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Since Robin died, Batman has been more brutal than ever before.
It worries Tim. He calls ambulances for petty thugs who Batman beats to a bloody pulp. He hacks the Bats’ computer systems to call the Batmobile when Bruce breaks himself more than is sustainable for him. He solves Arkham breakouts before the word is out to the whole of Gotham and sends hints about it to Commissioner Gordon to alleviate Batman’s workload.
It isn’t enough. Bruce keeps going overboard on small time criminals and not defending himself enough against actually dangerous opponents when Tim can’t get the police to arrest the rogues fast enough.
He’s running out of options to help keep Bruce safe without actually getting involved. He seriously doesn’t want to have to make himself known to Batman. Even though he could blackmail his way into being Robin as Alvin Draper instead of Tim Drake, or even fabricate a new identity, he doesn’t want to tie himself down too closely to Bruce. Doing that would limit his freedom too much.
One evening he comes to the conclusion that he could use his chameleon amulet to pretend to be the ghost of Jason Todd, back from the grave to make sure Bruce doesn’t kill anyone, not even himself.
His plan takes a lot of ironing out after he has it but he figures out a way to follow through.
Getting the details right on Jason Todd’s appearance is the easiest part. He’s stared at him long enough to be able to replicate his looks with the chameleon amulet.
It’s kind of difficult to get the clothes right. He learns to sew and looks back at the photos he’s caught of Jason as a civilian, so that he can replicate his outfit as both Robin and normal-civilian-Jason-Todd. Making them fit both Jason’s body and his own, as well as some of the backups he plans to use in case Batman comes after him, is another tricky part, but as long as Jason’s body is the biggest one he uses, he’s going to be fine.
Even though he doesn’t intend to speak a lot, he goes through the effort of learning to copy Jason’s speech. He’s learned the Crime Alley accent to blend in with the street kids as Alvin Draper, but his voice and intonation are different. He has to do a lot tests to figure out how to alter his vocal chords with the amulet. Originally he just wanted to do an imitation but it would’ve taken too much effort to do consistently, and the simple anatomical change and just learning Jason’s intonation and word choices is easier.
He practices the transformation, over and over, until he gets to a point where the change in vocal chords happens automatically with the outer changes.
He learns to edit video footage and change Batman’s cowl footage without it being immediately visible to Batman, so that he can hide any proof there actually was someone when Bruce inevitably searches for him.
Within a few weeks of the tragedy, he’s made himself capable of fixing Batman.
After Tim’s heard Batman and Nightwing having a fight on patrol and followed Nightwing leaving for Blüdhaven in a hurry, he decides to make his first move. He changes into his uniform, the Robin leotard he made look just like the one in the display case in the Batcave, that he’s seen through the surveillance cameras, covers it up and makes his way into town.
He hides on a roof while he prepares himself for his job, making sure the Robin uniform looks perfect, that his face looks just like Jason’s, his domino is on well and his voice is indistinguishable from that of the dead boy. Then he goes through some breathing exercises to calm down enough to do his job, and places himself at the edge of a roof, just barely in the line of sight of Batman some time later on his patrol route.
The moment Batman sees him is clear. Batman stills, and there are a few moments of eye contact, as perfect as it can be in between a cowl and a domino a few rooftops away from one another. Tim does his best to stay perfectly still, and exude as much disappointment as he can.
Then Batman corrects his course toward Tim. Instead of waiting around on the rooftop to get beat up by the vigilante, he flees. He’s done his own research into grappling hooks, using the resources he found at a few parks (yes, he went swinging), and he knows what parts of the drop-rise cycle are the most disorienting.
As soon as Bruce is at that part of the swing, he does his own disappearing act.
It isn’t anything fancy. He purposefully chose a roof with easy roof access for this stunt, so that he can get inside the building fast. As soon as he’s inside, he’s covering his outfit with the clothes and blankets in his backpack, plucking off the domino, getting in one of the empty apartments in the building. He takes the amulet off briefly, to change out of Jason’s appearance and into that of Alvin Draper, just severely more haggard.
When Batman lands on the roof, and comes into the building, there isn’t anything there for him to find. A young squatter who scares at his presence, some rats and cockroaches. No dead Robin in sight.
He reassures the kid, guides him to a shelter and makes sure he knows where to get food from.
The patrol continues as normal. He doesn’t see his dead son again. He stops robbers, beats some grunts, and finds realizes a building’s potential to become a criminal hideout.
By the time he gets back to the cave he’s almost dismissed it. Almost.
He sees the case, the memorial to his son, and the memory comes back to the forefront of his mind.
When he’d seen him, Jason’s suit had been the same kind of tattered it is in the memorial. It was an uncanny sight, Jason looking healthy and hale in his death shrouds.
He checks the cowl footage, and there’s just a vague shadow in the spot where he’d seen his son.
Bruce really doesn’t know what to think of it. He writes his report, hides it into files Alfred won’t be looking at, and continues his post-patrol routine as he used to do with Jason. Shower, wound care, tiger balm, joint braces, things he needs to make his body feel semi-normal after going out.
It will never be the same.
Tim doesn’t do it again for a while. He didn’t like being pestered by Batman and doesn’t want it to happen again.
He follows Bruce’s actions on cave surveillance and looks at Bruce doing more thorough self care than he’s done since Jason died, hacks into the reports he made of that night, and finds what Bruce wrote out about seeing Tim.
“Sighting of Robin, possibly a hallucination. Uninjured face, suit like it is in memorial.”
The hardest part about Bruce walking him to a shelter is the fact that he was wearing his Robin costume underneath the threadbare hoodie and other loose clothing he had on. It made him paranoid of his clothes slipping and Batman spotting the costume underneath.
He tries to speed up the pace at which he changes clothes, so that he could pack the outer costume away and not have to worry about it in case it happened again but it feels futile.
He’s fiddling with the chameleon amulet when he realizes that his clothes change size with him. He tries again, changing into adult sizes and tiny kid sizes, and as long as he’s hoping that the clothes fit him, they do. He wishes for his shirt to be a different colour, and it is.
He tests it out for a few days. He can use the amulet for a quick outfit change but it isn’t perfect; the fabric behaves weirdly, the colour isn’t too steady. Most annoyingly it feels weird on his skin.
But, it looks passable enough. He can change the colour of the Robin costume, make the material look different, make the fabric fit around any size body he wants to have, and when he covers it with a top layer, he thinks he wouldn’t have to worry about Batman seeing the costume under the layers.
He’s ready to try again.
The next time Bruce sees Jason during patrol, he’s swinging towards Crime Alley.
One moment he’s grappling, and the next, there’s the ghost of his son making eye contact from a rooftop. His face in perfectly smooth, uninjured, but his suit, his armour, is torn and tattered.
Again, he almost loses control of the swing. And again, his son disappears during his next swing.
Same as last time, he searches the building on which the ghost of his son was. There are a few squatters, nothing really interesting.
He continues his patrol, and when he returns to the cave, he checks the cowl footage with the same results, writes the same reports he did the last time.
He does his stretches, showers, tapes a few aches, adjusts his braces, and goes to sleep.
He dreams of a healthy, living Jason, and wakes up with tears in his eyes.
Tim’s plan is working splendidly.
After the third time he watches the camera footage of Bruce doing thorough self care after seeing Tim, he knows it’s because of him. It’s working!
After the sixth time, Bruce’s hidden notes speculate about him, whether it’s Bruce mistaking someone as Jason, if someone’s trying to deceive on purpose, or if he’s just plain hallucinating. His notes are inconclusive.
Still, Bruce does better self care after he’s sighted Robin, so on Tim’s ninth time doing it, he gives a prize to Bruce. Instead of using the suit he made look like the one in the memorial, he uses his neater suit, the one he keeps pristine and clean. He practices Jason’s grin beforehand, and when the time comes, Bruce doesn’t chase after him.
He runs the rooftops like he used to, for the rest of Batman’s patrol, and watches as Bruce doesn’t let himself get hurt. When he returns to the cave, the cameras show him Bruce doing more thorough self care Tim’s ever seen him do.
He’s so very proud.
Over a few months the sightings become more frequent and Bruce becomes almost certain he’s hallucinating. There’s no evidence of anything in his cowl footage, there aren’t even vague shadows in the places he saw Jason, like there was in the beginning.
Another thing that makes him more certain of them being hallucinations is how well Jason seems to be doing. It took him embarrassingly long to notice the correlation between his own physical health and Jason’s perceived well-being.
As soon as he’d noticed the correlation, he’d tested it. He’d purposefully gotten hit on patrol, and hadn’t treated the bruises as well as he probably should have.
The next time he saw Jason, his son was back in his death shrouds, looking at him with an angry scowl.
When he’d taken extra care to stay uninjured, take care of his body, and do similar post-patrol routines as he would do with Jason, his hallucination got all better, wearing a perfectly pristine Robin suit, and, eventually, civvies.
The hallucination keeps appearing only on buildings Bruce knows to be abandoned, usually inhabited by some squatters, and eventually he decides to stop chasing the hallucination onto the buildings to stop scaring the inhabitants.
It becomes normal.
His subconscious reminds him to take care of himself by showing him Jason in bad shape, and he takes care of his hallucination by taking care of himself.
It’s simple, it’s routine, it’s an everyday patrol thing.
Until that too has to change.
Tim fucked up.
Like most nights, he had put together his outfit for the night (Jason in civvies because Bruce had been good), set up on his rooftop of choice, and set up to wait for Batman to come grappling by.
He got too confident in his routine. Show up, disappear during a dip in a grapple, follow the patrol through cowl footage or by running rooftops, and erase himself from the any camera footage.
He forgot that Bruce had another Robin, one who’s still alive and occasionally works with him.
He forgot to check up on Nightwing.
He’d heard Batman coming his way, set up on the edge of the roof, and instead of making eye contact with the cowl, been confronted with an angry look from Nightwing.
And Tim knows it’s over.
Dick drops for his next grapple, only for Batman to glance at him, and the drop that’s disappeared from his swings after seeing Tim is back. Tim guesses that Bruce can see his frown from way back where he is.
Civvies Jason is supposed to be smiling! Civvies Jason is proud of Bruce for doing good self care, and civvies Jason smiles at Batman for doing his self care. Civvies Jason doesn’t frown, doesn’t scowl, and doesn’t slump.
And any Jason that Tim pretends to be is never there after one swing.
But Tim is frozen in place, unable to move, unable to do his common disappearing trick, because he’d forgotten Dick Grayson, he’d forgotten Nightwing, he’d forgot Robin.
Nightwing keeps grappling towards Tim, Bruce on his heels. There’s nowhere for Tim to disappear to, there’s no gap in visibility long enough for him to do what he always does.
All he can do is stare in horror as his inevitable ending comes towards him.
Bruce feels frozen in place.
He’d seen Jason, his Jason, like always, and he hadn’t disappeared like he always does. And when Dick had gone to grab him and get him off the ledge, he had been there, physically, possible for Dick to touch.
Bruce stares, frozen in some sort of shock as his eldest lectures his– the ghost of– as his eldest lectures a child, that looks so much like Jason, on rooftop safety, tells the boy that there are other options than killing himself, that he’s sorry he’d grabbed him from the ledge.
He stares in horror as he realizes how this would’ve gone without Dick there. Bruce wouldn’t have noticed the kid jumping off the roof because he would’ve been busy ignoring the happy feeling he always gets when Jason looks healthy on rooftops.
Or– or, alternatively the Jason he’s kept seeing having been an actual, living child, and not a hallucination like Bruce thought.
“You weren’t going to jump,” Bruce interrupts Dick’s worried ranting.
“No,” the kid says in Jason’s voice, jumping a little at the sound of his voice. Bruce blinks back tears as Dick freezes, looking closely at the exact picture of their dead Robin. “I wasn’t going to jump, B.”
There’s a choked gasp, a wet sniff, and the feeling of someone looking at him intently, as Bruce keeps staring at his ghost child.
“You’ve done this before.”
“Yes.” The kid’s avoiding his gaze, so very different from his usual of forming a few seconds of eye contact and disappearing.
“You’re real.”
He kicks at the ground, looking solidly in the direction of his shoes. “Kinda.”
There’s a wet sob from Dick’s direction. Bruce waits for his ghost son to elaborate.
The boy raises his gaze, forming eye contact with the cowl. “I don’t usually look like this, actually. Or sound like this.”
“You’re a shapeshifter?” Dick asks, his voice wet and quiet.
“Not really.” The kid shakes one hand in a so-and-so gesture. “I have–,” he pauses, glancing around. “I shouldn’t really talk about it. You can take me back to the Batcave and I can explain it. I won’t, otherwise.”
“We can’t take you to the cave,” Bruce says. He really wants to, the kid is the carbon-copy of his dead son, but he can’t take a civilian into his centre of operations.
“Aw, c’mon, Bruce,” Jason– the kid says, exactly like Jason would. “You can’t just leave me here.”
“We’ll blindfold and restrain you,” Dick tells the boy. The kid nods, and Bruce is calling over the Batmobile while Dick makes sure the child, who Bruce had been convinced was a hallucination, can’t see where they’re headed.
Getting to sit in the Batmobile is so cool, even though Tim can’t see anything in it. He’d wanted to insist to the Bats that the restraints weren’t necessary, that he already knew where the cave was, but that’d be risking a bystander hearing the Bats’ well kept secrets. He’d already been taking unnecessary risks with calling Bruce by his name.
He tracks the turns, marks the spot where they go into the underground tunnels into an imaginary map, and tracks and draws the tunnel’s where they drive. The Batmobile feels weird to his extra senses but he’s mapped the tunnels a little bit before, too, and he’s dug out the maps in the Batcomputer archives, so it is actually fairly simple to follow which way they’re taking. There’s extra turns and backtracking, as if to make sure Tim doesn’t know where they’re going.
It’s kind of pointless. Tim’s no elephant but his memory is extremely good. And even if he couldn’t track exactly where they are every step of the way, he’d still know where they are heading. The cave systems under both their manors.
Dick and Bruce are silently communicating with each other, grunts, hums, exasperated hand signals and whispered exclamations filling the cabin of the car.
Dick reminds Bruce multiple times that Tim’d called him Bruce, and Bruce grunts in response every time, and tells him that he knows Tim, that he’s seen him before.
There’s no mention of Bruce’s theory of Tim being a hallucination.
Now that Tim is thinking about it, the way Dick had flown into him on the roof had felt kind of like he had expected and been ready to deflect if there didn’t end up being someone there to collide with.
The thought settles for a while, Dick’s arm colliding with him while he does a soft and theatrical landing on the roof, and he realizes–
“Dick thought I was a hallucination, too,” he tells Batman.
“Too?” Dick questions.
“Why do you think so?” asks Bruce.
“The way he collided with me. He was ready to just hit air and the roof. He was ready for there to be no-one there to collide with, while also hoping for there to be someone there.”
“You don’t go to Blüdhaven,” Bruce states.
“No,” Tim tells him. “I’ve only been pretending for you.”
“Pretending what, exactly?” Dick asks.
“Pretending to be a hallucination of Jason.”
“Why would you do that?” Dick practically yells.
“It was helping. Bruce has been taking so much better care of himself since I started doing this.”
There’s a long silence, during which Tim assumes Dick is trying to pressure Bruce to either confirm or refute Tim’s point. Then, in a reluctant gruff, “It’s true. I stopped taking hits, and returned to my old post-patrol routine after I noticed that my health affected the well-being of my hallucination of Jason. I assumed it was my subconscious trying to tell me to take better care of myself.”
“And you didn’t think to check the cameras? Your cowl footage?”
“I scrubbed myself from any video evidence,” Tim points out, proud. “It was all a part of my plan in getting Batman to stop trying to get himself killed.”
Tim assumes the sharp inhale comes from Dick, and the long exhale from Bruce.
“We’re talking about this at the cave.”
“We could talk about it now, too,” Tim says, as helpful as always.
“We’re talking about it at the cave,” Bruce repeats.
“What’s your name, anyway?” asks Dick.
“We’re talking about it at the cave,” Tim reminds him.
“I think your identity is separate from the explanation of why you did all of this.”
“We’re talking about it at the cave.”
When the car stops, Tim knows exactly where they are. He remembers the cave’s layout from watching the camera footage, and he has a fairly good understanding of where in the cave system they are, even as Dick and Bruce lead him deeper into the cave.
They stop at one of the ordinary cave -ish looking areas of the Batcave, where Nightwing sits him down and takes off his blindfold. The restraints stay on.
“So who are you?” Dick tries to start the interrogation. “How do you look like Jason?”
Tim scoffs. “I think we should talk about your hallucinations first. Because I know that Bruce doesn’t hallucinate, he’s just seen me stalking the rooftops. But you were prepared for me to be a hallucination. And I haven’t given you a reason to think you’d be hallucinating.”
“I mean,” Dick starts, “wouldn’t you be suspicious if your definitely dead brother was suddenly standing at the edge of a roof?”
“I’m an only child,” Tim tells him. “And you wouldn’t think that I’m a hallucination straight off the bat, pun unintended, unless you’d been seeing hallucinations. You know a rogue who can shapeshift.”
“I also know many rogues who can make me see things that aren’t there.”
“Rogues who are all locked up and accounted for,” Bruce interrupts. “We can talk about Nightwing’s potential real hallucinations later. My faked hallucinations take priority. Who are you?”
Tim sighs, a deep and heaving thing. “I’m your neighbour. Tim Drake. You can take off my necklace; it’s the thing that lets me shapeshift.” As the amulet is pulled over his head and he feels the warmth of his own body return to him, he explains, “They’re called chameleon amulets. They’re made from the souls of butchered chameleon faunoids. One soul can be used for multiple amulets, about twenty, if I remember correctly. This one I salvaged from a faunoid hunter.”
“So you found it and just, what? Decided to mess with some local vigilante?”
“No. I’ve had this for almost a decade. And I wasn’t trying to mess with Bruce’s head, I was just trying to make him take better care of himself. Which worked, by the way,” he reminds them.
“And how does making these amulets from the souls work?” Bruce gruffs out.
“I mean, I’m not a hunter so the process is foreign to me. But a faunoid is a person who has an animal’s soul. It’s a lot of energy, and hunters, the people who can see the auras of faunoids often hunt us to capture our souls and use them for energy and other things, such as amulets like this one.”
“How did you say you got it, again?” Dick asks.
“A hunter came after me. I dealt with her and took this off of her. It wasn’t too hard to figure out what its function actually was.”
“So you’re a faunoid then?”
“Yes.”
“What’s your end goal in pretending to be my hallucination?”
“You take better care of yourself,” Tim tells Bruce simply.
“And you were ready to do it how long?”
“However long needed.”
There’s a lull in conversation, Bruce returning briefly to the main Batcave, probably to make some notes of what Tim has said and to actually look into his identity. Tim is kind of awed at being in the Batcave with Nightwing even more so. He tries to think of anything intelligent to say to the vigilante but before actually coming up with something, there’s assumable some sort of a transmission to Dick’s comm and he’s asking for permission to pick Tim up and move him.
Of course Tim agrees.
The kid seems even smaller than before as Dick hauls him back to the main Batcave. He might actually be that, the shapeshifting charm taken from him.
Tim Drake’s identity is sound. He’s their neighbour, living with his parents. Except his parents are on a months-long trip to another country, at some archaeological dig. The quick look Bruce had at their travel history shows no evidence of him ever being taken with them on the digs, and looking at their employee records, there’s no-one there to actually take care of Tim.
A housekeeper comes by occasionally, and if she doesn’t, Tim’s on his own devices.
It’s a sudden decision, but one Bruce is quite sure in. He’s already taken in two other boys around Tim’s age with no-one else to care for them.
He can take in a third one.