Chapter Text
Tim goes home in early June.
For once, he’s glad to leave.
Wayne Manor, once so full of life and color, becomes a cold shell of stone as the loss of Jason Todd seeps into the structure's bones, poisoning it from the ground up. Wayne Manor, once Tim’s sanctuary, becomes nothing more than a dilapidated reminder of the greatest heartache he’s ever experienced.
His parents are sympathetic enough when Bruce tells them what happened. Janet actually hugs Tim and tells him that she would’ve come home sooner if she had known. Jack quotes a book on healing from grief and brings up how much it hurt when his own father passed away. Logically, Tim knows that their words are supposed to be comforting.
They aren’t.
Logic is not enough to ease the hurt.
Graciously, his parents dole out two weeks and three days of allotted mourning time. While they do not hold him as he cries as Bruce has done, they do sit on the foot of his bed and wait for him to tire himself out, then they draw his quilt over his shaking body and bid him goodnight. Janet even kisses the crown of his head and doesn’t withdraw in disgust when it makes his tears start over again.
“This will hurt less someday,” Janet says with a soft sigh.
“You’re a strong boy,” Jack agrees. “You’ll get over this.”
He says nothing.
He doesn’t know how his parents can be so wrong.
Eventually (Tim is learning that all things must inevitably end), his parents get fed up with his grief. They are people made of steel willpower and plastic smiles, and when his pain soon stretches past what is allowed and morphs into something weak, he becomes the unacceptable that his parents can’t bear.
“What will people think if the sole heir to Drake Industries is nothing but a fucking mute?” His dad raves when Tim’s refusal to speak encroaches on his plans to flaunt his genius son at the annual Drake charity gala.
Tim bows his head, feeling the words he knows he’s supposed to say bubble up in his throat beside an overwhelming incapability to vocalize anything other than a baleful sob. It’s not that he doesn’t want to talk; it’s really not. It’s just that every time he thinks of speaking, he thinks that it is one more word that his brother doesn’t get to hear. One more act of betrayal toward the person to whom he owes everything to.
“Honestly, Timothy,” Janet interjects, her voice brisk and unimpressed as she adjusts the sapphire hanging from her neck. “What kind of impression do you think it would make if you refused to say even a simple hello? I won’t have our guests thinking something is wrong with you.”
Something is wrong with him.
That’s the whole problem.
He breaks because they wait him out, because they always do, because there has never been a version of this story where he wins.
“No, Mom,” he says, voice scratchy from disuse. Then, because that is the price of peace in this house: “Sorry, Dad.”
Jason, Tim thinks, would hate him forever if he knew Tim had broken his vow of silence to cater to the people Jason had disliked so fervently. Jason, Tim knows, would think he was being pathetic. Jason, Tim forces himself to remember, is gone forever. He is gone and he is not coming back, even to scold Tim for being made of shattered glass and safety pins.
Jack fixes the crooked edges of Tim’s black tie (black tie, black suit, black everything, like it’s not a gala but a funeral that he’s attending) and smiles with something like pride. “That’s my boy.”
Tim doesn’t feel proud. He feels empty.
Tim spends the next three hours in a state of limbo, floating around the Drake Estate gala like a ghost haunting the very halls he grew up in. Hello, he says to the upturned noses. Good evening, he says to the socialites and their families. It’s a pleasure to meet you, he says to anyone his parents stick him in front of.
“Hello,” he says to the blue suit standing in front of him.
“Tim?”
Lamely, with sluggish reflexes, Tim’s head turns upward to get a better look at the familiar voice of. Of. His brother. Yes, that is his brother. With wide, tense blue eyes and a tight smile. Except his brother’s skin is a darker tone than Jason’s and the lines in his face carve a different jaw and. And it’s not Jason.
It’s Dick.
Not dead. Not lost. Just late.
His brain glitches like a computer dunked in water, and Tim nearly punches him, his body flooded with a hot, useless anger. But the anger he feels, the raw resentment and betrayal, falls flat when Dick simply steps forward and folds Tim into his arms.
His brain frantically reboots.
Dick is talking. Tim thinks maybe he is, too.
He doesn’t hear any of it over the aching grief that Dick’s presence, Dick's apologetic tone, Dick’s sorrow is only proof that the loss of Jason is real. “What do I do?” Tim feels himself asking, the words hollow and blank. He doesn’t sound right. He tries again, searching for meaning, for something real, “What do I do?”
“I don’t know, kiddo… I’m sorry, but I really don’t know.”
And, if anything, at least Dick is honest.
Tim steps away first. He wipes at his face with the heel of his hand and checks the room on instinct. No one seems to have noticed. Good. A Drake should know not to fall apart in public. That lesson was taught early and taught well. He can’t afford to make a scene at his own gala just because. Because.
It doesn’t matter.
Tim closes his eyes, gathering himself together in his suit’s stiff, cold fabric. “What are you doing here?” He eventually asks around the hole of pain in his throat. “Why did you come here?”
Why now? He doesn’t need to say.
Why not before? Dick understands immediately.
“I came to see you. I was…” There is a brief hesitation, and then Tim feels himself being led by the arm out of the foyer and into the hallway. The hallway with the red Persian rug. He knows this hallway. Knows it by the maroon wallpaper and the creaky wooden floors. “I wasn’t supposed to be gone that long. I was off planet and…”
Tim’s heart begins to ache all over again because he cannot imagine how it would feel to return to a planet that his brother no longer inhabits. Had Dick been able to sense the loss from the moment he stepped onto dry land? Had he felt it in the air when the rocketship doors had opened? Had he known?
How had he found out?
Surely not by Bruce, surely not in the same way Tim had been told. Tim wonders if, unlike him, Dick had been able to remain standing when the news had rocked through his system. He wonders if either of them cried. Yelled. Screamed. Broke things. He thinks of all the fights he has witnessed between Dick and Bruce, and he knows that it couldn’t have been good.
He knows it couldn’t have been okay.
None of this is okay.
“Tim?” Dick is speaking again, and Tim blinks once. Twice. Focuses his gaze on his oldest brother (only brother?). Breathes so shakily that it actually hurts. “Tim, chum, are you okay? Stay with me, now. I’m right here.”
The hallway spins and spins; Tim feels sick.
God, he feels sick.
“He left me,” Tim says, finally finding the words he’s spent weeks searching for. He shakes his head and feels himself reaching for his arm. The arm that once housed a bullet. He had thought he would die that day, for a moment, but he never could’ve understood how much death really hurt. “He left us, Dick, and he’s not coming back.”
Jason is not coming back.
Tim failed him.
________
Later, Tim tells himself that this is why he put on the colors.
Not for Bruce. Not for Gotham. Not even for all the poor civilians in need of saving.
For Jason.
Sometimes, he really believes it. Other days, when the moon hangs a little too low, and darkness smudges too deeply against the sky, it’s not enough to believe he’s doing everything he can to make up for his wrongs. These days, days like today, none of it is enough.
Tim isn’t enough.
He hasn’t been enough since his brother stood at the Manor doors and waved goodbye to Tim one last time before boarding a plane and never coming home.
Titan’s Tower is supposed to be something akin to a safehouse, but alone in the large building, Tim finds himself in the same room he always finds himself in. The one filled with rock posters and with cigarettes hidden underneath the mattress. The room that is Tim’s in title and nothing else.
Robin’s room.
A dead boy’s room.
It hasn’t really changed since Jason last slept in it. Nobody has had the heart to clean it out, so Tim has made himself comfortable alongside the remnants of his dead brother.
It’s penance, he decided long ago. It is his job and his job alone to honor Jason. To honor Robin. To apologize for ever letting him leave. For not fighting harder, objecting more.
Tim is sitting cross-legged on the bed, hands smoothing over a Wonder Woman fleece throw, wondering how many times Jason fell asleep wrapped in its warmth. Dozens of times, he’s sure; Tim knows Wonder Woman was one of Jason’s favorite heroes.
The lights die.
Tim is on his feet immediately.
“Hello?” he calls out, then feels stupid when nobody answers because, of course, nobody answers. Batman had specifically sent him to the Tower so he would be safe from the Red Hood. Safe and alone.
A box with walls high enough to keep danger out.
Or keep him in.
Tim retrieves his domino mask from the side table and slips it over his features. Once the mask is on, he narrows his eyes against the dark lights of the Tower and fetches the bo staff leaning against the wall.
He waits a moment, but the backup generator never turns on and so the golden lights never return. Instead, emergency lights flood the corridor in a dim red.
Strange, Tim thinks, because he’s never experienced or even heard of Titans Tower having any technical issues. Things don’t just go wrong when backed by Batman’s money and the Justice League’s tech; they just don’t.
(Unless…?)
“Cyborg?” he calls out, voice too hard to sound hopeful. “If this is a prank, all of you are so dead.”
Except Cyborg isn’t here and Tim in his heart of hearts already knows that. This isn’t some stupid prank by his friends. Bruce sent him here as a last-ditch attempt to keep him safe from a crime lord who is too fascinated with him and like hell would he allow anyone to pull some dumb joke.
Tim clamps his mouth shut, forbidding future comments from slipping free, and glides through the dark hallway, gripping his bo staff with an aching pressure in his knuckles.
He reaches the control room in less than a minute, releasing his weapon just long enough to breeze his fingers over the keyboards and check the status of the Tower.
Transit offline. External access locked. Internal cameras down. Auxiliary power severed. Ventilation manually overridden.
His breath catches.
This is not a malfunction. This is a hunt.
The vents were supposed to be his last resort. The doors were supposed to slow an intruder down. The cameras were supposed to warn him before any of this got close enough to matter.
Tim is a caged mouse and now he hears footsteps that do not belong to him and fuck. Fuck, fuck, fuck, this isn’t good.
This is so not good.
He has nowhere to go.
________
Jason Todd has wormed his way out of a great many situations, but death is his crowning jewel. Granted, he had needed some help from the League to do so, and yes, he had still technically died, but one moment his heart had been still and his body cold, and the next, he was screaming and fighting and swimming and he was alive.
That was two years ago.
He’s nineteen now. An adult, if the law saw him as anything other than legally dead. He’s nineteen and everything that has happened in the past two and a half years is a blur. The explosion. Cold body, cold blood, cold everything. And then the League. Excessive amounts of training and Ra’s whispering in his ear and being told he is dangerous only to be handed sharper tools and taught more efficient moves.
He tried to leave once — to get back to poor, lonely, broken-hearted little Tim — the moment he’d recovered enough to move on his own, but Talia’s cold, measured words had stopped him in his tracks. “You killed four men when you came out of the water,” she told him. “You don’t remember because rage erased it. You want to go home like this?”
Home.
As if that word still belonged to him.
“He needs me,” Jason had said, shaking his head.
“You’re dangerous.”
“Not to him.”
“To everyone. Will you be able to forgive yourself if you return and hurt him?”
“I wouldn’t—”
“—But you already have, Jason. Haven’t you?”
So he’d stayed. Trained. Slaved day and night in an attempt to fix himself. To numb his anger and soften his newly sharpened edges. To make himself safer for his baby brother.
And now it’s time.
It’s just.
Well, Jason hadn’t been expecting Tim to be the one on the offensive.
_____________
Robin is sure he could’ve heard the intruder from a mile away.
The moment he catches sight of the familiar deep red mask, he goes for the knees, his bo staff cracking into the hooded figure’s knees with enough force to send them spiraling backward with a grunt of pain.
“What the fuck?” The Red Hood spits out, reeling away from Robin and snapping himself into a defensive position.
There is a brief moment where neither of them advance, and Robin uses the time to catalogue the plethora of weapons the Red Hood has strapped to his form. Guns, knives, throwing stars. If the break-in wasn’t enough, the sheer volume of weapons is only proof that the Red Hood is not here for peace.
“What are you doing here?”
Red Hood stretches his hands out, palms out, “Robin…” he says, and the word sounds strangled and garbled through the voice modulator. He steps forward, and Robin tenses his muscles and swings the weapon warningly.
“Stay back,” he hisses. “Answer my question.”
“I’m not here to fight.”
Fat chance, Robin barely keeps himself from snapping. He can feel defensive anger bubbling in the back of his mind, taunting him. Yearning for a fight, yearning to prove Bruce wrong and show everyone that he didn’t need to be hidden away from the threat. He’s fourteen-years-old, not a baby. “Then drop your weapons.”
The Red Hood doesn’t move, his arms stiff and unyielding. “Come on, baby bird—”
Baby bird. Baby bird. Baby bird.
Nobody has called Tim that since. Since.
The rage is back. Boiling him from the inside out, lapping up his arms and legs and shoving his body into a launch. “Don’t call me that!” he screams, swiping the bo staff toward the Red Hood in a frenzy and knocking him over the side of the head with a powerful clang.
Red Hood stumbles sideways, his groan of pain sounding more like a monster’s growl than anything human. His boots scrape against the Tower’s polished floors as he catches himself on the elevator doors, one hand flying up to clutch at the side of his face that had been struck.
Robin doesn’t let him breathe.
He comes in fast and low, staff whipping for Red Hood’s ribs, then his shoulder, then back to his knees— a training pattern he’s performed dozens of times against opponents larger than him.
Red Hood blocks the first hit with a padded forearm, twists out of the way of the second, but can’t recoil away from the third fast enough before the staff slams into his knees again. He hisses with a wince and Robin takes a sweeping step backward to dodge whatever hit Red Hood is bound to send his way.
No hit comes.
Newfound confidence pushes him forward boldly. “I said,” Robin snaps, his voice high with shaking fury. “Drop your weapons!”
“Kid, listen—”
Robin goes for the throat, anger turning his movements sharp and quick.
But Red Hood is faster. More experienced. In tune with Robin’s moves in a way that’s near impossible, he jerks his chin to the side and the staff scrapes against the corner of the metal helmet with a shrieking scream.
“That’s enough!” the crime lord snaps, sounding more like Bruce during a training session rather than an opponent hell-bent on vengeance.
Before Robin can even pull his staff back and regain control of the weapon, Red Hood’s hands snap out and catch hold of the metal alloy. With the sudden, sharp loss of momentum, Robin lets out a strangled yelp and panic flutters in his chest as Red Hood yanks the weapon from Robin’s grip entirely.
“No!” Robin gasps as Red Hood steps a steady step backward and twirls the bo staff in his own hands.
“Not bad,” Red Hood murmurs thoughtfully, weighing the weapon in his hands.
Gritting his teeth, Robin stares the man down, subtly inching his fingers toward the batarangs in his suit. Without his bo staff, his chances of defeating Red Hood without injury to self have dramatically decreased, but fuck it. At least he’ll know how to dodge any incoming hits from the staff.
Except Red Hood doesn’t attack.
Again.
Instead, he throws the bo staff to the side and the weapon clatters to the ground pathetically out of reach. “Robin,” the crime lord huffs, breathing heavily. “I told you. I’m not here to fight.”
Robin tucks his fingers around the batarangs, feeling the cold metal press against his skin like an ice pack. “Then why are you here? Why come after me?”
“I would never hurt you.”
His certainty has Robin stuttering, grip tightening on the batarangs with a suspicious scoff. “Yeah fucking right,” he almost laughs. “Then why. Are. You. Here?”
“Because…” There is a heavy silence and then, slowly, oh, so slowly, Red Hood reaches up and unlatches his helmet. Robin tenses, pulling out the batarangs with lightning fast tension, ready to defend himself, ready to—
—The helmet hisses with compressed air—
And.
No.
Tim’s voice is young and broken as Jason’s name crackles out of his mouth and he flinches when the batarangs ring out on the floor.
The Red Hood— no— Jason. Jason is there, watching him with round green eyes, looking haunted and teary-eyed. There’s a beat in which the world feels flipped on its axis and then Jason smiles.
Jason’s voice is wounded, “Hey, baby bird…”
_______
Jason doesn’t know what it is that he expects from Tim. He’s dreamt about this, pictured Tim’s reaction a thousand times. Imagined him as angry, sad, happy, anything— everything.
It’s worse to actually experience it.
So, so endlessly worse.
“That’s not possible.” Denial creeps into Tim’s tone and Jason’s heart wrenches as his little brother struggles wildly for the right thing to say. He attempts boldness but all that comes out is a fragile warbling of, “Take the helmet off. All the way.”
Jason can’t stand to risk breaking his little brother’s heart even more by objecting, so he does as he’s told, slipping the helmet off and letting it fall to the floor with a clang beside Tim’s metal staff.
There’s a small gasp and Tim’s body collapses forward for a moment before he catches himself and huddles backward once again.
Jason lets him. Gives him time. He can be patient; he’s been patient. This is what he’s trained for. What he’s spent two fucking years reining in.
“You’re lying,” Tim says, his voice no way near as hard as he must intend for it to be. “There’s no— there’s no way. That’s impossible. It’s impossible.”
“It should be,” he agrees softly, trying to stay calm, trying to remember who he used to be before everything had gone wrong. It’s near impossible over the foreignness that is his Tim is the Robin suit. “But it’s not. The Lazarus Pit—”
“—It’s not possible,” Tim grits out, tears streaming down his face past the domino mask. “Because my Jason would never have stayed away so long. He would’ve never—“ his voice cracks down the middle. “Never abandoned me.”
The truth cuts deep and the aching burn that spreads through Jason is worse than any of Tim’s previous hits.
“I didn’t…” Jason shakes his head. “That wasn’t.”
“Wasn’t what?” Tim sniffs, folding his arms against his chest and looming forward. “Wasn’t what happened? You didn’t. What?” The kid stares down Jason as though half convinced he will fade away into stardust. “What happened?”
And oh, boy.
This is worse than his nightmares. Worse than anything he’s ever imagined before. Even through the domino mask, Tim’s gaze is wide and terrified, like a deer caught in headlights. It’s a look that feels both hauntingly familiar and devastatingly new.
(Jason hasn’t seen that look in Tim’s eyes since Liam, and if that doesn’t feel like forever ago, what does?)
“I died,” Jason says, his own voice cracking around the words. “And the League… do you—”
“—I know about the League.”
“Right. Of course, you do. Why wouldn’t you? Well. They brought me back to life. Used the—”
“—Lazarus Pit?” Tim’s eyes have zeroed in on Jason now, looking owlish and serious. Jason nods, not even attempting to waste time by being surprised at his baby brother’s wit. “Yes, I thought about that. One of my theories…” Tim trails off, shaking his head. “And what? They saved you and you decided to become a crime lord? To… to sever heads and leave them in a duffel bag?”
The words are biting but Jason doesn’t flinch this time, prepared now for the blistering heat Tim is filled with. It’s only fair, he tells himself. It’s only fair. Stay calm.
He deserves the brute of Tim’s wrath. He deserves it.
“I couldn’t come back right away,” he responds lamely before wincing at Tim’s scoff. “I couldn’t! The Lazarus Pit. It doesn’t just bring you back, it brings you back wrong. Tim, I hurt people. I— I…”
Tim has gone still, his shoulders arching in defensive positioning. It startles Jason how much he looks like Bruce in this light. How much he looks like Jason once had, and Dick before him. A true Robin. A true martyr.
“What happened to your eyes?” Tim asks suddenly, launching forward with his body angles in fascination and fear. “They just…”
It doesn’t take a genius to guess, “Turned green?”
His little brother nods and Jason lets out a heavy sigh, forcing himself to breathe through the Pit rage bubbling beneath his skin. “The Pit. I told you: It brings you back wrong. You’d have been better off if I never—”
Tim punches him.
Hissing in pain, Jason’s hand flies to his cheek, pressing the cold heel of his hand to the flaring ache in his face. “Fuck!”
But Tim doesn’t stop. He pulls back his hand and punches again, angling again for his face. Sloppy. Miscalculated. Tear stains blurring his movements. Instead of dodging, Jason’s arms fly upward, blocking the incoming flood of punches with the meat of his armored forearms.
“Shut up!” Tim wails, voice breaking like shattered glass and cutting deep into Jason’s cavernous heart. “You shut up with those words! With this better without you bullshit! It’s not true! It’s not!”
“Tim, stop. Focus on me. Just listen!”
The punches grow weaker, desperate and wobbly, and Jason catches Tim’s fist the next time it makes contact with his arm. “Tim! Tim— stop, damn it. Please.”
Like clockwork, like an old ghost, Tim obeys.
Falls still.
Hands tightening around Tim’s wrists, gloved fists that hide what Jason is sure is a plethora of bruised flesh and healed scabs, Jason yanks his kid brother forward into a hug.
“Let go of me!” Tim snaps, fighting the embrace with a pathetic jerk of his body. “Let… just. Just let go of me…”
There’s a moment where Jason thinks he’s about to get another shot to the face and it takes everything not to pull back and let go, but instead of hitting him, Tim crumbles into the embrace. He sobs into Jason’s chest like the child that Jason left behind and everything is wrong and right and everything is finally. Finally complete.
He has his little brother back.
(Now just how much of him actually remains?)