Work Text:
Tim Drake almost wished he could enrol back in school. Almost.
It was only for a case he’d been solving for a few weeks now when his patrol as Red Robin had led him to a girl young enough to be his sister. She’d met him on some back street, scrawny and short with scraped knees and dirty clothes had whispered to him about the… friend of her parents’ who watched her dress and bathe, who had touched her last night after dinner in a way she had suddenly been terrified of and had screamed and slapped his hand away, and been beaten for it. Then she had run away. Her parents, presumably, had no idea. They were probably out looking for her, but she would not go home. She had begged him not to tell anyone. Wouldn’t sob louder than a whisper.
It had taken a significant part of the night to calm her, especially when she wouldn’t let anybody near her except Robin. She had been almost incoherent with hiccups when Nightwing arrived take her to Montoya for a statement and figure out where to go from there. “Its okay, sweetie,” Tim had urged, rubbing her shoulders soothingly over his cape that he had placed over her shoulders. “He was a Robin too. He was the very first.”
Nightwing smiled at her warmly, hands outstretched and knee on the ground to make himself smaller as she stumbled to him slowly, eyes still leaking.
Tim had extracted from her the name an appearance of the perpetrator, one John Carrington, and had tracked him down at his day job to Gotham Central Academy.
It had chilled his blood. All his brothers had studied there. Damian still studied there.
So when some days of relentless hacking and tracking did not reveal enough proof for an exposé to have him suspended from the teaching profession, he almost wanted to ask Bruce to enrol him again. He knew his height and the baby fat around his chin lent him the appearance of being younger than he was, if he wanted, and a few tricks of wardrobe and makeup that Steph had taught him (“white on the waterline makes your eyes look bigger”) and he could pass himself off as a student to catch him in the act. Nobody would disbelieve a Drake and a Wayne, and the private academy would almost certainly fire their employee immediately before risking the wrath of the city’s elite.
If only it were that simple. Tim sighed and sipped his coffee, awake the third night in a row, daydreaming about how the case could have been shut by now if only he hadn’t dropped out. But readmitting him to the school would be a long, arduous process and Bruce would get involved.
The next day, he punctured Dick’s front bike tire with a sewing needle, carefully, so no one could tell it hadn’t been an accident. He called in a favour from Kate to have Bruce over and busy for the week (He’d fed her a story about Bruce getting hovery over his relationship with his Kryptonian boyfriend, “I need him out!”). He’d discreetly set Alfred and Jason up into a situation they would not be able to resist involving one Le Grand Livre de la Pâtisserie et des Desserts. He’d shuddered and left before they could rope him into the activity.
With no one else to pick Damian up, and before Jason and Alfred, making mournful eyes over the monstrous recipe book could suggest they would be up for the task, he volunteered.
He was leaning against the red brick walls of Gotham Academy, waiting for Damian’s club meeting to end when he walked out.
John seemed normal. Good even. His remark half-yelled cheerfully at a pair of kids to be nice and finish their worksheets had Tim scoffing, lips turned up in disgust. John threw his jacket over his shoulder in the crisp fall air and jovially hopped down the steps to- Damian?
Tim forced his heart to calm and started walking rapidly toward his little brother, not too fast to seem abnormal, but desperately hoping Damian still carried his League Daggers; and how would he explain the incident to everyone else if things went sideways? when-
John had reached Damian first. Damian, who hadn’t spotted Tim yet, turned to him, bored expression caught in surprise John leaned over to tuck a piece of his hair behind Damian’s ear-
Tim saw red. His dropped his backpack and any pretence at normalcy and strode over to them, palm already fisting, and struck John hard, right across the jaw.
There was a part of his brain that was calm, no, unfeeling, and it told him to stop. But he picked John up by the collar where he had fallen and slammed his fist into him once more, and then once more, and more until he had lost count, until the man was bleeding raw and red, until people were yelling -too distantly for him to care though- until he felt Damian’s little hands on his sweater pulling him back, telling him to stop.
The clamour of his audience came back into focus along with Damian’s voice in his ear. Someone was calling Campus Security.
Not that he cared. He was breathing hard. His hands hurt. His chest hurt too, and he didn’t know why. He saw the scene in front of him, but not. He saw the girl, her eyes swollen and her face cut so close to the eye she had been lucky to not lose it. Her hands, bruised. Her torso, purple when she had raised her hand.
“STAY. AWAY FROM MY BROTHER. OR I SWEAR, I’LL KILL YOU,” he panted.
He left with Damian in tow and no one stopped him.
The car ride back was silent. He hoped Damian would leave him alone in his fuming.
He did, for a while.
He cleared his throat twenty minutes in.
“You could have killed him,” Damian cut to the chase.
“Yes.”
Damian absorbed his reply.
“Why?” he asked finally. “Red Robin doesn’t kill.”
Any other time, it would have sounded like a jab, a test, designed to prove he fell short of the Robin mantle. Today it was just. It wasn’t.
“Tim Drake,” he bit out, “made no such vow.”