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It was Jason that Tim made his last stop to before leaving Gotham that day, before leaving the states at that, in his search for Bruce. A search that he had no idea if he would come back from.
One that he wasn't sure that he wanted to come back from so long as the job got done.
The Red Robin costume was already draped over his skin, the colors comforting even if everything else about it was not.
Not the reason for the colors.
Not the reasons for the costume at all.
He didn't really want to see the older man, not right then after the last time that they had been around one another. When Tim had broken the other out of jail and Jason had decided to kill far too many while wearing the bat's suit.
While playing Batman, guns in his hands that reminded the teen far too much of a future that was never to come.
It hadn't been a pleasant time.
Still, this conversation was needed.
"Another costume of mine?" A voice asked from the darkness of the alley, from the very edge where the Crime Alley territory bled into Tim's own.
He met the other there on purpose.
"Does it matter?" Tim asked in turn, his voice tired. It always was these days.
(Something that would only become more true in the months to come.)
"Little bit," Jason grumbled, the other hearing him still as the elder thought of how bizarre this whole meeting was.
Just yesterday they would have already been trying to spill the other's blood, but they weren't right then. After all, as Tim had said when he had called him for this meeting, Jason owed him for breaking him out of jail.
This was the older following through.
"Why do you want, other than to steal another of my gimmicks?" The crime lord asked, just as annoyed as the other in regards to the costume choice.
"Will you lay off about that?" Tim asked, but pushed forwards in his talking before Jason had the time to take complying with that as the favor that the man owed him. "Look, I'm leaving Gotham for a bit, there are some things that I need to look into on my own, will you cover my territory while I'm gone since it already bleeds into yours?"
The older Robin thought about it for a moment, looking at the other. He thought of the last time that a bird flew so far from home with such a searching sort of determination in their gaze, of how that had ended.
Of the all but cautionary tale that he had become.
He agreed all the same, because even if he and the other still had problems, Gotham and her people were something that they both loved.
"Just don't add too many things to the list of what you're copying," Jason warned, seeing the other bite back a flinch right then, one that he wasn't supposed to see.
Tim didn't say anything when he turned to leave at that, not until he was just almost out of ear shot of the other.
"You know," the younger starts, not knowing if Jason was even still there it hear him at all, not really caring either way, "neither of the 'thefts' - as you like to call them - had anything to do with you. Especially not this one."
The words were cold right then, biting and true even if they cut the speaker much more than they did the older of the two men.
There was a reason that Tim had chosen this suit out of all of the spare ones that they had laying around, one beyond just how removed it was from the rest of the bats and the birds.
Something closer to the last changes that Tim had made to the Robin suit before it had been given away, the memorial that he had made out of it.
(After all, it was Kon's colors that he had been changing all this time)
—-
Later he would wonder if it was that conversation that he'd had with Jason before leaving that made him think as he did. That when he found himself in the desert with four assassins at his sides, and a world before him that he found himself fitting into just a bit too well as the five of them talked and drove through the endless sand, he was reminded a bit too much of days long gone with the coffins in the ground.
Of a different group of four.
The thoughts of them didn't fade even as he found proof of what he had come to find, a painting of a bat on a cave wall. Even as he came back down to the sand and smiled brighter than he had in longer than he could remember, something that spoke of hope and a life that he could save even as he had to give up on the one that he had tired to bring back nearly a hindered times before.
The thoughts only grew as he laid down in the blood soaked sand, his eyes closing for what his brain screamed at him would likely be the last time as he did so, Pru's form blurring with the motion.
Conner, he wondered if he would see Conner on the other side.
He hoped so.
"Kon," Tim whispered as he felt himself slipping into unconsciousness. As the world slipped through his fingers in the sun warmed sand, something that he could almost pretend was the grass outside of the resort in the mountains if he tried just hard enough to do so. That maybe they were taking a break before training some more, it would almost be enough to explain the pain.
He thought that he would be okay dying with Kon's name being the last word to leave his lips.
—-
Somewhere on the other side of the world, there was someone that heard a whispered name.
His name.