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English
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Part 3 of Tim Travel (Tim Drake Time Travel)
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Published:
2023-07-19
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1,420
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1/1
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I Used To Be Afraid Of Falling

Summary:

Outtake from This Is No Funeral Horn: Jason regains his memories, and has a brief argument with Tim about Bruce's no killing rule. Bruce realizes that he, Jason and Tim all need so much therapy.

Notes:

Here's an outtake! I wrote this as the end of This Is No Funeral Horn, but I wanted to end that fic on a mostly upbeat note, so this got trimmed from the final draft. It's not too dark or angsty, I just didn't want the last scene of the fic to include any major conflict. Plus, I feel like while this is a necessary conversation, lots of people have rehashed the moral debate of Bruce not killing Joker before. All things considered, this is a pretty brief blip in terms of angst: they don't move past it straight away, of course, but the whole trajectory of this verse is very much a positive upward trending one, so it didn't work as the last scene. Tim and Jason eventually develop a rapport and are two little gremlins, Bruce gets closer with Tim and reestablishes his relationship with Jason again, and Dick even comes home for a visit. I have Dick's visit half written, so maybe that will get posted sometime.

(See the end of the work for more notes.)

Work Text:

“You replaced me pretty fast.”

Bruce froze on the threshold of Jason’s room.

“You’ve regained your memory,” Bruce said neutrally.

Jason whirled around to glare at Bruce.

“I haven’t… I hadn’t even been dead for six months, Bruce!” Jason shouted. His wounds had all disappeared thanks to Tim's miraculous Dionesium, but his face was still too thin and angular. His eyes were huge and wide and wet. Bruce felt his heart aching in its cage.

“Jason,” he said, raw. “Jay. I…”

“He didn’t want a replacement. I forced him to take me on because he wasn’t functional. Think of me like an emotional support puppy something.” Tim’s voice was light and steady. He stuck his head into Jason’s room. “C’mon, don’t look surprised. I’m in the next room and soundproofing only works when all the doors are shut.”

“Why did you bring me back?” Jason demanded of Tim. “If you wanted to be Robin… it would have been better to leave me.”

“Are you hearing yourself?” Tim demanded right back. “Are you seriously asking why I decided that your health and safety was more important than me being Robin? I wasn’t even… Bruce had agreed to train me, sure, but he hadn’t actually said yes to me going out as Robin or anything. Think of it as an internship that didn’t work out, if it would make you feel better.”

“And I suppose that’s how it went in your original timeline too, Mr Time Traveler?” Jason asked bitterly.

“Hmm,” Tim said. “Well. No, obviously not. You were supposed to get thrown into a Lazarus Pit by Talia Al Ghul then try to murder me and Bruce a bit. It made family dinner kind of awkward. But things worked out in the end. He forgave me for replacing him as Robin, I forgave him for beating me up for replacing him as Robin, we team up sometimes and have fun brotherly adventures. You know, the usual.”

“Well, genius,” said Jason, “maybe you should have just left me, if my future self was such a shithead towards you. What about the timeline? Is the world going to blink out of existence now that you’ve changed things?”

Tim shrugged indifferently. “Nope,” he said. “That’s not how my kind of time travel works. Don’t worry, Jason. I’m a bit too old for Robin anyway. I’d passed the mantle on already, you know, back in my timeline. Now Bruce can have his Robin back and maybe be less horribly depressed, Alfred can stop trying to replace 2am cereal with cucumber sandwiches, and Dick can stop his death spiral of guilt and anguish and be around the Manor for more than 5 minutes at a time without needing to run directly to his emotional support Titans.”

Jason laughed, a cold, bitter, tearing sound.

“If Bruce or Dick or Alfred really cared that much about me,” he said, with the horrible precision of someone who knew exactly where to hit a loved one to make it hurt, “the Joker would be fucking dead already. Shut it, kid, don’t try any of your flippant word vomit with me. You might know all about the future and time travel and everybody’s secrets, but you don’t know anything about this.”

Bruce, who had stayed out of the conversation as much as he could, felt like he had been punched in the chest. He leaned back against the door frame to brace himself, physically incapable of holding up his own weight. Was that what Jason thought? That his dad didn’t love him enough to…

“Look,” Tim said. “I was here picking up the pieces. You didn’t see Bruce. He was on the verge of going on a murder spree on the petty criminals of Gotham. I had to call a few very urgent ambulances. The reason that Bruce won’t kill the Joker isn’t because he doesn’t love you or want to avenge you, Jason. It’s because if he started, he wouldn’t be able to stop. And he would… He would never want to make you the reason that he turned to evil. He loves you too much for that.”

“The Joker isn’t…The Joker isn’t some fucking-” Jason cut himself off, agitated. His chest heaved with the force of his emotions. It was like he and Tim had both forgotten that Bruce was still in the room with them. “The Joker can’t be fixed. He can’t be stopped. Only killed. There’s no redemption left for someone like the Joker. He deserves to die.”

“Of course he deserves to die,” Tim said. “But that doesn’t… That’s not a decision that we get to make. We can’t be judge jury and executioner all at once.”

“Oh, that’s rich,” Jason laughed derisively, “coming from a vigilante.”

Tim closed his eyes.

“Look,” Tim said, voice going high and thin with repressed emotion. “I… I understand that this is difficult and upsetting for you. I just… I’ve recently met with an evil future version of myself who uses a gun and programs evil surveillance AIs and doesn’t hesitate to kill, so this isn’t a theoretical thought exercise for me. I can’t let myself be that person, and so I understand why Bruce won’t let himself be that person. I’ve… I’ve fought too many evil versions of Bruce too recently to think otherwise. He murders Joker one minute, he’s going to be keeping a pack of zombie Robins on chain leashes and stirring up multiversal plots the next.”

Jason stared at Tim.

“You’re fucking crazy,” he said. “Get the hell out of my room.”

Tim gave Jason a sardonic salute and left, closing the door behind himself and sauntering two meters down the hall to his own room.

“Don’t keep any children on chain leashes,” Jason said to Bruce. “And you get out too. I need a goddamned minute to think.”

Bruce left without another word. He hesitated outside Tim’s door

“Hey, cheer up, old man,” Tim said, not bothering to keep his voice down. He was sprawled out on his bed, laptop laid across his chest as he typed with his hands awkwardly curled up like T-rex claws. “No bombs, no guns, no death threats. I consider that a success. Go hug him or send him to therapy or something.”

He turned his head and leveled a sardonic look at Bruce. Bruce resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose. Maybe he should send Tim to therapy. The boy used to have a filter. The neuroses were pretty much just bursting out of Tim, who had already been a pretty neurotic kid before the time travel. Bruce could foresee the issues that Tim and Jason would be having with each other already.

“We all need so goddamned much therapy,” Bruce said, but he didn’t say anything about if anyone was actually going to be getting any therapy, because he was the goddamned Batman, who was going to be his therapist?

Tim opened his mouth, hesitated, then snapped it shut again with a click. Yeah, that was what Bruce thought too. The only therapists that they knew were evil, mentally unstable, or both.

“Um,” Tim said, always needing to have the solution. “Um, I guess… I’ll go get a psychology degree or something?”

“Don’t do that,” Bruce said. His head ached. It was hypocritical, but he hated how Tim now thought he needed to have a solution for every single problem he came across. It also made his heart hurt. He didn’t have a lot of hope about how peaceful and uneventful the next eight years were going to be. Maybe he would bring up the idea of vetting a counselor with the Justice League. Not that he’d ever see a counselor, but it would go a long way to mitigate any potential emotional and psychological instability in all the superpowered individuals involved. “I’ll take care of it,” he decided.

Tim looked at Bruce for another moment. Then he shrugged, satisfied with Bruce’s ominous pronouncement, and went back to typing furiously.

Then again, it was pretty unnerving to be informed that he was one bad day away from keeping sidekicks on metal leashes. Maybe he’d give the therapy a try, if he managed to find someone and they didn’t turn out to be evil after the first…six months. Year. Two years. If the JL managed to find a counselor that didn’t turn out to be evil within the first two years, Bruce would consider speaking to someone about… at least one of his feelings.

Notes:

Thank you for reading! Please let me now what you think.
I just need you to know that I deleted a two hundred word tirade on the whole Bruce Not Killing Joker thing. I am exhibiting SO much self control.

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