Chapter Text
Tim is in his regular cafe, in his regular spot, drinking a large quad coffee.
But this time, Dick is with him, sitting across from him, looking at his phone. Tim is so done with Dick right now. He had forced Tim out of the cave with the promise of coffee, and off they went. Tim closed his eyes for a second, then a flash of light from the other side of the table, and then a swear followed. Tim opened his eyes to look at Dick turning off his flash frantically; he looked up and smiled at Tim as if nothing happened. Dick went back to look at the photo. He looked confused.
The phone was flipped to him. Tim saw a black-and-white figure covered in static and fog, right behind Tim in the picture just a booth over; the most unsettling thing about the picture was the Lazarus green eyes glowing brightly and ominously.
Tim turned around to see a college kid with papers scattered across the table, a laptop open with equations and diagrams, 2 empty coffee cups, and a third well on its way.
But the kid looked normal: black hair, blue eyes, just a normal-looking college kid.
Tim turned to meet his brother's eyes. “Meta??” Dick said quietly. Tim shrugged, then looked back at the picture, staring into the eyes of the figure.
Tim's curiosity was piqued, and he was determined to learn how this kid got his meta powers or if they were meta powers at all. Dick smiled at Tim, looking at Tim's determined face and wishing he wasn't looking at his phone so he could snap another photo.
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Tim was in the cave looking at security footage of the teen trying to get facial recognition to work on the Batcomputer. However, all the footage was blurry wherever the boy was. You can't use Face ID on a computer if there is no face to ID.
How has the footage not been flagged? How long has this been happening before they accidentally found him? If Dick wasn't being annoying, would he have ever known of this guy who always sat behind him in the same booth almost every day? Tim's not going to think of that; right now he's gotta figure out the guy's name and search for him manually from there.
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Tim was extra early to the cafe, waiting with his laptop open for when the guy (he's definitely going to have to get his name; calling him “the guy” is not working) showed up. Around 1:00, walking in, the barista called him over “Heya, Danny, what’re you thinking for today?” “A venti Blonde quad, please,” Danny said with a sigh. “You got it, boss.” Danny gave a soft smile and sat in his normal spot.
Tim got a name. He has a name.
Now all he has to do is cross-reference any Danny or Daniels looking for matches on a Caucasian, black hair, blue eyes, male, ages 17-20, until he can narrow it down to the person behind him.
The whole process took less than 5 minutes to sort through till he found the face of "Daniel Nightingale," or should he say “Fenton”.
There wasn't much on Danny. Odd… The name change happened as soon as he turned 18. He's from Amity Park, Illinois; his parents are.. Insane?, to say the least. Ghost hunters, apparently. There are pictures of him with a few people. A red-headed girl with teal eyes, maybe 2 or 3 years older; a girl with the same hair and eyes as Danny, maybe 5 years younger. (So he can take normal pictures?) The photos with others in them did look a little old, though.
Okay, the file has pictures of his sisters, but his sisters don't seem to have a lot on them either—especially the little one who could have been Danny's twin if she was a few years older. Tim can't even find her birth certificate, let alone a name. He found that Jazmine was his older sister and is in college for law school in California. She also changed her last name as soon as she turned 18 to Nightingale. That… had some more implications about their parents.
Tim went back to Danny's file, reminding himself that he's looking into Danny, not his sisters, no matter how odd it was that one of his sisters didn't really exist in the eyes of the government.
He found that Danny is going to Gotham U as an aerospace engineering major on a Wayne Enterprises scholarship. Tim also got his apartment's address.
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Tim, dressed as Red Robin with a camera, was heading to the address. He's got Danny's class schedule, and he shouldn't be back for another 2 hours. Gotham is almost always dark and gloomy even in the day, but it's dusk, and Danny has morning classes (poor guy, freshmen taking morning classes because they “woke up earlier in high school”)
Tim hops into Danny's apartment through the window and immediately sees how much of a nerd this guy is. Everything is space-themed, or he just has enough stuff about space to make it look like a theme.
He looks around, seeing star charts sprawled across the walls like it's the wallpaper, broken-apart gadgets on the coffee table next to the small couch, books stacked on a desk in the corner, and pictures on a dresser separating the bed from the rest of the room and kitchen across the way.
The picture on the file was a little old, so he thought he might not have had meta powers before then, but now he can see he was wrong.
There were a couple of pictures on the wall. One was of Danny in the middle of two people; he was draped over their shoulders, hanging onto them, everyone smiling. The girl on the left had a black bob, with violet eyes, and a very goth style. The boy on the left had a red beret and glasses on, with green eyes; he seemed to have a wrist computer, too high-tech for what a normal person should have. Tim will have to look into that.
Another picture was a close-up of two faces. Danny's head was on top of his identical sister's head. She looked super annoyed while Danny was smiling an impish grin at her from above. This one reminded Tim of how annoying his siblings were to him and everyone else.
The last picture was just of Danny when he was younger, maybe 12-ish?. Sitting in a planetarium seat, looking up. The stars from the ceiling were seared into Danny's eyes, wide enough to be considered planets themselves. Tim smiled at this one and took a picture of it with his own camera and continued to look at everything else. (if he can't get a direct picture from security footage, he's going to get one from the picture he liked the best)
Danny was the space nerd to rival all other space nerds.
Tim looked at the parts on the coffee table; it looked like it was a dis-assembled comms piece or a Bluetooth earbud. Some slightly glowing green wires caught his attention, which were half out of the earpiece, still connected to the inside. This is.. Odd for a college student to just be working on. It reminded Tim of the Lazarus pits. He took a picture of the wires from a couple of angles. Tim was not going to touch it and warn Danny that someone had been here, but he needed something to figure out what it was. Tim thought the kid might be part of the League of Assassins if it was something akin to Lazarus, um, Wires? That thought sent a shiver down Tim's spine. Lazarus tech sounded ominous.
Tim continued over to the star charts sprawled across the walls like wallpaper and took pictures of them. He looked at the few he knew- and then the thought got caught in his brain halfway through thinking it. “The ones he KNEW??” Why doesn't he know most of them? Why is it a select few? Tim looked closer at the ones he didn't know. They looked like star charts from different planets, based on the ones in the Watchtower. Odd, but how big of a space nerd do you need to be to have other planets' star charts???
He looked at some others, and they looked similar to the Earth star charts until he realized that some of them were star charts based on the past. They didn't look like an approximation; they looked exactly like what you would expect a historically accurate star chart to look, not a guessed one. Some of the other charts look like they're from the future. How could the guy he's “researching” (Tim is not going to say stalking in his own thoughts) know what the stars are going to look like in the future? Tim thought to himself that it was odd, but not impossible, that the guy is such a nerd that he approximated the future star charts for the next millennium.
He was going to take pictures and send some to Martin Manhunter later for him to cross-check some of the star charts for his planet.
Tim moved on to the pile of books on the desk. He expected more space stuff, maybe textbooks, but not whatever language they were in. One look at them and he thought maybe he was studying another language. Tim tried to place the language and realized he didn't know it. One of the world's greatest detectives should know at least how each language should look to figure it out, but he's got no clue for this one. This is odd, very odd. He took a picture of a couple of the pages and the covers of some. He did a quick search and got occultist and ghost stuff. That reminded him of what Danny's parents did and thought, “okay… maybe. But occult stuff? Really? This guy is so odd.” He'd have to ask Constantine about it later.
This is getting more interesting. Tim is stumped on literally everything in this guy's apartment, Danny's apartment. Tim can usually figure out a person's whole life story in under 10 hours. But it took a whole day to even get Danny's name, a college student no less (given that he had to wait to get it, it only took a few minutes for the name to spill, but you know), and even when he did get the name, he had to manually look up everything because it couldn't use the facial ID the computer had from the scrambling.
It's been forever since Tim had to manually do anything!
Looking over the pictures he's got, he has to go and work with others to find things out about this guy. Tim never has to ask others questions, because he usually knows what they do. Tim actually has to go ask if the League of Assassins can make tech out of the Lazarus pits. He has to go ask alien heroes about their star charts from their home planets; he’ll have to talk to Constantine about dead languages and to look at the books to see if he knows anything about them.
Tim’s domino mask crinkled into the smile he gave, and he jumped out the window. This was going to be fun. He was going to figure Danny out one way or another.