Chapter Text
Tim hadn’t meant to allow himself to think about the possibility of ‘retiring’ himself from being Red Robin, but he had been drinking- in moderation, thank you very much, he wasn’t that irresponsible- with a bunch of his old teammates (not that he ever stopped helping him if they asked, and they did ask for his aid on occasion, in whichever way he was willing to provide it), and Bart had asked a rather benign question. Something innocent, and nothing more than wistful dreaming while a little bit inebriated. Nothing to dwell upon come morning. But the words had stuck with Tim once morning arrived and he was left fending off the worst parts of his hangover.
“What would you do if you didn’t have, you know, hero work to do? Like ever.” Except Bart had rushed through the words, all chipper and over the place because instead of acting as depressant like most people and inhibiting the motor skills, his metabolism burned through the alcohol so quickly that he was basically fine. It was a little unfair, Tim groused to himself after the fact but allowed it- Bart had agreed to be the one to keep them from making too big a mistake if they actually drank too much, and all they had to do was agree to a single collective favor- which, knowing Bart as Tim did, would probably involve a deal too many sweets for any sane person or a great deal of time spent with in him in the middle of group hug.
(Who was really the loser in this deal? The answer was no one, that’s who. Young Just Us- and they really did need to think of a better name for their little team that wasn’t a pun on the Justice league and their relative ages, but that was a Future problem to think upon- were close and always put each other above the rest, no matter the spats and fights they got into with each other. They were all strong-willed individuals, but Tim was pleased to know that at the end of the day, they would always choose each other over anyone else- even if those people happened to be their legal guardians.)
(There had been that small bit of time where grief had overwhelmed Tim and Cassie, and they hadn’t really spoken to each other, but unlike a lot of other people from that particular period of time, at least Cassie had apologized. Explained herself, apologized, and then made good on her word of promising to be there for her teammates- of which Tim was part of, regardless of his official status being only that of a temporary consultant.)
But the question Bart had asked, between handing Cassie some water and Tim some chips so he didn’t only have alcohol in his body, had sparked a debate. A lot of his former teammates had gone onto the topic of their hypothetical civilian jobs, and Tim was left bereft when he realized that he’d never really given thought to the subject. Back before he had become Robin, he had figured that he would take over the company his parents owned- Drake Industries. Except, his parents had gone and died and he was suddenly the face of his parents company and it was no longer a distant dream but a crushing nightmare that he had little choice in. Then there was the fact that by that point he’d also been Robin, and he couldn’t really focus on the future when there was more than a fifty percent chance that he’d be dead before the night was out in any given twenty-four hour time period. Then there was that whole mess with Joker Jr. that Tim still refused to touch with a fifty-foot pole, and Bruce vanishing into the timestream- Tim hadn’t really given much thought to his future, more busy trying to secure the past to bring what little remained of breaking sanity back in one piece.
(If Ra’s al Ghoul featured in more than one of his nightmares since, well that was between him and the League of Assassins that Tim was steadfastly ignoring now that he didn’t have to play nice with the man to get Bruce back to his correct time period. Damn it Ra’s- get it through your thick head that he wasn’t interested in being his Heir. Tim had more important things to do than be tied down to an Assassination Cult. Like not being the Heir to a cult of Assassins.)
At the time, Tim had answered the question by saying that he’d honestly never given it much thought, but that he’d like to do something with his photography. He hadn’t touched his cameras since he donned the Robin suit, but he had fond memories of the stakeouts he used to do to get just the right angle and shot. It was all true- not a single lie in his heart when he answered the question. However, the question lingered long after the party had broken up and everyone was back at their respective homes. It tossed and churned in his brain, eventually settling like a discomforted animal in the pit of his stomach. If he weren’t a vigilante with a near ninety-percent chance of being killed in action, what would he like to do?
… The frustrating thing, Tim realized much later as he turned to his side and closed his eyes, fighting off the nausea and urge to vomit off the side of his bed, secured in his aptly named Nest and away from anyone who could potentially witness the impending hangover-panic attack that was happening, was that he just out right didn’t know. He’d never given it much thought, much more worried about the things going on in the 'here and now'. Besides- who was he really, at the end of the day?
To his parents, he was a disappointment. Never proper enough for high society, never well-mannered enough to be displayed among his parents' treasures, and not even worth the effort of a decent phone call once in a while. Tim loved his parents, as any child should, but he did not like them. He would thank them for teaching him how to navigate the treachery of high-society, and he would thank his parents for bringing him into this world, and he’d even thank them for leaving him with a source of income for the future if he could manage it correctly. He was privileged in that way, he knew full well, but he often wondered if the only reason Jack and Janet Drake had a child was for a publicity stunt- having a child at home would be just the sort of thing to tie together an illusion of ‘happy family,’ wouldn’t it?
To Bruce, he had been the placeholder Robin. More of a semi-annoying coworker than anything else. Tim had been the one who forced his way into things because a child had watched Batman break in real time and decided enough-was-enough and took matters into his own hands when Nightwing had refused to put aside his own issues to stop Batman from trying to break Gotham apart at the seams in an attempt to punish himself for his own failure to save one of the few nearest and dearest to his heart. Tim had taken on the responsibility of making sure that Bruce ate and slept at regular intervals when Alfred couldn’t- or maybe wouldn’t, Tim wasn’t sure and at this point he didn’t want an answer to that question- coax him out of his Nightly Work, and Tim had endured test after test after test that got hurled on top of him because Batman refused to lose Robin again. Because more often than not, when Tim wasn’t being Robin, he was being misnamed as Jay. Even if it was quickly corrected, Tim didn't need words to be expressed that Bruce was always disappointed those days his mind slipped back to when the one under the mask of Robin was his preferred child.
Tim didn’t want to attempt to guess what Alfred or Dick thought of him, but at least one of them tried to interact with him in a positive light- and even then it hadn’t been enough to stop Dick from threatening him with being sent to Arkham for a psych evaluation behind his back with Alfred. Though, to be fair, hindsight was a bit of a bitch and Tim could admit that he hadn’t been in the best of places mentally when he'd tried to ask for help bringing Bruce back from the timestream. He’d lost too many people close to his heart in too short a time, and he’d started to shut down in his grief. In this grief, anger started to bubble.
Why.
It was a poisonous question to ask, especially in a city like Gotham, but Tim had asked himself that damned question every night. Why did the people he opened his heart to have to go and die? Was he the common denomination? Was he cursed in some capacity? Maybe he was- maybe it’d be better for everyone if he wasn’t around anymore- not in a suicidal sort of way; he could just pack up and move somewhere else. Somewhere far away from the people he loved, somewhere that his supposed curse wouldn’t affect them. Let them have the family he couldn’t have, if it meant that they didn’t have to die.
Then Bruce had vanished, and Tim had… essentially lost it. First Steph, Kon, Bart and his own parents. Then Bruce? No, Tim refused to believe it. He had watched Bruce breakdown in real time after the death of Jason, and he had patched Bruce and Alfred back together, thread-by-thread. Broken bone after broken bone. Now he had to do it in reverse, but this time with Dick and Alfred, all while attempting to avoid assassination by a mini-demon masquerading as Bruce’s biological child? No. Tim needed to draw a line in the metaphorical sand somewhere, and being a ‘grief punching bag’ was not in his bucket list of experiences he ever wanted to repeat.
So Tim poured hours and hours into trying to figure out what happened in that single scene, between Darkseid’s final attack and the echoing aftermath, if only so he could prove beyond reasonable doubt that Bruce was well and truly dead for his own sake. Bruce had dug into him too deep and ingrained that paranoia and self-doubt. He just needed something to hold onto. Some minute molecule of proof that some greater power out there could take mercy on him just this once. Then he found something, in reviewing some of the security videos of the Manor as a way of trying to stress-relax (yes, he was aware of the oxymoron in those words. Did he care? Not in the slightest). It was miniscule detail in one of the pictures of Bruce’s ancestors, one that as far as Tim could tell had always been there. And it had been as far as Tim could tell, but what had really caught his attention was that between one day and the other an image had been added to the picture without anyone touching it- one that appeared to be far too similar to Bruce to be coincidence. Idly curious but perhaps believing that he’d just never noticed it before, Tim checked the time stamp on the two videos and felt confused elation when he compared it with the time stamp of Bruce’s disappearance.
Tim knew time travel was technically possible. He had worked with Bart, after all, and he had come from the future. But had Bruce somehow traveled through time? How? Was it even possible? Was that a power that Darkseid possessed? Bruce had contingencies upon contingencies, and Tim was willing to bet that ‘accidental time travel’ might have been covered somewhere in there, and Tim knew how to hack into the Batcomputer and find most of them. So he went and did just that, using the backdoors he coded into the system to avoid having to be questioned by Oracle on the more-than-often occasion the two of them were in the system together and Tim didn’t want to have to explain himself. He was Robin, yes, but again, unlike the other two Robins, he was more ‘Batman’s Business Partner’ than ‘Bruce’s Wandering Child.’ Besides, he wanted to gather some evidence before he brought the idea up to Dick or Alfred. He needed something to prove that he wasn’t insane for this thought process. Just one bit of proof that he was either right or wrong. He just needed something to hold onto in the face all the loss he’d recently experienced.
So he had tried to ask Dick for help. Only to then be told he was insane for even daring to hope (even if it hadn’t been those exact words, he didn’t need to be genius to know the implication of the words), and then he had the Robin mantle ripped away from him. If losing the Robin mantle was a choice made by Dick himself or by Alfred, Tim wasn’t sure, but he knew how to take a hint and leave when he wasn’t wanted. Sadly, that had left him without much of a support system, because Dick had decided to live up to his nickname and informed the entire Justice League that he’d gone mad with grief and to ignore him. Which really just all sorts of rude. Tim hadn’t gone around and informed the entire Justice League about Batman’s dip into suicidal-depression after Jason’s death.
(The thought spiral of ‘should-haves’ was a very dangerous road that Tim refused to let himself think upon. If he did, then he began to feel ungrateful. He should have gone to the Justice League about Batman when Nightwing had refused to return to Gotham. But then he’d have to explain how he knew their identities and why he even bothered, and he never would have been Robin or met his friends and teammates. But it wasn’t like he had set out to be Robin in the first place, even if he had technically set himself up for it. He hadn’t wanted to do that to Jason- there was no way that Tim would ever be able to live up to the memory of Jason Todd, Batman’s beloved son. But he had accepted the suit when Alfred handed it to him and had continued to put it on night after night after getting Batman to respond positively to it- as in, lessened drinking to the point of blacking out and no longer beating a man half to death for simply doing a walk-by pocket snatching. So Tim had put up with the abuse he suffered in the interim and ignored the sting of rejection when Alfred wouldn’t treat some of his injuries that absolutely hurt but weren’t necessarily life-threating.)
(The less said about the mockery of his sixteenth birthday, the better. That was a sting that never stopped hurting. And also probably point number two on why Tim Drake needed a therapist. But who could he trust to keep his secret that wouldn’t spill the beans to Bruce, even if by accident? Point number one on why Tim Drake needed therapy had everything to do with him putting on a suit late at night and fighting crime in Gotham alongside Batman. What was that saying about acknowledgement being the first step to self-improvement?)
Unfortunately for Tim, Dick’s choice to inform everyone that he might be a tad bit unhinged also meant that no one would listen to him seriously. So, left bereft, insulted, and without any sort of support, Tim had gone- and Tim could quote the mission report in the Justice League Database that was issued after his disappearance had been noted- rouge. He simply left with a vague note mentioning that he would prove that Bruce was still alive, and that he would be out of Gotham until either he had succeeded or failed. It really wasn’t his fault he had been so vague. He needed to make sure that neither Oracle or Nightwing could track him down to stop him from leaving, and he might have been making plans on four days of no sleep.
Then Tim had his whole thing with the League of Assassins, and Tim was pretty certain that Damian hadn’t forgiven him for (which he didn’t really understand. Was it the attention of Ra’s al-Ghul that the kid wanted? Was it the shared history of being trained by assassins that Damian objected to? Tim had been trained by Lady Shiva long before he had ever heard of Damian. Was it Tim’s gall to have gone to his former home in Nanda Parbat and violate the memory of the place by simply being there?). But Tim had proven that Bruce had simply been lost in time, and he had even left the information for the Justice League to use to bring him back. He’d been a little more preoccupied with making sure that Ra’s al-Ghul didn’t take over Bruce’s Company as retaliation of his little stunt of blowing up a rather large number of bases belonging to the League of Assassins.
Then Ra’s al-Ghul had kicked Tim out of the top floor of Wayne Enterprises as retaliation for foiling his revenge, and Dick had caught him. Dick, who as far as Tim had been aware, shouldn’t have been anywhere nearby to catch him unless he had been rerouted. Dick, who Tim had thought for certain had wanted nothing to do with him anymore. So, yeah. Tim didn’t know what to think about how Dick might perceive their relationship. Had he simply caught him as a form of apology about the whole ‘Bruce isn’t dead’ thing? Had it been the residual brother-bond the two of them shared? It wasn’t like the two of them had actually stopped to talk about the whole ordeal, and Tim wasn’t really interested in talking about how he had been fully prepared to die that night, content in the knowledge that he had stopped Ra’s al-Ghul twice and brought Bruce back so the Wayne family could be as whole as they could be.
(Tim really, really tried to not think about his relationship with Alfred these days. Man was polite enough, as was required of him as the Wayne Family butler, but it wasn’t like Tim was actually part of the family. Tim was just the annoyance that had brought Bruce back from the razor-thin edge he had been straddling after the loss of Jason, and for all that Alfred was grateful for that save, their tumultuous start was impossible to forget. Tim hung around on the outskirts of things like particularly stubborn weeds, and Alfred was a skilled enough Gardner that he could probably remove them if Tim gave him even a quarter of a reason to do so.)
Then there was Steph. And there was Babs. Both women who kind of terrified Tim if he was being honest with himself. One of them he had dated and had his heart broken by- and boy did it sting like nothing else to realize that Steph had faked her death and was now joking about it like it hadn’t traumatized him. Like the two of them hadn’t had an argument and Steph had gone running out of the apartment, and the next thing he heard of her was her death via Dr. Leslie- who apparently had been in on the whole thing. Tim understood needing to go underground to hide from people- he had so many spare identities hanging around for a reason, after all. Identities that Tim knew for a fact that Steph knew about and knew that Tim would have been more than happy to set one up for her. But to just leave your partner thinking that the last thing you two had ever done was argue over ones lack of social understanding? That stung. Tim had thought the two of them had been on good terms with each other, but apparently Tim had fucked up that relationship too, and it scared him a fair bit how Steph could pretend like nothing that had happened between them had meant nothing. Like it was the culmination of one big cosmic joke told at Tim’s own expense.
Babs scared Tim for an entirely different reason. Babs was the sort of woman who hacked the national government, caused wars and then resolved them all because she was bored and the lunch-time library rush wasn’t due for another three hours. If given half an inch, Babs would take a mile and then run circles around you, holding all the possible blackmail that had ever been incurred in your life over your head. Some of it being blackmail that Babs had just-then fabricated, backdated, and then left you as the fall-guy for. Babs was kind, don’t misunderstand Tim, and she was very much a professional when it came to being Oracle. But that didn’t change the fact that Tim had borne witness to some of the things that Babs could get up to when permitted a chance to let loose. Tim had enough in his life that making an enemy out Babs was not something he wanted to do, and it wasn’t like the two of them were particularly close. Oracle had been terse with him at the start of Tim’s stint as Robin, being that he was some random person in a suit that didn’t belong to him, but they had warmed up to each other enough that Tim had occasionally sat in on some of Babs sessions as Oracle and helped her with some of her code-based work and surveillance. The efficiency at which Babs worked was something that Tim admired about her and feared in equal turn. To have that much laser-focus directed his way? No. Tim had gone through great pains to make absolutely certain that anything that did get back to Babs from his time away had been both minimal and useless in tracking down his location.
(How and why she hadn't cracked down on him about the League bases he'd blown up, Tim guessed it was either a matter of time before she learned of it, or she just didn't care enough to go digging now that he was back. Tim wasn't sure he really wanted to know which was the correct answer.)
“What would you do if you didn’t have to be a Hero anymore?”
Tim blinked listlessly up at his ceiling, already giving up on getting any sleep this night and mulled the answer over in his head. Aside from an obligation to keeping Bruce’s family relatively together… what did he have keeping him in Gotham? What kept him tied to the position of ‘Robin,’ or ‘Red Robin’ as the case might have been.
(Don't make fun of him for the name. He’d been nursing a head injury and didn’t exactly have the time to sit down and produce a brand new vigilante identity from scratch. It had been better to stick to what was familiar to him, and unfortunately too many people knew him and his fighting style to separate him from Robin entirely. Maybe he could- but this wasn't about setting up a new vigilante identity. This was about separating himself from that life. If he could.)
Dick, or maybe it had been Alfred- Alfred seemed like the more likely culprit based solely on past experience- had basically fired Tim by handing Damian the Robin suit while Tim had been Robin. He hadn’t needed to go back to being a crime fighter after bring Bruce back, and technically Tim still hadn’t gotten an apology for anything that had happened before Tim had brought Bruce back. Everyone who absolutely needed to be able to contact Tim no matter the time could do so without worrying about where in the world Tim was. And, as it just so happened, Tam had been trying to get Tim to nab himself some personal vacation time. She’d even rearranged his schedule to minimize meetings and disruptions. (The Drake Industries schedule, that is. Lucius Fox had been trying to do something similar for Tim’s work as CEO of Wayne Enterprises, but for some reason people kept wanting to speak to Tim specifically. Something about how Tim couldn’t be an appropriate CEO for the Wayne-Brand when he wasn’t even- and Tim could quote people on this one- ‘the first choice.’ People just wanted to scent blood in the water when it came to people like Bruce Wayne, and the son of a competing company would have been free meat to tear from the bone if Tim hadn't been on his A-Game with them.
Speaking of, Tim had been doing good with Bruce’s company but maybe it was time to hand it back over. He knew for certain that Lucius would be sad to see him go, but it wasn’t like Tam didn’t know how to get ahold of him at all hours of the day, regardless of whether or not he was planet-side or not. Besides- it would be kind of funny to see what the fallout of leaving Wayne Enterprises would be when he was no longer there to manage it. Was it perhaps a little bitter and petty of him to do so when Bruce had made no mention of wanting his position as CEO of his own family company back? Maybe. But it wasn’t like Tim was going to be leaving Wayne Enterprises a ruined husk of what it had once been- if anything, Tim considered himself proud of the job he’d done of not only keeping Wayne Enterprises together with Lucius Fox’s aid, but propelling it forwards as a company and making it grow more than it had in a long time.
(Also, a major part of Tim’s pettiness was simply so he longer had to deal with the near-daily phone calls from a certain Lex Luthor asking if Tim would be willing to sell ‘that terrible heartache that surely isn’t doing your mental health any good’ to LexCorp. Tim prided himself on his professionalism. No matter how badly he wanted to curse Lex Luthor for the insinuation, he had no idea if the man was recording his phone calls and needed to make sure he wasn’t saying anything that might be possible grounds for being mentally unstable. He had already fought off that accusation on one front, he didn’t need the war a second time. Bruce Wayne, however, would have no such issues playing up his Brucie persona and giving Luthor another dose of rejection.)
But that brought Tim's thoughts back around to Bart's question, and Tim added a new line of questioning to it: What did Tim Drake have to keep him going as a Vigilante? He had only become Robin because he hadn’t seen any other avenue to keep Bruce from self-destructing. But now he wasn’t needed. Bruce had all his children by his side, and all he was doing was being a reminder of something best left forgotten. The one who stole Jason’s title. The one who wore a dead-man’s suit and was punished for it. Who wanted a reminder of that when all you needed to focus on was healing?
… It also wasn’t like Tim didn’t have the means to escape from Gotham these days. He had a perfectly good boathouse that, despite popular belief, actually was rated for long-distance sea travel. He also knew how to sail the boathouse, and he could be pretty self-sufficient. The biggest issue he had would be his medicine for his missing spleen, but that was a medical issue on his civilian record and there were ways to circumvent the need for them- mostly lifestyle changes, but it wasn’t like he didn’t also have a little something stored away curtesy of one Ra’s al-Ghul as a ‘fair play’ sort of thing in the aftermath of his numerous betrayals and consequent survival. Or maybe it was a mock-courtship sort of thing. Tim didn’t want to think about it too hard since neither of them were actually interested in each other in that way, but Tim had heard whispered-rumors, equal part in awe and afraid about Ra’s al-Ghul’s preferred method of courtship.
(Apparently- and Tim did not want to believe this but couldn’t afford to ignore it with the boxes that keep getting sent his way from Nanda Parbat- but beating the current Demon’s Head in either combat or intellect was worthy enough for consideration of being the mans spouse. Then you had to prove yourself to his cause- and somehow Tim blowing up a whole bunch of the League hadn’t disqualified him from the work he’d done hunting down the Cult of Spiders. Then, because Tim’s life wasn’t enough of a dark-comedy, it turned out that blowing up Ra’s al-Ghul’s bases was proof enough of Tim’s own convictions and now not only did he have Ra’s al-Ghul sending him gifts- some poisoned, some not- but he also had the fear and respect of many of the League of Assassin’s operatives. What even was up with his life?)
“What would you do if you didn’t have to be a Hero anymore?”
Tim blinked and let out a sigh as he continued to stare at the ceiling in his bedroom, the ceiling fan lazily spinning overhead to keep the air from stagnating and growing humid. He didn’t actually know. He’d never stopped to think about it before, but now that he was… His thoughts kept circling back around to Bart’s question. Kind of like the ceiling fan above him, Tim noted with some distant amusement. He didn’t know, and for once… Tim wasn’t certain on how that made him feel. A distant part of him was aware that uncertainty meant an increased chance to die, but this wasn’t combat. He didn’t need to be at full alertness for this. This wasn’t a challenge he needed to overcome to continue to allowed around. But nonetheless, the indecisiveness felt like failure.
But unlike a challenge that was issued to him, Tim felt… free? Yeah, that sounded right. In his failure to decide how he felt about what he would do if he hung up his mantle as Red Robin and walked away from the caped community in its entirety, he felt free. Because he didn’t know what he would do, but he did know what he wouldn’t be doing, and with the might of Drake Industries history behind him, he did know it left the rest of the world open to him. To borrow a phrase, but the world was his stage and if there was one thing that Timothy Drake was exceptional at, it was putting on a performance that the world could be deceived by.
Of course, he couldn’t do everything all at once. He would need to ease off of patrols and on working cases first. He’d have to talk to Oracle and maybe even Red Hood to make sure that no one tried to pull him back in. Barbara and Jason were going to be the two hardest to work around, so he’d have to bring them up to speed on this plan and make sure they understood that this was something he actually wanted. Because, for once, Tim was actually pretty certain he knew what he was feeling this time. Now that he had identified his upcoming freedom, he felt… ecstatic. Elated. Happy and content. He’d never been given a chance to a ‘regular’ child, having gone from raising himself to being Bruce’s Punching Bag, to be the one who kept Bruce’s Family together, but perhaps this was a chance to him to be able to redefine himself without the expectations of others twisting his obligations.
Bart has asked “What would you do if you didn’t have to be a Hero anymore?”. But Tim now had a new question: Who was he, at the core of his being, when he wasn’t Red Robin or acting as Bruce’s Glue? And unlike most people, Tim didn’t really sleep during the night, especially when he had a new puzzle to solve- and there were precious few puzzles that Tim enjoyed solving more than the puzzles involving himself. So giving up on attempting to rest tonight, Tim used his newfound motivation and walked over to his desk, booted up his laptop, and began to work on setting up a plan.
But first, he needed something to ease the world's sudden spinning. Maybe he had drunk a little too much. Whoops.