finally started to change things nearly two months after the secret of Joker Junior was revealed. A mood stabilizer, an antipsychotic, and two kinds of benzodiazepines were what did the trick. Tim started sleeping through the night better, and when he woke up he had no memory of any nightmares.

The bad nights became farther between, and when they did happen and JJ got out, Tim didn’t remember any of it. He had no idea about the threats spewed from his own mouth, the psychotic fantasies his other half detailed to Bruce through the glass wall separating them. Tim was so relieved to be seemingly free of Joker Junior altogether that when he decided he was fit to leave the cell and move back into his old room at the manor, Bruce didn’t discourage him.

If Tim had no idea the incidents were still happening, then Bruce wasn’t going to ruin what little progress he’d made by telling him. He couldn’t risk losing his son to his inner demon.

Besides, Bruce is handling the situation just fine. He watches over Tim every night while he sleeps, waits for JJ to appear, and takes care of it before anyone can get hurt. Tim doesn’t need to know. As long as he keeps taking his medicine, he’ll believe he’s cured. He can live his life without fear, and doesn’t he deserve that after everything he’s been through? How could Bruce tell him the truth and take away the one small glimmer of hope he has?

Sometimes he and the others take shifts watching over Tim; Dick will spend the night, or Jason, or Barbara. All are armed and prepared with a sedative on the chance that JJ gets violent, but nothing that will hurt Tim. None of them could stomach it.

Most nights turn out fine, anyway. The JJ incidents are down to no more than once a week, and he hasn’t made it out of the manor since that first night they realized what they were up against. Usually Tim sleeps soundly through the night until five minutes before his alarm is scheduled to go off, which is when Bruce slinks back to his own bedroom and sleeps well into the afternoon. It’s a functional system. Gotham is safe, and Tim believes he is healed. Everyone is happy.

Bruce has learned to bring his tablet with him so he can get work done or read a novel while Tim sleeps. He sits in the beanbag chair in the corner of Tim’s room and wraps up a few cases until a little after three o’clock when his phone suddenly starts ringing.

Bruce scrambles to answer it before the sound can wake Tim. The sleep meds Tim is on make him hard to wake during the night, but Bruce doesn’t take risks. It’s Clark calling from the Watchtower; Plastic Man got them all locked out of the computer system again trying to download a movie, and Bruce is the only one who can ever remember how to restart the system.

Bruce takes his phone down the hall into one of the sitting rooms to walk Clark through it out of Tim’s earshot. He isn’t gone long—eight or nine minutes at most. Tim has been fine all night; he can handle a few minutes unsupervised.

Except when Bruce returns to Tim’s bedroom, the bed is empty.

Bruce is on high alert in an instant. He doesn’t raise any alarms or alert the family—not yet. The window is still closed and locked, so at least he knows Tim didn’t jump. Bruce checks in the closet and under the bed, but both are empty. The room is undisturbed apart from one picture frame out of the collection on Tim’s desk: this one in particular is of Tim and Superboy from back before the Joker kidnapped Tim and his entire life changed. The frame has been smashed and a large shard of glass is missing.

That’s when Bruce hears a quiet creak behind him, and suddenly something long and sharp is being plunged into his left shoulder blade. Bruce grunts and folds, but only for a second before he whips around and lashes out at his attacker. It’s a shame Tim is faster than Bruce.

No—not Tim. JJ.

It’s jarring to confront the monster that is now wearing Tim’s face and Tim’s pajamas, but he is nothing like Tim. JJ grins up at Bruce, eyes wide with wretched glee.

Bruce reaches back and yanks the shard of glass out of his shoulder. He is going to need stitches, but later. He can’t let JJ get out of the manor. “Tim—”

“Tim’s stepped into the other room.” The thing wearing Tim’s face giggles maniacally. “But I’ll be sure to tell him you called.” And he leaps at Bruce.

It’s difficult to fight back without hurting Tim. If he were using his full strength, it would be easy for Bruce to take down JJ and be done with it, but that’s his son’s body that has been weaponized against him. Any punch or strike would be left on his son in the form of a bruise, and Bruce just can’t bring himself to do that to Tim after everything he’s already inflicted upon him. He just needs to get close enough to JJ that he can inject the sedative without damaging Tim in the process.

JJ cackles through it all, taunting him. “The big bad Batman,” he sings. “Can’t even take a joke!”

JJ gets in another lucky strike, this time with a letter opener from Tim’s desk. He slashes across Bruce’s leg, making it buckle, but the closeness of the attack gives Bruce the window he needs. He seizes JJ by the hair and, with his other hand, jams the device with the sedative into JJ’s neck and injects it.

It only takes a few seconds for the chilling laughter to weaken, for his eyes to droop, and then JJ gradually goes limp in Bruce’s hold.

Once he’s finally out, Bruce sighs and catches his breath. His leg has begun bleeding all over the hardwood floor, which he will have to clean before Tim wakes up. The wound on his shoulder isn’t doing great either.

Bruce carries Tim back to bed, being careful not to get any blood on Tim’s pajamas. He’ll sleep through his alarm while the sedative has ahold of him, but Bruce will go to the meeting in his stead tomorrow so he can sleep it off.

After Bruce has tucked Tim back under the covers, he turns and discovers a half-asleep Dick standing in the open doorway surveying the bloody scene before him. He’s only moderately surprised to see Bruce battered while Tim sleeps soundly in his bed. It isn't the first time, and it won't be the last. “Thought I heard banging,” Dick says by way of explanation. He rubs one tired eye. “You okay?”

Bruce bends to pick up the bloody letter opener with a grunt. “Flesh wounds. I’ll be fine. Will you watch over him while I get this cleaned up?” He only has a few hours before he has to be up for Tim's meeting. It's cutting it close, but he can make this work. He always does.

He needn’t have bothered asking for help; they both know Dick can’t say no. They’re stuck in this together. “You can’t protect him from this forever,” Dick reminds him. “You’re not always going to be there when this happens.”

Bruce brushes past Dick as he limps out of the room, blood droplets dripping behind his carved-up leg. “Watch me.”

He's a parent. That's his job, isn't it?