Chapter Text
Jason could feel yet another headache coming on as he stared up at the foreboding clock tower attached to the condemned Wayne Central Station. He clutched the strap of his fraying bag tightly and took a careful look around to make sure no one was openly keeping an eye on him, but it was clear that the homeless population who took shelter there didn’t think much of yet another kid running around in threadbare clothing. (He was just one of… too many, honestly.)
He skulked across the open courtyard, using the piles of trash as a sort of cover. The back of his neck prickled with unease but when he paused to take another look around, he couldn’t find the reason for it.
He took a deep breath and eyed the boarded up front entrance. Two planks from the bottom was a space that looked just large enough for him to squeeze through. It was the first time since waking up in the body of his 12-year-old self that he felt grateful for how small he was.
Jason breathed out.
And then he ran.
In the span of a few heartbeats, he was within the decrepit entryway of Wayne Central Station, his eyes quickly adjusting to the dim, but not dark, lighting. Thin rays of sunlight forced their way in through filthy and broken windows, decaying boards of plywood doing after no upkeep for so many years.
Of course, Jason knew it was just an illusion.
The structure was sound, reinforced where it needed to be and the rest purposefully left to dissuade anyone else from taking refuge within. The old train tunnels had been caved in long ago and the stairs leading to higher levels destroyed to the point that only someone with the ability to fly could hope to reach them. If that wasn’t enough on its own, then the fact that it was stifling hot in summer and frigid during the winter, offering little to no protection against the elements, typically did the trick. No one stayed long.
Jason kept his wits about him as took the leftmost hall toward the back of the station, where he found the out-of-commission elevator and slipped through the half-open doors, hopping down into the pit where the cab once rested when on the bottommost floor. At that point, he had to dig into his bag for the flashlight he found that barely worked, casting a feeble yellow beam that he hoped would last just long enough for him to find —
Yes!
A barely visible square seam in the wall. He pressed it in and slid it to the side to reveal a keypad, which he used to type in the agreed-upon code before they kicked off this whole disastrous idea. (Jason blamed Tim. It was Tim’s plan. Tim’s scheme. And he was going to gladly hold it over him until the day that they died! He told Tim it was a fucking awful plan, but noooo everyone else had to go over his head and praise their resident supervillain-in-disguise and now here he was twelve and tiny again and —!)
There was a grinding sound as part of the wall to the right of the panel moved and he stepped up into the single working elevator in the whole structure. There was no switch on the inside. He simply had to wait for the door to close and for the cab to move, carrying him up to the very top of the clock tower, which, to his memory, had been converted into a secret base a year or two after Dick started running around as Robin.
For the first time since waking in the past, Jason Todd started to relax.
If he was lucky, Dick was already at the top, waiting for him so they could revise their plan.
If he was unlucky, Dick wasn’t there yet. But even then, Jason would be in a place with air conditioning, emergency rations, and cash to buy more food and anything else he needed. Then, it was just a matter of waiting.
The elevator pinged and the doors opened.
Jason’s flashlight flickered and then died, but it hardly mattered anymore with how well-lit the belfry was.
It was hardly the clock tower as he last saw it, lacking all of the flair of Barbara Gordon’s personal taste and the imposing screens of her very own supercomputer, but it was nice for one of Batman’s secret bases. There was a kitchenette tucked away in a corner with a spindle leg table and matching chairs, partnered with surprisingly tasteful light blue cushions. Just beyond that was a thin sparring mat and a pair of dummies repaired with duct-tape.
Jason stepped out of the elevator and took note of the sound of the television up in the loft playing the local news. There was an anchor whose name he couldn’t recall speaking about a potential issue with the northern dam and urging the public to remain calm, that it would be resolved in a matter of hours. (A problem for Batman? But who would be messing with the dam in Northern Gotham? On second thought… Yeah, Jason could think of several Rogues who would pick it as a target.)
He huffed softly and hung his bag up on the rack near the entrance. “Hey, Dickhead! I’m here!” He cringed at the sound of his own voice; he missed his deeper, adult tone so much.
Jason braced himself for an arrival that was way too over-the-top. Surely, Dick would perform one of his classic flips, complete with the cackle that had menaced much of Gotham’s underworld over the years, landing perfectly in front of him. Or even some complicated leap and a cry of: “Little Wing!” followed by a too-tight hug.
The TV went silent.
Two pairs of footsteps sounded on the carpet above him.
(Fuck, had tiny Tim beaten him to the belfry?)
“Todd?” / “Jason!”
Jason whipped his head to the stairs.
It was then that he began to fully understand exactly how badly they’d fucked up by going along with Tim’s plan. Because Dick was neither of the two people rushing toward him. And the those same two people should be roughly nine and three, not a scrawny teenager and a grown-ass adult, respectively.
(Wrong. Wrong. WRONG!)
“You made it!” Tim sounded genuinely delighted as he elbowed by the adult who was unmistakably Damian fucking Wayne.
Jason was going to strangle him to death.
In his sleep.
There was no reason for Tim to be so happy about the bullshit he’d landed them in and Jason was going to make him regret it. He’d signed up to go back a few years, not topple headfirst into some fucked up alternate reality where Damian and Tim were both older than him!
Jason jabbed a finger into Tim’s chest the moment the teen was close enough, a seething scowl fixed on his face. “You! Explain this!”
Tim stopped in his tracked and raised his hands, palms out, as if that would placate Jason’s ire. “Okay, I know this seems bad — ”
“Seems bad?!” Jason cut in shrilly. “This was not the plan, Tim! You fuckin’ swore - you swore! - that you had it all worked out and — don’t laugh at me!”
Tim covered his mouth, but that did nothing at all to hide his mirth. “Sorry, you’re just so tiny and adorable… I think I’m starting to understand why Dick was the way he was.”
Damian sighed. “Drake…”
“Lets see how adorable you think I am when I beat your ass into the ground!”
Jason lunged for Tim’s throat with a growl.
And was jerked back by the collar of his shirt mere inches from victory. He tried his best to twist around and break free, but only succeeded in making Damian lift him up off the floor and toss him over one shoulder.
“Honestly, I was never this volatile when I was your age,” he drawled.
Jason lifts his head in perfect time to witness Tim stare at Damian’s back with exaggerated bewilderment.
“Uh, you tried to murder me? More than once?” Tim pointed out.
“Not in this life.”
“You can’t keep using that as an excuse, Damian!”
Damian said nothing and Jason just knew that he had that awful smug smirk on his face. The one that he’d developed after his growth spurt that saw him shooting up past Dick’s height and in the same range as Jason and Bruce. The one that Jason always wanted to punch straight off his stupid, punchable face.
“Do try to quell your murderous instinct, little brother,” Damian remarked as he carried Jason toward the kitchenette table.
(That was it. Jason was killing them both. It was unavoidable.)
“Are you capable of holding a rational conversation or will I need to restrain you until you calm down?” Damian asked.
“I’ll claw your eyes out if you try, you big boob!” Jason hissed, the words breaking past his lips without his permission.
His whole body went taught, his chest tight. It wasn’t the first time since he woke up that his body had acted in some way without his permission. He’d brushed it off at first as an effect of being in a younger body and a lack of muscle memory that he’d grown used to, but reverting back to language he was prone to using as a child was… well, it was just another thing that was weird.
Wrong.
The fight drained from Jason all at once and he went limp in Damian’s arms.
“Ah, you must not have found balance with your younger self yet,” Tim said in the same tone as a normal person might talk about the weather.
Jason’s world spun and then he was settled upright in a chair.
“This is a conversation that requires tea,” Damian said. He walked over to the countertop to the left of the stove, where a glass electric kettle was already waiting and full of crisp, clear water. With the flip of a switch, it was set to heat, and Damian opened a cupboard to reveal a tiered arrangement of tea leaves, all labeled in individual jars. He selected three blends and placed them near the kettle.
Jason’s attention slid from Damian’s meticulous preparations to Tim as the teen (?) flopped into the chair nearest him.
He assumed Tim was roughly high school-aged. It was hard to tell when at 23 Tim looked nearly the same as he did at 16, though he’d maybe gained an inch in height between those ages in their original life. His hair was still pin-straight and allowed to grow just long enough to frame his face, but there was something about the shape of his eyes and the cut of his jawline that struck Jason as… different.
Jason looked back at Damian, taking in the differences between the man standing in front of him and the 17-year-old he remembered. He was taller, probably the same height as Bruce, and maybe a little bulkier, but not so much that he could put on the Batsuit and be a dead ringer for Batman, even considering the padding of the armor. His hair was still short on top and buzzed even shorter along the sides and back for a neatly kept undercut.
Aside from the obvious age difference, he couldn’t see anything that was really different about Damian. He had the same dark skin, the same intense green eyes. A near perfect blend of Talia and Bruce.
“To begin, I apologize for the subterfuge in getting you all to agree to my plan, but it had to be done,” Tim said, dragging Jason’s attention back to him. He didn’t meet Jason’s furious gaze, instead staring unblinkingly off into the distance. “Well, almost all of you. I did tell Dick about my revised plan because he was there when I started to realize exactly how much going back in time would work against us and I needed his help to properly calculate how screwed we’d be and well…”
Tim shrugged.
Jason scraped his tongue across his teeth to keep from immediately blurting out insults.
“Basically, time travel? Bad idea. Bart told me so and maybe I didn’t really believe him when he started telling me how dire the consequences could be, but then he brought Wally into it and Wally brought Dick and now, here we are.”
Jason hated when Tim started talking like that. It was that awful, train of thought thing he did when he was trying to distance himself from whatever nonsense he was getting into, as if him saying things in a tone that indicated near disinterest would in turn prevent Jason from flipping the table just to punch him in the face.
Damian placed a steaming cup of chamomile tea in front of him before he could do just that.
“Where the hell is Dick, anyway? Stuck at the manor?” Jason asked.
Damian sat down with two more cups of tea: a black tea with vanilla and a spoon of sugar for Tim and a Chai for himself. “To the best of our knowledge, Haly’s Circus is currently making its rounds through the midwest and is on track to arrive in Gotham this August. Most of the advertisement is around the youngest member of the Flying Graysons, who officially joined his parents after his ninth birthday three months ago.”
“Which gives us roughly two months to figure out how we’ll save his parents,” Tim said, finally looking at Jason.
Jason’s heart did something complicated in his chest.
John and Mary Grayson were still alive.
They had time to save them.
But that meant Dick wouldn’t stay in Gotham. He’d never meet Bruce. He’d never become Robin.
But his parents would live.
"So… So, what’s the plan? We save the Graysons and Dick goes cartwheeling away with them at the end of summer. He never puts on the suit. And we just, what, go on with our lives like everything is hunky dory?” Jason asked, unable to muster up the energy to get angry about it.
(Dick had a second chance to save his family — like hell would Jason be the one to ruin that.)
There was a sense of helplessness that came crashing down on his shoulders at the realization that Dick wouldn’t be around for anything. No 2 am ice cream runs. No mocking Bruce behind his back during debriefs. No full-body hugs. No commiserating over Tim’s unhealthy diet of Zesti and whatever unusual bag of chips he found at the corner store.
(No smile that was reserved just for him. The one that made Dick’s impossibly blue eyes crinkle at the corners and warmed Jason from the inside out.)
It felt as though they’d finally been on the cusp of addressing whatever was going on between them, but all of that slipped through Jason’s fingertips in a heartbeat.
Tim was talking.
Something about a report?
And then Damian was frowning at Tim, his arms crossed over the table as he… argued? It seemed likely, with Tim’s involvement.
Pain split across Jason’s head.
Another headache.
His vision went dark.
The very last thing Jason Peter Todd remembered before succumbing to unconsciousness was a quiet voice in the back of his mind asking: “Who are you?”