Chapter Text
Bruce gave himself two hours to plan. It made for sloppy work, but he couldn’t risk Tim popping out of the vents (again) like a deranged raccoon. Bruce had bought several hours of freedom from the boy, but he didn’t doubt that as soon as the timer was up, Tim would be back to darker his doorstep.
The thought of another day with the clone—going over schematics, listening to him chatter about memes while he tried to force Bruce to eat random food combinations—was nauseating. Bruce could already see how it would go; Tim would be talking, Bruce would start to relax, and then he’d blink and see Jason instead. First, grinning and smiling, then charred and glassy-eyed.
The hallucinations were what Bruce deserved, but he knew he reacted . . . badly . . . to people right now. It was better he left entirely than submit Tim to that again. The boy needed to stop seeing the good in him for both their sakes, because Bruce didn’t have any goodness left.
The Dark Knight clicked another set of keys as he finished making his code. For all the Watchtower’s security, it’d been laughably easy to steal a tablet from the supply. He’d been tempted to steal a league member’s phone as well, but that ran the risk of discovery sooner, which wasn’t worth it. Of course, two hours was not enough time to circumvent the combined forces of Oracle and Cyborg’s coding, but Bruce had several fail safes installed for times like these. Granted, he’d imagined using them in actual life or death scenarios, but the important thing was that they were an option.
Bruce finished setting up his escape route and sighed with relief. Soon, there would be no more pitying gazes as he walked through the halls, or over-excited children hanging off his arm and asking for things he couldn’t give. No friends, no time for reflection, no respite. He’d be free to wallow to the darkness of the Batcave, at long last.
Bruce stood with a wince. He’d been resting (as per Clark’s asinine orders) but recovery was taking too long. He couldn’t afford to waste more time on it. Gotham was already suffering the loss of Batman, and the latest Arkham breakout put the city in a precarious position.
He squeezed his hand into a fist, recalling just who had escaped. Bruce had been on the hunt nonstop, but had been forced to step back from the investigation once Clark kidnapped him. Were the streets already echoing with laughter? Had more victims been taken and pumped full of Joker venom? Bruce had to get back as soon as possible. He wouldn’t be able to forgive himself otherwise.
He tapped the start button for his program. The lights above flickered, then went out. The doors to his room slid open, and Bruce threw the tablet on the bed in satisfaction. The cameras would be on loop for the next ten minutes and Cyborg would be too distracted by a glitch in the heating system to investigate. Bruce’s security clearance for the zeta tube was unrestricted again, so all he had to do was walk to the zetas and he’d be home free.
He paused, then added a subroutine to the code so that Tim’s zeta tube access was denied for twenty-four hours.
Bruce’s shoulders relaxed. He’d had a horrible premonition, but it was averted. Tim couldn’t burst in at the last second anymore. He’d be stuck in Mount Justice (asleep, hopefully) while Bruce made his getaway.
Bruce didn’t allow himself a smile (he didn’t deserve those) but he was righteously vindicated as he left the room. This would teach Clark and Diana to think they could “handle” him. He didn’t need handling. He didn’t need anything.
***
Tim glared at the clock. His eyelids were dead weight, but he refused to give in. Drowsiness was propaganda made up by Big Sleep to sell more z’s, and Tim was not a paying customer. He could stay conscious as long as he wanted. Clocks were lying liars, and Tim was not bound by them. The only sun he regularly saw was through the space station’s windows. Circadian rhythm who?
“I have better things to do than stew here,” Tim said, rubbing his eyes. If he couldn’t sleep, he couldn’t sleep. The exhaustion would have to get over itself.
There was also the teensy weensy fact that Tim didn’t want to sleep. Sometimes, when he woke up he thought he was still in Ra’s’ cloning chamber, and that was never a fun time.
Maybe he could work on his rocket-skateboard? Experimenting on random robot parts would keep him awake . . . although the pieces could blow up in his face and ruin his beautiful visage.
Hrn.
New plan. No explosives until he had Bart on hand to tackle him out of the blast radius. Tonight, Tim would goof off and make more Bat-Bonding plans for the morrow.
But first, a snack, and possibly an energy drink.
Tim got up, threw on a Batman shirt and a red jacket, and skittered out of his storage-room to the zeta tube. There were still a few hours left on his Bat Ban, but the Watchtower had better food than Mount Justice. As long as he stayed away from Mr. Tall Dark and Spooky he’d be following the letter of the law. And, even better, Tim could potentially steal another phone. Sometimes heroes had important people’s numbers saved, which had limitless possibilities for prank calls. Tim hoped the next person’s he grabbed had access to England’s Prime Minister so he could make a bunch of yo mamma jokes about the royal family.
Tim cackled to himself, sleepy and schemey, as he put his hand on the zeta’s print scanner. Tonight was going to be awesome. Hopefully, there were still lots of Pop-tarts for him to munch on. The added sugar gave Tim super powers.
[Unauthorized user]
“What in the cranberry muffin?” Tim said, and tried again.
[Unauthorized user]
“Siri, stop gaslighting me, I’m in the system!” Tim said. He kicked the side of the tube.
[Unauthorized user]
[Unauthorized user]
[Unauthorized user]
“I knew you’d betray me, evil machine,” Tim said. “This is why you’ll always be the 2 to Bianca’s 10!”
He grabbed a Sharpie from the junk drawer and scribbled on the outside of the teleporter. Tim’s drawing skills left a lot to be desired, but Jackson Pollock would appreciate the wrath he imbued his art with.
Once he was done with that, Tim ran to the computer and contacted the Watchtower.
“Tin man,” Tim said when Cyborg popped up on the screen. “You go too far. Let me in.”
“Tim, it is five in the morning, what are you talking about?” Cyborg said. “I was about to go to bed.”
“As if you don’t know,” Tim said scathingly. “I repeat, let me in. Let me in!”
Cyborg muted Tim as he pulled up the zeta permissions. Tim continued to yell for equal Zeta tube access, and recited several manifestos.
“What the hell,” Cyborg said a minute later, finally unmuting Tim. “Someone changed your access a few hours ago. Who’d you annoy this time?”
“No one,” Tim said. He wasn’t even lying. “The only one I talked to yesterday was . . .”
Tim’s hands balled into fists. Batman.
“That rat-loving, food-stealing, iron-deficient waste of oxygen conned me,” Tim whispered. “Batman mocks me! This is child abuse.”
“No, this is karma for harassing him,” Cyborg said, rubbing his face. “You’re two peas in a pod. Respect the man’s personal space, okay? And my personal space.”
“Never!" Tim said.
"Then enjoy staying on Earth," Cyborg said. "You can come back here once you've gotten eight to nine hours of sleep."
Tim began to protest, but Cyborg ended the call. Why that no good, outdated Linux user—Tim would remember this day.
Luckily for Cyborg, Tim was angrier at his creater. So, the Dark Knight wanted to get rid of him? Fat chance. Tim was on a roll. He’d made progress last night. He could sense it, and nobody was taking that away from him.
Kudos to Batman for manipulating Oracle’s code—that was a boss move—but he was still on Tim’s blacklist. How did he even get access to the mainframe, anyway?
“Wait,” Tim said.
He and Batman were similar. Ergo, they had the same ideas. Ergo, there was only one reason Batman would have stolen something to access the Internet.
Tim slammed the video call button seven times at high speed.
“What now?!” Cyborg demanded when he answered. He was now wearing a sleep cap.
“Batman is going to escape!” Tim said.
***
Bruce was nearly done entering coordinates to one of Gotham’s more dilapidated zeta tubes when Cyborg put the Watchtower on emergency lockdown, overriding Bruce’s carefully tweaked code before he had the chance to use it. A loud, automated voice message system passive-aggressively demanded he go back to the med bay or suffer the consequences.
“Damn it,” Bruce said. Time for plan B.
He abandoned the zetas and ran for the escape pods, which were a floor below on the opposite side of the ship. The doors were already starting to slide shut, but a baseball slide (ow) got him out of the zeta chamber, and then it was a simple matter to throw a batarang at one of the cameras to block Cyborg’s line of sight, thus buying himself an extra couple of minutes.
Bruce looked mournfully at the vents before sprinting down the corridor. He wished he was small enough to take advantage of those, but that ship had sailed with his growth spurt at sixteen. He’d have to get out of this prison the old-fashioned way—with cunning and a lot of violence toward his coworkers.
***
Clark’s LA phone beeped as he preheated a burrito in the Daily Planet’s microwave. He’d decided onworking late so that he'd have time in the morning to call Ma and Pa while Kon was at school, which meant Clark would be able to safely complain about Batman’s obstinace without the kid overhearing.
Kon was a great kid, but his fuse was much shorter these days. The drama between Tim and Bruce seemed to be dredging up a lot of his own traumas, and Clark was self-aware enough to know he’d caused a lot of those, so he was trying to keep the kid away from the Bat shaped catastrophe. . . it wasn’t easy, of course, but at least Clark could make sure his own issues with Bruce didn’t bleed into Kon’s life on the farm.
His phone beeped again, and Clark pressed it against his ear with a polite hello. He hadn’t heard any disasters in the background today, but there was never a good reason for a surprise phone call. Still, Clark liked to be optimistic. Hopefully, it wasn't anything serious.
“Superman,” Cyborg said, livid. “Your depressed rodent man just stole a rocket ship. Make like a labrador and go fetch.”
Damn.
***
“I can’t believe you,” Clark said fifteen minutes later as he dragged Bruce back into the infirmary. “Bruce, we had a deal.”
“The terms have changed,” Bruce said, arms crossed. Somehow, he managed to look dignified while windswept, wild-eyed, and visibly limping. Clark may have been a tad too rough when he’d yanked him out of the escape pod (now safely back in its hanger, only slightly dinged up from Clark catching it before it fell into orbit).
“Seriously?” Clark said. “You stole a rocket, B. To avoid talking to your clone.”
Bruce glared harder, unrepentant.
Clark sighed. The truth be told, he was honestly impressed it took this long for the man to resort to this. Depression was one hell of a sedative.
“Gotham needs me,” Bruce growled as Clark strapped him into the med cot again. “You’re impeding justice.”
“Where have I heard that before?” Clark said dryly.
He’d survived babysitting Dick. Batman didn’t scare him.
“Why don’t you just spend some time with your kid?” Clark said. “It’d be good for you.”
Batman hissed. Actually hissed.
This had to be karma for how Clark had treated Kon. The gods had to be congratulating themselves—constructing a glass house the size of Wayne manor and then handing Clark a fistful of stones was a special kind of irony.
“Fine, be that way,” Clark said. “But you’re not going home. If you want to avoid Tim that badly, I’ll make sure he stays in Mount Justice today for the sake of your health, but no more escape attempts.”
“You have no authority over me,” Bruce growled.
Clark’s eye twitched. Bruce was sounding irritatingly like his clone right now. Tim had been saying stuff like "I do what I want" and "I only answer to bribes" since he'd been born. It was much less endearing coming from Bruce.
He walked away, hands in the air, cursing his stupid friend’s stubbornness.
***
“You want me to what?” Tim shrieked, banging his hands on the computer console. “But he needs me!”
“Just give it a day,” Superman said over the video call. “He’ll rebreak a rib if he tries to make a run for it again. Just relax with some video games for a couple of hours. Kon will be there to hang out with you soon.”
Tim fumed. “I don’t want Kon. He already knows the secrets of mental health. I can teach him nothing.”
“Nice counterargument,” Superman said, “but my answer is the same.”
The call ended. Tim continued to fume. Not only had Cyborg not fixed Tim’s zeta access earlier (even though Tim was instrumental in stopping Bratman from escaping), nobody had told him anything for hours. He’d just had to sit here, alone and bored, and hope they remembered he existed.
Screw Superman. Tim would rather be the fly in B’s ointment than stay stranded here. If Cyborg wouldn’t let him go to the watchtower, Tim would find his own way there.
His resolution would feel a lot cooler if he hadn’t been forced to make a million other ones just like this. Rather than an obstacle, stuff like this was starting to feel like the defining element of Tim’s existence. What was the point in fleeing Ra’s if nobody here bothered to check up on him?
***
An hour later, Victor sighed as another hacker alert popped up on his mainframe. Tim was trying to get in again. Just as annoyingly, a quick glance at the security cameras showed that Batman had broken out of the med bay as well.
“I miss the Titans,” Victor said. Volunteering to do maintenance work on the systems here was a mistake, even though it had been a favor for Oracle.
He couldn’t wait for Nightwing and the others to get back from their mission. It’d be any day now. As soon as they cruised back to Earth, he was done with the JLA. There was way too much drama, and all of it far too Bat-shaped. Nightwing was a handful, but at least there was only one of him.
Victor pulled up his contact list again. Superman had already gone back to work, but maybe the Flash was available. Having a speedster on board to waylay Batman's Houdini act would be helpful right now.
***
By mid-afternoon, Tim was blinking phantom spiders out of his eyes. Big Sleep was about to win. It was mightier than him, and Tim hadn’t had a nap since . . . a long time ago. But he couldn’t admit defeat. He still needed to bond with his furry!
Tim rubbed his eyes, trying to stay motivated. Embarrassingly, he hadn’t made much headway in his hacking. Cyborg was adding more restrictions to Tim’s PC with each attempt. Soon, all he’d be able to do would be to play that weird little dinosaur game that popped up when the Internet was shut down.
“Not cool, Tin Man,” Tim mumbled. “Next time I see you, I’m putting kick me magnets on your butt.”
Nobody saw Tim stonewalling pure-hearted clones from reuniting with their mentally ill DNA donors. If this were a musical, Tim would be the tragic but adorable child actor that the audience cooed over, and the JLA would be the evil Big Business that got one weirdly good song about being immoral child-hating lunatics. Cinema was on Tim’s side here, was the point, and Tim would be putting the world's so-called 'heroes' on the top of the list for culling when the robot uprising came.
Since hacking was going nowhere, Tim had taken to texting Kon out of anger, theorizing the best way to take out the JLA for revenge. Currently, throwing Green Lantern into the sun was in the lead, but Tim was sure he could come up with an even more painful fate for the man who’d forced him to shower.
However, his muttered plans of how to take out the justice league were put on hold when a green message box popped up on his computer. Tim narrowed his eyes, automatically suspicious.
O: Fallen on hard times?
Tim pursed his lips. The Internet in his brain said it was a bad idea to talk to strangers online. But that was easily ignored since he was bored.
Tim typed back Who are you? Are you evil? Die! And waited for a response.
O: Rude. You really are Batman’s kid. That’s no way to talk to your favorite hacker.
Favorite—? Tim gasped, his sleep-deprived braincells finally connecting the dots.
“Oracle?” He said, putting his hands over his mouth. “My personal Jesus? The Beyonce of coding? Woah!”
That answered his evil question. No way were they a literal baddie, just a metaphorical one.
O: Cute. Keep up the flattery. I don’t hear enough of it.
Tim gasped again. They could hear him? Wait, of course they could. Oracle was the system. They could do whatever they wanted forever and nobody could stop them.
“What do you want?” Tim said.
O: Nothing. Just thought I’d do my good deed for the day.
A notification dinged in the bottom right corner of the screen. All Zeta permissions had been reset, including his. Tim’s jaw dropped. This must have been what delirious soldiers felt like when they hallucinated angels coming to their rescue on the battlefield. Why was a higher being like Oracle helping Tim?
O: Say hi to Bats for me. As enthusiastically as you can. I hear loud, excitable teenagers are good for recovery. As is reality TV and karaoke.
Oh. Oh. That explained it.
Tim steepled his fingers, not even bothering to hide his devilish delight. Sometimes, it paid for Batman to be super bad at interacting with people. It meant he had a lot of enemies. How nice that one of them was now Tim’s allies.
“You can count on me, oh great wise one,” he said, and ran to the zeta tubes.
***
Bruce looked at the man he thought was his friend in horror.
Clark stared back unapologetically.
“—destiny is what it is,” Tim said, spinning on the small medical stool he’d put beside Bruce’s cot, “we’ll be more inseparable than rubber and glue! Tomatoes and pizza! Gum from hair! I’m not leaving your side ever again, promise. The two of us are going to have the best recovery period in the history of ever, right B?”
Saying no was pointless, and escape was no longer an option now that Clark had someone on rotation to man the med bay doors 24/7. Bruce had missed his chance to get out of this hellscape, and now everything was a thousand times worse.
“You’re dead to me,” Bruce told Clark, who had the gall to look unaffected.
“Luckily, you’re not dead,” the treacherous traitor said. “So sticks and stones, Batman. Tim, make sure he takes his painkillers. You’re officially on batsitting duty.”
Tim’s smile made the sun look dim. “You’re finally seeing reason. Yes, I’m the best person for this job. Leave it to me!”
He pumped his fists in the air, then got up and threw several Batman-themed blankets onto Bruce’s cot for “enrichment purposes” before turning the wall TV’s channel to The Real Housewives of Star City (most of the women had been in flings with Ollie) and running a lap around the room to "secure the premesis."
“After we binge this, I’m making you waffles,” Tim said proudly. “There’s a TikTok hack in my brain that says we can add gummy worms and M&Ms to the batter for maximum mouth feel. You should feel honored to be my fist test subject.”
"He definitely is," Clark the Devil said. "Make sure he eats the whole thing."
"With pleasure," Tim said, giving the Man of Steel a salute.
Bruce banged his head against the mattress, idly wondering if he could give himself enough brain damage to be admitted into a real ER.
***
Kon poked his head into the canteen a few hours later, keeping a wary eye out for Clark. Luckily, he didn’t see Superman anywhere, so the odds of giving his sorta-uncle Kryptonite poisoning again were low.
“What’s up, Vic?” he said as Cyborg stomped toward the fridge.
Cyborg pulled a carton of orange juice out and chugged half of it before answering. “Existence is a curse and reality is a prison.”
He finished the carton, crushed it, and walked off.
Kon . . . was going to not question that. They all had their bad days.
A brief look-around revealed that Tim was here, which was good. Kon had been worried when he couldn’t find the kid in Mount Justice. He hadn’t thought Tim had escaped to Gotham again since Batman was still under lock and key, but it was still a possibility.
Instead, Kon found him and the Dark Knight in the infirmary. Batman was not-so-subtly trying to up his pain medication to make himself pass out while Tim was drawing on the glass walls with dry-erase markers. Batman’s ankles had been cuffed to the bed-frame.
Kon crossed his arms and carefully unclenched his jaw. His conversation with Pa—and later, Ma—echoed through his head. He wanted to show Batman a piece of his mind for what he'd said to Tim during the Lasso incident. Ma even said sometimes the only way people learned was through a slap on the wrist and a a good-old talk-down, so it would be a learning experience for the man and very satisfying for Kon.
In the med bay, Tim turned around and gestured wildly at the board, which (Kon read it in reverse) was a relationship chart of a reality show that included rankings for random categories like “most likely to drink gasoline by accident” and “would not be able to identify a possum in the wild.” Batman did not look amused by it, but he listened to Tim ramble.
Kon squeezed his arms tighter around himself, staying out of sight. Batman didn't seem to be doing anything horrific right now. And Tim looked so happy.
Maybe Kon could give the vigilante the benefit of the doubt a little longer. Even though he’d told Tim to cut his losses, part of him yearned to be proven wrong by the kid. For Batman to turn around and fix this, like Clark eventually had with Kon.
"I hope I don't regret this," Kon muttered, and decided to let sleeping dogs lie.
***
Twenty hours later, Victor bolted upright in bed and swore profusely.
He stumbled into the closest pair of pants he could find and ran toward the computer consoles. Stupid, stupid— he’d been so preoccupied with the Bat drama on the watchtower that he’d completely forgotten something important. No, 'important' wasn’t doing it justice. He’d screwed up colossally.
“Woah, slow down. Where’s the fire?” Superman chuckled as Victor narrowly avoided colliding with him.
“Here, if I don’t stop it!” Victor yelled.
But it was too late. By the time he got to the control room and frantically checked his communication log, it was too late. There were several voice messages left on the system that’d he’d meant to respond to last night, all of them timestamped with numbers that screamed TOO LATE in all caps.
With a trembling hand, he pulled open the latest one.
“Vic?” Kori’s voice said, tinny over the interface. “You haven’t answered any of our digital letters, so we haven’t been able to confirm anything, but regarding our last message, the plan is still to rendezvous at the Watchtower for refueling. The Woman of Wonder was very generous in allowing us to dock there for a few hours, and we are happy to pick you up before we go back to Titans Tower. If you are still onboard, that is. We will be arriving 8:00 Earth military time. It has been too long my friend. I am excited to see you aga—”
Victor exited the video and stared in horror at the clock at the bottom of the screen. It was 8:25.
Oh no. Oh no no no no.
He’d meant to tell them the situation had changed. Batman was stuck in the Watchtower, so it was currently the worse place in the galaxy to do a quick refuel. Everything about this situation was DEFCON 1, situation critical, because tshere was only one thing worse than Bat drama, and it was more Bat drama. Vic still had nightmares about the last time Nightwing and Batman had been in the same room. There were reasons the Titans had made the unanimous decision to go on interstellar mission after interstellar mission, and all of them started and ended with Dick Grayson.
“Calm down, Cyborg,” he muttered to himself, “There’s still time to fix this.”
But the corner of his eye was drawn to the security cameras, and he knew he was dead wrong. Heading toward each other like the beginning of a Greek tragedy were the three people Victor had been hoping to keep separated as long as he was alive.
Shit.
***
Dick was tired. That was not a good thing. When he was tired his temper frayed, and these days that meant he was always seconds away from snapping.
The mission had been a nightmare from the get-go; alien traffickers abducting Earthlings to sell at intergalactic auctions, an old nemesis of Kori’s revealing themselves to be the mastermind, and a Star-Wars level ship fight with their armada. The odds had been 6:1 and they’d still managed to come out on top, but now Dick was not feeling the aster. He wanted to fall asleep and never wake up.
“We’ll only be here for a few hours,” Kori said soothingly as they finally finished docking. It'd taken an extra ten minutes to complete. “You have time to recover in one of the guest rooms, and then we’ll be home so you can properly sleep.”
“I can sleep on the ship,” he said, slouching into his seat. Deboarding sounded worse than dental surgery without anesthesia.
Garth snorted. “Sure, because you rest so well in anti-gravity. Go to the Watchtower, Wing, you need to ground yourself for a bit.”
Dick ran a hand through his hair, torn between sniping at them and being touched. The Watchtower had too many people he didn’t want to see, but on the other hand he’s implode if he spent another second in this tin can. Choices choices.
“Your mind is unbalanced,” Raven said, nudging him toward the exit hatch. “You need respite.”
Dick deflated, argument dead on his tongue. “Alright, fine. Thanks, Rae.”
She smiled and floated back over to Garth. Dick steeled himself and entered the Watchtower.
Immediately, he know Raven had made the right call, convincing him to leave. The Watchtower's smooth white halls felt more open than his ship’s cramped quarters, while the floor to ceiling windows made him breathe easier. He walked quickly through the hallways toward the residential area, thanking his lucky stars that there were only a few leaguers milling around. He wasn’t in any state of mind to see—
“B!”
Dick stumbled. He caught himself on one of the walls and whipped around. No. He wasn’t supposed to be back at league meetings yet. The last Dick had heard, Batman was staying in Gotham. There was no way—
Batman appeared around a corner, walking as if the weight of the world hung from his shoulders. Dick felt a pang as he saw the new creases on his lower face. Even with the cowl, his Da—his ex-guardian looked older than before.
Then Dick saw the kid hanging on his arm, dressed in a bright red hoodie. Black hair, blue eyes, short.
Something in him froze.
“B, I’m serious,” the kid said, tugging Batman’s arm. “You need to lighten up, and I don’t just mean that emotionally. Black is obviously the superior color, but imagine how freaked out Penguin would be if he saw you in a pink tutu or—”
“What the hell is this?” Dick said.
Bruce turned statue-still. People liked to call him emotionless, but that was only because they didn’t know his tells. Robins always did, whether they wanted to or not. Even through the mask, Dick could see his guilt.
The short, grinning kid hanging off Bruce’s arm blinked owlishly, eyes wide with curiosity. Bright, alive, and new.
Dick barely noticed his hands curl into fists.
“B, what the fuck have you done?” Dick said, dangerously calm.