Chapter Text
There were many things that Leonard Mitchell had prepared for.
Death, for Leonard Mitchell, was not peaceful.
It was smoke. Screams. A vision of himself reflected in cracked glass, eyes wide with understanding just moments too late.
And then—nothing.
But nothing did not last.
There was a silence deeper than death.
Not the kind found in crypts or caskets but the cosmic kind. The silence between the ticking of fate’s clock. A silence where the past burned away, and only truth remained.
Leonard Mitchell opened his eyes.
But they were not his.
The rise of the Red Priest, the return of ancient evils, the crawling entropy at the edges of reality.
He had prepared for pain, for betrayal, for divine silence. He had stared madness in the eye, and, with a tired grin, called it by name.
He had not prepared for this.
The first sensation wasn’t touch. It wasn’t even breath. It was a terrible stillness. A pause between heartbeats, as if the universe itself was holding its breath.
Then—light.
Not the holy light of the Evernight Goddess, nor the flickering lamp glow of Backlund’s rainy evenings. This was sterile, artificial. It buzzed.
His body felt wrong.
Too soft. Too small.
Too clean.
He tried to reach inward—to sink into his spiritual body, to find out what was happing, But there was only a quiet, childlike confusion.
Then it came: a trickle, soft and warm, a whisper behind his consciousness. Not an entity. Not an angel’s gaze. Just… a name.
Timothy Jackson Drake.
He didn’t know how he knew it. It was like remembering a dream that was never his to begin with. The name sat in his mind with quiet insistence.
He tried to cling to Leonard.
But the fog of death takes everything eventually—even identity.
"He's waking up."
A voice. Female. Soft, but strained. Not the confident speech of aristocracy, nor the hushed whispers of cults. Just... maternal fear.
Leonard opened his eyes slowly, blinking against the glow of white ceiling tiles and cold fluorescent light. The walls were pale, almost grey, and the air smelled faintly of plastic and antiseptic. There was the rhythmic beeping of a heart monitor to his right, its constancy more eerie than comforting.
He turned his head.
A woman sat beside the bed, dark-haired, elegant even in exhaustion. There were fine lines around her eyes, and her makeup had smudged slightly at the corners. She wore pearls, too neat for a late-night hospital visit, and her hands clutched his too-small ones with quiet desperation.
"Tim… sweetheart? Can you hear me?"
Leonard didn’t answer right away. He observed her—measured the tightness of her grip, the tremor in her voice, the too-perfect posture that only cracked in the presence of grief.
She was afraid of losing him.
She had lost him, in a way.
Because Tim Drake—the real one—was gone.
"Yes," he said at last.
The voice that came out was not his.
That night, Leonard sat curled up in the bed of a suburban mansion, one hand clutching a stuffed elephant he’d found on the nightstand. A child’s room. Too organized to be recently used, but lived-in nonetheless. The walls were soft blue. Bookshelves lined the corners—volumes about animals, puzzles, and a few comic books. He stared at the shadows thrown by the elephant-shaped nightlight across the ceiling.
Memories seeped in.
Not his.
They came in flashes.
A circus. Laughter.
A boy in red and green.
A name: Dick Grayson.
A camera lens. A moment of awe.
Tim was observant. Quiet. Always watching.
He had followed the Bat—not as prey, not as an enemy—but as puzzle, as myth, as anchor. Even at this young age, he'd wanted to understand. And that made Leonard pause.
Because he had been the same.
Leonard Mitchell. Nighthawk, Night Watcher, and Sleepless.
He had watched the tides of fate until they consumed him. Drowned him. Now, somehow, he had surfaced again—into this boy. This place.
Gotham.
He whispered the name to himself like a spell.
It didn’t sound holy. It sounded… tainted.
In the days that followed, Leonard tried not to draw attention to the shift inside him. He played the part of a recovering child: quiet, withdrawn, occasionally confused. The adults attributed it to trauma. Some "fall." An accident he couldn’t remember. But Leonard did remember.
Not the fall.
But the end of the world.
And the beginning of this one.
The Drakes—his parents—were wealthy, often distant. His mother lingered now, but there was guilt in her presence, not tenderness. His father was gone for days. Leonard watched them both with the detachment of someone too old for such innocence. They were fragile. Not from weakness, but from the illusion of control.
There were books here. Newspapers. A globe in the study. He read all he could when no one was looking. The names were different. The geography was familiar, but altered. America, yes. But also… Metropolis. Gotham. Central City. Cities that hummed with secret power.
And then there were names that rang with meaning, even to one who had lived under the shadow of true gods.
Batman.
A human, apparently. No powers. No superhuman strength. Just will. Obsession. Pain.
Leonard studied the myths. Watched old news clips, grainy footage of a caped figure vanishing into the skyline. He saw the same thing in Bruce Wayne that he'd seen in Klein Moretti: a man marked by tragedy, remade by it. Someone who had stared into the void—and built a mask from the pieces.
There was no Tarot in this world. No Sequences. But that didn’t mean the arcane was absent.
It simply wore different names.
One evening, lightning cracked the sky outside the Drake estate. Thunder rolled across Gotham like a god’s slow exhale. Leonard stood at the window, watching the rain gather into rivers along the glass.
In it, he thought he saw something move.
A flicker. A shadow.
Not a man. Not quite.
A shape that didn’t belong.
He blinked. It was gone.
But he felt it. The pull.
Somewhere beneath the grime of this city, beneath the masks and the myths and the madness, there were truths buried deep.
And Leonard—Tim—would find them.
Just as before.
He returned to bed without a word. But as he lay there, eyes open in the dark, one thought circled endlessly in his mind.
The storm is coming.
And this time, he would be ready.
Nighthawk, Night Watcher, and Sleepless
The night deepened.
Somewhere below, the quiet hum of a security system buzzed under the thunder like a warning whispered too late. The Drake estate was still, untouched by Gotham’s usual chaos. But Leonard—Tim—could feel it.
Something watched this city.
And something else waited beneath it.
He sat on the edge of the bed, listening to the patter of rain. It came down like a ritual. Every droplet echoing louder than it should, each one drumming against the glass with a strange rhythm. Familiar. Too familiar.
Silence.
And yet…
There was something. Something in the cracks of the quiet. Not an angel, not a god, but a presence. It didn’t speak. It didn’t breathe. But it lingered. The way a shadow clings even after the light has gone.
He turned suddenly toward the bookshelf across the room. The air had changed.
He stood, bare feet touching the cool floor, and approached the shelf slowly.
Tim—Leonard—had never been superstitious. He was the superstition, once. But in this moment, the hairs on the back of his neck rose in warning.