Chapter Text
So, it wasn’t that Tim had gotten over the dying thing, exactly. It wasn’t that easy, to die and then come back again. Jason could, at least, probably, attest to that, though Tim could admit that being submerged into a Lazarus pit for a wash and spin cycle sounded significantly more unpleasant than just crawling out of your own grave.
Who hasn’t crawled out of their own grave a time or two?
Tim counted himself very, very lucky to have a brother who had also died, because then he got to make jokes about dying that nobody else really found funny. To everyone else it was just unnecessarily macabre, though Tim thought he had gotten pretty far into training Dick out of the slightly horrified, slightly concerned face he would make whenever he’d make a joke about it. Bruce was still a work in progress. A very, very slow going, work in progress.
This lack of progress, Tim had to admit, was likely due to the fact that Bruce was generally the one privy to the nightmares that dragged Tim from sleep, screaming, until Bruce either woke him up, or he woke himself up, throat bloody and raw, and dragged himself into Bruce’s bed.
So. It wasn’t exactly that it had been easy getting over the dying thing. It was more that it didn’t happen all at once, slow and mellowing itself out, until one day Tim had looked up and thought, Ah. Alright then. And that had been that.
It was, though he couldn’t actually tell anyone this, uncomfortably related to his mother. Not that she had helped him through it. She was dead, and she, unlike Tim, hadn’t crawled out of her grave. Neither had his father, but Tim had always felt more his mother’s creature anyways, and for a while, Tim had wondered, selfishly, if it was genetic. If the reason behind Their choice to drag Tim back to life was hidden in his DNA, and that his mother had it too; that it was inheritable, and that his mother would come back.
Janet Drake did not crawl out of her grave. He did not admit to checking, religiously, for the six months post her death.
But it hadn’t really been any of that that had pulled Tim from his wallowing and spat him out into some puddle of ‘okay’. What had actually happened, was he had been staring at his mother’s grave, his father’s tucked somewhere to the side of him, and realized his mother would be deeply disappointed in his current behavior.
He could see her, blonde hair and ice blue eyes, making eye contact with him briefly through her mirror as she slicked on a layer of red lipstick, gala ready. Honestly, Timothy, she would say, I raised you better than this. You don’t need to be coddled, you’re fifteen. Stop moping about and go do something useful, please.
Except she wouldn’t have said please. Tim allowed himself that one, very brief, bit of indulgence.
He hoped she would be proud of him, now that he had gotten past that…grey, bit, where all he did was lay on rooftops and contemplate all of the things that could kill him, tragic and accidental, that never would.
Look, mom, he would mouth to himself sometimes, at the very edge of his patrol route, when he was alone, or in the silence after he had returned from a mission with Young Justice and he sat writing the report. I’ve made something out of it. I’m useful.
He thought she would appreciate, at the very least, the way he now used it as another tool in his arsenal. It wasn’t that he couldn’t die. It was that, no matter what, he would live, and now that. That was useful. That held merit. That made it worth something.
In reality, he knew she wouldn’t really be proud of him, because primarily, she wouldn’t believe him, if he said it. Or if she did she wouldn’t really care. She wouldn’t care that he spent his free time running across rooftops in a costume, whipping through air and shadows like he was one of them, that he could use himself as a shield, a stop gap, a last ditch measure, because he was the thing that lived.
So Tim had “gotten over it” and then he had been back to normal and totally fine and he had gone back to being sarcastic and mean to the goons, and also, Riddler, because Riddler had shitty riddles and Tim just couldn’t respect that. He had, both at Dick’s nudging and his own burning need to do something, dropped himself into the middle of his own little team. Young Justice, they called it, which Tim kind of thought was tacky, considering all of their parents or guardians were in the Justice League, but who was he to say anything about names.
That had helped, too, being surrounded by other teenagers who shared that same clawing, desperate need to help, to save, to do something good in the world; even if he clashed with some of them constantly, especially Kon, who was an asshole, and who Tim couldn’t help being an asshole back to. He and his stupid goddamn face made it so easy to say something biting and snarky back, every time he took a dig at Tim. He knew it was mainly his family trying to keep him distracted, and busy, and surrounded by people who would stop him from doing slightly too reckless things because Jason still hadn’t quite trained a healthy survival instinct or fear of physical harm back into him, but. It was nice, was the thing, to have people who he could call his, who didn’t know the Tim who had never died. Who only knew him, Tim, the Robin who had, who never would again, and was a little reckless and feral and hurting with it, even if he buried the last bit in his own grave.
He had also, against Bruce’s wishes and also Bruce’s general knowledge of the situation, done a little…digging. Jason didn’t talk about his time spent with the League of Assassins, especially not his relationship and whatever remained of said relationship with Talia, but Tim needed to know. They didn’t know if Jason could die, or if the remnants of the Lazarus pit that lingered in his bone marrow and blood stream would pull him back. None of them were willing to test it, either.
Tim got very, very acquainted with every form of immortality—Kon’s, who had stopped aging, really, once he and Tim had both hit sixteen, and neither Tim nor Kon knew if he would ever start again, Diana’s, who was a god, Bart’s, which wasn’t immortality, just time travel, and a smattering of odd curses, entities, and ancient objects—to the point that Constantine had almost tattled on him to Bruce. Tim had had to resort to a combination of bribery, and blackmail, to stop that one from happening.
He wanted to know. He wanted to know why, and how, and what made it all tick. What brought him back, what drove the Lazarus pit, what kept Ra’s Al Ghul alive. What would kill an immortal, what would kill immortality itself, what could kill him—and then, like water circling a drain, his attention had swarmed back to the Al Ghuls. To Ra’s, to Talia, to the rest of the League of Assassins, screen glowing as he hid in a closet—because Dick and Jason and Bruce were nosey—as he peeled his way through their layers of firewalls until finally, eyes sticky with exhaustion and computer on the verge of death, he had found it.
Damian Al Ghul.
Really, Damian Wayne. The Blood Son, Son of the Bat. Bruce’s child. Tim had stared at the screen until the computer died completely, screen flickering out. Until the information had seared itself into his retinas.
Damian Wayne, ten, raised by assassins and Ra’s, who Tim hated, set up to be the heir to his grandfather. Who would, when the time came, be used as nothing more than a weapon, a body, a tool.
And now that.
That just wouldn’t do.
Tim was not a fan of deserts. He didn’t really like sand, he discovered, because even though the lenses of his domino kept the grit that blew, ever present on the wind, out of his eyes, he could still tell it was there. He had been on deserts of different planets, before, with the rest of his team—not many, because they still weren’t really trusted with cross galaxy missions—but he had been to alien deserts before, and he hadn’t liked those either, but had hoped maybe earth deserts would be more tolerable, considering he was from earth.
They were not more tolerable.
Also, it was hot. Very, very hot.
Luckily, Tim didn’t plan on being there for long.
If Tim was kinder, more benevolent, he would have told Ra’s Al Ghul that his cybersecurity was shit, and that he was essentially broadcasting the location of every LoA base and Lazarus site to anyone intrepid enough to squirm through all of said shitty firewalls.
Tim was not, however, kind or benevolent when it came to Ra’s Al Ghul. He was also on a time limit, and taking his time to give an evil shitty immortal guy advice on how to best defend his evil, shitty, immortal endeavors, was not on the agenda.
For one, he had—well, he hadn’t stolen it, because technically he had been the one to design the newest version, so it was sort of Tim’s, too, if they really got into it—he had borrowed the Batplane. Which meant, not only was his location currently being tracked, it also meant his family would know he was missing far sooner than they would have if Tim had, for example, used a fake identity and flown economy. He would have done that, actually, but he figured bringing a baby assassin through airport security would go really, really poorly, so instead he had stolen a Batplane, and he was very much going to be grounded for it.
The things he did for family.
He supposed he could have, of course, taken something from the Tower, but then in turn that would have eventually alerted someone anyways, even if he did tamper with the system that catalogued where things were and when. Plus he didn’t really want to bring his team into this. He trusted them, but this was a…family, matter. The Bats were already sort of considered their own, interwoven group by the rest of the Justice League, and Tim would not be the one who changed that.
(Bart thought the whole thing was hilarious. He knew, of course, exactly what Tim was doing, and had just laughed when Tim shot him a look, and continued laughing even when Tim had smushed his face down into the couch cushions).
So, instead of dealing with his team, and the Justice League, he stole the Batplane, dooming himself to dealing with his own family, and rocketed it towards Nanda Parbat as fast as he possibly could.
Post that, he had landed, turned on the camouflage, and slipped his way into the towering and silent base for the League. Spires of it arched their way into the sky, beautiful and ominous in a way Tim couldn’t exactly pinpoint, and he knew there were tunnels that carved their way down, under his feet, and back, into the core of the mountains. There weren’t exactly floorplans of the thing uploaded to the League servers—they were smart enough to not do that, but still had shit cybersecurity, because that made sense—but it wasn’t necessarily hard to piece together the vague layout.
Lazarus pits, he knew, weren’t just out in the open. Buried in the middle of a League base, set into the depths of a mountain? Yeah, that tracked.
The majority of the rooms were empty, cavernous things, ornate and shadowed in equal measure. He was glad that his version of the Robin costume had pants, and also wasn’t quite as…traffic light, as his predecessors had been. His boots, near silent on the stone flooring, scuffed slightly as he wound his way deeper into the heart of the base. The server room wasn’t hard to find, it was just…tucked away. By the time he found it, he was irritated, and absolutely on a time crunch.
There was only one League member in there, which was good for Tim, and not good for the League member, at all. He winced at the sound their head made as he slammed it down on the desk, waited a second, and unceremoniously dumped them into a corner behind a bank of servers. He would have felt worse, he was sure, if one, they weren’t working for an organization that centered on crime and also an evil immortal shit stain of a guy, and two, if he didn’t also have a massive layer of malware to dump into the servers and a dwindling time period to do so.
The servers made a nasty, upset sound as they churned to life—he was lucky, it turned out, to find that there were servers hidden away throughout the entirety of the base, woven into the complicated web of tunnels and rooms. He scraped as much information as he could out of it, waiting for the sound of shouts, of any alert that he had been found out, and pulled it all into one hard drive. He would give that to Barbara later, when he was back, ungrounded, and hopefully not being hunted for sport by Ra’s Al Ghul.
Ra’s Al Ghul would be hunting him after this no matter what, especially once he realized Tim wasn’t just a son of the bat, but was, akin to him, a creature that could not die.
Worse, that he didn’t need a pit to drag him kicking and screaming back to life—that he did that all by himself, every time, sweat slicked, covered and grit and dirt. He knew how Ra’s worked, even though Tim had never done anything to garner his attention, and he knew that this, and his very existence, would be enough to keep his attention for a long, long time.
He had a feeling that this, despite his best efforts, would have consequences. He knew what Ra’s was capable of, had dug through the files Bruce didn’t think he had access to, had scoured through the things lodged in the League’s own servers, until he knew, for better or worse, exactly what he was dealing with.
It was why he hadn’t wasted time, once he had found the last bits of it, on going round, and round through mission planning, intent on making this endeavor as casualty free, as undamaged as possible. His way was better. He would cause the damage, and, well.
Tim couldn’t be a casualty.
And most importantly, he didn’t want Damian to become one, either.
He spent another minute weaving a flurry of commands throughout the web of servers in this base, and the twenty nearest bases, safehouses, and pit locations as well. If he was going to cause issues for Ra’s Al Ghul, he was going to make them catastrophic in nature and a pain in the ass to handle. Partly because he was hoping his utter destruction of a large swath of League resources would keep Ra’s distracted enough to at least partially minimize the intensity to which he would subsequently be hunting Tim. Mostly, though, it was because he wanted to be an asshole, and he hated Ra’s.
By the time he was done, a faint, metallic burning smell had begun to creep from the servers behind him, the whirring of their fans growing ever louder, and he grinned a little, just once, before slipping out into the hallway.
If I was an immortal shit stain, Tim mused to himself, silent as he slipped up a set of stairs, winding his way towards an upper balcony, where would I put my ostentatious and assholish throne room?
He rounded the bend, making direct eye contact with a League assassin through the sliver of skin visible through their cowl, shrouded in dark, armored bodycon. The secondary guard behind them stilled at the same time.
Tim grinned, easily. “Hey, guys,” he said, and then ducked, dropping under the swing of a dagger to slam the end of his staff into the knees of the second guard. The stairwell wasn’t quite wide enough for him to get a full extension to the side, so he shifted, slamming his elbow up into their face as they toppled, and used the back end of his staff to shove the other assassin from behind.
He caught them off balance, just barely, the end of their dagger nicking across his face, before he managed to grab the unconscious body of the other guard and haul it over himself, shoulder twinging, throwing it, and by result the other assassin, down the stairs.
He left the two League guards behind him, sagging in the stairwell, sporting a new cut across his cheekbone below his domino, and a painful twist in his shoulder. He winced, barely, as he felt the cut begin to close, skin knitting itself back together slowly—not…human, slowly, but not as rapid as things healed for Bart, or Wally. That was another thing he had come to discover, once he got back into the field, and had had to learn how to deal with it, too. He had gotten older, yeah, but when he looked in the mirror, he still looked fifteen.
Tim knew the change between fifteen and sixteen weren’t going to be drastic, of course, but he had wondered, sick to his stomach, if he had aged with his own birthday, or if his body had stayed suspended in limbo. He had taken a scan of his face, then another scan, imperfectly pulled from previous imaging, of his face from before he died, and they were the same. No minute changes, no growth, no change in height, nothing.
He didn’t know if that meant he was aging slowly, even as he healed quickly, or if that meant he wouldn’t age at all. If he would stay, fifteen in bones and blood, even as his identity left him behind, lapping the sun to sixteen, to seventeen, eighteen.
He felt the cut on his cheek close completely, and knew, with a bit of annoyance, that he had slid back into that blue-grey tinged view, lingering silent in the stairwell considering his own immortality again, for a moment too long.
By the time he found the yawning expanse of Ra’s throne room, he was irritated even further, his shoulder had healed itself, and the shadows among the corridors had deepened, somehow, with the setting of the sun.
He knelt, peering down, in one of the high, arching vaults in the ceiling, perched in a pooling bit of shadow. It was high, but not enough for him to be overtly concerned. He had fallen from further. Dick had taught him how to fall from higher.
Below, Ra’s was saying something, loud and imperious with it, sat in a throne that Tim’s mother would have called, perhaps to Ra’s face, compensating. There were twin lines of assassins, shrouded in that same darkened fabric and cowls, stretching across the sides of the room. Two people Tim vaguely recognized, but couldn’t name, stood on either side of Ra’s, face unshrouded.
And there, in the center of the room, was Damian, hair a shock of black against the silvery gray of the stone flooring, small at the side of Talia.
Tim frowned, at that, brow creasing behind his mask. He leaned forward, tilting his head to listen to whatever the immortal shitstain was saying, and froze.
“Talia,” Ra’s was saying, voice laced with unhidden condescension and threat, “this is a great honor, for you, for my grandson. He has trained well, and that will be rewarded.”
Talia stiffened, almost imperceptibly.
“He is too young, Father,” she replied. Tim could see the way Damian’s shirt creased at the shoulder where her hand clamped down harder, finger tips digging in. Damian, to his credit, didn’t flinch. “He’s not ready yet. With more training, a few more years—”
“Talia,” Ra’s said, voice gone impossibly colder. “It is not up to you to decide when he has developed into a sufficient host.”
Tim watched as slowly, Talia’s shoulders dropped, even as her hand remained clamped around Damian’s. He couldn’t make out her face from this angle, only Ra’s, but he could tell, in the tension she was hiding, badly, in her spine, that there was something about to happen that she very, very much would like to not happen, and that she had no way of stopping said thing, either.
Tim realized, very abruptly, that there was really only one thing he could see Talia wishing desperately to stop, and being largely unable to do so.
“We’ll begin the preparations,” Ra’s said, calmly, and the assassin standing to his left stepped back, melting into the mass of tunnels and shadow. “Someone will come to collect him.”
And Tim probably, totally, should have just waited. Should have tracked Damian and Talia back to Damian’s quarters, should have confronted her then. Offered her a way to stop this, offered Damian a way out, and then gotten Damian to Gotham with less risk of a major, catastrophic fight.
Tim should have thought it through, and planned it out carefully, and been the epitome of a trained operative raised by Dick, and Bruce, and Jason.
But—
Tim was, still, Robin.
Damian was, still, not just a child, but his—soon-to-be—little brother.
Tim should have waited.
Tim should have made a plan.
Instead, he took a second to secure his staff, and then dropped, out of the ceiling and shadows, to land directly in front of Damian, eyes trained on Ra’s Al Ghul.
“Hello, Ra’s Al Ghul,” Tim said. His grin was sharp. Feral. A cutting, biting thing across his face. “I’ve come to make a deal.”