Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Tim remembers the first time he met Bruce Wayne, particularly because it was at the first, and last, gala he ever attended with his parents. He remembers the party being crowded, and loud, and boring, with rich food that looked appetizing only until he put it to his lips. He remembers his parents talking, wandering between groups of people all dressed in stuffy clothes and having conversations that weren’t even a little fun to overhear, and seemingly forgetting he was standing beside them except for the occasional few minutes when all eyes would be on him and the people in the stuffy clothes would call him ‘precious’ and ‘so well-behaved’. He remembers being so tired of standing and listening that he finally wandered away in hopes of finding better food or a kid somewhat close to his age or even just a comfortable chair to wait around in.

He remembers ducking between and around legs, remembers making a game of weaving through the crowd, until finally he and another person moved at the same time and instead of going through he went barreling into the surprisingly solid legs of one of the faceless socialites. He remembers falling back, landing with an oof as his butt connected with the polished marble floor. He remembers the man he ran into bending down, surprise twisting into concern, and large hands settling on his small shoulders.

“Are you alright, son?” He remembers Bruce Wayne asking as he pulled Tim to his feet. Of course, then Tim didn’t know who Bruce Wayne was. To him, it was just another weird man in stuffy clothes. He remembers expecting to be steered back to his parents, remembers being surprised when Bruce walked him to the line of chairs against the back wall and sat him down and brought him juice.

He remembers Bruce offering his name, “Call me Bruce”, remembers Bruce calling him ‘Tim’.

“How’d you know my name?” he remembers asking, swinging his legs in the comfortable chair, and sipping on the fancy flute filled with apple juice.

He remembers Bruce smiling, warm and a little sad. “I memorized the guest list,” Bruce had said.

“My parents did too,” Tim remembers saying, because the topic of the guest list had come up more than a few times that week. It made Bruce knowing his name seem plausible.

He remembers enjoying talking to Bruce, because Bruce asked questions Tim could actually answer, about his interests and which outfit at the party he thought was the worst. He remembers smiling and having fun.

He remembers his mother coming bursting through the crowd, the look on her face so thunderous Tim couldn’t help but flinch back against the chair. He remembers her holding out her hand to him wordlessly. He remembers sliding off his chair and looking back at Bruce to say goodbye, only to be surprised at the weird look on his face as he looked back at Tim’s mom. He remembers his mom coming and snatching his hand when he faltered, remembers being tugged away, remembers the sad way Bruce watched them go.

He remembers his dad leading him to the car, remembers that his mother didn’t join them until several awkward minutes later. He remembers that the drive home was tense, remembers his mother yelling at him for leaving her side and for talking to strangers.

He remembers not being allowed to join them at galas again after that.

Worse than any of the bitter tears, any of the curses and accusations, is the tiny bubble of excitement. Bruce is young, and naïve, and self-destructive in the wake of a tragedy he’s never learned to cope with. That he tears Janet Drake down with him is something he regrets, because his self-destruction was always meant to be inward, imploding in with him as the only victim. When Janet shoves the pregnancy test in his face and hisses, I told you so, in a voice so frigid he nearly shivers, Bruce is finally forced to reconcile the fact that his inevitable destruction does not just affect him after all. It affects Janet and all the women who came before. It affects Alfred, the man who has tried his best to guide him. And now, it affects a much smaller, much more innocent, life.

Strangely, that’s when the excitement hits; buried in the regret and the doubt and the horror. He isn’t ready to be a father, hardly knows what a father is after losing his own so young, but it feels like finding a purpose. It feels like a reason not to drink himself to death, not to implode after all.

“You will have no contact. You will have no rights. This is not your child,” Janet tells him, and the small spark of excitement is extinguished.

Bruce first meets Timothy Drake at a gala. It’s not one he’s invited to, and that is by design. Janet wants him completely uninvolved in Tim’s life, and Bruce respects that until he doesn’t, until Janet avoids every event with his name on the roster, until she refuses his unsigned gifts and blocks his number so he can’t even call to inquire if his son is still alive. Bruce still knows he isn’t meant to be a father, but he also knows what it’s like to lose parents so young, to constantly wonder about ‘what-ifs’. He can’t be a father, but he can’t abandon his only son either.

So, he schmoozes his way into the event, because his name isn’t on the guest list but he’s Brucie Wayne and that doesn’t mean anything. He isn’t truly expecting Timothy to be there, because Tim is only four and a fancy event is hardly the place for a boy that small. Still, Bruce keeps an eye and an ear out, eager to hear about Janet and Jack if nothing else, until a spark of conversation about a ‘well-behaved little boy’ catches his attention.

Before he can decide the merits of searching with purpose, Timothy quite literally runs into him and sprawls out on the polished floor with a noise that runs Bruce through the heart immediately. He’s kneeling before he can think, terrified that he’s hurt this painfully small child, and then Tim’s big blue eyes meet his and his heart stops. Tim looks so much like Bruce that he can’t help but wonder what Janet has said to Jack. Maybe Jack knows and just doesn’t care.

“Are you alright, son?” Bruce asks, and kicks himself for the wording immediately. Tim isn’t his son, no matter what the DNA might say, and Bruce knows if Janet heard that word from his lips, she would strangle him for it. But Janet is nowhere to be seen, and Tim is on the floor. He rights the boy and looks for his parents and frowns when he can’t find them.

Tim doesn’t seem upset to have lost them, so Bruce grabs his tiny hand and leads him to the chairs at the back and hands him a flute of juice. The boy is so small his legs dangle, kicking with the restless energy of youth. Bruce sits beside him and drinks in the sight of Tim’s black hair and Tim’s blue eyes and Tim’s too-serious face even though he knows he shouldn’t. He isn’t a father and doesn’t deserve to be. He doesn’t deserve to ask Tim about his interests, to make jokes about the partygoers in an effort to make Tim smile. But he does: he asks, and he jokes, and when Tim’s face lights up and he finally smiles, Bruce smiles right along with him.

When Janet appears and pulls the boy away, he can’t help but watch with a sadness he never quite expected. But Tim isn’t his, and Janet reminds him of that in a secluded hallway as Jack leads Tim from the venue.

“You stay away from him, Bruce,” Janet hisses, “He isn’t your son.”

“Can you blame me for wanting to see him? I just wanted proof that he even exists, Janet, I’m not asking for much.” But even as he says it, Bruce knows he’s lying. Now that he’s seen Tim, spoken to him, and heard about his interest in dinosaurs and space, can he truly call himself satisfied?

Janet must know he’s bluffing too because Bruce never sees Tim at another event. Eventually, he stops looking.

Seeing Tim at Haley’s Circus is an accident. Going to the circus at all hadn’t quite been planned, but when he sees Tim sitting all alone—and he’s only five, how could they leave him alone even for a few moments, even just to grab a bag of popcorn—Bruce can’t stop himself from waving. Who knows what sort of conversation Janet had with Tim after the gala, who knows what she said about Bruce to ensure Tim never wanted to speak to him again? But Tim waves back bashfully and ducks his head as if he isn’t sure what to do with the attention.

It’s barely anything, but it’s enough to keep Bruce’s lips tugged into a smile for the rest of the show.

Until the Graysons fly, and then fall, and then die.

The first thing Bruce thinks as he watches panic sweep through the tent is that Tim is in attendance. That Tim has seen. Bruce is reminded of seeing his own parents, of the sound of the bullet, the smell of the alley. Tim is even younger than Bruce was, and already Tim has seen death. Bruce looks back, wild in his haste to catch a glance of Tim, to make sure he’s okay, but the Drakes are lost in the crowd.

Instead, Bruce catches sight of Richard. Richard Grayson, with his wind-swept black hair and his small shoulders bowed in grief. For a moment, Bruce sees himself reflected in that traumatized child. Then he thinks of Tim and stands from his seat.

Making Dick his ward feels almost like betrayal, like he’s replacing a child that has never even been his. Tim is a boy with two parents, and a bright future ahead of him. Dick is a boy with dead parents, and without a place in the world. Dick needs Bruce in a way Tim doesn’t. Dick is real and solid and his in a way Tim never will be.

Bruce tries his hardest not to compare them, not to look into Dick’s blue eyes and picture Tim. It helps that Dick is twelve where Tim is only five, that Dick goes from sullen to animated in almost no time at all. He talks a mile a minute, flips around the house like only an acrobat can. When Bruce buys him bedding with the solar system on it, Dick wrinkles his nose slightly before he says, ‘thank you’.

The differences are good. Bruce replaces the solar system sheets with something more to Dick’s taste and pushes Tim from his mind as much as possible. It doesn’t take very long at all to distinguish Dick’s shade of blue from Tim’s. Keeping up with a twelve-year-old with hyperactive ADHD isn’t easy at all, but Bruce manages. Dick isn’t quite his son, but Dick proves that Bruce could be a father, and Bruce makes sure Dick knows he might want to be one, if ever he changes his mind.

Dick leaving feels like a bandage being torn off.

For all that Bruce has distinguished Dick’s blue from Tim’s, watching him leave feels a lot like losing them both. Bruce grew up in an empty house, but six years with Dick and his light and his laughter makes the silence in the wake of his departure feel more oppressive than ever before. For the first time in years, there’s nothing to distract Bruce from the hole Janet gouged in his heart when she took Tim. Instead, there’s now a second gouge to accompany it, so fresh it bleeds. The thought makes Dick feel like a replacement for Tim, like his interest in Tim is a replacement for Dick. He wallows, torn up and lonely and guilty. But Dick wants nothing to do with him and Janet wants him to have nothing to do with Tim and in the end, neither can replace the other if neither of them is there.


It’s when Bruce is at his lowest that he finds a boy with a tire iron and his whole world changes again.

Jason Todd is a scrawny thing, a few years older than Tim and a few years younger than Dick. It’s easy to see a bit of both of them in his messy black hair, his too-thin shoulders, his frightened-angry blue-green eyes. Like them, Jason has seen more than any child ought to. Furthermore, and most importantly, Jason has no mom and a dead-beat for a dad.

Before Bruce has even considered the consequences, he brings the boy to his home and knows he will keep him forever so long as it’s what Jason wants.

It’s what Bruce wants.

Maybe it isn’t so right away, but quickly: it is what Jason wants.

Differences are easy to find between Jason and Dick, but Bruce knows at their core they really are quite similar. They’re both passionate, and energetic, with a willingness to put in the work.

When Bruce had first allowed Dick out in the cape, he’d worried the boy would float up somewhere beyond the clouds. Dick always was a good partner, eager to make a name for himself, eager to bring to justice those that would hurt others. But his energy was impossible to match and so difficult to rein in. In the end, Bruce should have expected Dick would chafe under his close supervision.

While wearing the cape, Jason needs to be reined in too, but in a different way. He’s violent, and perhaps too eager. He’s seen the scum of Gotham from a different angle, uncomfortably close to the lowlifes crawling about the city. He knows how the worst of them think, can sympathize with the victims in a way that often hits too close to trauma he’ll probably never get over.

So, Bruce reins him in, and counts himself lucky that he can, that he found Jason before the anger lurking under his skin could consume him.

Jason needs Bruce even more than Dick ever did. Jason needs a father, and Bruce finally has enough confidence in his ability to give that to him. Jason needs Bruce more than Tim ever will, too, and that hurts as much as it helps. Like his two not-quite-sons, Jason’s eyes are blue, but they’re a different shade. Bruce memorizes the color, sets it right besides Dick’s and Tim’s in his heart and settles into his new role.

It feels a lot like coming home.

Rooftops and alleyways are no place for children. That’s the first thing Bruce thinks when he first spots Tim, camera around his neck and small hands gripping the banister of the fire escape. He’s a hypocrite and he knows it, but Jason isn’t twelve and tiny for his age. Rather than a camera, Jason carries weapons to defend himself.

At the very least, as hypocritical as Bruce is, Jason has his father supervising.

Sending Jason home early disappoints him, but Bruce isn’t sure the two boys should meet. He snaps at Robin in his best Batman voice, the one that finally cuts protests short, and waits until his son is out of sight before rounding on Tim’s hiding place.

Years though it’s been since Bruce last saw Tim in person, it’s still so easy to recognize him. All Bruce need do is remember himself, think of the photos and portraits of a young Bruce Wayne that Alfred keeps at the manor. But Tim is scrawny in a way Alfred never allowed, too small for twelve. Seeing the image of him against the grime of Gotham feels wrong.

“Where are your parents?” Batman asks, as Tim edges the camera behind his back guiltily.

“Home,” Tim says, seeming intimidated but far braver in the face of Batman than even most grown men.

“You shouldn’t be out here.” It’s not his job to parent Tim, but he can’t just ignore this. “It’s dangerous.”

“I’m careful.” Tim pulls a canister of pepper spray from his pocket. “I have this.”

Bruce imagines Tim, a small can of pepper spray as his only weapon against Clayface, against Killer Croc, against the Joker, and feels his heart stutter to a stop in his chest.

“I’m taking you home,” Batman says, and hefts Tim under his arm before the boy can protest. It’s the first time he’s ever held this not-son, but nothing about the situation lends itself to enjoyment. He buckles Tim into the Batmobile and, though he doesn’t need to, thankfully remembers to ask Tim for his address before they leave.

The drive back to Bristol is short for a car as efficient as the Batmobile. They don’t talk, but Tim prods at the interior of the car while he thinks Batman isn’t looking, and Bruce watches while Tim is distracted. Pulling up to the Drake house feels like disappointment, but Bruce dutifully pops open the passenger side door despite the pang of longing for more time.

“Don’t let me catch you alone on the streets again,” Batman says, as if he is Tim’s parent and has any right to police his activities.

“Bye, Batman! Thanks for the ride,” Tim says, rather than argue or agree, and ducks into the house. Though not as big as Wayne Manor, the Drakes still live in an estate. The house is large, and dark. Bruce watches as lights turn on, and finally concedes that Tim is safe.

That night, Bruce snoops into the lives of Janet and Jack Drake for the first time in years and learns many things he almost wishes he doesn’t.

Tim’s parents are not ‘home’. Tim’s parents are away in Germany and have been for three weeks. Tim’s parents have an entire itinerary planned, one that spans nearly a full year with stops back in Gotham made only once every few months and not for nearly long enough. Bruce pours over information on Drake Industries, the employees on their payroll, and comes to many conclusions. Tim Drake is only twelve, spends maybe four months out of the year in the company of his parents, and does not have a permanent guardian. Only one person makes frequent stops to the Drake house, and she is hired to stock the fridge and dust an otherwise unoccupied house.

Anger flares in Bruce’s gut, white and hot and terrible. Tim is not his son, but in the face of this evidence neither is he Janet’s. Thirteen years ago, Janet had assured him Tim would be cared for, that Tim had no room in his life for more than one father and Bruce would not be that man.

‘Jackson’, Janet had placed into Tim’s name where Bruce would see and know it; undoubtedly, there to hurt him personally. But by all intents and purposes, Jack is not the boy’s father either.

When Bruce sees Tim again on patrol, he observes, and he wonders. Is Tim so scrawny because he doesn’t eat enough? Do Jack and Janet make time for him in other ways? Does he have friends? Is he happy? No amount of snooping through public record can answer those questions, so he allows Tim to watch him while subtly watching him back, allows Tim to run around dangerous streets at night because the alternative is an empty house without supervision. At least in the streets of Gotham, Batman is watching.

“Where are your parents?” Batman asks Tim again one night when he’s seen enough, after encouraging Jason home with a reward should the boy get there first.

“At home,” Tim lies. He’s practiced, of that Bruce can plainly see. Twice now he’s heard that lie, and still Bruce can’t quite spot his tell. But Tim has spent years assuring grown-ups that he has someone at home waiting for him.

“Try again,” Batman says, in his most menacing growl. Tim flinches and ducks his head, and while that doesn’t feel very good, it does get results.

“Egypt, I think?” Tim finally confesses. “I dunno.”

Bruce knows they were in Egypt some weeks ago but have since left. He can’t help but wonder when the last time Janet even called her son was.

“Why are you out here?”

“I wanted to see Robin fly. He’s so cool,” Tim says. The expression on his face makes it apparent he didn’t mean to be quite so candid. Bruce has to hide a small smile in the face of that revelation.

“Do your parents know you come out here and take pictures in the middle of the night? That you put yourself in danger like this?”

How could they? They haven’t been home in over two months, and the last time they were they only stayed for ten days.

Tim shrugs. “I’m careful. They don’t have to know.”

“I could tell them.” It’s a threat, to see how Tim responds. He expects panicking, bargaining, like any other child who fears the wrath of their parents. What he gets is another careless shrug, dull eyes trained away as if Tim is sure there will be no repercussion and hasn’t quite decided if he’s happy about it.

“What are they gonna do from Egypt?”

Bruce has the paperwork started the next day. Alfred finds him in his office, head in his hands, after hours of tortured inner struggle.

“Master Bruce?”

“What should I do, Alfred?”

He hasn’t told Jason about Tim. He hasn’t interacted with Tim without the cowl in years. How would either of them respond to Bruce Wayne outing Tim Drake as his son and suing for custody without any warning? Would that be fair to either of them?

“I’m afraid I cannot make that decision for you, my boy. But I believe you are not the only one with a direct say in the outcome.”

Of course, Alfred is right. Bruce puts the paperwork away and picks up his phone instead.

The argument he has with Janet is larger than any he’s ever had before. Try as he might to rein in his temper, in the end he raises his voice. Though he doesn’t accuse her of neglect in those words, he certainly implies it. Janet says the usual: that Tim is her son, that she knows what’s best for him, that Bruce has no right to criticize her parenting when he’s never been part of Tim’s life. Bruce tells her she isn’t home enough to parent, that he never wanted to be cut out. Janet threatens to get lawyers involved, and Bruce finally concedes when she informs him she’ll be on the next plane to Gotham.

Though he knows she only returns to keep Bruce away from Tim, at least part of him is pleased. Tim deserves to see his mother.

When Jason tracks his birth mother to Ethiopia, it’s with that same mixed emotion that Bruce reluctantly plans the trip. With Janet back in Gotham and someone around to keep Tim from sneaking out after dark, he doesn’t feel quite so guilty about leaving. And Jason deserves to see his mother, too.

Losing Jason feels like losing the rest of his heart entirely, as if the beating, bleeding mess has just been torn from his chest. Bruce grieves like he’s never grieved before: even the pain of watching his parents die cannot hold a candle to the agony of cradling his son’s mangled body against his chest.

He returns to Gotham a broken man and leaves a trail of equally broken bodies whenever he takes to the streets. Nothing feels real without Jason, without Robin, as if the loss of his colorful partner has sucked all the color from the world right along with him. Bruce remembers the unique blue of Jason’s eyes, and mourns the loss of all three shades.

When he sees one of them out on patrol, after weeks of nothing but colorless darkness, he sees red—because it’s Tim, small for thirteen and with a camera around his neck.

“You shouldn’t be out here!” He practically shouts at the boy, who finally looks afraid. But that fear in his blue eyes isn’t really directed at Batman, and Bruce doesn’t know what to think about that.

The drive to the Drake house is silent, tense, until Bruce opens the door and Tim stays seated a beat too long, nervously fiddling with his camera strap and refusing to look at Batman’s cowled face.

“I’m really sorry… about Robin,” Tim finally says, in a small voice bright with sympathy, before he flees from the car.

Bruce watches him go with his hands locked tight around the wheel.

That night, Bruce learns that Janet left Gotham just two weeks after she arrived. She has flights booked out three months in advance, and no current plan to return to Gotham at all in that time.

With alcohol and unshed tears burning his throat, Bruce pulls out the paperwork he’d pushed to the back of his desk and regrets. Regrets not filling it out sooner, regrets that Jason never did meet his little brother, regrets that the only person around to save Tim is a man undeserving of children at all.

The next day, after a phone call with his lawyer, Bruce arrives at Tim’s school just as his classes let out. Tim looks shocked to see him as Bruce waves him over. The tabloids know that Bruce Wayne’s son is gone, but he’s done an admirable job hiding the bags under his eyes and combing his hair for this meeting and can only hope Tim doesn’t notice how wrecked he truly is.

“Hello, Tim,” Bruce says, stooping down to Tim’s level, “I’m Bruce Wayne and I have some things to talk to you about.”

“I know who you are,” Tim blurts out, and immediately flushes in embarrassment. The bashfulness is so unlike Dick and Jason. It helps.

Bruce doesn’t take him to the manor. It doesn’t feel appropriate, and the last thing he wants to do is make Tim feel trapped as he blindsides him with a truth he’s sure Janet has kept from him.

Sure enough, Tim gapes at him after the bomb is dropped, intelligent blue eyes roving over Bruce’s face as if the evidence is all right there. Bruce knows it is because he’s done the same.

“Why didn’t they tell me?” Tim whispers. ‘Why didn’t you?’ is what Bruce hears.

“Janet didn’t want me involved. As your mother, she had a right to you that I…” It’s an excuse, Bruce realizes, as he lets his voice trail off. As Tim’s biological father, Bruce had had a right too. It was a right Bruce hadn’t fought for, a right he’d given up just because Janet had told him to.

“Why are you telling me this now?” Tim asks, clearly struggling to make sense of it all. “Is this because… because Jason—?” Tim cuts the question off and presses a hand to his mouth as if he’s horrified by his own implication.

And that hurts, but Bruce can’t be upset with Tim for asking.

It has nothing to do with Jason.

It has everything to do with Jason.

Nothing, because he’s watched Tim from afar for so long, because he’s wanted the chance to get to know his son from the very moment he learned of Tim’s imminent existence.

Everything, because Jason is dead and Bruce is full of regret, because Tim is alive and alone and if Bruce loses him before ever getting to know him he would hate himself even more than he already does, because Jason died even with Bruce watching over him and Tim roams the streets all alone.

“I know Janet and Jack are never home, Tim. I know you’ve been living alone for years. I’ve never approved of that. I gave Janet a chance to correct that behavior, and she didn’t. I won’t allow my son to be neglected any longer.”

Tim wrings his hands in his lap and worries his lip. Emotions pass over his face like a view-master, in frame for a moment only to be snapped away to something else in the next.

Finally, he stills, and lifts his eyes to meet Bruce’s, calm and surprisingly serious from someone so young. There’s determination on his face, bravery covering all the emotions Bruce has just seen.

“Okay,” Tim says, whispered like a secret. Bruce isn’t sure what to think about it.

The custody battle is bloody. Proof of Janet’s and Jack’s neglect is easy to find, and Bruce’s lawyer is the best money can buy, but Gotham loves its drama and Janet doesn’t go down without a fight. Jason’s death is dug up and smeared through the tabloids; used as proof of Bruce’s own neglect, proof of his inability, proof of a man grieving and looking for a new child as if it could be possible to replace the last.

Nothing about it is fair to Tim, or to the memory of Jason. Tim moves into the manor when it becomes clear he has no supervision at home, and Alfred dotes on him through his own fresh grief. Bruce tries to be the father he claims he is but finds the timing truly is terrible after all. He has no time and no energy after dealing with accusations all day, after seeing Jason’s face in the paper beside Tim’s.

At night, he takes out his feelings on the scum of his city, and pretends he’s trying to make the world a better place for his son.

He finds Tim waiting up one night, sitting at the kitchen table and nodding off against his arm. The desire to carry him to bed is strong, even though he’d had to pop his arm back into its socket barely half an hour before. Part of Bruce debates leaving him there, because how can Bruce explain his rough appearance so late at night to a boy who doesn’t know the truth? But then Tim’s head drops off his arm and yanks back up in surprise, and their eyes meet.

“Tim,” Bruce sighs, “What are you doing up?”

“I know who you are,” Tim says in a rush, as if he’s practiced what he might say. “I know about where you go at night.”

Bruce freezes, so Tim continues.

“I know that you’re Batman.”

They don’t get much sleep that night. Tim explains that he’s known for years, and Bruce can’t help but laugh; a strangled, bitter approximation of a laugh anyway, at the thought that Tim uncovered Bruce was Batman without ever realizing Bruce was his father. But that isn’t funny, and neither is it when Tim admits in a quiet voice that he knows Bruce is hurting after losing Jason, that Bruce is allowing his grief to affect his work—affect Batman.

“Batman needs a Robin,” Tim says.

All at once, Bruce realizes a few painful truths: that Tim believes himself to be Jason’s replacement, and that he is perfectly willing to be.

Tim is thirteen and not quite young or small enough for it, or so Dick and Jay always swore at that age, but Bruce stoops to lift the boy into his aching arms and carry him to bed after all. The sheets on his bed are printed with the solar system, the same ones he told Alfred to throw away all those years ago. He doesn’t know if Tim is still interested in the stars, at least not the way he had been when he was four perhaps, but Tim lets Bruce tuck him beneath the sheets without complaining about them.

“I don’t need you to be Robin,” Bruce tells him, in the darkness of Tim’s room, as the boy struggles to keep his eyes open, “I just need you to be Tim. That’s all I’ll ever need you to be.”

As Tim lays back and lets his eyes stay closed, Bruce considers placing a kiss to his son’s forehead. Instead, he pats his knee beneath the blanket and stands.

“G’night, Bruce,” Tim murmurs as Bruce approaches the door.

“Good night, Tim.”

Bruce hasn’t seen Dick since just after Jason di—since Jason, so it comes as a surprise when Alfred answers the door one day only for his eldest to appear in the doorway, a bag thrown over his shoulder and his face pinched into a glare.

“Dick,” Bruce says, in way of greeting.

“Bruce.”

One doesn’t need to be the World’s Greatest Detective to piece together why Dick might be upset. Ever the considerate boy, Dick still provides the answer in the form of the newspaper he shoves into Bruce’s chest.

“Care to explain this?”

Bruce looks down to read the headline, but all he can see is the photo: a collage of Bruce himself between two boys with black hair. He sighs and looks away before he can get caught on Jason’s face.

“Dick—”

“Isn’t it interesting that I had to find out about your teenaged bio kid from a newspaper article claiming you’re suing his mother for custody?” Dick’s voice is bitter, and Bruce kicks himself. He’s given Dick space because space is all Dick’s ever asked for, but in the shuffle that space has turned into a chasm Bruce has no idea how to cross.

“I wasn’t keeping it from you maliciously.”

“Then what’s up, Bruce? You just find out about this kid or something? Because I find it hard to believe you didn’t know that the kid who lives in the mansion next door was yours.”

That’s fair. “I knew.”

“Alright, I need more than that.” Dick lets his bag fall to the floor and crosses his arms. “I’ll start with: why now, Bruce? If you knew about your son all this time, why did it take Ethiopia for you to fight for him?”

Hearing those words from Tim had been one thing; a child’s fear spoken aloud. Bruce could never fault Tim for wondering. From Dick is feels like an accusation, and his proverbial hackles rise accordingly.

“Jason has nothing to do with this,” he growls in a voice that sounds more like Batman than Bruce Wayne.

Dick opens his mouth to reply, but Alfred steps into the doorway and pins them both with a disapproving look before he can say anything else.

“Master Bruce, Master Richard. I do hope not to find you squabbling like children when the newest resident of our home returns. The last thing that boy needs is to hear you debating whether or not it is his place to walk these halls.”

Dick looks thoroughly chastised.

“Alfred—I wasn’t trying to—” He sighs. “I’d never say anything like that in front of the kid.”

“Master Timothy is surprisingly intuitive. I fear even harboring the thought is enough; best purge it now.”

Dick peers at Bruce, lips quirked in a mockery of a smile. “Guess there’s no doubt he’s yours, then.”

“You’re welcome to meet him,” Bruce offers: an olive branch. Dick and Jason were never particularly close, and perhaps that was his fault. Again, he regrets. Regrets not asking Dick again if he’d like to be adopted, not pushing harder when Dick pulled away. Regrets having a hand in a bitter relationship between two boys who deserved to love each other unconditionally.

He can’t make that same mistake now.

“That’s the plan,” Dick says, and Bruce can see that same regret reflected on his face. For all their problems, he knows Dick cares for Jason like a brother, knows he feels the loss undoubtedly as deeply as Bruce does. Before he can talk himself out of the action, Bruce reaches to clasp Dick’s shoulder, though he removes his hand before Dick can feel compelled to shake it away.

“Fill me in while the kid’s still at school,” Dick adds, in a tone far less combative than it had been.

It’s a start.

Bruce makes a point to pick Tim up from school every day. It’s a job Alfred is perfectly content to do, a job Tim has assured him is unnecessary, but Bruce knows what it’s like to grow up in an empty house with nothing but the echoes to imitate life. It’s important that Bruce proves his presence is consistent, no matter what Tim says to the contrary.

The car he uses is nondescript; the media attention given to the custody battle follows Tim to school and the last thing Bruce wants is to hand more ammunition to Tim’s gossiping classmates. Tim slips into the car like a shadow, clearly avoiding attention as much as possible. Not for the first time, Bruce wishes there had been a better solution for taking Tim out of that empty house.

“Hey, bud.” Bruce glances at Tim’s expression and posture to gauge his emotional state before pulling out of the pickup line. “How was school?”

“It was fine.” Tim slouches in his seat. “Passed my history quiz.”

“Good job. You studied hard, I’m proud of you.” From the corner of his eye, Bruce sees Tim duck his head, embarrassed. Tim has a hard time accepting compliments, and Bruce can’t help but wonder how often Janet and Jack told him they were proud of his accomplishments.

“There’s company at the manor,” Bruce says, when Tim doesn’t offer anything else about his day, “Dick is visiting. He wants to meet you if you’re feeling up to it.”

A pair of bright blue eyes whirl to face him, and Tim’s expression turns star-struck for a moment before it’s carefully smoothed out.

“That’s cool,” Tim says, in a tone that Bruce can tell has been carefully wrangled into something teenager-blasé, “I’d like to meet him, too.”

Watching Dick and Tim meet is everything Bruce could have hoped for. With Jason, Dick had been guarded and standoffish, perhaps even jealous in a way Bruce had never expected. With Tim, there’s instant connection. Dick ruffles Tim’s hair, calls him ‘squirt’, makes a joke about Bruce’s age that earns a shy smile. Tim is bashful, unused to undivided attention, and when he blurts out ‘Nightwing’ like a fanboy, Dick shows off with a few of his more juvenile acrobatic maneuvers right there in the hall.

The space where Bruce’s heart used to be pulses with warmth, reminding him that it is still there after all, merely mangled.

Dinner that evening is the best he’s had in a long time. Bruce can’t remember the last time Dick stayed for a meal, and Bruce has never seen Tim so open and eager to talk. There’s an empty spot where Jason should be sitting, and it hurts like nothing else, but having two of his sons so near feels like a soothing balm for the worst of the pain.

“Are you staying in Gotham for a while?” Tim asks around mouthfuls of chicken parmesan, eyes bright with hope.

“Honestly, Master Tim,” Alfred chides gently, “Swallow before speaking.”

“Sorry, Alfred.” Tim not only swallows, but straights, as if the scolding had been harsher.

“For the weekend,” Dick says, passing over the interaction with his natural grace. When Dick first arrived, he’d said the same to Bruce as if even that time seemed painful to him. Now, he sounds truly apologetic that he hadn’t thought to take time off work for a lengthier visit.

Tim’s eyes shoot to Bruce, and then to Dick and back again.

“Are you going to go out together tonight?” Tim hesitates. “Like for patrol?”

Dick’s inhaled breath is sharp, pained. Suddenly, the chasm feels just as large as before, as if their pleasant evening has only been masking it.

“Bruce and I don’t really work as partners,” Dick says at the same time Bruce admits, “I’d be happy for the company.”

They both stop talking, mouths clicked shut awkwardly. Tim slips his napkin from the table and wrings the fabric in his lap. The look on his face dissuades any potential arguments, forces a strained smile onto Dick’s face.

“Nothing wrong with that though, buddy. We tried it; it was good for a while. I’m just so used to working alone now.” They all know that’s not exactly the truth; Dick still has his stints with the Titans and Tim is too in the loop (somehow, and Bruce is still gobsmacked at how much Tim already knows) to not pick up on that.

The disappointment on Tim’s face is apparent even when he tries to hide it. Bruce might have passed it off as a fanboy whose hopes at seeing his heroes teaming up were dashed, but his previous conversation with Tim about his nightly activities paint a different picture. Tim is spending his energy worrying, not about the custody battle being waged over his head, not about his mother and his stepfather and his own future, but about Bruce and the way he’s been carrying on as Batman.

“Tim,” Bruce says, gentle and halting.

Before Bruce can think of something placating to say, Tim seems to find his confidence. “I know things are weird between you guys. But… Batman needs help.” Tim’s earnest blue eyes peer imploring up at Dick across the table. “He can’t ask for it, but he needs you, Dick.”

Silence lapses for several moments. Dick places his fork down against his plate with a gentle noise. His mouth is a thin line, hesitant and conflicted, and Bruce watches as Tim’s confidence bleeds out of him. The longer no one speaks, the lower Tim’s eyes drop, the more inward his shoulders hunch.

“Sorry,” Tim finally mumbles to the remains of his broccoli.

“What’s a night, for old time’s sake?” Dick relents and resumes the scraping of his fork against his plate with forced nonchalance. “I know B has a spare suit for me down in the cave anyway.”

“I do,” Bruce confirms, hope bubbling in the mangled remains of his heart. The smile Tim flashes them is hesitant, but more genuine than anything Bruce has seen from him so far.

Patrolling with Dick used to be seamless. That night, they get in each other’s way and bicker like children about things that really don’t matter in the grand scheme. More than once, Bruce is tempted to part ways, and he can tell Dick feels the same, but then they hesitate, and sigh, as if they’ve both remembered that painfully hopeful look in Tim’s eyes.

It’s awkward, and painful, and without Tim as a buffer they really don’t get along the same way. Jason feels like a presence looming over their shoulders, and it seems like it’s only a matter of time before they part on the same awful terms they first did those years ago. But they make it through the night in one piece, and Bruce doesn’t beat anyone into a full body cast even once. It’s a victory, and beyond that, it’s proof that Tim was right: Batman really does need a partner.

“Can’t say I really enjoyed that,” Dick says in a tone only slightly cutting as he drops into the passenger side of the Batmobile and looks out the window, “But it could have been worse.”

They pull into the Batcave, to the sight of Alfred ready at the medbay to treat only minor injuries for the first time in weeks, and Tim, perched on a chair with ramrod straight posture and hands twisting nervously in his lap, only to light up at the sight of them.

Dick regals Tim with a recap of the night, squabbles omitted for young ears and heroics exaggerated, and Bruce yearns. This is what he’s been missing. This is exactly what he’s wanted, even if he never had a name for it.

Jason’s memorial case casts a long, dark shadow across the cave, but for once Bruce is able to tear his eyes away before the pain can choke him too badly.


When the weekend draws to a close, they all stand in the foyer and bid Dick farewell. Tim holds his hand out for Dick to shake and only squeaks a little when Dick nudges it aside and pulls him into a tight embrace instead. Tim’s posture stays stiff for a moment, and then he wraps his arms around Dick’s back and melts, clinging like a boy at least three years younger. Bruce watches as Dick tips his head down to whisper something into Tim’s ear, to which Tim nods quickly.

They look like brothers, no matter that Dick has a darker complexion, that their bone structure isn’t really that similar. It’s in the way they hold each other, the way Dick squeezes and then releases to ruffle Tim’s hair affectionately. It’s only been a weekend, but Bruce can tell they’re good for each other.

“Come home soon. You’re always welcome.” The use of ‘home’ is deliberate, and Bruce can tell Dick picks up on it when he rolls his eyes, but nods, and pulls first Alfred and then, surprisingly, even Bruce into a quick hug. A pointed look at Alfred has the man leading Tim away for a snack, and then Dick lets his shoulders slump slightly.

“Tim’s a good kid,” Dick admits when the boy is out of earshot. “No matter your reasoning or timing, I’m glad you’re fighting for him, Bruce. He really needs you.” Bruce isn’t surprised that Dick has already picked up on the signs of neglect; he’s trained for it, and Tim seemingly has no idea just how obviously he carries them. “Just. Don’t let him take care of you too much.”

Knowing Tim, it’s a valid concern. Bruce nods. “You’re good for him. I really hope you’ll take me up on that offer.”

“To visit, maybe.” Dick shoulders his bag. “I can’t promise anything more than that right now, but I will be around. For Tim if nothing else.”

“Thank you, Dick.” Bruce presses his luck with a quick squeeze to his son’s shoulder. “I’m proud of you.”

Dick shrugs the hand away, but his heart doesn’t seem to be in it. “Go wrangle your teenager. And warn me before he ends up in a cape on the streets; I know it’s coming.”

They’re both smiling faintly as Dick ducks from the house, and that’s more than Bruce could ever hope for. For the first time in a long time, it feels like they’ll be okay.

After bitter months of fighting, Bruce does get full custody of Tim. The Drakes are legally allowed visitation, but Bruce strongly suspects Janet will rarely be in the country for the ‘every other weekend’ she is allowed. Tim agrees, if the way he looks away and frowns when the judge announces their rights is any indication.

“I’m sorry it came to this,” Bruce says, as he parts ways with Janet for what will probably be a while. “But I’m not sorry for taking him. You were wrong to keep him from me.”

She looks angrier than he’s ever seen her, but he can’t help but think she’s more concerned with the hit her reputation has taken and the dip in Drake Industries’ stock than the loss of her parental rights. If she truly cared about that, Tim wouldn’t have had to raise himself in the first place. Janet purses her lips and breezes right by him without a word.

The goodbye she shares with Tim is warmer, but still stiff and awkward. Out of earshot, Bruce watches as Janet and Tim embrace, as she says something to him, as Tim nods slowly and lowers his eyes to the ground. When Jack steps up, the look on his face is smoothed over but uncomfortable as he and Tim share a stilted handshake.

Before they leave, Jack stiffly ruffles Tim’s hair and Janet briefly touches his cheek. Then they’re gone, the whole first thirteen years of Tim’s life tidied up in less than twenty minutes, and Tim returns to Bruce’s side.

His eyes are downcast, faintly unfocused. Bruce winds a grounding arm around him and guides him toward the car as quickly as he can without pushing. Papers the next morning will undoubtedly feature the picture of them leaving the courthouse together, but Bruce is more concerned with Tim than the headline they’ll make.

In the car, Tim is quiet, and Bruce gives him the time to think. It’s once they’re back at the manor that Bruce encourages him to the den rather than let him sequester himself upstairs. Tim looks out of his element as he sits on the couch, as Alfred nudges a bowl of popcorn into his slack hands, as Bruce takes a spot on the same couch and leaves just enough room to keep from crowding.

“Family movie night,” Bruce explains when Tim turns lost eyes on him. “Dick will be arriving shortly.” Bruce has never been good at emotion, at emoting, but every new son has needed something different, has taught him something different, and he’s trying. He distinctly remembers the sound of his own voice echoing through an empty mansion and knows Tim’s memories of the same are far more recent, sharp without time to dull the edges. So, he turns the television on and lounges back against the plush couch cushions and offers idle commentary through the start of the movie as Tim slowly relaxes.

Dick comes rushing in like a whirlwind sometime later, drops his bag off in the doorway and plops himself down on Tim’s other side to sling an arm around his shoulders. Dutifully, Tim scoots closer to Bruce to give Dick more room, but Dick just stretches out to take up all the offered space.

“Sorry I’m late! The traffic from Blüd was ridiculous today. You definitely gotta rewind for me, I have no idea what we’re watching.”

Bruce couldn’t have summarized the plot if it were somehow pertinent to a case. He restarts the movie.

“Hey, Dick,” Tim offers, shy, and Bruce watches as Dick pulls Tim closer, arm steady until Tim’s head slowly lowers onto his shoulder and they both visibly relax.

“Hey, little brother,” Dick says. It’s not the first time Bruce has heard him use those words with Tim, but the title is especially important with the courthouse so fresh. Tim tries to hide the intensity of his smile, but Bruce can see it plainly from his position at Tim’s side. He doesn’t reach out to touch his sons, as much as he wants to, and instead allows them their moment.

Tim dozes by the end of the second movie, tucked fitfully under the blanket Alfred draped over the three of them and leaning boneless against Dick’s side.

“Bathroom,” Dick whispers to Bruce as the third movie drones in the background. When he nudges Tim away from his side, the boy flops until his head finds Bruce. He’s still half asleep, loose-limbed and barely aware, so he doesn’t pull away as Bruce slides an arm around his back to support him. Instead, he mumbles, sighs, and curls up a little closer, until his head is pillowed on Bruce’s chest and his knees are knocking uncomfortably against Bruce’s side.

It’s easy to convince himself to pull Tim into his lap, because Tim would surely end up with a crick in his neck otherwise. Tim hums nonsense as Bruce’s arms go around him, as Bruce finally allows himself to slide his fingers through Tim’s hair the way he’s wanted to since he first met a four-year-old at a gala with hair as black as his what feels like a lifetime ago. Jack had done similar just hours before, the action impersonal and hurried. Bruce takes his time, touch gentle and hesitant. Tim’s eyes crack open slightly and his hand reaches up to grip in the fabric of Bruce’s shirt like a kid half his size. He closes his eyes again before Bruce can see the color, seemingly when he determines he is safe. Bruce is more than touched by the show of trust.

Movie night ends when Dick’s own subtle dozing turns into a snore. Tim is still in Bruce’s lap, so it is Alfred that brushes the hair from Dick’s face and nudges him toward the stairs when he finally wakes.

Dick pauses long enough to run his own hand through Tim’s unruly hair and offer Bruce a smile that feels like approval before he starts the slow shuffle up to his bedroom. Alfred hovers longer, and Bruce angles his neck just enough to catch the soft look on the man’s face as he watches them together, stays still just long enough for Alfred to get his fill.

“Do you require any assistance with Master Tim?” Alfred finally asks, and Bruce takes that as his cue. He stands, easily lifting Tim with him.

“That’s alright, Alfred.”

“Very good, sir. Then I shall see you both in the morning.” Like Dick, Alfred steps close just long enough to pet Tim’s hair and smile at Bruce before going on his own way, undoubtedly toward the kitchen to tidy up their snacks, though he does take an extra second to pat Bruce’s arm as he moves away.

“Good night, Al.”

It’s as Bruce is tucking Tim beneath his solar system sheets that blue eyes crack open again and regard Bruce blearily.

“Dad?” Tim mumbles, and Bruce freezes, unsure of what to say. Tim could be waking from a dream, one where Jack Drake just ruffled his hair affectionately or passed a ball around with him in the yard. Bruce doesn’t want to assume that word is for him, that that word might ever be for him. But when Tim blinks at him a beat longer, long enough to have seen Bruce’s face, without taking the word back, he finally relaxes.

“Yes, Tim?”

“I fell asleep during the movie, didn’t I?” Tim looks… regretful, disappointed. As if he’s been given a gift only to immediately lose it. As if he can’t imagine the next time he’ll have all four of them together in a room again, and didn’t get to properly enjoy it.

“Family movie night is bi-weekly,” Bruce informs him, having just decided, “Dick insisted.” He hasn’t told Dick, but he can’t imagine his eldest making a liar of him. Not about this.

“Oh.” Tim relaxes back against the soft mattress and smiles just slightly; hopeful, pleased. “I’ll stay awake next time.”

Bruce smooths the hair from Tim’s closed eyes. “Get some sleep,” he says, but Tim’s breathing has already evened out. This time, he allows himself to lean forward just enough to press a quick kiss to his son’s forehead before quietly tiptoeing to the door.

He lingers in the doorway for some time.

Batman needs a Robin. Tim seems so sure of that fact, and Bruce really can’t fault his logic. On the off weekend Nightwing joins him on patrol in Gotham, Bruce returns far less beaten and with less brutality left in his wake. But Bruce knows it’s not quite as simple as Tim believes; knows that already there is a marked improvement. Where Batman had once been violent for the sake of violence, for the sake of anger and grief and revenge, he is now only so out of necessity—because of the knowledge that there is no partner there to watch his six and zip-tie the stragglers that aren’t beaten down for long.

It’s not the same, but Tim doesn’t, can’t, know that. Doesn’t, can’t, know that Robin was never the presence that tempered his anger. It was Dick, and then it was Jason. It was his son: watching, emulating. Tim doesn’t join him in the field, but Tim is still watching. Despite Bruce’s reservations, Tim sits in the Cave and waits up for him every night.

Violence for the sake of violence is never what Bruce wants to teach any son.

“I could help you in the field,” Tim insists, as Alfred stitches the wound on Bruce’s arm where a lucky punk’s blade sliced the suit at just the right angle to get at his skin.

Bruce imagines Tim sitting where he is, Alfred repairing a wound from a knife, staunching blood from a GSW, repairing a broken bone, and has to fight against a violent physical recoil.

He thinks of Jason—shoves the thought away.

“No,” he nearly snarls, not out of anger but of fear. Tim doesn’t quite flinch back, but Bruce drags a hand down his fault guiltily as if he had, and adds, softer, “You already help.”

Batman doesn’t need a Robin. Batman needs a partner, maybe, someone to watch his back when he’s outnumbered nine to one and struggling. That partner never had to be Robin. That that partner was ever Robin was a mistake. Jason was proof of that, buried six feet under before he ever made it to eighteen. Too young to have died for Batman’s crusade. Too precious, too irreplaceable.

Batman doesn’t need a Robin.

Bruce needs his son.

In a perfect world, he would have all three. In a perfect world, there would be no Batman at all. In a perfect world, Dick would still live at home and Jason would be picking out universities and when Tim was feeling lonely the three of them would pile on the couch for family movie night, all together in a row so Bruce could assure himself they were all safe and happy and healthy and whole.

“But Br—” Tim pauses, like he always does before he addresses Bruce by name, like he isn’t sure he’s brave enough to switch to ‘Dad’ when awake and yet doesn’t want to feel shoehorned into calling him ‘Bruce’ any longer.

“Son,” Bruce says, and rests a hand on the back of Tim’s neck. Tim leans closer, pulled in by the weight of it, and looks up at Bruce with big, imploring blue eyes. “You help more than you know.”

Tim’s expression goes sour, confused. After a moment, he gestures helplessly to the wound Alfred has silently finished stitching and wrapping. “I mean—with that. You keep getting hurt. And Dick’s here on the weekends, but you still need help when he’s not.”

“I don’t need you to be Robin,” is what Bruce says. Tim’s eyes flash with feeling for a moment, only to shutter in the next. But despite his efforts, Tim is not practiced at hiding his emotions the way Bruce is, and he catches that flash of pain on his son’s face. He amends, “I need you to be safe.”

Alfred has already stepped away, leaving the two of them alone, but Tim still drops his voice when he admits, “But I need you to be safe, too.”

It does something funny to Bruce’s heart, to hear that quiet admission. And he’s surprised, though he knows he shouldn’t be, because he’s been a father for long enough that he should have realized—that as much as Bruce is still that young, traumatized kid in an alley, he is also the father stepping in front of the bullet every night.

Tim waits up for him every night.

Bruce opens his arm, invitingly, and Tim leans forward without hesitation. It’s a marked improvement, from when he’d first come to the Manor, that Tim melts into the embrace from the moment Bruce closes both arms around him. A small face shoves into his shoulder as thin arms circle his neck, and Bruce holds Tim just a little closer despite the flair of pain in his arm.

I’m not going anywhere, he could promise. But it’s not a promise he’s sure he can keep, so he doesn’t.

“I’m here,” he says instead, as Tim starts to tremble slightly in the protective ring of his arms. “I’m here.”

In a perfect world, he always would be.

The next night, Bruce allows Tim to access the Bat-computer.

“You aren’t allowed to leave the Cave,” Bruce tells him, when Tim’s eyes go wide with glee, “but I will allow you to run surveillance for me while I’m out in the field.”

There is a lot to teach, far more than can be covered in a night, but Tim absorbs his knowledge like a sponge without the complaining that Bruce frequently hears about school and homework. Tim takes to computers easier than Dick and Jason did, and when Bruce introduces him to Oracle he seems almost as star-struck as when he met Nightwing.

The two of them get on quickly; Tim has an unending list of questions and Oracle answers them with an amusement he hasn’t heard from her in a long time. It eases the anxiety in Bruce’s chest, a little; allows him to imagine a future where Tim is always satisfied to stay in the background where it’s safe. He can’t allow another child—another son—on the streets, and part of Bruce fears even this is too great a risk, but the happiness on Tim’s face is so rare, so precious. He tramples down his anxiety as much as he can and observes fondly.

With Tim watching through CCTV, keeping an eye on his back, patrols do get easier. It’s not the same as having a partner in the field, but it helps. Best of all, Tim believes it helps.

For now, that’s enough.

Self-defense training is a must no matter what role Tim is to play, but Bruce reminds him that it doesn’t give him the right to a cape perhaps too frequently: as they set up, while sparring, during cool-down, over dinner. Tim doesn’t take to physical training the same way he does to surveillance, and that suits Bruce fine. There’s no rush to get him street-ready, so Bruce allows Tim to take his time, learn at his own pace. He focuses more on redirection and agility, endurance and the ability to flee. Unlike Robins past, Tim is not trained to be a weapon. Tim is trained to untie knots, to evade blows, to pick all manner of lock—to stay alive.

Some nights, Bruce feels himself getting impatient, growing harsh. Training Tim reminds him of Jason, of finding Jason bound and bloody and unresponsive. On those nights, he forces himself to stop, makes Tim run laps despite his groans of protest until it’s time for patrol. On those nights, he’s a little more aggressive in the streets, until Tim’s small voice chattering in his ear talks him down. If Tim’s a little more talkative those nights, neither of them acknowledges why. It just proves that Tim is a good partner for him, that Tim always was what he needed.

It’s not a perfect system by any means, but it works. They make it work.

“Can I really still be Robin, even if I never leave the Cave?” Tim asks one day, wedged between Dick and Bruce on the couch for bi-weekly movie night. The question takes Bruce by surprise, mainly because he’s never seen Tim smile as wide as he did the night Dick passed on the mantle to him, his eager eyes begging Bruce not to take it back. That was days ago, and they’ve used the name over the comms since. It does still hurt to hear, occasionally, knowing it would never be Jay that responded to it again, but he’s been careful not to let that slip in front of Tim.

“Of course you can, baby bird,” Dick replies easily, undoubtedly as eager for Tim to see physical action as Bruce, “Unless you have your own call sign thought up? That’s okay too. You don’t even need a costume, but we could absolutely design one anyway.”

“No,” Tim says, as he idly plays with his hands overtop the blanket draped across their laps. There’s anxiety in the action, nervousness, and Bruce lowers the volume as the film starts rather than pause it completely—Tim so easily feels put on the spot by undivided attention. “Just.” He pauses, hesitates. “Robin’s supposed to fly.”

Dick catches Bruce’s eye over Tim’s head and inclines his head.

“Tim,” Bruce says, “There’s no correct way to be Robin.”

It doesn’t seem to be the right thing to say. After a beat, Tim nods, smiles, but it’s subdued.

Dick settles his arm around Tim’s shoulders and pulls him in close, ruffles his hair obnoxiously until Tim sputters and tries to pull away. “And, hey, if it’s flying you wanted, all you had to do was ask.”

Bruce shoots him a warning look, says, “Dick,” in a warning tone.

“Relax,” Dick says, easy smile on his face, “I’ll take him to a training spot and wont even let him hold the grapple.” To Tim, he adds, “I bet you’re still light enough to swing with me; we probably weigh less than Batman even combined.”

Imploring blue eyes lock on his. For a moment, Bruce sees a different shade, sees Jason running from the change room in his uniform for the first time, sans mask, with open excitement on his face. He has to look away to dispel the image, but even so the anxiety won’t dislodge.

“You’ll let me oversee.” It’s a concession, and the boys brighten immediately.

“Just don’t cramp our style, old man,” Dick says, tone light. Tim’s smile is beaming as he shuffles from Dick’s side to Bruce’s, as he curls arms—slightly stronger than they’d been just weeks ago—around Bruce’s side and presses a small face against his shoulder.

“Thanks, Dad,” Tim says, happy and rushed and breathless the way he always sounds when he says that word, as if to say it any slower would give them time to think about it, would give Bruce time to disapprove and Tim to regret.

Bruce is weak.

He curls an arm around Tim in turn and holds him close. “This doesn’t mean you can go out on the street,” he reminds him, again, for the fifth time in as many hours. “You’re still locked to the Cave, and you can only go when I’m there to watch you.”

“Okay!” Tim agrees so easily, doesn’t let his smile dim. Jason would be pushing for more slack, to do more and sooner and longer and with less supervision, but Tim is so accommodating. Tim is glowing from the very prospect of being out with Nightwing and Batman as Robin, even if it means swinging with his brother on a line between abandoned buildings while his father watches anxiously.

They’re so different, need different things.

It helps as much as it hurts.

Seeing Tim in Jason’s Robin uniform would be too much to bear. That’s the only reason he allows Dick and Tim to redesign it, even for something as simple as a flying lesson. They pour over it together for the rest of Dick’s visit, eager and excited like children, but when Tim presents it to him it is with a renewed shyness he’s been slowly outgrowing.

Bruce takes their designs to heart but adds his own embellishments: more padding and armor, reinforced and durable, still bright but with a long black cape to hide the flashiness away and allow him to fade back into the shadows. Tim will never need to do that, because Bruce will never allow him to truly fight, but he adds it all anyway. Just in case. Just because those modifications should have happened long ago.

When Tim steps out from the change room, in his uniform for the first time, sans mask, with open excitement on his face, Bruce feels his heart stutter to a grueling stop in his chest. He thinks of Jason—Jason’s blue and Jason’s grin and Jason’s blood caked under his fingernails.

It’s too much. He sends Tim—Robin—on ahead with Nightwing and holds himself together as well as he can. When Alfred steps up beside him to rest a grounding hand against his arm, Bruce clutches it like a lifeline.

He’s late to the flying lesson, but Tim doesn’t complain.

In a perfect world, parents would not be shot in alleyways.

In a perfect world, sons would not be beaten to death with crowbars.

In a perfect world, children would not need to protect their parents.

In a perfect world, Tim’s Robin suit would only ever be used for the occasional flying lesson.

Bruce’s world is not perfect, has never been perfect.

In Bruce’s world, parents are shot in alleyways and sons are beaten to death with crowbars and children protect their parents and Tim dons the Robin suit while Bruce is incapacitated and comes to his rescue, puts himself in front of the gun in the alleyway—in front of the crowbar in the warehouse—no; hangs in the rafters as he was taught and picks the thugs off one by one and disarms the gunman and unties the ropes binding Bruce’s wrists together and ushers him to the car with a grounding arm around his waist while the paparazzi loom to make their headlines—and, wait, no.

Bruce has a concussion, and nothing makes sense. He isn’t sure what hit him and when but it’s the only explanation for the lost time, for the drop the gang had gotten on him, for the fact that Ti—that Robin is there to save him. And Tim—Jason—Robin sits in the driver’s seat and puts the Batmobile on auto as the sound of sirens permeate the air.

“Jason,” Bruce says, as his eyes flutter and his head spins, and Robin flinches.

Later, when Bruce’s thoughts have been sorted, he pulls Tim in against his chest and holds on tight.

“Tim,” he breathes against his son’s messy hair, as they both tremble slightly.

Never do that again, he wants to say.

He imagines himself as the son in that scenario, imagines his father telling him about the alley and the gun and informing Bruce that he would need to allow him to die. It’s what a good father would do. But Bruce remembers being the son in the alley with the sound of the gun and the smell of the blood and his father dead on the ground. Bruce knows what choice he would make at thirteen, if it meant saving his father from the gun that would kill him.

Tim is his father’s son—Bruce’s son.

“I need you to be safe,” Bruce says instead, “I can’t lose you. Please, let me be the one to take care of you.”

And Tim—Tim is Bruce’s son.

“I need you to be safe, too,” Tim says, because he’s thirteen and his fear isn’t guns but the loss of the father that steps in front of them.

They hold each other until Tim’s breathing evens out and his body grows lax and heavy in Bruce’s arms, until the hands fisted in Bruce’s cape go slack.

Bruce holds him for a long time afterwards.

Dick quits his job in Blüdhaven and moves back home. Tim seems torn between assuring Dick it isn’t necessary—that he’s perfectly content being Robin so Dick won’t feel the need to displace his entire life—and glowing with the knowledge that he has finally gotten his wish.

For Dick’s part, he never once lets Tim think it’s his fault. Bruce knows that Tim going out as Robin without them is the trigger, but Dick crafts a cover story that Tim pretends to believe. Bruce thinks Tim is just happy to have his brother home all the time. Bruce is certainly happy to have Dick around, is elated even if it is so his eldest child can keep an eye on him.

They work out a system, slowly integrating Nightwing back into Gotham so his arrival isn’t timed so perfectly to Dick Grayson’s. Tim is locked back to working surveillance in the Cave, and Bruce only breathes easier when the Robin cape is hung and stored where Tim will hopefully never need it again.

It’s not a flawless system—Batman and Nightwing are not the perfect team Batman and Robin once were. Janet never visits, Jason is still dead. Tim is often still anxious, touch-starved and too independent. Bruce still looks at Tim and occasionally sees a boy long gone—not in Tim’s place but as an omen, a warning, a fear that turns Bruce’s blood to ice in his veins. There is no replacing Janet, no replacing Jason, but Bruce would never want either of them to try.

Their system isn’t flawless, but it works. They make it work.

Dick moves home and bi-weekly movie night becomes weekly movie night.

As Alfred arranges the coffee table with popcorn and sandwiches and pastries, Tim grabs the blanket and settles on the couch in his usual spot: centered, so Dick and Bruce can settle in around him. Dick slings an arm around Tim’s shoulders and complains about the movie—“Star Wars again, baby bird? You just want me to be able to quote them all with you, huh?”—while Tim relaxes against him and laughs. The sound makes Bruce’s heart feel lighter.

“I want Dad to be able to, too,” Tim admits, as he stretches his legs across Bruce’s lap. And that; his sons leaning against each other and Tim laughing and comfortable and ’Dad’—that’s everything.

In a perfect world, Jason would be squashed in with them on the couch, would be picking out universities soon.

In this imperfect world, Jason is gone, and Bruce’s parents are gone, and Janet never visits, but Dick and Tim and Alfred and Bruce are home and happy and whole and together.

For a moment, Bruce’s world feels as perfect as it can possibly be.

Chapter Text

There’s plenty to say about the time that comes after; after Tim becomes legally his, after Dick moves back home, after Batman hangs up Robin’s cape and swaps it for Nightwing’s blue finger stripes—as if he worries significantly less for his twenty-one-year-old than he does his fourteen-year-old. He doesn’t. But he’s already ruined his chances of keeping the twenty-one-year-old from the streets. At least for now, the fourteen-year-old listens when he says ‘stay’.

Mostly.

There’s plenty to say, but it’s easily boiled down into an unfamiliar contentment, into the strangest feeling of things going right for the first time in a long time.

Dick living at the manor again feels right. Batman running around Gotham with Robin-turned-Nightwing again feels right. They fit together much better now that Dick is twenty-one than they ever did when Dick was seventeen. Tim’s presence in their life helps, acts as a distraction for Bruce’s over-protection and Dick’s emotional yearning. It’s not quite perfect, and Bruce knows it; knows that it probably puts too much pressure on Tim, but Tim never complains.

It probably distracts him, too, from the phone Janet rarely calls, from emotional yearnings of his own.

Though Tim’s cape is hung up, he keeps the call sign. Robin does as much good for Batman over the comms, the first of Oracle’s protégés, as either of his predecessors ever did while physically on the streets. They work out a system: Batman and Nightwing and Robin—Bruce and Dick and Tim. The manor has never felt so lived in with two of his children at home.

It’s contentment, it’s right.

Bruce smiles more. Alfred points that out to him one day, casually, as he hands Bruce a mug of coffee. He sounds pleased as he says it.

It’s good. It’s a good thing, to be happy, to show that happiness on his face. Dick and Tim deserve to see that outward display. He smiles a little wider as he accepts the mug and finds that it feels right on his face.

Jason’s voice still echoes in the halls; around the shelves of the library; in the dark of the cave. Where it once haunted Bruce, now he finds a semblance of comfort in the reminder. He isn’t sure what that says about him. Part of him is afraid to find out, but a bigger part feels at peace. Content. Happy.

Tim moves on to high school proper. He doesn’t seem to hate it as much as the middle school grades of Gotham Academy, and that’s a marked improvement. He’s smart, and his grades reflect it. Bruce takes him out for ice cream after each report card, and makes sure Tim knows he would still do so even if he only brought home Cs. Tim smiles when he says, “I know,” but Bruce doesn’t quite believe that he does.

That’s alright. Bruce has time to prove it to him.

Everything is fine. Better than fine—good. And, really, that should have been the first clue that something was amiss, because Bruce’s world is imperfect, because good comes before tragedy, and always has.

In Bruce’s imperfect world, it probably always will.

It starts with a crime lord: a new, up and coming player on the board with grand designs to consolidate the Gotham territories. That in and of itself is not unusual, or frankly even noteworthy. Gotham attracts the sort, like a tragedy attracts the camera. The difference is this crime lord thinks like Batman. The Red Hood always seems to be a step ahead, just a hair out of reach.

Batman and Nightwing track him for weeks with little headway, and that is the sort of frustration fresh blood rarely manages to stir up in Batman’s city. Fresh-faced crime lords and two-bit thugs appear as blips on Batman’s radar: extinguished nearly as soon as they appear. But Red Hood puts the rest to shame. Red Hood lingers, stacks heads into a bag and takes over a significant amount of the drug trade quite literally overnight. Red Hood moves like a spectre; there one moment and gone the next.

Red Hood evades him.

Even more frustratingly, he seems to make a game out of antagonizing them. Frequently, while in pursuit, the man in the bright red helmet performs a move that nags at Batman as familiar, says something cryptic that Batman assumes is meant to spark recognition in him.

The familiarity Red Hood has for them is concerning, but not unheard of. It certainly would make more sense for Red Hood to be an old player operating under a new name, with the amount of information he clearly has on them. Plenty of masked vigilantes abandon old costumes only to step into new ones, and the scum of Gotham are often the same—as if a new mask is enough to run from an old record.

But the Red Hood clearly wants to be recognized, and that is what makes him a particularly distracting, and concerning, variable. Because people do dangerous things to get noticed, act out in bigger and bolder ways until they get what they want. With heads already rolling and bullets flying, Batman is quite sure he doesn’t want to know the extent Red Hood is willing to go to get what he wants.

With that worry in mind, he has Robin create and run software specifically meant to match and compare Red Hood against prior enemies. It’s hard, without any visible facial features. Red Hood hides everything about himself, including the color of his skin and sound of his voice. There isn’t much hope of ever finding a connection without a truly damning clue, but Robin is nothing if not determined.

Tim truly is Bruce’s son; already on his way to becoming Batman’s mental equal, with more than enough potential to surpass him. He churns out the software in record time, and searches for clues on Red Hood whenever he has a free moment, so often trailing Red Hood’s movements via CCTV and watching old videos of past players to compare their styles. Every time Batman asks for an update, Robin has one, and the two of them spend as much time debating Red Hood’s potential identity over breakfast as they do while in work mode down in the cave.

When Alfred points out how unhealthy that is and Dick pesters Bruce not to allow Tim to emulate his terrible work/life balance, it’s already too late, because Robin takes every delay, every failure as hard and personally as Batman himself.

“I’m sorry I still haven’t spotted him coming or going from any of his safehouses,” Robin says, tone truly apologetic, when Batman and Nightwing slink from the Batmobile nursing bullet bruises and sore egos.

“Red Hood is practically a ghost,” Robin groans another night as he rubs sleep from his eyes long past his bedtime.

“I just wish I could do more,” Robin laments, soft and pained, to Nightwing when he thinks Batman is out of earshot.

From his vantage spot, Bruce clenches his hands into fists and feels like a failure twice over.

Tim’s grades slip. Hardly at all, not even yet a notch on his report card. Just a test, marked at the top with a big, red, capital D—and underlined three times for good measure. Tim presents it meekly as soon as he slips into the car, as if Bruce has his hand out for it. As if Bruce remembered Tim would be getting grades back that day and would be expecting to hear about it.

“I’m sorry,” Tim murmurs, to the cold form of Gotham Academy lingering beyond the passenger side window.

Bruce sighs. “You don’t have to be sorry.”

“You said Robin can’t affect school. But it did. I let it. And I’m… I’m sorry, Dad.”

“Tim,” Bruce says. “Look at me.”

Tim turns his head slowly, makes eye contact for all of two seconds before he regards Bruce’s nose instead.

Bruce hands the test back. “We’re stopping for ice cream on the way home.”

“Why?” And Tim seems so bewildered, he meets Bruce’s eyes again in surprise for a few extra seconds.

Bruce brushes the haphazard bangs from Tim’s sullen eyes and does his best to wrangle the stress and guilt from his face as he smiles. “To make you feel better. I did say it’s not just the straight A’s that warrant an ice cream run.”

Tim smiles weakly back. He fidgets with the edge of his test as Bruce drives, but shoves the paper away into his bag when they arrive. The two of them eat their contraband ice cream at the parlor despite the attention they attract, and then check their mouths in the car’s mirrors lest Alfred see the proof. Neither of them has any doubt Alfred knows immediately, but Bruce winks at Tim behind his back as if they’ve managed to keep the secret. The smile—slightly brighter, less strained—that Tim flashes him makes the subterfuge well worth it.

Batman benches Robin. It’s not meant to be a punishment, but Tim’s eyes still flash with hurt when Bruce attempts to explain his reasoning. He knows he must come across as a hypocrite when he insists Tim take time for his schoolwork and hobbies and friends and regular sleep, because Tim purses his lips as if he wants to argue. Dick, the more socially capable between them, does his best to smooth things over. Tim doesn’t seem happy about his mandatory week-long vacation, but he does eventually concede. At least in terms of stubbornness, Bruce still has a clear advantage.

In Bruce’s imperfect world, it is during that week without Robin that the situation with Red Hood finally comes to a head.

As it happens, the comms cut out about halfway through their usual circuit on what seems like a perfectly ordinary night. Unusual, but not unheard of. Robin might be able to repair the connection, but Robin’s week-long ban from the cave is only half complete and the dark circles under his eyes haven’t faded enough to consider attempting contact. Oracle, on call in his stead, checks in on them between other important projects and might not notice for a while. Batman considers just turning back toward home, but they’ve survived without communication devices before and there’s just enough untouched ground left to make him feel unease at the thought of turning in early. He informs Nightwing they’ll be switching to hand-gestured communication and continues like normal.

Half an hour later, there’s a voice on their usual frequency. Modulated, nearly robotic. Not Robin. Not Oracle.

“I’ve got your bird,” the mysterious caller informs him. Nightwing lands beside him, two fingers to the communicator in his ear and brows furrowed. Batman’s heart stops, because if not Nightwing, then…

“Where?”

But the line is dead.

“Batman, wait!” Nightwing calls at his back. Batman is already grappling away, tracking the coordinates their mysterious caller failed to wipe during the brief call. “It’s probably a trap, we should check—”

But Batman isn’t listening. Batman is in Ethiopia, racing to a warehouse, begging gods he doesn’t believe in that he’ll get to Robin in time. Batman is focused with single-minded intensity on the teenaged boy he’s inadvertently left with a monster.

Bruce’s heart is in his throat, his hands shaking even as they support his weight as he swings between rooftops, because his son—Tim, Jason, Robin—is in danger, and he can’t fail again.

God, please. Don’t let him fail again.

“Batman!”

Batman doesn’t turn back. He can’t, not when seconds can mean the difference between arriving in time and running up to the building just in time to watch it blow.

Barely fifteen minutes later, Batman touches down at the coordinates he’d tracked from the signal and—it’s a warehouse. An abandoned one, it looks like. As abandoned as any warehouse ever is in Gotham, anyhow, because it is Gotham.

Not Ethiopia. Gotham.

And the son he’s seconds away from losing is Tim.

Not Jason. Tim.

He’s already been to Ethiopia. He’s already lost Jason. He’s already failed once.

If Batman were thinking with his head, he would wait for Nightwing to arrive. He would case the perimeter more efficiently and devise a plan. Better yet, he would have stopped at a payphone to ring Agent A and determine whether Robin was asleep in his bed where he ought to have been.

Batman isn’t quite thinking with his head. He doesn’t wait for Nightwing. He doesn’t devise anything beyond the skeleton of a plan. He certainly doesn’t find a payphone.

What he does do is slip inside through a panel in the roof and glide down onto the landing as quickly and quietly as possible. There isn’t much to see from his vantage spot, so he moves along the length of metal catwalk as quietly as he can, easily molded into the shadows of the dark warehouse and eyes keen through his cowl’s special night lenses. A light in the center of the warehouse draws his attention, and he skirts towards it eagerly—perhaps too eagerly, too quickly to be properly watching the shadows.

It’s a mistake. Batman realizes that just a second too late, as something dark and solid connects with the side of his cowl hard enough to send him to his knees. The lights dim, or maybe that’s his vision, because the next thing he knows there are boots in front of his eyes, hands pulling his head back, a red mask, a foot against his chin, nothing.

Batman comes to slightly disoriented, the way he always does after a blow to the head. It gives him the warning he needs to keep his eyes closed, to quiet any small noises of pain, and observe.

Pressure under his legs and back imply he’s sitting in a chair. No chill beneath him, so probably not metal, or else he’s been there long enough to have heated it up to his body temperature. A wooden chair would be ideal; easier to break, but the slight bite of pressure that winds around his arms—undoubtedly binding of some sort—wraps high and strong enough that Batman has probably not been underestimated. Similar pressure winds around his chest and legs, which only further accentuates his suspicion. Batman shifts his limbs as subtly as he can, to check the tensile strength of his bindings, and is disappointed to find them near completely immobile. Not an amateur job, then, wooden chair or no.

The smell around him matches what he last recalled from the warehouse, the stale air of abandonment, full of dust and the earthy dregs of mildew. Most likely the same warehouse he’d been overtaken in.

Batman turns his attention on the sounds around him—

“You done yet? Gotta say, I’m getting pretty bored watching you play sleeping detective,” a modulated voice drawls from a few feet in front of him. The effect is disconcerting but does answer some questions: it’s the same voice that had intercepted his comm line. The memory of a red helmet, his last memory before he’d been knocked out, clicks the last few pieces into place—though it still doesn’t explain how his captor knows he’s awake. Batman has filmed himself waking up and going through his senses more than a few times to gauge how much he gives away, and so he knows it usually isn’t much.

Could be a concussion making him more obvious. Could be that the Red Hood knows him even more intimately than Batman had previously anticipated.

Batman opens his eyes. The cowl should keep them hidden, but it’s habit to save sight as the last sense in the off chance his cowl is damaged. Batman doesn’t remember it cracking that badly with the blow and can’t feel any absence of pressure on his face to indicate missing pieces, but Red Hood waves even before he lifts his head.

“There he is! How nice of you to finally join us.”

Us.

All at once, Bruce’s heart is in his throat because of the message, I’ve got your bird, because he hadn’t been able to contact Robin before going down.

Finally, Batman allows himself to look around the warehouse, going for controlled and not outright panicked by turning his head as little as possible.

Red Hood lounges just in front of him, casually sitting against a stack of palettes fashioned into a makeshift platform. There’s an automatic rifle laid out in his lap, untouched in favor of the pistol in his hand. Trigger discipline keeps Red Hood’s finger on the guard, but Batman knows not to relax. Good trigger discipline usually points towards proper training, and Red Hood has proven himself more than competent with a firearm. Even if Batman could free himself, it’s highly unlikely he could get anywhere without a few bullet holes for his trouble.

There’s nothing particularly noteworthy behind Red Hood, just empty space and dirty warehouse windows further away, at least from what Batman can see at his level, but there could be any number of additional weapons stacked behind the palettes.

To his right, nothing beyond the same dirty windows catches his eyes. To his left—

Nightwing, bound to a chair—wooden after all—with tightly braided nylon rope wound around his legs and to keep him firmly in his seat. From what he can see of Nightwing’s bindings, and Batman’s subtle pulling against his own, it appears Red Hood has taken his time to secure the rope properly. Tape around Nightwing’s mouth bulges away from his lips, undoubtedly hiding a gag, and though ugly bruises are already forming across his temple and jaw, the twisted glare on his face proves he is at least conscious and likely not too terribly concussed. Lack of a serious concussion won’t save either of them from that automatic, but it does release the smallest knot of tension in Bruce’s chest.

“Taken it all in yet?” Red Hood asks. Batman can practically see Nightwing roll his eyes beneath the domino before he yanks his attention back to the threat. “C’mon, we haven’t got all day. Though, our last player is running a bit behind schedule. Rude little shit. Kids these days, am I right?”

Red Hood makes a show of pulling back his sleeve and looking down at his wrist, but there’s a layer of body armor beneath the jacket that keeps Batman from catching a glimpse of his skin.

“Guess we can give him five more minutes. That cool with you two?”

Nightwing jerks in his seat, just enough to scrape the chair’s legs against the concrete floor, and Red Hood laughs. Laughter through the voice modulator sounds equal parts like a burst of feedback from a microphone, and one of the harsher fictional languages of Star Wars. If Batman could spare the time, he could probably narrow it down to exactly which one, but the reminder of the franchise Robin loves so much just re-incentivises him to figure out what Red Hood’s play is.

“Man, I am loving the stony silent vibe from you,” Red Hood says through residual bursts of static laughter, pistol angled toward Nightwing. “Always knew it’d take a gag to get you to shut up, but… worth it.” The gun angles back toward Batman, like a teacher’s pointer. “Kinda hate it on you, though. Too damn predictable. What, got nothing to say? No questions about how I hacked your comm? Why I lured you over here? Who we’re waiting for?”

Batman has a few working theories to answer those questions, and an idea of who they might be waiting for, but he doesn’t know Red Hood well enough to say for certain. As far as he knows, Red Hood employs all manner of criminals, but treats his low-level dealers the same as he does his high-end distributors. For all Batman knows, any number of people could be coming to share the glory—but Red Hood has never seemed like the sharing type. And what he’d said, “kids these days”, could imply someone Red Hood considers beneath him, if not an actual child.

An icy finger of dread curls down Batman’s spine.

An actual child… a bird. Robin.

“Who are you?” Batman demands, low and deep and menacing. The effect is not usually lost when Batman is at someone else’s mercy. Even while bound to a chair, that growl normally makes his captors hesitate, flinch; show their weakness.

Red Hood hops off his palette throne and advances on Batman, pistol in one hand and automatic in the other. The barrel of the pistol comes to rest on Batman’s temple, the automatic against his chest.

“Where’s the fun in that?” Red Hood asks, voice calm and hands steady. “Shouldn’t you be telling me all about myself? Isn’t that what you do, oh great detective?” He sounds mocking, even through the voice modulator. “Let’s answer my question, first. Who are we waiting for? Don’t tell me you still haven’t figured it out.”

Giving in and responding would be handing Red Hood the power he’s so desperately chasing. Even bound and with guns trained on him, Batman still holds a lingering shred.

“You’re losing your touch, old man. What is he, like… 5’1? Hundred pounds soaking wet? Black hair, mask, cape, wears spandex?” Red Hood chuckles humorlessly. “Guess I described a few sidekicks, but you know the one.”

“There is no Robin,” Batman barks, even though his heart is beating fast in his chest. He thinks of the last time he’d been incapacitated, when Nightwing was too far away to be of help. Thinks of Tim donning the cape despite his explicit instructions not to.

“Oh, B-man, we both know that’s just not true. And I bet Robin Three would be mighty hurt to hear you say that. What kind of father just pretends his kid doesn’t exist? Pretty crappy one, I bet. The kind that lets his other kid die, maybe?”

There have always been rumours that Robin was Batman’s son, that Robin was dead, but the way Red Hood says it sparks something in Bruce, tugs at his instincts and fills him with a renewed sense of dread. The way Red Hood moves, the way he thinks… he’s always been one step ahead of them. Occasionally, he’s acted with such foresight Batman had added the possibility of telepathy to his file. That card isn’t off the table just yet, but the way Red Hood insists Batman should recognize him… that points in a direction Bruce can’t let himself go down.

“Figured out who I am yet?” Red Hood sneers, poison dripping from every modulated word. Steady hands push the pistol against Batman’s temple with such force his head is shoved roughly back. “You talk a big fucking talk, but when shit gets real, where the fuck are you? Huh?! You’re a joke, Bruce.”

Batman stops breathing. The click of the safety being released against his temple echoes through the suddenly silent warehouse.

A wall of sound smothers everything else in the next moment; the automatic’s clip unloading, now pointed up toward the ceiling. Though not unused to the sound of nearby gunfire, Batman grits his teeth against the cacophony. The silence in the aftermath feels as thick as the residual cloud of gunpowder, once the last of the shells have clattered to the floor.

“Time’s up!” Red Hood suddenly shouts. The helmet’s voice modulator distorts the words with them spoken so loudly, but they’re still identifiable. “I know you’re there, kid. Now let’s all cut the crap.” The pistol presses ever sharper against Batman’s cowled temple, violent and distressed, “I’ve got a gun to dear old dad’s head, so you might wanna step where I can see you. And no funny business, bird boy. I want to see your hands.”

For a moment, all is still and quiet. Batman allows himself a flash of relief that Red Hood is wrong, that Robin is uninvolved after all.

In the next moment, that relief is yanked away with a brutality that leaves Bruce reeling when Robin glides down from the rafters with a swirl of his cape. He lands neatly, the way he’s been trained to, and holds his hands up. He isn’t armed, and his hands are steady. Nightwing makes a noise behind him, but Batman can’t tear his eyes away.

“I’m here,” Robin says. The domino’s lenses hide his eyes, but Batman can tell from his stance he is actively assessing the situation.

There’s a gun pressing uncomfortably against Batman’s head, but it’s the sight of Robin—still fourteen, trained in self-defense but entirely too little offense, with hardly any practical experience against firearms—standing in Red Hood’s vicinity, that finally fills him with fear.

“You get lost on the way over, kid? I thought my instructions were pretty clear.” Red Hood’s voice sounds as casual as the modulator allows, but Batman can read a renewed tension in the way he holds himself. He’s angry.

“You know how it is; the gargoyles all start to look the same,” Robin says. The lighthearted joke falls flat, with the automatic still in Red Hood’s hold and Robin’s hands lifted in the gesture of peace.

Red Hood snorts through the modulator. “Funny,” he says, and then the automatic is trained on Robin, aimed toward his chest. The pistol is still pressed against Batman’s cowl, but Robin is Red Hood’s new target.

It feels as if all of Batman’s training has failed him, disappeared up in smoke. He can hardly focus beyond the panic because Red Hood—Joker’s old moniker just makes this whole situation so much worse—has Robin defenseless in a warehouse and Batman’s seen exactly how this ends, has lived through years of regret and grief in the wake of it. He would sooner die than live through it again.

“I’ve heard a lot about you, Robin,” Red Hood says, the stress on the name bitter, “Only seen out in the field a handful of times, rarely seen fighting, never against Gotham’s rogues. Batman’s little secret. S’pretty funny; Robin’s whole schtick has always been about being a flashy target. Then you take up the mantle and stick to the shadows? What, don’t like being the center of attention?”

Robin stays quiet.

“I’ve got a theory. You want to hear it?” Red Hood’s distorted voice sounds a bit less put together, tinged with emotion. “My theory is, after Batman’s shitty fucking parenting put Robin Two into the fucking ground, he decided it was time to pick up a younger model he actually gives a shit about.”

Bruce’s heart clenches painfully at the same moment Tim flinches and blurts, “You’re wrong!”

Before the vice around his heart has even begun to lift, the pistol is removed from Batman’s cowled temple. Rather than spark relief, it further exacerbates his panic as Red Hood advances on Robin with quick, sure strides, so suddenly Robin’s arms drop as he flinches back slightly in alarm. The visual reaction is a stark reminder of Robin’s lack of experience in the field.

He shouldn’t be here, Bruce’s heart screams.

“Stop!” Batman commands from his prone position, as if he has any lingering authority. With Red Hood’s attention directed elsewhere—at a boy too precious, too young, too his to ever be a target—he pulls against his bonds harder than before. There’s barely any give, but another forceful tug slackens them just enough to fill him with renewed determination. Unmindful of the consequences to his arms, Batman pulls ever harder. Slightly behind and to the left of him, Nightwing’s chair squeaks against the ground from his own desperate movement.

The sound of gunfire stills Bruce’s heart and locks his muscles, but Robin flips out of the way as the bullets lodge into concrete. A quick hand movement toward his belt later, and Robin’s staff is snapped open and spinning. Red Hood seems surprised—not telepathy, Bruce reasons, because he would have known about Robin’s preferred sparring weapon otherwise—and that moment of hesitation is all Robin needs to snap the bo against Red Hood’s gloved hands. With a curse, Red Hood drops the automatic. Robin sweeps it out of reach.

Before Batman can feel any semblance of relief, Red Hood lifts the pistol and fires again. Robin dives, rolls, and then scampers backward with a small noise of alarm as Red Hood follows him with bullets. The next few moments are punctuated by shots from the gun, by Robin’s frantic movements and the clatter of the bo as he discards it to focus on speed. Bruce clenches his jaw and wrenches his arms against their bindings all the harder as each bullet becomes an even closer call.

In Bruce’s imperfect world, parents are gunned down in alleyways and sons are killed in warehouses and if he loses someone else—to a gun—in a warehouse—no colorful partner will ever be able to save his soul again.

Robin fires his grapple toward the rafters, and Bruce has never been more thankful for Nightwing’s flying lessons as his son swings out of reach. Red Hood is growing impatient, firing after a flying bird. Batman can hear it in his voice as he growls taunts, as his shots lose a bit of their precision.

But Robin—Robin isn’t street ready. Not like Red Hood, who prowls Gotham like he’s lived in the city’s gutters all his life.

All too soon, Red Hood’s slightly wide shots pay off. Batman curses himself for not noticing where the gun was truly aiming when a bullet finally connects, severs the grapple’s line. Then Robin falls—like the aerialists at the circus, like a bird with clipped wings.

Robin shoots his spare grapple, but he’s a moment too late: the line steadies his descent, but Red Hood is there to catch his cape before he can fully swing out of harm’s way. Harm yanks him in close, wraps a thick arm around Robin’s narrow chest and shoves the pistol under his jaw. Harm is Red Hood, and he twists the two of them until Batman can clearly see his son at another’s mercy.

“That’s better,” Red Hood says. Bruce can hardly breathe with that finger so close to the trigger. “Now, I’ve already asked dear old dad if he knows who I am, but apparently the World’s Greatest Detective just couldn’t cut it. Unfortunately for you, if I don’t hear my name in about thirty seconds, I’m gonna start shooting. So, how’s about it, bird boy? You got a guess for me?”

Robin’s head angles just slightly, enough to look at Batman’s face despite the discomfort of the pistol digging into his jaw. His brows are furrowed, his mouth downturned. Bruce’s heart aches fiercely.

“Red Hood,” Batman growls. He just needs to buy time; the bonds have loosened just enough for him to strain his hand toward the small blade he keeps in his belt. He’ll be free of his bonds in minutes, but Robin doesn’t have even that.

“You stay the fuck out of this!” Red Hood’s trigger finger twitches ever closer. The mask hides his face, but his body language is far less controlled than before. He’s practically shaking, and Batman can easily see it’s not with fear. The last thing they need is for the man with the gun to lose control of his anger, but Red Hood clearly already has one foot out that door. “I already asked you, and you failed, just like you always fucking do! What, now that I’ve got the Robin you care about keeping safe, you’ll try harder? Fuck you, you’ve lost your chance.” Red Hood pushes harder on the pistol under Robin’s jaw to force his attention. His fingers shake around the gun. “Last chance, kid—what’s my fucking name?!”

Robin sucks in a strained breath. The look on his face scrunches tighter, but finally Bruce can see that it isn’t pinched with fear—it’s guilt.

“Jason Todd.”

The name feels like a shock of ice water. Batman’s next breath is audible, pained.

No matter what Robin thinks, it’s not possible. Batman almost let his mind go in that direction himself, but it’s—it can’t be true. He’d had the body examined by people he trusted. He’d examined it himself. He’d run the DNA three times, just to be sure. He’d tortured himself before he finally put Jason in the ground.

No matter what conclusions Robin has jumped to—and Batman can’t fault him, even if it hurts—he can’t be right.

But Red Hood laughs so hard his shoulders shake, so hard the gun rattles against Robin’s jaw.

“Well, Bruce, I guess it’s true what they say. The apple doesn’t fall far, does it? I can see why you tried so hard to replace the kid with Dickie—and then with me."

Batman’s fingers fumble with the blade. Red Hood is bluffing. But ‘Bruce’, ‘Dickie’—no. He can’t spare it any thought. He must get free, save Robin, prove that this man is not Jason, prove that Jason is dead.

There are ways to cheat death, a traitorous part of himself whispers.

“No!” Batman thunders aloud; at Robin’s declaration, at Red Hood’s scheming, at his own inner doubt. No.

Batman punctuates the word with the final slackening of his bonds, with the batarang he nabs from his belt and lobs at Red Hood. It connects with the hand holding the pistol, knocks more than slices against gloved fingers. In the same moment, Robin slams his heel down on Red Hood’s booted foot and jabs his elbow back against an armored chest. Combined, it appears to be enough to disorient him, and Robin slips from his grasp and stumbles out of reach as Batman slices at the cord crossing his legs as quickly as he can.

But it’s not enough, because Red Hood shoots an arm out and catches Robin’s cape before he can fully clear the distance. Robin has a birdarang in hand at the same moment, twists back as if to slice the fabric from his shoulders, but Red Hood tackles him to the floor and pins Robin’s arms against his sides with heavy knees.

“Believe what you want, Bruce. You’ve still failed,” Red Hood taunts, unworried even as the last of Batman’s bonds fall away and he springs from his seat. Batman imagines the man to be grinning under the mask as he yanks his arm back and slams the discarded batarang straight down into Robin’s chest.

It is, easily, one of the worst nights of Bruce’s life. Even hours later, long after night has given way to daylight, as he sits at Tim’s bedside and listens to the sounds of the machines that assure him his son is still alive, all he can see is the blood he’s already washed from his hands. There had been so much—Bruce drops his head into his deceptively clean hands and breathes slow and deep.

“B.” The voice is soft, weary, positioned in the doorway. Bruce keeps his head down, unwilling to look his eldest son in the eye. “Bruce,” Dick tries again, louder.

“Tim’s asleep,” Bruce quietly admonishes, as if Tim could possibly be woken by moderately raised voices so soon after surgery.

“Exactly. He’s asleep now, so why aren’t you?”

Bruce grunts, noncommittal.

Dick sighs and shuffles into the room loudly enough for Bruce to track his movements with his head still bowed.

“He’ll be okay,” Dick says. Bruce can tell he’s trying to convince himself as much as he is Bruce. But it doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter what Leslie said—that Tim is lucky the blade hit his shoulder rather than his chest proper, that he would likely regain full use of his arm with therapy—because Tim was still stabbed with a weapon Bruce handed to their enemy, because Bruce was too slow to get to him before he was hurt at all, because his pain is all Bruce’s fault.

Because their enemy—Red Hood—Jason—wouldn’t have ever been their enemy at all if not for Bruce and his failures.

Bruce has already unearthed the grave. The memory feels like the heat of tears in his eyes, tastes like bile in his throat. Worse is the knowledge that Tim is right; that Jason is the man behind the mask, the man that stabbed Tim in cold blood right in front of Bruce’s eyes. He can hardly parse those two thoughts together, because of how poorly they fit.

Jason is alive, and Bruce is elated.

Jason is Red Hood, and Bruce is devastated.

And now—now that he knows his second son is alive, that his second son wields guns and uses them to take lives, that his second son has no qualms about stabbing his fourteen-year-old brother in the chest and leaving Bruce to pick up the bloody pieces—now… Bruce isn’t sure what happens now.

The Jason that Bruce knew—raised and held and loved—would never be so cruel, no matter how close to the edge he once skirted. Bruce had seen the capability for violence in him, but not like this. Not like Red Hood.

“I don’t know what to do,” Bruce realizes aloud, through the clamp of dread and grief around his heart. Dick’s hand clenches painfully around his shoulder.

“We’ll get him back,” Dick vows. His son’s voice is as torn up and conflicted as Bruce feels.

He can’t bear to look up, to see the ugly bruises blooming across Dick’s jaw, to see the anger and pain on his eldest son’s face. Can’t face another person’s emotions, with his own so volatile and unsteady. So, he hides; keeps his head in his hands and listens to the rhythmic beat of Tim’s heart and reminds himself over and over that everything is his fault.

Over the next few days, time becomes a concept Bruce steadily loses track of. He staves off food and sleep, hunkers down in front of the bat-computer to pour over Tim’s notes on Red Hood and actively hunts the man himself between manic bouts of research into the chillingly unanswered questions regarding Jason’s resurrection. Bruce ignores all responsibility to WE, and, though he keeps a close eye on Tim’s recovery, he does the actual monitoring from afar with the camera he’s installed. It’s especially useful for letting him know when Dick and Alfred have cleared the room while Tim is asleep, and he times his visits for those moments. As far as Bruce is concerned, facing Tim is far easier while the boy is unconscious.

Neither Dick nor Alfred agrees with the way he carries on. He gets earfuls from them both, and fights against them until they grow weary enough of his poor mood to finally leave him to stew in his silence. Bruce knows he’s reverting to old bad habits, hiding himself away from his family and acting out to push them ever further, but his heart is sick with grief and guilt. No matter that he understands the coping mechanisms he utilizes are flawed, they’re comforting in their familiarity. Despite knowing he’s doing nothing but torturing himself, he can’t force his own hand, can’t bring himself to meet Alfred’s judgement, Dick’s expectations, Tim’s trusting eyes.

He doesn’t deserve to be forgiven, and yet can’t bear to hear the accusations he knows they have every right to fling at him.

Never the sort to shy away from a challenge, or from the worst of Bruce’s darkness, it is Dick that eventually puts his foot down.

“Go talk to Tim,” Dick says one day, hovering over Bruce’s shoulder in the cave, in a tone that brokers no arguments.

Bruce argues anyway; with his silence, with the gaze he refuses to turn away from the computer, with the way he continues typing as if Dick has not spoken at all. This stubbornness is exactly what pushed Dick away in the first place, but Bruce can’t bring himself to stop.

“Bruce,” Dick tries again. “I’m not asking; I’m telling. Tim’s awake, go talk to him.”

“I’m busy,” Batman grunts.

Dick slams a hand down on the keyboard to force his hand, and when Batman turns narrowed eyes on him, Nightwing glares right back.

“Then make time. Glare and resent me all you want, Bruce. Tim’s up there blaming himself over how things went down with Red Hood and interpreting your absence as agreement.”

Bruce sucks in a sharp breath. It doesn’t make sense for Tim to blame himself, particularly because the fault lies entirely on Bruce’s shoulders, but… it’s Tim, and Tim truly is Bruce’s son. Don’t let Tim take care of you too much, Dick had said after two days in the boy’s presence. After so much more time with him, it’s impossible to deny that’s what Tim does: take too much into himself to make himself as helpful—useful—as possible. Part of Bruce considers it an admirable quality, his son’s earnest compassion. The other part sees how destructive it can be, especially when Tim thinks he’s failed.

“Fine,” he finally concedes, voice weary.

Dick scoffs, the noise harsh and unkind but exactly what Bruce deserves. “Sound happier to talk to him when you see him. I swear, Bruce, if you make him feel worse…”

“I know.” He does; Dick has rebuked Bruce for perceived slights against Tim more than once. Though it never feels great to be on the receiving end of Dick’s righteous anger, Bruce always walks away from those interactions feeling a peculiar mix of chastised and immensely proud. “Thank you, for taking care of him.”

“I shouldn’t have to, Bruce,” Dick reminds him, but some of the anger has bled out. “You’re the one he wants taking care of him.”

Bruce knows that, too. After hours of sitting, Bruce’s back screams at him when he stands, but it’s a familiar pain. He shakes it off with minimal fuss and drops a stiff hand onto Dick’s tense shoulder. The vow to do better is on the tip of his tongue, but he can’t bear to vocalize it.

It’s inevitable that he will fail again.

Speaking with Tim proves even harder than Bruce has anticipated. Seeing him with bandages wrapped tight around his chest and shoulder, with dark bruises under his eyes from his unnatural sleep, with the even angrier ones peeking beneath his clothes from the fight… it hurts. It hurts to know that Tim donned the cape again because of Bruce’s inability, that Tim was wounded because of Bruce’s past failures. It hurts to know it was Jason that almost took his youngest son from him.

But Bruce can’t keep running away. He sits in the chair at Tim’s bedside; hesitant, awkward, tensed to flee. Despite the amount of time he’s spent agonizing over this conversation, he still hasn’t decided what to say. Part of him wants to yell at Tim for placing himself in harm’s way, but—

“I’m sorry,” Tim blurts, voice small and rushed and stressed as his only unencumbered hand grips tight in the blanket across his lap.

Bruce forces himself to sit a little heavier in his chair, as if that might cure Tim of his anxiety. “Tim—”

“I was the one looking into Red Hood’s identity.”

Ah. Bruce mentally kicks himself. Tim takes his own perceived failures so hard it sometimes feels as if he was raised to do so by The Batman himself.

“Tim, you had no reason to suspect that… that he was alive.” Even now, it hurts to say Jason’s name.

Tim’s clenched hand twists in the blanket.

“But I did,” he admits, in a soft voice bright with shame, “Suspect, I mean. His fighting style, what he knew about you… it pointed toward an old villain, sure—or an old ally. And I watched Robin a lot when I was a kid. Red Hood felt familiar.” Tim drops his eyes from Bruce’s surprised face. “I didn’t want to upset you, so I kept it to myself. I mean, obviously, I’m not the only one who’s emulated Robin, right? So being wrong was a real possibility! But we’ve heard of people coming back before, and that made my suspicions credible. I kept them from you, and we all almost died because of it.”

Tim’s blue eyes flick back up to Bruce’s face; weary, wary, wet. He adds, much softer, “Because of me.”

After years of learning Tim, Bruce still hasn’t quite figured out what he’s done to deserve this brilliant, caring boy. Oracle should be proud of his mind. Bruce certainly is—a strange swell of pride wedged somewhere between grief and concern and guilt, but pride nonetheless, because Batman hadn’t let himself consider what Robin had clearly given considerable thought. He stands from the chair and moves to perch on the edge of Tim’s bed as those wet blue eyes track him miserably.

“I’m the one that should be sorry, Tim,” Bruce says. “And I am. You’re more than I deserve, and as payment I continue to fail you. I should have protected you. I never should have given you reason to come to my aid.”

Tim’s face sours the way it always does when he hears something he either doesn’t understand, or doesn’t agree with.

“But none of this would have happened if I’d just—”

Bruce holds up a hand to halt him.

“No, Tim. None of this would have happened if I’d done my due diligence. I let Red Hood get under my skin. There were dozens of ways I could have better handled that situation before you ever got involved. This is my failure.”

Tim presses his lips together and looks away. He looks so small against his solar system sheets, swamped in a bed too big for him and connected to monitoring equipment via snaking tubes and wires.

“What will you do about Jason?” Tim asks after a moment of quiet. It’s not a concession, and that means he is still blaming himself for things beyond his control, but his eyes meet Bruce’s. There is still time to fix this.

Bruce sucks in a grounding breath. “Bring him home.”

It’s all he can do.

Tim smiles, relieved, and inadvertently releases a thick knot of anxiety in Bruce’s chest.

Relinquishing control is difficult for Bruce. Dick might snark and call it ‘impossible’, but even Batman must occasionally rely on others. Bitterly, uncomfortably, but occasionally.

The next few days are a lesson in patience, a trial in that relinquishing of control. Nightwing steals his place in front of the bat-computer while Bruce is distracted with Tim, and plants himself too firmly to be uprooted. There is a bellowed argument on the very tip of Bruce’s tongue as he stares his son down, but Nightwing squares his shoulders and glares right back. The bruises on Dick’s face are angry, twins to the ones Bruce has been steadily ignoring on his own. He places a hand over his eyes to dismiss the sight of them and, though neither has spoken a word, finally concedes with a small, defeated nod.

Though plagued by nightmares, Bruce does sleep that night—and then the next. He eats entire meals and sits at Tim’s bedside both while his son sleeps and when he wakes. He’s still restless, anxious, his mind still occupied by Jason and Red Hood and another son’s blood caked into his suit and the cracks of his skin. It’s difficult—not quite impossible, but difficult—to allow Dick and Alfred to help. A large part of him, of Batman, wants nothing more than to sit at the computer, to find his son. But another, equally large part, is needed elsewhere: home, as Bruce Wayne, with the two sons still with him.

To compromise, he claims the computer while Tim sleeps and provides Dick with guidance on how best to track Red Hood when their shifts overlap. Though he’s spent years with a partner at his side, the Batman part of Bruce still stubbornly resists the help. His heart screams for Jason with a ferocity that leaves him gasping—but Tim sits in his room, days removed from near-death, and another part of Bruce trembles with the irrational fear that this son will vanish the moment his attention is diverted too long.

So, he forces himself to take a deep breath as Nightwing slides into the computer chair, deftly taking over right where Batman left off, and returns to Tim’s room to remind himself that his youngest is still breathing.

“I’m on a call, Dad!” Tim warns, when Bruce knocks on the door. Bruce pushes his way inside anyway and is only vaguely surprised by the domino on Tim’s face and the open laptop at the foot of the bed.

Hm. Young Justice: the group of super-powered teenagers Tim leads behind the shadows on his off days. Bruce still struggles somewhere between accepting that Tim needs friends his age who understand that part of him and worrying about how much of his time they snatch away.

“No working,” Bruce reminds him from the doorway, out of sight of the webcam.

“OhmyGod, is that Batman?! Your dad is Batman, right?” A tinny, rushed voice screeches loud enough through Tim’s headphones that Bruce overhears; Tim hisses and yanks the remaining bud from his ear.

“No working,” Tim assures him, as he shoves a pinky in his ear and winces. “Just ear trauma. Thanks for that, Impulse.”

Bruce vaguely makes out what sounds like Superboy complaining about his super-hearing from the discarded headphones.

“Did you need something, Dad?”

Tim’s eyes, and the dark smudges beneath them, are hidden by the mask, but there’s a small smile fading from his face; despite the way he lays propped up by pillows, despite the bandages and the sling that keep his arm and shoulder immobile. There’s residual laughter in his voice, wisps of lingering happiness on his face, despite, despite, despite. Despite the wounds, despite the failures, despite Red Hood. Bruce can’t ask for anything more than that.

“No. I’ll leave you to your phone call.”

The lingering happiness seems to falter slightly. Guilt creeps back, as if Tim has just caught on that he’s allowed it to slip; allowed himself to forget, if only for a moment.

“Are you sure?” Tim asks, doubtful and hesitant.

“Robin,” Bruce says, in a voice he hopes is gentle. “I’m sure. Talk to your friends.” After a momentary pause he adds, “No working. I’ll know.”

Tim tries on another small smile. He lifts his one mobile arm in a sloppy salute. “Yes, sir.”

Bruce’s lips finally quirk up slightly. “At ease.”

He closes the door behind himself and waits there, like a silent sentry, until the muffled, perfect sound of Tim’s laugher resumes—and then just a few minutes more, just in case.

Red Hood remains a puzzle Bruce can’t quite figure out. Red Hood lets Batman get close, only to scream at him. Red Hood risks his life in his haste to get away from Batman, only to look back longingly. Red Hood is rage and grief and fear, twisted up and altered nearly beyond recognition. But despite it all, Red Hood is still Jason. Bruce’s son.

Finally, Bruce has his answer: that Jason was revived by the Lazarus Pit and returned to him like a gift, ill-conceived by a man Bruce wants as far away from his family as possible. It explains so much—the rage, the differences, the tangled mess that is Jason’s mind. It explains how Jason knew about Tim’s Robin, because of course Ra’s would know.

But having answers, explanations, does little to settle Bruce’s unease. An explanation is not a solution, and Bruce still doesn’t have one of those. Batman is unused to not having one of those.

Tim heals slowly. Even with the wound mostly stitched back together, the damage requires no small amount of therapy to regain full mobility. The sling makes it difficult for Tim to type, but locking him from the cave is still nearly impossible. When he’s healed up enough to get bored, Robin slips from his room and plants himself in front of the bat-computer. Beside him, Bruce struggles to maintain his composure.

Bruce wants Robin as far removed from the cave as possible. Bruce wants Robin retired for real, for good.

“You haven’t healed. No working.”

Tim drapes himself across the computer chair and spins dramatically. “But I’m so bored! I can’t even play video games with my arm like this.” Tim gestures for emphasis, wild and exaggerated, toward the sling.

“You could always re-watch Star Wars for the five-hundredth time,” Dick suggests from the mats, stretching before their patrol.

“Oh, hardy har.” Tim spins another loop before stopping to peer imploringly up at Bruce. Bruce pulls Batman’s cowl over his head, as if it can protect him from his son’s wide-eyed stare. “Please, Dad?”

“No working,” Batman growls.

“C’mon, I promise I won’t go out. I know I can’t really type, but it’s not like I’ll be writing code and case reports right now. I’ll just keep an eye on CCTV. You’re still looking for Red Hood, let me—”

“I said no!” Batman roars, loud enough that Tim flinches, that Nightwing straightens in his peripheral.

It’s not the first time that Bruce has yelled around—at—his sons. Not by a long shot. Bruce’s temper is short, his triggers delicate. For all that he’s made headway in his grief, started to open himself up again, there are still bad days. Still days where hearing ‘Red Hood’ from Tim’s voice, where imagining Tim in the same room as Red Hood again, triggers a physical response.

That’s all the explanation for his outburst that Bruce even has; that it’s ‘one of those days’. He clenches his hands into fists and sucks in a slow, shaky breath.

No one else makes a sound as Batman struggles to get his emotions under control.

“I just want to help,” Tim finally says, once the silence has dragged on beyond discomfort and Batman’s fists have stopped trembling.

“I know, baby bird,” Dick says, before Bruce can think to speak. Nightwing steps between them, his back like a shield—protecting Robin from Batman; Tim from Bruce. “You already help a lot, y’know? You deserve a longer break.”

Tim’s voice is softer than before when he replies. Bruce doesn’t strain to make out the words beyond the peculiar rushing in his ears. Dick says something else, ruffles Tim’s hair, laughs the way he does when tensions are high. Finally, Tim stands from his seat with a sigh and makes to leave.

Batman lets him go without a word. Without an apology. There’s tension in the line of Nightwing’s shoulders. Neither speaks until the grandfather clock slides back into place.

Dick breaks the silence with, “The fuck is your problem?”

“I don’t want Tim anywhere near this,” Batman says. It’s not an excuse. Not an apology.

“Anywhere near Red Hood, you mean.”

Batman levels a glare in Nightwing’s direction. “I won’t risk him.”

Nightwing makes a rude noise in the back of his throat. “Have you met that kid? Tell him ‘no’, and he’ll just find a creative way to go behind your back. All you’re doing is pushing him away.”

“Dick. I won’t compromise on this.”

Another derisive snort. “When do you ever compromise, Bruce?”

Batman doesn’t deign that with an answer. He pulls on his gauntlets.

“I’m serious, Bruce. I know you’re blaming yourself for what happened. I know you’re spiralling the way you always do when you feel powerless, but Tim isn’t Jason.”

“Tim almost died!” Bruce is yelling again, shouting at a son that loves him. Pushing away another person who only wants to help. It’s all he knows; all he ever does. “Jason almost killed Tim. I can’t risk that—I won’t. I can’t lose him, either of them, ever again.”

The tension in Nightwing’s shoulders doesn’t release, but he does slowly uncross his arms. “Bruce,” he says, voice slightly gentler with sympathy, “I know.”

“Tim can hate me all he wants. I never should have allowed him anywhere near Robin. I never should have allowed you, Jason. Every injury, every near miss, every son taken from me is my failure. How long until Tim dons the cape again? Jason was trained for the streets, and he still—” Bruce sucks in a sharp breath, dismisses the memory of blood and grief and loss, “Tim would have died if it had been anyone else holding that blade. He wasn’t lucky: Jason left him alive on purpose. It was a warning, Dick. Whatever ill-will Jason harbors for me, he’s directing it at Tim. I won’t risk my son’s life. Not again. Tim is done with all of this.”

Dick sighs. “Believe me, I want Tim as far away from a cape as he can get, too. But you know you can’t just pull him out, Bruce. He’s too much like you. Now that he’s got a taste of the life, there’s no ‘normal’ left for him. So long as Batman exists, so will Robin.”

There’s only a drop of bitterness when Dick adds, “You taught me that.”

“Robin never should have existed,” Batman growls. It’s probably cruel to say to Dick, Robin’s originator, but his son doesn’t react.

“Robin is on both of our shoulders, B. You think I feel good, knowing my little brother died while wearing my old colors?” Dick’s gaze cuts to the memorial case, before flitting away somewhere else. “I’ve worked myself down that rabbit hole plenty of times, too. But without Robin, where would I have been? What would have happened to Jason on those streets?

“You think Batman would still be here, without Robin? Call me conceited, but I don’t. Every injury, every near miss—without Robin watching your back, how many of those put you in the ground, Bruce? Where would I, and Jason, and Tim be with you gone? Foster care, the streets, that empty house. You’ve fucked up plenty, but you’re alive. I’m alive, Tim’s alive, Jason is alive. We both know how precious that is, Bruce. You want it to stay that way? Let us in. Let us help. Stop pushing us out. Red Hood never would have gotten to Robin in the first place if we’d just stopped to talk to each other.”

It’s too rational for Bruce’s aching heart. Batman dismisses Nightwing with a grunt and stalks toward the Batmobile.

“I’m not discussing this right now.”

When Dick follows, more argument on his tongue, Batman closes the door in his face. Argument over.

Tensions run high at the manor. When the next family movie night rolls around, Dick takes Tim and Alfred to the theatre and pointedly leaves Bruce out. Alfred claims not to take sides, but he looks decidedly smug as he offers Bruce dinner suggestions on his way out the door.

Bruce is miserable. Stretched thin. He feels hopeless about Jason, about Dick and Tim. Everything that was once good in his life has fractured before his very eyes. As Dick and Tim and Alfred leave the manor, he watches them go and feels all of eight years old again, left alone in a house too big for his dark thoughts.

He retreats to the cave.

Sneakers squealing against the polished floors signal Tim’s whirlwind arrival through the kitchen before the visual cue. He’s in the snack pantry before Bruce can blink, rummaging through Alfred’s approved snack foods and the contraband the man pretends isn’t smuggled away behind it: Dick’s more sugary cereals, Bruce’s chocolate-heavy protein bars, Tim’s poptarts. He emerges with a fistful of Bruce’s and shoves them in the open pocket of the bag slung over his good shoulder.

“Where’s the fire?” Bruce asks, from over the lip of his coffee mug.

“I’m going out,” Tim says. He hasn’t asked permission, hasn’t briefed Bruce at all. It’s not a rule that he must, but only because Tim has always shared that information voluntarily. With Bruce keeping him from the cave and monitoring him more closely, the lack of information feels pointed.

Bruce sets down his mug. “Where?”

“Hanging out with a friend. We’re just going to the skatepark, and then probably video games and dinner at his place.” Tim is already making for the doorway. Bruce clears his throat before he can get too far.

“Which friend?”

“Ives, from school. You’ve let me hang out with him before.” It feels like an accusation. Tim isn’t glaring, but it’s still a challenge. Bruce’s mouth pinches unpleasantly.

It’s a lie, but Bruce won’t find out for several hours. Even now, Bruce can’t quite spot Tim’s tell. Maybe Bruce feels too guilty to look hard enough for it. Maybe Bruce is just tired of his sons hating him. He relents, forces his stiff fingers to bring the mug back up to his lips as casually as he can.

“Call me when you get there.”

Hours later, Tim stumbles into their usual den with a freshly bruised jaw and crooked nose. From the couch, Bruce freezes. Across the room, Dick gasps. Alfred, at Bruce’s side, covers his mouth with a gloved hand.

None of them are looking at Tim.

“Don’t look so fucking surprised,” Jason says, angled slightly behind Tim’s much smaller frame. Wariness wafts from him; from the hunch of his shoulders, from the hands shoved in his pockets, from the tension in his legs that prove he’s ready to bolt at any moment.

Tim grins, and his teeth are still slightly stained with blood.

Neither son offers an explanation, and Bruce is too afraid to ask for one. The air is so thick, so heavy, that it feels like one wrong word, one sudden movement, one harsh breath, and Jason will disappear. As if he’s wandered into the wrong house and hasn’t yet noticed. As if questions will suddenly remind Jason of the contempt he harbors for them now.

Finally, Alfred tuts and reaches for Tim. “Oh, don’t bleed all over the floor, Master Tim. Come, allow me to set your nose.”

Jason’s eyes track them, track Tim, as they leave. He looks as if he wants nothing more than to follow, and Bruce can hardly reconcile the image of his two sons standing together with the one of Jason looming over Tim’s bloody body from just weeks ago. Questions are on the tip of Bruce’s tongue, but they feel too big for his mouth. He swallows them down.

“Jason—”

“Don’t.” Jason eyes Bruce warily, and Bruce pinches his lips together. Dick is practically vibrating across the room, as if all he wants is to come closer and is yet too terrified to move an inch. “I’m gonna talk,” Jason says, “and you’re gonna stand there and listen.”

Bruce nods, grateful. Jason talks.

Later, when Jason has locked himself away in the new room he’s tentatively accepted, Bruce finds Tim. Nose set and splinted and bruised, Tim looks like hell. The sight of him makes Bruce’s heart stutter in his chest.

Not for the first time, in the last few hours alone, Bruce yearns for knowledge, for explanation. Part of Bruce inwardly screams for those answers; wants to demand and ground and punish for the lies, for the secrets, for the things Bruce doesn’t understand.

Tim looks wary as Bruce closes the door behind himself and he deserves that, but it still twists his heart as he perches on the edge of Tim’s bed. Before Bruce has the chance to pat the empty spot beside him, Tim joins him of his own willpower; eyes downturned, fingers fidgeting against his leg. Bruce wraps an arm around his small shoulders and pulls him in close, presses a kiss to the side of his head.

“I’m so sorry, Tim.” Bruce whispers, and Tim freezes against him.

“It’s—”

“It’s not okay.” Bruce drops his words against Tim’s soft hair, bundles Tim’s small body close. “I’m sorry; for yelling, for pushing, for everything. I love you, son.”

So slowly, Tim’s one good arm snakes out to clutch him in return.

“Dad,” Tim says. His voice breaks on the one word, but it’s enough. Bruce cradles the back of his small, precious head and holds on tight.

I’m sorry. I love you. They’re words Tim deserves to hear, and often. But there are more, because no matter that Bruce has his unanswered questions, he’s pieced together enough to know that Tim is the reason Jason has come back to him.

Jason, and Dick, and Bruce’s soul. Bruce owes them all to Tim.

“Thank you.”

Things are not resolved overnight. In Bruce’s imperfect world, nothing is ever that easy. Jason talks and accuses and rants for hours, accepts the new bedroom with a hesitance that makes him seem so fragile, and then sneaks out sometime overnight. It’s painful, to lose Jason again so soon, but the next morning is hopeful even in the wake of that loss.

The next week sees a marked decrease in sightings—and violence—by Red Hood. And that’s… that’s hope.

Tim is purposefully vague about his time with Jason. All he’ll say is that they scuffled, that they spoke, that Tim explained what happened in the aftermath of Jason’s death. The lack of answers makes Bruce uneasy, but the last thing he wants to do is push his sons away with their peace so fresh, so tentative. So, he swallows down his questions as best he can and offers an olive branch: two hours at the bat-computer a night and access to low-level cases… if Robin really wants to help.

Jason doesn’t return to the manor until after the bruises that cut across Tim’s nose fade and the sling is switched out for a lighter, less obtrusive model. When he does, it is with as little warning as the first time.

Bruce finds him in the kitchen, raiding the snack pantry. The sight of his back makes Bruce pause, nearly hold his breath. As Jason steps away, a box of Tim’s poptarts and Dick’s cereal clutched in his hands, he narrows his eyes at Bruce challengingly.

“Reparations,” Jason says, and Bruce snorts a quiet laugh.

“Take whatever you’d like. This is your home, too. Whenever you’d like it to be.”

The next moment is quiet. Jason observes him, face guarded, hands tense. “I’d rather have a credit card."

Bruce can't imagine that Jason is serious, not with his tone so mocking, not with his inability to ask for what he needs. Still, “I’ll get you one,” Bruce promises, without missing a beat.

Jason shrugs, feigning disinterest. “Whatever helps you sleep at night.”

“I’d sleep better if you used your room; if I knew you were safe.” Bruce worries he’s overstepping, pushing Jason too far too fast, but rather than flee, Jason rolls his eyes. The tension in his shoulders eases slightly.

“Worry more about the birds you’ve already got living here. Your kid’s fucking wild.”

Bruce smiles slightly. “Which one?”

Jason grunts. The brief, upward tilt of his mouth isn’t quite a smile, but it’s close enough to one that he hides it. With his back turned toward Bruce, Jason tips the poptart box in the air in a mockery of a salute.

“See ya.”

“Don’t fill up on sugar, Alfred’s making chilidogs for dinner,” Bruce calls to his back. In the past, Alfred only ever broke his own rule and made chilidogs—a word he suffered to even say—during Jason’s more stressful nights; to offer him something comforting and familiar. Chilidogs are just another bribe, but bribe is all Bruce Wayne knows to do.

“Got the memo. Later,” Jason calls back, carefully flippant. Bruce smiles as he watches Jason head in the direction of the family wing, rather than the door.

Family movie night rolls around again. Things have been better, lately, and it’s not even the first movie night since the theatre betrayal, but Bruce is still pleasantly surprised when Dick and Tim and Alfred join him in the usual den. The whispers as he approaches are suspicious, sure, especially considering they’re usually much better at hiding when they’re hiding things from him, but at this point Bruce figures he deserves whatever they’re scheming.

Still, the last thing he expects to see as he steps into the room is Jason Todd-Wayne, dressed down in sweats and arranging snacks on the coffee table. He looks up when Bruce walks in but diverts his gaze when Bruce fails to smooth over his surprise in time.

Dick ignores the interaction. “Drink orders? I’m heading back toward the kitchen.”

“Nonsense, Master Dick. Sit down this instant, I will gather whatever we’ve missed.”

“I’ll take a zesti, Dick,” Tim pipes up from the couch.

“Water for me, chum,” Bruce says, entirely so Alfred will glare in his direction. It works. Bruce flashes him a small, smug smile.

“Get me a beer, will you?” Jason asks Dick, but he’s looking at Bruce with a challenge in his eyes. Jason is still underaged—Jason is pushing at boundaries like a tongue worrying at a loose tooth.

“So long as you do it at home, you can have a bit of alcohol,” Bruce concedes, and counts the interaction as a success when Jason doesn’t storm out and insist the manor is not his home.

“Then I’ll take a beer, too!” Tim shouts at Dick’s retreating back.

“Absolutely not.”

“Y’know, Dad, there are some cultures that let kids drink alcohol. And the more you push back about it, the more enticing you make it.” Tim sounds like a little businessman, his argument carefully crafted even though Bruce is almost sure he isn’t interested in drinking and is just putting up a fuss to make Jason’s victory feel hard-won.

“Let me think about that.” Bruce pauses for a single beat. “No.”

Jason laughs. It’s a rough, beautiful sound. Bruce absolutely prefers it to the static of Red Hood's voice modulator.

Tim pouts, a little too exaggerated to be real, and Bruce’s heart lifts when Jason reaches over to ruffle Tim’s already unruly hair. “Cheer up, kid. I’ll let you swipe a sip of mine.”

Two pairs of blue eyes turn to watch Bruce’s reaction: challenge in Jason’s and something like hope in Tim’s. Maybe he was wrong about Tim not actually wanting to try beer.

Bruce sighs with the realization that Jason is going to make this transition as hard on him as he possibly can. “Just one sip.”

“So what movie are we watching?” Jay asks when Dick returns, newly acquired beer open and entirely too at home in his hand.

“Star Wars, probably,” Dick says, “Timmy’s kind of obsessed.”

“Dick!” Tim sounds affronted, embarrassed, as he whacks Dick with a throw pillow, and Bruce realizes the hero-worship never stopped at Nightwing. Tim is as desperate for Jason’s approval as he ever was Dick’s. It makes the whole situation with Red Hood feel even worse, but it also makes whatever has been happening lately at the manor feel even better. Bruce watches, fond, as Tim shoots Jason a shy look and clears his throat. “Um, you can pick the movie, Jason. It’s your first movie night.”

Jason looks equal parts startled and like he wants to refuse on principal. He takes another swig of his beer, as if he needs an extra moment to decide which reaction he’d like to utilize. Finally, he swallows, and nods seriously. “Pride and Prejudice.”

No one protests. Jason hides his smug smile behind the lip of the beer bottle. They put on Pride and Prejudice.

As the movie drones in the background, Bruce looks around the room.

Alfred sits, prim and proper, in his usual chair by the door. Tim is in the center of their usual couch, Dick contorted in a way that shouldn't be comfortable at his side. Jason… Jason isn’t sitting where Bruce would prefer: on the couch, snug beside Tim where Bruce can see them all in a row. Instead, he’s lounging in a chair all his own, just a smidge out of reach. Bruce can’t observe all three sons at the same time, but he can feel Tim’s warmth against his side, hear the rhythmic tapping of Dick’s foot against the coffee table, see Jason without turning his head too much.

It’s even better than he’d imagined.