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Tim didn’t know why he was here. He’d spent a large majority of his time as Robin on the Titans, but that was Titans West, not Damian’s territory. San Francisco, where he could be free of the Wayne legacy. His old friends were still there. Tim could go and visit, could see Kon again, could laugh with them again—
But you can’t, Ra’s al Ghul’s voice whispered, you don’t want them to see the monster you’ve become.
Tim ignored it. It was infinitely easier to disregard than the actual Ra’s al Ghul, and if an insane megalomaniac’s voice in his head was the price to pay for ridding the world of the actual insane megalomaniac, so be it. His sanity had been fractured a long, long time ago; Tim was very efficient at working with the leftover shards.
It meant that he had no clue what he was doing in Tower East, though. Tim had bought a train ticket up to New York for the weekend, and cross-referenced the list of current Titans with rumors of active cases to make sure that the Tower would be empty. No Nightwing, or Flamebird, or the rest of the superhero group that could give the Justice League a run for their money.
No one but Tim.
The Tower security was laughably easy to break into. But Tim had always been the superior hacker and he didn’t think they’d changed the security since he last updated it. As Robin. It was child’s play to shut off the cameras, turn off the alarms, and make the building go dark.
Tim stood in the empty foyer of a building that belonged to the legacy of heroes he’d grown up watching, and wondered why he was here.
He had scripts. He’d always had scripts, but the tendency had only been exacerbated with his time in the League. Scripts made things simple. It allowed him to develop a step-by-step plan to take control of Gotham’s underworld—a plan that was working flawlessly. It let him stay in Gotham without giving into the mess of feelings he had about a dark, bat-shaped shadow trailed by a burst of color. It helped him tie together a semblance of a moral code while he was being tortured and brainwashed by a psychopath.
Currently, Tim’s script was telling him to explore his surroundings. In the absence of a goal, know your environment. Or perhaps know your enemy? With the League gutted and in disarray, there were only a few people that both knew League teachings and were strong enough to defeat him. One of those people was Nightwing.
Damian Wayne could resurrect the League if he wanted to. He had the name, he had the skills, he had the temperament. He’d certainly made Tim’s life a torment when Tim was growing up. Tim took a single second to imagine Nightwing as the Demon’s Head, and shuddered. He wouldn’t let that happen. And Tower East was a great place to start gathering intel.
If Tim was remembering correctly—which he was, Ra’s had done many things to him and the curse was that Tim was never able to forget them—the control room was three floors up. His footsteps echoed oddly on the stairs and Tim slid the helmet back on as he ascended. Theatricality was a lesson he’d learned from both Batman and Ra’s, and there had been no shortage of empty shells in Gotham for Tim to sidle into.
But the Red Hood, Tim had to admit, was slightly personal.
The Joker had started this whole thing. The clown was long dead, but Tim would destroy his legacy too, the same way he’d destroyed the League of Assassins.
The whole building had an eerie feeling to it, one remembered from a childhood in an empty manor, and Tim did not like it. It was abandonment—sharper than desertion, heavier, and it brought back several unpleasant memories. It figured that even without Damian here, his base would find a way to be unwelcoming.
Tim didn’t let down his guard. It was a part and parcel of Ra’s al Ghul’s training—the inability to ever truly, fully relax. Even in an abandoned building with security he built himself. It was why he ducked before he consciously registered the whistle of a birdarang, and Tim spun out, unsheathing his kris in one fluid move.
A red-yellow-black figure was swinging across the empty space between staircases, and that was why this place had felt lonely but not empty. The new Robin vaulted off the railing and spun up with—a bo staff.
Tim had tried his very best to avoid Batman and his ever-increasing brood of vigilantes, but it was hard not to take this personally.
“You’re a long way from Gotham, Hood,” the kid snarled, and a dagger against a bo staff shouldn’t have been a fair fight, but Tim knew the bo staff, had trained against it intimately, had several teachers, and Jason Todd was nowhere near his level.
“So are you, Robin,” Tim said, watching his guard for an opening and—there.
He caught the staff with the flat of his blade, redirected its momentum, and completed the motion with a twist of his wrist. The dagger clattered out of his hand as the staff spun straight into it, Robin forced to let go with a strangled yelp.
Tim had left his last bo staff in pieces, kindling for a fire, and he twirled this one in an unnecessarily showy, expert twist. Robin blanched, stumbling back and raising his fists. How cute.
Tim snapped the staff and threw the pieces over the railing. There was a distant clatter when they hit the floor. “Get out of my way, kid,” Tim said flatly. “This has nothing to do with you.”
“You’re from Gotham, it has everything to do with me,” Robin jutted his chin out challengingly. “And you’re breaking and entering.”
Tim laughed behind his helmet, “I haven’t broken anything.” He moved, fast as a striking snake. “Yet.”
Robin was not a half-bad brawler—he had an unpredictability that Bruce and Damian, both League-trained, were too fluid to possess. Tim had done his research on the newer Bats, and it was clear that the streets had left their impact on this Robin.
Tim-as-Robin would’ve been hard-pressed to defeat him in a hand-to-hand fight. His attack style back then had relied heavily on the staff, on distractions, on circling and retreating and delaying until he got one good hit in.
Ra’s brooked no such weaknesses.
If Tim had still been with the League, he would’ve left Robin bloody and broken on the floor. Alive, as one last insult. Would’ve utterly destroyed him on the way to his objective, even though Jason had done nothing but get in his way.
“What’s the matter, Gotham goons not cutting it?” Robin didn’t sound winded as he danced around Tim. “Decided to recruit from outside? Where’s your Gotham loyalty?”
But Tim was not with the League. Not anymore. Never again. His fingers snapped out, carefully crooked, and he let himself take the punch against his flexible armor to get close enough for the strike.
“The last person who asked for my loyalty, I left in pieces,” Tim said pleasantly.
Two flashing pinches—Robin could no longer lift his hands. One more, and he teetered on one working leg. Finally, a precise strike at the top of his spine, and Robin crumpled into a heap, temporarily paralyzed.
Utterly unharmed.
One annoying little bird, taken successfully out of his path. Tim left Robin where he was and continued on his way. The paralysis wouldn’t wear off for a while, and by that time, Tim would be long gone. Robin was perfectly safe in Tower East, and Tim would wipe all traces of his presence here, so all the Titans and the Bats would have to go on was Robin’s recollection.
Tim amused himself by imagining the look of consternation on Damian’s face, but the amusement faded quickly when the image shifted to that scowl being directed at the kid. Tim quickly shook the thoughts free—Bruce had never tolerated Damian’s malice in front of him, and Tim doubted that that had changed. The kid would be fine.
Tim, meanwhile, would be getting his intel and getting out. The control room would be…right…about…here.
Tim stared at the dual biometric scanner on the door. Goddammit.
Installed after he died, so no chance that it was running on his code or that it had his details on file. Not that it would really prove a problem, he knew three ways to get past it off the top of his head, but why work hard when he could work smart?
Tim turned on his heel and headed back to the stairs. “Looks like we’re going to be acquainted for longer than I planned,” Tim hummed as he took the steps down. Robin was sprawled out on the landing, just where Tim had left him, strangely quiet. “If you decide to behave, I’ll even leave a TV on, what do you say? Any preferences?” He nudged Robin with the tip of his boot. “No?”
Robin made an oddly strangled sound and Tim immediately dropped into a crouch. Fuck, he wasn’t trying to suffocate the kid. Tim gripped his shoulder and flipped him onto his back in a swift movement, scanning for restricted breathing or changed color or—
Robin’s face shone wetly, breathing high and quick, lip bitten red as he trembled. Oh. He was crying.
Tim felt a flash of annoyance at his previous concern. “Really, kid?” he drawled, straightening up to loom over the downed vigilante. “I barely even touched you. You’re going to cry over a little paralysis?”
Robin’s expression shifted to a shaky scowl. “What—what do you w-want?” he tried to snarl, but it came out high and choked.
“Access to the control room,” Tim volunteered easily, bending down. “Now, you’re going to be a good boy for me, right?”
“No,” Robin almost shrieked, and the only thing he could move was his head but he made full use of it, snapping up and trying to bite him. Definitely a fucking street kid. Tim was not in the mood to play games, though and merely jammed the kid’s mouth shut with one hand.
“Try that again,” Tim said, soft and level, “and I’ll dislocate your jaw, do you understand?” Robin’s breathing had gone too-fast again, cheeks shining in the filtered sunlight, but he was no longer struggling. “There we go.”
Tim hefted the boy up easily and carried his dead weight up the stairs. Robin’s muffled sobs were too close to his ears, and he could hear the way his breathing hitched even through the helmet. Unbelievable. Tim found it hard to comprehend how this kid had remained in one piece around Damian, who scented weakness like blood in the water.
“Here we are,” Tim murmured, carrying Robin over to the biometric scanner. He pulled both a glove and the domino mask off, revealing Robin’s tearstained blue eyes. The finger was easy to maneuver into place, but Tim needed to hold Robin’s eyelid open and keep him from squirming away from the iris scanner.
The door beeped and clicked, and swung open smoothly at Tim’s touch.
“Great,” Tim turned to Robin. “That wasn’t so hard, was it?” The kid had dropped his face against Tim’s shoulder and was crying harder. “Okay, what TV show do you want? Comedy? Documentaries? Action?” Robin shook his head weakly. “Come on, kid, you earned a reward, what do you want?” The kid didn’t respond. “Robin,” Tim said irritably, and when that didn’t work either, his voice rose sharply, “Jason.”
The kid jerked his head up, and all Tim could read was terror.
“You did good,” Tim’s voice automatically dropped into the soothing tone he’d last used before his death—the effect was ruined by the voice distorter—and he kept his voice low. “What, are you hungry? Want something to drink?” He shook Jason slightly. “Hello? I said you’d get a reward, don’t make me change my mind.”
Jason took a sharp, shuddering breath. “Please,” he whispered, and Tim mentally rolled his eyes—he should’ve just hacked through the door, it would’ve been faster than all this sniveling—“please, don’t—I don’t—please—”
“Please what?” Tim snapped, patience entirely gone.
“Please d-don’t t-touch me.”
Tim nearly dropped Jason in surprise. Something cold curdled in his gut as he carefully set Jason on the floor, propped against the wall to sit upright. Robin’s expression was halfway between terror and despair—he looked far too young with the mask off.
Tim was that young once. Before death and Ra’s al Ghul had changed that.
He dropped to his knees and spread his empty fingers. “I’m not going to hurt you,” Tim said slowly, but Jason was shaking in place, attention focused on his hands and not his words. “Hey—Jason—”
Watery blue eyes lifted to meet his helmet. “How do you know my name?” came the broken whisper.
Oh. Right. Shit.
In Tim’s defense, he’d kept a secret identity secret for years, was it really his fault that he’d been indoctrinated into Ra’s al Ghul’s ‘it doesn’t matter what you say because you’re going to kill them anyway’ philosophy?
Tim stared at Jason, mentally skipping through lie after lie, but the kid was definitely panicking and nothing Tim thought of would be good enough to halt that. He could just…leave, leave Jason here and get out, the kid wasn’t in any danger, he would only be immobilized for a few hours.
Unable to move. Unable to fight back. Unable to do anything but scream.
Tim remembered his training with nerve strikes.
“Fuck,” he exhaled slowly, and reached for the catches of his helmet. Jason’s eyes grew wider as Tim pulled it off, trying to push back against the wall but having nowhere to go. Tim swept back the hair spilling out of his untidy bun, and looked Jason in the eyes, bare-faced.
“The same way I know who Batman is,” Tim said quietly. “And Nightwing. And all the others.” Jason looked like he’d stopped breathing. “Look, I wasn’t trying to scare you and I’m not here to hurt you. The paralysis will wear off in a few hours, you’ll be fine.”
Jason…looked like he’d seen a ghost. Ha.
“Robin?” he whispered, and fuck, that was a blade to the heart that Tim hadn’t been braced for.
“Not anymore,” Tim reached out to tap on the R on Jason’s uniform. Jason didn’t even track the movement.
“But…you died,” Jason inhaled sharply, in between disbelieving and confused. “What—how—”
“A megalomaniac with an immortality pool and an unhealthy interest in bringing me back to life,” Tim shrugged. “I’m not sure if I died all the way, but it certainly hurt.”
“But you weren’t—here,” Robin was frowning now. Tim supposed it was better than crying. “You—reports of the Red Hood only surfaced in the past few weeks after…” Jason trailed off, met Tim’s gaze, and swallowed. “After the League of Assassins was destroyed.”
Tim smiled. It was not a nice smile. “I told you what happened to the last person who talked about loyalty,” Tim said softly. “Ra’s al Ghul sought to turn me into a weapon. Unfortunately for him, he succeeded.” Tim leaned closer, until he could see the reflection of his burning green eyes in Jason’s blue ones. “A little too well.”
This close, he could hear Jason’s pounding heartbeat, could track every twitch, could see the minute shifts in Jason’s expression as he tried to keep his expression blank and failed.
“Why,” Jason’s voice cracked, and he tried again. “Why did you come here?”
Tim, sitting on his heels, considered the question. “You know,” he mused, “I don’t actually know.”
“You…don’t know why you came here?”
“It happens sometimes,” Tim shrugged. It bothered Tim at first, but there were so many other things he could worry about that there was no point. “It’s like that thing where you walk into a room and don’t know why you’re there, but like, bigger.”
Robin was staring at him, both eyebrows raised. “You know that’s a problem, right?”
“Well, I haven’t had any major issues yet,” Tim retorted, a little stung. He was managing just fine, thank you, and he didn’t need this pint-sized kid’s judgment. God, it was like dealing with a younger Damian.
“You revealed your entire identity to me, dude.”
Tim opened his mouth, ready to protest—and closed it again. He didn’t actually have a good defense for that one. He hadn’t really planned what he was going to do if he had run into a Titan. Or what he was going to do once Batman figured out who he was. Or why he’d bothered taking over Gotham’s underworld in the first place.
Fuck.
Was it a sleeper command from Ra’s? Had Tim taken one of his sleep-deprived, caffeine-fueled ideas too seriously again? What was the point of taking over all the gangs in Gotham only to set it all on fire? He’d cause a whole bunch of chaos, true, but then he’d leave a vacuum for a bloody, vicious power struggle amongst whoever was left.
Apparently, his crisis was extremely easy to read on his face, because Jason spoke up, voice a little high but squarely in the reassuring-victims Robin tone. “I mean, it’s fine! I’m not a snitch. You—you do you, man.” He was eyeing Tim with naked concern.
Oh God. Tim buried his face in his hands and fought the urge to scream.
“Uh—look, the control room is open? What were you looking for in there anyway?”
“Information on Nightwing,” Tim said through his muffled hands. Why, though? If he really thought Damian was going to restart the League, he could’ve just killed him, like he killed all the other snakes that popped their heads up. He didn’t need to hack into the Titans database to do it.
“Oh, man, I should’ve thought of that. Steph has a shit ton of blackmail on him, but she’s never showed any of it to me. You think we can find some in here?”
Tim slowly dropped his hands. Jason was looking at him, expression fixed into determined cheer. He flinched when Tim shifted forward, but he didn’t turn away.
“Why?” Tim asked.
Why do you want blackmail on Damian? Why are you helping me? Why do you care?
Jason shrugged, or attempted to, tucking his chin in lieu of lifting his arms. “You said I could watch whatever I wanted until the nerve strikes wore off,” Jason pointed out. “I want to watch Damian messing up. Preferably tripping and falling flat on his face. There’s got to be some.”
The little shit hadn’t answered any of Tim’s questions but wasn’t, Tim had to admit, wrong. Finding evidence that the famed Demon Prince was just as human as the rest of them was incredibly enticing.
“Fine,” Tim said, scooping Jason up and walking into the control room. “I’ll go make the popcorn.”
Damian hadn’t seen Jason’s message until he’d gotten home from work, and by the time he’d zeta’d to Tower East, it had been hours since the alert. The message on its own was innocuous, a notice of a system bug, but Jason had not followed up afterwards, and Damian headed to the Tower with the cold, icy dread of having failed another little brother.
He tried to tell himself he was catastrophizing. But was it really catastrophizing when catastrophe struck on the regular?
The Tower was silent as he crept through the corridors, eerie and echoing with an almost plaintive air. Like a lost child, crying to come home. Damian shook the thoughts free and continued to the main atrium.
He found the bo staff there. Snapped neatly in two. The same way his heart cracked, right down the middle.
The biggest piece of Timothy Drake they’d ever found had been his bo staff.
The silence whispered harder, louder as he strode up the spiraling stairs, taunting him with his failures and broken promises. He’d vowed to protect Jason, to shield this new Robin like he’d never shielded the last, and all he could hear was the interminable cackling that meant too little, too late.
The control room, he told himself, attempting to shake off memories and ghosts. The control room would tell him what happened here. Whose blood he would have to spill to avenge his family, yet again proving his worth as a murderer and not a protector.
Before he reached the control room, he found the helmet. Bright red, almost offensively so, left on the stairs like a taunt.
Didya think you got rid of me forever, the Joker chortled.
Damian burst into the control room, sword at the ready—only to draw up short. It was already occupied.
The monitors were showing footage of his old fights, early in his time as a Titan, and the room reeked of butter. Robin was curled up in a chair, mask off, face faintly puffy but to all intents and purposes unharmed. He appeared to be in the midst of licking his greasy fingers.
The other occupant took a moment to place. He had long, dark hair, tangled up in an unkempt bun, with a streak of white that reminded Damian of his grandfather. But his face—angular features that had lost their baby fat, turning a calculating look into something almost cruel—that face haunted Damian in half his nightmares.
“You look like you’ve seen a ghost,” the dead boy said.
Damian staggered, knees abruptly weak, and caught himself against the doorframe. He didn’t dare look away, not when the image might prove fleeting. If—if he was here, and Jason was here, then either they were all a mirage or they were all real. Damian didn’t know which option he preferred.
“Timothy?” he asked, throat tight and voice hoarse.
The dead boy’s eyes narrowed, face shuttering. “Don’t call me that,” he snapped.
“Drake,” Damian said instead, his grip on the doorframe turning painfully tight. “You’re—are you—is this real?”
He needed the answer. He wanted nothing more than to never hear it.
“Yup!” Jason answered.
“Jason,” the dead boy spun towards him, tone aggrieved.
“What? Was I supposed to lie?”
“You said you weren’t going to snitch! Ugh, now what am I supposed to do? I’m not going to get a second’s peace with him on his ass.”
“If you wanted me to lie, you should’ve gotten our stories straight before he showed up. Besides, you told me you’d teach me how to do that nerve strike. You can’t leave.”
“Watch me—”
“Drake.” Damian found that his hands could clasp the dead boy’s arms. That he was physically there. That he was real.
Damian also found that the dead boy’s hands could jab into him, targeting with exacting precision.
“There,” Timothy Drake glowered down at him with Lazarus green eyes. “Consider that your demonstration.”
Damian couldn’t twitch a finger.
“Wait, that was too fast—Tim—dammit.” Robin stopped well short of following the dead boy into the shadows. “You can’t keep running forever!”
“Bite me,” floated back towards them, fainter with every step.
Robin made a crude gesture in its general direction, before flopping down besides Damian. He peered at him, upside down. “It takes about an hour to wear off.”
“I’m aware,” Damian said wearily. The League of Assassins up in smoke, Lazarus green, and Grandfather’s favorite nerve strikes. He could put the pieces together on his own. He narrowed his eyes at Jason, “You never followed up on your message about the system bug.”
Jason widened his eyes. “I was paralyzed!”
“You appear to be moving just fine to me.”
“I was held captive by a lunatic!”
“The same one you just provoked?”
Robin crossed his arms sullenly. “Your other brother is running around calling himself the Red Hood, and you’re lecturing me?”
Well, Damian supposed, if anyone had the right to use that name…
“Don’t try to distract me,” he said instead. “Regardless of Drake’s naming conventions, you failed to communicate a hostile entry into the Tower and clearly attempted to engage with them alone. In addition—”
“You’re not going to tell B,” Jason cut him off.
“Excuse me?”
“You’re not going to tell B,” Jason repeated, and gestured up at the monitors, which were showing a still of an incident that Damian slowly recognized as the first time he’d tangled with Deathstroke. “Or I’m going to take this little compilation I made, working title Robin I’s Biggest Fails, and I’m going to send it to absolutely everyone in the hero community.” His smile was wicked. “And maybe some of the villains too.”
Two hours. Robin had been alone with Timothy Drake for two hours and already he’d learned how to scheme against Damian. Damian was almost impressed.
“Agreed,” he said instead.