Chapter Text
> Location: The Cradle
> Time: Present
Ra's al Ghul did not sit. He stood before a wall of monitors, his hands clasped behind his back, watching a grainy, hacked security feed from the Gotham Museum of Antiquities.
On the screen, Red Robin was a ghost in the dark, moving through the colonial exhibit.
"The payment has cleared, My Lord," Ubu announced, looking at a tablet with wide eyes. "The funds are... unprecedented. It is enough to fund the League’s operations for a decade."
Ra's didn't look at the financial report. He kept his eyes on the boy.
"That is exactly why we are pausing, Ubu," Ra's said softly.
He walked over to the side table where the digital tablet sat. It displayed a simple contract: TARGET: TIMOTHY DRAKE. REWARD: [REDACTED].
"The Client is not a fool," Ra's mused, tapping the slate. "He knows who this boy is. He knows he is the Detective's son. He knows he wears the mantle of the Robin."
Ra's turned back to the screen, watching Tim scan the room.
"But a Robin is merely a soldier. A sidekick. One does not offer a kingdom's ransom for the death of a pawn."
Ra's narrowed his eyes.
"If the Client is willing to pay this much to remove him from the board... it is because the boy is not a pawn. He is a King in disguise. And I intend to find out why."
> Location: Wayne Manor, The West Wing Gallery
> Time: Two Weeks Ago
The Manor was a tomb.
It wasn't just the silence. It was the dust sheets covering the furniture. It was the way the shadows stretched too long in the hallway. Without Bruce, the house wasn't a home; it was a mausoleum.
Tim Drake stood alone in the West Wing, a half-drunk cup of cold coffee in his hand. He hadn't slept in thirty hours.
He was staring at the portrait of Mordecai Wayne.
"You're pathetic, Tim," he whispered to the empty air. "He's gone. Darkseid killed him. You saw the body. You buried him."
Logic. That was Tim’s superpower. He was a Detective. He looked at facts, and the cold, hard, completely unforgiving facts said Bruce Wayne was dead.
But then, the cold sensation in his chest said the facts were wrong?
It started as a hum, a low, resonant vibration against his ribs, right where his mother’s seal was hidden. However, it wasn't pain, it was pressure. It felt like his heart was trying to solve a math problem that was too big for his body and going into palpitations.
Tim curled in on himself against the discomfort with a wince. Was he having a heart attack?!
Then he blinked, and the world tilted.
The air in the hallway dropped forty degrees in a split second. The coffee in his cup froze solid, cracking the ceramic mug with a loud POP.
Tim didn't drop it. He couldn't move. He was locked in a moment of absolute, terrifying clarity.
He stared at the painting of the 17th-century Puritan.
[Glitch]
The canvas didn't just ripple; it seemed like it re-rendered. The oil paint dissolved into streams of cascading blue data. The brushstrokes straightened into grid lines. The chaotic reality of the room was being overwritten by a higher form of Order.
[ANOMALY DETECTED]
The words weren't on the wall. They were in his mind!
Cold, hard, and undeniable.
[TEMPORAL DISPLACEMENT SIGNATURE: MATCH 99.9%]
[SUBJECT: B. WAYNE]
[STATUS: OUT OF SEQUENCE]
Tim gasped, clutching his chest. The logical part of his brain was screaming that he was having a psychotic break. ‘This is grief,’ his brain shouted. ‘This is a hallucination. You need a doctor.’
But the Order was louder.
The magic he still didn’t know existed within him surged from a crack in his mother’s seal, flooding his synapses with ice-cold certainty. It bypassed his fear and doubt relentlessly until it finally rewrote his common sense.
Until the "impossible" became the "variable."
The painting flickered. For one second, Mordecai Wayne wasn't a Puritan ancestor. He was Bruce, trapped in the wrong century, leaving a fingerprint on history that only a Nexus Being could see.
"He's alive," Tim whispered. The words weren't a question anymore. They were a statement of fact.
The frost spread from his feet, coating the floorboards in a thin layer of diamond-hard ice.
"He's not dead," Tim said louder, his voice trembling not with fear, but with the adrenaline of a breakthrough. "He's lost."
The logic of the magic slotted into place. The body they buried was a clone. The Omega Beams didn't kill; they displaced. The "Mordecai" portrait was a distress signal.
It sounded insane. To Dick, to Alfred, to the Justice League… It would sound like denial.
But Tim felt the math in his bones. He felt the equation balancing.
SNAP!
The pressure vanished. The ice on the floor sublimated into mist. The coffee in his cup was liquid again, leaking onto the rug from the crack. The painting was just a painting. His heart settled back into its normal rhythm.
But the certainty remained.
Tim set the broken mug down on a side table. His hands were steady now. The exhaustion was gone, replaced by the cold, burning focus of a bloodhound who had just found the trail.
He pulled out his phone. He didn't call Alfred. He didn't call Dick. They wouldn't understand the Order. They couldn't see the code.
He opened a new case file.
CASE NAME: The Return.
STATUS: Active.
"I hear you, Bruce," Tim whispered to the painting. "Hang on. I'm coming to get you."
> Location: The Cradle
> Time: Present Day
On the monitor, Ra's al Ghul saw the tremor. He saw the boy nearly collapse as he approached the glass case that was holding some sort of bat-shaped carving.
But most importantly, the thermal sensors flared blue the moment Tim touched the case.
"The glass," Ubu gasped, pointing at the telemetry. "My Lord... the temperature dropped to absolute zero for three seconds. He froze the air with a touch."
Ra's al Ghul smiled. It was a terrifying, satisfied expression.
"So that is the secret," Ra's whispered.
He picked up the digital tablet. He looked at the astronomical sum of money that had been offered in the contract.
"The Client tried to buy my ignorance with gold," Ra's said, his voice dripping with disdain. "He tried to pay me to destroy a diamond because he was afraid of its edge."
Ra's dropped the tablet into the brazier. He watched the contract glitch into nonexistence as the electronic device melted onto the glowing coals with hisses and sparks.
"We do not work for cowards, Ubu. And we don’t throw away power."
Then Ra's looked back at the screen, where Tim was fleeing the museum.
"Bring the young Detective to the Cradle. If he was worth that much dead, imagine what he is worth to the League of Assassins alive.”