Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Haly’s Circus had come to town. Jack Drake, an affable man-about-town that had managed to get himself banned for life from Gotham society, and his wife Janet Drake, head of a celebrated tech start-up, were for once on the same continent as their young son. That meant the circus was the only topic of conversation in the Drake household. Tim seemed to find his parents’ presence in the house interesting--the way a hail storm in Death Valley is interesting--but not all that important. Jack thought that couldn’t stand. The family was together, and they needed to do together things. The circus had always been his favorite as a child; it only stood to reason that Tim would love it too. Janet was less convinced. She’d always found the florid colors of the tents off-putting, the clowns in costume and mask-like makeup--ghastly.

After weeks of talk and heated storm-offs, it became clear that neither his mother nor his father would have their way without some input from their son. With all of the emotional gravity that a five-year-old could muster, Tim finally registered his desire to go.

“It sounds acceptable,” Tim said.

Jack counted it as a small victory, and Janet counted it as a tolerable defeat. Tim folded his hands at the dinner table and allowed himself a serious, adult smile. He didn’t want to let it show that he was ecstatic.

At the circus, Tim was (unsurprisingly) frightened by the clowns, and leery of gaiety of the other patrons. He was a little frightened about what would happen if he let himself enjoy the bright lights and the wide cornsilk-grass lot like the other kids darting through the crowd. He’d be happy, and then it would stop. His parents never stayed interested for long.

Janet saw the dour expression on Tim’s face, and tugged on Jack’s sleeve to pull his attention away from the gambling tent, where slot machines and oddsmakers flashed their colors.

“He’s not enjoying himself,” Janet insisted. “Let’s introduce him to someone, Jack.”

A family of acrobats stood off to the side of the biggest tent in their arresting green, red and gold leotards, murmured conversation passing between them. Jack worked his charm, and soon all of them were huddled in a cheerful ring around one of their showbills. The Flying Graysons! An acrobat team of father, mother, and son. Up close, Tim discovered they weren’t frightening at all. They teased Tim gently, but took his wariness seriously. The boy knelt down, and motioned for Tim to come closer.

“I’m Dick Grayson,” he said solemnly, “and you’re safe here.”

Dick propped Tim on his knee, and they smiled for the camera. The film cranked out a snapshot that blossomed into a picture when light hit the film. Dick handed the snap to Tim, who stared at the instant film as colors spread across its gray surface. It was a marvelous picture: two families that loved their sons.

The announcer called 15 minutes ‘til showtime, and the Graysons invited them to sit in the blue section. Ringside. Best seats in the house. Tim clutched the snapshot to his chest. It was going to be a great show.

Even if memories could fade like Polaroids--graying at the edges, until the nightmare of that day subsided into one even, palatable tone--even if Tim forgot everything else, he couldn’t forget the fear. The scrape of the trapeze bars wrenching loose. The screams of the crowd. The hush afterward.

Tim jumped out of his seat. His needed to be down in the ring with Dick! Horror gripped him as a great black shadow descended into the ring to tower over Dick Grayson. Death had come to claim him too. Dick sagged to the floor, sobbing. He didn’t even look up at the monster. Why should he? Hadn’t Dick already lost everything that he could? And then rationality reasserted itself, and Tim knew the darkness was just a man. He wore an all-black suit and jacket, spoke softly to Dick, and held back the crowd that tried to rush the ring. He stood over Dick like a towering angel. When Tim caught a glimpse of his face, he saw a burning fury that matched his own.

Tim tried to fight his way through the crowds, but Janet caught his arm, and hauled him out through the nearest tent exit. She cried out for Jack, who had separated from them in the press. The picture of the Graysons was clenched in Tim’s hand, and he wanted more than anything to return to the tent, to hand the picture to Dick Grayson’s dark guardian for safe-keeping until he was ready to see it again. Tim panicked. How was he going to do that if he didn’t even know the man’s name? He struggled against Janet’s grasp, but she held firm until they were outside the circus’ gates.

“Ssssh, Tim, baby, darling, it’ll be okay. It’ll be okay. I’m still here,” Janet cried as she clung to Tim. “I’ll always be here, my darling.”

“No!” Tim yelled.

Because it wasn’t true. Janet would hold him now, but in another two months, when the shock and pain of the day had faded, she would be gone again with Jack, jet-setting around the globe. Tim fought like a wild beast in her arms. He needed to get back to the ring, to tell Dick’s dark guardian all of the things he had seen today. That Dick had been loved. That his parents were good people. And that they hadn’t deserved what happened. A cosmic unfairness needed to be righted, and he couldn’t do it alone. Tim raged and screamed and cried until he fell asleep in his mother’s arms.

In retrospect, Tim shouldn’t have been so panicked.

The papers covered the story the next day--with a story that dramatic, how could they not?--and it was there in the headline, next to a half-page splash of the dark guardian and his broken charge under the big top, the crowd surging up in horror and compassion.

Tim cut the article out of the paper and wrapped it around the polaroid. Jack and Janet argued over whether he should be allowed to keep mementos of that grim day, but Tim was clever, and when they came to take them away from him, they removed copies instead. The originals were tucked safely in a records box under Tim’s bed. Tim didn’t plan to forget.

The dark guardian’s name was Bruce Wayne.

And the world had wrongs that needed to be righted.

Chapter Text

Jason was dead.

The remnants of the Wayne family gathered at the mausoleum to inter Bruce’s youngest ward in an empty casket. It was a brisk September afternoon, and everyone had bundled into greatcoats. Bruce and Dick gripped the silver handles on either side of the pall as they bore it across the dirt path through the old cemetery. The casket was surprisingly light. Dick tried to forget the cheerful mortuary assistant who had informed him that it wouldn’t be much heavier with a body. You forget how light a person becomes, when they die. It slid easily into the stone wall next to Thomas and Martha Wayne. Jason’s plaque would have to be hand-engraved. Bruce would install it next week. There was no rush.

That was actually the thing that burned Dick up the most.

Not that friends and guests were forbidden from the funeral, because no one could know Jason was dead. Dick understood the risks of the vigilante life all too well. If the wrong word got out about Jason’s death now, so close to the publicized death of Batman’s sidekick, the taint of suspicion would never leave. The Wayne name would be tied irrevocably to the bat vigilante rumors, and that would be the end of anonymity for Dick’s civilian and crime-fighting lives.

Alfred had already informed him that there would be another funeral in six months’ time. Bruce and Alfred would stage an accident. A car crash in London, or a ski-lift accident in Bern--and then, Dick would be allowed to grieve in public.

It was the fact that Bruce had tracked the Joker for weeks and he hadn’t even bothered to recover a body. Batman hadn’t searched the collapsed warehouse where the Joker had beaten Jason to death. They had the video record. They had the crowbar. They had eye-witness testimony from Harley Quinn. But they didn’t have a body.

In Dick’s world, the rules were simple: no body, no death. In a city where the Joker could crawl out of whatever hole he was put in, the rule imposed order on a disordered universe. Until Dick saw Jason for himself, he wasn’t dead.

It was as simple as that.

Out in the harsh autumn sun, the grounds were starting to show a little wildness. Grass came up to the mild-calf, and the resplendent shade gardens that had been a Wayne fixture since before Dick was born mingled with the daylight flowers. The cicadas and a fainter, mechanical sound of clicking blanketed the world in noise. As they hiked back to the house, the strain was evident on everyone’s faces. The terrifying blankness on Bruce’s face was the hardest part of all.

When they returned to the mansion, Alfred took an unfamiliar turn down into the East Wing, and ushered them into an unfamiliar room.

“Why have I never seen this part of the house before, Alfred?” Dick gawked at the burgundy drapes gathered into majestic waves along the edges of the ceiling and the delicate wood-inlaid chairs. It felt like standing in the heart of a Victorian boudoir.

“This is a mourning parlor, Master Dick,” Alfred said heavily. “I had hoped to never open this room again.”

“Jason would definitely get a kick out of this.” Dick cracked a wry smile. “Don’t you think so, Bruce?”

Bruce merely stood in the dying light, his shadow stretching backwards until it became indistinguishable from the darkness.

They toasted Jason. Bruce downed half a bottle of Tennessee bourbon with a hungry look that Dick had never seen before. Relations didn’t thaw between them, so Dick left the mansion the next afternoon with the old Robin costume he had given to Jason packaged in brown butcher paper and carefully stowed it under his bed for its eventual return.

Chapter Text

Dick didn’t like to think about that day in the mausoleum--Bruce and Dick standing like perfectly counterbalanced weights with Alfred between them, piling red roses beneath the stone wall. It was exactly the kind of ceremony Jason would have hated. Back when he still had hope that Jason might materialize from a river bank, or turn up in a hospital ward, badly beaten but alive, Dick thought: Jason would get an absolute kick out of our manful silence.

When he got back.

But Jason didn’t come back.

Coping had never been a Wayne strong suit, and the Graysons never had to teach Dick how to move on from life’s stinging failures--so Dick did his best. He read the pamphlets Alfred sent. He went to support groups. He tucked the Robin costume into his closet. He tried to move on.

Whenever his field training officer at the precinct asked him why he looked so ragged, Dick fabricated innocuous but lingering fights. My sorta-brother drives me up a wall, he said. I can’t wait until he leaves for London.

“You’ll miss him when he’s gone,” the FTO told him.

“Not likely,” Dick said, with a grin that could only fool someone who didn’t know him.

So Dick didn’t put it together that it had been six months to the day since Bruce and Alfred had buried Jason. Frankly, he hadn’t thought about his family in two days. (Later, he’d feel both shame and relief that maybe grief, too, could fade.) He was sleeping the sleep of a beat cop who put in a week of double-shifts, when a polite but insistent knock woke him up. It was mid-morning, and Dick didn’t have to report to his precinct for another three hours. He put real thought into letting the interloper (a door-to-door salesman, no doubt) scram.

The knocking continued until he shouted, I’m up, I’m up!

His badge stuck to his thigh until he pried it off pink, angry flesh, and replaced it with a pair of blue-striped jogging pants.

He found a kid on his doorstep, clutching a camera, an overstuffed box, and a Gotham Free Press morning edition. When Dick offered him a brief smile, a triumphant flush spread across his face like he got picked first for dodgeball. Absolutely glowing. He couldn’t have been older than twelve.

“Dick Grayson?” he asked.

The question was moot; the kid already had that I fucking knew it look plastered across his face. Kinder, more knowing than he was used to. When he puzzled out a difficult case with minimal help from-- Shit. Jason.

“That’s what it says on the mailbox,” Dick replied, reaching towards the burner phone for Wayne family communication that he kept on the hall table. No messages about upcoming funeral arrangements. Darkly, Dick thought that maybe Bruce had him disinvited. “Who’s asking?”

The kid ignored the question, and pulled a thick manila folder out of his box. “Dick, look at these please--”

He shoved the envelope at Dick hard. Instinctively Dick grabbed for it in a downward break, as smoothly as if he were disarming an opponent. The kid ducked the follow-through elbow jab, and side-stepped the ankle sweep.

Jason’s voice rang in his head: What the hell, Dickie. Beating on kids now?

“Good on you, uh. Good--reflexes,” Dick said lamely. He swallowed down his serious lapse in judgment. “Rough neighborhood?”

The kid’s eyes went wide, and his mouth gaped. Dick thought, shit, was this someone from his beat? Dick knew the streets of Bludhaven like the back of his hand, and his recall of repeat offenders was second only to Batman, but Dick still had trouble putting names to faces in the tenements.

The kid radiated faint embarrassment. “You wouldn’t--it was a--you wouldn’t remember-- I’m from Gotham, Dick.”

“Look, I don't think we're on a first name basis yet--” Dick started, and then stopped when he flipped open the folder.

Inside were pictures of Batman. Not the motion-blurred ones that the newspapers ran in their Freak of the Week columns, but composed shots that would make the Pulitzer Prize committee weep.

“They were developed in a private dark room,” the kid said, worrying his lip. “No one’s seen them. Aside from us.” That was definitely one of Dick’s concerns--but probably not the very top of his list.

Batman on stakeout. Batman on a rooftop with Gordon. Batman perched next to the Bat-signal. Batman with a laughing Robin. Batman with a serious Jason. Batman with his cowl pulled off. A back shot, but even matted to his head and sticking up at odd angles, too similar to Bruce Wayne’s salt-and-pepper hair for comfort.

Dick stared down at the years of meticulously documented photos, with precise labels underneath each one. Robin I retires. Robin II debuts. A Chat With Commissioner Gordon. Night after Batman v. Joker, I. Batman v. Two-Face.

The kid wiggled the newspaper in front of his face emphatically, a worm wriggling on the line.

Wayne Family Heir Found Dead in Mansion Fire

Dick didn’t know the game the kid was playing. Matching wits with a pre-teen and failing appeared to be a real goddamn possibility. Biting back the pang of sympathy he felt for Gotham’s underworld, Dick resolved to stay calm. Stay one step ahead if possible. Refuse to humor him.

“Young man, do your parents know where you are?”

“I’m on break,” he said in a rush. As though Dick was worried that he wasn’t getting his proper state-mandated education.

Which maybe Dick was, a little. Someone who took that many photos of Batman had to have put in hours in the dark on the rooftops of Gotham, waiting for the perfect shot. But Dick had done exactly one week at Gotham Academy--and that was enough to set him for life--so maybe he wasn’t all that worried. Sidestepped the parent part of the question, though. Orphan?

Dick didn’t press.

The kid, however, was near-to-bursting. In a flurry of pressured speech: “I was on the grounds when the fire broke out.”

“Tell me you weren’t--” It was a given that whatever he was doing was illegal, invasive, dangerous, and in slightly bad taste for anyone this side of a documentarian or a stalker. “--doing anything I wouldn’t.”

“I would never! No,” the kid stressed. “I needed a good shot of Alfred. I didn’t have one yet. I was up in the Old Man’s Tree, when the fire sparked in the East Wing, right about center where there was no, uh, usual activity in the house. That seemed suspicious, but I--I--didn’t know what you would do in that situation. Bruce and Alfred could have been incapacitated! They could have been hurt!” The kid was miserable.

The mirror of memory, distorted by age, was no less terrifying. A child younger than the kid, standing under the colored tents of the big top, trembling from inaction, burning himself up from the inside out. Could I have saved them?

At a complete loss, Dick laid a hand on his shoulder. “Give yourself a break,” Dick tried, uncertainly. He couldn’t say, no one got hurt, and he couldn’t say, it wouldn’t have made a difference, because acting always made a difference. That split second between life and death, ledge and grapnel line, let you know that some lives were in your hands. And others, viewed on the grainy video of a warehouse camera--no matter what action you took, some lives were never yours to save.

“I called 911.” He stared at Dick, suspiciously watery-eyed. Dick blinked the moisture out of the corner of his, wondering if he looked any better. “But the mansion still burned down. It’s a wreck, Dick. It’s all gone.”

Dick scrubbed a hand through his hair, as a smaller, more dour version of himself struggled to hold back tears. Dick was not Bruce; he was not made of stone. Dick held the door open, and tipped his head toward the small kitchenette. It was probably a mistake but-- “Hey, you eaten yet? Gotham’s a long haul from Bludhaven. I’ve got cereal, saltines, and stale English muffins. Anything you want--sky’s the limit!”

It seemed completely worth the risk of inviting the shutter-happy stalker-in-training into his life when the kid cracked a smile powerful enough to light the bat-signal.

Dick wasn’t actually kidding about the state of his pantry. He fixed a (dry) English muffin for his guest, and poured a bowl of cereal for himself. Dick made small talk to keep up a companionable atmosphere. Without the patter of questions and inconsequential answers, it would have been weird. Dick asked for a name, but the question fell flat, and no amount of prompting dislodged a hint about his identity beyond what Dick could read off of him. Gotham, from his accent (and his earlier admission). Moneyed, from his table manners (he was perennially fidgeting for a lap napkin that Dick did not own). No younger than 11, no older than 13, from the Gotham Academy yearly colors that poked out from under his windbreaker. Dick had to attend those dreadful Wayne year-end parties, and he thought he knew everyone who was anyone in Gotham.

Turns out, Dick could be wrong about a lot of things in a day.

They ate breakfast while the photograph folder lay on the table between them, a picture of Batman and himself laughing right back at them. The kid sniffled back tears, and pawed at his red-rimmed eyes, but now his sadness was tempered by an honest delight that threw Dick for a loop.

When they finished eating, the kid bussed the dishes into the sink and got down to business.

“Robin didn’t die in a warehouse six months ago,” the kid said. “Jason’s not dead.”

Dick felt a chill in his bones as the kid pulled two pictures out of the folder, and laid them next to each other. One of them was from the security footage from the warehouse across from the site. A zoomed in shot of a pool of blood and the crowbar. The other, a fuzzy snapshot from an ATM camera in Prague of someone of similar build and coloration as Jason with a baseball cap pulled down to cover his eyes.

Anger built like it did after every dream or nightmare Dick had in the past year--Jason’s alive, and-- Jason’s alive, but--. Suddenly, Dick didn’t care enough to deny anything.

“He’s dead!” Dick seethed, smacking a hand against the file folder. The pictures flew out like little bats and scattered across the floor, the rug, the kitchen table where the kid shone with his own fierce determination. He wanted to make the kid see reason. Just like Dick had had to. “No one could’ve bled that much and lived! Do you understand, kid?”

“Tim,” he replied.

“What?”

“It’s not important right now,” Tim said in a practical tone as he collected the photos off of the ground. When he’d straightened the edges of all of the photos, he clutched the folder to his chest. “Whatever issue came between you and Bruce, you need to bury it. He needs you right now.”

Despite Alfred’s (friendly) sarcastic comments to the contrary, Dick could put two and two together and come up with four. Bruce attracted damaged orphans to him like iron shavings to a magnet. Before he could begin tearing into Tim’s assertion--he and Bruce didn’t have issues, they had whole fucking encyclopedia volumes--his burner phone under his pillow pinged its emergency code. The Red Phone.

Dick yelled over his shoulder as he dove into his bed, “Look…Tim. A door-to-door relationship repair coach isn’t going to fix the fact that Bruce Wayne is a bull-headed, stubborn jackass who refuses to accept--” Dick bit off what he was going to say next. The problems he’d had with Bruce’s escalating violence were nobody’s but his own. The GCPD sure as hell didn’t care, and the newspapers were more than happy to crow about the city’s “falling” crime rate.

“It’s not about you. I mean, it is about you, but it’s about Batman. Gotham needs Batman, and Batman needs Robin. He needs you, Dick. He needs you to help him find Jason--” Tim went on, but Dick didn’t hear the rest of it. Dick read the coded message three times to be sure he wasn’t misconstruing it.

[[ Batman has killed the Joker in cold blood. Body has been discovered. Not a drill. ]]

He had felt angry before. Now it was just numbness.

Resignation.

“He’s beyond my help now,” Dick said. He thought about it a good minute, because he was a twelve-year-old kid, and Dick wasn’t a heartless monster. But Dick recognized that determined glint in his eyes. Tim needed to see the man he idolized as exactly what he was. Dick tilted the screen so Tim could see the message. BK4JNAD. Tim studied the letters with a serious expression. At least their codes weren’t common knowledge. There was a comfort in that.

Dick scrolled down to the attached picture.

Tim sucked in a breath; nausea roiled in Dick’s throat.

Dick closed a hand over Tim’s shoulder. He said as gently as possible: “Do you have any hobbies besides photography? I suggest you focus on those.”

“It could have been a mistake--”

“The Batman doesn’t make mistakes.”

“But he--”

“Let it go, Tim. Robin is dead. Batman buried them both tonight.”

The door to the apartment closed on Tim and his photos, and his dossiers, and his protestations that Bruce was going down a dark path--because it didn’t get any darker than it already had. Batman wasn’t a murderer. Except today he was. Dick had woken up in a world where he was persistently and heartbreakingly wrong. Dick pulled the uniform box out from the high shelf in the closet, still tied up in butcher paper.

You knew it was heading this way, Dickie bird. Ever since he found that crowbar in a pool of my blood...this was going to end one way.

He knew what this package was. Dick’s last shred of hope that one day, he, or Jason, or another young hopeful would take on the mantle of Robin. He threw on a windbreaker, and squeezed out through the window in the bathroom that had no good photographic vantage points for several blocks. He would go to the Bludhaven cemetery.

Batman had burnt the last bridge. It was time for Dick to bury Robin for good.

The apartment door closed on Tim with a quiet click. Dick hadn’t seen the photos that really mattered. The ones from his Flying Grayson days--Dick and his parents dressed in their leotards--with a small cherub-faced boy smiling up at Dick. The ones from the day of Jason’s funeral--with three smudged figures cutting through the wheat-colored grass. The ones from last week--Batman chasing a criminal across the rooftops in the Bowery, until a foot had slipped, and the criminal had plunged into the ravine between buildings.

Batman hadn’t cared whether the man had lived or died. The guy had grabbed at a railing two stories down, and pulled himself, panting, wild-eyed, onto the metal grating. But he could have easily missed the fire escape and plunged fifteen stories to his death.

Tim pulled out his phone, and browsed to the Gotham news feeds. The Wayne Mansion Fire had pushed the Joker story below the fold on Gotham’s World Weekly, but the grisly crime-scene photos of the Clown Prince of Crime were splashed across the page. Gotham Applauds Clown’s Last Laugh.

The Joker was dead.

Batman had killed him.

Tim packed his folder and his box into the red-and-black backpack he’d stashed against the far hallway’s wall, and flew down the stairs of the squat apartment building. The morning traffic of Bludhaven, the cries of street vendors and the far-off blaring of horns, swept Tim up into its lazy pace as Tim pushed, ducked, wove, and scrambled towards the Bludhaven transit center. He had a bus to catch back to Gotham.

Dick Grayson might have given up on Bruce, but Tim hadn’t.

Tim found a snug corner in the Gotham City Public Library against a concrete pillar and a bookshelf, and opened his laptop. He discreetly scanned the area for too-casual library patrons. Ones that glanced at him more than once. Ones that didn’t fit. Tim angled the screen so the foot traffic couldn’t see the file he opened.

A web of interconnected notes popped up in a program of Tim’s own design. He pulled one note across the screen.

>> DID DICK GRAYSON RETURN TO GOTHAM CITY?

Tim clicked no, and he watched as his notes reflowed across the screen, and others disappeared like smoke.

Dick’s refusal to come back had always been a possible outcome of this mission. There was no way that he could go looking for Jason--the boarding school was year-round, and only let out for three days at a time, except in winter when his parents could surveil his activities. The ATM footage had shown Possible Jason withdrawing enough cash to slip off the grid entirely.

>> DID GOTHAM FREE PRESS RUN JASON TODD RUMOR STORY?

Tim checked his shell email accounts. No response from his contact at the paper.

Tim clicked no, and considered the new options that streamed across his interface.

>> HAVE YOU CONTACTED BRUCE WAYNE?

It would be the logical next step.

If the papers refused to run his photos, who better to consider the evidence than the man himself?

Tim stared thoughtfully at the web of possibilities that spun off of this decision. He could meet Bruce Wayne in person. He could plead his case for Robin’s necessity. He could caution Bruce against the darkness of the path he was walking, how reckless and sloppy he’d become. In some ways, Tim could understand killing the Joker (even if he could never condone it)--but the disregard Batman had shown for a criminal’s life terrified Tim. Without Robin, the Batman had no reason to hold back. If no one pulled Bruce out of this deadly spiral--Gotham would come to hate and fear the Batman as much as they had the Joker--

--Across the room, the rustle of newspapers drew Tim’s attention. From the front page of Gotham’s World Weekly, the empty eyes of the Joker laughed back at him. Joke’s on you, Timmy boy. He’s mine now.

Tim clicked Remind Me: Two Months.

Two months would give him the time to plan. Steering Bruce back to the side of the angels would require Tim to enlist the help of others. Those in Gotham who had been touched by the Joker’s violence would celebrate tonight in a drunken, riotous, exhaled breath that had been held for far too long. Tomorrow morning, Tim would upload the video to a few Gotham chatrooms and messageboards, start the rumor mills churning. Maybe Jason Todd wasn’t dead. Maybe he faked his death. Maybe he’s in hiding. Maybe the Wayne family should hire an investigator to find him.

Because Tim was certain Jason was alive, just as certain as Dick Grayson had been wrong about Bruce.

The proof was written in every snapshot he had labeled, numbered, and filed. He had tried to show Dick, but he hadn’t seen. The Batman wasn’t infallible. Gotham’s Greatest Detective hadn’t even noticed some kid with middle school gymnastics training tailing him for five years.

Chapter Text

Tamora had been drunk twice in her life and she was steadily working on her third (to confirm that being drunk mainly consisted of dizziness, warm feelings towards society and the easing of tedious conversation), when a murmur passed through crowd and gathered strength until it became a dull roar. Everyone on the second floor where Tamora was seated on a ghastly floral-print chaise longue pressed to the balcony railing to watch the scene unfolding on the ballroom floor.

Sheer delight that the spangled guests at a terminally boring Gotham society dinner were throwing themselves into various states of turmoil, with cries of I never! and This is not to be tolerated! and He’s gone too far, this time! motivated Tamora to have a peek herself. She grabbed her heels, and pushed her way to the balustrade.

On the graceful parquet ballroom floor--none more storied in Old Gotham-- ball-gowned ladies and black-tie gentlemen ringed four central figures. One was a child, holding a white handkerchief to his nose. Rust brown spots dribbled down the side. Next to him stood Sasha Mayez, a young theatre talent who had made her successful debut. She looked completely at a loss. If she was the child’s mother, she was coming off of the society rolls--she didn’t give the poor unfortunate a backward glance. Sasha’s eyes were fixed on the man standing opposite her, his fists clenched and his body poised for violence. From the balcony, Tamora couldn’t make out the face. He wore standard black tie, and sported a thick, unkempt beard. Could be anyone over the age of forty in the Gotham or Metropolis set.

That’s when she spotted the man that tied the scene together: a silver-haired presence in a double-breasted wool coat. Who could it be other than Alfred Pennyworth? In her younger days, Tamora remembered flirting with him just for a chance to see his charge. Something about the scene shifted, and the tableau began to lose coherence. Why would Alfred Pennyworth need to placate affable billygoat Bruce Wayne, who never so much as slapped a fly off an hors d'oeuvre plate, let alone slugged a society lady in public? Was he so much changed after his five-month absence from Gotham society? He hadn’t been seen in public since he’d withdrawn as CEO at Wayne Enterprises five months ago, and now he was the scene.

For he appeared to be seconds away from violence. Bruce kept turning involuntarily back towards the child, seeing blood, and winding himself tighter. Coupled with the untamed beard that had never been in style for the playboy, Bruce Wayne looked savage.

Tamora brightened. She knew an opportunity when she saw one. And how she absolutely loved to share Bruce Wayne’s spotlight.

The shoes slipped from her hands as Tamora hitched up the fabric train and pushed her way towards the grand ballroom stairs. She cried out, “My cousin! OH! OH! Dear, are you alright?”

All of the heads in the room swiveled to her, the whole of Gotham’s society opening its sleeping jaws to frown at her. Bruce positively vibrated with anger, and Alfred--well, at least he could tell a rescue when it was bounding down the stairs in ready-to-wear Valentino.

Tamora elbowed her way through the crowd, and charged straight at the child. “Cousin--oh, my dear, what happened? Do you want me to call your mother?” She clasped him in a tight embrace. “Play along if you don’t want to be eaten,” she whispered into the child’s ear.

“You’re ruining my plan,” he hissed, rearing back.

“Listen, brat,” Tamora said through her teeth. “Your carrying on and bleeding is one step away from getting Brucie over there banned from society for life. I stuck my neck out for you--now hug me back!”

The brat listened, and hugged her back stiffly.

“Cousin,” she cooed loudly, as she glanced over her shoulder. Alfred had collected Bruce and was steering him out the nearest set of double doors.

“I hope you mean that in a Shakespearean sense, because you’re old enough to be my--” Tamora pinched his cheek hard enough that he let out a little yelp of surprise.

“Your mother will be so relieved you’re alright--” Tamora raised her eyebrows at him.

Her cousin wrinkled his nose, but relented. “Tim,” he whispered.

“Tim,” she enthused.

Suddenly, Tim squeezed her neck tightly, and in a syrupy-sweet voice, crooned: “I’d like that so much, cousin. Let’s get some air.”

The crowd murmured its approval, and parted for them. Tamora escorted Tim out demurely, her hand twitching at the scruff of his neck in case he tried anything funny. As they passed down the line of good old Gotham society, Tim collected a mountainous pile of clean white handkerchiefs. To think they’d come back in season as an accoutrement, only to go up some twelve-year-old’s nose.

On the expansive lawns of the estate, wreathed by diaphanous paper lamps strung between well-manicured groves of birch and ash, Tamora yanked Tim down by the elbow as she stopped herself from toppling into a planter. Tim strained for a moment, hand to his eyes, searching for some sign in the dark. Laughter erupted from the double doors that neither of them had bothered to shut behind them. The brat slumped minutely, which had the propitious effect of halting his march through the grounds.

Tamora grumbled about trampling through weeds as she inspected the hem of her dress, soaked and dirt-stained to her ankles. The brat corrected her absently as he dumped the mountain of handkerchiefs on a stone bench, and then dumped himself beside them.

“Are you a gardener too?” Tamora inquired, piqued that her forced exit had dragged her from the only good scandal she’d sunk her teeth into all year.

“My mother planted them.”

“You!” Tamora exclaimed. “You’re Janet’s son!” Tamora seized him by the forearms, and spun him around once in the light. “Not bad! You know your mother and I used to do body shots in the…” Tamora’s eyes unfocused. That story was not appropriate for twelve-year-olds. Suddenly, Tamora realized a difficulty with her plan to bundle him off home; he was already home, and he probably needed a stern presence to dismiss the guests by 2 am. Otherwise, Gotham parties continued rolling until dawn the next day, and if they didn’t like the look of the weather, often into the next night.

“What am I supposed to do with you! Your parents are in Milan!”

Tim scrubbed at his upper lip with the bloody kerchief, and then tucked it into his jacket. The edge of it poked out of his pocket; the light wasn’t low enough for her to miss the embroidered W on the silk. He sniffed a line of blood back into his nose, when it threatened to dribble down the front of his Sean Jean junior jacket.

“Technically, this is my party.” Tim sniffed, in a grand imitation of Gotham society manners.

“Technically, you were battered by one of your guests,” Tamora replied glibly. “Which one was it, the oaf or the debutante?”

Tim pinked, because blushing was the kind of thing that young boys did about girls (or boys) at this age. “Sasha hit me. It was an accident.”

“Accident! Jack’s boy, involved in a society accident,” She swallowed down a sudden wave of nausea. “--I am that drunk, but your story is a load of toss.”

“Don’t tell anyone,” Tim pleaded miserably. “Please.”

“You haven’t even told me the story.” Tamora collapsed onto the bench, and Tim yanked away a kerchief that she’d squashed. Her presence, even when drunk, had always had a loosening effect on those around her. She had been told that she had a trustworthy face, and her reputation managed to remain spotless, even as she had racked up the choicest gossip on this side of the bay. It was because Tamora Pierson knew the difference between a secret worth telling and a secret worth keeping.

What he told her definitely fell into the latter, as he laid out the whole sad tale of Bruce Wayne and his poor (dead) unfortunate ward and some unnamed (but strongly hinted at, recently dead) lover. The pieces were falling into place. For what other reason would Bruce Wayne throw away an easy paycheck and the esteem it brought, if none of the other tragedies in his life had succeeded in dampening that bland, easygoing Brucie attitude?

“A lover!” Tamora exclaimed when Tim paused for breath.

“A co-worker. Bruce tried to impale him.”

“Oh, honey, that’s what lovers do.”

“With an actual spear,” Tim insisted. “That makes it attempted murder.”

“How romantic,” Tamora cooed, as her head buzzed with laughter. She was quite ready to be on a horizontal surface.

The story become more impossible, more ridiculous, until Tamora’s head spun with images of Bruce and his (probably dead lover), snippets of the heroic death of Superman that Gotham papers had squeezed for six straight months, Bruce and his dead son, and Bruce and--Bruce and something about photographs? Tamora suspected Tim was telling her several different stories, but she didn’t bother to set the record straight; let him blow off steam for whatever’s bothering him (a crush, she decided), and learn about the fine details of amorous pursuit from his mother.

Tamora radiated the kind of matronly support that Janet would approve of (she gasped and clucked where prompted, and never, ever, asked for follow-up details; she was absolutely too sodden to be a snoop), as she wondered if her car service could fetch her from the garden tomorrow morning. At least the scene in the ballroom would be a diverting story to tell her girlfriends when she finished sleeping off all thirty-six hours of her hangover.

Tim hadn’t meant for the story to come out as it had. He plucked threads out of one of the handkerchiefs to contain himself, but the words kept gushing out. He was heartsick. Defeated. Tonight was the first night that Gotham society had seen Bruce Wayne since Doomsday had destroyed the old port; it had been far longer since Tim had seen Bruce at all. After the Superman had destroyed half of the financial district in Metropolis, his Batman had disappeared completely.

Gotham Academy breaks no longer coincided with cases that interested the Bat. Gun smuggling rings went unchallenged. Petty burglaries were ignored. The hard stuff, the truly dangerous cases deep in the Bowery, still brought out Batman, but Tim could never guess which one (and his sources at the papers had long given up trying). Month by month, new reports of the Bat vigilante branding criminals filtered through the Gotham IRC channels. Two years ago, the Batman had been a folk hero; now he was a dark plague that rose out of the streets to devour the criminal underclass whole.

And Tim had let it happen. Just as he’d let rumors of Jason Todd in Budapest slip through his fingers, because--it hardly seemed to matter. Tim stopped showing up at Dick Grayson’s apartment for stale English muffins. Not because Dick wouldn’t let him in (he always did, even if some mornings, it took twenty minutes to convince him that the door was worth opening), but because Dick Grayson had snorted, and said Bruce Wayne’s one-man crusade against Superman was only going to end when someone died.

Tim hadn’t believed.

He had been so wrong.

Footage of the break-in at LexCorp had made its way to his Gotham IRC channel. He had seen Batman steal the kryptonite sample with his own two eyes. The next day, Tim had hastily put in for a sick day at the academy, and had ducked out of the grounds at nightfall. By then, it had been too late. Tim had showed up to a smoking crater in the Gotham Port as the military had locked down the area.

It was the first time Tim broke his own rules.

(One: don’t attend Gotham parties. Two: don’t hack Wayne Enterprises servers. Three: always trust Commissioner Gordon. Four: Don’t Do What Dick Won’t, Unless There’s A Good Reason For It. Five: don’t touch Oliver Queen’s toys. He’s the wrong mixture of dangerous and bored.)

The violent collision between Superman and Batman had been caught by Queen Consolidated satellites. He hacked their feed, and with ice in his veins, reviewed the fight. It was testing, almost teasing at first: Superman sighed as he marched through anti-tank rounds, sonic emitters, covering smoke. Then Superman had committed to violence, and it became brutal. Each time Bruce went down, Tim half-jumped out of his chair. No, he thought, the Batman always gets back up.

Once they had crashed through the roof of the old GCPD building, Tim had to simply guess what the outcome had been, give the weapons Batman had carried into the deadly arena. (It was a good bet that Kryptonite spear ended up in someone.) Tim clutched the library desk hard enough to splinter the fake wood veneer…until both Superman and Batman had flown away from the encounter.

This was the story Tim told Tamora as she sagged against him in the garden of the Drake estate. As the words spilled out, Tim found enough control to cloak the story in euphemism or edit out details: but the meat of the tale was there. A good man fell from justice, and a man who could have dragged him back into the light died to save him and the world. Somehow, it hadn’t been enough.

In the wake of Superman’s death, a brief flicker of hope kindled in Tim.

For a month, the Bat had been spotted in the company of an armored woman (the IRC channel called her the Amazon), fighting crime, patrolling Gotham, being seen as the city’s dark protector. It was like the early days of Batman splashed in vivid color across the newspapers. Actual good photos this time: Batman posing heroically on a gargoyle above the GCPD’s new headquarters.

Tim had thought it was too good to be true. Optimism was a hard habit to kill, however, and he had begun to believe that Gotham’s hero had returned without the help of Robin.

One month after the Superman had fallen fighting Doomsday--all of the cameras across Gotham had scrambled, satellite feeds had gone dark, a powerful BOOOOOOM had cracked through the sky. The sound was vast and ancient. Afterward, a silence fell. It was so profound that Tim could hear his own heart hammering in his chest.

After that, nothing. No Amazon, no Bruce Wayne, no Batman. Tim had waited restlessly for news. He haunted the GCPD rooftop when Commissioner Gordon had lit the bat-signal. It had taken three months, but Tim had finally cracked. He broke two of his most sacred rules. He hacked Wayne Enterprises servers, and began stuffing RSVPs into Bruce Wayne’s calendar. Then he’d aired out the house (Jack and Janet were abroad again for the year) and begun reading up on event hosting for the elite jet set.

He began hosting parties.

That was, more or less, how Tim had ended up holding a bloody handkerchief to his nose on the ballroom floor of the Drake estate.

Tamora pursed her lips as the tale concluded. “None of that explains you, kiddo.”

“What do you mean?”

A white cloud flew up as Tamora grabbed the handkerchiefs and tossed them above her head. Tim let out an undignified squawk, and tried to pluck them from the air as they fell. “That’s what I mean!”

Tim could usually follow most of his peers’ bizarre explanations, but this particular demonstration was beyond him.

Tamora grabbed his wrist, and shook him lightly. “You! You’re trying to fix something that’s a force--force of nature. You’re struggling against gravity. So you have to--let them fall. And pick them up afterward. See?”

Reaching down to the ground, Tamora scooped up a dozen of the white shapes from the hosta. She waggled them exaggeratedly, shaking dirt and branches from their folds, and then tucked them into a pillow-like shape next to Tim’s leg.

“That’s it for me, kiddo, very last and best advice I have. You’re in the middle of this story somewhere, rushing to catch the pieces before they fall. Just--let them fall--and enjoy the show.” Tamora laid her head onto her impromptu pillow and made a very obnoxious smacking sound with her lips. “Maybe you’d get less elbows to the face if you cut loose a little, stopped getting up in other people’s business,” Tamora pronounced.

Tim gaped at her. The idea of letting things fall where they may was antithetical to his very being. He remembered how he trembled when Wayne Manor had gone up in flame; and the older, concealed fear that he had been running toward/from his entire life. A young boy in the seats of the circus, watching the worst day of someone else’s life. So afraid that inaction might cause someone to die, Tim had vowed to never simply watch again. He had. So why was watching all that he had done? Why had he watched as Batman--

“You’re wrong,” Tim said quietly, his whole truth burning fierce in his cheeks.

“Ughh,” Tamora groaned, trying to swat Tim’s cheek for a gentle motherly pat, but completely missing. “Call my driver in the morning, okay?”

Sickened, Tim seized her arm. He had to make someone understand. He needed someone, for once, to understand. “Sasha thinks it was an accident, but I provoked her. She--she--roofied him, Ms. Pierson!”

Chapter Text

The sequence of events on the ballroom floor had a clarity that Tim’s own motivations didn’t.

Bruce Wayne had accepted a glass of champagne from the woman on his arm, Sasha Mayez. The tell-tale fizz of dissolving chemicals had been clear-as-day to Tim--but Bruce, who had been charmed by Sasha’s wit, or simply out of practice, sipped the wine without a second glance.

Tim knew what he had to do. He positioned himself to be the perfect interloper: Sasha’s hand came up with her glass, then back down, and had smashed right into Tim’s face. It would have been no harm, no foul, but Tim pinched her across the small of the back. Sasha’s elbow had crashed into his nose again. Tim used that momentum to bounce into Bruce, who grabbed his shoulder, frowned at him, then over to Sasha who was impugning Tim’s moral fiber, his parentage, and threatening to hit him again.

Tim hadn’t counted on Bruce’s reflexes or his anger. Even drugged, Bruce saved the glass from Tim’s interference, and then downed the rest of the champagne in three angry swallows.

Tim pressed the back of his hand to his nose to staunch the bleeding. He had wanted to save Bruce. But standing there, under the eyes of all of Gotham society, the only thing that had rushed through his head was: this is what your life has come to, Bruce Wayne. Before God and All His Witnesses, a society darling dripping with the blood of a shadow he didn’t even know he had cast.

“What an interesting theory,” a dry British voice cut into the conversation. “I’ll have to mention it to Master Wayne when he’s in better spirits.”

Time slowed. Tim had never had felt the sensation of being caught. Short, unruffled, unflappable, invisible Tim had never so much as been caught sneaking a book in class when he was attending lecture. With a kind of horrifying inevitability, he turned his head. A very irate Alfred Pennyworth, hands stuffed into his coat pockets, stood on the pathway that snaked behind the stone bench. He glowered at Tamora and Tim.

“Mr. Pennyworth.” Tim bunched his hands into the handkerchiefs.

“Mr. Drake. Our host for the evening.” Alfred appraised him. “I don’t suppose one of you is sober enough to help me move him?”

Tim leapt off the bench. He scanned the area for Bruce, but found the grounds empty.

Alfred jerked a thumb toward the line of trees that canopied the back drive like a French countryside highway, and explained that Bruce was in the car, and that he would need to be carried back to his house. For no power on Earth would compel Alfred Pennyworth to carry his employer back to the house alone. By Tim’s last calculations, Bruce had at least fifty pounds on the butler, and had he been roofied rather than merely drunk, the timeline fit. Tim wasn’t sure whether to feel secretly pleased that he had guessed correctly and intervened, or angry that the event had necessitated contact with Bruce before Tim was ready for it.

“Let him sleep in the limo,” Tamora shouted, sitting up suddenly, and draping herself across Tim like a warm, sodden blanket. “Let me sleep in the limo. Don’t wanna wake up with mice in my hair.”

“Your cousin is charming,” Alfred smiled tightly. “We’re well acquainted. Well enough for me to know that you don’t have a cousin, Tamora Pierson, of the shipping Piersons!”

“Alfred Pennyworth, Lord of All He Surveys,” Tamora hiccuped happily.

“I’ll help,” Tim put in quickly. When he abandoned his seat, Tamora listed to the side like an unmoored yacht.

Tim caught her before she fell. It was tempting to leave her here in the garden, to wake up the next morning with bits of his mother’s prized shade garden in her weave. Tim’s conscience bit at him. Tamora, for all of her primping for the spotlight, had done what she said she did: she stuck her neck out for Bruce. Bruce could have hit Sasha in front of Gotham society, and he would have being expelled from its good graces as neatly as Jack Drake had been sixteen years ago.

“...if I can bring her too,” Tim insisted.

Alfred evaluated the pair of them coolly. Tim learned and understood people from behind a lens, a camera, or a screen; yet, of all of the Wayne clan, Tim had never captured photos of Alfred in the wild. From this angle, shadow played over his face, and Tim felt at a loss to reconcile Dick’s fond stories with the menacing presence that stood before him.

“Both hands,” Alfred commanded.

Tamora had no such compunctions about him. She presented her arms immediately, laughingly, and Alfred hoisted her easily to her feet. He slung her arm around his shoulder, and guided them toward the back drive. Tim followed in their wake without a backward glance to the raucous laughter floating through the open double doors. The staff would clear out the guests by the morning, he thought uncertainly. Tim wasn’t certain about how parties ended in Gotham; he’d never had the endurance to see the end of any he’d thrown.

“Mr. Drake, would you be so kind as to--” Tim darted forward to open the door of a car, a Rolls Royce Phantom, and he kept his eyes front and center. “Ah, yes, thank you.”

Alfred deposited Tamora into the car, and then tipped his head up toward the passenger side door. Tim climbed in. His hands clenched and unclenched involuntarily, as he stared at the floormats. In the back of the car, he could hear the quiet murmurs of conversation between Bruce and Tamora. Then nothing. Then steady breathing.

Alfred slid into the driver’s seat, and they drove back to the manor in silence. It was a short drive; the Drake estate abutted two sides of the Wayne estate. They had been uncommunicative neighbors all of Tim’s life, the tops of the Wayne Manor trees visible over the tall hedges maintained between the two properties.

Alfred turned them down past the burnt-out manor shell which--surprisingly--showed new construction. Demolition scaffolding, Tim realized with a start. He had been so busy keeping tabs on the Batman, he had forgotten to watch Bruce Wayne. Bruce Wayne, apparently, was ready to move on...but to rebuild the Manor or destroy its legacy completely?

In front of an empty carport, Alfred entered an impressively long number on a concealed security panel. They had arrived at the lake house. Tim twisted around in his seat and faced Bruce for the first time that night. Tamora was snoring, and Bruce was breathing evenly, if a little heavily. She had collapsed into Bruce’s lap, and Bruce absently stroked her hair as he stared out at the lake.

When Alfred succeeded in disentangling them, Tamora snorted loudly, then curled up in the back seat like a cat. Alfred slung one of his arms around Bruce’s waist, and he motioned at Tim to take the other side.

Even hunched over, on the verge of total collapse, Bruce towered over Tim. It was fitting. Without knowing it, he had towered over Tim’s entire life. The dark guardian, standing over Dick Grayson like an immovable black wall. As they staggered towards the door, the thought struck Tim that this might be the only time he’d ever see Bruce up close; he might never get the chance to tell Bruce that.

Tim’s breath hitched.

The glassy sheen over Bruce’s eyes sharpened. Tim startled. He didn’t know it was possible to shake rohypnol. Bruce snaked out from Alfred’s grasp, and roughly spun Tim around by the shoulders. Suddenly, the weight of Bruce’s attention was entirely on Tim, scrutinizing him, dissecting him. It was about to cross the threshold from awkward into threatening when Bruce, with a small cry, fell to his knees and buried his face into Tim’s shoulder.

“Jason,” Bruce cried, his voice weak and cracking. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry.”

“Jason, forgive me.”

The young Timothy Drake (whom, after many interesting reports from Master Richard had passed into his intel folder, Alfred could only think of as the Wayne Family Interloper) stood stock-still. His eyes implored Alfred to do something. With the hulking figure of Bruce curled into a ball around him, the young man looked like he was being mauled by a particularly large (but no less mangy for his thousand-dollar suits) stray. It was a pitiful sight. Alfred was not unmoved by the outpouring of emotion. It was just that, on balance, he found the situation too amusing not to let it play out.

Bruce sobbed against Tim’s shoulder until Bruce burnt up his strength, and collapsed gently against him.

“Let’s get him inside,” Alfred said not unkindly.

Tim looked haunted--thrilled and miserable in equal measure. “What about Tamora?”

Alfred’s pursed his lips. What about Tamora indeed. He had too much fondness for her from her youth, but he wasn’t going to lead a chipmunk to a cache of acorns and trust it not to grab every last one before he returned. The security to the Batcave should hold off an eager teenager, but he wasn’t willing to risk it. “I’ll call her car service.”

“Okay,” he agreed.

More elaborate communication seemed to be beyond him for now, so Alfred took pity on him. “Open the doors, and I’ll carry.”

Tim lit out faster than Alfred had seen a person move (this side of Dick bounding down the manor stairs for breakfast), and he propped the front door open. Working in tandem, the two of them managed to dump Bruce into bed with only moderate back strain. The young interloper crept out into the sparse living space Bruce had made his home these past three years. Alfred folded his arms across his chest and watched him. He moved like a bird, striding and side-stepping around the room. Both of his hands were clasped behind his back to remove the temptation to touch anything. Glances were thrown back at Alfred every few seconds, asking is it okay for me to be here? He was very much as Dick had described him: quiet, intense, curious. Timothy had a cherubic face and kind eyes; and Alfred suspected he was older than the “twelve or something” that Dick insisted on calling him. Something that Dick hadn’t noticed was strange push-pull in his mood. The sheer wariness rolling off of him, completely at odds with the intense need for something from those around him.

Long experience with Master Wayne’s brooding, Master Richard’s compulsive honesty and Master Jason’s explosive temper had taught Alfred that the best way to learn about a person was to let them tell you what they wanted. Body language spoke volumes. Tim was dying to tell someone something.

Simply refuse to ask him about it, and he would find it impossible not to tell.

Thus equipped, Alfred brushed past Tim and began brewing tea in the modular kitchenette. The boy materialized at his elbow, watching him set the kettle to boil. He offered Tim his own cup of steaming chamomile tea. Tim took it, and frowned at it. His fingers drummed restlessly on the table, and he folded himself into the chair. He stole looks at Alfred over the cup of tea, but drank it in silence.

Alfred sipped his own as he arranged Bruce’s calendar for tomorrow. Eventually the sound of fidgeting died off. Over the top of the tablet, Alfred saw that Tim had dozed off at the kitchen table, practically hugging his teacup. The sound of a car pulling up to the lake house roused Tim, and he blinked himself awake.

“The car service,” Tim said, overly-loud, pushing out of his seat. The driver fetched a yawning Tamora out of the back of the Rolls. “I should--”

Alfred had miscalculated. Tim still looked nervous and miserable, but he clearly had a tolerance for internal turmoil that rivaled Bruce’s. If the velvet glove approach wasn’t working, it was time to deploy the iron fist.

Alfred tossed the tablet down on the table. Tim twitched but he made no move to leave.

“Actually, Mr. Drake, I think you’ll better explain yourself to me first.” Alfred steepled his fingers. “Why don’t we begin at the part where you’ve been hacking Master Wayne’s appointment calendar for the past three months, and proceed from there.”

Master Richard had said that Tim Drake told very curious tales, but at the mention of Bruce Wayne’s calendar, he clammed up faster than your average Gotham street punk.

Alfred decided that an easy question would be a sufficient icebreaker. He asked about Tim’s age--but Tim was apparently as immune to Alfred’s pleasantries as he was to Alfred’s silence.

“Is this an interrogation?” Tim asked warily.

Clever boy--that was exactly what this was. Alfred decided a modicum of tact would yield better results than a direct assault.

“Consider it a friendly chat that might have an adverse outcome if I feel you aren’t being completely honest with me,” Alfred said.

Tim didn’t react strongly--the shock of the night was still dampening his mood. He bit his cheek, and dragged his head up to make eye contact. He said: “Sixteen, sir.”

“Good. Now, obviously you’re skilled, if you can circumvent some of the most secure protocols that WayneTech has developed. You’re obviously motivated, if you’ve been trying to lure Bruce Wayne to a party for three months when he hasn’t even left the house in five. But why on Earth would you go through all that trouble, if your master plan was to bleed on his suit?”

In spite of his control and his great self-possession, Alfred’s barb had landed. Tim was annoyed. Translated through the boy’s heretofore demonstrated restraint--he seemed positively enraged.

“I was wrong. People were hurt because of it,” Tim said sharply.

Pieces were beginning to fall into place. “You mean Bruce, don’t you?”

Tim’s eyes flicked down guiltily. “And others.”

Alfred’s tone brooked no compromise: “What did you do?”

Now here was a curious turn-up: while Tim had eloquently pleaded with Master Richard to suit up, he apparently had no such facility when he spoke about his own experience. Haltingly, Tim related the tale of his first encounter with Dick Grayson on the day that the Batman was first branded a murderer. Tim had wanted to make someone see that Bruce was heading down a dark path, but Alfred knew that it had already been too late. While Tim was on the bus to Bludhaven, the Joker was already dead.

“Batman went down a dark path, and--it’s my fault. I had the chance to tell Bruce that Jason was alive but I didn’t.” Tim looked like he was going to be sick. “I went to see Dick Grayson first. I waited.”

In silence, Alfred watched Tim. Alfred knew that the greatest sin in the world was hardly ill-timing; that was merely the irony of living in the world, where so many moving gears had to turn in concert to give a boy a good life or destroy his peace utterly. He had seen too many of the latter to believe choosing prudence (for who else would have given Tim a chance? Bruce would have shut the door in his face) over bold action was a mistake. The greatest sin man commits is when he hardens his heart against the suffering of others. Slotting the pieces into place, Alfred saw Tim as he didn’t want anyone to see him: a heart with so little emotional skin that it was constantly on fire. A boy whose only way to force the world to make sense was to narrow it. Dick Grayson. Bruce Wayne. Batman. Robin. The machinery of logic a veneer over a vast, deep well of pain.

But how to explain this revelation?

Alfred Pennyworth was an avid student of the mind. The motivations of men were his study: what they choose to do under duress, how to point them to the right path when they’ve fallen, how to wait patiently for the other person to arrive. All of which had fallen on deaf ears for the past two years. At least Alfred knew a little more about good advice, frustrated.

There was one thing he could offer the boy that he could never give Bruce: absolution. Tim could take the olive branch for what it was, or he could reject it.

“Waiting’s hardly the worst sin a person has committed, Mr. Drake,” Alfred demurred.

(He was hardly surprised when Tim rejected it bitterly.)

“You don’t understand,” he said.

“Humor an old man, Mr. Drake. I know a little something about guilt. Trust me when I say that nothing can turn Master Wayne from a path he freely chooses.”

“Robin would have stopped him,” Tim insisted. What a stubborn, familiar set to his jaw.

Tim was in fact correct--but not for the reasons he thought he was. There was no way that Alfred could tell him this knowledge; Tim would have to understand it for himself.

“What is to be done, Mr. Drake?” Alfred stood up, crossing his arms in his most terrifyingly parental guise. Disappointment radiated off of him, and Tim drew back from it instinctively. “You know far too much about us and I know far too little about you. Do you know what my position is in this household, Mr. Drake?” Tim gave that one a good think before his shook his head. “It’s a rather simple relationship. Master Wayne’s job is to protect Gotham. My job is to protect him. You’ve presented a peculiar case since Master Richard first told me about your visit to Bludhaven. As far as he could tell, you presented no harm to Bruce or this family. Normally, I trust Master Richard’s judgment. Having met you, I don’t know what to make of you.”

“I would never--” The protest died on Tim’s lips as he appeared to think through all of the permutations of how he could hurt the Wayne family without meaning to, or anticipating it. “I understand. I am a threat,” he conceded.

“I have a non-negotiable proposal for you. Prove to me that you’re not a threat to Master Wayne, and I won’t take steps to permanently remove you as a danger to this household.”

“Blackmail,” Tim breathed.

“If we have to be crude,” Alfred returned easily.

Tim stared at the tea residue in his cup, as if it could tell the future.

“What are your terms,” he asked at last.

Alfred set out his expectations: Tim was to arrive promptly every morning, and assist with chores. Included in his duties were errands, housework, short reconnaissance missions, and light house-sitting duties. When Alfred mentioned that this was to be a daily requirement, Tim protested that the schedule would interfere with his schoolwork.

Alfred flipped his tablet so Tim could see the Gotham Academy records that he had called up.

“ ‘Secrecy has this disadvantage: we lose the sense of proportion. We cannot tell whether our secret is important or not,’” Alfred quoted.

Tim was chagrined to see the angry row of red marks next to his name.

“E.M. Forster. Which I suspect you would know if you were actually attending your classes. You dropped out of Gotham Academy six months ago.”

Alfred tapped the screen of the tablet, and a syllabus appeared for the American History class that Tim had dropped halfway through the semester. Another tap, another syllabus. And another, and another, and another.

“So I can be assured that if I don’t have enough work, you won’t be delinquent on the streets of Gotham: you will also read anything that I give you.”

As an almost breezy aside, Alfred added: “Oh, and you are to respect the house rules about Master Wayne’s privacy. If you want to know something, ask him directly. Or you politely learn how to hack triple-zeta encryption.”

Alfred held his breath. The last concession was the only important one; it was the one that would guarantee Tim’s safety. No more late nights on the GCPD building. No more tailing Batman to busts. No more possibility of bleeding out in a chilly alley with no one the wiser to his location. The entire request was impossible; no one would agree to these terms--not when the offer was based on a complete bluff. How could Alfred stop Tim, after all, if neither Batman nor Gotham’s criminal underworld had?

But he was surprised yet again. Tim’s entire frame slumped, as though his strings had been cut. Whatever force had motivated him all night deserted him with a small, hitched sigh.

Tim capitulated entirely, and agreed to every last term that Alfred had set. He looked miserable and chastised as he did so, but it was progress.

By the time Alfred had wrung the last assurances out of Tim, it was just gone midnight and (from his on-the-ground intel) the party still hadn’t wound down at the Drake estate. Tomorrow, Alfred would have to install cameras on the grounds, so that in the future he would know without the need for intermediaries. It wouldn't do to send the boy back into the madcap debauchery of late-night stock trading and drunken stories about Old Gotham that constituted an after-midnight Gotham party, so Alfred tramped into Bruce’s room, pulled a spare pillow and a duvet out of a closet, and settled them on the couch. He laid the duvet across the cushions, and fluffed the pillow. Tim regarded the set-up on the couch a little like a traveler would an unusual foreign custom, curious and a little confused.

He motioned to Tim, who stood at the end of the couch, with his arms crossed.

“It’s not comfortable, but it’ll have to do,” Alfred said.

“Mr. Pennyworth?”

“Do call me Alfred, everyone else does.”

Tim crawled onto the couch, and pulled the duvet cover over himself.

Then there came a quiet: “Why are you being kind to me?”

Alfred did a double-take, and his heart broke a little.

If Tim considered blackmail and a hard couch kindness, he almost couldn’t imagine what life had given him. He suspected very strongly that, like many secrets long held, Tim had lost all sense of proportion. And that sense of proportion was what he should expect from life, when he wasn’t busy filling it with the obligations he felt toward the Wayne family.

Alfred supposed that Tim’s attachment to Bruce was another secret long-buried, a secret that their taciturn young interloper wouldn’t part with for the world.

Shutting off the lights over the living space, he said:

“Goodnight, Mr. Drake. I expect you to report for your assignment no later than 6:45 tomorrow morning.”

Tim burrowed under the duvet, until only a small, pale sliver of his face was visible against the darkness. He looked so impossibly young. As he polarized the glass walls to their privacy setting, Alfred thought: with a dash of Bruce’s famous charm towards houseguests, it was only a matter of time before Alfred learned all there was to know about Tim Drake.

Chapter Text

For once, Bruce Wayne woke up to something other than the sound of his own heart hammering in his chest. The clink and rustle wine bottles from his nightstand sounded like shotgun shells smacking against the pavement. Someone was clearing his room of its accumulated detritus. Bruce cracked open an eye. His vision was blurry. Bruce rubbed a hand against the bio-timer he’d patched himself with in the car. Its texture changed depending on how many hours it had been exposed to air, before evaporating completely at twelve hours. According to the timer, It had been approximately ten hours since ingestion. Bruce’s hand shot out to grab Alfred’s wrist. If Alfred was going to passive-aggressively clean before the sun had crested over the lake, Bruce wasn’t going to play fair either.

His balance must have still been shot from the tranquilizer--instead of grabbing skin, Bruce clutched air.

“Still groggy, Master Wayne?” Alfred said amusedly. His voice came from across the room, in the wrong direction from the sounds of cleaning.

“Tranq kicks like a mule,” Bruce grunted. The sounds of cleaning had ceased entirely, and Alfred was standing in the passageway between bedroom and living area--strange, Bruce could have sworn... He must still be suffering after effects from the latest compound, a tranquilizer that combined psychoactive and sedative effects.

A wave of nausea crashed over him as he tried to recall last night. His memories fractured and spun in kaleidoscopic color, monstrous and foreboding. A fractal of him stretched out darkened wings, knuckles covered in blood. Had he hit someone? Then, warm, strong hands carried him from the car. Alfred and--Jason. A stricken look had flashed across Jason’s face as Bruce had embraced him, sobbing his bitterness out onto his tiny frame.

Bruce half-remembered apologizing over and over as the loss rushed back to him. Killing the Joker hadn’t scabbed over the pain--it had only cauterized it onto his heart.

But none of that had happened.

If it had, Alfred would have been at his bedside with a cup of chamomile tea, as he did whenever Bruce screamed Jason’s name. Alfred’s calming presence was the only thing that made those nightmares tolerable.

“Coffee, sir?” Alfred prompted.

“Pass this morning. Thanks, Alfred.” Bruce dragged a hand over his face, tangling his fingers through his beard. He was still in his black tie from last night.

“Time and date to be noted. Blurry vision and sonic distortion. No euphoria,” he reported, half for Alfred’s benefit, half for his own. The security system had audio recorders synced to the main system for dictation. Though Bruce preferred to do experiment post-mortems while the data were still fresh in his mind, he remembered nothing after Jason. Bruce hoped he hadn’t had to be carried, but found it more likely that Alfred had dumped him in bed, and called it a night. “Possible loss of muscle control and hallucinations,” Bruce added. “The tranquilizer batch needs further refinement. If the drug is used in the field, we can’t afford for the target to become unpredictable.”

“Very good, sir,” Alfred returned, more affable than usual. Something tickled at the back of his neck--the feeling of breath being held. Bruce shook off the feeling: he was in his own home, and safe.

Covering his face, Bruce rubbed away tears prickling at the corner of his eyes. His emotions were still raw from the tranq. That was all. He was fine. Everything was fine.

Even if it had only been a hallucination, seeing Jason had unsettled Bruce. Since Doomsday, new batches of Jason Todd rumors had cropped up at an unprecedented rate. Bruce had set an algorithm to mine the Gotham IRC channels for posts by ALVN DPR, who provided the most reliable information, but Bruce hadn’t even looked at the data. He’d tried to hold on to the revelation he’d had as Clark’s casket had been lowered into the earth.

Men are still good. Atonement was possible. Maybe even for him.

But Jason--

Avoiding the elephant in the room would be foolish.

“I saw Jason last night, Alfred.”

There was a loud clink by his headboard. His vision lurched dangerously, but Bruce was on his feet with a forearm to the throat of whomever else was in his room.

“Alfred,” Bruce growled. “Who is this?”

“I’ve hired staff,” Alfred said mildly, as Bruce radiated bloody-minded violence. “If it would please you not to maim him, sir. Staff is not replaceable.”

The help in question appeared to be only mildly inconvenienced as he was smashed into the wall, but he radiated faint worry towards Alfred. Bruce blinked. His vision cleared. Jesus. It was just a kid.

Bruce released the hold, and let out a shaky breath. “What’s--what’s your name, son.”

“Tim,” Alfred put in after a long pause, when the kid didn’t seem in any hurry to answer.

He was dressed in one of Alfred’s ever-present aprons over a waistcoat and a button-up shirt-- it was like looking at a young, short Alfred. Bruce was fairly certain there weren’t more Pennyworths in the world, but he did wonder…

“Mute?” Bruce asked seriously.

“Jack Drake’s boy,” Alfred replied. Well, that was one explanation for it.

The disgraced Jack Drake had purchased the neighboring estate when he’d been dismissed from Gotham society, perhaps in a bid to cloak himself in Bruce Wayne’s untouchable (if questionable) reputation. As far as Bruce had known, Jack had undertaken a truly epic gambling excursion around the world, and his wife had chased after him, trying to smooth down the worst trouble that he got into, bailing him out of prison, bribing local authorities, standing witness for him in a truly impressive number of legal jurisdictions. How a boy was raised in that upheaval was a question for more moral minds than Bruce’s. Having never met the boy, Bruce expected that Tim had been secreted away at year-round boarding schools for much of his life; a coat tucked away in the closet, now that it was out of fashion.

A familiar, directionless anger stole over Bruce.

Still, Bruce didn’t like the idea of having another person in the house. By years of habit, Bruce hardly felt Alfred’s presence--except when he was absent, and the lake house took on that cold, ringing emptiness, as though Bruce weren’t enough of a person to count. But a guest. Staff. The little glass box closed around him like a transparent noose.

Bruce crossed his arms. Tim, surprisingly, mirrored the gesture. “Does he follow orders?”

“Mine, certainly. Yours? That remains to be seen.”

The undertone of mirth struck Bruce as being unnecessarily cryptic--but when Alfred was this delighted by the irony of the universe, it was best to let him be. If Bruce couldn’t figure out a small mystery without Alfred’s help, he would have to live down Alfred’s sarcastic World’s Greatest Detective quips for months.

Bruce stared Tim down. To his surprise, Tim simply scowled. The sound of a dry throat-clearing broke the battle of wills. Alfred reminded Bruce of the errand that Alfred needed to run with their LexCorp associate. And with his quick (and entirely insincere) apologies, Alfred sailed from the room with a diplomatic wave that would have satisfied the Queen Mother--leaving an ocean-sized communication gap in his wake.

Bruce ordered the help to stay out of the room while he was awake, asleep, or any state in-between. His duties were only to extend to the rest of the house.

“That’s not for you to decide,” Tim said, and resumed collecting bottles of Chateau Margeaux and Clos Haut-Peyraguey--Sémillon or Sauvignon all the same to his palette when the goal was taking the edge off of the crushing weight of memory.

Bruce watched him dumbly in his day-old suit that was really starting to itch. Mentally, Bruce added abnormal sweating and dry mouth to that particular tranq’s notes.

(It wasn’t going to make the cut for field use.)

Bruce felt twitchy; he needed to get out of Bruce Wayne’s suit.

“Just give me twenty minutes to change, okay?” Bruce bargained.

Tim pulled out a handwritten list from his apron, and unfolded it twice. The list was as long as his arm and covered with tiny, neat block printing. “I suppose I can chop wood,” he said at last.

“I suppose you can,” Bruce agreed carefully.

When he heard the front door swing shut, Bruce discarded his jacket and fled to the Batcave.

“Alfred,” Bruce said, pressing his fingers together to keep some semblance of calm, even though they couldn’t see each other through the communications relay. “What am I supposed to do with him?”

“What’s he doing now, sir?”

Bruce consulted the video feeds that had been tracking Tim Drake’s movements through the house for the past several hours, while Bruce had run compounding ratios, and settled on a new formulation for the tranquilizer.

“He’s dusting the art.”

Alfred made an appreciative hum. “He’s already half-way through the list. An industrious young man, wouldn’t you say?”

“That’s one word for it,” Bruce said. “What are you paying him.”

“Why?”

“So I can double it for him to quit.”

“Why, sir--the work is its own reward,” Alfred insisted. “Package acquired from our associate. ETA twenty-five minutes.”

Bruce acknowledged the receipt, and composed a quick note to thank their associate--an intern from LexCorp’s biotech lab--to the tune of half a million dollars.

“We are paying him, though,” Bruce said sitting up in his seat as Tim moved into the bedroom to dust the walls near the hidden elevator keypad.

“Ah, well, that might not be in the spirit of our initial contract sir. Certainly he’ll be reimbursed for his work here, but not in any form that will be traceable to us.”

“You blackmailed him,” Bruce said flatly.

“It worked for Master Jason, didn’t it?” He could hear the sound of a car engine starting in the background. “Except Tim’s quite a bit brighter than Master Jason or Master Richard. He’ll figure out this is being done for his benefit.”

“He seems a bit dim to me,” Bruce muttered.

Alfred clucked his tongue, and insisted that Bruce knew better than to judge a book by its cover. After all, shouldn’t they know something about the sacrifices made to keep secrets?

Bruce snorted and flicked off the communicator. On the monitors, Tim paused at just the correct place where the panel was hidden, slid his fingers to a matching gesture, and mimed pressing forward onto the panel. He stopped short of triggering the panel to reveal the keypad, flicked his eyes around the room until they landed on the camera, then dropped his hand altogether.

Bruce narrowed his eyes.

So Tim Drake had secrets. Whatever secrets a sixteen-year-old kid with a record of chronic truancy at Gotham Academy could hold, they couldn’t be all that shocking.

Tim hadn’t completed the list by the time Alfred returned to the lake house. Bruce chose not to activate the audio channel as Alfred dismissed Tim for the day. When he had finally exited the house, Bruce came back up from the cave. Alfred’s errand lay on the table: a steel metal sample tube sealed in biohazard-grade polycarbonate plastic.

Alfred looked up from a cup of tea and a paper, his eyes crinkling in amusement. “Don’t tell me, you’ve been hiding in the cave all day.”

“The tranquilizer tests were important.”

“As you say, Master Wayne,” Alfred demurred. “And tonight?”

“I’ve radioed Cyborg to cover Gotham tonight.”

“Did you know, sir, that It’s been five months since you patrolled Gotham?”

Bruce didn’t even bother to look surprised, as he said, “Really? Didn’t think anyone noticed.”

Alfred nodded toward the front door--and the Drake estate that lay beyond the lake. “He noticed. He’s been trying to get your attention.”

“Don’t tell me--he’s an IRC Gotham junkie. That’s just what this household needs.”

Alfred folded the newspaper, and leaned forward in his chair. “Tell me, sir, why did you attend the Drake party last night?”

Bruce pulled up a chair.

“Honestly, Alfred?”

Bruce ignored Alfred’s murmured, it certainly would be a nice change of pace.

“All of Gotham society has been turning out for Jake Drake’s parties. Him, the one who would never be forgiven after he beat his wife in public. I figured--why not use his reputation, pick a fight, get myself knocked off the rolls of Gotham’s finest. Then I wouldn’t have to refuse another invitation on the count of extreme boredom again. Bruce Wayne would be stricken from the records. If not forever, at least for a good five, ten years. But Jack Drake wasn’t there, and I didn’t want to taint anyone else’s reputation, or lay anyone else up in the hospital. I happened to have the tranqs on me--” Alfred raised an eyebrow. When did Bruce ever happen to do anything? “--as a backup plan to mimic a collapse. Heart trouble. Opioid addiction. Your typical playboys tend to have such a short lifespan. It moved up the timetables a little, but it’s better this way.”

Alfred looked alarmed. “So the reason you gave up your position as CEO of Wayne Enterprises--”

“Bruce Wayne is dead,” Bruce bit out. “It’s time I buried him.”

It was a quiet night in the city. The gun smuggling ring that had been giving Bruce trouble for the past couple months was lying low. Cyborg confirmed his presence in Gotham. They agreed on a patrol route that would keep him out of the high-traffic areas. Over the years, Gotham had become accustomed to the invisible presence of bats, and out of respect for his dark lady, Bruce wanted the other heroes to keep a low profile. After the quick status update, Bruce activated the tracker that all Justice League members had agreed to wear while patrolling his city. Even if he hadn’t worn the cowl in five months, or spend an evening wrapped in her seductive embrace, Gotham was still his city.

It was because she was his city that Bruce had to listen to reason.

Time had proven that he couldn’t keep her safe if he only focused on the traffickers and gangs. Doomsday had written Bruce’s failure to account for all possibilities across the Gotham Port, whose cracked slabs of melted concrete still gaped like broken teeth. Diana, Bruce, and Clark had barely been enough to contain Doomsday the first time. It had taken Superman’s life to kill Doomsday the first time…

The probability of another battle like Doomsday or Black Zero happening in Gotham terrified Bruce. So the Port had been burned and salted as WayneTech and S.T.A.R. Labs technicians scoured every last inch of the rubble for biological material from Doomsday and the Superman. It had to be an irony of the highest order that the only sample recovered had been by the lone LexCorp representative allowed onto the clean-up site.

Bruce arranged the sample case that Alfred had acquired today from LexCorp on the lab workbench. Bruce slotted the biological sample into a key encryption unit. He input the bio-locked code that had been purchased from the intern, and waited the seconds necessary to see if the information had been worth the cost. Hissing as the biological catches released, the polycarbonate plastic cube popped open.

Inside the clear cube was the only sample of Superman’s blood that had been collected from the site. A smeared, bloody fingerprint on a stone outcropping. Not enough Kryptonian DNA to do anything significant--but Bruce only had one question he wanted answered.

Why had Doomsday come back when Clark hadn’t?

That was the thought ricocheting around in his mind three hours later when he finished setting up the experimentation site, applied the bio-timer patch to his arm, and swallowed an undiluted sample of the latest formulation of the tranquilizer. Bruce’s hand shook as he prepped his arm with an alcohol swab. The needle almost slipped twice, but he finally stabbed it into the meat of his arm. A liquid suspension of Kryptonian DNA and a nano-tech coursed through his muscle tissue.

Bruce managed to switch on the nano tracker and lay down on Silas Stone’s biobed before the darkness rose up to claim him.

“Mr. Wayne? Mr. Wayne?!”

The voice sounded frantic. He was being shaken. Bruce groaned as someone peeled open his eyelid and shone a light directly into his pupil.

“How long has he been like this, sir?”

“I found him like this an hour ago. He disappeared into the lab overnight. The tranq might still be affecting him--unless he took something else. I don’t recognize most of this equipment.”

“He’s monitoring his brain waves--can you show me the formulation?”

“He’s fibrillating!”

“Bruce--!”

Bruce felt the twilight of sleep pull him back under. He was standing on the rooftops of Gotham with Diana, as they dove through the air. Diana was swifter than air--sometimes she landed as lightly as though she were flying, and sometimes her footsteps cracked the Earth. She laughed, and tumbled through the Gotham night. She was no more a creature of the darkness than Superman, but she had agreed to stand by Batman’s side as he--tried--to step forward as Gotham’s hero. Bruce reached out for her lasso, to pull himself up, but his hands, slick with blood, couldn’t grab the magical golden thread that burned, burned, burned with a truth he wasn’t willing to embrace, not yet.

In the distance, a roar cracked the sky. A frantic radio call from the Flash. The Gotham Port. Doomsday. One month after he had fallen, he rose again from the hard-scrabble dirt.

Bruce knew it was a dream, and he knew how the battle played out (Cyborg opened a portal to another world, and they tossed Doomsday through it)--but in the dream, Bruce felt the thrill of fear and elation. If Doomsday was alive, Clark might be too.

The thought slipped from him as soon as he had thought it, whispering back into the darkest places in his mind. A spotlight clicked on, drowning him in radiance. Raising a hand to his eyes, he shaded his vision against the blinding, scouring light. Something dribbled down his cheek. He tore his hands away from his face from the wrongness of it, and saw that they were thick with blood. A kid stood in front of him on a parquet ballroom floor, kerchief pressed to his face. Bleeding. Had Bruce hit him? As Bruce moved toward him, his body grew heavier and heavier. The air solidified around his legs, arms, an invisible wall between him and the other. Bruce threw himself against the barrier. He wanted to shout, No, Jason! but he somehow knew this wasn’t him. Bruce always found Jason--in his dreams, he always cradled his broken, bleeding body.

Gray edges vignetted his vision; everything was losing color now.

Not-Jason smiled at him wanly, crossing the distance between them, slipping between the panes of glass that had frozen Bruce in place. He gripped Bruce’s shoulders. A cape rolled down his body, reaching out for Bruce, wrapping him in the comforting embrace of darkness as the world shattered to pieces around them.

“Finally,” Tim said, clutching Bruce tightly. “It’s my turn to save you.”

Chapter Text

It was a Friday afternoon, washed with a generous downpour, when Bruce found himself sitting on the lakeside pier, dangling his legs over the side of the rain-swollen bank. Lazy raindrops flattened the hair against his skull, but the water felt good: cold, vibrant, and alive. Alfred hovered behind the glass walls, busying himself with housework while he kept an eye on Bruce. Although Bruce had explained the scientific validity of his experiment (as well as the fact that the biobed would have revived Bruce from flatline, if they had kept him in contact with the device), Alfred had treated Bruce like a recalcitrant child. Just as he had when he found Bruce playing near the fissures in the rock where the bat cave vented to the surface months after his parents’ funeral. Then, as now, Alfred responded with the only prohibition that had ever worked on Bruce: he was to refrain from unsupervised activity. As long as Bruce was chaperoned, he could experiment to his heart’s content.

Alfred couldn’t watch Bruce twenty-four hours a day, so they had taken shifts. Alfred had the majority of the day, and the night was given to his newly minted auxiliary Pennyworth.

They’d done that for two days, before Bruce declared the supervision intolerable, and demanded to be let back to “work.” Apparently the euphemism was funny to Tim, who rolled his eyes and grinned like a cheshire cat.

Bruce was stricken when Alfred delivered the news: “He knows, sir.”

Tim had seen the cave, the workshop, the suit. It had been Tim who checked his reflexes in the cave. And it had been Tim who had (correctly) identified the base components of the tranq and helped Alfred administer the correct medical agonists. Bruce remembered the dream vividly, but little else. The hours after his resuscitation were a complete blank.

Bruce leant back. Alfred had disappeared from view, and Tim swung his legs at the table as he read his tablet. He met Bruce’s gaze, blinked his acknowledgement, and returned to his reading.

That was the extent of Tim’s reaction: a knowing grin, and his constant watchfulness. Even when he didn’t see Tim, Bruce felt a watchful gaze fall across him at the oddest moments. Bruce pinched the throbbing vein in his brow. Obviously a sign of paranoia. Bruce was a master of his environment. He would know if a teenager was surveilling him in his own home.

Bruce dripped across the length of the house. Tim followed his progress without moving from the table. He could practically feel the auxiliary Pennyworth chastise him for untidiness. Bruce fetched a towel out of the utility closet in the kitchenette, and dried himself. As he was toweling off his beard, Alfred appeared from the bedroom. He had his coveralls on over a three-piece suit, so he must have been in the workshop.

“Good news, sir. Dr. Stone has reviewed the biobed’s read-outs. According to him, your prohibition against injectables will be lifted in three days’ time.”

“Does this mean I’m allowed back in my own workshop?” Bruce needled.

“You can do so now, if you wish. Tell me or Tim, and we’ll accompany you for however long you need to work,” Alfred returned placidly.

If anything had changed since the incident, it was that Alfred was even more immune to Bruce’s moods than before. None of Bruce’s weary sighs, or protestations of need for uninterrupted (and therefore solitary) time in the workshop moved Alfred. Instead, Alfred had swiped his decryption key and updated all of the locks. Bruce didn’t have an adequate reason for it, as Alfred at least knew how to work silently in tandem with him from long habit, but a moment’s thought gave Bruce his answer.

“Tim, with me,” Bruce commanded.

As Bruce changed out of his wet clothes in the bedroom, Alfred and Tim fell into a quiet but heated conversation in the kitchenette. Bruce activated the voice relay in the closet, and Alfred’s voice came through clearly:

“Far be it from me to dissuade a man who’s chosen to shoulder the world’s sins, but I hope you take this to heart: Bruce’s actions are not your fault.”

Bruce didn’t hear Tim’s reply. It’s possible that he didn’t have one.

Tim joined Bruce in the bedroom a few minutes later, outfitted in one of Alfred’s coveralls that had been modified for a much slighter frame. He seemed bleakly determined for someone who was essentially embarking on glorified babysitting duties. Bruce bristled at the thought, but he realized he had been given an opportunity. Since Tim had come to the household, he and Bruce had exchanged all of ten sentences. Half of them had been pleasantries about the weather. Bruce had questions that needed answering. The first being: how much did Tim know?

Bruce nodded slightly toward the blank wall in front of them. The first test.

Tim looked at the blank wall of the bedroom, and steeled himself for what came next. Alfred had warned him that this would happen, and reassured him that it wouldn’t catch him by surprise.

“Bruce isn’t subtle,” Alfred had said, with a rousing shoulder-clap. “You’ll know when you’re being evaluated.”

Tim hadn’t felt encouraged.

Although Tim had been down in the Batcave once already, he suspected that the real event had yet to occur. The intense scrutiny that fell onto him now confirmed his suspicion. The real event was proving to Bruce how much he had managed to observe and process.

With a slight nod of his head toward the wall, Bruce demanded how much do you already know?

Tim stepped forward, slotting his fingers into the indents in the wall that could only be felt by touch. He slid his fingers over, and the panel released. Alfred had given him the decryption algorithm for the rotating code lock. It was a simple math puzzle, whose input changed based on the hour of the day. Tim input the correct code from memory, and the wall slid back to reveal a modified freight elevator, its rough edges and heavy hydraulics a (probable) remnant from transporting machinery into the cave.

Bruce’s observation was a palpable feeling, like sharp needles on the back of his neck, whenever Tim turned away from him. It was a uncomfortable ride down to the top level of the workshop complex.

Bruce set off toward the computer terminal, but Tim lingered behind. He had already seen the main workshop down the long cement corridor. The lab where they had found Bruce was a new addition that branched off of that floor.

But instead, Tim was drawn toward the lighted glass tower that rose up through the staircase. He had no chance to explore during his previous visit. He had to rush Bruce to the medical bay, and had stayed with him there until Bruce had regained consciousness.

Tim descended the stairs.

At the foot of the staircase, Tim stopped cold. The Robin suit and a vicious, blood-rusted crowbar had pride of place.

“You want to ask me something,” Bruce said. It wasn’t a question.

Tim spun around. Bruce had crept up on Tim soundlessly. In his gray Italian wool suit, Bruce was no less imposing than if he was towering over the rooftops of Gotham. “Why did you keep the suit?” Tim asked hurriedly. If he didn’t ask now, he didn’t think he’d have the nerve to later. “Why didn’t you keep looking?”

Bruce pulled back, and hunched his shoulders. Tim had seen that pose before. If he’d been wearing his actual suit, the cape would have cascaded over his shoulders to cloak him from sight.

“It’s a long story. No offense, kid, but I barely know you.”

“I understand,” Tim said, even though he didn’t. Just as he didn’t quite understand the mixture of mourning and defiance in this shrine.

Bruce headed back toward the lab, and a few moments later, Tim followed.

The biotech lab was filled with unusual tech. Tim gawked at the biobed where they had found Bruce days ago. The design was beyond anything he’d seen in the WayneTech medical prototypes. It felt warm, and seemed to curl towards his touch. The tech wasn’t from Earth; Tim was willing to bet anything on that statement.

“Is this going to be a problem?” Bruce asked.

Tim turned around, and saw Bruce standing in front of a smaller glass case, outfitted with a diagnostic batsuit that had been rigged with various medical sensors. From the angle, it seemed to squat on his shoulder, like a vicious bird. The question had multiple meanings, but only one correct answer.

“No,” Tim said.

Bruce threw down the latest report from the nanotech sensors. The results were negative. The massive neuroleptic onslaught from the tranquilizers hadn’t triggered cell regeneration. The endorphins and adrenaline from defibrillation hadn’t triggered a reaction from the cells either. The Kryptonian blood remained as dead as it had been before.

That wasn’t right. He knew Kryptonian cells could regenerate from the point of death. Just as he now knew that kryptonite contamination only slowed (not stopped) Kryptonian healing. And it wasn’t just the grotesque science experiment that could do it either. Clark had died when the nuclear blast hit. The creature certainly had. Dying must have triggered cellular regeneration. Bruce was missing something. Maybe if he could replicate the environmental conditions of the ionosphere he could--

A flash of red darted in and out of the corner of his eye, and he tensed. When he looked up, Tim was lying on the biobed. A red tie fluttered freely over his arm as one of his legs bobbed to a syncopated rhythm.

“This isn’t going to work,” Bruce muttered, pushing back from the workstation.

Tim looked up from one of the secure tablets that Alfred used in the workshop, blinking owlishly at the uncompressed Kryptonian genetic code that was scrolling across the lab’s monitors.

“I agree,” Tim said, jumping off the bed. He tapped his finger against the screen that displayed a green highlighted portion. “The protein folding is completely wrong for this activation site.”

Bruce gestured between the two of them. “I meant--you chaperoning me.”

“Oh.” Tim looked crestfallen. “Sorry. Was I…disturbing you?”

Bruce set his jaw. He had been disturbed. The flutter of red had touched a nerve. Too many associations with red. Clark’s cape. Jason’s domino mask. Dick’s tunic. He thought about asking Tim to take off the tie, but the request seemed foolish. The Bat Vigilante of Gotham, upset by a tie.

“I’ll call Alfred,” Bruce said instead.

“If I cleared out the needles, I’m sure Alfred wouldn’t object to me waiting in the workshop,” Tim offered quickly.

Bruce looked at the monitor again, and caught the portion of protein that Tim had pointed out. The green section was the only section Bruce was sure was correct. It was extracted directly from the portion of Lex’s notes on Kryptonian biology that hadn’t been scrubbed from his systems. Lex had actually worked with direct Kryptonian DNA, in samples large enough to allow for retesting--

“No,” he said in clear dismissal, mostly to himself. “According to Lex’s notes--”

“Lex’s notes are wrong,” Tim shot back, his temper up. He gathered the case of hypodermic needles and compounded tranqs. He gestured vaguely at the cave. “If you need me, I’ll find you.”

By the time Bruce had turned back to Tim to ask how in the blazes he could have an opinion on Kryptonian protein folding (when Bruce was only starting to comprehend the complex interplay between protein and cell structure), Tim had vanished with all of the sharps. Bruce paced out into the workshop. Tim wasn’t in Alfred’s usual perch, or stationed in front of the main terminal.

The stash of emergency needles was missing from the first aid kit. Which meant that if Bruce was going to extract some of those Kryptonian cells to prove the protein folding question one way or another, he was going to have to track the kid down.

Twenty minutes later, Bruce admitted that he was frustrated. Somehow Tim moved faster and more silently through a cave that he had only visited once than Dick or Jason had ever been able to. Not a hard feat, given that Dick’s enthusiasm for movement made him an impossibly easy target, and Jason’s smugness meant that once he found a good perch, he was given to gloating. But… for a near stranger to evade Bruce in his own home?

Not all of the pathways were equally safe. The cave’s lake system looked placid on the surface, but if Tim had slipped, it was possible that--

Bruce was not calling Alfred. He hadn’t heard any sounds of distress. Tim was fine. Hidden. Frustrating. But fine.

Having exhausted all of the safe hiding places in the sublevel, Bruce circled back to the main level. The telltale squeak of the uneven bars came from the training room; there in the dim light of the small gym, Tim perched on the bars, weight distributed so that he could crouch into a back-handed spin. He was fine--no bruises, marks, or blood. A memory of Tim holding a blood-soaked handkerchief to his face flashed through Bruce’s mind--but without context, it felt as drained of significance as the dream it had come from.

As Bruce watched from the doorway, Tim released from the bars, and executed a lazy hand-stand. His body flew in the face of gravity as he spun himself back up into a brooding crouch, then repeated the routine backwards.

Bruce slid into the room, edging through the shadows. He couldn’t spot the sharps; Tim must have hidden them somewhere within eye-line. There was no way that he would risk having them out of his sight. All he needed to do was to get Tim to reveal their location, and he could complete the experiment without further interruption…

The familiarity of the form stopped him.

The turns Tim made reminded him of how Dick moved through the air--minus the fluid grace that came with being born to live in the air, or the ease of decades of practice. But Tim’s movement did have the precise, technical edge of a very talented observer. Tim had to have watched Dick closely. Bruce filed that information away for later.

Tim hooked his legs on the bar, and hung off of it. He regarded Bruce from his upside-down perch. Instantly, the quiet ease he’d shown on the bars was replaced by a defensive posture. He physically drew back into himself.

As Bruce moved further into the room, he saw Tim’s misery shining out at him as plain as day.

“You’re miserable here.” Bruce stepped into the light. “Why do you stay?”

He expected silence, or deflection, or politeness. What he got was entirely a different beast.

“You can barely stand my presence,” Tim accused angrily. “Why haven’t you dismissed me?”

The vehemence startled Bruce. He tried to phrase in a way that made sense (because Bruce wasn’t sure if he could describe how Alfred had built Bruce’s own childhood around making forgiveness feel like penance). He settled for the most obvious: You know my identity. That complicates matters-- but even that explanation felt flat to Bruce.

Bruce didn’t want to bring up the fact that Alfred had basically been treating Tim as he had all of the orphans that had been charged to his care. That Bruce himself had received a list of chores as long as his arm when he’d first became Alfred’s ward. A task that Bruce had spectacularly failed. (Wild-eyed and grief-stricken, Bruce had torn up his list, and hugged his knees on the steps of Wayne Manor.)

Attachment would only complicate matters further.

Tim dropped to the ground, and drew himself up to his full height. Bruce found the posturing charming, considering he was more than a head shorter. Squaring off with him, Tim looked ready to tear into Bruce.

“It doesn’t even matter.” Tim laughed, a small bitter sound. “Bruce Wayne is as good as dead. You said it yourself.”

“I meant--” Bruce blinked slowly.

What had he meant? The conversation had occurred so close in time to Bruce’s fairly disastrous experiment. He hadn’t put the two events together in his mind, but to Tim (who seemed to not believe in coincidence with a fervency that rivaled his own), they must have felt intrinsically linked. He was certain he hadn’t said it within Tim’s earshot.

The house security was triple-zeta encrypted.

A smile came to Bruce’s face that he thinned into a flat grimace. Tim must have hacked the security feeds. He filed away that information too. What Bruce needed to do was de-escalate the situation. Violence was not an acceptable outcome.

“I meant: there was no more need for me to play around in public. If I’m not patrolling as Batman, and I’m not attending parties, I can devote time to what really matters.”

“Protein folding?” Tim’s nose wrinkled in derision. “Do you really think you don’t have twenty scientists at Wayne Enterprises who couldn’t do better than you?”

“It’s not the science, son. It’s trust. I don’t trust anyone at Wayne Enterprises to handle this information. I trusted Lex Luthor, and he gave us Doomsday. I trusted WayneTech, and the project lead sold the samples right back to LexCorp.”

“So that’s what you’ve been doing for five months. Hiding in here, trusting no one, saving the world with science?” Tim seethed with rage, edging closer to Bruce. “Gotham needs you Bruce. How could you?”

The accusation stung. How was it that he could hear his own inner voice so perfectly in Tim’s words? Bruce approached Tim, and dropped into the crouch that felt more natural to him than anything else. The cape would have made it easier. It gave him permission to feel what Bruce couldn’t. Bruce confronted Tim’s fury with earnestness.

“I’ve been building something that the world’s never seen before,” he said. “If--” Bruce corrected himself. “When Doomsday returns, or God forbid, worse. We will be defended. It’s the only way I know to protect her. Do you understand?”

Tim seemed to chew over Bruce’s words. He didn’t answer at first--instead, he retrieved the sharps and the tranqs from their hiding place--and they walked wordlessly back to the lab. Bruce tied off his arm, and drew the Kryptonian cells out of his muscle (with the help of the nano-cameras).

Bruce prepped slides with the new cells. And there it was, as Tim had said: these Kryptonian cells were different than the ones from Lex’s notes. They were doubled, tripled, quadrupled--an infinitely expanding fractal of information. The cells Lex had drawn from Zod were child’s play by comparison.

They stood side-by-side in front of the screens. Bruce made an observation about the structure, and waited for Tim to contradict him.

At length, Tim did say something. “Could I--see what you’re building?”

Bruce owed him honesty, at the very least. “I don’t exactly trust you either.”

“No,” Tim said, deflating. “Right. I knew that.” It had the ring of honesty. He had probably never been told anything of importance by the people in his life, aside from the one thing his body language screamed right now: I-don’t-matter.

Bruce said: “But there’s a difference, Tim. I would like to.”

Chapter Text

Bruce hadn’t even noticed when Tim slipped out of the lab that evening. He turned around from the microscope to announce a new observation, and his spot on the biobed was empty, the tablet powered down. Late night, apparently. Bruce shelved the slides, and thought about showering as he pulled up the League tracker. Tonight, the Flash patrolled Gotham. He was less discreet than Cyborg, so Bruce had pulled him back to peripheral hotspots only. Bruce scanned the Gotham Ports. No sign of the Flash. As excitable as Barry was, he never closed out a patrol without confirmation from Bruce. Nor was he as taciturn as Victor; Barry never engaged a target without radioing in his position.

Ice crawled down Bruce’s spine. He pulled back the map to show a street-view of the entire city. There in the Gotham Grand, in the center of the most crowded tourist destination, was a blip and a red-flagged CONTACT TERMINATED, 11:59:00 PM.

Three minutes ago.

He activated the comms. Unless their opponent had a greater-than-average technological know-how, the shielded implants were harder to disable than the transponders.

“Flash, status report,” Bruce ordered. He repeated the command a minute later.

Bruce brought up the comms protocol, and toggled the external audio feed. A tearing, jarring scratch of feedback fed into the system, and Bruce adjusted the levels to reduce the interference. Confused noises filtered through the comm--the sound of something scraping over concrete, the heavy tread of feet, the small groan that could only be Barry. Dragging, kicking, and laughing? Silence. Bruce clenched his jaw. Make a sound, Barry. Any sound.

“You sick fuck,” Barry coughed.

Silence. And then, a breathy sadistic purr, spoken inches away from the comm:

“I was hoping for a Bat, but you’ll have to do!”

No.

No.

He was running as that laugh filled up the cave. Bruce was in the suit, and powering up the Batwing before he activated the emergency broadcast:

“B to all points, the Flash is down. Back-up required at the Gotham Grand.”

“Acknowledge and report, Justice League.”

Tim sat bolt upright on his bed. He had tuned his laptop over to the communications channel that Bruce and Alfred used, letting the various status updates that the Batcomputer spat out during the evening lull him to sleep. This was something else. An emergency broadcast?

“Diana, reporting in. I am on Themyscira, in the Hall of Warriors. I will not arrive in time.”

“This is Dr. Stone, reporting in for Victor. He is currently undergoing diagnostic maintenance. I can have him on his feet in twenty minutes.”

“Acknowledged. Converge on my coordinates as soon as possible.”

Tim’s thoughts jumbled; wasn’t Bruce in the Batcave working on the cell samples? The communication channel clicked over.

“Alfred.” The calm voice from a moment ago cracked. Bruce sounded ruined. “It’s him.”

“I can be at the cave in--”

“Dick might not have his emergency communicator. Contact him. Whatever the outcome, he is to stay in Bludhaven.”

“Bruce, let me--”

“Keep Tim safe, Alfred.”

Another click as the channel between Bruce and Alfred closed. There was a long, shuddering pause.

“I think we both know that you’re listening in, Master Drake. Meet me in the cave in 15 minutes.” The line went dead.

Adrenaline pounding through his body, Tim said: “Acknowledged, Alfred.”

The Gotham Grand wasn’t a target that stood out to most of the criminals in Gotham. It wasn’t the tallest building, the flashiest venue, or fashionable with the night crowd. It was well-trafficked in the evening on the lower floors, but its observation deck shut down at sunset. That gave Bruce at least one advantage: it would be easy to clear the building. With the Joker, expect the unexpected. Bruce expected nothing and everything. The Gotham Grand was ostensibly a Wayne Enterprises holding, through a subsidiary. In the Batwing, he activated an emergency protocol from the older, badder days of the Black Mask, and Two-Face--when every week brought a new bomb threat, or a hostage situation.

Bruce activated the silent alarms in the Gotham Grand. Security would begin low-profile evacuations. No new guests would be let into the building. Gotham PD would be notified in thirty minutes.

The Batwing circled over the city. Bruce set her down on a building a block away from the Gotham Grand. He crouched on the rooftop next to the cockpit.

“Computer, identify heat signatures in the building.”

“Small heat blooms on the observation deck and the basement levels.”

“Show me.”

A map popped up on the display. The hot-spots spiraled around the building supports, with one gigantic blob in the middle of the observation deck. The likelihood that the Flash was in the basement was slim. The Joker would have him on the observation deck. Save the building, or save the teammate. One of his favorite jokes.

Joke’s on him, this time, Bruce thought. Freeing Barry meant that he could diffuse the bombs planted on the sublevels.

Bruce grabbed the scoped rifle.

There. Center of the observation deck: Barry was restrained with a metal cuff across his midsection, with tech that looked like it was out of Silas Stone’s workshop. His mask had been torn off, and he was in bad shape. Blood and hair plastered against the side of his face. If Barry was still bleeding, the injury had to be serious. Or the device around the midsection was leeching his speed.

What the Gotham Grand did have were multiple, crenellated balconies good for a grapnel hold. Bruce fired the grapnel line onto a floor below the eyeline of the observation deck, and slipped easily down the line into the shadows of the gargoyle-studded roof. The landing jarred him, as he tucked into a roll. Bruce was out of practice. He disengaged the line.

Still within the window of the silent alarm, Bruce smashed open a window. No new alarms would trip. He flowed into the room, cape billowing behind him. He had less than ten minutes before the GCPD would be notified. Twenty minutes before whatever circus a police cordon would bring.

It was fine. Bruce and the Gotham Grand also had history. This was where Batman had killed the Joker in cold blood three years ago.

Twenty minutes would be more than enough time to do it again.

When Tim skidded to a halt in Bruce’s room, the elevator door was thrown open. He scrambled down into the cave; he didn’t even wait for the elevator to arrive at the workshop floor. Tim leapt off the platform as soon as he knew the fall wouldn’t break anything vital. Alfred wasn’t at the main terminal, or in the workshop.

“Alfred!” Tim yelled.

“Stairs,” was the reply.

In the background, the comms channel was open. Tim could hear the sound of breathing, and the methodical thunk, thunk, thunk of gauntlets hitting flesh, and bodies dropping to the floor.

A small cry, and a gurgle.

Tim found Alfred standing in front of the glass case, a wheel-out mini-terminal for the Batcomputer up and running. One of Alfred’s diagnostic machines for the Batwing. Tim raised an eyebrow. Alfred motioned to the Batwing set-up--controls, full readouts of the engine status, manual override.

“Observation deck cleared. Flash is rigged with a motion-activated explosive.”

“B, I don’t know where he came from--” Barry groaned.

“Flash. Do. Not. Move.”

There was a quiet question that neither of them heard.

“It’s an inhibitor collar of some sort. S.T.A.R. labs has been testing--B, is it safe to--”

“Inhibitor disabled.” Snip, snip, snip. “Motion sensor deactivated. Can you achieve safe distance from a blast radius, if you run this out to the Port?”

“What kind of blast radius are we talking about?”

Alfred ran the numbers. “Recommend disarming the bomb rather than detonating,” Alfred interjected. “There’s an unpredictability in this particular compound. The explosion could be small, or it could chain react with other chemicals to wipe out the East Side.”

“Are all of the bombs like this, Flash?”

There was the sound of whooshing. It reverberated through Tim’s gut like a gong mallet striking his teeth.

“No, the rest appear to be thermite.”

“Thermite--?” Tim whispered.

Alfred covered the mic with his hand. “All flash and no bang.”

“Clear the building, Flash. I’ll defuse.”

“B--not that wire--”

A manic peal of laughter bounced off of Tim’s eardrums--he’d heard it only once before. It was an unforgettable laugh.

“How is he alive?” Tim hissed. The crime-scene photos were seared in his mind. The Joker was dead.

“How are you alive?” Batman growled.

“No fair, Batsy,” the Joker tutted. “This isn’t a multiple choice question. There’s only one correct answer. And that answer is BOOM.”

The laughter swelled with sound, then fizzled into static. On the screen, the transponder in Bruce’s suit cut out.

CONTACT TERMINATED, 12:25:49 AM

RE-ESTABLISH CONTACT? Y/N

UNABLE TO ESTABLISH CONTACT.

TRY AGAIN? Y/N

Alfred hunched over the terminal. Eyes on the screen, he pinged the transponder. No response. There would be no response. Tim stood next to him for a moment, a hand on his shoulder. The contact grounded both of them.

“The Justice League are still inbound. They won’t arrive in time for--for another half-hour.”

“We know where Bruce and Barry are,” Tim said quietly.

A gesture from Tim, and Alfred input the override sequence into the Batwing. The rubble was still burning. He scanned the area, but the entire building was a patchwork of white and red. No way to discriminate body heat from trapped, burning pockets except by painstaking human search.

“I’ll bring her home,” Alfred said. His voice didn’t hitch. This couldn’t be the end for Bruce. Not at the hands of the Joker. “She's inbound.”

“Good,” Tim said, faint for a moment.

Alfred lifted his head.

Tim marched back from the workshop, holding a massive spanner wrench. Squaring his shoulders, he pulled Alfred down behind the computer terminal as he swung the wrench at the glass case, and released it. The spanner arced through the air, and slammed through the case. Glass showered down around the costume as the entire column cascaded to the floor. Alfred suspected that the force of anger and gravity couldn’t have created a more spectacular display.

By the time Alfred stood up, Tim was digging the Robin uniform out of the shards.

“Do you know the danger of putting that costume on?” Alfred demanded. Because even though he needed someone in that costume right now, Alfred could not ignore Bruce’s charge. In all of the ways that counted, Tim was his responsibility until he was absolved of that duty.

“Batman needs Robin,” Tim said, his face alight with determination and wonder. The pieces were slotting into place.

(Finally, Alfred thought.)

“Suit up quickly,” Alfred said. “We’re airborne in five minutes.”

Suffocating bits of concrete and strings of melted plastic dribbled from the ceiling. Barry crouched over a pocket of safety that he created with his body--Bruce tucked on one side, the Joker on the other. The force of the blast had knocked everyone out. Bruce was the first one to regain consciousness. How long they’d been out--was a question he couldn’t answer. His fingers brushed over a computer interface. The screen was completely smashed. Bruce took a quick inventory. Utility belt was undamaged. Feeling below his waist was spotty at best. Bruce activated the one working emergency light on his gauntlets, and looked down. A girder pinned his legs to the ground. He struggled for his utility belt. Slapping a pair of cuffs on the Joker’s wrists, Bruce heaved the clown’s limp body out of the concrete morass. Restraints had never stopped him before, but they would at least slow him down. If he woke up. When he woke up.

Apparently, not even the freaks stayed dead in Gotham any more.

“Flash.” Bruce spit out a mouthful of saliva and blood. “Barry.”

Barry moaned, and slumped onto his body. Bruce slid a hand along the back of the red uniform. It was slick with blood. His spine had been crushed.

“Be--fine--in--a--minute, B,” Barry wheezed. “Sorry--gotta--recharge.”

“Barry, wake up.” Bruce shook him hard, but Barry’s eyes fluttered. Electricity rolled over his irises. He was out cold.

The building had been gutted by the bomb. In the seconds between heartbeats, the Flash had run them to the most defensible stairwell in the building. The Gotham Grand had been built during World War II under the presumption that its concrete-lined stairwells could withstand shelling or high explosives. It was good to see that the craftsmanship of the era lived up to its standards.

Bruce attempted to activate the comm. He touched his ear, and came away with more blood. The transponder had been smashed in the blast. He was sightless. Under the sound of his own harsh breathing, Bruce heard the rumble of the settling building. Heat washed over him. Fires were still burning in pockets of the building. Who knew when that heat would reach the thermite charges in the basement. They weren’t deadly, by themselves, but in this condition, even the smallest reaction could ignite a gas line… or shift a column bearing up the rest of the building.

A litany of regrets rose to the front of his mind. Bruce never had any use for his guilt. But he indulged himself in it, this once. The moments of his greatest regret. Crime Alley. Gotham Grand. The abandoned GCPD headquarters. He hoped fervently that Alfred had locked down the cave, with himself and Tim inside of it.

“Feeling--sorry for yourself, Bats?” That voice. “I can feel the stink of guilt from here. It’s as rank as that ridiculous, mangey beard.”

The rage wiped clean any self-indulgent thoughts Bruce might have felt. Bruce struggled against the girder.

“You would have given it up forever, if I hadn’t found you,” the Joker sniped, his voice gone coldly jealous. “You should be thanking me.”

Behind him, he heard the Joker tinkering with his cuffs. A lock clicked. Bruce gritted his teeth, and pushed. A burst of strength from adrenaline and sheer bloody-mindedness lifted the heavy steel enough for his legs to slip free.

The Joker stared at him, turning petulant. “Aww, Batsy, aren’t we friends? Don’t you have a kind word for your old pal? Grooming tips? That beard, that beard--it’s awfully familiar, wouldn’t you agree? Who else has been wearing the hair-shirt in Gotham? And without his little ward to entertain with him--”

In the rubble, the Joker looked small. Pathetic. His bare feet slapped against concrete, his grin eating up all of the available thought left to Bruce. He saw red.

“I killed you once already,” Bruce seethed, as he dragged himself up, as far as he could stand, in their pocket of space. “I regret that it didn’t stick.”

The Joker gnashed his teeth. “I heard you were over that killing schtick. Just needed your old pal to remind you how good it felt?”

Bruce slammed the Joker’s face into the ground. “I have one word for you, freak.” The Batman smiled a bloody, terrifying smile. “Dig.”

The Batwing hovered over the ruins of the Gotham Grand like a bird of ill omen. Alfred had refused to pilot the craft remotely (“You will need my help, Master Drake”). From the second seat, Tim pulled up the the aerial telemetry. The building had collapsed inward, flattening the floors below it. The first Search and Rescue team had arrived with the Gotham Fire Department, but they would be looking for civilians on the first and second floors which were still mostly intact.

“Look!” Tim stabbed his finger at the screen. Excitement bubbled up. “Do you see how the building has collapsed around the south stairwell?”

“I’m reading cool spots in the stairwell. There looks to be enough--” “--if Barry got them to--” “--they could still be alive!”

“Any charge could disrupt the structural integrity, so you will need to find a pre-existing hole--a vent, a window, decorative terrace--before you attempt a breach. Do you have the torch? Flashlight? Utility belt? Grapnel? Communicator?”

“I’m ready,” Tim confirmed. He adjusted the domino mask.

“Not for this,” Alfred muttered. He depressed a button that opened the canopy. Tim fired a grapnel line, and disappeared over the side of the aircraft. “None of my boys were ever ready for this. Godspeed, Master Drake.”

Seeing the devastation up close was so much different from Metropolis or the Port. Tim had experienced one through his television screen, and the other through his camera lens. But that had been from a distance. His boots touched ground on an unstable column of broken rebar, and he struggled not to think of the bomb shredding through bone.

“Alfred?” Tim breathed out.

“I’m with you, Robin,” Alfred replied. There was no urgency in his tone, just a bedrock certainty that they were the men for the job. “Emergency services report minor casualties. A silent alarm started the evacuation a full twenty minutes before the collapse. The fire department is coordinating with S&R to rescue the remaining civilians on the third floor.”

Tim leapt to a more stable cement column. The floors had been sheared away by the power of the blast. Colors tumbled into pools of melted slag, cooling in the night air.

“Watch your step. Hotspots to your 12 o’clock and 3 o’clock.”

Three minutes later, Tim had navigated the structure. He scrabbled for purchase against the concrete shaft of the stairwell. Ten feet below his position, Alfred spotted a ventilation shaft. It would be a tight squeeze, but he should fit through the grate.

“The grapnel has a tension release mechanism. Third toggle under your thumb. That should--” Tim fired the grapnel upward, and then pressed the switch. The line dropped him down eight feet. “Yes, just like that. Can you make the remaining jump?”

“Standby.”

Tim rocked himself back on the line to gain momentum. He flew backwards, then--his feet crashed through the vent, and he skidded through the shaft.

“Impressive,” Alfred offered. “Torch?”

The flame roared to life as Tim methodically cut through the steel. An ominous creak was the only warning he got, before the steel crumpled underneath him. In a second, Tim realized his mistake: he hadn’t accounted for how the heat and the damage in the fall had weakened the metal. He tumbled into the stairwell--for a second, he felt nothing but a sickening lurch as he fell down, down, down. When he hit bottom, his leg gave an equally sickening snap.

Tim cried out in agony.

Through the comm, Alfred was calling his name. It felt so far removed from the pain, but he tried to focus on it. Stuffing a gauntlet between his teeth, Tim whimpered as he tested the leg. The shock of standing upright tore his composure to pieces.

“You’ll feel the pain for twenty minutes, then the endorphins will kick in,” Alfred gentled. “You can do this.” The pain swam through Tim’s vision. “Robin. Bruce needs to you focus now.”

“Acknowledged,” Tim responded, breathing through the agony. Pushing back the sharp, bright bloom of heat and oh-god-is-it-really-broken, Tim smacked the computer interface on his gauntlet.

“Act--activating camera.”

“Turn slowly. Give me a clear picture of where you are.”

Limping up to a landing, Tim surveyed the two blockages in the stairwell--one above him, and one below. The lower blockage showed a smaller heat signature. The upper blockage was crisscrossed with girders from the building’s core. The pockets of breathable air in both of them were diminishing, thanks to the planted thermite bombs. Bruce might have only minutes--which one should he search? Tim needed more data. Without data, he was just guessing blindly.

“Who would have gotten them to safety?” Tim gasped. Batman would have picked the better shielded area, if he had time to shelter them.

“Barry,” Alfred replied. There was an undercurrent of mirth that hadn’t been there a moment ago. “Bruce isn’t that fast.”

Tim stabbed his finger against the HUD, pulling up a composition list of the materials in the rubble. “I think…Barry would have stayed upstairs. It’s…closer to rescue.”

Alfred concurred. The endorphins hadn’t kicked in yet, but Tim knew that Bruce was running out of time. Robin’s job was to protect Batman; the pain couldn’t touch him. Taking a deep breath, Tim leapt up the stairs. As he barreled up the stairs, a flurry of conversation passed under the threshold of Tim’s hearing.

As he struggled over the first downed girder, Alfred cleared his throat. “Justice League inbound. ETA, ten minutes.”

Tim frowned. “I’m not on the JL comm?”

The drawn-out sigh was so familiar, a weight lifted from Tim’s chest. How many times had Alfred groused into someone’s earpiece during a mission that Tim had photographed? How many of those death-defying missions did Batman and Robin return to find Alfred with folded-arms and sarcastic quip. Every one of them, Tim realized. Every one where someone came back fine. Everything was going to be fine.

“--you’d understand the concept of training wheels any better than he did,” Alfred groused.

The comms crackled, and a buffet of winds rose around him. Suddenly a rich, warm voice filled him, as though it had been whispered directly into his ear: I am Diana, little bird. Hermes protect you, I will be with you shortly.

He skidded to a halt in front of the blockage. Wreckage filled the wide stairwell landing. Concrete, rebar, melted girders twisted together in a grotesque heap. Somewhere under there was Bruce. Tim could feel it. With the torch, he cut off a length of rebar, and set to work levering the boulder-sized chunks out of the way.

Bruce wasn’t losing blood, but the pain was slowing him down. Six months without a knife to the ribs made a man complacent about suffering. The self-righteous Bruce who’d pulled tractor tires to wear his Superman buster would have scoffed at him. He shifted another slab of concrete out of the way. The Joker, with the heel of Batman’s boot knife in his spine, slowly carted off smaller chunks of debris. The air was thinning, and Bruce wondered if he should bother digging--if he wouldn’t be happier using his dying breath to asphyxiate the Joker.

The sounds of digging seemed to multiply. Confused, Bruce checked on Barry--he was still unconscious. Then his brain made sense of what he heard: the digging was coming from outside.

A few chunks of cement rolled down warningly. The cave-in was destabilizing. “Batman! Batman! I see him. Batman, can you hear me?”

A smile suddenly animated the Joker’s face.

“Don’t,” Bruce said warningly.

“Oh, Bats, it’s like you don’t know me at all,” the Joker cooed. Faster than Bruce could see, the Joker threw a small bouncing purple-and-green ball through the hole.

There was a few seconds of silence, and then another, muffled explosion. Cement dust rained down on their heads.

“Flying rodents! Pah, pests, every one of them. You give ‘em a good killing, and they just don’t. stay. dead.”

Above him, Bruce didn’t even acknowledge when the entire ceiling was ripped away with a single, mighty tug. All he felt was the blood pumping in his veins, and the vengeance that curled his lips.

“The last time I ended you, I regretted it. I won’t this time.”

The Bat rose up, and lunged for the Joker. If he saw nothing else in this world, the look of sheer terror on the Joker’s face would have to satisfy him.

Diana touched down lightly, as Victor made short work of the cement barrier between them and the rest of the stairwell. Diana’s attention was drawn to her teammate. Inhuman rage ripped a snarl from Bruce’s throat as he tightened his fists around the Joker’s throat. The Joker strained against him, fingers scrabbling for purchase against the carbon fiber shell of the Batsuit.

“Release him, Batman,” Diana commanded. “Do you not remember your promise?”

“He killed him, Diana,” Bruce raged. “He takes everything from this city, and the joke is always on me because I can’t kill him. Even when I kill him, he doesn’t die. It’s not enough Diana. This has to end.”

Laying a palm on Bruce’s shoulder, Diana dragged him bodily away from the Joker, who gasped as the air flooded back into his lungs.

“Much obliged, Madame. Mmhmm, I do love a woman in uniform.”

The petty jester was beneath her notice. Diana felt the pulse racing strongly through the Flash, as the speed of Hermes filled his body with vital life. He would rise again. As he punched through the rubble, the shock was evident on Victor’s face.

“Hey, there’s a kid in there!”

Diana nodded her approval to search the stairwell, as she rounded on Bruce, whose hands were opening and closing involuntarily. The rage in him was a killing rage. By words alone, she had to bring him back to his senses--or be lost to madness.

“You’re like a wild beast, Batman. Don’t let him do this to you.”

Victor tore another chunk of cement from the wreckage. He returned to the stairwell with a body cradled against his massive chest.

“I found him curled up in the corridor under a girder!” Victor scanned his small passenger. “His vitals check. He’s stunned.”

“Don’t tell me, the rodent’s safe.” The Joker collapsed against the wall with a theatrical sigh. “Well, I killed one of them. One out of two is still good enough for the majors.”

That taunt was too much for any parent to bear. Diana thought of her mother pouring her sorrow into the sand over the broken body of Hippolytus--the helpless rage of it. She held up her arms to physically restrain Bruce if she had to, to fight with him if he insisted on the vengeance due to him--but to her great surprise, Bruce’s face transformed. All of the fury drained from his expression, until only a single upturned corner of his mouth remained. He pulled himself upright, and his cloak unspooled darkness as implacable as Truth.

“Joker,” Bruce said, pulling a silver dart from his utility belt. “A present for you. On the occasion of first meetings.”

“Do you have bats in your belfry? We’ve--”

Faster than thought, Bruce flicked the dart at the Joker’s neck. His aim was true. It struck the Joker’s neck. His hands weakly reached up to yank it from his artery, but his fingers became clumsy, slipped on the slick metal. With a final twitch, The Joker’s mouth gaped as he fell into a sightless sleep.

“B, you okay?” Victor asked, as he switched over to monitoring the Joker’s vitals.

“I made a different decision,” Bruce said, his eyes locked on Victor’s small cargo. “Here--” Bruce ordered, then softened his tone. “Please.”

Victor passed the small form into Bruce’s arms. Diana could hear his breath hitch as Bruce saw that he was wearing the suit. Ha, ha, Batman. The Joke’s on You. It was too much to ask of one man.

Bruce slapped the emergency communicator on the boy’s wrist. “Alfred.”

Moments later, a black rope snaked down from the sky. Batman--not Bruce--caught the line around his arm, and took off flying faster than Midnight and all of her horses, racing toward the fields of a new dawn.

Chapter Text

Tim awoke in the Batwing, which had the supreme disadvantage of only seating two people. A worried butler, a glowering bat, and a suddenly spasming sidekick was just too much for the cramped quarters. Tim’s knee ended up in the back of Alfred’s head, and he accidentally backhanded Bruce without any break in his stream of apologies.

“Save that energy until we disembark,” Alfred muttered.

Bruce simply said: “You’re safe here,” and stroked Tim’s hair until he calmed. Tim thought he remembered his mother doing the same on that day at the circus, but time had blurred that memory too much at the edges. He hardly could recall what had happened to him on that day. It had all blurred into what had happened, and been done, by other people.

As Tim was lulled by the motion of Bruce’s hand, he supposed there was a lesson in that.

Back at the cave, Tim kept expecting Bruce to disappear. Alfred would weave in and out of the lab with new medical supplies, or a tablet, or water, and Tim thought now would be the instant that Bruce chose to merge back into the shadows. But Bruce sat on a small chair that he’d dragged into the lab, arm propped up on the chair, watching Tim with a focused intensity that made him long for small talk.

After some discussion, Alfred and Bruce moved Tim from the medical cot onto the biobed, where the warmth of the material actually soothed the edge of his pain into a distant ache.

“Will he be back?” Tim asked, when the question didn’t seem to matter.

Bruce blinked.

“The Joker always comes back. Did you mean, is he still alive?”

“Yeah,” Tim said, unsure if that was actually his question, or if it was its corollary, What will I feel when I have to face him again? As though there would be a next time. His brain felt cotton-wool fuzzy--was there a chance that there wouldn’t be a next time?

“Yes and no,” Bruce answered.

Tim made a confused sound. He was tired. He was bruised. His leg was broken. Under these circumstances, it was perfectly okay to admit that he was having trouble following the conversation.

“The Joker--” Bruce started. “The one I clashed with for years--is dead. Will always be dead. I killed him.”

“Today--” Tim said uncertainly. “But how did you--? He sounded--he looked--”

Bruce clasped his hands over his knees. “It was the Joker’s big finale. Because it wouldn’t have been funny if he took it to the grave.” Bruce bent his head to his knees, his whole body contorted in grief and guilt.

Bruce choked up, then began again, in a calmer voice. This was Bruce’s secret long-held, and now, finally, it was out:

“Jason’s alive.”

Tim almost said, Of course, I knew that. But then it hit him--Bruce knew too.

All of this time, Bruce knew.

The force of that revelation punched the breath out of him.

“I killed to avenge a person who didn’t even want my vengeance. If he wanted to be home, he would be. Instead, he’s--” Bruce clenched his fists so hard, the knuckles blanched. “The Joker’s death was hollow. Last empty act of a cruel man. Joke’s on you, Batman.

“Somehow, that vengeance wasn’t enough. When hope personified descended from the cloud and slapped me in the face, it wasn’t enough. This world makes killers and cowards of us all, Tim Drake.

“I tried to kill Superman for my mistake. What a goddamn awful punchline.”

Bruce let out a truly mirthless laugh and the bitterness of it cut Tim to the quick.

And then the pain--ebbed. Like the biobed working its slow, healing science--Tim saw the bitterness in Bruce’s face as a puzzle whose pieces had been mislaid. All of the parts were there, just jammed into slots that were never meant to fit.

Bruce subsided, and said no more until Alfred returned with hot-press bandages and a compress for Tim’s leg fracture. Then they argued about doctors and treatment history and what an injury like this could mean for Tim’s status as an emancipated minor. Which was all rather silly, Tim thought. He wasn’t emancipated from anyone. He didn’t have anyone to be emancipated from. Dimly he wondered where Jack and Janet were in the world, and if they were in trouble, and if they might need him. But--no--if they did, or if they had--surely, they would say when they made their quarterly check-in.

Bruce still wasn’t gone when Tim floated back from the white haze the biobed had lulled him into. Apparently Tim had more extensive injuries than he’d thought, because there was an IV in his arm, and Alfred was preparing compresses for his chest and calf. The medical shears snipped through Robin costume, shredding it beyond all repair.

When Alfred was done, he folded the strips of the ruined uniform and handed them to Bruce.

“The display is in a similar state, Master Wayne.”

“I want to rebuild it,” Bruce said. “Not as tall. More like a case.” Alfred quipped something that Tim didn’t understand. Impossibly, Bruce laughed. “Safety glass this time, Alfred.”

His eyes had closed for a second, and he’d blinked them open hours later. Bruce’s chair was empty. Tim sat bolt-upright, and tore at the IV in his arm. Heat flushed through his system, like the pressure bubble of an explosion. He needed to suit up, he had to find--

“Relax,” Bruce said, as he closed a book. Bruce was reading at the foot of the biobed. He must have left at some point, because he had changed out of the batsuit and his chin had a raw, angry pinkness to it. The beard had been shaved. The scraps of the Robin suit had vanished.

“Where’s my suit?” Tim demanded, but it had come out wrong because he wanted to know where Robin’s suit was, not his own clothing. Maybe he had said it the correct way, and his mind was simply tricking him--Bruce had pulled out the neatly folded Robin costume, which from this angle, in this light, with Alfred’s efficient folds, he could almost believe was still whole.

Bruce laid the suit next to Tim.

“If you knew he wasn’t dead, why did you keep it?”

Tim ran his fingers across the tears. The edges of the carbon weave bit along his flesh, leaving little white scars behind.

Bruce took his question seriously. (It was the thing Tim liked most about Bruce; he took everything he was asked seriously.) “It took me awhile to understand everything that suit was trying to say.”

“What’s it telling you now?”

Bruce merely hummed contemplatively, as Tim stroked the fabric.

At least there were no more lapses of unconsciousness. It was morning. Even down in the cave, Tim could feel the pressure charge the air with something that simply felt like sunlight. Alfred checked his vitals every hour. After the first few full-routine checks, Alfred (grumpily) gave in to Bruce’s suggestion to run the vitals through the biobed and suddenly everything was accomplished in seconds instead of minutes. Tim didn’t miss the pressure cuff.

“Kryptonian?” Tim asked, when Bruce had started tinkering with the bed’s diagnostic panel.

Bruce evaluated him contemplatively.

“Apokoliptian,” he said at last.

Tim eyed the device. “And you trust it?”

“There’s this kid who asked me once if I had spent the last six months puttering around my cave, not trusting anything, trying to save the world with science.”

Tim’s eyes widened.

“No,” Bruce answered, before Tim had even asked. “Silas Stone built the bed. I merely reverse-engineered it to make it compatible with our systems--but that’s not what I’ve been building. When you’re up for it, I’d like to show you.”

Tim motioned at the roomful of nothing that he was currently doing, and Bruce chuckled. Alfred rolled a mobile terminal into the lab, and of the host of impossible things that had happened in the past twenty-four hours, the most impossible one of all happened: Bruce trusted him.

Chapter Text

Dick regretted how easy it was to hop a bus from Gotham. It was an injustice of the largest magnitude that Tim could simply materialize in his city, as if no time had passed since their last meeting (it had been long, Dick hadn’t been keeping a calendar), looking more than the pale shadow of Bruce Wayne. There was life in Tim’s cheeks, this time. He greeted Dick heartily, a picture of hale youth fed three square meals a day. At Dick’s slightly less run-down apartment (he’d moved into a section of a neighborhood with more convenient roof access), they reminisced about Haley’s Circus. Dick fed him another stale English muffin. Tim enthused about Dick’s favorite flips, and asked if they could hit the Bludhaven rec center.

“You want me to show them to you?”

After all of these years, it hadn’t become any less weird that Dick had fanboys.

“It could come in handy,” Tim said innocuously.

Dick already had his suspicions, the way that Tim favored one leg over the other. The limp was subtle--but Dick knew that kind of pain. In the locker room of the rec center, Dick pinched Tim’s shin across a thin white scar as he was changing into a leotard. Tim yelped, and then glowered. Yeah. Compound fracture of the tibia. Kid musta had one hell of a dismount.

In a neighborhood this bad, the rec center didn’t get much foot traffic before lunch, so they had the gym equipment to themselves. Tim leapt onto the pommel horse, and began a series of simple leg cuts, swinging his body back and forth, building momentum, gliding his legs over, and over, and over. Dick launched himself at the rings. It felt good to limber up--pulling his body over and through a series of inverted crosses--balancing on the point between the mass of his shoulders, and the Grayson freedom that seemed to defy gravity. Tim joined him on another set of rings--mimicking Dick’s moves with the darting, technical edge that made him too rigid for truly fluid bodywork--which was about when Dick decided to get fancy. He threw in an aerialist trick of launching into the air, only to arc and catch hold of the rings again.

Maybe he shouldn’t have pinched Tim earlier; Tim waited until Dick was up in the air to spill the beans about Jason and the Joker.

A second after Dick had missed the rings, Tim had caught him with the one-handed grip that Bruce trained all of his Robins on after their first grapnel lesson, and Dick knew. He just fucking knew.

In that haze of elation and resentment (did Alfred forget to pick up a phone? Did Dick?), Dick may have wormed his way up to hugging the kid from the upside-down save, and they may have tumbled to the mat in a sprawl of limbs, and he may have gotten a little glassy-eyed. That’s probably why Dick didn’t have a clear picture as to how they ended up in the Bludhaven cemetery, digging up a grave.

They was being generous: Dick was doing all of the work.

“You want to get down here and help?” Dick motioned the small pit he’d managed to dig in his first burst of enthusiasm.

“I’m the lookout,” Tim said primly.

Damn, he’d buried it deep. What the hell had he been thinking?

“We’re not going to be in any trouble.” Dick grinned, pointing to his dirt-smeared badge. “That’s why I wore my uniform.”

Tim eyed him with a dubious, downturned smile. The resemblance between Tim and Bruce had grown even more uncanny, now that he showed some interest in respectable hobbies like apprehending criminals, and justice. Dick would bet anything that Tim hadn’t given up the photography, though.

When the shovel struck metal, Dick threw it down and swept the remaining dirt away from the case with his hands, uncovering the steel box bit by bit, like an urban archeologist. Despite the clawing guilt, the numbness he’d felt on that day, he’d gone through the trouble of sealing the suit into a moisture-proof enclosure. Thank god. There was a decent chance it might not look like a Universal Monster Movie when he popped the locks.

Tim craned his neck, head blocking out the sunlight.

Dick hoisted the case out of the grave. Tim looked curious, but not thrilled. “You aren’t excited.” Dick frowned. Excitement was a key component of this plan.

“You haven’t explained what that is,” Tim retorted.

“Man, you really aren’t--” Maybe it would get any easier with time, maybe it wouldn’t. “--anything like Jason,” Dick finished with only a slight hitch in his breath. What the hell--it was progress. Dick would take it.

He brushed the rest of the dirt from the case, and slapped it on the ground. The bolts popped with some encouragement from the edge of his multi-tool. Dick spun the case so Tim could see its contents. The first first Robin suit. The red, yellow and emerald of the Flying Graysons. Emblazoned on the chest, the R of his once calling-card.

Tim pulled the suit out of the case, and a dreamy expression stole over his face. Yeah. The kid must have seen this suit a lot through his camera.

“So there’s this kid on the Gotham IRC channels,” Dick started. “Alvin Draper. He’s been keeping tabs on Jason. I’ve tracked his progress as he’s reported sightings in Tibet and Bhutan--and you know what? I always thought, ‘why is this kid wasting his life? Jason is dead. He needs to accept it and move on.’

Dick elbowed Tim, and slumped against him. “But you didn’t, did you. You didn’t move on.”

“Jason doesn’t want to come back,” Tim said, folding the uniform back into its case. As though that wrapped up his previous years of longing to reunite Bruce and his son in a simple package. And wasn’t that the most Bruce Wayne thing he’d ever fucking heard. Almost as Bruce Wayne as burying a suit in a graveyard.

“Like that fucking matters to this family,” Dick said hotly. Dick slammed the lid of the case down over the Robin suit. “Bruce let me brood in Bludhaven. I gave him time to get his shit back together. We both were apparently giving Jason space. Everyone in this family has had far too much fucking space.”

Dick pressed the case into Tim’s astonished arms. “It’s yours, if you want it.”

“But aren’t you--” Tim was truly lost for words, because he didn’t find the end to that sentence before Dick decided it would be okay to let the kid down easy, this time.

“I haven’t been Robin in a long time. That’s not who I am any more.”

“What are you going to do?”

Dick brushed the dirt off his sleeves, as he considered what Bruce might term to be the beginnings of a plan. Having never found the patience to micromanage reality down to every last detail, Dick had never given up his streak of showmanship. Much could be won with simple, honest adaptability.

“I’m going to perform the greatest trick Bruce Wayne has ever seen.” Dick paused for dramatic effect, as the mid-afternoon sun haloed his hair. “I’m going to bring Jason Todd back from the dead.”

Tim blinked in astonishment. A sly look came over him, like Alfred used to get before a particularly cutting verbal takedown. Dick expected snark, sass, or sarcasm--but what he didn’t expect was Tim’s quiet doubling-down on the Wayne family bravado: “I might be able to do you one better.”

Dick snorted. “Is that a bet?”

Tim smiled enigmatically. They shook on it, because that’s what sort-of-brothers did when a wager was made, and they returned to Dick’s apartment for badly under-seasoned Chinese, a short tutorial in handsprings, and an even more impromptu tutorial in how to dodge sideswipes. As Tim sulked over his graceless landing, Dick beamed like the cat who caught the canary. He wasn’t proud, but at least he’d gotten Tim back for the rings at the rec center.

And slowly, very slowly, Dick tried to impart what he could never form into words: that being Robin was the freedom that flew in the face of impossible grief; and that even falling could be a kind of flying.

And the look on Tim’s face when Dick showed off his quadruple somersault? That was a picture worth saving.

Chapter Text

It was nearing the end of the Gotham social calendar when Tim decided to host one last party before Tim Drake, Son of Janet and Jack Drake, took an extended leave of absence from society. Tongues would wag about temperament and suitability (as they always did about the Drakes) but he didn’t have the reputation of a Wayne. He wouldn’t be missed.

Results in the lab had been promising, so he didn’t even begrudge himself the night off. He wanted to celebrate with someone. He hadn’t had a chance to share the breakthrough; Bruce and Alfred had been overseas with the Justice League for the past week (sweeping up flood victims and planning out new infrastructure in Bangladesh), and Tim hadn’t wanted to impose. The results would be just as valid when they returned.

After the last party’s disastrous conclusion, Tim didn’t think that Gotham society would turn out in any great number--but RSVPs poured in from names he hadn’t even recognized--and he’d called up extra staff to cover the turnout. It was just as well: by ten o’clock, the house was overflowing; Tim instructed the waitstaff to open up the terrace to accommodate the revelers. And when it became overwhelming, he crept up to the mezzanine, and found Tamora Pierson seated on a particularly tasteless chaise longue from Jack that he was sure his mother had thrown out, but must have kept for sentimentality’s sake. Tamora was clear-eyed this time, and shared a private smile with him.

“For balance,” she said, as she tipped her tonic water to him.

Tim sat beside her, attempting not to shrink back into the wall. He remembered with terrifying clarity how he had poured out nearly everything that had meant something to him in his short life. It was such a violation of the privacy and secrecy he had charged himself with--and yet, he couldn’t regret it. This was one conversation that felt beyond him, but he still had to try. He cleared his throat. “You haven’t--told anyone what I told you--have you?”

“Janet’s boy,” Tamora murmured. “Never was one for small talk.” She downed her drink, and set it down on an empty tray next to her. “Frankly, Tim, I don’t remember much except for vomiting in the back of Bruce Wayne’s Rolls. How on Earth I ended up there--”

“We--ah--Alfred took you home.”

“God, I hope I didn’t sleep with Bruce again.” Tamora wrinkled her nose. “I did once; it was awful.” Like a deer caught in headlines, Tamora blinked at Tim, as she realized what she had said. “Oh god, that wasn’t appropriate for twelve-year-olds.”

Tim fiddled with his cufflinks. He felt that showing gratitude should come as easily to him as accepting kindness. (And neither would come if he didn’t practice.)

“Iwantedtothankyou,” Tim rushed. He took a breath, and slowed down. “You gave me some advice that put things into perspective for me. I wanted you to know that I appreciated it.”

Tamora looked regretful. “Was it very good advice?”--as though advice were a pair of shoes that could be swapped between ensembles--repeated for any occasion, if she just tried hard enough. The thought chilled Tim.

“It was the worst thing I’d ever heard in my life,” Tim said honestly.

Tamora fixed her arms around Tim, and drew him into a tight hug. “Good. As long as you knew that. Did it help?”

“It did,” Tim affirmed.

Tamora kissed the side of his head--and Tim fancied for a moment what life would have been like as a Pierson, instead of a Drake. All things considered--he counted himself lucky for the accidents of birth. Tamora appraised him with the same gaze that he was giving her, and she smiled that private smile that linked them as co-conspirators against the tide of Gotham society, if nothing else. “Now--could you see about another tonic? Service has been atrocious tonight.”

He couldn’t help himself: Tim smiled--a small shy smile.

“I’ll see what I can do.”

Tim had just snagged staff, and sent them upstairs with more of whatever Tamora was actually drinking, when movement on the terrace caught his eye. He untangled himself from a flock of Janet’s distant acquaintances, and made his way through the double doors to the patio. Through the diaphanous curtains, Tim spotted Bruce Wayne and Alfred Pennyworth mingling with the other guests. He lit up with excitement. They were back early!

Even better: Tim finally had a legitimate reason to introduce himself to Bruce Wayne in front of Gotham society.

He saw Sasha Mayez hand Bruce a drink--there was no tell-tale fizz of a dissolving chemical this time. Bruce held the flute by its stem, swirling the champagne, but not sipping it. When Sasha turned away, Bruce quickly poured some into the shrubs--and then let himself go in a full-body laugh--as though he’d been caught mid-drink when Sasha gripped his shoulder.

The performance was masterful.

Tim weaved through the party guests, and made good on his escape from one of Jack’s “investment” partners.

Out in the cool night air, red lanterns crisscrossed the dew-covered bushes. Rain tonight, Tim thought. It would make for a gorgeous view from the lake house.

When he appeared at Bruce’s elbow, he said: “Good evening, gentlemen. It’s a pleasure to make your acquaintance.”

Alfred Pennyworth bowed slightly. “Our host, I presume. Timothy Drake, of Drake Technologies?”

“Mmmph,” Bruce mumbled, pretending to swallow. He raised his glass in greeting. “Always a pleasure to drink my neighbors dry. Sasha, you remember--”

Sasha paled--but true to her theater breeding, she recovered quickly. “Ah, I had not known it was the host who managed to traipse into my wingspan. Hello, little Timothy,” she cooed, just this side of venomous.

“The Drakes are always proud supporters of the arts, Ms. Mayez. Perhaps we’ll have an occasion to see you on the stage next season? Maybe after the Drake foundation announces its theater grants?” Tim inquired.

The threat had barely been veiled, and Sasha took his meaning immediately. “Charming company you keep, Bruce,” she snapped, and she cut through the stream of guests.

Bruce watched her retreat with an equivocal frown. “Verdict?”

“Good, not great, Master Drake,” Alfred said. “Society manner is all about your reputation. Next time, try affably dim. You’re far less likely to make enemies that way.”

“Oh, I don’t plan on throwing any more parties.”

“Really.” Bruce snorted, emptying the rest of the champagne into the bushes. “I will miss the free booze. You have a singular taste for bad vintages.”

Tim suppressed his bubbling excitement, and only let a small smile turn up the corner of his mouth. “I was thinking of heading west for a few months.”

“Do tell,” Bruce hummed.

“I hear Kansas is lovely in the fall, don’t you think?”

Results had been very promising after all.

Later that night, Tim stuffed his hands into his pockets and watched the thunderheads roll in. Rain fell in gentle sheets across the lake. Somewhere beyond the hedges and the little birch grove, laughter and wild music rose up in equal measure from the Drake estate. He’d taken to sleeping on Bruce’s couch while Bruce was away on Justice League business. The hard cushions of the Miles van der Rohe knock-off had felt more comfortable than anything in that house. For a moment that evening, he’d felt an uneasy lurch when he’d realized that Bruce was back. Tim was technically house-sitting for his technical employment as staff, and technically he was no longer invited. Bruce had inclined his head in a friendly question, and Tim had followed him home.

Bruce returned from the bedroom with a bottle and two glasses, raising it. Another question.

“I’m sixteen, Bruce,” Tim said.

“Call it an experiment in palates.” Bruce poured two glasses. “Drink this, and tell me if it’s better than what you serve.”

Tim tasted it, and set the glass down on the table with a decided gesture.

“Hmmm.” Bruce set down his glass, and pulled a folded letter from his jacket pocket.

“What’s this?”

“Last month’s pay, and a reference letter. Congratulations. You’re fired.”

Tim laid the letter down next to the wine glass. He watched the rain play on the surface. Bruce hadn’t told him where in Kansas they were headed--just where to load the equipment, and that the jet would be prepared to leave tomorrow.

Some secrets weren’t his to tell.

Bruce turned a melancholy eye out to the stunning loneliness of the place he’d chosen to be his world.

Weeks ago, Tim had glimpsed the puzzle that had made up the Bruce Wayne he hadn’t ever seen through his camera lens. The one who contorted himself into the shape of grief. Tim picked up the first piece he could find, and fit it back into an edge that made sense.

“He’ll know the difference,” Tim said.

Tim fit another piece back onto the board: “I know that you had a chance to kill him, and you didn’t. You both flew away from the fight you picked.”

And another: “I know that you stood over his body at Ground Zero, and you mourned him.”

And: “I know that once you let Jason Todd bum a cigarette from Commissioner Gordon on the rooftop of GCPD building, because Two Face had just collapsed a building on him.”

That one shocked Bruce out of his brooding disposition.

“You would have been twelve.”

Tim flashed him an inappropriately sunny smile.

“Christ. Dick was right. You are trouble.” Bruce drained the rest of his champagne. “Ready?”

“Drills? Now?” The thought of sparring with a tipsy Bruce did have an appeal to it--maybe Tim would finally land a punch that wasn’t immediately countered by a take-down and Bruce’s growled refrain, Stealth, Tim--that’s your strength.

“There’s a saying: good news can wait.” Bruce tapped a communicator in his ear. “Doesn’t apply to literal miracles. Pack your gear--wheels up in 20 minutes.”

(And then, Bruce had some had edges that even Tim couldn’t anticipate.)

The house began to shake on its foundation as a dim roar grew, and then filled the room as the ten very powerful anti-gravity thrusters fired to slow the descent of a sleek bronze craft. Tim flung himself against the glass--but he didn’t have to crane his neck very far to see the realization of seven months of research, planning, and development.

Human ingenuity, Apokoliptian tech, and Kryptonian design.

“--she’s called the Javelin,” Bruce was saying, “and I thought you and I could take her on a shakedown flight. There’s a lady I’d like to introduce you to. Her name’s Martha Kent.”