Time Bomb Town - Moxibustion (RyuuzaKochou) - Batman (2024)

Chapter 1: 00:20

Chapter Text

The thing was that it was just an ordinary day. That’s what Tim realised a long time after. It wasn’t anything in particular that made it happen, there was no tipping point, no nameable thing that he could point to and say and that was the proverbial last straw.

Thinking on it some more, he might admit that the fact that there was nothing was, maybe, a part of the problem.

Tim had been called to a crime scene in the middle of Gotham. The call had come in at the end of a long day at the Wayne Parapsychic Institute, gladhanding various visitors who came in for testing and making sure all the Gooseggs were calibrated and precog recordings were accurately taken and stored. None of those duties were particularly hard or onerous, but WPI was, as Tim’s long deceased grandmother would have said, ‘a lot to do for’.

But Tim had always preferred field work over the cut and thrust of the office, so of course when the now rare call came in for a psychometrist Talent at an active crime scene he activated his fieldtech nanosuit uniform, slapped on his nano-domino and got on his skimmer bike. It was a necessary precaution for Talents in the field to be masked. People (read: criminals) could get awfully annoyed at the small subset of people able to break through all lines of corruption and prove beyond a doubt what they were up to. And since Gotham’s facial scan and records system had more security holes than a colander… yeah, masks.

And codenames, natch.

Batman was already there. So was Nightwing. So was… Robin.

It was still galling, having to call someone else by that callsign.

Still, personal issues aside, Tim did his thing; carefully pressed his ungloved knuckles to the warehouse floor. The warehouse disappeared and an entire universe opened for him like a flower. He could count, to the last dozen, how many billions of dirt particles there were on the floor, he could count the blood down to the last molecule, and sweat and tears and…

Ew. Other stuff too.

But it was more than that. Each molecule was at the end of a tiny quantum thread, linked up to all the molecule was and ever would be. It took careful focus and a hell of a lot of mental processing power but you could map the path of the molecules back to their starting point. You could unlock all the directions, angles and forces that led them to end up where they lay now by the trail they left through other molecules, and those molecules in turn.

It was a lot of molecules. It was a lot of information. Most of it was a buzzing white noise in his head. It was too much, even for his genius brain. But he’d been trained — and had trained himself — to strip down each layer and find the data he needed.

“Whoever they took here is dead,” Tim came up out of his trace. His statement was concise and without inflection; straight fact and nothing more. “Male. Young. Pre-pubescent.”

Up on the rafters where the others were all perching out of his way, Nightwing cursed. Batman and Robin weren’t the type to announce their feelings, but Tim suspected the news brought them no comfort.

“Perpetrators?” Batman dropped from the roof, nano-cape flying and all business.

“Eight,” Red Robin reported, looking around. Psychic impressions were all very well and good, but you always had to back it up with physical. He paced the area. “They stood in a circle. They were here with the victim a long time. At least two of them are related—their DNA molecules are very similar. They all wore leather; good leather, not cheap stuff, good boots. The same kind of leather too; maybe a uniform of some sort. There was a violent release of psychic energy no more than two and a half hours ago. They took the body then left.”

“Emotions? Voices? Names?” Nightwing flipped down from the rafters too, followed by Robin.

“You mean aside from the screaming?” The impression he received wasn’t physical noise, of course. It was the feeling of a scream, raw anguish moving air molecules farther than any other human voice in the room, leaving a jagged Pollack of disturbed molecules, moved by the sound and the psychic power behind it. “There’s too much information for me to tease out something quiet like that.”

“So essentially,” Robin sneered, “Your little parlour trick tells us nothing a physical examination wouldn’t. You are wasting our time. As you always do, Red.”

That was another sting. Red, Green, Blue, Yellow. Those were standard codenames. They were used by the standard WPI employee in the field, not those in Bruce Wayne’s inner circle.

Tim clenched his fists and swallowed his gall even as Robin smirked at him.

“They’re bringing out a new crime scene processing droid this year, did you hear?” Robin said idly while Batman and Nightwing conferred. “I daresay it will be able to do everything you can do, and we can fold it up into a closet when we’re done.” Robin downright gloated. “How does it feel to be obsolete, Red?”

It was the same weary refrain Tim had heard a thousand times before. And yet, looking at Robin’s smirking face and Batman and Nightwing standing behind, talking quietly with each other and not doing anything to interfere….

…. Tim came to the sudden, jarring realization that he didn’t want to be here anymore.

Not just here at the crime scene. Here in an absolute sense.

Tim Drake had a lot of faults but being indecisive was certainly not one of them. He turned on his heel and wordlessly left the scene.

“Hey T — Red!” Nightwing hurried after him. “Wait up! B wants us to work the case together.”

Tim ignored him.

He activated his nano-helmet.

“Red?”

He remotely activated the skimmer, which obligingly switched on and began to hover a few feet off the ground.

“Hey, Red! Wait!” Nightwing was running after him.

Tim mounted the skimmer, drew out his personal comm, and in one, violent, emphatic throw, shattered it at Nightwing’s feet.

Dick jumped, startled. “Tim? What’s wrong? Tim?!”

He could feel Dick trying to get inside his head. Dick was a Prime, all of the Wayne kids were Primes. Both telepaths and telekinetics, powerful ones, with a smattering of precog and empathic abilities scattered between them.

Except Tim, of course. Tim wasn’t a Prime. Not anymore.

Tim blocked him out and blitzed away before Nightwing could try something less passive.

By the time he hit the freeway, all his personal comm lines were blocked or disabled.

By the time he crossed the Sprang, he’d completed the e-paperwork, officially renouncing his access to the Institute’s financial arm, where all the Talents working for it pooled their resources.

By the time he’d parked at the edge of the Bowery and programmed the skimmer to return to home base, he’d sent his official resignation to the Wayne Parapsychic Institute using the blandest, most impersonal form letter he could find on the ‘Net.

Then, penniless, alone and free, he walked into no man’s land — the north island Linears.

Chapter 2: 00:19

Chapter Text

“Lockers are located in the anteroom there, you collect a trolley at the start of your shift and you are responsible for what happens to it, your lunch break is strictly forty-five minutes and you are to bring no outside food or drink onto the premises. Any questions should be directed to the duty nurse.” The supervisor narrowed her green eyes at him behind her severe glasses, practically telepathically projecting that no questions whatsoever were to come to her.

Tim accepted this without demur. “Yes ma’am.”

The woman turned away, looking like a bleached out grey ghost among the gloom and grime of Arkham. Tim sighed and got out the cleaning trolley. Freedom, he thought, was more complicated than most feel-good TRI-D holoreels would have you believe.

But he had no choice. It had been two whole months since he’d severed ties with his… with the Wayne Parapsychic Institute. In that time he had tried and been forced to discard several plans and contingencies in order to stay under their omniscient psychic radar. His psychometry made him a ‘natural shielder’ but the Waynes were all so powerful there was no chance they wouldn’t break through eventually.

The first and most effective plan was to live and work on the north island. He wouldn’t be able to leave Gotham; the few lines in and out had heavy security because of attacks, plus there was green, empty land on three sides of the city and a big empty sea on the fourth. Places where a single mind would show up like a beacon even to a so-so telepath. The odds of slipping out under that kind of barrier undetected were slim to none.

The Linears were different. Hundreds of thousands of people all crammed tightly together behind big, industrial slabs of steel and concrete. It was as effective as a skullcap for blocking out psychic searches. Telepaths, even really powerful ones like Barbara Gordon or Bruce, would struggle to pick out a single mind in that seething mass. Finders and Trackers found it difficult to ‘see’ a location in the Linears because so much of it was completely identical; all fabricated little cells with the same colour doors, the same furniture, the same everything. Whatever they ‘saw’ would look exactly the same as a thousand other locations. A finding Talent was nothing like having a GPS—the background had to be identifiable in some way.

About the only Talent Tim couldn’t hide from down there was a precog, but no one could hide from those. Their visions were completely random. He was reasonably assured that that very randomness would hide him. They couldn’t steer their vision towards a subject; it didn’t work that way. Plus, they’d run into the same problem as the Finders and the Trackers; even if they ‘saw’ him, any background information that might betray his location wouldn’t likely be of any use.

There was a good reason neither the Institute nor the police had managed to penetrate into the north island Linears. For all their efforts it was and always had been a mecca of crime and unregistered Talent, despite the fact that half of the island itself was a junkyard wasteland where nobody could survive. The Joker had all but decimated a huge chunk of it a decade ago and the containment field was still up around his old ACE Chemicals laboratory hideaway.

Tim’s initial plan for revenue had been to join one of the data conglomerates that operated in the poorer areas. Spending all day in a cubicle doing workaday coding and sorting social media metadata was dull work, but it was a safe enough job that Tim could do blindfolded, with a steady if unglamorous paycheck.

Then his face got plastered across every TRI-D in Gotham two days in. Even worse, it offered a substantial reward for news of his whereabouts, which was as good as blood in the water to a school of sharks in these parts. Tim had fled deeper underground, deeper into the wasteland that was the north island, closer to the contamination zone and the empty junkyard, to places where no one could report your face because no one looked at faces, ever, or cared what anyone did.

It was like Bruce and the others were deliberately sabotaging him. Tim had expected them to give him at least a week to come crawling back, tail between his legs as he assumed they expected. Given their track record lately, he was somewhat cynically amazed at the expression of concern.

Regardless, there went legitimate, if plebeian, sources of income. Tim’s options now were hard labour for cash, freelance home employment, or crime. He was a certified engineer because of all the equipment that had to be maintained at the Institute, so he made a little revenue there fixing odd gadgets and things for his fellow tenement dwellers, but it wasn’t enough and it wasn’t steady.

So here he was, taking a job that no sane person would ever want; custodian at the infamous Arkham Hospital, which butted up to the significantly more infamous Arkham Asylum. Apparently the Asylum wasn’t quite as bad as it had been since the Joker’s demise, but it still wasn’t a safe place to work.

The hospital, Tim thought, wasn’t much better.

He wheeled his trolley with all his cleaning tools and supplies into the creaking, two-hundred-year-old elevator, hitting an old fashioned button to take him to the sub-basem*nt, his designated ward. No one had actually told him what the procedures for cleaning were. They were so desperate for people to take this job that they’d take a brain damaged monkey if it could wield a mop, and didn’t really bother with training.

The duty nurse was an old woman who hobbled with a crooked back. She spoke old Russian and not Babel, which would have been a severe impediment to most, but Tim could actually speak Russian, so he was able to get actual specifications from her. Sweep, scrub, mop, disinfect, in that order, walls included. Then do bathrooms, both patient and staff, empty the bins into the incinerator, then haul the dirty laundry to the air chute. Spot clean messes as needed.

The minute she said that, a fifty-year-old colostomy bag finally gave up the ghost on one of the patients and dropped its contents all over the floor. Yeah, that was now Tim’s problem. Awesome.

How Damian would laugh.

Tim tried to find some positives while he attempted to hold his nostrils shut and not taste anything. The sub-basem*nt was for coma patients, so he guessed that unlike the psych wards or the regular wards the patients here wouldn’t be too much trouble. He was in an industry that demanded he wear gloves, always a bonus for a powerful psychometrist. It was really just him and the Russian duty nurse down here so there were no prying eyes or annoying co-workers. The industrial grade disinfectant was powerful enough to kill any odour and, really, Tim’s ability to smell at all.

And also, the pay was at combat pay rates because no one wanted to work in Arkham. He kept that in mind as he worked his way through his onerous, harrowing day. He needed the money.

Tim wasn’t a stranger to hard work. Almost everyone at the Institute agreed that no one worked harder than Tim Drake. He worked intake, he did field work, he’d participated in lobbying, he’d liaised with law enforcement, he’d maintained the equipment, he’d handled R&D. He’d done every job ever put in front of him, dawn ‘til noon, noon ‘til night. But his foundations had been bricked with privilege and he’d never pretended they weren’t. Singing for his supper was a more jarring experience than he’d anticipated.

Stupid Waynes, Tim grumbled inside his head. He’d have been fine with data entry.

He worked his way past patient after patient, row after row filling the warehouse-like basem*nt, all deathly still under their sterile field drapings that made the place look like one of the ancient malaria wards. Tim spotted quite a few patients in the gaps between the draping with mad, Joker grins fixed on their faces, evidence of the late unlamented madman’s victims.

The Joker was the kind of Talent no Institute wanted to claim. His madness made crazy contagious. Whenever he got close to someone that mad, chilling laughter would start without stopping.

The bathrooms, garbage and laundry runs were only twice a day — at the beginning and end of the shift. The sweeping and mopping was an infinite, never finished ordeal. Dust and detritus continually rained down from fine cracks all over the walls and ceiling. This place was falling apart.

He was on his third… well, sweep of the ward when he finally noticed it; a little alcove made by the jut of the basem*nt's massive support pillars, housing a single lonesome bed. It didn’t look like the cleaners before him had spotted it either. He could see dusty footprints from the duty nurse and a couple of others very clearly on the floor. Okay, the draping around the bed was static charged and kept all this mess away from vulnerable patients, but it still wasn’t the kind of thing anyone wanted to see in a hospital.

“Knock, knock. Housekeeping,” Tim murmured. “Sorry for the inconvenience sir, we’re just taking care of this now.” Only a day in and he was already having one-sided conversations with the patients. The duty nurse did it too. Anything to break the monotonous, stifling silence.

In the midst of sweeping he checked on the equipment hooked up to the patient. The nurse hadn’t asked him to do this, but he’d gotten into the habit anyway, as she only had two speeds — full stop or slow hobble. Tim wasn’t a trained medical professional, but at least he could spot when things were malfunctioning and bring it to her attention. He’d already spotted four malfunctioning nutrient lines and a muscle conditioner on the fritz, zapping the patient.

Bags, all good. Muscle stimulating chainmail array in working order, so atrophy was kept at bay. Vital sign monitors blipped away, the EEG machine was literally a hundred years old (actual needle and paper, geez!) but reeled on, mindlessly tracking any activity.

Tim leaned into the draping to check the oxygen lines were clean, and blinked. The patient looked awfully familiar. Tim couldn’t for the life of him figure out why though.

He was a big guy, over six feet and broad. He was handsome enough, Tim allowed, even with that many tubes running in and out of him. You’d have to be downright gorgeous in the waking world to pull off handsome while in a coma. The anti-atrophy chainmail must be one of the newer versions, because his body was buff. Only the newer versions worked well enough to maintain conditioning.

He was so familiar but Tim, even with a profoundly eidetic memory, couldn’t place him. The splash of white in his otherwise black hair was distinctive. Tim felt for sure he’d recognize a person from that alone. The chart only had a patient number and a date of admittance — almost five years ago.

He felt a pang of pity. The guy was young, maybe twenty? He’d vanished from the waking world still a teenager, maybe younger even than Tim’s lofty sixteen.

The feeling of recognition bugged him throughout the rest of his shift. He felt sure that handsome face was familiar, but it just wasn’t coming to him. He couldn’t be an Institute denizen. Bruce wouldn’t let any of his people or employees wallow in such a rundown plague hospital as this was.

The answer hadn’t come to him when he clocked off his shift. Resigned to letting it percolate in his brain all night, Tim wearily left the hospital and took the Underground back to his tenement in the Bowery.

It was times like this that he had to acknowledge just how much good Bruce Wayne had done for Gotham. The train was free because the Wayne Foundation had poured money into the city’s infrastructure. It meant that people living in extreme poverty had the option of commuting easily to remote jobs across the city, which had done quite a bit to alleviate said poverty.

There was one section of track where the train briefly travelled above the surface. Tim was always careful to position himself facing southwards towards the prosperous Midtown and South Islands, where towering buildings jutted literally up as far as a stratosphere, grey motes of copters zipping and buzzing between buildings like insects in an immense forest. It was a paradise designed by art deco gods. Gotham was two-thirds a beautiful little archipelago within the grey sprawl of Jerhattan.

The North Island, home to the Bowery, Burnley, Otisburg, the famous Amusem*nt Mile and the infamous Crime Alley and Arkham, didn’t have such a lofty aesthetic. Their skyline was a stubby and cramped gothic morlock ruin next to the glittering eloi settlements of the other two islands. They hadn’t built upwards in the north; they’d built down, into Old Gotham, pre-Decimation War. The Linears were all but completely underground. It was said that lifers on the North island could go their entire lives — from birth to school to work to marriage and death — literally never seeing natural daylight, scurrying about like ants in their nest.

Tim never looked north, because through the North Island’s clipped skyline you could see the vast swathe of green that was the Wayne Land Holdings, which bordered Gotham on all sides and was so tied up in entails and trusts and clauses the government had never found the clout to acquire it from the Wayne Trust to build more tenements for the urban sprawl. With the advent of psychic Talents in society, the Darrows and George Henner had set a legal precedent with Beechwoods; Talents, especially telepaths and empaths, needed space to function. If the government had trouble wresting control of all that space from the Wayne Foundation before the emergence of Talent, they’d find it impossible now. The Wayne Parapsychic Institute was here to stay, along with all the beautiful, untouched wilderness that came with it.

He had mixed feelings about the family, but Tim missed having space . He missed jogging through the orchards when the flowers were in bloom. He missed the lake and the gardens and the towering column of fig trees so thick daylight never reached the ground, and the way he could go entire days and not have anyone unexpectedly touching him. Life in the Linears was rough for someone whose Talents were almost all tactile based. Glimpsing that flash of green never failed to sharpen the pervading sense of homesickness, so he looked fixedly in the opposite direction until the underground swallowed him again.

He got off the train at the last stop and joined the hordes of fellow poverty line workers trudging home to the underground tenements, lit by the strobing multicolour flashes of TRI-D displays glittering and fritzing around them, promising a better life with a smile. They reflected vividly off bright, multicolour hair dyes that everyone used in these parts; kids, parents, labourers, little old babushkas, everyone. It seemed to be a fad down here. Most if not all of the crowd of commuters getting off at the Bowery stop joined the massive queue at the big ration station a few levels down. The crush and noise were immense. Tim hated to go there because there was no feasible way to maintain a personal space bubble, but he, like everyone else, could flash his Social Welfare armband under the scanner there and be issued with a box of rations for the week, which he and everyone else down here needed to survive on.

He kept his free hand clamped around the band. They were pretty valuable targets for thieves. Tim had been lucky that Bruce insisted they had multiple entries in the DNA Registry for the safety of their identities, and Tim had been clever enough to have one or two even the family hadn’t known about. A couple of forms and a DNA scan proved he was Alvin Draper, a legally born Gotham citizen under the two-child law. Even the officially signed permit to procreate was on the file.

Illegal children — and there were plenty of big families in these parts — couldn’t afford to get identified or their parents could face jail time and the family broken up by Welfare. The armbands were useful to these folk; stealing one was at least seven days more rations for a healthy adult before the profile got yanked from the system. Illegals lived at the fringes; they never went to school or got legitimate jobs. They were bread and butter recruits for gangs and prime targets for traffickers.

The good thing about being Tim was that he was always absolutely aware when somebody touched him, so he’d gotten by pretty well so far in the essentially lawless Bowery. By now the gangs local to his level were well aware he could do a lot worse than just throw a bad punch and try to run — so much so that he was gaining a rep as a makeshift one-man security force for his neighbours.

He gritted his teeth all the way to the scanner, grabbed his box and all but ran into more open spaces beyond the queue. He quietly headed for his assigned tenement, doing the same thing as the rest of the crowd and ignoring everyone. He cursed quietly when he saw a pop-up security booth at the main entrance to his Linear. They did random audits to make sure the tenements didn’t go over the maximum allowed occupancy. Today was apparently Tim’s turn. It wasn’t a problem, he had the armband certifying it as his home, but it was a hassle waiting in line with a heavy box of rations as people were scanned in one at a time.

Wearily he looked around for some amusem*nt while he inched forward, and immediately regretted it. His part of the queue was slowly filing past a Wayne Parapsychic Institute recruitment and information centre. Tiny little offices like that one were peppered liberally throughout Gotham, so anyone too intimidated at the thought of going all the way up to the estates could be quietly evaluated for Talent potential conveniently in their own neighbourhood. Tim doubted they got much business here; any untapped Talents were gold standard recruits for the gangs. They loved a good telekinetic or a precog in their ranks.

Still, the office was there. It was clearly a Wayne affair — the Lucite frontage was shiny and scratch, crack and graffiti free, and the TRI-D’s on either side of the door were state of the art, crystal clear coloured displays. The sensors must have registered his gaze, because the displays lit up with the usual, friendly spiel about Talents coming out of the shadows and into the community as educated and respected members of Gotham society. Well paid the displays stressed, because whoever had programmed them knew the local audience. There was a brief history of the discovery of Talents; images of the Darrows who had done the initial research and the hypersensitive Goosegg EEG they had used to measure psychic potential and activity, and also a brief outline of how, once Talents were a scientifically provable fact, the people who had them could be employed to do tangible good in mass manufacturing, crime solving, disaster management and disaster prevention too. And also, lately, launching space shuttles.

Then the display started in on the Waynes. Tim had a surreal moment of shuffling slowly past a picture-perfect to-scale holo of Bruce Wayne wearing his picture-perfect PR smile, talking glibly about surviving his parents’ harrowing deaths because of his latent Talent, and dedicating his life to making sure others didn’t discover their own Talents too late. Bruce’s voice-over went on even as his image dissolved into short clips of people — specifically, Bruce’s children — showing their Talents.

Tim’s hands tightened convulsively around his ration box. There was Dick Grayson, levitating in mid air, doing his family’s traditional zero-gravity acrobatics, because they hadn’t called them the Flying Graysons for nothing. There was Stephanie — god, he missed Steph — punching through about forty layers of bricks, and Cass (also sorely missed) calmly levitating a book while reading. There was Damian, assembling a hundred thousand lego into a massive castle set in seconds, because even those who hated him couldn’t deny the brat was disciplined as well as powerful.

There wasn’t a clip of Tim. Your Talents aren’t very photogenic, had been PR’s apologetic excuse. He only appeared once, very briefly, in a group shot with fifty other Institute members as part of ‘a community of Talents’ portion of the spiel. A bland, impersonal shot to show the Institute had a lot of personnel that weren’t involved with the Waynes directly.

Tim snorted, angrily jerking his head away. That said it all, really. He shuffled forward, willing the line to go faster, and told himself not to look at the spiel went on and on; more Bruce Wayne and his perfect (fake) smile, more shots and clips of a family that somehow never included Tim…

Almost against his will, his eyes were drawn back to the display.

He dropped the box.

There, on the holo, disintegrating a boulder to shards, was a young, carefree, gorgeous Jason Todd.

The display discretely noted an In Memoriam down the bottom.

Which, Tim thought hysterically, wasn’t exactly necessary seeing as he was very much alive, buried in a basem*nt in Arkham Hospital.

Chapter 3: 00:18

Chapter Text

Somehow, Tim managed to pull most of himself together, heft his ration box, and hoof it for the sanctity of his tenement the second he got through the random census check. Some of the others of the tens of thousands who lived there, crammed in like sardines, tried to flag him down as he was their resident fix-it, but he ignored them and beelined straight for his door.

He unlocked the door, disengaged the homemade secondary electro mag chain lock, darted in and slammed it shut behind him and then sank to the ground next to the closed door. He couldn’t think. He could barely breathe.

Psychometry was one of the rare psychic talents that didn’t require voluntary activation. You didn’t need to focus to use it; you needed to focus to stop using it. Otherwise raw data chains composed of a quadrillion molecules rolling back through their own history would sleet through the frontal lobe like a flood of lava and lightning. It stood to reason, then, that Tim had pretty good mental discipline.

Focus, he told himself as his chest tightened to choking point. Focus.

His fridge glowed green. It was tiny, a minifridge compared to what he was used to, sitting in his equally tiny apartment like a green alien cube. He latched onto that.

It was green because, of course, the company that had thought to Donate To The Poor had suffered a Stroke Of Almost Genius in the process. To whit; theft was very common, theft of complicated appliances even more so. The solution? Make the fridges so luridly phosphorescent that security nets couldn’t possibly fail to catch sight of them. The fact that the downsides of actually living with such an inconvenient permanent light source in a small living space had never occurred to the benevolent benefactors was the most scathing indictment of trickle-down philanthropy Tim had ever seen.

It sure as hell hadn’t been dreamed up by the Wayne Foundation, Tim was sure.

The ridiculousness of his fridge and the hopelessly ignorant good intentions surrounding it jolted Tim back into himself. He breathed. And breathed.

His first instinct was to call Bruce. Everything inside of him voted to call Bruce. Tim had come to the Manor after Jason’s… death. He’d been at ground zero of the devastation that event had caused Bruce Wayne and everyone around him. The Institute had barely survived it. Bruce had barely survived it.

Tim was on the cusp of drawing out his cheap, nasty comm and calling it in.

Except… it was actually only nearly all of him voting. A tiny, stubborn part of him railed against the thought of calling in for help, like some stupid kid who couldn’t handle life outside his little bubble. It wasn’t exactly admitting defeat, but they’d all come, wouldn’t they? They’d come and they’d ask him to come home and he would and… then he’d be back where he started.

Besides, a less emotional and more cerebral part of himself reasoned, did he know for a fact that it was Jason Todd? His memory was superlative, but one encounter and an old, fuzzy holo did not conclusive proof make. Tim was trained in deductive work, he knew better than to jump to conclusions.

He relaxed a bit. Of course, if he confirmed it was Jason then Bruce would have to be told. No matter Tim’s issues with the family, he wasn’t so bitter as to keep something like that from them just out of spite. But calling them all in only to find out he was wrong would be worse than crawling back, tail between his legs. Damian would never stop gloating. Bruce and Dick would be disappointed in him.

No, Tim had to prove it was Jason. That way he could return triumphant and capable rather than sad and defeated. Plus, deep in his heart, he admitted that he didn’t want to raise Bruce and Dick’s hopes only to dash them. Jason’s death had nearly destroyed them both.

Heart rate slowing now that he had a plan, a path to focus on, Tim scrambled over to his tiny work desk/dining nook. Really, the apartment was one tiny box—single cooking unit, fridge and sink on one side, a standing-room only shower and sanitary cubicle on the other, with his single size bed taking up the rest of the space save a narrow strip to walk down and a pop-out clothing storage chest in the wall. He considered himself fortunate to be by himself; there were whole families squeezed into boxes this small here.

He grabbed his salvaged scratch tablet and a stylus and began scribbling down unassailable methods of identity confirmation. Biometrics, Timeline, Positive Identification, Fingerprints, DNA … he hesitated and then wrote Telepathic Scan.

Biometrics he already had. The amount of match up between the man in the coma ward and the boy in the holos was uncanny enough, but it wasn’t proof. Jason Todd had come from the streets. These streets specifically, where illegally born children were legion. Jason Todd’s father was a known junk-popping deadbeat; it would be entirely possible and perhaps even probable he’d negligently sired a bunch of illegal children and left them to suffer in poverty and hunger. It was therefore possible that the guy in the coma ward was the late Jason Todd’s brother or half-brother, which would explain the similarities neatly.

Timeline… Tim only had a single relevant date to work with, there. The date of admission into the hospital was very shortly after the recorded date of Jason’s death, but as compelling as that sounded, he was reluctantly aware that the coma patient could have been comatose long before being admitted to Arkham. That was generally the last stop for a lot of people after medical bills ran too high, a situation which a long term coma would likely generate. It didn’t prove anything unless he could see an actual patient history. He might be able to access the hospital records system, so he put that one on the backburner.

There was no way to do a positive ID; the whole point of this was to establish identity without calling in Dick or Bruce, the two who had known him the most intimately before his death. Calling in Alfred or Babs wasn’t to be thought of. Tim loved them, but they were loyal to Bruce. They would not be willing to keep Tim’s involvement a secret.

Fingerprints and DNA were the cleanest way to be sure, but then he ran into the knotty problem of records access. Tim Drake could access those kinds of records as part of the management staff at the Institute, but good-for-nothing loner Alvin Draper? Not a chance. He could hack into the system, of course, but that left him vulnerable to the mighty intellect of Barbara Gordon. He would be amazed if there weren’t a hundred different red flag algorithms on all their files. Tim was pretty good, but Barbara had been the one to train him. He wasn’t a hundred percent sure he’d survive going up against the master, especially since with his admin duties at the Institute ramping up he’d fallen out of practice at sysops. He decided to save those as a last resort.

That left him with… telepathy.

He was a touch telepath. He hadn’t had occasion to use it much; there had been far more powerful telepaths all over the Institute and Bruce’s training had been about focusing on his shielding more than developing it. But, like the psychometry, it was involuntary. It would work with skin to skin contact whether Tim wanted it to or not. Or the person he was scanning.

He felt uneasy about using it on a coma patient. Consent was the foremost ethical principle Bruce drilled into all their heads. A person had to consent, or their family and proxies consent, or you had a warrant consenting for the good of the wider community. You couldn’t just go into someone’s head and start rummaging around.

The guy in the coma ward couldn’t consent.

On the other hand… if there was any consciousness to contact at all (and Tim was gloomily aware there might not be), there was every chance they’d consent happily. He knew for a fact that the inside of your own head could be the loneliest place imaginable.

That kind of ethical end-run made him uncomfortable, but it might be the most direct way to confirm his theory. All his other potential verifications were either too broad to be conclusive or would get the Institute involved. Should he be so quick to shrug off all he’d been taught because it was the most convenient option for him?

He was so deep into his ethical quandary that he nearly leapt to the ceiling when someone pounded on the door.

“Draper! You home?" a voice bellowed through the door. “Come on, man, I need to know if you have the thing!”

Right, his side job. Tim had almost forgotten. He brushed his fingertips against the rubber mat he’d carefully positioned under the door and out into the hallway. His cold read told him that Quentin was alone.

“Hang on,” Tim disengaged almost every lock and peered out of the crack before unfastening the chain. This was the Bowery. You didn’t take chances in the Bowery.

Quentin, no other name given, was tall, twiggy, pierced in every place you could remotely pierce, and had a shock of bubblegum pink hair spiked up over his face. “’Sup dude. You fixed it right?” Quentin played it cool but he was twitching. He’d brought his gang leader’s personal comm to Tim in a frantic state two days ago. The boss had trusted him with it and Quentin had accidentally dropped it down an air shaft and onto the underground railway tracks. A train hadn’t actually run over it, but it was just about the only misfortune that hadn’t been visited upon it.

Tim was gaining a rep for fixing just about anything.

“Yeah, I got it. You got?” Tim asked archly.

“Got your credits right here m’man!” Quentin activated the holo interface of his armband, showing a sum of transferrable blank credits, ready for deposit.

Tim closed the door, went over to his workshop and grabbed the repaired comm from its hiding place, then went back to open the door.

Quentin sagged to see his boss’ precious personal comm. “All data intact?”

“He didn’t lose a byte,” Tim affirmed. He waved his armband significantly.

Quentin transferred the laundered cash readily enough, snatching the comm during the handover as per Bowery transaction rules. “Duuude, you’re a lifesaver! Bossman would have sent me flying to Mars if I didn’t fix it.”

“I added a couple of apps,” Tim told him. “One that he can use to clone the phones of rival gangs.” And send that information straight to Tim’s home array, not that he was telling Quentin that. “But,” he held up a finger as Quentin’s eyes lit up. “I’ll only activate it for an extra fee.”

Quentin scowled. “Ain’t got no more cash, you feel me?”

Tim shrugged. “I can take other things. Not that,” he added as Quentin leered. “I haven’t got many connects in these parts. I could use a few more. I’m looking to expand the business and all my work’s word of mouth.”

Quentin’s lips twisted. “The people I know already got their own fix-its, fix-it,” he said slowly. “Didn’t want the boss to lose his sh*t; that’s why I went to you and not them.” Quentin looked down at the phone again. Tim didn’t have to be psychic to see Quentin doing the mental math. Just fixing the mistake wouldn’t net him much clout, but a shiny toy like Tim’s bespoke programs definitely would. “sh*t, okay. Look, you ever heard of Madam Mim?”

Tim’s blank face was a picture.

“f*ck, you really are new, aren’t you?” Quentin sighed. He dug out a holocard. “There. Three tenements south, deep in the basem*nt. She’s the best hair dyer this side of anywhere. Go see her, take that and she’ll give you a freebie. Believe me, she don’t do that often.”

Tim blinked. “You think I should dye my hair?” he asked slowly.

“I think if you want connects ‘round here, rich boy whoever-you-really-are,” Quentin looked him up and down disdainfully. “You might wanna start embracing the aesthetic. We good?”

Tim shrugged internally. Connections were connections. “Sure.” He drew out his comm and showed Quentin that the app was activated.

Quentin wandered off without a salutation and Tim closed the door behind him.

Not really hungry, he shoved the box of rations whole into the glowing fridge, threw the card onto the worktable, took a lukewarm, low pressure shower and staggered to bed.

Flopped on the thin mattress, Tim repeated his plan to himself. He’d try a telepathic scan tomorrow. Maybe he could reach coma guy. If so, then he’d have something to work with.

He drifted into an exhausted sleep.

His dreams were weird and surreal. He was sweeping out the ward in the hospital, red digital displays on the machines all counting down, while Damian shouted incomprehensibly at him from the entrance, his voice muffled and indistinct.

The clocks ticked down to one.

Tim woke up.

Chapter 4: 00:17

Chapter Text

Tim had checked the area three times, wired up a pressure sensor he’d ripped out of an old, defunct automatic door he’d been tasked to fix, and sighted the nurse doing her slow, hobbling rounds checking on the patients. She had done her check here for the day and Tim’s shift was all but over, so she might not notice that he hadn’t actually left.

Really, he was probably taking way too many precautions. The old lady did her work with ground-in routine drudgery, ninety percent of it handled by automatic systems. Even replacement of nutrient bags and vital signs were monitored by the hospital’s array of droids and the AI system. She could literally spend her days sitting at the duty desk knitting, which she did frequently.

Tim took a deep breath, readied his mental shield and offered a mute apology to the man in the bed. This was a violation, no matter how much he dressed it up as necessary.

He shuffled deeper into the shadows of the draping just for extra protection. Then he told himself to stop stalling and reached out to grab one large, cool hand.

Information flooded in. A lot of it was external because Tim had trained up his psychometry first and foremost. He disregarded the flood of routine days marching backwards through his mind, nurse checks, bag changes, doctors visits. He had to look past all the information and look for deeper data.

He found it.

A hazier, less rigidly fossilized experience than what coma guy’s dead skin flakes recorded. A fuzzy, fleeting, ephemeral thing, but a thing that was nonetheless moving. He wasn’t empty, a shell waiting for a grave. He was alive. Something inside him was awake.

Tim braced himself and went in deeper.

It was difficult, because coma patients had no external awareness; there was no sensory input to leave a trail into thought. The ward disappeared around Tim as he swam into the empty blackness, a terrifying sensory deprivation limbo where he could see, hear and feel nothing.

Then, worse than the silence, a maniacal cackle anyone who’d ever seen a holoreport on the Joker would recognize. HA. HA. HA.

It filled the universe, end to guffawing end. HAHAHAHAHAHA! The blackness coalesced into a terrifying, white and painted face, larger than a skyscraper, giggling away, leering with jagged green eyes, pupils tiny pinpricks in space.

Tim jolted back so far he could feel his body again, sitting huddled on the floor next to the patient’s bed, the feeling of those limp fingers gripped in his. He gritted his teeth and went down again, facing down that evil mask.

An impression, Tim told himself. A last memory, stuck on repeat like a fritzing holoreel. He’s not here.

It wasn’t just sight through. The sickly, corrupt feel of the Joker was here. But then, the Joker had been unique amongst Talents. All send, absolutely no receive. He turned people into little copies of himself, their cognitive pathways tangled up so badly it took months of telepathic therapy to untangle them, to pull out all the triggers and trauma.

The Joker had murdered Jason Todd. Of course a part of him would be left here. Jason had been, among many other things, an immensely powerful receiving Empath. A prime target to get infected by the Joker’s psychic madness.

Tim went deeper, searching for anything not the Joker. He pushed past the sicky, prickling feel of the madness and opened his eyes.

He stared at a wooden wall.

It was made of crates.

There were crates behind him too. He was in a long corridor of crates, lights flickering overhead.

“HAHAHAHAHAHA!” came the Joker’s high pitched, grating laugh. “WHERE ARE YOU LITTLE BIRDY? TIME TO COME OUT AND PLAAAAAAY!” The voice seemed to come from right on the other side of the wall of crates.

Startled, Tim, leaned forward to peer through a gap between crates. As he squinted, the shapes and colours on the other side moved. The Joker’s mad green eye appeared.

“BOO!”

Tim backpedaled and then ran for his life. The holoreports did not do the sheer terror of the Joker’s face justice. He flew down the corridor, picked a turn and then went down another, then another. Every step was dogged by maniacal laughter that rattled the light fittings overhead.

After twisting and turning and getting thoroughly lost in his panic, Tim found a wall — an actual steel wall. It was an edge. He followed it, haunted by mad giggles, up down and around the maze of crates until finally he emerged into a corridor with a door at the end of it. The door was locked, but it was an out and that was all he cared about.

In a distant way Tim was aware that none of this was actually real. It was a mindscape, a mental construct jigsawed together from memory and imagination. It was hard to reason with the way it felt, though; harsh, lurid and dangerous. Psychosomatic phenomena were very real, especially for Talents. Just because it wasn’t physically real didn’t mean Tim couldn’t get hurt here.

The door was his only option.

Tim hit the door, rattled it, looked frantically for a keypad or something he could hack…

… then was tackled violently to the ground by a heavy, tall body.

Yelping, Tim squirmed and struggled. Self defense lessons with Bruce had ended a long time ago. Tim was pinned on his front, with no leverage to flip over or grapple with his opponent. Left with few options, he jammed one elbow backwards as hard as he could and was rewarded with a pained grunt and a shifting of mass.

Tim squirmed and kicked free frantically, hearing that evil laugh echoing across the walls. He’d nearly managed to crawl completely free when a hand clamped around his ankle and yanked him back, flipping him over and slamming him back-first into the concrete with psychokinetically charged force. The air left his lungs in a rush.

Not because of the body slam. Because he was face to heaving face with a furious Jason Todd.

“You think you could fool me you f*cking psycho clown!” Jason roared. “You think I’m gonna let you waltz outta here ‘cause you picked a new skin to wear?”

“Jason w—!” Tim choked as Jason’s hands wrapped around his throat and squeezed mercilessly. Tim clawed at the long fingers, thinking hysterically that he was about to be psychically murdered by his childhood hero.

“Drop the skin, you f*cking clown!” Jason yelled, freeing up a hand and slamming his psychokinetically charged fist into the pavement, leaving a crater of dust and debris.

“Ja…son!” Tim wheezed desperately. “Loose… board! S-sec…cond…from… the… riiiight!”

That startled him. “What the f*ck?!” His grip loosed slightly.

“Loose board!” Tim yelled desperately. “Second from the right! Near the window box of the blue room!”

Jason jerked back from him, scuttling until his back hit the crates, face wild. “What… how the f*ck did you know that?” he scowled at the sound of soft, eerie chuckles echoing from somewhere in the warehouse. “He didn’t know that! No one knew that!”

“I found it,” Tim croaked, sitting up. “I came to live at the Manor after you… after you. I found your stash of… stuff, I guess. Under the loose floorboard, second from the right of the window box of the blue room.”

Jason’s eyes narrowed. “What was in it?”

“Blank credits,” Tim answered promptly. “Long term rations. A burner comm. Some holodiscs with stills on them. A couple of bottles of… I don’t know what they were but when I found them they stank.”

“Hair dye,” Jason muttered. “The special kind. sh*t,” Jason stared at him in wonder. “The Joker didn’t make you. He couldn’t have known that. f*cking hell, you’re real!”

The epiphany of hope on his face was almost too much to look at. Tim nodded.

Then he squeaked in surprise as Jason Todd — childhood hero and raging storm of Talent — engulfed him in a hug, clinging like a drowning man to a life preserver.

“Holy sh*t! Holy f*cking sh*t, kid,” Jason’s voice was rough. “How the f*ck did you even get here? Wait, are you scanning me right now?”

“Um… sort of?” Tim replied sheepishly.

Jason let him go and sat back, eyes glittering with relief, slightly wet. “f*ck, Bruce let you get away with that?”

“Bruce doesn’t know,” Tim admitted quietly.

Jason frowned. “The f*ck now? Ain’t I at the Institute?”

Tim shook his head. “You’re in Arkham.”

“What the f*ck?” all the hopefulness drained out of Jason’s face, as well as the colour. “He stuck me in Arkham?”

“Hospital, not Asylum,” Tim corrected hastily.

“Like that’s f*cking better!” Jason snapped. “I can’t believe he f*cking dumped me in Arkham! Did he really think that little of me?!” he rose to his feet, back stiff as a board.

“Jason, no, you don’t understand,” Tim got up too, hands raised. “Bruce didn’t put you here. Bruce thinks you’re dead. Everybody,” Tim added to Jason’s shocked face. “Thinks you’re dead. They never found your body after…” As if to finish his sentence, an unseen Joker let out a bellow of laughter. “What is that?”

“sh*t, don’t worry about that f*cker,” Jason grunted, hunkering down. “He’s just a leftover bit of sh*t in my head I can’t get rid of. He can’t hurt you; he’s just really f*cking annoying. He keeps tryin’ to get out the door, the f*cker.” Jason’s mouth was pinched. “So they think I’m dead, huh? How’d I wash up in Arkham of all places?”

Tim shrugged. “No idea. It was sheer dumb luck I even found you.”

“How did you find me?” Jason asked shrewdly. “You said you lived at the Manor after me, right? sh*t, B waited all of two seconds to replace me, huh?” he said bitterly.

“He didn’t replace you!” Tim protested.

“Oh come on, Replacement,” Jason rolled his eyes. “Dark hair, blue eyes, smart if you’re a capable enough telepath to break through a consciousness barrier and into the subconscious. B has a type when it comes to kids, yeah?” Jason made a face. “That came out wrong. Hell, I bet you anything you’re a Prime too.”

“You’d lose,” Tim crossed his arms over his chest, self-conscious.

Jason raised an eyebrow. “So, what, you’re like Barbie? Supercharged telepath?”

Tim shook his head. “Not really. I’m a touch telepath. Actually, I’m mainly a psychometrist. Object reading, that kind of thing. I’ve got mirror-touch empathy and I’ve got telekinesis, but…”

“So you’re a multi-Talent,” Jason snorted. “Kid, that makes you a Prime. Ain’t you ever read up on the diagnostic standard?”

“They changed the official diagnostic two years ago,” Tim sighed. He was still salty about it. “They have these new ranking systems now, T-1, T-2, and so on. My Talents are all touch based except for the telekinesis and I can literally only lift dust motes. That puts me right at the bottom of the scale,” Tim couldn’t keep the bitterness out of his voice. “And I’m not at the Institute now. I left. I work in the hospital. That’s how I found you.”

Jason frowned. “How long have I been under?”

“Five years, roughly.”

“sh*t!” Jason ran his fingers through his hair. “And no one knew?”

Tim shrugged. “They never found your body. The warehouse was destroyed by a tungsten bomb. They only found bits of the Joker. Tiny ones.”

“Right,” Jason’s mouth twisted. “It’s comin’ back to me.”

Tim sat in awkward silence while Jason digested the news. “I’m sorry about all this. I mean, I’m sorry it happened. But now that I can absolutely verify it’s you, we can get you back to the Institute and Bruce can—”

“No!” Jason lunged forward. “You absolutely can’t f*cking do that!”

“Why not?” Tim was wide eyed. “You can do telepathic therapy, all that stuff. You could wake up!”

“sh*t kid, don’t you know nothin’ about the Joker?” Jason’s mouth was a flat, resigned line. “He stuck triggers in my conscious mind. I wake up and boom,” Jason spread his hands. “Massive release of psychic energy. You know I was a Prime telekinetic. I took things apart. Explosively.”

Tim nodded mutely. He remembers the holo and the smiling young Jason, reducing a boulder to dust.

“That's why that Joker fragment keeps trying to get out. The real Joker left it in me because he wanted to set off his last great joke. The Joker might have died from his f*cking bomb but he left one behind,” Jason smiled cynically. “And it’s me.”

Chapter 5: 00:16

Chapter Text

Tim made his way through his rounds looking like a steampunk aesthete with a glowing ring of a data-monocle around one eye and an ancient Bluetooth headset clamped to his ear. One good thing about living in the Bowery — they never threw anything away. He recited lines from Persuasion by Jane Austen, which were transmitted from the microphone to the receiver Tim had planted in one of Jason’s ears.

In the last few weeks he’d been through all the Brontes, Voltaire, Doyle, and Chesterton, reciting until he was hoarse off the text scrolling across the tiny monocle screen next to his eye. Whatever else came of this, Tim was getting an excellent education in ancient English literature.

Soon his shift would be over and his real job would begin.

Tim had reluctantly acquiesced to Jason’s request not to get the Institute or especially Bruce involved. Jason was of age now, he was the only one who got to have a say in his own treatment. Tim had already violated that right once and felt he must owe it to Jason now to respect his wishes. It had taken a bit of cajoling and argument, but Jason had agreed to let him at least try to find the psychic triggers the mad clown had left in his brain that would cause him to lose all control should he ever hit consciousness. Tim wasn’t an expert in telepathic therapy, but he knew a little bit. He was sure with time and lots of research, he could find a way for Jason to return to the waking world.

In the meantime, every shift, every train ride in and out, every moment he wasn’t actually conversing with another person, which wasn’t often, he was reading into a microphone. Jason had been stuck inside his own head for five years. He’d built a little nest for himself in the mindscape copy of the warehouse where he’d died, mostly filled with books. When Tim noticed some of the books were half blank, he realised Jason could only read things he’d already read before. Hence, Tim’s foray into literature therapy.

It was… different, just hanging out with Jason. They’d sit for hour upon hour in Jason’s mental landscape guarding the locked door against a crazed last fragment of the Joker and talking about everything under the sun. Jason had so many questions about the outside world, things that had happened while he’d been asleep, stuff he’d talked about to four imaginary walls because the Joker was a really sh*tty cellmate, in Jason’s words.

Jason had been alone a long time. Tim had too, in his own way. Trapped working with adults for the last couple of years, relations with his peer group had dwindled to almost nothing, especially after Steph and Cass both took up specialised training with Babs at the remote Clocktower Academy. Anyone of Tim’s age was still at the Titans Academy, learning how to use their Talents for the greater good. Tim admitted to himself he’d never been that good at making friends.

Tim had always thought of Jason as a friend; in a strange, two degrees of separation way. When he’d come to the Manor, half insane from the noise in his head and skeletal from malnutrition, it had been just Alfred and Bruce living there. Proximity to Bruce had completely nulled Tim’s out of control Talent and allowed him to start learning to function again, but it had been so soon after Jason’s death that Bruce hadn’t been in the right mindset to interact with him very much and Alfred was perpetually busy trying to keep the Institute afloat while Bruce swam through his mire of grief. Neither of them had really had the time or energy to actually deal with Tim. He was mostly left on his own — which hadn’t bothered him, because he was used to that — with the Manor as his playground. And the Manor had stored a billion memories, the most recent of which was Jason Todd.

So Tim the psychometrist would sit at the breakfast table and have the memory of Jason sitting at the exact same table; so clearly it was almost like he was there. He had memories of Jason running down hallways, sliding down banisters, playing pranks on Bruce. It was like Tim, in seeing all of these memories, had made friends with Jason’s ghost. He was everywhere Tim looked. After seeing all the loving gestures between Jason and Bruce, Tim couldn’t resent Bruce for his unspoken rejection; the man in those memories was a totally different Bruce than the hollowed out version that lived in the Manor now. Tim had always known that he could never live up to that memory. He hadn’t even had sufficient charm to make his parents love him.

Actually getting to talk to Jason, his almost-friend, the ghost he’d once lived with, was everything Tim had secretly hoped it would be. Jason was snarky and funny and clever. He liked Tim, he lit up every time Tim came back. What a heady and euphoric sensation it was, to have someone that glad to see you, even if Tim acknowledged that Jason wasn’t exactly spoiled for choice.

Getting to sit with Jason every day made all the toil, all the aches, the bad food, the heartbreak, all of it, worth it.

So, Tim clocked out on time every day, fizzing with anticipation. The hospital administrator, the bleached grey ghost that haunted the halls and corridors, often glared at the scut workers if they didn’t clock off on time to the minute — no slacking off but no overtime either. She didn’t seem to like Tim very much, judging from the way she watched him particularly.

But after clocking out he’d head to the supply room to ‘store his trolley’, dart out the other side of the supply room, and make his way back down to the ward. He could sneak under the sterile drape and sit perfectly hidden for hours on end, considering the only night nurse was the hospital AI and whatever doctor was on call upstairs.

Jason was in good spirits today. He’d read all of Austen but he liked to just be able to listen to it without struggling to recall finer details of the prose. He was happily re-reading Persuasion when Tim arrived. “Hey Baby Bird.”

“Don’t call me that,” Tim huffed, even though he knew it was a lost cause.

“You’re Robin, you’re a tiny, weeny, itty, bitty scrap of bones,” Jason delicately turned a page. “Therefore, you are the Baby Bird. QED. I am not accepting appeals at this time.”

“I’m not Robin,” Tim denied vehemently. “Not anymore.”

“Right, where’d we get up to on the Bruce Wayne Drama Llama Spectacular?” Jason put down his book. “Dickie invoked his wrath by becoming a full-time police consultant rather than a freelancer. Babs,” Jason grimaced. “Got paralysed by some anti-Talent lunatic. Where’s she at with therapy?”

“Babs has no telekinesis, she can’t pull off what Bruce did with the bullet in his back,” Tim shrugged. “But Alfred’s doing his healing hands thing with her. It’s slow, it might take a few years because the myelin sheath is a bitch to fix, but they’re hoping she’ll regain full function. It honestly didn’t slow her down much.”

“Well, yeah,” Jason smiled, relieved. “It’s Babs. So, then Bruce took you in, Replacement,” he grinned at Tim’s glare. “And apparently also adopted the world's most powerful Empath as a side note.”

“Cass,” Tim smiled, bittersweet. He really missed Cass. “You’d like her. She’s a total badass.”

“Natch,” Jason nodded. “So what was your story? Did your parents die? That’s generally how it goes.”

“No,” Tim sighed. “My parents are alive. They gave me up to the Institute.”

“Didn’t want a Talent kid, huh?”

“Oh no, they wanted one,” Tim snorted. “Talent was the new black, especially when B got the Institute off the ground. But the cheap baby designer they went to didn’t have a full map of genetic markers because, you know, no one does. So, they activated a few promising sites and then took a couple of big, fat guesses with the rest. My parents wanted a Prime. What they got was… me. The kid who screamed bloody murder when anyone touched him, who had overload seizures, who couldn’t wear a lot of normal stuff or eat a lot of normal stuff because psychometry is not a pretty, photogenic Talent. Eventually,” Tim scuffed the concrete ground of the mindscape. “They just dumped me with a housekeeping AI and a homeschool bot and took off to Mozambique or Montreal or Mogadishu or wherever the cruiser jockey set was this week.”

“Oh,” Jason seemed to realize he’d struck a nerve. “Wait, you said they gave you up to the Institute?”

“The Housekeeper Mac broke down,” Tim shrugged. “Food stopped coming. I spent weeks and weeks trying to fix it, but when I started passing out from hunger I hiked to the Institute. My parents’ estate was right on the border of the Wayne Holdings. The police made a call, my mother asked if they could legally give me up to the Institute. Turns out they could, so they signed the papers long distance and then got on with their lives.”

Jason scowled. “Wow, that’s really f*cking sh*tty. No wonder Bruce took you in.”

“Bruce didn’t take me in,” Tim clenched his fists into his work overalls. “The state forced him to take me because I was an out of control Talent and Bruce was the only Talent on record that can completely block another Talent. See? I’m not your replacement. People replace things with other things that they actually want.” The words came out far more bitter than Tim intended.

“You’ve been bottling this up for a while, huh?” Jason said knowingly.

“Huh?” Tim gaped at him.

“Receiving Empath, remember? When you showed up here and I finally got a read on you the one thing I got more than anything else was pressure,” Jason nodded to Tim’s slack jawed amazement. “Like just constant, heavy pressure. You internalize a lot.”

“Oh,” Tim sat down amongst the nest of books. He thought about that. “I guess I do,” he admitted slowly.

“Come on,” Jason sat down next to him. “You can talk to me about it, if you want. It might help you feel better.”

“You’re not supposed to be my therapist, Jason,” Tim sighed. “My problems are just… stuff.”

“Everyone’s problems are just stuff, Baby Bird,” Jason nudged him. ‘Sides, I ain’t got nothin’ better to do.”

Tim shrugged. Given the opportunity to vent, he wasn’t sure what to say.

“So, Bruce was forced to take you on,” Jason led winningly. “You lived at the Manor, right? Are you sure about that forcing thing? Because the Bruce I remember never let anyone into the Manor he didn’t intend to keep. That was his parents’ home; he’s got, like, feels about it.”

“Bruce changed after you died,” Tim murmured, looking up at the ever-present rafters of the warehouse and listening to the mad, distant laughter of whatever was left of the Joker. “He didn’t want to work with kids anymore.”

“So, he didn’t train you?”

“No-o, he trained me,” Tim replied slowly. “Like, he taught me meditation and shielding and all that stuff. He taught me a lot about his crime solving work because psychometry is really useful for that. And he taught me the Discipline.”

The Discipline was a martial art based around breathing techniques and full spatial awareness that was supposed to fool the brain and body into outputting the highest possible strength and cognition, the kind that you’d usually only get at the peak of an adrenaline rush. Bruce was a big proponent of the Discipline being used by Talents because it both expanded their scope and gave greater control. This was the area where he divided fairly sharply with the Parapsychic Institute started by the Darrows and currently run by Rhyssa ap Owen. They advocated that Talents shouldn’t learn to physically fight in order to maintain their strict pacifism. While Bruce did agree that no one wanted to see Talents turned into soldiers — that would end badly for everyone — he didn’t think it practical or wise for a Talent to walk around the world physically defenceless except for their Talent. As he well knew, the Talent would usually only protect the Talent themselves, not anyone around them.

“Sounds like you got the full Bruce Wayne experience,” Jason mused. “That’s the same thing that happened to me and Dickie.”

“I said he trained me,” Tim murmured. “I never said he finished training me. He trained me for three years. But then about three years ago, he just… stopped.”

Jason blinked. “Stopped? Like, he said he wasn’t gonna anymore?”

Tim shrugged. “He never said anything. I think that’s the worst part. One day we had regular meditations and sparring and things scheduled, and the next he was ‘busy’. All the crime scene stuff continued for a little while, but he stopped doing that too. He started me on management modules and gave me some stuff to do around the Institute instead.”

“If you were Robin, you musta gone out into the field,” Jason pointed out.

“Oh, I did,” Tim nodded. “I was good at it, too,” he added with no false modesty. He’d liked field work. It had been the first time in his life his psychometry, an otherwise uncomfortable, debilitating, and high maintenance Talent, had had a practical use. He could solve crimes, track criminals, find lost things. It had been the greatest time of his life, going out as Robin in the field. His mouth turned down, the bitter feeling of betrayal turning in his chest for a moment.

“I’m guessing that didn’t work out in the end,” Jason said shrewdly. “Why the sudden change? What do you think happened?”

“Oh, I know what happened,” Tim gave a bitter laugh. “Three years ago Damian arrived in our lives, that’s what happened.”

“You mentioned a Damian before,” Jason nodded, looking curious. “Who is he in all this f*ckupedness?”

“Damian Wayne,” Tim replied. “Bruce Wayne’s actual blood child.”

“Holy sh*t ,” Jason’s mouth dropped open. “Someone had the balls to file for a baby license and put Bruce Wayne’s name down as the baby daddy?”

“Not even that,” Tim was reluctantly amused by this part. “Do you remember Talia Al Ghul? Dick said she was around when he was at the Manor, so maybe you met her?”

“No f*cking way!” Jason’s eyes bulged. “He actually f*cking married her?”

“You met her?”

“She’d show up every couple of years like a bad credit,” Jason snorted. “Mostly she’d stay long enough to f*ck B over then disappear back into her creepy-ass cult. Why the f*ck would Bruce even…?”

“Oh, he didn’t,” Tim shook his head. “Not in the way you’re thinking. Damian’s technically illegal. No permission was filed to have him. The Gotham Genetic Vault was broken into and set on fire; turned out Talia had paid a bunch of guys to do it so she could get a hold of Bruce’s genetic material. From there I guess it was just a turkey baster and time.”

“Holy sh*t,” Jason scrubbed his hair. “That’s about fifteen different shades of f*cked up. I could smell the crazy on that lady. Does she still believe in all that ‘Talents are a superior species’ nonsense?”

“Yep,” Tim snorted. “And she raised Damian until he was ten before dumping him on Bruce like the world’s worst Christmas present, so you imagine what a treat it is to live with him.”

Jason whistled. “A brat.”

“A demon brat. From literal hell,” Tim affirmed. “Think Ra’s Al Ghul but drained of all patience and charm and with a superiority complex that would make Ghengis Khan look meek, and ethical principles that could make a mafia don blush.”

“Don’t hold back, Baby Bird,” Jason said dryly, nudging him. “Let it all out.”

“Hey, you want to talk replacement, that’s what he is, not me,” Tim blushed anyway. “He came along and suddenly I’m a glorified paper pusher and quasi CEO while Bruce and Dick train up the ungrateful gremlin to do all the things they were going to teach me. I reserve the right to be a little salty about it.”

“That’s fair,” Jason grinned and nudged him again. “But at least you admit it. Feel better?”

“I don’t know,” Tim rested his chin on his hand gloomily. “I usually feel better about problems I can actually fix. Damian’s a Prime, better trained than me in every single way, and he’s got Bruce and Dick wrapped around his little finger. Little not-Prime me is a winged donkey compared to their Pegasus and they’ve made their preference pretty clear. What can I do about that? Nothing,” Tim shook his head. “Nothing at all.”

“We-ell,” Jason said slowly, considering. “I can’t do anything about demon brats or Bruce and Dick being assholes. But the training sh*t? Maybe I can help you with that.”

Tim turned to look at him. Jason’s fifteen-year-old face, the same but different to what he grew into on the outside, looked back at him earnestly. “You think?”

“I could teach you to fight, definitely,” Jason affirmed. “I was so good at it Bruce had me teaching the kids, you know, before this happened.” In the background, the specter-Joker let out another haunting laugh. “And Bruce has already given you the basics of the Discipline, so it’s not like you’re starting from scratch. I can help you with your telekinesis too.”

“Nobody can help me with my telekinesis,” Tim snorted. “I’ve tried everything. All I can manage is dust motes. After that, it’s all migraines.” He grimaced, long since discouraged about the possibility of improvement. “I don’t think I need to know that much about my kinesis, really.”

“So you’re a micro-kinetic, not a macro-kinetic,” Jason pointed out. “Just like me. What, that’s a surprise?” he added while Tim looked up at him. “How do you think I blew sh*t up? I’m just breaking a lot of teeny, tiny bonds between molecules, a lot of them all at once.”

Tim blinked. “Bruce never mentioned that. Mind you, he didn’t really talk about you afterwards at all.”

“Of course he didn’t talk about it,” Jason sneered. “I wanted to go into the military because they wanted space pilots and, you know, space . I always wanted to go to space. They’d have taken me in a heartbeat because the whole exploding thing is kinda revered in the military. Bruce and I were fighting about it when I sort-of died, ‘cause he doesn’t like guns or the institutions that glorify them. Bruce probably regrets ever training me to use it that way because it made me too attractive as a recruit. I bet you my trust fund he was gun shy about training up another micro like he did me.”

Tim went silent for a long time.

“Baby Bird?” Jason asked worriedly when Tim’s thousand-yard stare persisted. “You okay?”

“Do you really think he did that?” Tim asked in a strangled voice. “Do you think he… kept me from exploring it on purpose?”

Oh. Jason regretted letting out that bitter little note. Timmy looked devastated at the thought of his trusted mentor deliberately sabotaging him. “Um… it may not be what you’re thinking. B can be kind of overprotective. I bet it got a lot worse after I was gone. Maybe he didn’t want to teach anyone anything that would have made you attractive to the military, in case they took you away. They’re always pushing for mandatory Talent conscription; that sort of thing really gets to B.”

“All telekinesis can be weaponized,” Tim said in a small voice. “He trained Dick. He trained Damian.” Both macro-kinetics and then some.

“Micro is different,” Jason persisted. “Micro is worse. The stuff I destroyed couldn’t be fixed, even with a forge. I unmade sh*t. The military was practically drooling over me. Look, I don’t know what was going through B’s head. No one does. But he has been known to use his good intentions as an excuse to meddle. If he did then that’s just B being an officious prick, Baby Bird. It’s got nothing to do with you. You’re awesome!”

“You think?” Tim’s voice was still small.

“Timmers, do you have any idea what it was like in here with just him,” Jason jerked a thumb at the crate wall and the Joker giggled on cue. “For company? Knowing I was trapped and alone? I mean, it didn’t feel like five years to me, but I know it hasn’t been a day either. You found me, and you charged in like a white knight and… now I’m not alone anymore. Bruce wouldn’t have done that; too many ethical issues. Dickiebird would have wanted to, but would dither until the end of time. They’ll both try to wake me up, whether I want to or not.”

“But if I can find the triggers…” Tim started.

“Look, you can research if it makes you happy,” Jason sighed. “I doubt whether you’ll find much. The Joker wasn’t in the habit of keeping his victims alive. We’ll probably never know how he did what he did. If you can find ‘em, swell. But I don’t wanna wake up, Baby Bird. Not unless you can prove I won’t kill anybody. You respect that.”

Tim nodded. “But if I find something…”

“I’ll listen. No promises. And I make the final call,” Jason jabbed a finger at himself.

“Okay,” Tim nodded. “I promise. I’ll try to find out how you wound up in Arkham, too. You somehow got back to Gotham and ended up in the medical system without anyone doing a DNA test or printing you. Forget finding the Joker’s triggers, that’s impossible unless someone did it deliberately.”

“Sure, knock yourself out,” Jason sighed. “I doubt you’ll get much out of it. Come on,” he got up and offered a hand. “Let’s get you on the mats. I wanna see what your form is like.”

Tim felt a frisson of excitement. He was going to be trained by Jason Todd, the best fighter Bruce had ever produced.

This was going to be great!

Wait.

He was going to be trained by Jason Todd, the best fighter Bruce had ever produced.

The realization dawned on him as he watched Jason’s evil smirk.

This was going to hurt.

Chapter 6: 00:15

Chapter Text

Tim settled his aching bones into the padded chair of the train, wishing with all his heart that he had the credits to throw at the nearest cafe to get a cup of real, genuine coffee. He dreamed about real coffee these days. The Linear markets only had sad little freeze-dried coffee. It was enough to make him cry.

Even after just two months of training, Tim still went to bed feeling like his limbs were about to fall off. He wasn’t out of shape, but he was out of practice in the Discipline. Of course, the forms practicing and sparring in Jason’s mindscape didn’t have the same physical effects as the real world — everything was muffled there — but Jason had worked out a training schedule for Tim to do on the outside. Peak physical prowess was a huge advantage in the Discipline; it made it easier to hit the trance-like state of low latent inhibition and high pain tolerance that made a fighter smart, fast, strong, and nearly invulnerable.

And since they met in Jason’s mindscape, Jason would know if he lied and blew it off.

So, for the last gruelling nine weeks Tim had been working three jobs; the coma ward, freelance fix-it, and labouring at the rail tunnel construction site, where they’d take anyone walking in who could swing a resohammer. He was dogged by death by exhaustion, his bones feeling as brittle as kindling after a five hour casual shift down in the damp black, breaking rocks, lifting loads, and shifting scree by the cart load. Then he was back to his tenement to fall into bed. Then it was wake up, get to the coma ward, and spend the day using his micro-kinesis to help him clean so he could get a feel for how it really worked and what the limits were. That was exhausting in its own way; mentally draining as he shifted each individual dust molecule while it tried to proclaim its history to him. It was getting to the point where he didn’t need to be touching them to feel them, which meant he was constantly having to focus to get control over it. That in turn meant even more energy expenditure, which was yet another layer of grinding exhaustion piled on his steadily strengthening shoulders.

It was a nightmare. The world had turned into a blur of exhaustion, aches, and hunger because all the psychic exertion combined with the physical meant his metabolic rates were going through the stratosphere.

Plenty of days he wished for death. But Jason’s smile every time he came back to see him kept him trying. If nothing else, he was giving Jason a purpose after a long, aimless stint in prison.

And also doing his best to get him out of that prison.

He had a theory.

Someone had put Jason into that coma deliberately.

It all made sense. Jason could still use his psychic abilities even in the mindscape. Tim knew how to read an EEG. Even the crummy antique paper reel one Jason had been hooked up to clearly showed beta and theta wave activity. Plus the fact that he still had a fully cognitive, functioning mind in his mindscape — no aphasia, no memory issues, and no hierarchical decision making problems — all pointed to one conclusion; there was no serious brain trauma. There might be a little, because the subconscious mind that Tim was effectively dealing with was a different animal than the conscious one, but in terms of physical condition and processing ability, Jason’s brain was absolutely fine. He should have woken up a long time ago.

Joker’s triggers aside — and Tim absolutely believed the madman had left those — someone had arranged for Jason to be transported home under the radar. If Tim could get more information on how they had, he might find out why and also how they were keeping Jason under. The Joker wouldn’t have wanted that; he would have wanted the mayhem his little time bomb would cause.

He needed more information on how Jason had come to be at Arkham. Tim was thinking about breaking into the Hall of Records.

The Gotham Hall of Records was a massive art deco monolith in midtown, housing the e-data of every citizen in Gotham, past and present. It contained all the biomedical and timeline census data, even records of John Does, and records of every single body that passed through the Quarantine Barrier to get in and out of Jerhattan, everything. He’d been thinking for days about how to get in there and find out how Jason had ended up in Arkham. If he could just get in, he was sure he could find a trail to follow that would explain how Jason’s body got taken from Ethiopia and then smuggled here. And maybe why.

Anyone could access information at the Hall of Records. The problem was that facial rec systems in midtown were far better maintained than anything on the north island. Tim’s face was still plastered on TRI-Ds across the city. There was no way he wouldn’t be flash-scanned when he went through security; and no way the no doubt legion of search algorithms planted in every server in the city wouldn’t send that information straight to the Institute.

He stretched his hardening muscles idly as his mind chewed on the problem. He was tired. It was lucky he was making extra money these days because he was also hungry. All the extra workouts, both physical and kinetic, were ramping up his metabolism to the point where any moment not dedicated to training and research was spent squeezing whatever extra kilojoules he could find out of the thriving black markets that ran all over the Linears.

Suddenly, his hazy world of contemplation gave a terrifyingly violent lurch as the train rocked and screamed. It was an old-fashioned rail one rather than the international pneumatic expresses, so the stop was juddering and violent. Tim was thrown to the ground, the world becoming a terrifying wash of noise, sound and smoke.

He struggled to his feet in the stampeding crowd, bashed this way and that like pinball. It was a proper Linear Stampede. Stampedes were terrifying, the boogeyman and constant bane of the whole region that every sane person feared. Too many people were packed far too closely for safety in the Linears. It only took one small panicky mob to set off a chain reaction that would turn into a heaving, hysterical crush that if you lost your footing or tried to fight, killed you dead. That’s why the riot police were so draconian about cracking down on large gatherings down in the Linears. Stampedes were treated the same as natural disasters, with all the mass death and suffering that implied.

Bereft of any sane option, he was forced to move with the fleeing crowd. They were on a station. Tim couldn’t get an angle on the signs to see which one past the crush of people flowing through it.

A skinny hand grabbed his arm tight. “COME ON!” Quentin bellowed, bubblegum pink hair glowing like a halo in the light of the TRI-D displays. “WE’VE GOT TO GET HOME! SHELTER IN PLACE!” He pulled Tim onwards while Tim tried to work out if they were actually at the Bowery station or not.

Quentin was getting pummelled by the crowd, so Tim had to help him up off the ground and take the lead. Safe space , his brain repeated. Safe space, safe space, safe space …

This sort of thing happened sometimes. The Linears were a frothing mess of alchemy, always moving, always on the edge of some blow out. There were gangs, cults, disaffected and discriminated ethnic groups and just plain old crazy people. On any given day there was usually some sort of violence in the Linears, though things of this scale were not so common.

This was bad. They might call in the Institute and have them bring in Talents for crowd control. Which probably meant Dick would be here. Tim pressed on through the seething mass grimly.

He got to his door, Quentin doggedly following him.

“Hey man,” he said shakily as they left the noise behind them. “This is yours, right? Can I shelter here?” Quentin was white eyed and shaken.

“Sure,” Tim panted, unlocking the door. “Go on in.” He gestured.

Quentin went in…. to an exact replica of Tim’s room back at the Institute. Everything was there. His old bed, his comm unit, his half finished projects, all of it. Quentin froze. “What the….”

“Really, Damian?” Tim said coldly from behind him. “You think after three straight years of you mind f*cking me I don’t know what you mind f*cking me feels like?”

‘Quentin’ scowled angrily and his face melted into a spitting mad Damian Wayne, who crossed his arms to cover his humiliation at being caught out. “It hardly matters now, Drake, I’ve seen where you live.” He gestured around the mindscape which, like Quentin’s face, had been ripped from Tim’s own memories while he slept.

“You saw what I wanted you to see,” Tim retorted. “All you know is I’m living in the Linears; nothing you didn’t already know.”

Damian gave him a blank look but Tim returned it steadily. This was Tim’s dreamscape; Damian couldn’t lie to him here. They were literally inside his unconscious mind and whatever other enormous burdens tactile Talents had placed on him, Tim knew he was an excellent natural shielder. Mostly because he knew it drove Damian nuts that he couldn’t just yank his secrets straight out of his brain like he did with literally everyone else. Well, when Tim was awake, anyway. Sleep made for a trickier beast. The unconscious mind couldn’t be easily shielded, it was too ephemeral.

Damian’s face grew more constipated as his, admittedly very subtle, telepathic probing netted him no new information. He didn’t know where exactly Tim lived and wouldn’t be able to find Quentin. Quentin was an illegal, and he’d managed to get away with not having a record. “How like a Drake,” he spat instead. “To have a tantrum and run away. Like a coward.”

Tim’s fists clenched. “You’re right. I’m a huge coward. You’re grateful to be rid of me. So what the hell do you want, demon brat? I got places to be.” If Damian thought he could goad Tim into slinking back, well, Tim’s had lots of practice ignoring him.

Damian scowled harder. “My father,” he growled like the words were being dragged from him. “Wishes you to come home. Grayson also.”

Tim had a brief moment of consternation. “And they sent you to tell me this?” he asked sceptically. “You?”

Damian faltered ever so slightly. “And why not?” he snapped haughtily. “I am the most powerful Prime of record. Who else would be powerful enough to find you amongst the damned?”

“Except for Reidinger,” Tim jabbed automatically because a reminder that a quadriplegic 'peasant boy' at the Jerhatten Institute beat him to the highest power ranking pissed the little gremlin off to no end. His mind was whirring away with a thousand possibilities. He may not be a powerhouse like literally everyone in his life, but Tim was a damn fine detective. “Bruce could,” he glared at Damian suspiciously. “Babs, too. If they were lucky and timed it right, like you obviously have. A plea from them would have had far more impact than anything coming from your mouth.”

Damian met his gaze without flinching, but he didn’t respond, which was telling enough.

“They don’t know, do they?” Tim deduced. “You decided to ping me all on your own. What the f*ck, Damian, why?” Tim nearly yelled. “You got what you wanted! You wanted me gone and I was gone! Do you hate me so much that even living down with the peasants where a no-Talent like me belongs isn’t enough to satisfy your need to torment me? What the f*ck is wrong with you?!”

Damian recoiled, genuinely shocked. “I…”

“You got Bruce, you got Dick, hell, you got f*cking everything in the divorce! What the hell else can you take from me?”

Damian’s face screwed up. “I did not have Father. You did!” he shouted back furiously. “You went to the Institute with him every day, all day! You had his time! He was giving you his legacy. My legacy!”

“What the hell are you talking about?” Tim ran fingers through his hair in sheer frustration. “I didn’t spend my days with Bruce. I spent five damn minutes a day with Bruce! The trip there and the trip home, combined! We would walk in and then he’d take off into his lab that I couldn’t access and never have, while he stuck me with all the boring paperwork!”

“As if I would believe—!”

“Check it,” Tim cut him off. “Check the damn records if you don’t believe me. f*cking hell, are you really doing all of this because you begrudge me five f*cking minutes of increasingly awkward small talk? Really? You, who he trained in the Discipline, not me. You who he took into the field, not me. You,” Tim’s knuckles went white over his fists. “Who he takes on trips and adventures and even to a f*cking space station, and not me?”

Damian’s mouth was open, but no sound came out.

“You can keep your five minutes and your field work and your adventures, demon brat! You’ve got all of him now! I don’t want anything from any of you. Especially you!”

The air rang with Tim’s words, filled with bitter conviction. This had boiled inside him for too long. He couldn’t deny it was a relief to let off some of the terrible pressure, even if the aftermath didn’t feel as satisfying as he thought it would. Damian didn’t look defeated, he looked baffled and angry.

“So, you know,” Tim panted eventually. “You won. I guess that’s all you needed to hear. I’m going to wake up now.”

“Drake, wait,” Damian held up a hand. “I saw you die.”

Tim’s brow wrinkled. “What?”

“I had a vision. A precog,” Damian insisted.

“You don’t have any precognition longer than ten minutes,” Tim snorted skeptically. “The al Ghul’s don’t see the future, they make it, isn’t that the family motto? It was pretty much the only Talent they didn’t stuff into your stolen genes.”

Damian bridled at the mention of his chequered heritage, but continued. “I do have long term visions. Not often,” he admitted the fault grudgingly. “Usually only when I paint. It’s normally… big things. Big disasters, many dead people, that sort of thing. I can’t control it, but sometimes I slip into a trance and…” he mimed painting on a canvas. “I haven’t had one in a while. Jerhatten tends to be peaceful with Talents forewarning most major and minor incidents. But I had one three months ago. I painted you . You were… coming apart. Like you were turning into dust. I saw your death.”

Tim’s eyes narrowed. He was silent for a while.

Then he said, “And what bothered you about that, exactly? That I was dying without you being involved? Or that you won’t get to see it in person?”

Damian flinched, wide eyed. “You do not believe me?” he squawked.

“Are you kidding?” Tim snorted. “After all the stunts you pulled? Mis-programmed skimmer ring any bells? Frayed electrical wires in the pre-cog holoroom? Virus in my GPS? That was a classic, I nearly drowned.”

Damian looked bewildered. “You knew about…”

“Psychometrist,” Tim jabbed a thumb at his chest. “Your mother couldn’t teach you to block out my Talent. Of course I knew when you sabotaged my stuff. And all the rest of it. All of it.”

Damian’s face screwed up. “Regardless of our… difficult past, I am not lying to you now,” he tried. “As you pointed out, where is the gain for me if you come home?”

“I’m sure you’ll find something,” Tim scrubbed his face wearily. “Get lost, Damian. I’m not biting. And tell the real reason you’re here that it was as much his fault as yours.”

“Drake you imbecile, you ne—”

The train dove into the tunnel.

Tim woke up.

He’d fallen asleep on the train, when the train went over the brief break into daylight between the two underground systems, where the steel and concrete protection of the Linears was temporarily nulled.

Well… f*ck.

Chapter 7: 00:14

Chapter Text

Jason hit the floor with thud. “Okay, okay,” he panted. “You wanna talk about it? In fact, please let’s talk about it before you kill me.”

Tim flushed. “Sorry.” Maybe he’d been a bit vigorous in practicing forms today. He thought he’d worked out his irritation scrubbing the ward. It had been sparkling by the time he’d clocked off and snuck back for Jason Time.

Jason grinned at him, propping himself up on his elbows. “You can put me on the ground any time, Baby Bird.”

Danger, danger, abort! Tim’s mind klaxoned at him. He’d made it his solemn, extremely secret mission that Jason Todd, above average telepath and top-of-the-range empath, would never, ever, ever, ever find out about Tim’s pathetic childhood crush. A crush that persisted in hanging around being extra pathetic when he and Jason wrapped around each other and tried to get the other beneath them…

That came out wrong.

Anger, Tim thought frantically as images of sweaty, panting bodies in entirely the wrong context started downloading through his frontal lobe. Focus on the anger. “I can’t believe that little brat tried to dreamfast me.” God, it was still annoying. Damian's absolute inability to respect anyone else’s boundaries was one thing from the Institute he absolutely didn’t miss.

Jason curled his long legs underneath him and patted the floor. “You don’t think he might be telling the truth?”

“Damian? Trying to save me?” Tim scoffed. “You did hear me give you a list of various sabotages he tried, right?”

“Well, yeah, but f*cked up as that was, I can see his endgame with that,” Jason rubbed his forehead. “I can’t see his endgame here. Like you said, he wanted you gone. He would have had to scan day and night for weeks just to catch you at the right moment on the train. All that effort for what? What if there is a precog, Baby Bird?” Jason asked worriedly. “I don’t want you to die.”

Tim shuffled, ducking under Jason’s concerned gaze. “I’m sure there’s not. Damian’s favourite prank of all time was planting precogs on the system and having me run around calling agencies to prepare for a big event that was never going to happen and then neatly wiping it from the system when it didn’t happen so that I looked like an idiot stirring up trouble. Me getting lectured by Bruce was his, like, life goal. I’m sorry, but I’m not buying some moronic death prophecy from someone who, the entire time I’ve known him, would have wanted that to be true. Seriously. The first time he met me he punched me in the chest so hard I ended up in medical with commotio cordis. He literally gave me a heart concussion. And I promise you his attitude towards me has only gone downhill from there.”

“Yeah, okay,” Jason argued. “But that’s kinda my point, Baby Bird. If he hates you that much, why would he even do it at all?”

“Oh, I know exactly why he’s doing this,” Tim snorted. “When I resigned from the Institute, I didn’t exactly resign. Like, there wasn’t an exit interview or anything. I got called out onto the field — first time in a long time — did my thing,” Tim waved his hands. “Then Bruce and Dick wrote me out of the immediate universe and Damian took that as a sign to be his usual obnoxious self. And then I just… left. Walked out, ditched my comm, filed the papers on my way to the north and then…” Tim shrugged.

“Wait a f*cking minute,” Jason was open mouthed. “Are you seriously telling me you ran away from home?”

“I resigned,” Tim frowned. “Didn’t I tell you this before?” Usually he told Jason everything.

“f*ck no, I’d remember that,” Jason replied. “You actually ran away? How old are you?”

“Sixteen,” Tim shrugged. “I’ll be seventeen in a few weeks. Legally an adult. Seriously, how did you think an Institute educated certified Talent engineer ended up as a scutwork orderly at Arkham?”

“I figured it was charity work,” Jason shrugged. “Or training. A touch telepath would make a good coma therapist, and you’re really f*cking smart. You’ve helped me a lot, for sure.”

Tim flushed at the praise.

“So you’re hiding out from B, huh?”

“Straight into the one place even his level of telepathy never penetrated,” Tim stated proudly, but then turned rueful. “My face is plastered all over TRI-D’s though, so I couldn’t just work a nine to five. Someone would have blabbed, especially considering the money he put up.”

“How much?”

Tim told him.

Jason whistled. “I gotta tell ya, Baby Bird, that’s a lot of scratch for someone he supposedly doesn’t care about.”

“Oh, I know he cares,” Tim sighed. “He cares like he cares about the Mission, like he cares about the Institute. It probably looks bad for them, me leaving the way I did. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stand to be there a second longer. But I left a mess behind. The quickest way to clean it up is to get me back, at least long enough for a holo-op.”

“And you think that’s all there is to it?” Jason asked sharply. He could tell when Tim was lying, even to himself. “It’s just publicity?”

Tim grimaced. “Dick’s probably upset,” he admitted. “I pretty much threw my comm at him when I left and wouldn’t talk to him. We used to be close before Damian came along. You know what he’s like when someone doesn’t like him. That’s what lit Damian’s fuse, I’m sure. Dick found out what Damian ragged on me about and now he’s giving the gremlin the silent treatment over it. Damian doesn’t really engage with softer emotions — like, at all — but he does respect Dick. If anything could get under that kid’s armour, I bet that would do it. He’d lie up and down for Dick Grayson.”

“Yeah, but Baby Bird, he was in your mindscape,” Jason pointed out. “You’d have felt it if he lied to you. So the things he talked about had to be true.”

Tim hesitated. “Damian’s pretty cunning,” he said slowly. “He could wriggle his way around that. He said he had a vision and that he has long term precogs when he paints. He said he saw a picture of me dying; but that would be true if he was just painting a picture, wouldn’t it? He’d see it in his head as he painted it. It wouldn’t be anything more than imagination. He had a vision, but Damian has them all the time, constantly. He’s got two-minute Sight. He said he has long term precogs when he paints. Then he said he painted me dying. They were all true, but maybe they weren’t connected. He just made it sound as if they were. He’s definitely Talia’s kid,” Tim sighed.

Jason looked him over. “Maybe you should go back.”

Tim whipped around to stare at him.

Jason shrugged and took his hand. “I don’t want anything to happen to you, Baby Bird,” he said softly. “You might be right, but what if you’re not? Can you take the risk?”

Tim squeezed his hand. “I’m not leaving you here, Jason. I- l — I’m not going back,” his lips firmed into a stubborn line. “I’m not going back until I can find a way to help you.”

Jason froze and stared at their interlocked hands. “Yeah,” he whispered. “I hear ya, Baby Bird.”

They sat in silence for a while, holding on. The Joker’s crazy snippets of words were distant white noise somewhere beyond the maze of crates.

Finally, Tim blew out a breath. “Damn. I’m going to have to get a skullcap now.”

Jason burst out laughing. “You what, now?”

“If Damian admits he was able to ping me to the others,” Tim explained. “The Linears will be crawling with Institute Talents, Waynes included. I was pretty safe when that was a vast warren and they didn’t know where to start, but Bruce isn’t just a Prime, he is also a trained detective. He’ll figure out that I was on a train that broke surface. That’ll narrow down the search area considerably. I need to keep them out of my head when I sleep. Skullcaps look stupid, but they do work.”

“Aw Baby Bird,” Jason was still laughing. “You’ve really never been off the Holdings before, have you?”

Tim glowered at him. “So?”

Jason tapped Tim’s forehead, still grinning. “You don’t need a skullcap, dummy. Linear folk have been keeping out telepathic Talents for decades.”

“What? How?”

“Go see a hair dyer,” Jason told him. “Ask around, because I don’t mean a salon. There’ll be one or two you can go to, guaranteed.”

Tim’s mind flashed back to the card Quentin had given him. “Like Madam Mim?”

“Holy sh*t, Mimsy’s still alive?” Jason crowed. “f*ck yeah, Baby Bird, go see her. She did mine. Once she dyes you up your hair’ll get a new, neon look, but it’ll keep telepaths out.”

Tim gaped at him. “Wait, that’s why everyone has neon streaks in their hair down there?”

“Yep,” Jason nodded smugly. “We ain’t the most educated folk, but we’ve dealt with crazy psychic pastors, Talent gangs, and the Joker, Baby Bird. We have our ways.”

“Telepath blocking dye?” Tim’s face screwed up. “How does that work? It can’t be heavy metals, that would kill you. Reeeeallly slowly and horribly.”

“Naw, we get enough o’ that from the water,” Jason smirked. “They make it from a fungus which… yeah, you really don’t wanna know where it grows. It’s got all these little, like, microbes in it. They’re psychically reactive. I don’t remember exactly how it works, but if they’re charged the right way, they sink into the proteins in your hair and make a psychic static field. It colours your hair,” Jason pointed to his white patch. “But it keeps telepaths and empaths out.”

“Wait,” Tim reached up to tug on the forelock. “You never had that before. At least, it wasn’t in any of the stills I saw.”

“I used to dye it black,” Jason shrugged. “I came into the Institute after B had set up the Titans Academy, so there were other kids living there. Not the Manor, of course, but the Holdings definitely. I was the only Linear kid there, so, you know,” Jason shrugged. “I was trying not to be obvious. I wanted to fit in.”

“That’s a shame,” Tim tugged again. “It looks good on you.”

Jason smirked. “Oh yeah?” He leaned forward so they were nose to nose. “You think?”

Before Tim could blush his way out of that one, something rippled alarmingly at the edge of his consciousness.

“Something’s happening,” Tim said as Jason’s face turned alarmed. “There’s someone…” he can almost sense them, looming up near Jason’s bed.

… where Tim, the no-name scutwork orderly sat in a trance, holding his hand. How was he supposed to explain that?

“I’ve gotta go,” Tim said hurriedly, and before he could think it over, re-think it, or overthink it, leaned forward and pressed a kiss to an astonished Jason’s lips. “I’ll be back.”

Then he rose back up into the waking world.

He may have been a little smug. He’d finally gotten Jason to blush, for a change.

Chapter 8: 00:13

Chapter Text

He came awake just before the sterile draping — that incidentally hid him from view — was brushed aside.

Panicking, Tim let go of Jason and scuttled back and under the bed, as far into the sheltered, shadowy part near the wall as he could get. Thank goodness he was so small; between his compact size and the folds of the draping which bunched up towards him as it was pushed open, he was more or less completely hidden unless someone glanced at just the right angle or moved the bed.

He controlled his breathing and went silent as a mouse. The Discipline came to the fore. He smoothed out his presence and folded it inwards, a neat trick only available to Talent Discipline students, that let him be disregarded by unfocused minds.

He’d hoped it was just the duty nurse doing a spot round, but the harsh white high heels he could see when he peered through the bed legs definitely weren’t the nurse’s. Tim’s heart sank. That was the hospital admin, the one that never seemed to like him. She’d like him a lot less if she found him interfering with a patient.

The heels shifted a little and some of the tubes looped down low where Tim could see them jiggle. She was doing something with his IVs, low key muttering under her breath as she did so. She was probably also a doctor here, Tim decided. Staff turnover was so bad it was likely that people often had multiple jobs. Was it a check up? He had never seen her down here before.

Something… green was slowly making its way through the IV lines. Tim could hear beeps indicating she was messing with the pump, getting the flow to go faster.

“July 2nd,” she muttered as she did so. “Formula 337-2J.” She clicked keys on the old EEG, recalibrating it.

Desperate to know what she was doing, Tim cautiously pressed a hand to the floor and let his psychometry take over. He saw…

The woman, painted in molecules like an old pointillism picture, moving through layers of molecules, moving each onto a new thread as she did. He saw her injecting the IV with something from a syringe, dense lines of molecules flowing through the tube and rushing into the glowing supernova that was Jason. He felt the threads of her cotton lab coat, cheap business suit underneath, high white heels with a crack in one sole, steel in her glass frames, plastic in the lens, layer upon layer of skin gorging up dead cells as she moved, the sharp tips of her severe, long nails.

He felt the plastic lanyard containing her access card nestled in her lab coat pocket, where she’d taken it off hours before. He felt her skin and her blood and her bones, a heaving, seething mass of molecules held together with light.

Tim came out of his trance. He could really use that access key. He could still feel it in her pocket from his cold read — lines of bright shining molecules went from his bare hand and trailed all the way back to her coat pocket, as if Tim was tied to the card with a quantum string.

Too bad he couldn't pull it.

Or…

He focused as if he was going to use his telekinesis, a fundamentally different discipline than when he used psychometry. He didn’t know what he expected to happen — perhaps nothing.

Certainly not the quantum strings connecting his awareness to the position of the card to ripple like guitar strings, resonating with the exact molecular makeup on the card, its plastic sleeve, the tiny metal clip, the cheap weave of the lanyard, the ruthlessly ordered geometrics of the inbuilt chip.

He felt the position here, here, and here.

It was one completely unique point of reference in all of time and space.

Tim, half making this up as he went along, memorized every single detail of those molecules and pulled.

The strings lit up. They pulsed and reformed, spinning into a new weave, as if space itself folded and turned inside out.

Tim blacked out.

When he woke, it couldn’t have been more than a minute later. The doctor was still checking the machines, muttering notes into a recording that Tim couldn’t hear through the ringing in his ears.

The access card was in his hands. Plastic slip, lanyard and all.

Tim gaped.

Then he grimaced as the headache hit. It rammed into his brain, crackling like a storm.

Psychic hyperextension, Tim thought as he grimly tried to breathe through it. Not something that had afflicted him very much, but Bruce, Damian, and Dick got it sometimes if they tried to move too much too fast. Barbara too when she stretched to the outer limits of her range.

He’d just… what the hell had he done? Gritting his teeth through the pain, Tim did another cold read. No, he hadn’t copied the card from his psychometric survey of its molecular structure. It wasn’t in her pocket anymore. It was in his hands.

He’d moved it from there to here, somehow without taking it through the intervening space.

He gritted his teeth as another wave of pain and nausea rolled over him. The throbbing was so bad it even made his chest hurt. He’d only ever suffered hyperextension once before, but it was a mild experience compared to what was happening now. The memory came to him, bittersweet, of Bruce stroking his hair in the medical bay afterwards. “I admire your dedication, but I don’t think you really need to know that much about your kinesis, kiddo.” It had certainly seemed like such wise words at the time, even if there was the accompanying sting of knowing no matter how much he practiced he’d never be on Damian’s level.

Tim shook his head to clear the past away. His head was killing him. Each dust mote landing on the ground thundered like a boulder. He frowned blearily around that thought. There was a lot of thundering going on.

Forcing himself to open his eyes, he immediately regretted it. Dust was raining down in the ward. Even small pebbles of concrete and plaster joined their micro brethren to coat the floors and drapings in a scree-riddled layer of filth.

The doctor made an impatient noise and then took her equipment and clicked away, no doubt to harangue the duty nurse or one of the scutworkers to clean up the dusty ward. Tim blinked past the dust in his eyes, baffled. It wasn’t usually this bad.

He waited until he was reasonably assured the doctor had left the ward, and then scooted out of his hiding place, looking around with a dawning sense of fear. There was dust everywhere. He looked up, then at the walls. It wasn’t his imagination; the cracks were far more crazed than before.

Chilled, Tim looked at the monitoring equipment. The needle on the now dust-caked EEG had gone nuts. Definitely reading a higher level of brain activity.

They were trying a new treatment, Tim thought in horror. It wasn’t a surprise; when you had no other options you could try anything and Arkham wasn’t known for its adhesion to medical ethics. They were getting close to waking Jason up.

If I wake up….BOOM!

Tim automatically reached for Jason’s hand, realized he was still holding the access card, and hesitated. He had an extremely limited window in which this would be of any use to him without anyone knowing he’d stolen it. So small he might not make it if he didn’t go now.

“I’ll be back,” he promised, and tore for the ward doors like his feet were on fire.

The coma ward was in the sub-basem*nt, but Arkham was made of basem*nts. He went for the elevator door, yanking out his comm and typing into it rapidly as he did so. He hit the button for one of the upper basem*nts, one with a restricted access sign screwed to it. He stuck the card in the card slot and crossed his fingers.

The elevator dinged and the doors opened at the right level.

Tim pelted through row upon row of server banks in the artificially cool room, breath frosting in front of his face. He punched the card into the machine and waited; it booted up, but then asked for logon details.

That’s when Tim’s program on his comm got to work. He’d learned coding at the Institute, trying to squeeze more data out of Gooseggs and create the first interactive precog database. He’d only gone deeper into the nitty gritty area of spyware as his Linear’s resident fix-it. Arkham hadn’t upgraded its systems or its security in years, so Tim had no trouble cracking through its firewalls and having his bespoke decryption unlock the logon credentials.

Yes! He was in.

He wouldn’t have time to read files, but he could download one for later. His fingers flew over the keyboard; patient number and date of admission were entered in a flash. There! Jason’s file, even though it didn’t have a name. Tim fidgeted, sweating despite the cold while the comm program laboriously created a handshake with the antiquated hospital OS. If anyone found him doing this he would lose any legitimate access to Jason as well as probably getting arrested to boot.

The comm chimed quietly.

Tim wiped the log, shut down the system and sprinted back towards the elevator. A momentary inner tussle had him hitting the button for the ground floor instead of the sub-basem*nt.

He regretted it. The doors opened on the hospital administrator who scowled at him, lips drawn in a thin, humourless line. “You!” she said scathingly.

Tim felt his heart plummet and his stomach contact. Had she made him? Would he have to run?

What would happen to Jason if he didn’t come back?

“What are you doing here?” she demanded harshly.

“I… what?” Tim croaked.

“What are you doing here?” she snapped. “Your shift is over , we do not pay overtime! Don’t you realize there’s been an evacuation order for the building? All non-essential personnel must leave immediately! We’re liable if you wander around outside of shift, you stupid idiot! What are you still doing here?”

“I… I,” doing his best impression of an intimidated dullard, Tim shakily raised her access card. “Y-you dropped this. In the w-ward.”

Her eyes widened. She snatched it from his fingers angrily. “Fine,” she bit out. “Now leave. All non essentials are on unpaid suspension until we’ve confirmed the hospital superstructure is stable.”

“Leave?” Tim gaped. “For how long?”

“However long it takes. You will be notified,” she sniffed. “If you have income problems due to the suspension that isn’t the hospital’s problem.” She jabbed a finger at the main entrance where dozens of Tim’s fellow scut workers were being shepherded out as well as some of the walking wounded.

Swallowing but with no other option, Tim shuffled out to follow them, heart burning in his chest. What if a survey took months? Jason was down there waiting for him.

He’d have to find a way back in.

He clutched his comm hard, still aching all over when he reached the train to go home. He was rigid as a board the entire time the train was above ground, shields pushed to maximum, but he felt no questing presences. He stayed focused. He was a natural shielder, he had to lean on that.

It didn’t help though. All though the ride, walking through the station and into the warren of the Linears, Tim felt eyes on him. His eyes darted left and right, a social faux pas this deep in the wastelands, searching faces, searching for familiar faces. He expected to see Dick or Bruce, or maybe Damian, at every turn.

When he got close to his own Linear, he relaxed a bit. He knew these grounds pretty well, being the resident fix-it. Better than anyone at the Institute. He was more confident of his ability to escape here — he knew all the boltholes and secret passages. Trying to not draw attention with his paranoid scanning, Tim accessed his comm instead.

There was quite a lot of file; medical records, brain scans, doctors notes. Tim scrolled up and up the long record, looking for the start date.

He found it.

He froze.

It didn’t state where Jason had been transferred from. But it did state who had admitted him.

ADMITTING PARTY: BRUCE WAYNE

As if on cue, the holo-display for the Institute branch office near his apartment lit up. Tim raised his disbelieving, pale face to see Bruce doing his recruitment spiel for the Wayne Institute.

“Come and join us at the Institute; we’re all family there.”

Tim looked back down at the record.

That couldn’t be right.

Could it?

Chapter 9: 00:12

Chapter Text

After a day of winding himself up, pacing and fretting, Tim decided to do something constructive rather than sit around and wait for word he could go back to the hospital. He dug Quentin’s card out from under the junk on his work bench and headed to Madam Mim’s.

He’d been right about the search parties. He had holed up in his rooms where no one could enter without a warrant, but he’d heard rumours from his neighbours about Institute workers canvassing Linear tenements nearest to the Bowery station, looking for someone. Damian must have told someone.

It hardly mattered, he tried to reason past his anxiety. There were so many people crammed in down here like sardines it would take them weeks to make any headway and besides, no one saw anything in the Linears. You kept your head down, eyes to the floor and never knew very much about your neighbours. Oh, there were fiercely tight knit family and ethnic groups, people were loyal to their mates and their gangs, but there was a whole subset of sheer loners who lived here too, washed up here after a hard knock life that nobody knew or wanted to know. It would be difficult for anyone looking to find him specifically. His fix-it work was mostly for the illegals and they’d never talk to an authority.

Still, Tim kept his head down and his collar high, tamping down his psychic presence to a mere whisper in the wind, all but invisible.

It took him a little while to find Madam Mim’s salon. It was deep in the underground where there were more illegals than not. He kept a hand in his armband and didn’t ask directions, just systematically walked until he found it, tucked away in what looked like an ancient railway station ticket booth. It was hung with beads and esoteric bits of junk, looking more like an old carnival fortune teller's caravan than a hairdresser, and was surrounded by a gang of neon haired children all jostling and making noise.

Madam Mim’s voluminous lips pursed when she saw the card. “Quentin, little troublemaker,” but she was willing enough to fulfil the promise the card represented. “Take a seat and we see what’s what, yes?”

He took a seat — or a lay, as it was — in an old, lumpy dentist’s chair. “How does this work, exactly?” he asked curiously. “I heard it was… microbes?”

“A fancy word,” Mim snorted. “It’s simpler than it sounds. Little things floating in this ,” she held up a vial of pure, worrying brown. “Are living things. All living things can be charged with psychic energy. Some more sensitive than others, yes?”

Tim nodded. That was true.

“These things copy. You happy when charging, they always happy. You angry, they angry. When hair washed and dried, they stay in hair,” she tapped her forehead. “Still all happy energy. Or sad. Or angry. Always broadcasting. Your thoughts become… static. Lost in the noise. Happy is best. Draws less attention.”

Tim was impressed. If he’d been at the Institute he’d have been ecstatic. What this would mean for receptives who had shaky control or shields. What a boon it would be to not have to resort to skull caps or helmets!

“Come, we wash your hair. Put these on,” she shoved a pair of nose plugs at him.

Then she put an air mask with its own oxygen supply over her own face. “No worry,” she smiled reassuringly as Tim’s startled and worried face. “Will be over soon.”

The minute she opened the vial, Tim prayed to every god in the world that she was right. The stink of it blazed past the nose plugs like that were nothing and grabbed him around the throat. He gagged, stomach contracting.

“No, no. Still,” Madam Mim’s voice was stern. She grabbed his hand.

His whole body collapsed like the strings had been cut. Mim was clearly an unregistered Talent. Somewhere in the telepathic spectrum if Tim was any judge. He’d lost all control over his body under her compulsion, staring helplessly at the ceiling as Madam Mim massaged the stuff into every strand of hair in a layer of caked and drying foulness. It wasn’t even a sewage smell — that would have been bad enough. It had its own distinct and aggressive flavour and was rapidly killing Tim’s sinuses with a carpet-bombing level attack.

“Now, happy memory,” Mim nodded past her mask.

Tim rolled his eyes at her wildly. She wanted a happy memory in the midst of this?

He saw…

Bruce, looking stubbled and dishevelled, red eyed and sleepless, looking down at him. Tim felt his own terror, the memories of his clothes being made, what the inspectors looked like, all the hands that had touched them reeling back through his head. He barely knew where he was.

Bruce reached out. Tim couldn’t stop the flinch if he tried.

But when the huge hand landed on his skeletal shoulder, something amazing happened. The voices all went away, the feelings, the memories. The cracking storm of Tim’s perpetual migraine calmed, leaving him clear and silent.

“Better?” Bruce asked gruffly.

Tim nodded, too astonished for words, too frightened that any noise he made would destroy this fragile respite.

“You’re going to be living here for a little while. It’ll probably be temporary,” Bruce admitted, eyes shining with grief. “But while you’re here I… we’ll help you feel better. Okay?”

“Okay,” Tim whispered, so relieved he started to cry.

He saw…

“Hi, my name’s Dick. What’s yours?”

Tim was too busy staring. The lanky teen, almost an adult, was hanging upside down in mid-air like that was something normal people did. Dick seemed to have a special deal with gravity. “Uh…”

“Don’t be shy!” Dick beamed at him, flicking upright in one smooth, graceful, zero-g motion. His feet landed daintily on the hardwood floors.

“I s-saw your s-show once,” Tim stammered before he could stop and think.

“What, really? That was a while ago and… oh. You meant that show.”

“I’m sorry!” Tim blurted, wondering what had tipped him off.

“No, I’m sorry,” Dick smiled gently. “I picked up your feelings about it. I’m the world's worst shielder, ask anyone who knows me. Don’t be sad,” Dick crouched down in front of Tim’s stricken face. “I’m not sad anymore and the Manor is an awesome place to live! It’s doubly awesome today!

“W-why?”

“Because you’re here, silly!” Dick laughed, projecting the purest joy Tim had ever felt.

He saw…

“Hi, what’s your name?”

The girl opened her mouth. Closed it. Put her hand across it.

“Oh, you can’t talk,” Tim thought through a workaround. “Can you write?”

The girl’s face dropped even more. She shook her head.

“No? Um,” Tim was getting frantic. He wasn’t very good at social situations and he hadn’t meant to make her feel bad. She looked so wasted and waif-like, hair a matted mess from the streets. He’d approached her because he knew how scary the Institute could be on your first day.

Girding himself, Tim removed one of his gloves. They almost never came off. It had taken months for him to get to the stage where taking them off didn’t feel like risking death. It had been so bad he’d even worn them in the shower. He still didn’t like it, but Bruce had taught him all about staying above the influx and stripping it down, leaving the searing knowledge as defanged and declawed facts and nothing else.

“Um, can I?” he waved a hand. “I’m a touch telepath. You’ll be able to tell me your name with your brain. Um, I won’t if you don’t want to!” Tim added hastily as she backed away. “Only if you want to. I wouldn’t hurt you. Honestly,” he concluded lamely. “You’d be more likely to hurt me.”

Cass leaned in. She stared at his face with total concentration before giving one sharp, hard nod.

Never one to question good fortune, he held out his hand. “Hi, my name’s Tim.”

My name is… Cass

He saw…

A battery pack as thick as a brick came flying across the room to hit him square across the face.

“sh*t, sorry!” a blonde girl came running up from the training salle. “Sorry! I’m trying to get a handling on my tactile-telekinesis and, um, it’s not really going very well.”

“No kidding,” Tim mumbled ruefully, poking his nose. “Tim Drake.”

“Stephanie Brown,” she smiled, looking pretty and flushed. “Sorry about that. My control sort of comes and goes. You know how it is, right?”

“Not really,” Tim said awkwardly. “I have psychometry, but I can’t really control it at all, I kinda just have to shield against it.”

“Fellow tactile-Talent!” Stephanie said cheerfully. “Thank god, I thought I was the only one!”

“Yeah. I mean, no. I mean,” Tim fumbled for charm. “Yes, most of mine are tactile too. Sucks, right?”

“Oh man, I wear gloves all the time,” Stephanie groaned. “My fingers are getting rickets. But I’m a telepath. Well, they reckon I’m more of a telesend, really.”

“Telesend?” Tim hadn’t heard that one before.

LIKE THIS, boomed inside Tim’s head. I CAN SEND BUT I’M NOT SO GOOD AT RECEIVING.

Tim winced.

“Whoops, sorry,” Stephanie said sheepishly. “They said I was pretty loud up close. But I can send over huge distances, which is kind of neat.”

“That is kind of neat,” Tim agreed shyly. “Um, do you want to go over the tactile Discipline protocols sometime? It’d be nice to have a second set of eyes that actually understands it.”

Stephanie beamed. “I’d love to!”

He saw…

Bruce…

“That’s it, Tim, you’re doing great!”

“Alfred, look! Tim tested out of middle school already. He’s got a brilliant mind!”

“Good job, I’m proud of you kiddo!”

“Tim! Good to see you!”

“I’m glad you’re here.”

“ Idon’t think you need to know that much about your kinesis, kiddo.”

“Ready to go out of the field, Robin?”

“I’m thinking of starting a brand new arm of the Institute and I’d like you to be the one running it. I trust you, Tim.”

Tim frowned in his trance. In this parade of Bruce, precious moments he still hoarded, that last one triggered a rough feeling of dismay and pain.

Suddenly that triggered a bunch of different memories that cascaded down his cerebral cortex.

“ I’m not going to have as much time as I used to. We might have to put your training on hold for a little bit. ”

“ T- Red! Sorry, I wasn’t expecting you today! Oh, uh, Robin’s already in the field today, kiddo. I told him he could take the codename since he’s coming out in the field now. I figured you’d be too busy around the Institute for fieldwork anymore.”

“I can’t believe you told Bruce! How could you! I didn’t mean it like that! Now I’m going to train with Barbara Gordon at the Clocktower. You know what? Maybe it’s better if we just don’t see each other anymore.”

“We need field operatives for this, Drake, not paper pushers. Go back to your mediocrity. The future needs winged horses, not winged donkeys.”

“I’m sorry you can’t come with us to the space station, kiddo. I know it’s tough, but I really need you to look after things at the Institute while I’m gone.”

“No, no, no,” Madam Mim’s voice came sternly down from above. “ Happy memories! ”

The memories frizzled away, taking Tim’s pain and sadness with it. Happy memories .

He saw….

Jason smiling, Jason laughing, Jason teaching him how to throw a punch and grapple and use elbow and knees and all the dirty tricks, Jason reading to him off his memory books, Jason telling him about epic pranks wars while he was at the Institute, Jason stridently defending the old, outdated Worthington Method of psychic development, Jason smirking as he planted Tim on the mats, Jason talking, Jason playing, Jason scowling, Jason blushing after Tim kissed him…

They streamed past, fossilized in diamond in Tim's perfect eidetic memory, each one as clear and bright as if they’d just happened in front of him. His heart swelled at this manifest of love, so small and subtle he’d barely been aware of it until he was drowning in its ocean.

“There! There we are.”

Tim jerked back inside himself. He sat up suddenly with full control over his limbs again. He stared wide eyed at the still masked Madam Mim, who was nodding with satisfaction.

“Good. Good memories,” she stated. “Good charge. Very good protection!”

Tim's face almost melted. With the return of awareness came the return of his sense of smell; whatever was left of it anyway. He gagged. This stuff was horrendous. “Do we wash it out now?” he croaked hopefully.

Mim killed his hopes dead. “No. Must stay on. Three, four hours yet. Go, outside!” she pointed imperiously. “Wait. Come back, we wash.”

Wilting, Tim levered himself out of the chair and staggered out into the — thankfully — more open space of the old station. The multitude of children out there all shrieked and ran away from him laughing which he couldn’t, in fairness, blame them for.

Bereft of any company except the eye watering stink coming from his filth caked hair, Tim sat down on the lip of the old platform and got out his comm. His scalp itched abominably but he wouldn’t reach up to scratch it if you paid him in gold. He tried to put his current misery aside and started an in depth analysis of Jason’s medical file.

As damning as Bruce’s name on the admissions field had been, Tim had to grudgingly concede that it wasn’t exactly a smoking gun. There was literally nothing else; no signed admission forms, no proxy instructions, no record of consults with doctors, nothing. It was a name on a screen that literally anyone could have put there.

Okay, it might be bias talking — Tim was having a hard time reconciling the warm, paternal man that he’d known with a man who would put a son in a place like Arkham. For one thing, why? The Institute had the finest medical facilities in Gotham. Wayne Medical was at the bleeding edge. And while Tim might be uncertain as to what he meant to Bruce, or what place he had in the man’s heart or esteem, there was one thing he knew one thing with rock solid certainty.

Bruce had loved Jason.

Tim had lived in the Manor right after they’d lost him. He’d seen the memories. He’d experienced them, interacted with them. He knew how deep and how complete the change Jason’s death had wrought in Bruce. He’d practically had a side-by-side comparison. Tim wasn’t sure Bruce would even do that to him and he might as well be one of Bruce’s employees. Tim couldn’t imagine a world where Bruce would condemn Jason to a slow wasting death in a literal hell pit.

Still, that name on the file haunted his thoughts. There was one sure fire way to get past any barrier in Gotham and anywhere else for that matter, whether physical or bureaucratic, and that was money. It couldn’t be denied that Bruce had the capability to bring Jason home anonymously and tuck him away where no one would ever find him. But if that was the case, why not erase his own name entirely? It’s not like he couldn’t do that too.

There was no way around the fact that Bruce Wayne was a more than powerful enough telepath to put someone in a coma and keep them there. Would he do it? Could he? He was the foremost expert on Talent ethics, for crying out loud! Such an egregious violation would be against every principle he’d instilled in Tim and every other Talent who came under his care.

But for the safety of the many rather than the few...

Tucking that to the side, Tim gamely tried to read the rest of the file through his watering eyes. There wasn’t a lot, for all Jason had been there for six years. There were some clinical notes in the beginning and some indications that various methods had been tried to establish consciousness, but those had tapered off pretty quickly. About the last note of any value in the file was a physio’s recommendation for anti-atrophy chainmail; after that it was all variations of ‘stable, no change’. That wasn’t much of a surprise. No one ended up in the basem*nt of Arkham if they still thought there was any hope of recovery.

Still, as Tim reached the end of the file and his nose hairs were singed to stumps, he found himself more and more puzzled. There were no notes indicating the resumption of treatment or the beginning of an experimental treatment. Given what the lady doctor was doing, you’d think she’d have added notes to the file. Granted, Arkham wasn’t exactly a hotbed of medical competence but Tim would have expected there to be something.

In the end, Tim gave it all up in frustration. The file hadn’t told him much; it hadn’t even confirmed that it was Jason Todd, really. All it had was the date of admittance and the condition he’d been in. No patient history, no indication he was anything more than a random John Doe, no request for DNA matching from the Hall Of Records. The file had either been doctored or Jason had been admitted in Gotham, which left a huge question mark about how Jason’s wounded body had made it from Ethiopia to Gotham. There were only two ways it could have come; via air cruiser, which was expensive and had tight security, or via the pneumatic Amer-Afri rail line which was still pretty secure but was cheaper. Both of them would have required entry through the Quarantine Barrier, the electromagnetic shield that encircled all continents to help stop the spread of global pandemics. Surely that would have flagged a body in medical distress!

Tim sat back, trying his best to not think about his itching, stinking hair as he tried to think of ways around that problem that didn’t involve Bruce’s fortune.

Eventually, thankfully, he was called back into Madam Mim’s and his hair freed of its oppressor under an old, half rusted shower head and vigorous scrubbing from cheap vanilla peach shampoo.

Mim nodded and smiled when she saw it. “Good memories. They went in deep. Colour will change as it fades, but…” she held up a cracked mirror.

Tim stared at himself. Work and training and just plain old labour had boiled away the last traces of childhood softness from his cheeks. His face was sharp and angular, pale even under the soft lighting of Madam Mim’s makeshift shack, his cheekbones smooth and well defined. There was a new hardness, a coldness in his blue eyes, but it was more cold determination than cold numbness. In his dark, now long grown hair there were vivid neon shades of purple. It was mostly veins of marbling on the top of his head but the tips and bangs were all completely purpled.

He was Tim Drake, Linear denizen, without a doubt.

He thanked Madam Mim profusely and told her to send one of her kids if she had anything that needed fixing. Mim looked after a lot of young, abandoned illegals down here, using her dyeing gains for rations and medicine in a sort of informal orphanage. Not everyone could do what she did; it took a Talent to activate the dye as well as that.

It turned out that Tim had gotten it done just in time. When he clambered up the levels and went towards home, still reeking faintly, the Institute workers had spread out as far as his level. He could see them in their uniforms with the Wayne Institute bat emblems. Bats, he remembered, because Gotham was the home to the last extant species of bats in America, most of which seemed to roost in the cave systems under the Manor; and also because bats, Bruce said, fly blindly and fearlessly into the unknown.

Tim couldn’t deny, seeing that symbol made him heartsick.

What made him really sick, sick with fear, was rounding a corner and seeing Dick Grayson himself standing at the end of the row. He was in his Nightwing get up, flagging down passerbys, whomever would deign to stop for him. Most of Tim’s abilities were tactile based, but he did have some remote sensing. He could feel a slight tension in the air, a questing feeling, as Dick projected outwards.

If Tim backpedalled now, Dick would spot the change in traffic patterns. Talent or not, he was a trained detective, too. Tim would have to grit his teeth, school his thoughts, and hope this dye job static field was as good as advertised. Dick wasn’t stopping everyone; he couldn’t. There were too many people moving around at one time.

Tim breathed deeply and sank into a Discipline trance. He became aware of every footfall, every word of chatter, every one of his own heartbeats. He slowed the latter right down to a steady blip, smoothed his emotions out and let the tiredness and hunger come to the fore, masking anything else. All the anger and pain and betrayal receded into his mental landscape, leaving him with his steady heart and the streaming data coming off the crowd.

Tim stepped forward. He acknowledged idly that if Cass had been there he’d have been sunk. They’d never found a presence cloaking technique that worked on Cass. But Dick had always been slightly more send than receive. He might be able to fool Dick.

He was careful not to let his nerves hit the surface; everything was under the calm, clear waters of his trance, but for the occasional ripple of tiredness or hunger. Having nothing would be just as telling as having no shield at all.

As he came closer, Dick’s presence distilled; he was casting telepathic feelers out in every direction, searching. He wasn’t casting them at his full range, but Tim suspected that he was wary of the amount of static he was getting back. The Linear-folk with their anti-telepath dye must have felt eerily empty to Dick.

Finally he was close enough to Dick to hear what he was saying. He had a holostill in his hand, one of Tim’s publicity headshots. He was asking anyone who came past if they had seen him. Even the Linear folk respected Nightwing, but it wasn’t enough to break their code of anonymity. Nobody saw anything this deep in the Linears.

Tim got so close that he almost brushed by, Dick’s presence so unignorable that Tim was absolutely certain that he was inside Tim’s head, that he knew, that he would reach out to grab him the second he slipped past.

But no… Tim felt a weird, fuzzy sensation in his own senses as the static field reacted to a direct probe, and the next minute he was walking by. Dick’s telepathy hadn’t penetrated the static field. Tim was just another body in stained Linear tunics with neon hair and a hollowed out face. Nothing about his mind had stuck out to Dick as all.

Tim got back to his apartment and closed the door behind him.

He breathed out.

It had worked. The famed dye skullcap had absolutely worked, even against a powerful Prime.

Tim couldn’t say he was pleased about it.

Chapter 10: 00:11

Chapter Text

It was a week before Tim could go back to the hospital. He spent almost the entirety of it confined to his rooms. He was too paranoid about Institute searchers somehow finding him to go out. He had one brief, furtive foray to the ration station, but otherwise he bounced off the walls of his tiny apartment box.

He hadn’t been idle. He’d practiced the Discipline as much as he could in the tight space, he’d meditated, he’d dived deep into his Joker research although Jason’s skepticism had proved depressingly prescient. There really was almost nothing to find. The people the Joker had experimented on or affected had either died or been so mentally ravaged that trying to map exactly what he’d done and how he did it was next to impossible. About the only promising thing Tim had found was that the few who had survived whatever the triggers were had gone back to normal afterwards, if waking up surrounded by the family members you’d murdered was in any way normal.

Tim had also explored his new telekinetic ability as much as he could. He wasn’t sure what to call it except teleportation. He experimented with different objects within the room, finding that he could both draw them to him via the quantum strings or send them from him as well. It was fantastic, except there was a hard limit at about five hundred grams or so. Just getting to that amount of mass had made him sweat buckets, his heart hammering painfully against his ribcage. Anything higher left him curled up in bed, praying for death until the migraine receded.

Okay, so it wasn’t a massive blitz of power. It was still something. Plus, even if his kinesis was still on the very limited side of the spectrum, his psychometry was expanding rapidly as a result of the training he was putting in. It was getting so he didn’t even need to touch something; he just had to concentrate. The quantum strings would synch him up to it and the data rolled back neatly and sweetly, none of this knock-down flood business. It still required a lot of focus in order not to slip and start downloading the history of the planet, but all his work developing his kinesis had borne an unexpected side benefit to his main Talents.

When his head hurt too much and his chest was a wheezy mess, sometimes he’d just lay back and think about the past. His vivid trip down memory lane had awoken feelings he long thought numbed from neglect. Past all the hurt and anger, Tim still missed his family dearly. He still wished they were here with him and he with them. Confronting that longing was uncomfortable for him. He’d been fully prepared for those memories to be tainted by the bitterness he felt for his emotional neglect, but they had been so bright in his head, so clear. He almost wished he’d never dyed his hair. The real sweetness of those memories may have drawn out some of the bitterness, but had acutely increased the hurt. He still didn’t understand why they’d all turned away so easily.

Well, he was gone from them now. Eventually they would have to accept that and eventually he would too. He had a purpose now; to help Jason back into the waking world. He’d be seventeen soon, and even Bruce Wayne wouldn’t be able to stop him from going anywhere he pleased. Maybe he’d go see the world. There had to be a place somewhere for someone like him.

Maybe Jason would go with him. Maybe he’d want to, depending on what they found out about his admission into Arkham.

Tim couldn’t deny that mystery and its chilling implications had been on his mind too. He couldn’t prove it, he couldn’t disprove it. It sat on his consciousness like a weight. He wasn’t sure what to believe.

He was up at first light the day they commed and said he could go back to the hospital. He crammed into the overcrowded train with the rest of the scutworkers going every which way, and spent the entire time trying not to let his nerves get the better of him. The week had been torturously long without Jason’s bright company.

The train made its stop at the barren wasteland of Arkham, and Tim almost ran ahead of the crowd to get back into the hospital. His heart hammered at the sight of it; cracked and derelict but still standing.

Punch in, grab trolley, haul down to the sub basem*nt…. And wow, it was a mess down here. A week without any maintenance meant there was a thick layer of filth over literally everything. He looked at the cracks worriedly; there certainly seemed to be more of them now.

Tim was in early, way before the duty nurse. Carer bots trundled on their little treads up and down the rows like harvesters around a crop, seeing to bags and things. He shoved his trolley into a hidden corner and ran for the only bed he had eyes for.

Sliding under the drapes, he hunkered down in the shadows and grabbed Jason’s hand. The world dropped into darkness.

Tim opened his eyes in a familiar warehouse.

From beyond the rows of crates came a familiar cackle. “Birdie, birdie, don’t you cry! Daddy left you here to DIE. HA. HA. HA!”

Tim scowled at it. That little bit of Joker was a real nuisance.

He opened his mouth to call before he was abruptly tackled from his blind spot. Staggering against the crates, Tim had a moment of blind panic before a familiar voice reached him.

“You came back,” Jason breathed into his neon tipped hair. “You came back, you came back, you came back!”

“Oh, Jay,” Tim wrapped his arms around him and held on tight. “Of course I came back. I’m sorry, I would’ve come sooner if I could have.”

Jason loosed his death grip slightly and leaned back to smile at him. He looked almost ready to weep in joy. He leaned forward and…

Of course that’s when the Joker shadow started cackling and singing. “Two little birdies, sitting in the tree, they’re D-Y-I-N-G.”

“Shut the f*ck up, you f*cking lunatic!” Jason drew back, blushing.

Tim was blushing too. “Um, sorry. They pretty much shut down the hospital and forced all non-essentials off work for a week.”

Jason was staring at him. “….Tim?”

“Yeah?”

Jason’s face split into a huge grin. “You got your hair dyed!”

“Oh!” Tim’s hand flew to his violet tips. “Oh, yeah, I did that. Honestly, you could have warned me about it! That dye was rank.” He gagged while Jason laughed.

“Yeah, sorry. I forgot you wouldn’t know that.” Jason ran his fingertips through the neon strands hanging around Tim’s face. “I ain’t never seen purple before. Mim must have liked you. It’s beautiful.”

Tim felt himself going red. “She said it’ll fade,” he murmured.

“Yeah,” Jason said fondly. “Mine used to be orange. I thought I was hot sh*t. But then,” he tugged on the white splash ruefully. “It faded out to white. My mom said that was pretty rare, though.”

“Just the forelock?” Tim reached up to tug it.

“All we could afford,” Jason shrugged. “It worked well enough; even kept B out at long as he wasn’t really concentrating.”

Tim felt a chill when he mentioned Bruce; there was a warm fondness in his voice. The name on the admissions form jumped to the forefront of his mind.

“Hey, what’s wrong?” The receiving empath in the room frowned. “Are you okay?”

“I have something I have to tell you,” Tim admitted. “Let’s go into the nest.”

Once they were settled comfortably amongst Jason’s books, Tim fidgeted as he thought about what to say. He opened his mouth.

“What’s wrong, Baby Bird?” Jason was worried. “Is something wrong with Bruce?”

Tim closed his mouth. The real concern in Jason’s voice gave him pause. Jason loved Bruce, almost as much as Tim was willing to bet Bruce loved Jason. How could he tell him there was a chance, that there was evidence , however circ*mstantial, that Bruce had stuck him into Arkham?

It still sounded all wrong to Tim, but the possibility wasn’t zero.

He looked at Jason’s handsome face and felt his courage shrivel. He couldn’t do it. Not right now. It wouldn’t do any good to hurt Jason over what could be nothing. He’d have to be careful; Jason could tell when he lied in here.

“Bruce is fine,” he affirmed. “At least, he was when I last saw him. I haven’t heard anything different. Um, I need to talk to you about why I left, though.”

“Because they sent you home,” Jason’s eyes narrowed. “Why’d they do that, anyway?”

“Because they were worried about structural damage to the hospital,” Tim explained. “When I went back out a doctor at the hospital was doing something to you.”

“What?!”

Tim didn’t understand his tone for a second. “Oh, no, not that. Something medical; good gods what made you think of that?”

“B and I once tracked down some pervert working in the long term ward at Gotham General. Lots of sleeping beauties, see?” he grimaced. “I’ve never looked at hospitals the same way again.”

Tim made a face. “Ew. Well, don’t worry, it definitely wasn’t that. She was giving you some kind of new medication. But Jason,” Tim said urgently. “After she administered it a whole mess of dust and debris started raining down. Like the hospital walls were being unmade.”

Jason blanched. “Oh sh*t! They’re tryin’ ta wake me up! sh*t Baby Bird, you gotta stop them! I’m in a f*cking hospital with a sh*t tonne of sick people who can’t escape!”

“It’s worse than that,” Tim ran fingers through his hair. “You’re in the basem*nt of a hospital, right next to the main support pillars too!”

Jason groaned. “What the f*ck? I’m going to kill everyone! You gotta stop them!”

“I can’t do anything if I don’t know what they’re doing,” Tim replied. “But I… uh, stole the doctor’s access card.”

“Holy sh*t, really? What, did you pickpocket her or something?”

“No,” Tim brightened up. “I used my kinesis! It was so cool, Jason, I teleported the card out of her pocket!”

“What?” Jason gaped. “No f*cking way! How ?”

They spent a good long while with Tim giving a rambling account of what he did and how it felt, with Jason’s occasional excited interjections. Tim ended up giving him a survey of his experiments over the last week.

“…so, there are some hard limits. I can’t seem to move anything heavier than a small rock,” Tim finished, sighing.

“I dunno, it might just be a practice thing,” Jason offered. “I mean, I didn’t start blowing up boulders and old truck wrecks and stuff. I did little sh*t. Coffee cups. Door locks.”

“Skimmer blade holding bolts,” Tim added slyly.

“You heard that story, huh?” Jason grinned ruefully. “In my defense, Bruce was flitting about town in a Lemarr Phantasy. That thing’s rotors would have kept me in rations for months.” Then he shook himself. “We gotta do something about this, Baby Bird. I can’t wake up, especially not under a hospital!”

“Yeah, but that’s the thing, I looked over the record and I can’t see anything that indicates what she’s doing or how. She’s not recording it,” Tim scowled. “Which is really illegal.”

“Yeah, well, it’s Arkham,” Jason shrugged. “It’s the hospital that used to supply steady stream of victims for the Joker’s ‘experiments’ before he blew his f*cking lab up. It’s no surprise their ethical principles haven’t improved much.”

Tim sighed forlornly. “Then I don’t know what to do. Unless I know what they’re doing, I won’t be able to sabotage it and it’s not like they’re going to listen to me if I ask them to stop. I’m just a no-name scut worker who mops the floors.”

Jason scrubbed his hands through his hair. “sh*t, let’s spar or something. I think better when I’m moving.”

It was a relief to just fall into the Discipline and kick each other around for a while. Jason had been right, the exercise cleared some of the tension and frustration in the air. Tim’s first strikes were clumsy and distracted, but he fell into the rhythm more willingly as the endorphins kicked in. He’d missed this… this closeness that he got with Jason after his week of being forcibly forbidden from seeing him. After the revelation of all of his happiest memories now inextricably linked to Jason, Tim was all the more enthralled at just the gift of spending time with him.

Of course, Jason didn’t go easy on him, which was good. Tim rose to meet challenges. He managed to flip and immobilize the larger body three times in six.

“You always seem so surprised when you win,” Jason observed curiously. “Like, you never really expect to. Why do you think you’re so bad at this?”

Tim slumped down on the floor next to him. “Probably because I never won a match in my life before I met you. Bruce and Dick only got as far as teaching me forms and repetitive movement and stuff. We didn’t really spar , exactly, it was just a learning exercise. Damian was the only one I sparred with. He nearly killed me the first time. Any time after that I just couldn’t best him. Couldn’t get around the voluntary two minute pre-cog no matter what I did. I spent a year smoothing out every tell, learning to maintain a poker face, not telegraphing, random attack patterns, everything. He saw through it all, the little gremlin. Bruce stopped teaching me pretty soon after that anyway so I never got to find a trick that worked.”

“Hmmm,” Jason’s eyes narrowed speculatively. “Maybe you came at it from the wrong angle.”

“Like what?” Tim grumbled. “It didn’t seem to matter what angle I attacked if my opponent could literally foresee every one.”

“Like, you tried signal deprivation, right, giving him as little info as possible? That’s not how you beat a pre-cog, Baby Bird. You drown ‘em in information. So much information they don’t know whether they’re coming or going.” Jason smirked. “You’re a psychometrist and a touch telepath. You should have gathered up all the memories from everywhere around you and just dumped it in his head when he got his hands on you. Feed the demon ‘til he chokes.”

Tim blinked. “Holy sh*t, why didn’t I think of that?” Damian was so powerful that would have been overwhelming for him.

“B’s not much into teaching people to use their Talents as weapons, remember?” Jason shrugged. “You probably weren’t taught to think of it that way. But everything can be used as a defense, Baby Bird, especially in the Linears.”

“I almost want to go back to the Institute just so I can kick that little brat’s ass. I’d even get it recorded for posterity.” Tim said gleefully, then blinked. “That’s it!”

“What’s what?”

“That’s it!” Tim jumped up. “The Institute, recordings! Gooseggs, Jason! If I can get a medical grade Goosegg then I can tell you exactly what the doctors here are doing to you, and I can set it to delta wave stimulation which means they won’t be able to wake you up no matter what they try!”

Jason frowned. “Doesn’t that mean we’d… well, you, would have to go back to the Institute, though? Gooseggs are Class One Restricted, you couldn’t even get them on the black market in the Linears. All the Parapsychic Institutes keep their Gooseggs under lock and key.”’

Tim thought about it. “There is one place I might be able to get one without going to the Institute,” he said slowly. “You’re probably not going like it, though.”

“Oh boy,” Jason surveyed Tim’s expression. “I can’t wait to hear this one.”

“There is one… lab? In Gotham that was fully stocked up with parapsychic equipment. It’s been abandoned for about ten years, but no one ever goes there…”

“No,” Jason said flatly as the penny dropped. “No, no, no, f*ck no! You want to go into the Joker’s lab? You can’t!”

“Why not? It’s not like he’s around anymore and it’s a barren wasteland out there.” Eerie chuckles from the Joker mimic echoed throughout the warehouse on cue.

“Because it’s in a contamination field, Tim!” Jason grabbed him by the shoulders. “You know why it’s called a contamination field? Because it’s freaking contaminated. sh*t, the amount of poison that belched out into the world when ACE Chemicals blew…” Jason shook his head. “I remember the acid rains from the plume. It’d melt your tunic off and then take out your skin with it! We all wore air masks for over a year. It was no man’s land!”

“Not anymore,” Tim insisted. “I know, I’ve sat in on all the meetings. Ten years of decontamination has cleaned up the place. Our own surveyors admit it’s no longer hazardous. The only reason they keep the contamination field up is because there’s a war on about who owns the site and everybody wants in on the money. It’s abandoned, but it’s safe.”

Jason gaped at him. “You’re f*cking crazy! You’re talking about walking through a deadland to steal equipment that might not even be there anymore and hell, I sure as f*ck wouldn’t touch any machine used by the Joker. He used to strap people down, hook them up to his brain and watch ‘em go nuts! He was a lunatic! And not a f*cking scientist! How do you know that any Gooseggs he stole would even still be a workable machine?”

“If the components are there, I can make it work,” Tim stuck his chin out stubbornly. “Bruce may have dropped me like yesterday’s trash, but he did make it so I was the youngest certified parapsychic engineer in history. I just need one Goosegg; I can handle the rest.”

“Tim…” Jason looked stricken. “Bruce didn’t…”

“Besides,” Tim talked over him like he hadn’t heard. “What else can we do? They’ll kill you if they wake you up. You and bunch of others. You said we have to keep you under; a Goosegg is the only reliable way to do that. I can hook it to your coma array and hide it in the system. They won’t be able to get around it. Do you think I like this?” he demanded when Jason scowled. “I don’t! I want you to wake up, I want you to have a life! But you’re right, it’s too dangerous right now. It’s either no man's land… or we go to the Institute. That’s literally our only two options! You know what I want,” Tim felt his heart pound. There were all sorts of reasons he didn’t want to go to the Institute now. “So what’s it going to be? What do you want to do?”

Jason breathed out.

Chapter 11: 00:10

Chapter Text

Tim still had his field uniform. He’d been wearing it when he took off that last time and hadn’t had the resources on hand to ditch it as well. After filling out his forms with Welfare as Alvin Draper and winning the lottery that determined who got to sleep in the massive, stinking, communal shelters or a box apartment, he ought to have sold it off. Bleeding edge nanotech was rare in the Linears and it would have netted him a king’s ransom in funds had he found a buyer; something he’d sorely needed, really, because he hadn’t qualified for a Welfare armband until after he proved he’d gotten some kind of legal paying employment. Those first weeks had been stressful, hungry days, where he’d fixed things for a pittance until he’d built a rep.

But somehow that option had never occurred to him. He’d shoved the whole thing under his bed in a box and then left it to collect dust. He hadn’t looked at it again.

His pseudo-Freudian negligence had turned into an unexpected bit of serendipity. His field suit had equipment and scanners in-built, the sort of thing he’d need to navigate the wasteland. It wasn’t actively lethal anymore but he wasn’t stupid enough to believe that made it safe.

Tim couldn’t deny he felt a pang as he pulled the suit from its exile and laid it out. He’d been so proud to wear it once. Going out in the field had been one of the best times of his life; knowing for a fact that he was useful and not just a burden. He wasn’t sentimental or reverent about a lot of things, but he’d taken care of the suit like it was sacred. It had been, to him.

Shoving that aside with his usual cool practicality, Tim got to work. All the Wayne Institute badges had to go; they’d be a red flag to anyone around here, especially with the reports he was getting about Institute Talents hanging around the place being nuisances. The trackers had of course been disabled months ago. There was a backup comm that was a good quality little device, but Tim had ripped the battery out. He left it on his workbench as a possible source of parts. As for the rest of it, the nano-domino just needed a charge and the lenses to be dusted. His field packs were all above board and neat as a pin. The boots were still good, though they were tighter than he remembered.

The body suit was where he ran into trouble. A couple of months of hard labour and relentless training had filled out bits of him he hadn’t been aware needed filling. He still had a short and slender build, but his muscles had gotten thicker and tougher and he might have squeezed out one last growth spurt as well.

Whatever the reason, the suit once tailored for him no longer fit. Tim was forced to do an extensive and lengthy hack job on it, butchering it and then sewing the parts back together using a hard leather tunic that actually fit him as a gap filler. The result was Frankenstein’s body armour — he wasn’t the daintiest when it came to needlework, he admitted — but he got it functional enough to use all the embedded tech in it, albeit with a little jury rigging and work.

He left his apartment wearing his tunnel work overalls and a tunic too large for him, which was his clumsy best at hiding the high tech suit. People tried not to notice things down here but even the famous Bowery blindness wouldn’t be able to ignore a field suit, especially one worth this much money. The nano-domino stayed in his pockets, gripped in one unyielding fist against pickpockets.

The contamination zone had been called Amusem*nt Mile, a once thriving arts and entertainment district. It was only about two miles north of Tim’s apartment deep in the innards of the Bowery, at least as the crow flies. The reality of the twisting, turning pathways of the Linears put it more at four miles on the ground.

It was like crossing into a completely different planet.

The Bowery was pretty low on the liveability scale but it still had infrastructure. There were a few worn down shops and legitimate businesses, though of course they were co-mingled with brothels, junk-dens, gambling halls and the thriving, moving black markets. Mostly it was filled with people just scraping by.

By the time you hit Crime Alley, the glimmer of promise lit by those little oases of legal commerce had been well snuffed out. Tim had to call on every inch of his resourcefulness and all the Discipline level invisibility he could muster not to draw the attention of the hard-eyed gangs and hardscrabble criminals who lived here. The Bowery may be lawless, but this place was chaos. Tim avoided no less than three random shootouts and a full raid by heavily armed riot police trying, as they always did, to keep the cancer of this place from growing out of it.

Tim drifted through it all like a ghost, although the same dye that now protected him from constant illegal pinging from various Talents who lived here also protected them from being completely fooled by his invisibility trick. He had to run for his life more than once to get out of range of some extremely insistent telepaths who’d send their gangs out for either fresh blood or to spill it.

But even the purgatory that this place was couldn’t compare to the eeriness of everything past the old sailing boat basin.

The basin itself was uninhabitable still. The water was a toxic, rainbow sheened sludge that spoke of years of illegal dumping. It didn’t help the poisonous atmosphere that the entire area around the basin was a giant graveyard.

Literally. No one could live here, but Jerhatten was such a desperate crush that open space was at a premium. That’s why Bruce Wayne was equally loved and hated; he did a lot of good, but to people crammed in like fish in a tin, he was also a space hoarder of the highest degree. Even poisoned ground had to be used for something. Tim supposed there was a kind of sense in leaving the toxic ground for the dead.

There were no graves. You didn’t have the option of burial when the reaper came knocking; these days it was cremation or nothing. What there was, was thousands upon thousands of little grave markers picketing the area for a square mile around, crammed in as tightly as the living people they once represented had been. They all had a poignant, handmade look. The rich didn’t spend their eternities here; this was a Potter’s Field, stretching to the horizon, with only sad little trinkets and homespun memorials to remind that the ashes here had once been a beloved person.

People didn’t visit these graves. They came once, perhaps, to plant their marker, but would scurry back to safer places and leave the memories with the dead. Tim walked through the graveyard, heart in his throat, his footfalls landing like thunder and reminded every step that time was always running out.

The markers were thick as winter snow closer to Crime Alley and thinned considerably the closer he came to Amusem*nt Mile. Even without the contamination field, people in these parts knew a cursed place when they saw one. Because the aforementioned mandate of Jerhatten was ‘no inch wasted’ the city had turned the contamination zone into a junkyard. After all, car wrecks and retired cruisers and every other discarded machine Jerhatten regularly sloughed off like dead skin had to go somewhere and couldn’t be poisoned. As Tim approached the dead zone between the graveyard and the contamination zone he looked up and up and up; stacks of crushed and cubed metal two storeys high loomed over him, stretching away right and left and effectively cutting the Amusem*nt Mile spit of land off from the rest of Gotham. Someone had spray painted huge lettered warnings the entire height of the lumpy wall: DO NOT ENTER.

Tim could enter though; there were gaps in the bottom of the wall big enough to walk through if you ducked, and beyond that there was a labyrinth of stacks of junk of all descriptions. Old cars, skimmers, cruisers, boats, shuttles, a tower of fridges glowing faintly still, all manner of heavy appliances and broken-down heavy equipment, copters and old tanks, the works. It made his engineer palms itch. They’d tried to be systematic at first, group according to theme, but the drones seemed to just drop things wherever there was space and where it wouldn’t cause a catastrophic stack collapse. Sometimes, looking at dystopian piles of scattered junk, it seemed like they didn’t even manage that.

Tim weaved through the stacks, some of which went as high as a moderately sized building. It was a bit of a labyrinth but it was one without design; as long as he kept his sore feet plodding in the right direction he’d be unlikely to get lost. Sometimes, between a paper-thin gap, he’d see what was left of the ACE Chemicals dome, a burnt and burst husk squatting on the other side of the junkyard.

He had been expecting contamination hazards, but he hadn’t expected people. Unbelievably, there were a few here. Tim didn’t see them, exactly; he heard them scurrying away, far too large for even a feral Bowery rat. These weren’t the dirt poor desperates of the Bowery or the lawless rogues of Crime Alley. These were people beyond the edges, beyond the margins. The lost. Tim was pretty sure if you washed up here you were about as outcast as it was possible to be amongst the urban crush of Jerhatten.

They weren’t curious, they didn’t challenge him. They didn’t even show themselves. It might have factored into their calculations that Tim was clearly wearing a nano-domino and armour; he’d slapped on one and revealed the other hiking through the graves. Tim didn’t think they’d have come out even if he wasn’t wearing any such intimidating field gear, though. Life had beaten these people down so hard even the idea of a confrontation wasn’t to be entertained.

Still, Tim could see, from brief flashes he caught out of the corners of his eyes, they’d eked out a life even in this place. Little bits of tatters and trinkets, probably stolen from graves, were strung up over certain passages, though he couldn’t guess what it meant to the people here. There were battered old skimmers and appliances which showed signs of inexpert but careful repair. Once, peering through a cloister of old washing machines, Tim was startled to see a flash of living, growing green. Someone had, against all possible odds, planted a garden here.

While a part of him itched to explore, Tim kept doggedly on his path. These people didn’t want trouble and neither did he. They seemed happy enough to let him pass, but he didn’t particularly want to test their patience by poking around. He had a mission.

Eventually his tired feet stumped up to the actual contamination barrier. It was a smaller, more compact version of the Quarantine Barrier that surrounded the Americas, an energy shield designed not to keep people out and/or in, but to kill any microbes and viruses that people might carry with them to prevent pandemics. This one had a laser security net as well, no doubt triggered to alarm if any living thing tried to cross it, but that didn’t hamper Tim. It was well within his capabilities to shut down one section with some tin foil off his rations and a quick loop program from his comm. They weren’t exactly well secured; no one with any sense at all would try to break into this place. There were only pressure sensors on the inside that were there to snap the barrier to maximum if there was another explosion, which had been a risk ten years ago but was impossible now. A small body would barely register on the sensors.

The whole act of going into the haunted old factory was a little bit anticlimactic. No misunderstandings, it was as creepy as hell in there. Half the old building was just gone, a decimated ruin of rubble and busted old vats. There were a few parts still nominally standing, though the structure was clearly on its last legs, sagging and creaking ominously in the slightest breeze. Crazy graffiti painted the walls, including eerie Joker-faces in lurid whites, red and greens.

But the dust was half an inch thick and the place was netted with cobwebs. Horror had given way to sadness, sadness to decay. There was nothing left here to chill the soul; daylight had reached the darkest corners long ago, when half the roof had peeled off. The Joker had still been alive when the cataclysm had happened, but even he’d left it behind to rot.

The main chemical plant area had been the hardest hit, natch. Tim quested into whatever bits were still left; old offices, testing rooms, shipping docks. There wasn’t much left of anything here. He was right at the point of giving in and writing the whole adventure off as a waste when he found what he thought was an old testing lab near the waterside.

It was as grimy and cracked as the rest of the place but his psychometry made him a keen reader of atmosphere. There was an old dentist’s chair bolted to the floor there, with bits of machines and trolleys crammed anywhere they’d fit. It looked almost like an infirmary, but Tim wasn’t fooled. He wouldn’t touch anything in this room with his ungloved hands if you paid him in gold. Who knew what madness he’d absorb.

There was an EEG circlet array sized for an adult head, hooked up to wires and machines resting on the chair. Tim didn’t want to think about how many people the Joker had strapped in here and hooked up to what was, in effect, extremely crude gestalt circuitry, turning their brains up to maximum and then exposing them to his own madness riddled consciousness. If the victim even survived the badly made equipment, they’d walk out of here irretrievably insane and usually got shot to death by police while in the middle of their own killing sprees, laughing madly the whole time. Who knew why he’d done it or what he’d hoped to accomplish. Who knew why the Joker did anything.

Tim activated the scanning matrix in his domino. All Gooseggs since the Darrows had patented the special Talent-sensitive ones had a special serial number coded on them beyond the normal spectrum of sight. A quirk of genetics meant most Talents were tetrachromats, born with extra cones in their eyes that let them see up to a hundred million shades of colour. The scanning matrix in his domino was sensitive enough to pick out the photopigment they used to brand them. Most people didn’t know about that, and Tim was pretty sure the Joker wouldn’t have cared if he did. He’d stolen his equipment just like everything else he’d gotten in life.

There! The scanners picked up a faint blip under a half-collapsed table. Tim went forward enthusiastically but cautiously, digging with care. Gooseggs were made to be hardy, packed in their shockproof shells, but sitting in this decrepit ruin probably hadn’t done wonders for the highly sensitive sensory array.

He unearthed it with greedy fingers, elated. He’d known it was a long shot, and there was nothing like the feeling of a long shot paying off unexpectedly. Sure it was an old model, big and clunky, nothing like the sleek designs they used now, but Gooseggs had been designed for exactly one purpose — to interact with a Talent’s brain. It would have all the capabilities of a modern one once Tim was finished with it.

He unhooked it from the rest of the decaying gear. The Goosegg he needed, but the rest of it he could build himself. Even though he wasn’t touching it with bare skin, this place had a twisted, ugly feel to it. Before, he would have been hesitant to call any place irredeemable, but he now stood corrected. This place was evil. It was better to leave it to rot.

With that in mind, Tim shimmied the Goosegg into the folded up backpack he’d brought along and booked it for the exit.

In hindsight, he should have known it was never going to be that easy. He got back through the containment field and started to thread his way through the junkyard. It was only when he was halfway through he realized that it was way too quiet.

Tim had been a denizen of the Bowery long enough to know better than to slow down or start looking around. He did discreetly unwrap one glove; a cold read would give him a good overview of his surroundings without tipping off any followers.

He brushed one crushed metal wall. The world lit up with molecules and strings, overlaying his physical sight. There was a lot of data in the graveyard, all the detritus of civilization with a story to tell about how it ended up here. It was hard to get any clear picture past the flood.

There was someone moving up behind him, thoughts intent like a predator. There was nothing ahead of him.

Tim sped up.

He rounded a corner and nothing hit him square in the face, cackling metallically.

Clutching his jaw, he reeled back and away from the woman. She was smirking and advancing on him, head shaved completely bald. “Well, well, well. A Talent!” her voice had a weird, buzzing edge. It was possible her throat had some sort of implant in it. “This is going to be fun!”

Tim was blindsided. He hadn’t sensed her. She still read as nothing; as real in his psychic sight as a hologram. She was some kind of Talent nullifier, like Bruce.

Her compatriot came around the corner. He didn’t appear to be armed, but Tim wasn’t about to take that at face value. He was a big guy, his eyes flat and intent, crossing his arms as he looked Tim up and down, thoroughly unimpressed.

“Who are you supposed to be?” The metallic buzz to the woman’s voice caught Tim’s attention again. Her throat was covered by a patchwork scarf, so he couldn’t be sure about the cause.

Tim was caught off guard by the question, so much so that he fell back on his field protocol. “Robin,” he said automatically, then winced. He wasn’t anymore, was he? “Red…” Hold on a minute, he argued with himself. Why the hell couldn’t he be Robin here? He wasn’t at the Institute anymore, he could be whoever he damn well liked. “Red Robin, I guess,” he shrugged. He rotated his jaw. It was sore but there were no worrying clicks or loose teeth; she hadn’t caught him that hard. “And if you don’t mind, I’ll be on my way.”

“Unfortunately, we do mind,” said the guy. “This ain’t your place. It’s ours. You can’t just walk through it and take whatever you like.”

“Aw, Z, quit jawing about it,” the woman rolled her eyes. “He’s one of those Wayne brats; they’re the only ones that wear stupid masks like that. Bet it’ll fetch a mint. Come on, boyo, time to pay the toll.”

“I’m more interested in the pack,” Z jerked his chin at it. “He got into the dead zone to get it. Must be valuable.”

Tim stayed calm, because if he didn’t he was pretty sure they knew how to get rid of an unwanted body around here. He was sinking deep into a Discipline trance, feeling his senses expand and his heart rate steady, the pain in his jaw evaporating. This would be different from sparring. Sure, it’s not like he’d never used Discipline in the field as criminals weren’t very obliging about getting arrested, but regular field work had dried up for Tim Drake a while ago. He hadn’t had to deal with a physical threat in a long time.

“Let me take, ‘im, Z,” the woman smirked. “There ain’t much of him.”

“Pru, don’t go all nuts on us,” Z warned her.

“I won’t, promise! Come on, boyo, hand it over,” Pru came forward, still smirking. “We might only rough you up a little.”

And promptly shrieked when Tim neatly broke her nose with one swift strike. When she reeled back, spraying blood, he took off at a dead run, gripping his pack in a death grip. He darted around the stacks of junk like his feet were on fire. He wasn’t really in the mood for an actual fight.

He hadn’t dropped his quantum sight; that, folded into the hyper awareness of the Discipline, saved his life. The strings around him rippled as massive force was applied at a distant point. Tim dropped and rolled.

A bolt of pure force punched a hole the size of Tim’s head through the stack ahead of him, all the way through to the stack beyond that. The two assailants came around the bend while Tim was finding his feet again.

“What th’ f*ck Owens!” Pru yelled up into the stacks. “You f*cking missed!”

“The kid’s got pre-cog or something!” the unseen Owens yelled back.

Unregistered Talents, Tim thought. Unregistered but trained Talent. Oh, he had such a bad feeling about this.

His bad feeling was entirely justified as the big man, Z, stepped up to him, face like thunder. “Congratulations, you’ve managed to guarantee our interest. You don’t have the element of surprise anymore. Hand over the pack and we’ll decide whether or not to take your head clean off.”

“Then pick quickly, because I’m not giving it up!” Tim lunged in a swift strike, which was entirely blocked by a fast moving Z. But that was fine; Tim had expected that. He swivelled his body around, planted his feet and hefted, flipping the taller and broader man over his shoulder in a move that had never failed to surprise Jason in the past. It certainly worked on Z. He hit the ground with a wheezing thump, totally caught off guard.

Pru moved in; her pinched mouth was framed with sticky red trails, but her teary eyes hardly slowed her down. Tim was driven back with a series of swift jabs and kicks, her agility equal to his. Weeks upon weeks of training and hard work with the resohammer had hardened Tim’s body and lengthened his endurance. He held his own, matching her strike for strike even though he slowly lost ground.

But then Z was on his feet again and it was two against one — and they were both trained fighters. No, more than trained; their breathing patterns were slow and familiar, much like his own. And Z was apparently a specialist fighter, smooth and predatory like Jason had been. Tim could hold his own against the angry, chaotic, teary eyed Pru, but Z was a different beast.

Tim still managed to surprise him, again. Tim was agile; he deliberately focused on that because he knew he’d never have the brute strength of Bruce or Dick or even Damian when he was fully grown. But he could use raw power too; enough so that when he darted under Pru’s strike and seemingly into the range of Z’s grabbing hands, Z caught a right hook that he must have felt to his back teeth.

Z was a big guy, though, and trained to take hits. Tim could handle Pru or Z on their own, but both of them working in tandem meant he was outmatched. It was only a matter of time.

Z seized him in a chokehold after Pru managed to kick his legs out from under him. The big man squeezed tight as Pru’s greedy hands worked the straps of his pack. “He’s got Discipline,” Z rumbled in his ear.

“You think the Demon Head sent ‘im?” Pru asked grimly. “We ought to kill ‘im and toss ‘im in the Basin.”

What the f*ck ? Even as Tim clawed at the big man’s arm, Tim recognised what they were saying. Internally, he groaned. His first actual, real fight and he somehow manages to stumble across Ra’s Al Ghul’s castoffs, all Discipline trained and probably flat out assassins to boot? Was Tim born under some unlucky star?

Focus , Tim told himself. The Discipline gave him greater endurance; he had sufficient breath control to remain conscious longer than most under these conditions. He had to get them off him before Pru gained a hold of the backpack; it was possible but not likely they’d just snitch it and run, and Tim didn’t know this area well enough to give chase. This was quite possibly the only Goosegg he could access without help from the Institute. Jason’s life, and the lives of a lot of other people, depended on him getting it out of here.

Think, Tim. Hadn’t he always believed that resourcefulness meant more than Talent?

“Stop struggling, boyo,” Pru advised silkily as she worked the tight straps off. “You’re only making it worse.”

Tim focused. Strings lit up around him, and the junkyard lit up with quantum sight, a glowing array of heavy masses of all shapes and sizes.

Oh, he thought gamely. There was something he could use. Tim gathered the last shred of his will in his slowly darkening vision and felt a bloom of pure agony in his head when he grabbed what he needed and pulled .

He didn’t stop to think about it. He disregarded the pain, the dizziness, the screaming in his lungs, and his head feeling like it was exploding; he closed his hand tightly around the pipe he’d just summoned and swung it hard into a shocked Pru’s face. While she shrieked as her nose got hit again, Z’s grip loosed in sheer surprise, allowing Tim to whip around on sheer Discipline trained reflex and club him, hard, across the face. The shock on his face was a thing to behold, but it was not a degree less than Tim’s own as he hefted the pipe through searing double vision in amazement.

It was longer than he thought it would be; more staff than baton. But mostly what it was, was a lot heavier than five hundred grams. Tim had broken some kind of limit or something. Judging by the way his head screamed at him, he’d overextended himself nicely.

No time to wonder; no time to even recover. Tim turned and ran for his life, trying desperately not to weave like a drunkard as the dizziness and nausea hit him hard. The two he’d left behind were still staggering to their feet; he hadn’t managed to incapacitate them.

Still, if he could get enough distance, Tim was a pretty fast runner and he’d been a champion marathoner on all the fun runs at the Institute. He would outdistance them and outendure them if he could…

An old skimmer wreck ahead of him exploded in a spray of molten metals.

Right, Tim thought as he ducked and weaved around the mess frantically. The third guy. He was still active going, based on the swearing.

“Light ‘im the f*ck up, Owens!” Pru’s angry if nasally voice rang out from behind.

“I’m trying, f*ck it,” Owens yelled back from wherever he was. “He’s f*cking puny and fast!”

Zig zag, Tim though frantically. Get to cover. That wasn’t the Discipline talking, that was pure Gotham survival skills. He ducked and wove as fire rained down. They seemed to be bolts of pure kinetic energy. Cass could do something similar, only hers were more slice than blow holes in. It was something she’d learned trapped in the Cult of the Demon Head. Ra’s trained his people up to be lethal, no matter their Talent.

Tim was aware he couldn’t be this lucky; the Owens guy was missing on purpose. Tim was being herded back around, away from the outer wall, back towards…

Yep, there was Z as Tim rounded the next corner to force Owens to switch his positions on top of the stacks again. He didn’t attack again — he didn’t need to.

He flung an entire washing unit at Tim as easily as someone else would lob a softball.

Tim yelped, tucked and rolled out of the firing line, sweating like mad. Touch Telekinetic, he thought to himself. Like Steph, but Steph’s strongest skills were in telepathy rather than telekinesis. She’d never been able to heft something that big. Z was a strong Talent.

Tim still had the staff in his hands. No way he was getting out of here without going through Z; Owens needed line-of-sight and Tim wasn’t exactly sure what Pru could do, but anyone who had survived in the Demon Head cult must have offensive skills a-plenty.

They weren’t just going to let him leave.

Tim used every bit of Discipline and every bit of strength in his body to dodge incoming, half-tonne projectiles flying at him from Z’s position. His three-sixty constant psychic scan of the area caught the moving mass of motes that was Owens, clawing up a particularly tall stack, looking for the best vantage on Tim. Pru he couldn’t sense in the vicinity; she might be down for the count with the no doubt magnificent deviated septum he’d given her.

No, with Pru an unknown and Owens hampered by his need to keep repositioning, the Z guy had to be Tim’s target. And Tim? He had spent three straight years dodging everything Damian Wayne had thrown at him, literally. And the kid could move way bigger stuff than this.

Tim ducked and dove, tumbled and flipped like Dick had taught him long ago. Z couldn’t change the trajectory of whatever he flung once it was in the air like Damian could and that was a big disadvantage right there. He also seemed taken aback that Tim would move towards him rather than away, but Tim wasn’t fooled by their strategy. If he ran out towards the wall, Owens would be there to pick him off, as easy as pie.

Z was strong, he was fast, and he’d clearly done this before because he could fling with immense accuracy and speed, but every time he flung something he had a break where he had to physically reach and touch something else in order to throw it. In those blips and breaks Tim gained immense ground through Discipline assisted running, awareness at such high voltage that the world almost seemed to slow down.

The last few feet were the most dangerous. There was no space to dodge in close quarters and Z could afford for him to come close enough to get crushed by a well timed throw. But Tim was ready for that. His head might be killing him but thanks to the Discipline the pain was distant, far away. He spun his makeshift staff into a different position in his hand as he moved the last twenty yards to his target, sank into quantum sight, saw the strings links here, here, and here, and as Z threw an old washing unit like a basketball, right on a flat, direct path to Tim, Tim sent his pipe flying like a javelin, folded up through space, skipping past the moving unit and intervening space and reappearing to slam end first right into Z’s gut even as Tim ducked and slid for his life, washing unit skimming too closely over his head for comfort.

Don’t stop, Jason’s advice rang in his ear. Don’t stop, don’t hesitate, don’t think. Keep going until the other guy is down.

Tim kept going. Tumbling at the other side of the near miss, he rolled and gained his feet, still with a hefty part of his momentum propelling him forward into a caught off-guard Z. Tim lashed out with a flying kick, sending the man reeling back, giving him time to scoop up his improvised weapon. There was a weird buzzing sensation in his head, a sign he’d gone way overboard, too far to recover from easily, but it was irrelevant now. Tim’s brain was sinking into one lone, inevitable truth; he had to get the Goosegg out of here and save Jason. He was fast running out of processing power for any other considerations.

Tim spun and swung. The pipe was longer and thinner than Dick’s batons, which were the only combat weapons Tim had training in before all the lessons had ground to a halt, but Tim was smart and he’d done his best to keep practicing by himself over the years. Z recovered fast because the Discipline could let you do that, and suddenly it was a rough and ready fight. Z tried to get his hands on any kind of heavy object to slam at him, and Tim did everything he could to keep him from doing so, herding him away from junk piles with smooth swings and feints, dodging fists and kicks. A toaster oven close to their skirmish exploded; Owens had found a vantage point, but the fight was moving too fast to let him get a clean shot. He was there, though, waiting for the opportunity.

He got one.

Tim successfully slammed the pipe across Z’s chest, making him stumble back. Tim went in for the kill; or at least, to incapacitate. He lunged…

… and walked straight into a kick to the jaw from Pru, who had literally come out of nowhere.

As Tim reeled back, he tried to get a handle on the situation. His quantum sight gave him a full three-sixty awareness of his surroundings and Pru was nowhere in it. She simply didn’t ping on his psychic radar of all.

She really was like Bruce, Tim realised. Maybe not exactly the same. Bruce could block a Talent completely. This Pru seemed to be a complete Talent-null. Talents couldn’t seem to touch her at all. She was invisible.

This ceased to be a major concern of his though. Tim’s bell had been rung but good, and Pru was coming at him, crooked-beaked and furious, bearing a shiv that didn’t look in any way crude or ineffective. It flashed as she swung it at his neck. Tim pulled further back to avoid it, but she moved like a snake, swinging back and following him step for step. A slice was carved out of his armour, more suited for projectiles than blades.

Tim blocked the shiv with the pipe, teeth gritted and oozing sweat. Even the Discipline couldn’t help with everything and Tim was overextended as it was. He dodged her furious punch, kicked her hard in the knee with his very well-made combat boots, and tried to push her back and gain some space. She grunted in pain and fisted the pipe in her free hand, teeth bared like a feral animal. Freeing the shiv, she yanked Tim toward her and…

Tim yelped at the slice penetrated this time. It left him with a shallow but long cut against his collarbone and lost him a pack strap — no doubt what she had been aiming for.

“You’re gonna be sorry you ever thought you could take on the likes of us and win, boyo!” Pru snarled.

“Static Shock Override!” Tim yelped, hoping there was still enough juice left to do something.

There was. The suit, frankensteined or not, was able to release a single charge from its defensive system. The current travelled down Tim’s arm and into the taser contact points embedded in his palm, the only circuit to fully survive the suit’s retrofitting.

Pru shrieked and convulsed, gripping hand white knuckling around the electrified pipe. It wasn’t enough to kill or permanently injure her, but it still stung a hell of a lot. Her throat buzzed as the charge did something to whatever was implanted there.

Unfortunately, neither Z nor Owens knew that all the Institute’s field equipment was non-lethal. That’s where everything went wrong.

Z lunged towards them, intent on either taking out Tim or rescuing Pru. Owens had the same thought, only his method of rescuing involved firing wildly on Tim. Pru, meanwhile, kicked out at Tim to get him away. Tim fell back from the kick to his solar plexus. Pru was blown back from the charge she’d taken. The pipe they’d been grappling over whipped wildly between them as they both went opposite directions.

Z reached them.

Owens fired.

The pipe exploded into jagged chunks.

One end piece, sliced to a white hot, jagged point, was blasted backwards at sonic speeds due to the forces involved….

And impaled Z right through his chest wall.

He was thrown back what had to be twenty feet.

There was blood. So much blood.

Everybody stared at one another, too shocked to speak. Even Z gaped at the piece of hot metal sticking out of him, seemingly more surprised than anything else.

“Owens, what the f*ck?” Pru broke the silence with a horrified shriek.

“sh*t, I’m sorry!” Owens yelled over the clattering sound of his own boots as he scrambled down. “I’m sorry!”

“Z!” Pru yelled as she staggered to her feet. “Z, don’t—!”

Z blinked, then staggered back, one brawny arm reaching out to grasp the wall behind him. He was a touch-telekinetic, a Talent who was currently mid-extreme trauma and therefore spinning wildly out of control.

He sank his fingers into the wall, mindlessly looking for purchase. His Talent was still engaged.

An entire block of crushed metal was wrenched from the wall by one bloodstained hand as Z tried to stay upright. There was an ominous, primeval groaning noise.

“Get clear, f*ck it!” Owens cried. “The stack’s unstable! It’s going to go!”

The tip of the stack disintegrated, raining great chunks of metals down from on high.

Pru lunged for Z but Owen tackled her from behind, yelling.

Tim would be safe if he moved fast enough.

Z was at the epicentre.

Everything we do, Bruce’s voice was in his ear. Everything we do with our Talent, must be about saving lives above all else.

Tim dropped into quantum sight between heartbeats. Here he was, there Z was, two fixed points in time and space. It felt like the whole universe was trying to explode inside of Tim’s head, but he grabbed the strings, pulled down every last atom of Discipline, will and sheer desperation he could grab.

And pulled.

Tim felt the world dissolve into motes of light, but maybe that was just how his brain interpreted what was happening. Whatever it was, he surfaced into the real world that was moving in treacle, Z a complicated knot of strings and tangles placed here and here and here in space and time. Tim hit him in a full frontal tackle and the world dissolved again, his knotted up tangle of motes and Z’s tangled together but completely distinct as well. Tim didn’t pick a location; the only thought in his exploding mind was away.

He came to on the hard ground. There was foam on his lips, his body ached. He’d been seizing like an epileptic.

He was wet with blood, although in his dazed observation of his surroundings he managed to mistily note the fact that the blood mostly wasn’t his. Z was stretched out next to him, moaning in pain, red slowly spreading out in a horrific halo across the ground.

Tim got to his feet, staggered away from the scene and vomited until there was nothing to bring up. The Discipline couldn’t absorb the sheer exertion he’d just put himself through. His arms were tingling with pins and needles, numbed, and his chest felt too tight for breath. He tried to focus his blurry vision on the wider landscape and made out, in the far distance, two figures frantically pawing through fallen junk, their shouting voices and banging a tinny, distant buzzing in his ears.

Tim tried to breathe past the vice gripping his chest. His fingertips were blue, he was in shock. He weakly felt for his shoulders; yes, the bag was still there, but it had half slid off him while he’d been seizing. He gracelessly fumbled with the one remaining strap, trying desperately to focus.

Unfortunately, the only thing Tim could focus on was the wheezing, agonized moans of Z, who writhed slightly in his own blood, clearly out of it but in pain. The blood wouldn’t stop coming.

On sheer muscle memory, Tim managed to stagger to his feet, swaying like a drunkard. He tried to line up his priorities in his head, Goosegg, home, Jason. He had to get to Jason, to save him.

Tim turned to go, looked at his freehand, and froze. It was stained red with blood.

Tim looked back. Z was still there.

f*ck.

Tim levered off the pack and set it down carefully before staggering back to Z, shaking hands clumsily fumbling in his uniform punches for his field work first aid kit. He yanked the whole pouch off his belt and frantically worked at the fastener with slippery fingers.

“Gonna be okay,” Tim grunted out, even though every sound made his head scream. “Gonna…” he managed to regroup his scattered brain cells into some semblance of order, first aid procedures dancing in front of his eyes. He found the right sprayer. Sterile nano-patch. He yanked it out and ripped loose the sterile fastener.

It was no good trying to take the pipe out; he’d bleed to death faster that way. Tim shakily sprayed nano-bandage around the pipe and its hideous wound. That should seal it, at least. Long enough to get help.

There was an exit wound in his shoulder blade too. Tim gamely tried to turn Z on his side so he could hit that wound too, but couldn’t muster the strength in his limp noodle arms. Gritting his teeth against his ringing head, he stretched his body upwards and waved his arms frantically. “Here! Hey! Here! Help!”

Then he curled up, clutching his head in pain.

Shocked shouts and footsteps came at him as if through dark water. Tim managed to uncurl long enough to see Pru and Owens charge over, furious and upset.

“What the f*ck are you—?” Pru snarled. “How the f*ck did you get ‘im…”

“T-t-turn him over,” Tim held up his nano-bandage sprayer up shakily. “Gotta s-seal it. Please,” he said when they hesitated. “He’s bleeding.”

“f*ck, f*ck, f*ck!” Owens lunged first, grabbed Z and hauled him on his side as gently as he could.

Pru snatched the spray from Tim and went to town on the exit wound. “How much of this sh*t have you got, boyo?” she shook the empty can threateningly.

“Not enough,” Tim wheezed helplessly. “Not for this.”

“Kid’s right,” Owens, a grim faced, brown haired man up close, looked Z over with a more expert eye. “He needs a doc.”

Pru’s lips pursed. “He used up his turn yet?”

“No,” Owens shook his head. “We need to get ‘im to Old Tom.”

Tim blinked. Old Tom? “Old Tom’s just a story. Isn’t he?”

“You don’t know nothing, boyo,” Pru spat. “How are we gonna carry ‘im all the way to the Alley?” she added helplessly.

She had a point. Pru was muscled but short statured and Owens was slightly bigger, but Z was a huge guy. He was a heavy deadweight unless you had a boatload of telekinetic Talent.

Owens eyes flicked to a shaky Tim. “Oi. Can you take one of his legs?”

“Him?” Pru sneered.

Tim had no idea how bad he looked to rank such complete scepticism. He tried to focus his breathing, to eke out what little scraps of Discipline remained. “I can help,” he nodded.

“Right,” Owens nodded. “Pru, take his other leg. We have to get him to the car.”

Which is how Tim found himself straddled over a wounded man, frantically patching red leaks and trying not to pass out himself, riding in the backseat of an ancient, rubber tyred old Corvette convertible, while Pru yelled at him and at Owens, who was in the driver's seat and ruthlessly mowing a path through the graveyard as they screamed and steamed their way back towards Crime Alley.

Chapter 12: 00:09

Chapter Text

Tim preferred not to think too much about the ride back. Every jolt seemed to put another painful crack in the glass his head was now made from. Colours strobed in his vision, sounds were either deafening or muffled to nothing past the ringing in his ears.

The last of his strength was used hauling an unconscious Z into… somewhere in the Alley, he didn’t even know where, the Corvette with bits falling off and its antique engine giving a final death rattle. He had just enough left to grit his teeth and hold on to Z while Pru thumped on doors, yelling for Old Tom. He had a vague memory of his vision tunnelling as they staggered into the doors and a dreamlike impression of helping to load Z onto a creaky bed.

Then black.

When he came to it was twelve hours later and he’d been left in an out of the way spot on a stained carpet floor, curled into a ball of pain even in sleep. His body was on fire, his brain was aching, boiling sludge, crackling with thunder and lightning, and his chest still ached. He rolled on his back but didn’t dare do more. He knew if he moved he’d start gagging from the nausea and then his head would either drop off or explode. He’d welcome either.

“Oi,” a buzzy voice rumbled. “Don’t yank out your line, dumbass. It cost you a pretty penny.”

Tim risked opening an eye. Pru was sitting propped up against the wall. Well, Tim was assuming it was Pru — there were two of her and neither one was very distinct. He closed his eyes again. His ever-helpful always-working psychometry made the memory of a catheter needle being shoved into his vein dance through the swamp of his head; yes, someone had started an IV, and he’d just bet they’d skimmed his armband to pay for it. Hell, he was lucky that it hadn’t been stolen altogether.

Tim grunted. “Z?”

“Why do you care?” It sounded more curious than belligerent.

“Don’t know. Just do.”

The scrape of Pru shifting against the wall sent a wave of agony through his head. “He’s fine, I guess. He hadn’t used his turn, so Old Tom could help ‘im.”

The word snagged in his mind. “Turn?”

“Old Tom will only help ya once,” Pru said placidly. “Everyone gets one time only. After that you have to bandage everything and then cross your fingers.”

Tim tried to fit this into some kind of workable understanding, but the logic of it slipped through his fingers entirely. Old Tom had been, to him, a story. They spoke of Old Tom across the north island, a character halfway a folk story and halfway a saint. People would say casually; ‘maybe Old Tom will be walking by’ or ‘Maybe we’ll find Old Tom’, when they were about to embark on a dangerous job or someone in the family had gotten sick. As far as Tim knew, it was just a name invoked for luck and maybe a desperate hope. No one had ever actually met Old Tom.

He drifted for a while, waiting for the relentless throbbing tide of pain to recede. It felt like an entire moon phase but was probably closer to a few hours. When he blinked up from the haze again, the lights and noises outside had gone that special quality that indicated night had fallen. In Crime Alley, at least, it meant a lot of screaming and shooting.

Pru was hunched up in one corner, wheezing congestedly through her busted but now bandaged nose, with a weird, metallic buzzsaw edge to the sound. She’d loosened her tunics and collars enough for Tim to catch a glimpse of implant contact points in her throat. She had an electronic larynx. Probably necessary, because it was a stark, shiny pinpoint in the raised ridge of a wicked looking scar.

Tim sat up slowly, still aching, but it was more distant now. Most of his problems were now dizziness and light-headedness. Feeling weirdly floaty, he grunted his way to leaning against the wall he’d been curled against. He took stock of his surroundings for the first time.

The room was long and narrow, like a train car. It was also dim and damp spotted, the carpets old and brown and ground in with who knew what stains. Somewhere behind him was a tiny entrance hallway, smeared with Z’s blood as they’d marched him in. There, at the back, lit by a single yellow light, was the wounded man himself. He wasn’t hooked up to a single machine except an IV, but he was still breathing from what Tim could tell. Whatever mess his chest was in was hidden under blankets.

Owens was standing near him, swaying… no, Tim recognized that movement very well now; Owens was patiently mopping the floor. All the while not taking his eyes off Z.

Between the back end where Z and Owens were and the entrance where Tim and Pru were there was an old wooden desk. An old woman sat at it, completely still and almost invisible in the pitch shadows of the room, head bowed.

Tim thought she was asleep and nearly got the shock of his life when her head smoothly turned towards him, eyes still closed. “You’re finally awake then.”

Tim blinked when he realized only one other person should be here. “You’re Old Tom?”

The old woman snickered. “It’s a useful enough nickname, I suppose. Who might you be?”

“I’m…” various options flashed in front of his mind. He was Tim Drake. He was Robin. He was Alvin Draper. He was Red. So much had happened to him, he’d done things he’d never dreamed of considering before. He realized with an odd jolt that for all he’d been a keen observationalist with everyone around him, he hadn’t ever known himself very well at all. “I’m not sure who I am,” he answered honestly.

“Hm,” Old Tom grunted. “What happened to all that certainty in your voice, young man? All that ringing confidence and burning enthusiasm. You were a different person last time I saw you. Figuratively speaking, of course.”

Tim squinted at her through the shadows. “We’ve met before?”

Old Tom drew more into the light. Her eyes opened, revealing milky blue clouds over her irises. She was blind.

And familiar. “Holy moly, you’re Leslie Thomkins!” Tim blurted out. “I do remember you! We did an intake on you at the Institute four years ago.” Tim had been working the desks by then. He might have fanboyed a little; Leslie Thomkins was a rare bird, a psychometrist like Tim. She was so powerful her blindness didn’t even register. She saw as clearly through touch as anyone ever saw through eyes.

Tim’s eyes darted to Z, resting peacefully in the back. She had a rare form of telekinesis as well. Molecular level kinesis. Alfred’s healing hands were similar but nowhere near as powerful. No wonder the name Old Tom was invoked with such fervor.

Leslie chuckled. “Yes. What a bunch of stuff and nonsense just to get my name written down somewhere. But Bruce Wayne insisted, and that boy ever did have a way of insisting.”

“You registered, but then you vanished again,” Tim said, puzzled. “We couldn’t understand why. You’ve been on our number one wanted list for years. Wait, that came out wrong,” Tim flushed when he realised he’d made her sound like a criminal. “I mean, recruiting you to work for the Institute was our number one priority. Has been ever since Bruce started up the WayneMed branch.”

“Finally decided to follow in his father’s footsteps, eh?”

“I guess,” Tim shrugged. “It’s really personal to him. He spends more time in the labs there than anywhere else these days. No one is allowed to see what he does in them. Why did you ignore all the recruitment calls? I know they would have paid you top dollar.”

“Stop me if I’m wrong, young man,” Leslie said archly. “But as far as I’m aware, the only thing I was legally required to do was register, correct? I don’t have to actually work for the Institute.”

“That’s right.”

“Well,” Leslie waved a hand grandly. “There you are then. It’s nice that you’re all so interested but there was no law that said I had to be interested back. Places like this need people like me. They won’t go and see doctors, they don’t trust ‘em. But Old Tom? They’ll always come to Old Tom.”

“For one time only?” Tim’s brow wrinkled. “They said you only use your Talent on people once.”

“Full Talent, yes. Fiddling around with DNA is a tricky business, young man. Turning people into a puddle of cancerous sludge from too much fiddling often offends.”

Tim nodded weakly. “Right,” he tried not to think about just how she’d found out about that little pitfall. “Your Talent… what are the limits, exactly?”

“Name a limit.”

“Telepathic triggers,” Tim asked promptly.

Leslie snorted. “My abilities are strictly kinetic. Physical wounds, cancers and immune systems. I don’t deal in all that telepathic nonsense; thank goodness, because psychometry already shows me enough ugly things. If you are looking to remove a telepathic induced condition you’re better off taking yourself back to the Institute. I may not agree with Bruce Wayne’s methods but he does cultivate a lot of Talent. I daresay the stubborn fool is still looking for a way around his trauma, rather than doing the sensible thing and getting through it.”

“You know him,” Tim realized. “Personally, I mean.”

“Hmpf. I was one of the first generation Talents,” Leslie admitted. “I worked very closely with Alfred Pennyworth, so I got to know Bruce quite a bit. He was a stubborn, silly boy who grew into a rather sillier man, in my opinion.”

“He does a lot of good,” Tim felt perversely driven to defend his mentor. “For Talents and for the city too.”

“Oh yes? Training up children to go out there and absorb the same trauma he himself suffered, that’s good is it?” Leslie asked archly, blind eyes as sharp as tacks. “You don’t fix a fire by adding more fire. He had the power to do every bit of good he’s done without making others pay the same price he did and yet, here we are. Foolishness! He could have healed the wound, instead he carries it around like some martyr with bleeding hands, which would be fine if other people, other children didn’t have to bleed too. What he’s doing might do good, but it isn’t right. No sir, I’ll not be going back under his auspices any time soon. I’d sooner live here than live without my principles.”

Tim was taken aback. It wasn’t often he heard Bruce couched in such scathing terms. “You think he’s a bad person?”

Leslie shrugged into his silence. “No, not really. He just picked his road, I suppose,” she allowed grudgingly. “I don’t suppose it was the worst one. But I’ve picked mine, and it will not be his. That’s all I’ll say on it. Now then, have you credits to spare? You’ll need to eat after the shock you put your body through and I don’t keep food here. Too many thieves.”

Tim unzipped his gauntlet and extracted his armband. He accessed his account. It was quite a bit lighter than he expected.

“The IV,” Leslie answered his unasked question wryly.

Right, Tim sighed. His small but steadily growing nest egg was now, not to put too fine a point on it, scrambled. Whatever he had left he transferred to Leslie. She frowned and he flushed when her audio transcriber read out the amount, but nodded. “Enough for a meal, I suppose. Wait here.”

She turned and walked, faultlessly and fearlessly, into the chaos of Crime Alley. Tim couldn’t but admire her sheer confidence, although her Talent was so powerful he didn’t imagine much could or would surprise her.

“Is that why you wanted whatever thingamie you got out of the clown's lair?” Pru asked.

Tim jumped and turned around. “What?” he asked, startled to see her dark, half hooded eyes peering at him.

“You need to get rid of a trigger,” her voice buzzed.

“Not me,” Tim shook his head. “A… a friend. The Joker did something to him. I thought the Goosegg might help. Or at least, we could figure out what it was .”

“sh*t kid, don’t you know anything about the difference between compulsions and triggers?” Owens snorted as he ditched the broom and came over, nudging a space next to a grumbling Pru so we could still have a sightline of the sleeping Z. “You can’t find a trigger with a scan, not like you can a compulsion. I think you’re confusing the two.”

“What do you both know about this stuff?” Tim asked curiously.

Pru and Owens looked at each other and snorted. “You do know we were in the Demon’s Head Cult, right?” Pru said dryly, rolling up her ragged tunic sleeve to expose a knot of scars of her bicep. She’d done her best to obliterate it, but there had clearly been a Demon Head insignia tattooed there in the past.

“Yeah,” Tim poked his bruises. “I noticed your training. So?”

“So guess what The Head’s favourite method of recruitment is, boyo?” Pru asked sardonically. “Compulsions, o’ course. You get within his radius and suddenly you’re all mindf*cked,” she twiddled her fingers at Owens’ temples.

“Yeah,” Owens sighed. “He makes you believe you’re a part of this grand plan. He makes you expendable to it and he also makes you love him for that. ‘S’why no one ever leaves, right? He makes ‘em think they want to stay, that it’s their idea. ‘Cept Pru.”

“Yeah,” Pru grunted. “That sh*t didn’t work on me. I got some weird anti-Talent.”

“So why did you join?” Tim’s brow wrinkled.

“’Cause I was an ordinary run-of-the-mill dumbass, kid,” Pru snorted. “It ain’t like al Ghul didn’t offer his followers some benefits to go with the mindf*ckery. I was an illegal, from a long, proud, dysfunctional line of illegals. The Woods, they called us, cause there were so many of us and maybe one in eight of us could read and write, we were all so feral. Like we were born out in the woods, see? We were f*cking proud of being wanderers. Only, it didn’t matter for sh*t in the end. Epidemic came down into the Linears right on schedule. Wiped out the whole damn lot of us. ‘Cept me,” Pru said gloomily. “I was all on my lonesome, no prospects, nothing. Regular meals and the promise of steady cash was a f*cking lottery win to me.”

Owens patted her on the shoulder. “The world’s full of dumbasses. Half the people following the Head would’ve done it without the mindf*ckery. Hell, he’s tellin’ ‘em we’re the masters of the universe in some f*cking chosen one hierarchy of people. It sounded pretty f*cking compelling to me when his crew recruited me.”

“But you left,” Tim pointed out.

“Don’t see how that’s rightly any of your business there, boyo,” Pru huffed.

“He saved Z,” Owens shrugged. “An’ I’d kinda like to know how an Institute brat ended up in Amusem*nt Mile. sh*t, Wayne can’t keep his sticky fingers out of anywhere, can he?” Owens snorted. “He’s gotta send his minions all over the place, trying to root up more Talent for his f*cking collection.”

“I wasn’t there on behalf of the Institute,” Tim replied. “I’m not with them.”

“Bull. sh*t,” Pru jabbed a finger at him. “Wayne was trained by the Demon’s Head. He’s a f*cking carbon copy of ‘im. He collects the most powerful Talents he can find. Why d’you think I never went there? They ain’t looking for my kind of Talent, are they? They want kinetics,” she sneered the word. “What the f*ck would you call that little trick you pulled, eh?”

“I never did that before,” Tim retorted. “Never with a weight that big. I could only lift half a kilo. No wonder I was so out of it,” he shook his head. “I must have nearly blown my own brains out going that far over my limit.”

Pru and Owens exchanged a weird look. “That was the first time you’d ever done that?” Owens asked skeptically

“First time I moved myself and myself and someone else,” Tim rubbed at his temples. “My head still aches. But anyway,” Tim waved his hands. “I worked at the Institute once, yes, but I don’t now. Haven’t for a while. I went there to find a Goosegg since I couldn’t get an Institute one. I thought it might help my friend find the triggers. Maybe undo them somehow.”

“Naw,” Owens sat back. “It don’t work like that. Triggers are like invisible tripwires. They’re buried in the subconscious so deep the only way to find them is to trip them. All that Talent equipment is mostly for the conscious mind. That’s where compulsions are. They’re like… a pattern, a thought, that keeps repeating in your head all the time. So much you don’t really think about it. But it does affect how you act, what you think about. So, like, when Al Ghul put a compulsion on me, the idea ‘you are serving a grand purpose’ kept repeating in my head. All the time, everywhere. Wading through mud and sh*t for three days and I’m ready to shoot everyone? ‘You’re serving a grand purpose’. Eating maggoty slop when rations ran out? ‘You’re serving a grand purpose’. Take out this target, that target,” Owens made a finger gun and gently knocked a stylus off Leslie’s desk. “’You’re serving a grand purpose’. Kept me from asking questions, see? Kept me from wondering, or wanting to leave. Always, at the back of my mind, ‘you’re serving a grand purpose’ was ringing away. Who’d walk away from that when it felt absolutely true.”

“You did though,” Tim pointed out. He was fascinated; this sort of thing wasn’t really taught very much as the Institute, since what these guys would call ‘mindf*ckery’ was considered unethical there. All of this was information Tim could use to help Jason. “You left. How?”

Pru made a buzzy noise that was probably her clearing what was left of her throat. “That was me. Turns out I wasn’t just Talent-proof. I could also wipe out a compulsion with my voice,” she touched her scarred throat. “The Master didn’t like to hear that at all.”

“He went after Pru,” Owens nudged her. “Nearly got her good, too. But Z, Pru and I were a team by then, had been for a while. One of al Ghul’s best assassin teams; mostly against politicians he didn’t like so well. Z and I grabbed what was left of her and ran. Came here. Well, out there.” He waved hand vaguely north.

“To the junkyard? Why?” Tim asked curiously. “There’s plenty of places to disappear in Jerhatten that are way more livable.”

“Ra’s Al Ghul collects Talents, kid,” Owens snorted. “Including Finders. There’s only one place he’d never dare scan. He hated the Joker. Hated him.”

“He wasn’t sure who’d be the winner if they fought,” Pru snorted. “Which is reason enough to hate, I guess. A telepath that sensitive against pure f*cking crazy? Doesn’t seem to me like anyone’d win, really.”

“The Joker’s dead though,” Tim pointed out.

“Don’t matter. Ra’s is a superstitious asshole. So’re the people ‘round here,” Owens sighed. “They reckon his madness just floats around, looking to claim another victim. I sure as sh*t wouldn’t put it past him. We came to the Badlands after ACE had been blown to hell and the Joker was well on his way to dying, and people in the Linears were still scared sh*tless to speak his name.”

“Hell, he made more bodies when he was dying than any other time in his f*cked up life,” Pru added.

“Dying? What?” Tim’s brow wrinkled. “He died in an explosion.”

“Yeah, but he was dying before that, boyo,” Pru snorted. “Not many people knew, o’course. Ra’s got word he was riddled with cancer. Like, f*cking riddled with it. I mean, he did live in a chemical swamp for twenty f*cking years, so I guess that wasn’t unexpected.”

“They never mentioned that in the old reports,” Tim was shocked.

“After a tungsten bomb? They were lucky to find little bits of ash,” Owens chuckled. “That’s why he went on such a spree right at the end. Maybe he wanted to break some kinda record. f*ck knows why that clown did anything.”

Tim sighed. It was true. You could only ask so many questions about the Joker and his motives before you could feel the crazy start to seep in. He defied explanation. “So you couldn’t remove a trigger, then?” he asked Pru. “Just compulsions.”

“Hell,” she buzzed with a brittle grin. “I can’t even break a compulsion now,” she fingered her throat. “Got no voice anymore, do I? Got a computer speakin’ for me. It ain’t the same. It only worked when it was my voice, for some reason.”

Tim nodded sadly. That had been a long shot at best. It would have been nice, though, to just find someone who could wipe away what the Joker had done, so that Jason could wake up again. There was so much of the world that Tim wanted to show him.

He had to find a way.

“Sides, it’s not like you have to worry none,” Pru continued, oblivious to Tim’s wandering thoughts. “You wouldn’t need me to break your compulsion, boyo. You did that pretty well on your own.”

Tim was abruptly called back to the present. “What are you talking about? I wasn’t asking for me,” he denied, feeling his face start to heat. “It’s for a friend. Why did you think I was under a compulsion?”

Pru and Owens exchanged a look.

“Kid,” Owens explained with slow patience. “You said yourself that lifting more’n half a kilo used to lay you out flat. Are you seriously telling me you think you can go from that to moving yourself to moving yourself and an adult passenger just like that? I thought you were Institute trained. Ain’t you been taught about Talent neuroscience?”

“Of course,” Tim frowned. “So?”

“So, if you didn’t have the capacity in your neural pathways already, no way could you have suddenly pulled that off,” Owens pointed out. “You’d have done nothing, or done nothing and fallen the hell off the mortal coil via a massive stroke. Don’t tell me you haven’t seen what happens when psychics hyperextend past where nature says they can go.”

Tim turned that over in his head. With everything that had happened, he hadn’t stopped and really thought through the miracle of his and Z’s survival. But Owens was right; you couldn’t go from zero to a hundred that fast without serious consequences. “But it’s not like it didn’t cost me,” he pointed out even as a wavery feeling started to ripple in his gut. “I was nearly comatose for half a day!”

“No one ever said breaking a compulsion was painless,” Pru replied to this. “It usually really f*cking hurts. Would leave you with a killer hangover too. Usually only for a couple of hours, but they could be worse if the compulsion was older, more entrenched. Yours musta been a doozy, boyo.”

“But no one put a compulsion on me,” Tim argued. “Wouldn’t I know it?”

“Kid, the whole point of a compulsion is that it’s a thought you have so regularly that it feels completely normal,” Owens said. “But if it affected your kinetics, then it was probably to do with your kinetics.”

“There might be some of it left still,” Pru speculated. “Like a little tattered bit of it hangin’ about in your head, iffin you need proof.”

“Think about it, kid,” Owens added. “Really think about it. Whenever you think about your kinetics, what’s the first thing that pops into your head?”

“Usually that it wasn’t powerful enough,” Tim snorted. “Which was true.”

“Yeah, except it wasn’t,” Owens retorted swiftly. “Don’t ya think that’s a little bit hinky?”

“Didn’t you ever test it?” Pru added. “When I first found my Talent, I tried it out on as many people as possible. It’s kinda what got me into f*cking trouble, frankly.”

“Of course I tested it,” Tim could feel himself getting defensive. “I tried everything I could think of to make it work and nothing ever did! I spent years practicing when I was a kid.”

“And then you stopped,” Owens said shrewdly.

“It wasn’t any good! I could never… it never did me any good,” Tim remembers all the painful times he’d tried to best Damian, to earn his respect. All the disheartening failures, all the pity from Bruce and Dick. “I just stopped one day. I don’t need to know about—” Tim stopped, feeling his blood turn to ice. The words flowed so easily, so effortlessly, so peacefully from the worn in groove in his brain. “I don’t need to know… about… my… kinetics… really…” he trailed off.

His memory was perfect. He knew who had said those exact words to him.

Patting his hair as he did so, because touch was the one reliable way to get past his natural shields.

Pru and Owens were looking at him with sympathy. They knew what it was like to have that warm illusion of being included ripped away.

“f*cking Bruce Wayne, man,” Owens voice was tinny in Tim’s blood-roaring ears.

“Well, ‘e was trained by the old master, weren’t he?” Pru snorted past her bandaged nose. “I mean, at the very least he’d know how t’do it, wouldn’t he? Men can’t resist that mindf*ckery stuff. Having power over someone’s mind? No one ever says no to it.”

Their back and forth speculation faded to the drone of distant insects.

Tim couldn’t breathe. “I’m sorry,” he croaked out. “I have to go.”

He thought maybe they tried to call him back, but couldn’t be sure. It all became indistinct in his mind, like the distant sound of crickets in summer.

He made it back to the Linears without a scratch. Later he would wonder how he accomplished such a feat; he’d have been fresh meat to the average Crime Alley denizen in his state. Maybe even the people here had limits. Or more likely Tim looked like such a crazy person that they stayed well away. Living in the Joker’s backyard for years had given everyone in these parts a profound and unassailable respect for the practice of keeping a safe distance from overt crazy.

Tim didn’t know how. He didn’t really care. All he knew was he looked up from the blanked out white noise of his brain to see the Wayne Parapsychic Institute office near his apartment, all lit up and warm. There were some illegal kids messing with the holoreels, playing at trying not to set them off; good practice for future pickpockets.

Tim stared at the almost photoreal, to scale recording of Bruce Wayne. “Your gifts aren’t a thing to be feared or hated. They’re to be embraced and explored. They’re to be used, for your benefit as well as the benefit of the city itself. We can help you explore your potential, expand your horizons and connect you with others like yourself. You won’t be alone. Whoever you are or wherever you’re born, you will be welcome, helped and celebrated."

“Come and join us at the Institute; we’re all family there.”

There was a shot of Bruce, surrounded by his students, by his employees, arms around them and beaming, picture perfect for the cameras.

Bruce used to touch him, Tim realized as his eyes blurred with tears. All the time at the beginning, to show Tim that touch wasn’t something he had to be afraid of. He’d put hands on Tim’s shoulders. Ruffle his hair. Give him hugs. Hold his hand. Stroke his forehead.

Eventually Tim had learned to stop flinching. Eventually he’d sought out the assurance of those touches, the feeling of being cherished. He’d soaked in it.

Tim would have died for Bruce, for giving him that gift.

The TRI-D gave a massive pop that made the kids all jump with alarm. The holoreel of Bruce’s face fizzled out in a wave of sparks and smoke that made all the kids laugh and shriek with glee.

Unseen across the street, head bowed, chest aching and drops of moisture falling on his shoes, Tim’s hand clenched around the motherboard he’d just ripped out of it until it cut into his palm, shaking with cold rage.

It hadn’t been real. None of it had been real.

Tim was so deep in his grief and anger that it wasn’t until sometime later that he sat up in bed, still fully dressed and staring numbly at the walls, and groaned out loud.

After all of that trouble, he’d left the Goosegg behind. Not at the clinic, where he could possibly retrieve it, but all the way back in the badlands junkheap. He’d forgotten it entirely in the mad rush to help Z.

He slumped back, full of despair. He couldn’t do anything right. Now how would he ever help Jason?

But the universe granted him one, single solitary mercy.

When he shuffled out of his room, red eyed and depressed, his precious backpack was at his door.

The even more precious cargo was still inside of it, along with a note written in careful, blocky handwriting of someone who knew letters but wasn’t called on to write by hand very much.

We might owe you a broken nose, but we also owe you a life. Call in your debt. Good for one time only. And a comm number.

Tim breathed out. Well, it was something.

Which was a lot more than he’d ever had before.

Chapter 13: 00:08

Chapter Text

“So, let me see if I got this straight. Ahem,” Jason cleared his throat. “You walked through Crime Alley, into the Newtown Field, through the Badlands and into the lab belonging to the f*cking Joker,” there was a high-pitched giggle in the distance punctuating the words. “Stole…”

“Salvaged!” Tim protested from where he rested his head on Jason’s shoulder in his nest of books.

“Right, salvaged a Goosegg of questionable origins, got out, met some assassins, then fought some assassins — and let me repeat that one Baby Bird, just so you understand how f*cking f*cked up this is — you physically fought with three — not one — three assassins…”

“Former assassins!”

Jason’s face was hilarious. “Like that makes any f*cking difference! Alright, former f*cking assassins and then one of them somehow got impaled in the fight which, okay, f*ck, what the hell, why the f*ck would that be unlikely at that point and then, instead of, I don’t know, running for your damn life away from the remaining and possibly extremely pissed off assassins — sorry, former assassins — you decide to f*cking render aid to the — and I’m gonna stress this bit, Baby Bird — As. Sass. Ins. Who, I would like to remind you, had literally just tried to f*cking kill you. Is that about right, Timbit?”

“Well, sort of,” Tim muttered. He hadn’t told Jason about his sudden burst of raw power, because then he’d have to wade through the aftermath and all the new and terrible knowledge that came with it. He had spent two days in his room, willingly missing paying work, meticulously taking apart and remaking every single piece of the Goosegg and trying to ignore the screaming in his head. It was too raw for him to think of very much now, so he had opted not to go into that yet. He knew Jason knew that he was upset. He could hardly have missed the raging storm of emotions Tim was carrying inside of him, so the older boy was gently trying to tug loose whatever barbed wire wrapped around Tim’s heart had set all this off.

He hadn’t liked the story very much so far. Tim had to admit that if he’d heard such a tale he’d have a hard time believing it too. It seemed pretty far fetched even as he described the bare bones of what had happened, and Tim had actually been there.

“Sort of?” Jason asked shrilly, tightening his grip around Tim’s shoulders. “There’s f*cking more?”

“Well, they were kind of, you know,” Tim muttered. “Sort of… formerly part of the Demon Head cult?”

“Tim, what the f*ck?”

“I said formerly!” Tim added defensively. “They used to be members, but they left!”

“No one leaves the League,” Jason snorted. “Al Ghul is a mindf*cker.”

“Well, they did,” Tim retorted. “They were nice! Well, the ones that weren’t bleeding out were okay, and I’m sure Z will be nice too. Look, the people living out there are all… they weren’t dangerous, exactly, they were just desperate.”

“Once again, Baby Bird; they tried to kill you,” Jason moaned. “You do know what that means, right?”

“Well, yeah, but muggers do that in the Bowery too,” Tim pointed out. “I’ve been training pretty hard. I’m not a bad fighter.”

“For six months, yeah,” Jason snorted. “But those guys would have been training for a lifetime to be as high up the food chain as they claimed to be. You were raised in the Bristol Estates. You never even learned to punch until you were twelve.”

“Hey, I fought them off, you know!” Tim pointed out huffily. “That was my first real fight in a while! I think I did pretty well, all things considered!”

Jason opened his mouth, then closed it. “You’re right. You did a great job.”

Caught off guard, Tim blinked. “Really?” He hated the hopeful note in his voice.

“Yeah, Baby Bird,” Jason kissed his cheek. “You’re something else. I’m really f*cking proud of you.”

Tim felt himself flush. He couldn’t deny hearing those were a balm on his soul. After the revelations of what had been done to him at the Institute, he couldn’t even be sure any words of praise he’d gotten from them were real. But Jason’s were. They mattered. “Thanks, Jason,” he murmured, throat tight.

“Hey,” Jason nudged him. “You wanna talk about it? I know you left a coupla things out of that story. You’re carrying around all this… this sadness. You can tell me, you know?”

Tim looked down. “I… Did you ever think about what you would do once you were fully trained?”

“Like, back at the Institute?” Jason asked, looking perplexed. “Like, if the Joker hadn’t put me in here?”

Tim nodded.

“Well, you know about the military thing,” Jason replied slowly. “It wasn’t really the military, though. I just wanted to go to space. They’d announced the space station they were going to build with the Russians and sh*t, I wanted to go so bad. Bruce was more interested in fixing Gotham, which, okay, that’s not a bad thing per se but I really, really wanted to go into space. They were talking about tapping Talents right then but B didn't want any of his people involved. But, then the military started doing recruitment drives for space pilots. I figured if our Institute wasn’t going to go into space, then maybe I could on my own, with the military. Bruce was not happy when he found out I’d started asking about prerequisites and necessary grades I’d need.”

“He didn’t want you to go into space?” Tim asked softly and sadly.

“He’d trained me so I could help him clean up Gotham,” Jason sighed. “So that I could be an example to Linear kids, to improve recruitment and stuff. Help out the illegals, too. Improve their lot, get more kids registered, that kind of thing. I mean, I did want to do that too,” he admitted. “Of course I did. But I also really wanted to go to space. I figured I could do both. I thought he’d be happy for me. Wow, big mistake, right? B hit the f*cking roof over it. He said he wouldn’t give permission, that it was too dangerous, that it wasn’t my destiny to fire guns at people. I told him I was aiming to be a pilot and he just said there was no way the military would send me into a co*ckpit when they could make better, uglier uses for me on the ground. Told me I wasn’t ever going to space, not ever, not with my grades and not in the army. I mean,” Jason ran his fingers through his hair. “He was probably f*cking right, really, but f*ck, it f*cking stung to hear that from him. It felt like he’d just taken me in to further his own interests. Like, it wasn’t about me at all.”

Tim nodded, his own grief suddenly biting down hard. Maybe it wasn’t about any of them. Maybe it was all about the Mission, about Gotham. Bruce was at a level of omniscience so profound all he could see was the big picture, the big problems. Which was fine, on a certain level. No one had given up more or tried so hard to fix the world as Bruce Wayne had. But Jason’s and Tim’s yearnings were… small picture stuff. Jason would have done a lot of good if he’d become the head of recruitment in the Linears. Tim would have done a lot of good running the Institute. They would have had respectable, fulfilling lives, with all the trappings of wealth and authority that being a Wayne son would grant.

But, Tim thought, clenching his fists over his folded knees, they wouldn’t have chosen it. Maybe Bruce, with his Sisyphean outlook on the endlessness of the good fight, didn’t think that choice was important. Maybe, in his mind, it was fine to take that choice away from Jason and Tim because Bruce didn’t see this fate as something you chose, merely a duty that was laid upon you.

Who knows, Tim thought bitterly. Who would ever know what was inside Bruce Wayne’s head? He could access anyone else’s on the planets, but his blocking ability meant no one had ever gotten the same privilege back. Maybe no one really knew who he was on the inside.

Maybe that was the lie that stung the most.

“He didn’t want me to go to space either,” Tim said dully. “They invited the Waynes up there, you know. For the grand opening of the space station,” Tim curled in on himself, more wounded than he could convey. “It all went kind of sideways. The lady in charge was a lunatic. But Bruce went and Dick went and Damian went,” Tim’s hands clenched in impotent rage. “Even Alfred went. Not me. Never me. I wanted to go to space as long as I could remember. I thought the psychometry wouldn’t be so bad in space. He knew it!” Tim burst out. “He knew how much I wanted to, how hard I worked for the project! And he still wouldn’t let me!”

One of Jason’s hands closed over his clenched fingers. “Baby Bird?”

Tim shook himself. He didn’t want to dump his anger all over Jason. Jason didn’t know, he didn’t know what Bruce had done. Tim felt a stone lodge in his throat at the thought of telling him. “Maybe we should go to space,” was what he substituted.

“Come again?” Jason blinked.

“Like, you and me. Ourselves. Space travel is, like, the latest capital making enterprise,” Tim pointed out. “Has been ever since Padrugoi station got up and running. People everywhere are making little start-ups to get in on the space dollars. Why not us too?”

Jason stared at him. “Well, for one thing, Timmers, that sounds like a lot of f*cking money for initial outlay. You’re on combat janitor rates and they ain’t payin’ me sh*t per snore. Where the f*ck would we even get that kind of money?”

“There’s a mountain of resources discarded out in Amusem*nt Mile,” Tim explained. “Land prices would be cheap. We could open a salvage yard.”

“Are you okay, Baby Bird?” Jason asked worriedly.

“No, just, hear me out,” Tim warmed to the subject. “I rode back to Crime Alley in a genuine C3 Corvette. Someone had tossed it on the scrap heap and the former assassins dug it out and fixed it up. I mean, it’s probably in pieces in a chop shop in Crime Alley now, but people would have paid millions for a vintage car like that and they’re just sitting out there, basically free for the taking. What?” he asked plaintively when Jason cracked up laughing.

“Baby Bird,” Jason chuckled. “It’s a nice thought but you can’t take a ‘Vette into space. What happened to space?”

“That,” Tim informed him loftily. “Is only phase one of my brilliant plan. We use the salvage business to a) generate capital and b) buy up more land in the Badlands. I bet we could own most, if not all of it within a couple of years. And hey, look at that, we got ourselves a shipyard. A space shipyard. We make some good designs, point out that we have the space and the launchpad ready for ships. Hell, the place could be Gotham’s anchor point for the space elevator, because you know that’s how they’re eventually going to do it. We get some government contracts, some grants, and boom!” Tim clapped his hands. “We have a spaceship company. And we’d be the ones testing the spaceships.”

“All that?” Jason raised an eyebrow. “From Todd, Drake & Co Recycling Depot?”

“Drake, Todd,” Tim told him sniffily. “And we’d rebrand, of course. Drake-Todd Aerospace and Plumbing.”

Jason burst out laughing. He laughed as hard as he ever had, harder than the Joker’s constant, grating guffaws. “Oh my god, that’s f*cking awesome! Who do you fly with? Oh, it’s that plumbing joint!”

Tim giggled along with him. “I’m serious, you know,” he said when they’d calmed down. “We could do that. We could go to space. Just us and no one else. We could really do it, Jason.”

Jason looked at him, soft and sad. “You could, Baby Bird.”

“No!” Tim said furiously. “ We could. You too. The Goosegg is sitting out there right now collecting data. Give me a few weeks, a month even and I’ll have every pattern, every spike. I’ll know exactly what’s going on in your brain. You can wake up, Jason. Safely. ”

“Jesus, Tim,” Jason scrubbed his face with his hands, frustrated. “Don’t push this, okay? I still make the final call. My body, my choice, remember? And even if you get a f*cking map of that laughing f*cker’s face on the EEG, it doesn’t matter. You can’t guarantee anything. You can’t guarantee that I won’t go nuclear. If you’re wrong, even by a little bit, I’ll kill you. And probably a bunch of other people. Do you want that for me?” he demanded harshly. “Do you want me to open my eyes and realize I’m covered with a fine spray of what used to be you? Do you think that’s the kind of life I could ever be happy with being back, knowing what I’d done?”

“You don’t want to die here, Jason!” Tim lurched to his feet. “You,” he jabbed a fierce finger in Jason’s chest for emphasis. “Don’t want to die here. You could have destroyed this place, I know you could have. You could have torn it all down, given your mind no anchor and just drifted off. You didn’t. You stayed. With him,” he jerked a finger over his shoulder at the non-stop cackling laughter in the background. “You were waiting to be saved. Well, I’m sorry I’m not who you expected,” and Tim was, sorrier than he could express. “But I am here. You give me enough time and enough tools and I can fix anything, I always have. I can fix this too! I know you don’t want to believe it, that you don’t want to hope, but we can find a way for you to wake up, triggers or no. You can have everything you wanted, everything you missed, back again. Like… books. And fast skimmers, there’s a whole salvage yard of classics waiting for you. All of space is out there, waiting for you. You can have real food again like, like…” Tim scrambled for something that wasn’t Welfare rations because nobody came back from the dead for them.

“Chilli dogs?” Jason asked quietly.

“All you want,” Tim nodded earnestly. He felt a burgeoning sense of hope. Jason was listening. “You and me can get drunk together, because don’t tell me you never wanted to try it. We can build ourselves a cruiser and fly around the world, go see everything. You’re legally an adult and I’m almost an adult now, I probably will be by the time I’ve sorted this out. We can go be irresponsible young adults across every time zone, if we want. You… you can have those things, Jason,” Tim added softly, running out of steam. “I promise you, I will make sure you get to have the world if you let me help you.”

Jason rose to his feet and silently padded over. He cupped a surprised Tim’s face in his large hands. “You really mean it, huh, Baby Bird? I never had a choice in this, did I?”

“Well, you do,” Tim fumbled for suave and failed miserably, cheeks glowing. “Of course you do. If you stay asleep, that’s your choice. But strapping your comatose body to the nose of our spaceship and using you to power the gestalt circuits would be my choice, in that case.”

Jason burst out laughing.

“I’m serious,” Tim grinned. “Tim Drake, Hero Pilot of the Redwing, with his Sidekick slash Bespoke Hood Ornament, off to have adventures in the stars!”

Jason burst out laughing. “Hey!” he said in mock outrage. “Why am I the sidekick? I have seniority here, you know!”

“One, you lost time in here,” Tim poked him. “And two, you can’t be the captain of a ship if you’re comatose. I think that’s literally in a rulebook somewhere.”

“What?” Jason spluttered. “That’s discrimination! I oughta sue on behalf of the differently awake!”

Tim choked on his laughter, leaning in towards Jason’s chest, heaving. “Differently awake?!’

“Oh, listen to the skepticism! Don’t be consciousist, Baby Bird,” Jason wagged a mock stern finger at him.

Tim laughed until he cried, nearly collapsing back down to the floor. “Or,” he trailed off into giggles. “You could go the easy route and just wake up,” he offered.

Jason looked at him, suddenly sober. “You think we can do this, don’t you?”

“I do,” Tim reached out to touch Jason’s face before he could think to stop. “I really do. You can be alive again, Jason. I’ll get you there. I promise.”

“You’re different, you know?” Jason smiled softly. “So different than that scared, frazzled kid who dropped in here like a dream.”

“Is that a good thing?” Tim raised an eyebrow. “Or a bad one?”

“Oh, it’s good,” Jason squeezed Tim’s hands. “An’ I ain’t sayin’ there was anything wrong with that kid either. He was just… lost. Looking for something. You aren’t like that now. You’re… more focused. More settled.” Jason hesitated. “And… in more pain, too.”

Tim opened his mouth but couldn’t find the words. He was struck with the realization that after a lifetime of living amongst some of the most powerfully perceptive people on the planet, Jason was the only one who really took the time to see him.

The knowledge buoyed up inside him. Tim loved Jason. He loved Jason in ways he’d never before loved anyone or anything. It was an epiphany both world changing and absolutely microscopic at the same time. It wasn’t new knowledge. Just old knowledge, bought squarely into the light.

“You know you can tell me anything, right?” Jason asked him. “Anything.”

Tim wanted to. He wanted to tell him everything he’d learned, all the ugly facts. But the words jammed in his throat at the thought of giving Jason such pain. Tim could barely stand it as it was. He hadn’t processed it all. The love he felt for Jason left him with a burning desire to protect him from any further harm.

He would tell Jason, soon. But it was too raw to speak of now. Tim wanted to keep this peace, this oasis from the chaos in his head, a little time longer. Long enough so he could impart the truth without burdening Jason with the tsunami of his own grief. Jason would have enough of his own to contend with.

“It’s just,” he substituted. “I came to some realizations about myself, that’s all. Some of them… were a little painful, but I needed the perspective.”

“Like what?” Jason asked.

“Like I’ve spent my entire life trying to make other people happy,” Tim admitted. “My whole life, there was always someone there who was impossible to please whom I always worked myself to death trying to please. My parents. The Institute board. The police liaison department. A slew of politicians and attachés and other Talents at the Institute. And… Bruce. Especially Bruce, in some ways. I always worked so hard and there was never any reward for it. It stung to realize I’d wasted so much time for something that ultimately made me so unhappy.” Tim swallowed. “You’re right, I was lost. I’ve been conditioned to serve and I didn’t have anything to serve and I didn’t know what to do with myself except just get through the day as best I could. I feel so stupid about being so… eager to please. Like a puppy, begging for scraps.”

“Aw, Tim,” Jason hugged him. “It wasn’t as bad as you’re makin’ it out to be, I’m sure. So you messed up, so you weren’t mindful, so what? You’re still mostly a kid. f*cking up is basically your job. It’s only a waste if you don’t learn anything from it, that’s what Alfie used to say. Usually after I’d nearly burned the kitchen down again. Don’t hang onto your past, Baby Bird,” Jason advised, looking down at him gently. “I’ve been stuck here for the last five years ‘cause I never let go of mine. I’ve thought about that a lot. I was a dumbass, angry kid. When I got mad at B I let my rage rule me and I ended up in a heap of trouble over it. If there’s one thing I learned from this whole mess, is that you gotta look ahead, not behind. Stop lookin’ for the answer in your past; if you keep moving forwards, you’ll get closure from the look in the rear view. As long as you’re moving, you’ll be okay. And hey,” Jason bumped his forehead against Tim’s. “At least by acknowledging that you were never really happy, now you can focus on things that do make you happy. And that’s worth doing, don’t you think?”

“Like you,” Tim said shyly. “You make me happy, Jason.”

“Good,” Jason beamed. “You make me happy too.”

Chapter 14: 00:07

Chapter Text

When Tim went into work, he already knew it was going to be a bad day. Maintenance workers and cleaning staff were all swarming the hospital main entrance. It was chaos in there while they tried to stay out of each other’s and the clinical staff’s way. Walk in patients huddled warily together, coughing in the thin dust that was everywhere.

Tim silently punched in and got his trolley, taking his life in his hands wheeling it into the increasing juddering and groaning elevator. Even knowing what he’d see when he finally hit the sub basem*nt didn’t make his dismay any less acute. The dust was worse down here, it coated everything like batter and hung like a fine mist in the air. They weren’t even bothering to send home non-essentials anymore. They couldn’t afford to. There was way too much work.

Tim didn’t think he was imagining those cracks gaping wider.

Spying the duty nurse at the far, far end working her way back, Tim took a chance on dropping in to see Jason to give him the latest update.

“Why did the holo go to jail? IT WAS FRAMED! HA! HA! HA!”

Disregarding this latest piece of sparkling wit from the leftover psychic impression of the Joker, Tim called out. “Jason?”

“Yeah?” said a voice right by his ear.

Tim started and spun around, striking out instinctively.

Jason blocked him neatly. “Your reaction time is getting better, Baby Bird,” he smirked.

“Don’t do that!” Tim scolded.

“But you’re so fun to startle!”

“Jason,” Tim shook his head fondly, then sobered. “It happened again. There was dust everywhere , even in the upper wards.

“f*ck,” all humour drained out, Jason scowled. “Are we ready to hit me with delta sleep, yet?”

“No,” Tim sighed. “We’re close. The Goosegg has to collect more data.”

“It’s been a week!”

“This level of scanning is really complicated, okay?” Tim retorted. “If we want to guarantee it’ll work without wiping your mind like a bad credit chip, we need to know some very specific wavelengths and how to counteract them. And besides, it won’t be that simple even when we do have all the data we need. If we drop you into delta sleep and you stop reacting to whatever they’re doing to you cold turkey, they’re going to suspect something’s up. The only reason they haven’t spotted the extremely illegal Goosegg wired into your life support system is because I’ve shoved it deep under your bed where only a cleaner would see it and I’m the one cleaning the ward. If they find that, game over. We’re close. I promise we’re close,” he assured a worried looking Jason.

“Close doesn’t count with bombs, Baby Bird,” Jason scrubbed his hair.

“What’s the best movie bomb? Ticky, ticky, BANG, BANG!” came from the far distance.

“Shut the f*ck up, chuckles!” Jason snapped, mostly out of habit. It never actually did any good. “This is bad, Baby Bird. Whatever the f*ck they’re doing is making this worse. We need to do something.”

“I’m going as fast as I can, Jason.” Tim slumped. “But there’s no accelerator for this. Once you get past the tracking Talent Level brain activity functions, Gooseggs aren’t instant solutions. They need a lot of data to work properly.”

Jason put an arm around him. “I know you are. I ain’t saying you aren’t trying. But sh*t, it’s not gonna do us a lot of good if this whole stinking place falls down on top of us before we can do anything about it!”

“I thought about a couple of contingencies,” Tim admitted. “One of them involves me stealing enough supplies and equipment to transport your body from the hospital. That’s going to be really tricky though, both in hardware and logistics. The amount of this new therapy thing they’re doing to you is rising. It seems like a dust storm is happening every other day. The equipment would be easy to steal; they’re definitely going to notice when their prize experimental specimen vanishes.”

Jason huffed out a breath. “This is f*cking nuts. It’s getting too dangerous. Arkham’s been in a state of decay for decades . It was so bad they used to say that you only went to Arkham to die, and that was when I was a kid. The building is not designed to withstand what’s happening to it.” Jason ran fingers through his hair, pacing in a tight, tense circle as the Joker guffawed in the background.

Tim laid a comforting hand on his arm. “We’ll figure it out,” he tried to sound confident. He didn’t want Jason to give in to despair. He couldn’t deny that in the back of his mind there was a niggling, persistent worry that Jason might opt to pull his own plug. He would do it, if it meant saving people. Tim respected it, but that didn’t mean he wanted it to happen.

“Yeah, Baby Bird,” Jason smiled. “I know we will.” Then he sighed. “But I think we’re going to have to go with the last, last, oh-god-no resort.”

Tim felt his heart plummet. “What?” he croaked out.

“We’re going to hafta go to Bruce,” Jason nodded decisively. “You’re right. I don’t want to die here. So if I’m ever gonna wake up… we’re going to need Bruce’s help.”

Tim felt himself freeze solid. That was even worse than the worst case scenario he feared. “You mean… contact the Institute?” He hoped his voice wasn’t as shrill as he feared it was.

“I know you got some unresolved issues with ‘em,” Jason said gently. “f*ck, so do I. Bruce and I never did get around to putting our differences to bed.”

“Yeah, I know the story,” Tim mumbled. “About you and Bruce fighting.”

“You know a story,” Jason said with a brittle smile. “There was probably a bunch of stuff Bruce didn’t tell you about because…” He shrugged. “Reasons, I guess. But that doesn’t matter now,” Jason’s shoulders squared. “It’s too risky to let this continue. We need the Institute’s help on this.”

Tim felt his heart start to race. This was it. He had to tell Jason now. He hated the thought of breaking his heart, but what else could he do? “I… Jason, we can’t,” he shook his head. “We can’t do that. Look, just give me more time, I’ll make it work, I promise!”

Jason was looking at him strangely. “You want to gamble with the lives of all those people? Tim, what’s the matter with you?” Jason looked more concerned than incredulous. “You don’t take risks with people’s lives like that. Only your own,” he added dryly.

Tim felt his throat close up. But he had to speak. “No, you don’t understand. We can’t go back to the Institute. It isn’t safe there.”

“What the f*ck are you talking about?” Jason was bewildered.

“I… I found out some things,” Tim admitted. “About Bruce. I don’t know if we can trust him.”

“About Bruce?” Jason’s eyes narrowed. “Like what?”

Tim closed his eyes. “You remember I told you about the junkyard and fighting Z, Owens and Pru?”

“You mean the time you nearly got murdered,” Jason said flatly. “Yeah, I remember. Vividly.”

“I… I didn’t tell you everything,” Tim twisted his fingers together. “I said Z got hurt, and we all ended up rushing him to a clinic, but I… I never told you how he got saved. I saved him,” Tim blurted. “I saved him by teleporting myself in and then teleporting both of us out.”

“What the f*ck?” Jason exclaimed, slack jawed. “You said you couldn’t move a kilo without dying of hyperextension!”

“That’s what I thought too,” Tim replied. “Every one of my tests showed it. But… it wasn’t my limits that were the problem. Someone put a compulsion on me. They blocked me from using my kinetics,” Tim swallowed. “Bruce. Bruce blocked me. Pru, Z and Owens were the ones to point it out to me. When I broke through it, there were still remnants left inside my head, but I could see them. Like, now I could see them for what they were. He blocked me, Jason. He straight up sabotaged me from getting any stronger.”

Tim felt the tears well up. The grief he’d desperately tried to drown out punched him straight in the gut. Tim had loved Bruce so much. He’d trusted him. The betrayal was an open wound, screaming and bleeding. Saying it out loud was rubbing the salt in.

Jason stared at him. “Bruce… wouldn’t do that,” he said slowly. “I mean, he’s the one who basically codified Talent ethics, for f*ck’s sake. Why would he do that?”

“I don’t know,” Tim mumbled wetly. “But he did. He did, Jason.”

Jason went pale. He knew Tim couldn’t lie to him in here. “Are you sure those Demon Head assholes weren’t just f*cking with you? I mean, you trust them?”

“Jason, the compulsion was in my head,” Tim insisted, hating every second of this. “I felt it. It was obvious once I’d broken it. Besides, I wouldn’t have been able to teleport at all if I didn’t have that kind of raw power already and I did. The only explanation is that I was under a block. And I didn’t put it there.”

Jason slumped, sitting on a pile of books. “I… wow. B’s really different than I remember, isn’t he?”

Tim nodded. He’d lived in the Manor. He’d seen the memories.

“What else is there?” Jason asked sharply. “You’re really guilty right now. Guilty and scared. You’re hiding something else from me.”

The words hit Tim like a blow. “I…” he croaked. But he had to say it now; he had no choice. He couldn’t lie. “You know how I accessed your hospital record? I… I went all the way back to your admitting date. The… the record states that the admitting party was… Bruce Wayne.” Tim whispered at the end, as if by volume alone he could soften that blow.

It didn’t work. Jason went ashen, eyes blown wide. “B-Bruce… put me… in…” he abruptly spun away from Tim, staggering to the nearest row of crates. His shoulders heaved as he fought for breath he didn’t need, but the mind was weird like that. In the background, the Joker howled with laughter, like he’d heard a particularly excellent joke.

Tim was frozen, looking at Jason’s taut shoulders as he braced against the crate wall and breathed loudly. He didn’t know what to do. Suddenly he wished more than anything he’d never stolen that access card, never downloaded that file. He’d have done anything, right this instant, to take away Jason’s pain.

Nothing prepared him for what came next. When Jason finally found his voice, it came out a low growl. “Three months. Three f*cking months you’ve know about this! What the actual f*ck , Tim!” he roared, turning to face the other. “Why the f*ck didn’t you tell me?!”

“I…” Tim choked on his responses. He’d had reasons , good ones. He’d been sure they were the right ones. The certainty shrivelled in the face of the anger and pain on Jason’s face. “I wasn’t sure,” he tried. “Like, I didn’t have any other evidence and it just… it didn’t seem like it could possibly be true…”

“Oh, well I’m glad it’s possible now,” Jason’s sarcasm was bitter and chill as winter winds. “After all, it’s something that affects you so now you have to take it into consideration!”

“It wasn’t like that!” Tim protested. “You wanted Bruce to be the one to save you! You waited so long for him to come for you and… and I didn’t want to hurt you.” Tim concluded. The words were all absolutely true, but they came out so feebly.

Jason scowled. “What the f*ck?! I’ve sat in this f*cking torture chamber for five years, never allowed to leave, never allowed to forget. The first and only time I get a respite, I finally get someone else to talk to and you think knowin’ that he lied to me all this time doesn’t f*cking hurt? What the f*ck kinda naïve, selfish bullsh*t excuse is that ?” he raged. He was breathing hard, face a rictus of hurt. “You’re right,” he added hoarsely. “I was waitin’ for Bruce. I was waitin’ years for Bruce and he ain’t ever comin’, is he?” He dashed at his eyes. “He ain’t comin’. He won’t even care .” Jason turned away, shoulder shaking.

Tim twisted his hands into knots, his heart lurching in his chest. “I care,” he said in a small voice. “I care, Jason. Bruce doesn’t matter, you don’t have to wait for him. I’m here. I can help you wake up, just like we planned.”

The lights overhead flickered and shook. The Joker laughed and laughed and laughed in the background.

Jason was muttering to himself. Tim worriedly sidled closer, trying to catch what he was saying.

“… chilli dogs. Ice cream. Movies. Sunshine. Rain….”

“Jason?” Tim tried, voice hoarse. “Jason, what is it?” He was getting a bad feeling about this.

Jason’s head turned slightly, just enough so he could see Tim out of the corner of his eye. “You’re some piece o’ work, you know that?” Jason said in a low voice.

“Jason?” Tim asked, fingers digging into his palms.

“You’d have risked all these people’s lives, you’d have risked maybe hundreds dyin’, just to prove to yourself you could survive on your own without being wrapped up in the blanket of the Institute, wouldn’t you?”

Tim reeled back. “What? No, it’s got nothing to do with that! I wanted to help you! That’s all I ever wanted!”

“Oh please , Replacement!” Jason spun on him, sneering. “I’ve been able to feel what you felt from the start, remember? When you first came in here you were desperate, practically f*cking salivating at the thought of mattering again. You wanted to go to Bruce, like a good little acolyte, running back to daddy to show him what you’d found. You didn’t care about me at all!”

“That’s not true!” Tim protested, stung. “If it was I would have gone back to the Institute no matter what you wanted, wouldn’t I? Jason, please, I know I should have told you, but I was just trying… to protect you.”

“What, like Bruce did when he tried to run my life?” Jason snapped. “Wow, the apple didn’t fall far from that tree did it? You’re just like him; self important and arrogant and you think you have a right to know everything and control everything! You had no right to keep this from me! If Bruce was the one to lock me away, then I had the right to decide what to do with that, not you!”

“What…” Tim whispered. “What do you mean?”

“I’m just here waiting to die,” Jason said coldly. “Been waitin’ a long time. Thought I wasn’t but hey,” he gave a bitter laugh. “If the great Bruce Wayne thinks you ain’t gotta chance, then I guess you have to eventually admit he’s right. He always is.”

“Jason,” Tim’s heart thundered in his chest, his hands cold and numb. “Jason, no, you can’t! You can’t leave this place! You’ll die!”

“I’m already dead!”

“No you’re not!” Tim shouted desperately, reaching for him. “You’re still here! Just, please, give me more time! I can fix this!”

“What,” Jason snarled. “Because you love me, is that it?”

“Y-yes,” Tim stammered, feeling his gut wrench at Jason’s tone. “I do love you. More than anything.”

“Then there ain’t nothing to fix.”

“What?” Tim felt ice water wash over him at the brutal reply.

“What, you actually thought I loved you? You?” The sneer was like acid. “The pampered, entitled, sheltered replacement whose only real hardship was finding out that other people were more special than he was? Who couldn’t stand to be second in anything so he threw a tantrum and ran away into the big wide world? Wasn’t what you expected, was it?” Jason taunted cruelly. “You weren’t any more special among the great unwashed. You didn’t stand out. You’re just like everybody else, like every other worker bee and you can’t stand that, can you? How could I ever love some needy, whiny failure like that? I was a f*cking Prime .”

Tim backed away, stunned and devastated. He drew a breath, tried to find some calm, some firm ground on which to stand. “That’s not true,” he denied once he could keep his voice level. “I can’t lie in here but you can, and I think you’re lying now. You… you were happy to see me! When I couldn’t come back, you missed me! You said so!”

“Like you said, I can lie,” Jason snapped back angrily, red faced. “Besides, if all you had for company was him ,” he jerked a thumb at a cackling Joker, peeking through the gaps in the crates. “Then practically anything is an improvement. Even some arrogant little defective puppy, pissing all over himself in his eagerness to be special again! Being better than the Joker is some f*cking low bar to hit, kid! Even then you f*cking failed! But you must be used to that by now, huh? Failed at the being a son, failed at being a CEO, failed at going to space, failed at being a Prime… f*ck, after your litany of whining about how everyone’s against you, I think it might be time to look at the common denominator in all that, huh? It’s easy enough. Just go find a mirror!”

Tim registered in some distant, half grasped way that Jason was just flinging words, trying to get him to leave. That he didn’t mean them, he couldn’t mean them. The words still landed like blows all over. Tim felt himself breaking under it, tears dropping down his chin. “J-Jason… I…”

“And now he’s crying,” Jason sneered and looked away. “Welcome to the real world. You gotta live with the consequences, for a change. Now f*ck off! Don’t come back!”

Tim opened his mouth to try some argument, any argument, and all he could think of was, “I love you.”

Jason’s shoulders tightened. His fist bunched, white knuckled. “Get OUT!” he roared.

The whole warehouse shook.

Tim bounced back into his body in the hospital.

Dust was everywhere. A thick, choking miasma shrouded the room. He could hear shrill alarms start to go off in the distance; the air quality alarms.

Tim didn’t care. He squeezed Jason’s hand. “Jason?” he choked out. “ Jason ?” He tried to go back in, to get a grip on the consciousness he still felt glimmering within the physical body, but he hit a wall of static. Jason was blocking him out. “Jason, please ?” he pleaded. There were tears rolling down his face. He told himself it was because of the dust.

Then, terrifyingly, even the sense of that consciousness, the only signal he now had that Jason was even present, dropped out entirely.

Alarms started to shriek. Life support alarms.

“No!” Tim jumped up and shook Jason futilely. “No, no, no! Don’t do this! JASON!”

Tim’s thoughts ran at the speed of light. He hit the resuscitation protocol on the support system, which began life saving restarts of heart function and breathing.

It didn’t help. He crashed again.

Tim hit the button again, sobbing, pleading with Jason to fight, to stay . He couldn’t keep this up. He couldn’t hit the button indefinitely. He couldn’t….

The Goosegg! He could set it to stasis! It would only be temporary, but it would keep Jason from killing himself! Tim knew, deep down, that Jason would never, ever forgive him for it, but he had to! He couldn’t let Jason die!

The next thing he knew he was scuttling under the bed, frantically rewiring the Goosegg to the right mode with shaking fingers. He hit the right frequency, turned it up to maximum and scrambled back out to hit the resus-button once again.

The alarms still shrieked. He hit it again.

“Come on. Come ON!” Tim cried frantically. “Don’t leave me! Please don’t leave me! Jason!” He climbed onto the bed, trying to do chest compressions, anything , to try to keep Jason alive.

“What the HELL do you think you’re doing?” a voice roared. “Get off of there!”

The hospital administrator stood there, bleached white and grey with dust and looking mad with fury. It turned out the duty nurse could be quick on her feet if she wanted to. She’d managed to summon a crash team, doctors and nurses and all, who were watching the show with varying degrees of horror.

Hands drags Tim off Jason’s body as the team got to work on him. Tim was roughly shoved back as they descended, the alarms cutting off abruptly that Tim was left standing in a choking fog, desperate to know what was happening through the haze.

Be blinked upwards through teary, crusted eyes. There weren’t just cracks in the ceiling now. It noticeably sagged. They didn’t have much time.

Eventually the frenetic movement all stopped at Jason’s bed. The hospital administrator emerged from the setting dust storm, efficiently stripping off her gloves.

“Is he alright?” Tim asked, nails biting into his fingers. “Is he alive?” His voice was shrill and breathless.

“What are you still doing here?” she asked with cold contempt. “Has someone called security?” she called to the rest of the people and got an affirmative.

“Is he okay?” Tim persisted.

“It’s none of your damn business what he is,” she snapped, green eyes cold. “Do you think we want your kind around here, you skeevy little pervert? You’re fired. If I see you anywhere near a patient or anywhere near this hospital ever again I’ll have you arrested! For rape!”

“What? No!” Tim protested. “His life support dropped out, I was trying to help him! Please, you can’t wake him up, he’s—”

The woman held up a hand. “ Please, spare me. I’ve had a full report of all your perversions! Interfering with patients, malingering about after hours and before hours. As far as I’m concerned, you’re probably the one who caused this. You’re a worthless, sickening, twisted excuse for a human being and I won’t let you use whatever vile Talent you’ve been exercising on this patient for one second longer. Security!”

Beefy hands grabbed Tim from either side before he could think to fight. “Please! You’ve got to listen to me! There’s a Goosegg, it’s recording his data. We’re trying to get around triggers the Joker put on him! You’re got to let me help or he’ll die, please,” Tim pleaded.

The woman’s face stretched into a wide grin, the first he’d ever seen on her. She obviously didn’t do it very often given how creepy it looked on her face. “Security, get him out of here! Make sure he never comes back! Make sure he never wants to!”

“No! Wait!” Tim struggled as he was pulled away and into the elevator, pinned roughly to a metal wall, squirming as they rode up and out into the main entrance. Tim twisted in their grips but it wasn’t until their grips loosened once they were out of the doors that he got a chance. He jabbed one in the solar plexus and flipped the other and made to get back into the hospital. To do what, he didn’t know. All that was in his mind was to get back to Jason, to make sure he was okay.

He thought the hospital security guys were just there to escort him out. That’s why the first punch landed like thunder, knocking him clean down. Tim was blindsided by it, taken totally by surprise, face on fire.

He didn’t have time to recover before the first one was able to rise up with vengeance in mind.

All Tim could do was curl up and try to protect his head as the second blow came. And the next. And the next.

Jason might be dead. He wanted to die. And it was all Tim’s fault.

Tim was crying by the time they got bored with punching him, walking calmly back through the watching crowds as Tim sobbed, curled up on the concrete, bruised and bloodied.

They quickly got back to their business.

No one noticed anything in the Linears.

Chapter 15: 00:06

Chapter Text

Tim dragged himself home. He didn’t really remember the trip very well. His beat down had been weirdly precise in that they’d been careful to rough him up just enough not to be admitted into the hospital. He wasn’t concussed, but he was in a lot of pain in a lot of different ways.

He stopped off at an automated clinic in the Linears and got some salves and stitches applied. It was all droid run, free healthcare for the poor, no curious humans to ask probing questions. Tim was grateful for it. He wouldn’t have been able to choke out a word past the lump in his throat.

Then he went home. Well, he went back to his little box apartment. He unlocked the door on muscle memory, went in, shut out the rest of the world and then curled up on the floor, weeping silently.

He’d f*cked up. He’d f*cked up so badly. He’d made a bad call in not telling Jason everything. He’d been Jason’s only window to the outside, his only source of information. Jason had relied on him to be honest, had trusted him. He’d betrayed that trust deeply. Jason had had every right to be furious at him.

Tim felt more tears cascade down. It was worse than the anger, though. He’d killed Jason’s hope. Jason had been stuck inside his own head, hoping every day for rescue, for Bruce, to come and get him out. If Tim hadn’t lied to him, Bruce’s defection still would have hurt him deeply, but he might have turned to Tim, he might have leaned on that trust. He might still have hope that he’d wake up. But if he couldn’t trust Tim… then what escape could be reasonably hope for? That’s why he’d tried to end it. He’d tried to rip out that last anchor he had to life, the memory of the place where he died, and go quietly into the night because an age living in that awful place was a fate worse than death.

Tim had done this. Instead of trying to bring him back to life, Tim had made Jason want to die. In trying to spare him, Tim had made the revelation of that truth so much worse, so much more devastating.

Tim loved Jason and he might have killed him, because he’d been too much of a coward to confess the truth.

He cried a bit more. Usually he was a planner, a doer. He didn’t wallow in his failures; he couldn’t afford to, not when so many were waiting for him to be defeated, to give in. Now, though, there was no contingency, no plan. He had nothing. No home, no job, no safety, no one left to turn to. There was just him. A little, defective, selfish winged donkey, unloved and alone.

Tim hated to even think it, but Jason might be dead even now. Would they watch him twenty-four seven? Why? It’s not like they understood where his headspace was. They probably thought he didn’t have one of those. He cried a bit more thinking of it. How would he even know? All that psychic bond stuff, where you feel your loved ones die, that was all fiction holo stuff. They wouldn’t announce it, they may not even bother with anything more than a cursory search for family members. He’d be a number on a forgotten statistical file and a pile of ashes, lain in the Graveyard, unmarked. Tim would never be informed.

That was the worst of it; he just wouldn’t know.

Wait! Tim scrambled up from his tight ball of limbs on the floor. He would know!

He clawed at his desktop, searching for… yes, his old field comm unit, a cutting edge little anachronism amongst the cheap Linear burner comms. In his fixing and rebuilding of the Goosegg, Tim had managed to scrounge enough parts to jury rig it for data transmission over the ‘Net. That way he could keep his eyes on the data points at night, in case they spiked.

His hands were shaking as he opened the comm and accessed the program he’d built.

A few more tears slipped free, but in relief. It was still sending data. It was still hooked up to Jason, and Jason’s mind was still intact. He wasn’t dead. Tim dropped to sit on his bed with relief.

But what could he do now? Tim would be turned away from Arkham if he showed his face there again. He was pretty sure he could enter covertly, but to what end? Jason knew what his presence felt like, he could deliberately and wilfully keep Tim out of his head.

The knowledge that not only he could, but he would, burned Tim all over. His heart felt like it was being ripped out of his chest, it was beating so frantically. He clutched it, feeling sick.

Tim tried to find an angle, some other option, something.

Some part of him wondered why he should even bother. Jason had the right to his choice and… well, he didn’t love Tim back. Tim had no right to force that love on him as some kind of obligation. The knowledge sat bitterly inside of him that Jason had only cared about him as a new face, some entertainment while in his prison. He’d turned on Tim so fast, it was hard to believe that Tim had ever been more than an amusem*nt.

But he couldn’t let Jason just… die. Just the thought of it broke his heart. He still loved him. He couldn’t just do nothing. He had to try.

With that truth firmly etched in his mind, Tim looked at the problem. Getting in to see Jason wouldn’t be easy, but it could be done. Arkham Hospital wasn’t under guard like the Asylum was. He could find a stealthy way in.

The real problem, therefore, was getting Jason to actually talk to him once he did. Jason had full command over his own mindscape and Tim’s telepathy wasn’t that powerful. If Jason wanted to keep him out, there was no way he was getting in. He had to have something , some argument, some method, that would get Jason to at least consider what he had to say. But that was when it all circled back into futility. Jason didn’t want to hear a word from Tim, wouldn’t let him in to even make his case. He knew what Tim’s mind felt like, Tim’s couldn’t fake his way past that.

Maybe he’d let someone else in.

Tim stumbled over his thoughts. Maybe… Bruce?

After all, Bruce was the one he’d waited for. The one he’d placed his hope in. Tim had smashed that hope to pieces, though.

But… maybe he still would let Bruce in, if only to ask him why. If Tim were in Jason’s shoes, he’d want to know.

But then the problem became… could he trust Bruce?

Tim honestly didn’t know anymore. He couldn’t read Bruce. No one could read Bruce. He blocked people out automatically; that was how his null Talent worked. And it had been made very clear to Tim that Bruce could lie to his face and he’d never be able to tell.

Could he, dare he, risk Jason’s life going to Bruce now that he wasn’t at all sure what kind of man he was? How could he tell if Bruce would even help Jason? Especially when weighed against the greater good of many other lives?

Bruce had loved Jason. Tim knew this. He’s seen it, in every corner of the Manor. You couldn’t fake a memory. And Bruce hadn’t been playing for the cameras at the Manor, he hadn’t been acting. Bruce had been a different man with Jason that he had been with Tim. A father. Those memories, those moments, were absolutely real.

On the other hand… the hospital file. And Tim’s own treatment, which was looking less and less golden in his memory the more he looked at it.

What the hell was he supposed to believe, to trust? The man in Jason’s memories? The man in his own? Or the cold reality of the paper trail? Because if Bruce had stuck Jason in Arkham for the safety of the many, he wasn’t going to help Jason wake up.

If only there was some way to know for sure.

Tim blinked. There was a way. He had a way.

What had Jason said? He didn’t know the story of Jason’s death. He knew a story.

But he, Tim realised looking at his hands, had a way of seeing the true story. All he had to do was go to the place where Jason died. The memory would still be there, fossilized in time. That data couldn’t be falsified or changed. Whatever Bruce did in that moment was still etched there, and therefore the truth of whatever kind of person it revealed him to be.

Tim tried to get a handle on his breathing. He wiped his face. He had to go to Ethiopia. He had to find out the truth, whatever it was. He had to know . Once he knew, then he would be able to decide what to do next.

He breathed out. It wasn’t much of a plan, but it was a plan. It was something.

He’d have to hurry. The clock was ticking down fast.

He scrambled for his home computer array, now taking up a lot of space in his box of an apartment. He looked up schedules for the Afri-Amer Pneumatic Rail, and the ticket prices. He winced when he saw them. He wasn’t currently in any way solvent. The only reason he wasn’t starving to death was his social welfare armband entitling him to the Universal Basic Needs. He had no credit in his account because of that last meal he’d never actually gotten to eat at Leslie’s clinic. With fixing the Goosegg and spending his time with Jason, casual hard labour and fix-it work had dried up like dew on a hot day.

He could take up that work, but earning enough a round trip would take weeks. He didn’t have that kind of time.

He looked at the armband. Alvin Draper, registered citizen. That name in a file was worth quite a bit of money, especially if he promised not to have the profile yanked from the system.

But he’d lose everything. The apartment, the rations access, the record; all of it belonged to Alvin Draper. He’d become just another illegal, without access to full citizenship and the amenities therein.

Tim clawed it off.

It was time to go and see Quentin.

Quentin, once he’d tracked him down, was very amenable to the idea of being a legal citizen. Less for the record and more for the clout that would net amongst the gangs. Tim wasn’t concerned with the whys; his only driving ambition was to get to a loan shop and get the transaction on as quickly as possible.

He didn’t let Quentin argue him down to a bargain basem*nt price, though.

“f*ck man,” Quentin huffed once he’d given up arguing and wheedling. “What’d you do? Kill someone?”

“Trying to save someone,” Tim told him flatly. “We got a deal?”

“f*ck yes! Gimme,” Quentin held out his hand for the device. Tim transferred it only when the credits appeared on his comm and were verified, not a second before. “I know it’s bad business, but I gotta ask… are you okay with this?” Quentin seemed bewildered.

Tim supposed he might be. Even for the exorbitant price he’d gotten, Quentin was getting an excellent deal. He had access to resources that meant he could pay off the loan in no time, and legal status to boot. There would be no way to get that back for Tim, no access to legitimacy. Tim shrugged. “My life, my choice. See you ‘round.”

“Yeah, if there’s some catch to this,” Quentin said suspiciously. “You will.”

Tim let him have his paranoia. He had a train to catch.

The only things he deigned to take with him when he left the apartment were his high-end comm, his armour, with a tunic to at least hide the upper half. The rest he abandoned for Quentin to use or sell as he saw fit.

Once again Tim Drake shed a life he had built. But this time he wasn’t running away.

He had to catch the train to the Upper East, where tunics became finer and more fashionable than the ragged slops he wore, and people were brave enough to wear jewellery and carry expensive tech with impunity, out in the open. Tim Drake as he was would have felt the uncomfortable weight of the stares and suspicious looks he got, but Tim Drake as is kept his eyes religiously plastered to the comm, feverishly watching vital sign data pour in from Jason who was still breathing on his own, still alive .

Tim got off at the station nearest to the ferry. The pneumatic lines didn’t run into Gotham directly. They went to bigger, busier terminals in Old New York, but a Gothamite could take a ferry barge from the Sound to the cargo terminal way out in the Atlantic. From there it was a straight shot to the African continent on the Afri-Amer line. Tim looked away from Jason’s vital signs long enough to buy a ticket on the ferry.

He pondered the irony; his old Institute ID was stored on the comm he’d used to collect Jason’s data. He’d shed every other trace of his old life, but had missed erasing it off his field comm because his training had dictated he keep at least one comm untouched in case of emergencies. He’d buried it as part of his field uniform, a thing that, in his mind, no longer belonged to him. Maybe it had been some kind of half-baked attempt at the contingencies he so loved to create and keep. Maybe it was purely Freudian. Whatever it was, the ID allowed him to get his ticket because the ID was strong enough identification to act as a passport.

Tim knew he didn’t stand much hope of the Institute not discovering the record of his ticket, although he was hoping for a small head start. They wouldn’t be looking for indicators he’d left Gotham if they were sure he was still in it. Hopefully the data would reach them later rather than sooner.

If it didn’t, Tim thought grimly, he was prepared to pit all his skills and experience in avoiding them, depending on what he saw when he got to his destination.

The ferry was slow. Tim fretted on the deck waiting for it to churn its way to the Atlantic cargo terminal, surrounded by automated cargo ships circling the terminal like synchronized swimmers.

For all that it was a cargo station, the terminal itself was busy with people. This was the last stop before the Quarantine Barrier to go out and the first stop into America coming in. As such, everyone coming in had to get off here after getting blitzed by the barrier to be flash scanned and recorded before being allowed to go farther in.

They were much less stringent about passengers heading out though. Tim sprinted across the terminal to his designated departure gate, clutched the still blipping comm in his white knuckled fist. He’d paid extra for a business class cabin; he didn’t particularly want to squash into economy with all the commuters. He didn’t want to chance getting a chatty seatmate.

He gained his cabin early and stared out the window to the lapping ocean, willing the train to hurry along. To distract himself, he went over what he did know for a fact about the day Jason died.

Bruce and Jason had fought. They’d been at each other’s throats for a few months, but the last one had been a ‘big f*cking blowout’ according to what Jason had told him. Tim could confirm that; the rumour of it lingered amongst the staff at the Institute for years afterwards. Jason had taken off somewhere to cool off.

Here was where Tim wasn’t quite sure of the narrative, because Jason hadn’t actually spoken of it much; either because he hadn’t wished to or he honestly didn’t remember. His memory of the time leading up to the explosion was scattershot at best. What Tim did know was that Jason had somehow found out that his blood mother was still alive somewhere.

At the same time Bruce got distracted because the Joker, who had disappeared for almost two years after ACE Chemicals blew, had reappeared with his usual subtlety. People were dying, or going insane; worse, he was jumping from place to place. Even pre-cogs couldn’t get a bead on the Joker, he was just that hard to penetrate psychically.

So, Bruce and most of the rest in the Institute were busy trying to deal with that. Hell, every Talent was trying to deal with that, because the Joker was a stain on the good reputations of Talents everywhere. Even now he was the perennial show horse trotted out in various committees as an example of why Talents should be under government, rather than private, control.

Nonetheless, Jason, still smarting over the fight and chafing against the restrictions placed on him, had slipped through the cracks and taken off from the Institute. Tim had never known much about Jason’s mother; only that she was a Talent. Her file had been heavily redacted, the records sealed, but Tim theorised she was at least a micro-kinetic, as Willis Todd had been null in terms of Talent. Jason had gone to find her; maybe for parental consent for military service, since Bruce was so dead set against it. Or maybe he was just searching for some sort of explanation for his existence, some meaning that Tim didn’t know and maybe even Jason had only dimly understood.

But it had all gone wrong. The Joker had found Jason. Both Bruce and Dick had been close lipped about the details, but Alfred’s coldness towards the memory of the woman told Tim that she’d been involved in some capacity. Talents were still, even after all the backing of science and entry into the public sphere, misfits. Misfits sought out misfits. That’s how Ra’s al Ghul managed such an enormous following, how the Talent gangs all operated, even how the Joker had found henchmen. Everyone, especially misfits, wanted desperately to find a people, their people. Talents called out to one another. It wasn’t impossible that Jason’s mother had crossed paths with the Joker.

Tim felt a pain in his chest, thinking of it. Poor Jason, believing he was never really welcome in the family he’d thought he’d found had sought the only other family he probably had left and then been sold out to a homicidal maniac who had laughed while beating him into a coma, maybe to attack Bruce Wayne, a man who lived to spoil his plans for chaos, but probably mostly for the same reason the Joker did anything; because it was fun.

Tim’s hands clenched until his knuckles turned white. Fun. As if Jason’s trauma and pain were some kind of joke.

After beating Jason almost to death, the Joker had been going to leave him in a warehouse with a bomb, probably to taunt every pre-cog who could see it as well as get under Bruce’s skin.

Only the bomb went off too early. That was the prevailing theory. Given that it was a tungsten bomb, the area was more or less disintegrated, and so was the Joker. Bits of him were found miles away.

But that was the extent of what Tim knew. How Jason survived, what happened after, all of these were unknown.

He was jerked from his contemplations by a sizzle across his skin.

While he’d been lost in his reflections, the train had taken off. They’d just jumped the Quarantine Barrier. Finally, Tim was on his way.

There wasn’t much to do on the journey there. Tim kept his eyes on the precious vital signs blipping away on his comm, but that could only take up so much of his attention.

He tried not to think of actually facing Jason. That inevitably triggered painful memories of his last moments with him. He tried not to think about Bruce, or home. He felt lost and powerless enough — thinking of the Institute and all the people he’d left behind just made the homesickness into a dull knife, digging into his chest. The past wasn’t a happy place to dwell on right now and Tim, worn out and wound up with anxiety, had to relieve whatever burdens he possibly could or he would collapse. He didn’t have the money or the appetite for food, and sleep was an impossible thought.

He tried to meditate instead. He hadn’t done it properly for a while. Just dropping his breathing and steadying his heart rate and letting all his feelings fall away into the blissful abyss of nothing.

Tim didn’t have precognition. Honestly, he’d been grateful for that tiny mercy. The past already inflicted its traumas on him; getting the same from the future would have been a hellish way to live. Still, in lieu of having anything in his past that he wanted to dive deeply into right now, Tim instead tried to picture the future.

Not as a prediction. Just as a… speculation, perhaps. An aspiration. A dream.

He tried to envision a world with an awake and aware Jason Todd in it, standing tall and real, realer than a mindscape could make him. Tim had been absolutely serious about Drake-Todd Aerospace and Plumbing. They could while away their days fixing up old wrecks and selling them off to rich idiots. Maybe amongst those piles there was a perfect cruiser, their cruiser, that they’d lovingly take in and clean up, refurbish and reprogram. Maybe they could take off over the horizon and see all those places Tim had only ever read about because Jason had him pegged — he’d barely been off the Holdings except for field work, and even that never took him outside of Gotham. He’d always been studying or working so hard. There had always been some job that needed doing. He’d never gone on trips, too frightened of his psychometry to stray from Bruce’s side at first, and then he’d graduated and instantly become some kind of quasi manager of Bruce’s concerns while Bruce got to throw himself into his passion projects with WayneMed.

Tim shook his head internally. How complacent he had been! He’d never even asked for freedom. He supposed in a sense he couldn’t blame the others for assuming he was hunky dory with everything that was going on. He’d never spoken up about it.

Well, he wasn’t that naïve little kid anymore. The heady promise of being able to explore the world on his terms, taste it and experience it without someone else’s expectations continually being placed around his shoulders, filled him with anticipation. He didn’t need Bruce or anyone else to get him into space. He’d go on his own. He was capable and smart, he’d find a way.

And… maybe Jason could come with him.

No, Tim shook himself. Jason would come with him. Tim was not ready to believe that Jason had given up on him. He wasn’t willing to believe that he’d meant nothing, that Jason had no warm feelings for him at all. Tim believed, absolutely believed, there was a way he could make up for what he did, to let Jason know he still loved him.

But it would be easier with the Institute’s help. In order to know who he could trust, Tim couldn’t rely on what he’d been told. He had to see the truth for himself. He wasn’t going to rely on anyone else’s word. Tim Drake was going to stand on his own and take on whatever came out of it in whatever way he could.

He hoped it was enough. He hoped he was enough.

But he wasn’t giving up on Jason.

The train announcer indicated they had reached the terminus stop in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. Tim checked the comm again, reassured by the signs of Jason’s life ticking away. He squeezed it in his hands, his most precious object.

The warehouse where Jason had died wasn’t in the glittering, colourful capital city, but there were ranks of cruisers to take departing passengers wherever they wanted to go. What would have been a journey of days could now be accomplished in mere hours or less. Tim eschewed the charter cruisers for the smaller, single ride cruisers. They were more expensive, but much faster.

“I need to get to the Mustahil district,” he informed his pilot breathlessly. “I’ll pay extra for speed.” He flashed his armband readily

“No worries,” the woman beamed hugely. “That’ll be about forty minutes on the skyway, if you’re okay with going high?”

“That’s fine,” Tim nodded and clambered in.

He had to hand it to his pilot, she was every inch a professional and she kept her word. She went right to the top of the skyway with death defying precision, almost hitting the edge of the stratosphere where she could unleash full speed on the fusion engine of the little, but sturdy cruiser. Tim felt his stomach lurch seeing it; he’d never been up so high. Once the unsettling feeling passed though, there was nothing but exhilaration to be had.

“You’re pretty stable for a first timer,” the pilot noted cheerfully, gunning it.

Even though Tim was all wound up inside, the ride there was still a little snippet of exhilaration. He’d never gotten the chance to do more than perfect a score in a simulator before. Cruiser training only happened when you were old enough for a permit at the Institute.

He was definitely doing this again.

“Where do you need to be in Mustahil, honey?”

“Oh, uh,” Tim fumbled for his comm and brought up the coordinates. “Do you know this place?”

“That place?” the pilot was shocked. “Everyone knows it. Nobody wants it. It is ahyeh gwood, a very bad place indeed. The imams won’t let anyone near that place. Not until the evil of it is cleaned out. The Debteras are still working on it.”

“Debtera… you mean Talents?” Tim said slowly. He’d never been outside Gotham before and school projects on the manifestation of cultural specificity in Talents around the world had been a lifetime ago.

She nodded. “I’m in training, see?” she pointed to the holocard cruiser license, that bore the international symbol for Talent — the Pegasus in flight.

Time brushed it with his fingers, light dancing over the tips. “I can’t believe you’re driving a tourist cruiser.”

“Why not? I like to fly!” she laughed. “A part of my training is going out and being among people. What better way could I do it than this? What would I be doing if I was in America?”

Tim shrugged. “I don’t know,” he replied. “Working at an Institute, probably. Not this.”

“Pushing paper and doing busywork?” She snorted and patted the cruiser’s flight consol. “This is more fun.”

Tim couldn’t deny she had a point. Their lives really were narrow at the Institute, he mused as he settled back for the rest of the trip. We cut ourselves off from the outside world. It wasn’t intentional, exactly. Talents really did need the space and America — Jerhatten especially, was nothing but city until well over the horizon, people crammed in tightly, grasping for whatever space they could get. He wondered if in their desperation for breathing room Talents had sequestered themselves too much.

She dropped him off in the correct district. “This is as close as I am allowed to go,” she informed him. “It’s forbidden for us. Are you sure you want to go? There’s almost nothing there now.”

“I’m sure,” Tim nodded, unbuckling himself. “Stay nearby, I’ll be back soon.” And headed off in the direction she pointed him in.

The district she’d brought him to was clearly a thriving little community. The roads were wider than Tim, Gotham born and bred, could ever have imagined a road could be. While there were plenty of people around, it didn’t have the same feeling of crush that Jerhatten did.

But up ahead, there was a blank space that would normally be filled with a building. It was the fragmented slab of a foundation well and truly shattered. The rest of the wreckage had clearly been cleaned away. Most of the buildings around it were newer than the others, too.

A tungsten bomb was not a child’s toy.

Even without using his psychometry, Tim could pick up the uneasy feel of this place. The foundation slab had been the only thing they hadn’t bothered to move; less out of lack of will and more out of a need to warn. There was a fence around it and signs warning people not to trespass. More tellingly, the local population had strewn the area in kitabs. The talismans, tiny, rectangular books and bound scrolls large and small, hanging from beaded necklaces and tassels of all colours, had been woven into every square inch of the fence.

There was a gate. It wasn’t locked. People around here didn’t lightly disturb the dead.

Tim hesitated at the gate. Whatever was here would cut deep, he knew that. There would be no carefully maintained detachment, no trained-in emotionless disassembly of the vileness that people did to one another. He prided himself that he could look upon the most hideous of murder scenes and feel nothing but a cold sort of compassion for the victim and an icy contempt for the murderer.

But this would be Jason . Jason, who burned so brightly in Tim’s life that there couldn’t be any disconnect, any more than they could disconnect the planet from the gravity well of the sun. To think of Jason and to be with Jason was to feel, to be inescapably feeling all the time.

Tim wondered if he was ready for this. He’d never jumped from a height this high, over a fall this precipitous, without a safety net. If he got stuck or if he let it overwhelm him, he could burn out like a holo-projector with the chips shorted out.

You know a story, Jason had told him, fiercely angry.

It was time to find out just what the story was.

For everyone. For Jason. For Bruce.

For him.

Tim went in.

It was dusty and broken. The ground shifted under Tim’s feet, the slab mostly gravel from the weight of the blast. He went to where the centre roughly was, on the basis that it was the most likely spot he would be able to get a cold reading.

He yanked off a glove, braced himself, and lay his hand gently on the concrete.

The universe rolled back.

The past rolled in.

Tim woke hours later. He was not on the slab anymore, but he was lying just to the side of it, surrounded by worried faces.

“Ah, you are back.” A tall, spindly man was crouched over him. The pilot of his cruiser was watching him from the background. People were moving around the fence line, removing kitabs. Some were singing.

Tim was crying. He had no precog abilities but when he looked upon the man’s knowing face, he felt a wrecking ball of certainty hit him. “You were waiting for me.”

The man tilted his head like a bird. “We were waiting for someone. We didn’t know who. All we knew was this place had to be kept pristine. No new experiences, no new movement. The memory had to be preserved at all costs.”

“Do you know what happens now?” Tim asked, wiping his face. He felt wispy and floaty, disconnected from everything. His body ached. His heart ached.

“We are not American, young man,” the man smiled. “That’s not the sort of question we ask around here. Divination is forbidden.”

Tim kept forgetting — people saw Talents differently depending on their cultural specificity. In Jerhatten such a precog would have been studied, broken down to its component molecules, the wheres and whys endlessly analysed and debated. Africa didn’t even have a pre-cog database. They had a sense of distaste for those who would dare interrupt the fragile formation of the yet-to-be and the undignified defanging of the power of the present. To them, the future could not be seen. Every person must live in the present world and feel the weight of their choices. Visions were treated with respect, yes, but only as a thread to a connected whole, one that could be unwoven or changed if you were mindful of the present.

“Besides, it does not matter,” the man added knowingly. “If you know what you must do, then you know what will happen next.”

Suddenly, Tim wasn’t floaty at all. What he had seen came back to him in leaden lumps, his eyes widening as it finally sunk in just what the hell had happened.

And what was going to happen.

“I have to get back to the terminal,” Tim staggered to his feet, braced by dozens of helping hands. “I have to get back home!”

“Then go,” the man nodded. “Go with all speed. You know what you must do.”

He had to get home.

He had to get to Jason.

Before anyone else did.

Chapter 16: 00:05

Chapter Text

If the trip to Ethiopia was nerve wracking, then the trip back was pure torture. Tim spent the entire ride either curled up around his comm, watching Jason’s vitals blip away like a zealot at an altar, or pacing agitatedly along the hallways, still keeping his eyes on the comm.

He ached all over. The memories had been very clear and psychosomatic impressions had been totally unforgiving. He felt the pain right down to his bones. But he couldn’t sit still, couldn’t afford to pretzel up in agony like he wanted to. His heart raced.

Time felt like it was going past at lightspeed, too fast for Tim to hope to catch up. He fretted impatiently at every stop the train made, wound up like an over-tuned string, feverishly praying for no delays, no disasters. The pneumatic rail had seemed like such a quick commute before, but now seemed to drag across the ocean like it was swimming through a tube of treacle. All he could do was wait it out, eyes glued to the comm, his only flickering connection to Jason.

Oh god, he had to help Jason. He had to.

Finally they crossed the Quarantine Barrier and were on the fast track back to the Gotham cargo terminal. Back to Jason. Tim sagged down on his seat, ran fingers through his lank hair, and froze as he caught a hazy glimpse of himself in the ghostly reflection of the train window.

Frowning, he got out of his cabin and jogged down to the bathrooms at the end. Banging open the door as the lights went on, Tim felt his eyebrows rise as he saw himself in the mirror. It hadn’t been a trick of the light; the once violently purple streaks on his hair and tips were now a vivid red.

“Whoa,” Tim fingered them. He’d been peripherally aware of the dye itself becoming less vivid as the initial phase wore off and the microbes all settled in. It had been going a more matte shade of mauve for a while now. It had still been that colour when Tim had boarded the train.

“The Quarantine Barrier,” Tim breathed, trying to get a good view of the colour under the too-harsh lights. The Barrier was supposed to detect harmful microscopic pathogens. It also killed them off if they were on the surface of the skin, sort of like a free delousing. The Barrier must have been sensitive enough to strip out the last of the decaying layer of the initial phase of the dye, leaving Tim with the faded out state. It was different, that was for sure.

He wondered if Jason would like it as much as he liked the purple. Tim knew he shouldn’t think of things like that, because that kind of thought carried a jab of pain with it, but he couldn’t help it. Everything inside of him was centred around Jason, now more than ever.

He couldn’t believe he’d been so stupid. If he’d stepped back from the whole affair and set aside the heady promise of true validation, even temporarily, it would have been obvious what was wrong with Jason's presence in the hospital. Now, armed with the truth, everything seemed so obvious. Even Bruce Wayne’s name on the hospital record made sense. What better way to ensure no questions asked than to wield the power of that name?

He shook himself and left the bathroom. He had to get off this train and get back to Arkham as quickly as he could. He didn’t have time to dwell on little things.

He didn’t have time for Nightwing either, but unfortunately he neatly ran headlong into him while moving down the passage back to his cabin. Tim reared back when he realised who he’d nearly just bumped into, so taken off guard it didn’t occur to him to run. Not that he could have in a narrow space like this.

“Tim!” Nightwing seemed just as shocked as he was. “Oh my god! I found you!”

He moved in for a strategic hug. Tim skittered back out of grabbing range, out of habit more than anything else, but it still made Nightwing hesitate, dropping his arms and mouth going tight.

“What are you doing here?” Tim asked. That point genuinely bewildered him. There were no more stops now except the terminus and he was a hundred and twenty percent sure Nightwing hadn’t gotten on anywhere on the African continent, which had been the last stop. He would have found Tim long before this. The train wasn’t that long and didn’t have a huge amount of passengers this time of the day. “Did you fly here?” Nightwing’s self-levitation was a truly exceptional Talent among Talents, but he generally tried to respect airspace rules. Intercepting a train in motion was a big fat no-no as far as traffic control went.

“I’ve been looking for you,” Nightwing looked hurt. He might have misread Tim’s question as more of a why than a how. “Tim, we’ve all been looking for you! We’ve been running up and down Gotham for months! Where the hell have you been? Do you realise how damn worried we all were?”

Nightwing’s accusatory tone set Tim right off. He still felt guilt for leaving the way he did, but Nightwing had no right, none whatsoever, to make this whole thing sound like some wild teenage escapade, like Tim was still… still just some kid. Not after all the things Tim had seen and done and certainly not after Dick cut him off. “Thank you for your concern,” Tim said with icy politeness he usually reserved for anti-Talent politicians. “But I’m managing just fine. After all, I’ve always been so independent and competent, why would I need anyone’s permission to live on my own?”

Nightwing seemed to recognize he’d made a critical misstep. He hesitated. “Tim…” he began, then stopped, looking awkward. “Look, I’m not here to yell at you, okay? I just want to talk.”

“By all means,” Tim replied, still chill as arctic winds. “Talk. You’ll forgive my surprise, of course. You didn’t seem eager to avail yourself of the opportunity before this.”

Tim’s meaning couldn’t have been misunderstood. Nightwing flinched, turning a dull umber and shuffling slightly. “Tim, please,” he pleaded. “Can we just go to your cabin and… can you just hear me out, okay? Please?”

Tim would have dearly preferred having it out here, where possible witnesses might keep things nominally civil and thankfully short , but conceded to the minor point of allowing Nightwing access to the cabin. Whether Tim liked it or not, he was stuck with Nightwing until they reached the train terminal, because the man couldn’t get off. And he was unlikely to just leave Tim alone at this point.

So Tim found himself back in his cabin, Nightwing sitting in the opposite chair facing him, separated by three feet physically and an immeasurable abyss emotionally. Tim crossed his arms and waited him out. He’d be damned if he broke the tension first.

Nightwing removed his nano-domino, and then it was just Dick sitting there, looking tired and sad. His eyes darted up and down Tim’s form, taking him in. He seemed fixated on Tim’s hair; his eyes kept drawing back towards it even as he spoke. “You look so different…” he murmured.

Tim was pretty sure Dick meant that he looked like sh*t. It had been a long couple of weeks, especially the last day or two. Tim hadn’t eaten while getting the Goosegg working, and barely slept for the last two days in a row. With everything that had been happening, things like personal hygiene had fallen by the wayside. He probably still stank of disinfectant and cleaning chemicals from his last shift as the hospital, before everything went so horribly wrong. Hell, he probably still had smudges of his work and dust from Jason’s last blowout lodged in some places. His eyes were probably bloodshot and definitely lined with bags, his hair greasy and lank. There was almost nothing left of the clean-cut executive that had once silently run the hallowed halls of the Wayne Parapsychic Institute.

Tim didn’t respond. He just continued to wait him out.

“What did you do to your hair?” Dick blurted.

Tim’s eyebrows rose despite himself. “Six months of radio silence and you want to talk about my hair?”

“No. Well, actually, yes, a little,” Dick admitted awkwardly. “When did you get it done?”

Tim was faintly baffled about where this was going and he didn’t like it. “Today,” he replied curtly. “What do you want, Dick?”

Dick fidgeted. He seemed a little bit at a loss dealing with the new and improved Tim Drake. “I want you to come home,” he said plaintively.

“Well, I don’t,” Tim retorted brutally. “The Institute isn’t my home.”

“What?” Dick gaped at him. “Since when? Tim, that’s where all your family is, your friends! All the things you love.”

“For what, my friends, who’ve all matriculated and gone on to careers they chose? For my childish hobbies a CEO has no time for? For fieldwork?” Tim’s voice was bitter. “I haven’t done that in a while.”

Dick looked mournful. “I know you’re angry about… how Robin got passed. I’m sorry, okay? Bruce mentioned you might be moving out of fieldwork and the way he said it made it seem like he’d already spoken to you about it. I thought it would be okay to give the codename to Damian. I thought giving him something to live up to would keep him on a straight path. I didn’t think… I thought you already knew, that Bruce had talked to you about it. It was just a miscommunication, Timmy, I swear!”

“Tim,” Tim corrected coldly.

Dick flinched. “I didn’t know until … until you showed up at the scene that you didn’t know. I promise I would have never sprung on it you like that if I’d known. But,” Dick continued wretchedly. “Once you were there and all the cops were there, and you know Bruce’s policy on showing a united front. I couldn’t just… just take it back off Damian in front of everyone like that. That’s the kind of thing the al Ghuls did to condition him, you know. They’d give him something he wanted desperately, then snatch it back. I promised him it wouldn’t ever happen to him again. I couldn’t take it back. Do you understand?”

Tim was silent for a while. “I understand,” he said quietly. “Damian couldn’t be hurt. Leaving me standing there in front of all those officers looking like an idiot while my replacement pissed himself laughing over it, that makes perfect sense too. After all, you never promised not to hurt me,” Tim said viciously. “And besides, I’m just a crime scene android, right?” he added bitterly. “I’m not supposed to have feelings about things.”

Dick recoiled at such finely aimed venom. “That’s not…. Timmy, that’s not what it was!” he protested. “I was so sorry and I tried to find you later and explain but you wouldn’t talk to me!”

“How hard did you f*cking look?” Tim shot back, unable to let that fiction pass. “You knew where I was, Dick! You knew where I went to work every damn day! Not once did I see your face at the office explaining anything!”

“I was going to!” Dick protested, but the words came out more feebly than he probably liked. “I was! I complained to Bruce that he hadn’t prepped you like I thought he’d done and he was upset about it too. We couldn’t take it back off Damian after that, the press was all over it and we just… couldn’t. I wanted to explain but Bruce said to just give you a few weeks, you know, just to cool off. I don’t think… I thought Bruce had gotten the idea in his head that you preferred running the Institute over fieldwork, god knows where. He thought maybe you’d accept it on your own.”

“And you thought I would?” Tim asked incredulously.

“No! That’s the thing,” Dick explained miserably. “When Bruce took Robin off me to give to Jason, I was mad as hell. I was furious! But after a few weeks of stewing I pulled myself together and made up a new uniform and a new name and then paraded it right in his face the next crime scene I was on. Making Nightwing was the best thing I ever did. I made it and it was all mine and I thought… I thought you’d do that! I thought if I just left you alone you’d make your own name and tell Bruce where to shove it, because sometimes Bruce needs someone to do that to him, when he gets too overbearing. I thought,” Dick ran fingers through his hair. “You’d be like me.”

Tim glared at him. “And how did that work out for you, Nightwing?” he bit out.

Dick winced. “Not well,” he admitted in a low voice. “I’m sorry, Tim. I made a stupid assumption. And even if you did make your own name, you still deserved an explanation from me. An apology, too.” Dick smiled wanly. “You’re always so independent. I thought there was no way you’d let B get away with taking you out of the field. I just wanted to stay away from it because when the big blowout happened, I could still be there for both of you, to mediate. Lord knows B and I could have used a mediator when we were fighting.”

“That must be the biggest load of bullsh*t I’ve ever heard,” Tim declared.

“What?” Dick’s mouth dropped. “It’s true! Every word! I mean, it was stupid. I was stupid. But I really did think that’s how it would play out.”

“Oh please, Dick,” Tim sneered. “You backed off because you were tired of being the babysitter for all Bruce’s problem children. First Jason, then me, then Damian. Jason was… gone,” Tim choked on the word. “But handling both Damian and me was a lot on your shoulders when you wanted, more than anything, a life of your own.” Tim had to admit this, because while he had a lot of problems with Dick’s choices he also couldn’t deny Dick had been there for him in ways even Bruce hadn’t been. “Like you said, I’m independent. If you had to choose someone to cut out when the burden got too heavy, then it was going to be me. I guess I can’t blame you for getting sick of being stuck with all the emotional labour and jettisoning what you could, but the least you could do is admit it, even to yourself.”

Dick reeled back. He stared at Tim, open-mouthed, while the train sliced silently along on its cushion of air. “Tim,” he said in a strangled voice. “That isn’t… it’s not…. That wasn’t what it was. It wasn’t,” he insisted, but there was a wobbly wavelength somewhere in the back that Tim read as a sign that Dick was worried he was right. “But I wasn’t there for you and… and I should have been. You’re right about that. Damian’s always such a handful,” he admitted wearily. “I have to be with him all the time. I’m the only one he lets in enough so that he knows what love feels like, what it’s supposed to feel like. His therapy eclipsed everything else in my life. I’m not trying to make excuses, I just… Damian is a lot of work.”

“He needed you,” Tim allowed. “Turns out that I didn’t. So I guess it all worked out,” he finished. The words felt awful on his tongue, but it was true. He had loved Dick, but in the end, Tim hadn’t needed him. He could stand on his own. He could fly on his own.

“Oh Tim,” Dick looked heartbroken. “That’s not true at all. Maybe you don’t, but I do. I’ll always need my Timmy. And if it’s not need, then I’ll always want you in my life. Always.”

Tim shrugged, uncomfortable with that sincerity but unyielding. “I can’t help you there, Dick. I’m not going back. Ever. You need to come to terms with that.”

Dick huffed out a breath. “You’re only sixteen.”

“Not for much longer,” Tim shrugged. “Once I turn seventeen, that’s it. Why drag me back to the Institute for the last few weeks of my minority just to watch me be miserable? You had years of that.”

“Was it really so bad?” Dick asked in a small voice.

“No field work. No interesting cases. No cruiser trips or space stations. Just endless paperwork and gladhanding with people who either looked down on me or flat out hated me.” Tim shrugged. “You tell me, Dick.”

Dick looked even sadder. “Timmy, I swear if I knew you were that unhappy…”

“You would have what, exactly? Gone against B’s edicts? When have you ever?” Tim asked sharply. “And you damn well knew I was unhappy Dick, or didn’t my little screaming match with B over the space station trip clue you in?”

“I don’t know why Bruce didn’t let you go,” Dick said in a rush. “I really don’t! I asked him, I begged him on your behalf. I know how badly you wanted to go to space. But he wouldn’t budge! I never got a straight answer from him over it. But I swear, that was the first time I realized that managing the Institute wasn’t what you wanted. Bruce always made it seem like you did.”

“And you believed him,” Tim murmured. “Like a good soldier.”

Dick frowned. “What? Look, Bruce is hiding something, I know that. The more I look at this whole mess the more it looks like he was deliberately not telling me what I needed to know with what was going on with you. Like he didn’t want anyone to look too closely at why you got the CEO job, like he needed people to believe you were exactly where you wanted to be. He always keeps his secrets,” he added bitterly. “So let’s you and I go back to the Institute and have it out with him, okay? Let’s find out what this is all about. I’ll stand with you, I know I owe you that.”

Tim felt his grip tighten on the comm in his hands. “I’m not going back, Dick,” he declared.

“I won’t let him keep you there if you really don’t want to stay,” Dick assured him. “Just a meeting. Just so we can all figure out what’s going on here. We’re all just… miscommunicating, all the time.”

Tim shook his head, frustrated. “I can’t.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t have time,” Tim bit out. “I’ve got things I need to do.”

“Like what?”

“None of your damn business!”

Dick looked serious. “Okay… what if I help you, then?”

Tim recoiled. “What?”

“With whatever you have to do that’s so urgent,” Dick offered. “I’ll just go with you. You know, to help.”

Tim stared at him. “Don’t you have to report in to Bruce or something?”

“f*ck him,” Dick shrugged. “I want to stick with you. If you don’t want to come back to the Institute, fine. I don’t want to force you. I don’t want to fight with you, so I’m not; I’ll go with you instead. You seem really… like something’s really boiling inside you, Timmy. What little I can get from you at all,” he added sadly. “You’ve gotten so much better at shielding.”

Tim looked away. He couldn’t deny there was a certain attractiveness to Dick’s offer. Tim might have reasons not to trust Bruce anymore, but Dick had never been a part of that equation. There was no evidence that Dick had been anything more than a dutiful son, following Bruce’s commands. Sure, he’d been pretty lax in the big brother department lately, but Tim could believe he’d absolutely, a hundred percent get behind saving Jason if he knew that Jason was still around to be saved.

Still, there was a desperation in Dick’s eyes that baffled him. “Look, I appreciate the offer,” Tim allowed carefully. “But I’m handling my own affairs just fine. Maybe you can come by in a few days or something.”

“No, that’s not…” Dick hesitated. “I want to stick with you, okay? I don’t want to lose you.”

Bingo. “Dick, what the hell is this about?” Tim asked waspishly. “You can’t rail against Bruce for keeping secrets and then keep a bunch yourself!”

Dick winced. “You’re right,” he nodded. “I’m sorry. There’s been a pre-cog…”

“Oh, this again,” Tim rolled his eyes. “Damian’s a prophet now, on top of everything else, huh?”

“Wait,” Dick gaped. “You know? How?”

“Damian tried to dreamfast me. He told me all the gory details,” Tim shrugged. “Fancy him not telling you that,” he added sarcastically.

“Oh,” Dick was wrongfooted. “Wait, if you knew, why didn’t you come home?”

Tim stared at him. “Why the hell would I do that?”

“Because,” Dick floundered. “You’re not safe!”

“With Damian in residence I wasn’t much safer at the Institute,” Tim snorted. “Besides, you don’t actually believe that nonsense, do you?”

“You don’t believe him?” Dick’s brow wrinkled.

“After the sh*t he’s pulled on me?” Tim shot back bitterly. “You know, all those ‘pranks’ that he got away with because he’s ‘just a kid’ and ‘just developing a sense of humour’? I wouldn’t trust him to tell me the sky was up.”

Dick winced. “Look, I know… I know it’s been rough for you. With him, I mean,” he admitted. “He’s had such a bad life… I know that doesn’t erase the fact that you had one too,” he added when Tim opened his mouth to snap. “You were always so patient and maybe we leaned a little bit too much on that patience. I get it; it wasn’t your job to absorb damage from him while he learned how to be a real boy. You have every right to be mad at Bruce and me for that. But, Tim, please,” Dick pleaded. “Don’t take our mistake out on Damian. I know it’s hard to believe, but Dami really is trying, okay? He’s been looking for you as hard as everyone else.”

Tim snorted. “He finally hit a consequence he couldn’t bluster his way out of with you. I’m not surprised.”

“It’s got nothing to do with me,” Dick insisted. “He doesn’t know how to express it, but he does care.”

Tim sighed. Honestly, this whole discussion was getting tiresome. Dick Grayson, once again furiously stumping for the Damian Wayne electoral campaign. And trying the patter out on Tim of all people. “Have you ever considered that maybe you’re a part of the problem, Dick?” he said.

His tone was weary enough to pull Dick up short. “What do you mean?”

“I mean,” Tim leaned forward. “The reason he throws his weight around and generally acts like a demon brat is because he knows you’ll be trailing after him, making apologies and soothing ruffled feathers. He’s never had to negotiate with his own unpopularity, never had to work through the aftermath of his attitude. He has you for that. You’re his emotional surrogate; the chat lackey. You keep doing all the fiddly, messy bits for him. No wonder he feels so entitled.”

Dick stared at him. “Well, I…. look, maybe you’re right. Maybe I coddled him too much, and you too little. I can’t erase what I did, but I’m asking you to please, just listen to me now. You don’t trust Damian and that’s fine. He hasn’t earned that from you. But I’m asking you, just trust me, okay? The pre-cog Damian had was absolutely real. What he saw was real. He saw you dying,” Dick added quietly.

Tim couldn’t deny he got a certain chill from the sincerity in Dick’s voice. Damian’s assertions Tim felt safe to ignore, but not Dick’s. “What, exactly, did he see? Exactly, Dick.” This, above all else, was Tim’s area of expertise. The pre-cogs were the Institute’s bread and butter industry, predicting and preventing disasters was the number one selling point amongst lobbyists and sceptics. A lot of Tim’s time as ersatz CEO had been spent dealing with pre-cogs and their aftermaths; he considered himself pretty damn good at taking them apart and rebuilding them so that they made sense.

Dick seemed to sag slightly as Tim appeared willing to at least listen. “We don’t see very much,” he admitted. “Just a snippet really. You, in the epicentre of some sort of explosion. Dust. Debris. That’s really all we get.”

“Time? Location?” Tim asked, heart hammering.

“We’ve been trying to lock it down,” Dick sounded frustrated. “Imminent, that much we do know. It’s not just Damian anymore, Tim. All the pre-cogs are starting to see it. You, the explosion, dust.”

“And no location?”

“Damian’s painting had… lots of old junk in it. Like old cars and stuff. Mounds of them, it looked like. We’ve been scouring recycling depots and dumps for months, looking for you.”

Tim squinted. “The junkyard?” he muttered, almost to himself. “Why the hell would I go to the junkyard?” He’d never had a reason to venture back to the Badlands after his first foray and, free pass from the former assassins who lived there or not, Tim wasn’t exactly looking for another go around.

“Tim,” Dick leaned forward. “Do you know where it is?”

“Sure I know,” Tim shrugged. “In the Badlands around the old ACE plant. But I’m not planning on going there any time soon. Certainly not today.”

“Huh,” Dick parsed that, looking at Tim shrewdly. “The only thing we knew for sure was it wasn’t anywhere near the Institute. You see? You have to come back with me, just for now, just for a little while, until the critical stage has passed.”

He made to grab Tim’s forearm, just for emphasis, but Tim jerked back out of range before he could. He looked down at the comm still clutched in his hands, Jason’s vitals still blipping away. “I can’t,” he said even as he looked at it. “I’ve got to… well, I’ve got to go and check on something,” he finished lamely.

“Like what?” Dick gaped. “Tim, this is your life we’re talking about here!”

“I know!” Tim snapped. “But… someone else’s life might depend on this too. A lot of people’s lives, actually.”

“Because of what?” Dick asked. “Tim, will you please just talk to me? What’s so damn important you’d risk your life over it?”

Tim hesitated. It was an alluring notion to have someone, anyone, on his side for this. But he wasn’t sure he could trust Dick. His faith had been on shaky ground for a while. Besides, he couldn’t think of a way to explain it without sounding flat out crazy and the chances that Dick wouldn’t report at least something back to Bruce was approximately zero.

He was probably relaying at least some information back to Babs now. Tim couldn’t risk it. This was Jason’s life. It was no hardship to acknowledge that he placed it above his own.

Overhead, the train announcer confirmed they were pulling into the terminal. Without Tim noticing, they’d reached the final leg of the ride. He shook his head. “It’s complicated. I’ll go and do what I need to do, then I’ll see you at the Institute.” Hopefully, not alone, he added in his head. He rose to his feet; he wanted to beat the crowds to the ferry. The clock was still ticking.

“Tim, wait,” Dick rose too. “I said I’ll come.”

Tim shook his head. “I’ll handle it.”

“Tim, I’m here now. I’m with you,” Dick pleaded. “You’re just a kid. You don’t have to handle this alone.”

That struck a spark off his temper. “Why not?” Tim challenged. “You trusted me to handle stuff before. Requisitions and new field tech and lobbying for Talent rights. You trusted me to handle every bit of your lives that required even a modicum of patience and paperwork and common sense. You know what? I’m getting really sick of this. I am sick to death of your endless passing of judgement over my level of self-reliance. I’m sick of trying to decide whether I’m a kid or whether I’m an adult based on what you need or Bruce needs or anyone else demands of me! Well guess what, Dick?” Tim jabbed a finger at Dick while the taller man gaped at him. “When you picked Damian to be Robin, you picked adult! Permanently! You don’t get to claim seniority over me anymore! And you don’t get to tell me what I can and can’t handle!”

Tim turned on his heel and stalked away before Dick could recover, pushing sullenly through crowds of people getting out of their cabins. He could hear Dick calling his name over the hubbub of the passengers crowding the corridor, but ignored him. He was all kinds of steamed. It was probably three days without sleep talking, but Tim couldn’t stand the idea of their… their dismissal of him, even after everything he’d accomplished. He was through being ignored. He was through silently standing there and taking it.

And if some wounded, hurting part of himself bled a little more freely remembering Jason’s scathing dismissal of him too, well, Tim was still burying that deep inside.

He wished that someone, anyone, would see him as worth something.

He made it to the terminal without having to deal with Dick catching up to him, although he was sure Dick was wading through the crowds from behind and would latch onto him soon enough. Maybe Tim could outrun him to the ferry, but he didn’t think so. He’d probably have to resign himself to Dick coming along, regardless of what he wanted, though he certainly wasn’t planning to tell him anything. Dick could damn well find out for himself what was going on here.

Tim didn’t have pre-cog Talents; not even a little bit. But he did have instincts, and with his new, powered up quantum level understanding of what was happening around him, they were razor sharp.

The hairs on the back of his neck all stood up and screamed.

Tim ducked and rolled, narrowing avoiding a blow from a stun stick, and came up in a fighting stance.

In front of him, armoured up and with his usual perpetual look of disdain, was Damian.

“Drake,” he said in a low voice. “You will come with us now.”

Chapter 17: 00:04

Chapter Text

Tim straightened up from his defensive crouch. “Nice to see you too, demon brat. Is the whole circus about to show up, or just you two clowns?” he sarcastically asked Dick, who was hurrying up to them, his Nightwing mask back in place.

“D- Robin!” Dick admonished. “Put your weapon down! I said I’d handle this!”

“Tt!” Damian scowled. “You have clearly failed in your attempt, Nightwing, as Drake was attempting to escape alone.”

“I don’t have to escape, hell child,” Tim snapped. “Know why? I’m not under arrest. I can leave any time I want. And I am, so move aside.”

“Tim, wait,” Dick held up his hands. “Just, wait a minute, okay? Damian, go wait by the ferry. Just let me speak to Tim alone, okay?”

Damian made a frustrated noise. “There is no time, Grayson! It is imminent! Look at his hair!”

“I saw,” Dick nodded grimly.

Tim looked back and forth between them. “My hair? What the hell has my hair got to do with anything?”

Damian huffed out a breath. “In my… vision. Your hair was red streaked, like it is now. Whatever is going to occur is going to happen soon. So you will come with us now, Drake! Back to father, where you may explain at your leisure why you were worth wasting our time and resources on for the last six months.”

Tim stiffened, scowling.

“Damian!” Dick snapped angrily. He turned to Tim. “I’m sorry, Tim. He is kind of right, though. You should come with us back to the Institute. We can deal with your thing too!” he added earnestly. “We’ll help you! It’s not… look, we help each other because we’re family, okay? It’s not because we think you’re a kid.”

“Speak for yourself,” Damian growled. “He is a weakling, ill equipped for the rigours of the outside world. He’s never even been outside Gotham before! He can’t even recognise the danger he is in.”

“What, you mean like all the times you tried to kill me?” Tim said hotly. Something about the kid always just got right under his skin, no matter how hard he tried to stay composed. “I recognise danger just fine, Damian Wayne, mostly because of the things you did. I don’t need any more of your brand of help. Neither does the gestalt program, if the rumours are true.”

“Damian, you are not helping, okay?” Dick nearly yelled in frustration.

But it was too late. Damian’s hackles went right up at the criticism. “You should be grateful, Drake, that we are even expending the time on your worthless life! What are you but a badly made genetic experiment, abandoned by your creators and leeching off father’s unfathomable charity! Everyone must reckon with your failings! You have no right to a place with real Talent. You have neither the skill nor the strength that will take people into the wider galaxy! You have no Talent,” Damian sneered contemptuously. “None worth mentioning.”

A fraught bubble of silence descended between then, sequestered from the bustle of the terminal.

Tim’s lips thinned. “Is that your final answer?” he asked, his voice so cold he was almost blowing frost.

“Tim,” Dick pleaded. “Please, just ignore him. He doesn’t mean it. Damian, go home,” he barked with unexpected ferocity at the boy. “You’ve done more than enough, thanks.”

Damian recoiled at this attitude. A sliver of regret found its way onto his face. “I… apologize,” he essayed in stilted tones. “I withdraw my words.”

“I wasn’t talking to you, demon brat,” Tim turned arctic eyes on Dick. “So that’s it then? Damian lashes out and I’m just expected to take it, like always? And you want to call yourself my big brother?”

Dick flinched. “Tim, I’m sorry, I just… I don’t want us all to fight. Damian says things he doesn’t mean when he’s stressed.”

“Who cares if he meant them or not,” Tim looked Damian up and down with total contempt. “I didn’t see you tripping over yourself to disagree. Not today. Not ever.” Even though he hated himself for it, Tim felt hot tears prick at the corners of his eyes. They made all the overtures, all the promises. But they were the same as they ever were.

“Tim,” Dick reeled like Tim had waved a fist in his face. “Of course I don’t agree! You have to know that!”

“How?” Tim demanded. “It’s like Damian said, I have no Talent worth speaking of. I’m not a Prime . I can’t read your mind or pick up your feelings. What have I ever known except what you have deigned to tell me? And all you’re telling me right now is that Damian’s feelings are still your number one priority. Go home, Officer Grayson,” Tim snapped. “Your services aren’t required here. And as for you, demon brat? I’d tell you to go to hell, but even hell doesn’t deserve you. Your heart would freeze it solid.”

He shoved by a shocked Damian and stalked deeper into the crowd, almost bursting with the white hot rage that filled him. He buried himself in it, trying to outpace his pain. His disappointment. Some part of him was hoping that somehow, after all this, they might have seen fit to change. But no, it was the same old story still, the Pegasus and their little winged donkey.

He was done chasing them, killing himself trying to keep up with their flight. He hadn’t been all the way done before, but he was now.

The edges of the comm bit into the meat of his palm. He’d be damned if he ever willingly saw any of them ever again.

Jason needed him. He tried to focus on that.

“Tim wait!” Dick cried. And then, “Damian, NO!”

Tim ducked a furious swing from the stun stick, backing out of range and dropping into a defensive stance.

“Grayson, you fool!” Damian snarled. “Why did you warn him?”

“Why are you attacking him?” Dick sounded at the end of his rope.

“We don’t have time for this!” Damian’s voice cracked on the last word. “You heard him! He won’t come willingly. We can’t let him just leave!”

“Newsflash, Damian,” Tim snapped. “You don’t get a say!”

“Drake!” Damian whirled on him and then visibly checked himself. “Drake,” he repeated in a calmer voice. “Timothy. I know it is… difficult to believe. I know you do not have any cause to trust me. But your life is in danger. I am trying to save it.”

Tim gaped at him.

“I… have learned much from Father and Grayson. Much of my previous actions were the result of conditioning I received from others. I have come to realize much of what I was taught was incorrect,” he shifted uncomfortably. “You need not forgive me, if you do not wish it. But you must come with us now. At least long enough for the future to change. Do you understand? There is no more time. Whatever I saw will happen today.”

Tim felt his spine pull stiff, his lips thin. “And if I refuse?”

“Then I will make you submit,” Damian declared. “For your own good.”

“Damian…” Dick looked torn. “That’s not… we shouldn’t fight.”

“If he will not come, what choice do we have, other than let him walk to his death?” Damian barked.

Dick looked miserable, but Tim could see the acquiescence in his eyes. Damian was selling him on this. “Tim,” he pleaded. “Please. Please, just come with us now. I promise, I’ll help you with whatever you need help with, but you need to come with us. And if you really want to leave after that,” Dick looked heartbroken. “We… we won’t stop you. You have my word. But you need to come with us now. Please, little brother,” he pleaded. “I don’t want you to die.”

“Well?” Damian asked him. “What will it be, Drake? Will you come willingly? Or will you fight?”

Tim felt the boiling rage in him solidify into icy resolve. “Too little, too late. If you want a fight, you’ll get one.”

“Timmy, please.”

“I’m not Timmy!” Tim roared at him. “I’m not Timmy to you ever again.” He lunged at a started Dick, who was so taken aback by the speed and ferocity of it that it didn’t occur to him to make a countermove. Tim elbow went hard into his solar plexus as he drove the taller man backwards like a small freight train, slamming him into a nearby railing and driving the air from his lungs.

It was only when Tim moved back that Dick saw what had happened. The look on his face was priceless when he realized his hand was now chained to the railing in a Talent-suppressing cuff, the same kind they kept in their field uniforms as standard equipment. “Tim!” Dick tugged at it futilely.

Tim ignored him and turned to face his next opponent. His scuffle with Dick had attracted some attention from the other people in the admittedly pretty large terminal. He was a hundred percent sure security would be bustling its way here any minute. The comm he’d slipped into his chest holster continued to blip away. He gritted his teeth; he didn’t have time for this.

Damian was full Robin now, stance squared up and face razor sharp with focus. He had his stun stick out, and spun it like the katana Bruce had told him he couldn’t carry in the field. “You’re a fool, Drake,” he said, voice surprisingly soft. “Come quietly. You will not win. You’ve never won a single fight against me before.”

“You’ve never seen me try before,” Tim snarled. “Come at me then, Robin, if you’re such a superior model.”

Damian scowled. “You think I can’t see all your tricks? The stun pad you’re planning to drop? The Raspe manoeuvre you will try and fail? I see it all, Drake! How can you hope to win when… I…” he trailed off.

A look of complete bafflement crossed his face.

“Oh dear,” Tim mocked, deep in the Discipline and incidentally, deep into his quantum slight. Damian was lit up in front of him, a supernova of boiling light, resonating with a hundred trillion different strings. “Is your little two-minute trick not working? What a shame,” he sighed. “It seems like there is a way around that after all.”

“What?” Dick yelped in surprise.

“What?” Damian was briefly bug eyed.

Tim rejoiced; just this once, he’d managed to catch the demon brat off guard. “Maybe it’s time to find out what a fair fight looks like, Robin,” Tim waved insouciantly. “But unfortunately, that won’t be today!” He waved a mocking little wave and then leapt over the railing and down off the mezzanine.

“DRAKE!”

“TIM!”

Tim managed to pull strings of air around him to cushion his fall. Only just enough; the shock still went right through him and made his chest ache, but he landed safely from the two storey drop with a quick roll at the bottom. Honestly, he shouldn’t have done it. The only time he’d practiced the skill was extremely briefly, and then from a height only as lofty as his own bed. But he wasn’t stupid, and neither was Damian. The kid could adapt like nobody’s business and Tim had no desire to get into a protracted fight with him. He just wanted to get to the ferry.

It was too much to hope that Damian would simply give chase. The floor under Tim’s feet rippled, knocking not just him but dozens of people over on the terminal floor. Alarms started blared as people started yelling and screaming.

Tim got to his feet to see Damian float down more sedately from the upper level, Dick behind him frantically patting down his uniform for the cuff keys. “What the hell, demon brat?”

“You will submit, Drake!” Robin ordered imperiously. “I will not let you escape and you cannot win.”

Tim gritted his teeth. The crowds were surging back and away from them. Even if he stopped right now, the damage was done. This time tomorrow there would be a new wave of anti-Talent rhetoric on the TRI-D and shouted in council houses. How like Damian, Tim thought with angry resentment. He did as he pleased and gave no thought to the consequences.

If he wanted a fight, then fine. Tim would give him a fight. He surged forward; he had no projectile weapons and was too exhausted to risk teleportation right now; if he could pull that trick at all in this state, he’d prefer to keep it in reserve in case he needed to get to Jason in a hurry.

The comm was a forbidding weight on his chest.

Robin flicked his hand almost lazily, sending Tim flying backwards. It was nowhere near the devastating blow it could have been — Robin had more than enough power to turn him into a fine paste against a steel wall if he wanted to. The brat had settled for something mildly humiliating, Tim sliding back about twenty feet on his rear, no dignity to be found.

Robin smirked. He opened his mouth.

And promptly remembered that he couldn’t predict Tim’s moves any more, when the stun pad Tim had cast at his feet zapped him. His face contorted more from emotional shock than physical, but it was enough of a neuron disruption to null out his Talent. The effect was temporary, only a few seconds long.

But it was enough for Tim to leap up and bear down on his opponent like a train, landing a kick squarely on his armoured solar plexus. The blow was magnificent, three years of slowly building anger and pain unleashed in a single, perfect move. Robin doubled over even as reeled back, so taken off guard that all his hammered in grace and balance deserted him. He staggered to the floor, wheezing impotently.

“What…is this?” Robin gritted out past clenched teeth.

“Turns out that being on my own was the opportunity to learn a trick or two!” Tim quipped as he relieved his opponent of his stun baton. “Now,” he jabbed it right at the brat’s head without actually letting it touch. “Are you going to give up quietly? Lord knows you’ve done enough damage to the Institute’s reputation with that little stunt you just pulled.”

Robin knocked the baton aside, red faced and hissing. “I will not lose to the likes of you,” he declared. “I refuse to!”

He got in a kinetic shove but Tim was able to brush him with the baton as he flew backwards. All the force of the push was lost as Robin’s neural pathways were disrupted by the stun, giving Tim time to recover and lunge forward again. What should have been a storm of kinetics turned into a straight up fistfight, because Tim was moving fast enough to keep Robin from accessing the full force of his kinetic Talent. Every time the brat tried for a kinetic throw, Tim would stun him before he could rev up its full force, so all of its effectiveness was lost beyond an initial push away. Added to that, it turns out that as a straight fighter Tim was as skilled or more so than Robin. Robin had never had to strategize like Tim did. He’d never had to fight without his pre-cog abilities before and it showed. He didn’t plan beyond this blow or the next, whereas Tim was a dozen moves ahead and counting.

But Robin had one immense advantage; he was fresh as a daisy and Tim was operating on no sleep, no food and pure nerves, the clock still ticking away in his head. There was absolutely no way for Tim to maintain this fight in the long term.

This was proven relentlessly true by Tim’s over-focus on Robin, his brain too fried to keep any three-sixty awareness on his surroundings like he should have. This gave Dick the chance to get up behind and capture him in a huge, kinetic bear hug, lifting him off the ground before he could kick out or countermove.

“Timmy, please,” Dick pleaded in his ear. “Please stop. We’re trying to help you!”

“How f*cking novel!” Tim shouted furiously, struggling. “Where the f*ck have you been the last three years, then?”

“…Tim,” Dick sounded wounded. “I promise… I promise I will make this right.”

“Don’t bother negotiating with him!” Robin snapped. “He is clearly past the point of sense.” Robin snatched the stun baton back from Tim’s frozen grip. “I am going to stun you now, Drake. Then we will take you home. And… we will talk more later,” he muttered.

“Oh sure, now you want to talk,” Tim sneered, seemingly going still. He was surreptitiously working a hand free of his gloves. He was going to need skin for this.

Robin turned up the stun setting. “I know it is difficult to believe, Drake, but I no longer have any desire to hurt you. You are not being reasonable about this. Your life is in danger. We are trying to save it.”

“Maybe,” Tim hissed out. “I don’t want to be saved.”

It was just honest enough to be shocking; so much so that Dick’s grip loosed around his body, so he was no longer fully immobile.

“Tim, what—?”

Tim’s head slammed back into Dick’s nose. There was a crunch, and then Tim dropped when Dick’s concentration broke.

The baton was swung towards him but Tim slammed his hand onto Robin’s face before it could connect.

His bare hand.

Still deep in the Discipline and deep into quantum sight, Tim gathered up all the strings of data around him, the history of every tile, panel, nut and screw, every chip and light bulb, every hand that had ever been laid on the constructed platform, and dumped it straight into Robin’s head.

The effect was dramatic. Robin’s eyes rolled up in his head and he collapsed like his strings had been cut.

Tim was left standing there, arm outstretched. He was astonished. Jason’s idea had actually worked!

“Tim!” Dick mumbled, holding a bloody nose. “What the heck did you just do?”

Tim scooped up the dropped stun baton and brandished it at Dick. “Fed the demon until he choked,” Tim bit out. “Relax, I didn’t give him everything,” which was true. Giving him every single bit of data Tim could access would have been both unnecessarily cruel and downright dangerous. Tim might have his issues with Damian, but he wasn’t in the least bit interested in causing the kid actual permanent harm. “Just enough. Now are you going to let me go quietly, yet?”

“I doubt whether any of us are going to get out of here quietly now,” Dick muttered softly.

Tim grimaced. The ruckus they’d caused had made a lot of people retreat from their immediate vicinity. From the corner of his eyes Tim could see police copters approaching the terminal through the glass of the terminal roof. On the ground, armed personnel were slowly getting the citizens out of the area, but they would converge on their little drama once the area was cleared. Police were usually under orders to wait for Institute personnel to accompany them into a Talent affray, especially one of this magnitude. Dick Grayson was one such officer, which means he would have a distinct advantage over Tim from here on out.

Tim had to get out of here fast, while there was still some confusion to be lost in.

Then it was all for naught, because gravity picked that moment to switch off.

Tim flailed madly as his feet left the ground and he floated upwards towards the terminal roof at speed. There were screams and shouts as everyone in the terminal did the same. It was a massive conflagration of kinetic power, a maelstrom of force. Tim managed to turn in mid-air so he hit the roof of the terminal back first.

Dick floated up beside him, seemingly more controlled.

“Dick, what the f*ck?”

“It’s not me!” Dick teeth were bared as he strained himself trying to counteract… whatever the hell was happening here. “I think… it might… be Damian!” Dick pushed harder ever as more thumps of people and officers and luggage hitting the roof rained around them. “I think it might be some kind of trigger! Al Ghul planted a few nasty tricks in his subconscious!”

Tim felt a wave of force crush him against the glass roof. People were screaming and panicking, alarms were blaring. Out of the corner of his eye he could see ships wavering on the ocean, lifting and bobbing. The police copters were struggling for control, being pushed back wildly. The force radiated in waves, a crushing weight before a breath of reprieve.

“Di—!” Tim choked on air as the next wave hit him. The terminal roof was starting to groan. “Dick, can you stop this?”

Dick was futilely launching off the roof, trying to literally swim downwards through the forces at play, bringing his own telepathic weight to bear. He did manage against the current in the ebb, but once the next wave hit he would lose ground. “Yes!” Dick cried. “We have a protocol! But I have to be next to him! I have to be able to touch him! I have to get down there! Even he can’t withstand this level of exertion!”

It was true. Tim could see from his position Damian’s small body starting to twitch in pre-seizure. Once whatever pressure valve in his synapses gave way, the kid’s brain would be fried. That was way too much activity for a five pound lump of flesh designed to find ripe fruit in trees.

The blowout would likely not end well for anyone else in the terminal either.

f*ck, Tim thought succinctly. “Dick, come here!” Tim reached out a hand. “I can get you down there!”

“What?” Dick was still straining to reach Damian. “You haven’t got the juice! You’re not a Prime!”

“For f*ck’s sake Dick, you don’t know sh*t about me, especially now!” Tim roared at the top of his lungs. “Do you want to get down there or not? I have a way! You said you trusted me! So f*cking trust me , already!”

Dick stared at him. And then reached out to grip his arm tightly.

This was it, Tim thought grimly. His last shot, his only Hail Mary. And he was wasting it on Damian of all people.

But Tim couldn’t let Damian die. For all their weary refrain, Bruce and Dick did have a point. Damian was just a kid.

Tim sank into the Discipline and deeper still into quantum sight. He couldn’t see Damian anymore in it; his body was lost somewhere in a blinding mass of whipping, pulsing strings. For the first time ever Tim really and fully appreciated the power Damian brought to bear. This would be like diving through a supernova.

“Move fast, Dick,” Tim advised grimly. “I can get us down there, but I can’t hold us there.”

It was a cacophony of noises and crashes and crying around them, as panicking people tried to wriggle free of the sudden pressure they were under. The glass was really groaning now.

Tim let all it fall away. He focused hard, looking for the centrepoint, looking for Damian in the maelstrom of his own power. He was here , here and here, just another fixed point in the universe.

Tim gripped Dick’s tangle of strings and lights hard, and dove through it all.

He didn’t think about the pressure, didn’t think about the sheer fragility of himself up against all that force that could tear him asunder as easily as wet paper. He just grabbed the strings, felt the history of the planet try to download through his head, and pulled.

Tim came back to the real world in a crunch of downwards force. They’d hit the ground hard, but in his defense, he’d had to pull pretty hard against the forces fighting him. Even as he registered the pain he felt the kick of another wave gearing up, the kinetic lift already dragging him back up.

But Dick was not one to overthink when speed was called for. He glommed on to Damian as hard as he could and whispered in his ear. “I love you, Damian.”

Tim felt the upward thrust that had already sent him a good ten feet in the air steady and diminish. Not all at once; it was a steady but noticeable drain of force that made his drop relatively easy to manage.

The people, and there must have been over a hundred of them, didn’t agree with this assessment. Shrieks of terror filled the air as they abruptly lost altitude. Dick was ready for that too, though; he focused his own energy upwards, trying to mitigate the sudden loss. He wasn’t quite as powerful as Damian, but the difference was basically sapphires to diamonds. Everything falling went from an ungainly plummet to a gentle downwards coast, although sweat poured off Dick’s forehead with the amount he was exerting himself. He’d be fried after this. Tim couldn’t help him; he was already too dizzy to see straight, and every breath was agony.

It took a while for him to be clear headed enough to take stock of his surroundings. When he did, all he could do was take in the sheer chaos. People were dashing in a mad panic to get as far from the terminal as possible. Ships were churning the waters in their haste to get away. Security officers were concerning themselves trying to stop an all out riot and restore some sort of order.

They were keeping their distance from the three of them.

Tim felt the long, arduous work of three years of public relations go up in smoke. It would take Talents years to recover from this.

Tim turned to blearily look at Dick, who was cradling Damian, worriedly fussing over the now sleeping boy.

He felt a spike of panic and hastily fumbled for his chest pocket.

The comm had survived. That was good.

What was not so good? Jason’s vitals were spiking. All sorts of readings were raising red flags. The brainwave activity monitor still showed delta waves, but Tim was sure that couldn’t mean anything good.

Damn. He had to go now.

He forced his way to his wobbly feet.

“Tim,” Dick’s head whipped around.

“I have to go,” Tim said quietly. “I’m sorry, Dick.”

“Tim! Wait!” Dick shouted at Tim plunged into the mass panic of the crowd. “Come back! You’re going to die! Tim!”

Tim kept going, heart heavy in his chest. Dick would never leave Damian alone, not in the state the kid was in. Tim was a hundred percent sure Dick wouldn’t try to follow him.

For once, Tim didn’t think badly of his choice. He was at peace with it.

Chapter 18: 00:03

Chapter Text

Getting evacuated from the terminal was surprisingly trouble free. There was so much chaos, so much panic, that once Tim managed to grab a cap from some scattered, abandoned belongings and jam it over his distinctive hair to fool the initial flash scans, he was just another body, desperate to leave and showing it with every fibre of his being. He eeled through the police blockade checkpoint at the ferry’s wharf by virtue of his still-current Institute ID and all the psychic static he could bring to bear. It was still early days into the crisis and first responders were overwhelmed with panicking crowds; Tim scraped through, not distinctive enough in their minds to warrant further scrutiny.

After that, he flat out sprinted for the train station.

The comm was in his hand; Tim ran into obstacles and people while trying to keep his eyes on it at first. The spikes were getting closer together; whatever was being done to wake Jason up was working. Tim was running out of time. In the end he put it away and concentrated on the burn of his muscles and the stretch of his lungs. He wasn’t pacing himself. This was sheer, direct line physics in motion, point A to point B in the quickest time possible.

He managed to squeeze through the doors of an already departing train heading for the Arkham end of town, blowing hard from his run. He fretted and twitched, taking a seat as the train seemed to move at a snail’s pace along the tracks in his mind. He agonised over each new spike; the lines on the screen flaying his insides every time their steady blips became ragged, violent jumps.

Think, Tim, he told himself. It was no good just running in guns blazing when he got there. He had to have a plan. Compelled to patience, he had to occupy his mind with something other than catastrophizing.

Right now, his only plan was to get to Jason and somehow get him the hell out of that nightmare place. How he would do this was the trick. His brain was on fire; he wouldn’t have the energy necessary to teleport a dust mote in the state he was in. Only his determination was keeping him upright at this point. Even so, every so often his gaze would waver and blur, darkness creeping in around the edges. It wasn’t just psychic overextension; he was exhausted.

It didn’t even once occur to him to stop.

So he’d get Jason out. Assuming there was even a way he could deal with the logistics of moving a coma patient throughout the city, where could he go? He had no apartment, no safe haven. There were places to hole up in the Linears, of course, but usually that required a little cash to grease good will. Tim didn’t have a penny to his name, either. Otherwise he’d have rented an automated cruiser to get to Arkham.

Where the hell could they go?

It was the quiet that clued him in at first. He’d been watching the comm unit, feeling himself wind tighter with every spike. He hadn’t been very mindful of his surroundings.

But the quiet did eventually penetrate. Aware of the faint, deliberate movement of people around him, away from him, Tim kept his eyes glued to the screen, careful not to let on that he’d noticed anything. He tilted the comm just slightly, enough so that the turn of his body was natural with it. It was enough to spot the TRI-D running on the ceiling of the train. Usually it would stream advertisem*nts and schedule times, but in times of emergency it was also used as a news broadcaster, like it was now.

Tim cursed inside his head when he saw it. It showed swathes of clips from the terminal incident; none of the actual fight — that would have been locked down fast by the Institute PR team — but plenty of crowdsourced footage of the cataclysm and its aftermath. Talents both at their best and their worst.

There wasn’t much footage that showed Tim that was very clear, but it didn’t matter. The city surveillance machine ran at impressive speeds in the wake of terrorist attacks — and for all the police knew right now, it could have been one. They certainly weren’t going to treat it like it wasn’t. The second the alarm was raised, every possible camera would have its data fed through supercomputers and algorithms, piecing together what had happened, who the players were.

Which meant there was now a citywide BOLO out for Tim Drake. There was his face, plastered where everyone could see it. At least it said ‘wanted for information’ rather than a ‘person of interest’ or ‘perpetrator’, but in Gotham the average, sensible citizen wasn’t about to argue semantics. The air was tense around him as people spotted his face, even hunched as he was, and matched it up to the one on the holo.

Tim was very careful not to let on that he’d realized, keeping his eyes fixed firmly on the screen. He didn’t want to start a fight, or a riot. Tim had no doubt that somebody somewhere had slipped into another car and notified the authorities; he had to get off the train as fast as he could.

His blank face didn’t change as the next stop came up. He rose, his eyes still fixed on the comm, and moved to the train doors like any young man engrossed in whatever he was doing on the ‘Net. The second the doors were open, he was through and sprinting. No one got off with him.

Not willing to hope for a second that every flash scanner wasn’t flagged with his biometrics or that the buzzing police copters high overhead weren’t converging on his position, Tim took the opportunity to rip off his coveralls and stained tunic and slap on his nano-domino. There was enough jamming tech in each to buy him a little more time.

So, the trains were out. Cruisers and cabs were out for the same reasons. He was on his own two feet. If he’d been on the North Island he could have cut through the Linears for a broad swathe of the journey, underground and no one giving a damn who he was. Unfortunately he was smack dab in the middle of the Mid Island, skyscrapers towering above him, sky paths filled with cruisers and copters crisscrossing the entire upward view, skimmers and pedestrians down on the street level.

The mask helped, though. The Institute had done a lot of good in Gotham. People would grant someone wearing the mask a lot of leeway. They certainly wouldn’t think to report an Institute denizen to the police. They were, in a distant way, a part of the police.

Tim ran, boots clumping on the pavement. He kept the comm in his hands but would only look at it a block at a time, one quick glance that didn’t tell him anything he wanted to know. The spikes were constant now, the delta wave line was breaking up. Jason was close to waking.

Tim tried to pace himself as much as he could. It was easier going through Robbinsville Park and cutting through all the oases of green under the protective dome, but once he’d hit Coventry his body started to flag on him. He literally pushed himself to the edge of passing out, spots dancing in front of his eyes as his chest heaved and wheezed, before staggering to a stumbling walk, sides aching. It was no good; he had almost nothing left in the tank. Even the Discipline wouldn’t help him. He was using that just to stay upright.

The brainwave spikes were ongoing. Tim cursed the feebleness of his body, heart gripped in an unyielding vice. He was so close! Arkham Island was but a mile and a bridge crossing away. There was nothing he could do but grit his teeth and press on, drenched in sweat. He couldn’t get any more speed than his brisk walk. Even jogging a few dozen steps left him in searing agony.

Eventually he just had to stop. It was either that or collapse. Hopefully he was far enough away from the terminal and the train to be safe from immediate chase; he certainly wouldn’t bet good money on being able to stop for long. He had to keep going, though. That comm’s damning record meant Jason was in danger. He had to get to him. He had to get Jason out of that hospital.

In the end, Tim had no choice but to stagger onwards. He was close to the bridge to Arkham now. There was only a bit farther to push. Clocks were ticking down ahead and various interested parties were closing ranks behind. Even now the tell-tale whine of police copters spurred at his heels. The nano-domino might protect him from flash scanners, but there would be human eyes watching every camera in this city. There would be no way to slip through the net.

Tim had no idea what he was going to do once he got to Jason. All he knew was he had to get there.

He wasn’t quite hyperfocused enough to miss it when the streets got quiet, though. It was already a quiet street; a middling and mundane little tributary just before the rail bridge across to Arkham, lined with fashion shops and cafes. It was mostly for pedestrians, and those pedestrians were too busy in their lives to concern themselves with a random Institute employee pounding the streets. There wasn’t any traffic, just the hustle and bustle of people.

Until there wasn’t.

They all stopped, as if time had suddenly glitched.

Tim froze. There was only one Talent he knew that had mastered that level of fine telepathic control, that could unleash it as easily as breathing.

“Tim,” Bruce said quietly from where he sat at a café table. He was dressed in his field uniform, but didn’t have the nano-cowl on. This was all Bruce Wayne, slowly turning a coffee cup in his hand.

“I didn’t attack Damian!” Tim snapped and instantly hated himself for how defensive it came out. He shouldn’t have to keep justifying himself.

Bruce nodded. “I know you didn’t. They were overzealous when they approached you. You defended yourself. You couldn’t have known the trigger was there. It wasn’t your fault.”

Tim felt his hackles rise at such a suspiciously easy acceptance. If Bruce wasn’t going to take issue with Tim damaging his finest Pegasus children, then there must be some other, bigger shoe waiting to drop.

Bruce sighed at his suspicious silence. “Tim, please sit down.”

“I don’t have time to chat, Mr. Wayne.”

Bruce hesitated over the cold honorific but pressed. “Tim, you’re swaying where you stand. Please, can we just sit and talk? Like equals; like the mature young man you always showed you were. Just for a minute.”

Tim glowered at him. It was true, but he didn’t appreciate being called out on it. He eyed the frozen people around him and also the coffee pot on one of the serving trays. Caffeine and sugar might give him an extra boost, and he’d need one once he found Jason.

That didn’t mean he trusted Bruce in the slightest. He didn’t — he couldn’t — let himself believe that Bruce would help him, even knowing what he now knew. Given a choice, Bruce would always save the many over the few. Tim wouldn’t trust him to make a personal call, even if it concerned Jason. Maybe especially because it concerned Jason.

Tim grudgingly took a seat. He downed a cup before Bruce could do more than blink and at him and loaded up a second with sugar.

“That’s not good for your heart.” The observation was mild but the look in Bruce’s eyes was sharp.

“Neither are you,” Tim gulped down another half a cup in the strained silence that followed.

“Tim,” Bruce turned his own cup in his hands, about as close as Tim had ever seen him come to having a nervous tic. “I know I’ve made mistakes,” he admitted softly. “I presumed too much of you and I took you for granted. You are angry at me, and rightfully so. Though I never meant to,” Bruce looked at him almost pleadingly. “I wounded you quite badly with my actions. I thought…. I really believed you were happy at the Institute.”

“You wanted to believe I was happy,” Tim corrected, voice flat. “You never verified. You never even goddamn well looked.”

“I did!” Bruce retorted. “Too late, I admit it, but I did see it. I tried to correct, but you ran before I could do it properly or just tell you…”

“Tell me what?” Tim asked sharply. “That you had nothing more to teach a winged donkey? That your perfect blood son was going to take us all to the stars and you didn’t have the time to waste training up a charity kid who couldn’t lift a marble? Thanks ever so, Mr. Wayne,” Tim took another mouthful of caffeine and sugar sarcastically. “But I already figured that out on my own. I figured out a lot on my own.”

Bruce reared back, mouth open. He was genuinely taken aback. “Tim, what are you talking about?”

“Oh, please, spare me,” Tim sneered. “Three years ago two things happened; Damian got dropped at your doorstep and the Talent diagnostic changed. You had someone you could teach all the high-end techniques to again and I didn’t count as one of your carefully curated Prime kids anymore. You think I didn’t notice the connection? I may not be a Prime, but you did at least train me to be a good detective. From that day on, you suddenly remembered I was just the kid next door that you didn’t want. The first thing you said to me was that I was only going to live with you temporarily, remember? I do. I remember everything,” Tim added bitterly.

“Tim, that’s not…” Bruce looked bewildered, like Tim had accused him of being the emperor of Mars. His face went through a variety of expressions, speeding past at hyperspace on his face. “You can’t possibly believe that’s true,” he settled on after moment’s deliberation.

“Why not?” Tim snapped, temper fraying. Bruce’s hesitation wasn’t in any way as vindicating at Tim had thought it would be. It was, instead, strangely irksome. No one could ever get a read on Bruce. It could so easily be an act. Tim would never be able to tell.

“Because you’re my son,” Bruce told him beseechingly. “I… I may have made mistakes but not once did I intimate that you were somehow lesser than any of my other children because of your Talent status. Is that what you really thought?” His voice contained a note that, if this wasn’t Bruce Wayne, would have been called almost shrill.

“What the hell else was I supposed to think?” Tim demanded, slamming his cup down so hard it cracked. “The diagnostic changed and suddenly I didn’t rank all the other privileges the blood son or any of your other children got! I didn’t rank Discipline training or casework…”

“…Tim…”

“I didn’t rank Talent camps with my friends, I didn’t rank fieldwork…”

“… Tim …”

“I didn’t rank family holidays or exchange programs or higher education…”

“Tim, that’s not…”

“I didn’t rank space shuttles,” Tim’s fists clenched. “Or space stations…”

“…”

“I didn’t merit your time or your attention or a goddamn PR op in your stupid recruitment films…”

“…Tim…!”

“I didn’t even rank a f*cking HUG!”

The word bounced off the buildings around them. Without realizing Tim had, at some point in his litany of grief, began yelling at the top of his lungs. He sucked in a breath and tried to get a grip, furious with himself for losing control, for showing yet another vulnerable flank. He couldn’t have stopped the flood once he started if he’d tried though. It had been far too much pressure, compressed inside for far too long.

Bruce was staring at him, pale and aghast. Suddenly his face crumpled and he buried it in his hands, clawing his hairline. He actually groaned, something Tim had never seen him do it in earnest. “I… this is wrong,” he said, raising his face from his hands, looking devastated. “This is all wrong! Tim, it wasn’t—” he reached for Tim.

Tim jerked back violently. “Don’t touch me!” he hissed.

Bruce’s expression cracked a little bit more. “Tim, please! You’ve got this all wrong! God, you must have been so confused…”

“There’s no confusion here, Mr. Wayne,” Tim said coolly, which was a little bit of a lie. Bruce’s expression was freaking him out.

“Tim, you don’t understand…”

Suddenly, all the anger just drained right out of Tim. He was tired of this… this game, this weird dance they always did. It was always like this; Bruce would show just enough emotion to lead Tim on, to make him believe it wasn’t all part of some grand plan, and he wasn’t just one tiny cog in it, unwanted for anything more than a purpose. Necessary, yes, but that wasn’t the same as being wanted. “I do understand, Mr. Wayne. You had too many children,” he said quietly. “And only two hands. Whatever else can be said about you, you’ve never been anything but absolutely pragmatic. You know how triage works. A winged donkey was never going to get you to the stars, but the Primes will. Of course your focus had to be on them. The stars are the only place people like us are ever going to be free or safe. You always put the Mission first, I get that. If I was confused, then it was only because I expected our relationship to be more than what it was, something I should have known better than to do. I accept that. I’ll get on with my life and try to be a credit to your teachings and time. Whatever guilt or sense of duty keeps compelling you to chase after me, you can let go of now. I’m fine. You taught me to manage on my own and I can do that. I’m just not interested in following the Mission anymore. I’m asking you, adult to adult, like you said, to accept that.”

The horrified expression on Bruce’s face didn’t falter. If anything, Tim’s calm acceptance of the distance between them seemed to make it worse. “Tim, you’re wrong,” Bruce told him hoarsely.

“Please, just stop,” Tim rose.

“Tim,” Bruce rose with him, hand outstretched. “I swear to you that’s not what it was!”

“Bruce!” Tim’s snap was harsh.

“I swear on my parents graves,” Bruce persisted. “That is not what’s happening here. You don’t understand, there are things going on here that you don’t know. Things,” his expression twisted with sadness. “Things I should have told you a long time ago.”

Tim laughed humorlessly, all thoughts of a peaceful separation vanishing under a white hot flare of rage. “I know all I need to know,” he spat. “I know enough. What more could I need? After all, I don’t really need to know about my kinetics, do I?”

Bruce froze. Even the heavily trained and tried Wayne poker face couldn’t lock down fast enough for Tim to miss the guilt that sped across the man’s face. “Tim,” he croaked. “You don’t understand…”

“I understand,” Tim stood and turned away from him. “I understand you better now, perhaps, than anyone has ever done. Goodbye, Mr. Wayne.”

He made to walk away, heart burning in his chest.

Skimmers and cruisers blew around ahead of him like leaves in the wind, bumping and shuddering into place in a tall, tangled barricade. Sometimes it was easy to see where Damian got his genes from. Maintaining that level of power and holding all the people here in telepathic statis was no mean feat.

Tim didn’t appreciate it. “So that’s it then,” he said coldly, not turning around. “If I don’t come when you whistle then I’m just another criminal you need to hunt, is that it?”

He turned around, snarling, but then faltered slightly.

Bruce had risen from the table and followed Tim onto the street. He was there now, dropped to his knees in supplication, reaching out. Tim had been prepared for a lot of things, but not this. Never this. “Please,” Bruce pleaded. “Please, son. I know how it looks. I can’t imagine how it felt to find out. But please, please believe me, I had very good reasons to do everything I did.”

Tim backed up a step, unnerved. Bruce’s voice was one hundred percent sincere.

“Please, just come with me now. I will explain everything, Tim, I promise. No more secrets…”

“No more lies?” Tim retorted. “How the hell would I know though? How the hell would I be able to stop you wiping all my inconvenient rebellious tendencies away with one quick telepathic sweep? How can I ever trust that you wouldn’t,after what you did?”

Bruce was struck mute at the accusations levied against him. “I know it’s… difficult. I’m asking the impossible of you, just like I always do and always stupidly took for granted that you’d always accept. But please, Tim. You’re my son. I lost Jason and it nearly killed me. I don’t want to lose you, too. Please, if you believe nothing else, believe that. Just, please,” he pleaded. “Just give me one last chance to make this right.”

Tim gave him a long stare, the weight of the comm in his pocket, heart boiling and burning in his chest. “How can you make anything right,” he asked softly, “if you don’t really believe you did anything wrong?”

Bruce opened his mouth. Then he hesitated over his words.

Tim felt the buzz of caffeine and sugar rise in his blood as he entered the Discipline, his body chewing up the energy as he dropped into quantum sight, Bruce vanishing into a nova of glowing motes, so much like Damian it hurt to look at. Less so, though, than actually having to see his face.

“Go back to your family, Mr. Wayne,” Tim told him, almost gently.

Then he blinked, and was standing outside the main doors of the hospital, tired and heartsore. Bruce could search and search for him all he liked. And he could learn the lesson that Tim had learned all on his own: he did need to know about his kinetics, really.

Tim wiped his face. His hand came away wet, so he scrubbed again. Then he sucked in a breath and released it all into the universe at large.

Jason was right in there, waiting for him.

The future was here. The past was gone.

The comm picked that moment to hit Tim’s pre-set limit of silent mode, and scream.

Tim fumbled for it, all other considerations falling away like dead leaves. The spikes weren’t below the consciousness threshold anymore. This was alpha wave territory. This was consciousness territory.

Tim sprinted for the main entrance, cursing himself. All that screwing around with his former family had cost him time he’d never had. He couldn’t be too late now, not when he was so close!

The blast broke every window in the place. Tim was lucky, oh so lucky, he got past the main entrance doors before the shockwave hit, because if he hadn’t he’d have been a glass studded mess. As it was he had to hit the floor with everyone else in the lobby, dust billowing into a thick, choking fog that almost but not quite prevented people from screaming.

Two things he knew at once. One, that he had to get to Jason now.

And two, that was nowhere near the full strength that Jason could have brought to bear. Either that was a taste of the trigger being pulled – a popgun compared to the real event – or… he didn’t actually know what the other option was. Bruce hadn’t put Jason in here, but there were actively malicious forces at work. Tim, even with his new knowledge, couldn’t be exactly sure how they’d act or what they wanted the end goal to be.

He got to his feet, activated the thermal sight in his domino, and tried not to cough. “Attention please!” he bellowed into the mess. “This is Red… Robin, of the Parapsychic Institute. Please remain calm and evacuate as quickly as possible. Help is on the way!”

Then he doubled over, choking, because the dust was everywhere. He didn’t know if his old fieldwork panic button was any good, but it was designed to withstand quite a lot of punishment so he took a chance. Arkham Hospital was an actual hospital. Everyday people, especially desperately poor ones, came here for medical care when they had no other options. They didn’t deserve to get caught up in this fight.

And it was going to be a fight. He wasn’t going to let anyone hurt Jason.

He disregarded the elevator entirely; he barely trusted it on a good day. Instead, he headed for the stairwell, the thermals helping him avoid crashing into people and his psychometry helping him to navigate. He burst into the ancient stairwell, dust falling in a fine waterfall inside of it.

He didn’t think about his worn out body or Bruce or any other thing. All his burdens fell away, peeled back under the sheer force of his determination. His only thought now was get to Jason. Whatever they’d done, Jason was at the centre and the longer he was in this place the more danger he was in.

The stairs dropped through level after level, a hellish repeating landscape, seemingly infinite. Occasionally Tim would see groups of frightened people and staff going the other way. He avoided and ignored them. They became less frequent the lower he went.

Finally he burst through the doors of the coma ward. The dust had started to clear – or at least, settle – in the stairwell, but down here it was as thick as a sandstorm. It was so bad his thermal sight went on the fritz, his equipment too choked in the ultra-fine dust to function.

His psychometry, however, still worked like a charm, even though every surface in the building seemed to have had a layer stripped off it and disintegrated. And he wouldn’t have needed it anyway. He knew every step he needed to get to Jason’s bed by heart.

Still, even with the rebreather he’d slapped on at some point in his mad dash, it was hard going. He choked, eyes tearing even though they were mostly shielded by the lenses of his domino. The room was nearly pitch-black. Most of the lights had gone in the blast and what equipment wasn’t fritzing in the dust couldn’t throw enough light to really illuminate much. He could navigate, but he couldn’t see .

Suddenly, the air settled, the dust wafting back as if pushed by a steady wave of pure, clean air. Tim yanked out his rebreather, blinking in the sudden reprieve.

There was a figure moving under the static field of Jason’s bed. It was upright. It was tall.

Heart in his throat, Tim stepped up to the static field and yanked it aside. “…Jason?” he said to the figure standing there.

The figure turned around. Tim knew two things instantly.

One, it might be using Jason’s face, but the thing standing there, face all twisted up manically, wasn’t Jason.

Two, he’d made a mistake in getting too close too quickly. His opponent moved like a striking snake, and the scalpel punctured Tim’s chest wall in a white hot spike of sheer pain.

“Joke’s on you, little birdie!” The Joker flashed Jason’s teeth, green eyes dancing with madness. “HA! HA! HA!”

The next thing Tim knew, the lady doctor sunk a needle into his neck, giggling like a rabid hyena.

Then black.

Chapter 19: 00:02

Chapter Text

Tim never did very well with drugs. His immune system was kind of all over the place thanks to his shoddy genetic designer. It wasn’t a well-known fact; he had been at some pains to keep it hidden from Damian especially.

Thus, when he came to feeling himself being wheeled on a rolling gurney, it was less of a surprise to him than it probably would have been to his opponents, had they known. They couldn’t, though. There was a sheet draped over him, concealing his face like he was already a corpse. He couldn’t move his body yet; his mind might be awake, but his body was still under the grip of sedation. His orientation was still hazy and his Talent abilities currently offline, unable to be resurrected from the scattershot ruin of his focus. The only strategy Tim had at his disposal was to lie there and wait.

And listen.

“Move aside, there, move aside! We got a cold one!”

Hearing the Joker’s grating, manic tone in Jason’s voice was a shard of glass through his heart. He’d failed so badly. He hadn’t managed to stop him in time.

“What are you all doing here! Evacuate to your points!” the doctor barked in a credible imitation of authority. The minute they were alone, though, she would burst into giggles, eerily childlike. “Oh baby,” she burst out, like she couldn’t stop herself. “It’s so good to see you again! I told you it would work!”

“Right as always, my lovely squirt flower! Not many people,” he cackled, “have ever managed to prank death itself!”

“Do you like your new body?” she sounded so hopeful. “I picked it out just for you!”

There was a boom as something near to them exploded. “It’s a cracker!” the Joker laughed. It wasn’t anything like Jason’s laugh. “A real funhouse! Just think of all the fun we could have with it. Ha! HA! HA!”

“Oh honey, I know,” the doctor purred. “It’s just what the doctor ordered.”

“Isn’t it just!” Joker giggled.

There was a sucking noise that Tim didn’t want to think about at all. It made him so furious he lost his concentration, the thought of them using Jason’s body like that. He clenched his teeth, biting his tongue to stay silent. There was nothing he could do. Not yet.

“Arrg, I could do without the stupid wishy, washy feely stuff though,” the Joker complained at her. “God there’s all these… feelings around here and they just keep… feeling at me. It’s revolting! It’s not fun at all!” he whined petulantly. “Are you sure he had to be an empath ? Empaths aren’t any fun, squirt flower!”

“Oh puppet, I know it’s a little… different. But the only way it would work is if we found a receptive Talent. You know, someone willing to invite you in,” she gave a little laugh. “Who knows? You might find a better use for it…?”

Tim carefully considered that sentence. Unlike the manic, obsessive devotion he’d heard from her the entire rest of the time, there was a wavelength in that statement Tim didn’t think she realized was there. She wanted the Joker to feel.

“There is NO USE FOR LOVE!” The Joker roared, as unstable as ever. “I mean look at this scrawny thing laid out here. He loved his lost little bird, so much, so much!” The Joker cackled like that was the best joke he’d ever heard. “I actually felt a little bit moved watching them fumble and tip toe around. Like proper lovebirds! All blushes and sweet nothings! But, like all love, it didn’t exactly work out!” Fingers tweaked Tim’s nose through the sheets, which was deeply disturbing. “Silly little bird, shouldn’t keep secrets. I’d have stopped you, but it was so funny! Like a soap opera! Five years trapped in there and nothing to watch! FIVE. YEARS. TRAPPED! AND NOTHING TO WATCH, SQUIRT FLOWER! NOTHING!”

“I’m sorry, I’m sorry!” she squealed. “I’m so sorry, my love! I didn’t think it would take so long! It wasn’t until I had data from the Goosegg that I was able to–”

Her hasty excuses ended in a crack of flesh hitting flesh.

“STOP FEELING AT ME! I can feel it all over and it’s NOT FUNNY! HA! HA! HA!” Joker ended in a guffaw. “Besides, he thought of going to get my old stuff! Why didn’t you think of that? You wanted to bring me back, RIGHT?”

“Of course I did!” she said eagerly, hungrily. “More than anything! You’re here, aren’t you?”

“I suppose I am, squirt flower! You are my good little sweetling, aren’t you? I guess it is kind of funny. Poor little lovelorn bird; he ended up helping us quite a bit! I think we should reward him, don’t you think?”

“You’re…” the woman sounded baffled. “You’re gonna let him live? Is that why we patched him up?”

The Joker giggled madly. “Oh, good one! I’ll have to remember that one, for when you’re trying to be funny and not actually being funny! No, no, no, can’t have anyone knowing that the Joker’s back straight away, can we. That’d spoil all the fun! HA! HA! HA! No, no, no, I think it’ll be good for this body’s former resident to at least know,” Joker’s voice turned into an obscene parody of sweetness. “That this boy truly and deeply loved him. In fact,” the Joker added brightly. “I think he needs to know this little bird loved him so much that he died trying to save him. I think I’ll tell him that myself. I owe it to him, after all, for being such a good housekeeper. When he starts getting all uppity, he might not like his wages, his lot in life, which who does, really? Who likes their lot in life? Except me. Obviously. But ANYWAY, if he starts getting a bit fretful, a bit rattly in his cage, I can always go down there and tell him ‘you know that boy you loved? You know, the one you drove away? That one, the only one who helped you. Well he never stopped loving you. He died loving you. Ain’t that sweet? Ain’t that a mercy? Knowing that someone loves you, ain’t that the best feeling in the world?”

“Oh, yes, honey! It absolutely is!” she beamed on every word. “Like I love you and you love me!”

“Shut up I’m not finished yet! So I goes to him and says, he really loved you, you know. And it’s a pity he’s dead though. You coulda really had something! It’ll be the old one-two, pull the chair away kind of gag. The best kind! It’ll probably make him think on the frailty and meaning of life. It’ll keep him quiet in my damn head, at least! HA! HA! HA!”

f*ck. Tim forced himself not to react, not to make a sound. What would it accomplish? He still couldn’t move.

Jason is still in there, he reminded himself fiercely. He needs help. Concentrate on that.

He still felt an upswell of humiliation and devastation at their words though. They’d planned this so well, and Tim had unwittingly helped them! He was supposed to be a detective, dammit. He was supposed to spot patterns, to not rely on arbitrary presentiments. All this time he’d never questioned his initial theory, that the Joker wandering around in Jason’s mindscape was anything more than a figment of old trauma, a psychic ghost. The three in the junkyard had said it, hadn’t they? People believed the Joker’s madness floated around, looking for its next chance. He should have known better than to dismiss old stories. They came out of real places, real things people remembered and tried to tell others about. All those mad victims coming out of ACE Chemicals would have been remembered by the Linear folk. After all, you could hardly get to a full consciousness transfer withoutpracticing.

But Tim couldn’t wallow in his failure. He was still being wheeled god knows where for god knows what. He was restrained in a way far more profound than being tied down. Whatever ‘patching’ had been done on his stab wound had clearly not been extensive. He might not be able to move his body, but he could feel the wetness of his blood seeping through the absorbent layer and the cracks and Frankenstein seams of his body armour. Also, it was starting to really hurt .

His extremities already felt cold. He was dying, just extremely slowly.

The gurney he was on rattled, forcing Tim to grit his teeth against the impulse to suck in a telling breath. They’d banged open some doors. “Here we are! Just the place!” the Joker cackled. “The STUPID BATS! THEY’RE ALL SUCH GOODY-GOODIES. HA! HA! HA! I think they’ll take some solace in knowing this little birdie will do some good in death, don’t you think? I might even send a note with some flowers. HA! HA! HA!”

The woman giggled.

Tim sank into the Discipline, carefully trying to feel out the room with what little scrap of Talent he could shakily grip. There weren’t a lot of memories in this room. The few little flickers he got were mostly scut workers like him, cleaning. It was full of machines. Machines didn’t make psychic memories. Only people did.

Tim felt ice seize his heart in a cold vice. He knew exactly where he was.

“Oooo, lookie, all the blades ,” she squealed. “This will be ever so much fun!”

“SHUT UP! STOP FEELING AT ME!”

Tim felt the woman jump.

“Just all these feelings , you’re a free flowing flooding font of them! I ought to call you gush flower! God, they’re so revolting, they’re all over me,” the Joker pouted. “Like little ants. It’s not funny at all!”

“Don’t me being happy make you happy, honey?”

“Who cares about your happiness?” The Joker’s tone was genuinely baffled, like she’d just tried to describe sixteen dimensional space to him. “Arg, now you’re sad it’s making it worse.”

“Maybe…maybe it’s him,” she tried. “He’s been up for a while. My knock-out special was only good for a few minutes.”

“Oh?” The Joker said gleefully. “Is that right? Why didn’t you say so before, squirt flower?”

Tim grimaced as the sheet was ripped off. He would have preferred to play possum, but he had to open his eyes to confirm his suspicions about where these two lunatics had carted him to. Sadly, he was a hundred percent right.

“My, my, my, little birdie,” the Joker cackled, leaning over him. It was Jason’s face but so twisted up from the soul behind it, the eyes such a poisonous green, that Tim truly couldn’t see much of Jason in it. “Surprise! I want to thank you, little, ittle, bitty, Timmy, for all you help in getting this brand spanking new body up and running. Really, that kid had his psyche locked down so tight I couldn’t get out. I needed something special to get my warden to open up. Good joke, huh? HA! HA! HA!”

Tim clenched his jaw. He was enough of a profiler to know that the Joker thrived on responses. He wanted to provoke anger and fear and shame. He wanted to make his victims react. And he was a powerful, area-effect telesend. For once Tim was entirely grateful all his gifts were tactile based. The Joker’s madness couldn’t penetrate his shields by proximity. As long as the madman didn’t touch him, Tim should be relatively immune.

It still stung, watching the smug triumph in that grinning face, and knowing the Joker was a hundred percent right. Tim, with his stupid plans revolving around Gooseggs, had helped the Joker take control of Jason’s body, bringing to fruition a plan that had been in the making for at least five years, perhaps longer.

God, Tim wanted to scream, wanted to punch the Joker right out of that body.

The Joker snigg*red, probably enough of an empath with his stolen Talent now to know the helpless rage Tim was feeling. Of course that would make him happier than devotion. “Awww, don’t be such a sulky little sad sack,” he giggled. “It’s a great day! Everyone is getting their just rewards! I get a swanky new set of duds; this one won’t wear out in a hurry,” he ran his fingers obscenely over the scrubs he’d jammed himself into, probably too tight by design. “Gosh, I can have such fun with it and let me tell you, little birdie, since you never got to find out, there’s an express train parked in my south terminal. Oooh, yes,” he purred, teeth gleaming.

Tim felt sick.

The Joker cackled gleefully at whatever he was getting. “Aww, little birdie! Eyes too big for your stomach, eh! Eh, eh, eh! Maybe you’re right, squirt flower. These feeling things are fun. I almost want to keep him! ALMOST! HA! HA! HA!” The Joker was ever the devoted audience to his own wit. “But we can’t have that, can we? Nope, gotta keep my birdie in his cage . In his little saaaad death diorama, where his blood sprayed all over everywhere. We had such fun together, he and I. And now, when he hears about how his little lovebird died loving him, he’ll never want to leave somewhere he hates the most! It’s the best prank of all time! HA! HA! HA!”

God, but for one second, just one second of full body control. Just one moment it would take for Tim to wipe that smug look of that twisted face…

“All ready, honey!” the woman called. She hadn’t been idle while the Joker had taunted him. She’d been a busy little bee, flitting around the automated control panels of the equipment, switching things on, yanking out protocols designed to set off alarms if certain signs showed…

Specifically, vital ones.

It was the organ harvesting suite. A place where the dead were clinically but respectfully recycled, their tissues preserved to give someone still living an extension of what the person that gave it had already lost. Laser guided scalpel and bone saw robot arms were arching menacingly into position like a mechanical spider.

He’d never gone in here before. With psychometry, you just learned to avoid some places. The reality of it was much less harrowing than Tim would have thought; there were so many echoes upon echoes upon echoes that it was all a jumble of white noise to his Talent senses. It wasn’t like a murder scene. It was passionless disassembly, not screams and violence. But what it lacked in psychometric trauma it more than made up for in the psychological kind. Tim felt his heart start to race.

“That’s more like it!” the Joker cackled. “Now we’re cooking! Or not! This little birdie’s way too scrawny!”

God, the Joker was tiresome. Terrorising and horrifying, but up close? He was just plain exhausting to be around. Tim would be damned if he’d give the body stealing lunatic anything to laugh over. He concentrated on his breathing and dropped deep into the Discipline, sloughing off his emotions and letting the information on his environment fill him up, letting the fear and the helplessness dry up and flake away as gently as ash.

“Awwww, you’re no FUN!” The Joker tweaked his nose, and then punched him hard. Tim’s head snapped around, and the Joker yelped and clutched his own jaw. “Aaaarg! What… you…. I get to feel pain? YOU NEVER MENTIONED I’D HAVE TO FEEL PAIN, SQUIRT FLOWER!”

“Oh, darlin’, the body is new. The neural pathways are all… excited,” the doctor soothed him like a child. “It’s gonna take a little time to build some shield up, that’s all.”

“But the little birdie’s about to go all to pieces! I won’t get to watch!” the Joker whined. “Can’t watch someone go to pieces and enjoy it if I’m feeling the pieces. This new body is stupid! We should get a new one!”

“Well… I….” the woman hesitated. “I’ve perfected the technique. Maybe we could find another candidate?”

“Oh, you have! And you’ve got it all written down? That’s my beautiful squirt flower! You think of everything. You’re right, I should go out and see the sights. Have some FUN! HA! HA! HA!” The Joker’s mood hit another upswing. “You’ll take care of the birdie, won’t you? I’m just gonna go see if anybody missed me!”

“Oh sure, honey, I’ll just make sure this is all set up. Then… I can join you?”

“Oh course, squirt flower! I wouldn’t want you to miss out,” the Joker was all sweet charm. “And as for you, little Tim. Timmers. Little Baby Bird. I want to thank you from the bottom of your lovebird’s heart. You did help him wake up, after all. Not actually, of course, because KABOOM! But you left the door open on the way out and that was most gracious,. Thank you, Baby Bird.” For a cruel second, the Joker made the face almost look like Jason’s. “Thank you. And,” his teeth gleamed. “My condolences. What do we do with a little blackbird sitting on a table? We eat the pie . Eat the pie, get it? HA! HA! HA!”

The Joker flounced away, cackling madly.

“Just a minute, honey,” the doctor said as she set the machines in place. “Just lay back, it’ll all be over soon.”

“You’re going to die,” Tim told her.

“Oh, birdie, you’re in no shape for threats.”

“No, not because of me,” Tim’s voice was flat and calm. He was becoming more clearheaded by the second. “The Joker’s going to kill you. I could hear it in his voice. He doesn’t need you anymore. He doesn’t keep people around he doesn’t need.”

“My funny honey loves me,” she gloated. “Has for years and years. How would you know? You barely know what love is.”

But Tim did know. Perhaps briefly, perhaps fleetingly, perhaps only for a fragile instant, but it was a single fixed point here, here and here in the universe, as real and as immortal as all the rest of the fossilized memories of the world. He knew what real love was. “The Joker doesn’t love anyone.”

“He does love me!” she retorted, childlike. “He just didn’t have any way of knowing I loved him back. That’s why Jason was the one. It had to be him. The Joker wanted the booms but I knew if I put him into a receiving empath, he would finally know I loved him back. I was a bit sorry for the kid,” she admitted. “But it had to be him. Him and all that Prime level empathy. It’s like he was made to be the vessel. Now the Joker will be perfect. He’ll finally know how much I love him.” Her smile was wide, blazingly bright and disturbingly genuine. This was literally her best dreams made manifest.

“That vessel is your son,” Tim said incredulously.

Doctor Sheila Haywood gave him a strange look, as if he just announced he could divide the universe by the coefficient of spaghetti. “But Joker’s my honeybear. My one and only.”

Tim struggled against the weight of the sedatives still pressing down on him. “Sheila, you’re a receiving empath too. You’re where Jason got it from. You have to know he doesn’t love you back. You have to. You haven’t got any choice but to know.”

Her face twisted up, caught somewhere between grief and anger. “You’re wrong!” she flat out yelled. “You don’t know him like I do! The things he makes me feel! He does love! He can love! He just… never got shown how, that’s all! And now,” her voice filled with childlike glee. “I can be the one to show him! He always knows he can come to me. I’ll be the one he’ll chase until the end of time!” She laughed delightedly, as if all her dreams were coming true.

Tim gritted his teeth and lifted his head to glare at her. “And when the Joker wants to do the nasty, there’ll be no little niggling thought in your head that it’s your son’s body you’ll be f*cking? How f*cked up that makes you?”

“His body is perfect, though,” she looked sullen and hurt. “I made it. I built the perfect home for my beautiful Joker. I spent years and years looking for a way to save him. I offered him my body. I scanned every single neuron, mapped every single brain impulse. I spent years perfecting the technique. The medical board didn’t like my methods much,” she huffed. “What a bunch of stupid, hidebound idiots. I was giving them immortality! They whined about a couple of little errors, as if any medical breakthrough ever occurred without a few deaths. I could imagine it, you know. The Joker and I, being one forever. A true gestalt consciousness,” she smiled wistfully, then sighed. “But he didn’t want to be a woman. There was only one other person on earth who was a receiving empath and would be genetically predisposed to having similar neural pathways. Well, what else was I supposed to do?” she demanded, faced with Tim’s glare. “The Joker’s my all. He’s my everything. I love him, and now he can finally love me back. His telesend Talent won’t get in the way now! He’ll be so proud of me!” She actually wiped away happy tears.

Intellectually Tim knew it was pointless to try to reason with her. Her blue eyes had a mad green glint in them much like Jason’s eyes had now turned a haunting, poisonous shade. The Joker’s madness had infected her psyche. The Joker’s madness was contagious. And on top of that, Tim was pretty sure the woman in front of him hadn’t started out all that stable to begin with, fully trained medical professional or not. She could have just been a highly functioning mentally ill person. Given how her life had intersected with Willis Todd’s, odds were favourable she’d also been a junk addict at some point, and junk had a way of ripping your brain to bits if you were on it long enough. Sheila was so messed up that she had absolutely no insight into just how messed up she was. And when you are grappling with mental illness? Powerful Talents can make it worse; especially if you had no training.

Still, Tim had to try. He may be a failure as a detective given recent events, but he could psychologically profile the Joker just fine. “He doesn’t love you. He never loved you. He just needed you,” Tim twitched his fingers, testing, pushing. He was well past his limits as it was. “He uses what he needs and then he throws it away when he doesn’t need it anymore. You know this. You’ve seen it!”

“And now, he’ll always need me,” she replied like she was talking to a dim child. “Always. You need a receiving empath for it to work.”

“Sheila, you’ve given him a receiving empath he can use for himself!” Tim told her, exasperated by the complete disconnect to reason he saw in her eyes. “He. Doesn’t. Need. You. The Joker never lets anyone anywhere control any part of him. You think he’s going to let you live when you know all his vulnerabilities? You can’t be that stupid!”

“I’m not stupid! He loves me!” she shouted back angrily. “He loves me! He loves me! He loves me! And the more he’s with me now, the longer he’s exposed to that empathy, my empathy inside that… that brat , the more he’ll know it. He’ll finally understand love! Love saves the world, you know! Love saved yours, why shouldn’t it be the same for the Joker too!”

“Because he’s a murdering psychopath who delights in torment and pain!” Tim snapped. “Unlike your son, who lived to help people, who clawed his way up with bravery and kindness. And you think Jason is somehow worthy of the Joker? The Joker isn’t fit to lick Jason’s boots!”

Sheila flushed. “He’s a great man! He saved me! Willis got me pregnant with the little leech that took over my body and my life and he convinced me to keep it so he could suck me dry of my hard earned money, selling some dopey con about being a happy family. And I bought it! I tried to be a good mother! Stopped the junk and everything! But then everyone started seeing the withdrawal symptoms and nobody minded their own damn business! I was once the top neurosurgeon on the eastern seaboard! The next thing I knew, no one would hire me! I had to take work in back alley clinics wherever they would take me! Even Arkham! It was humiliating!” Her fists clenched at her sides. “And then Willis left when the money dried up! It was all his fault, the little brat! But the Joker, oh, my honey,” he face softened from its enraged rant. “He saved me. He got me out. He helped me in my work. All those timid so-called Talent specialists!” she spat derisively. “So afraid of pushing boundaries, of gaining new ground, new breakthroughs. What a bunch of weak-willed cowards! The Joker isn’t afraid! He isn’t scared of anything!”

“Sheila,” Tim ground out. “He doesn’t love you. He doesn’t love you now, even with his new fangled empathy pouring all your love into him. Surely that’s proof your experiment was a failure.”

“It’s not a failure!” she snapped irritably, hands on her hips. “He just needs time!”

“Yeah, but only one of you has that!”

“My honey wouldn’t hurt me!”

“Right, because he loves you,” Tim sneered. “You can tell by the way he treats you like sh*t unless he wants something from you. You’re just a body to him, Sheila. A tissue paper minion. Forgettable and disposable.”

“Shut up!”

“The second he knows where your research is, that’s it. Boom, boom, bye-bye Sheila. Or should I call you whatshername, because that’s pretty much all he’ll remember.”

“Shut up!”

“You know I spent months visiting Jason in his mindscape,” Tim taunted her. “You know how many times the Joker mentioned you when I was there? How many times he waxed lyrical about his sweet little squirt flower? Not. Once. If I hadn’t seen what happened in Ethiopia, you wouldn’t have even existed. You’re nothing to him except a means to an end.”

“Sh–!“

“And you damn well know it!”

“Shut up, shut up , SHUT UP!” she screamed. “You don’t know what you’re talking about! HE LOVES ME! ME! ME! ME!”

“Jason loved you,” Tim said coldly. “God knows why.”

Sheila’s face twisted up with rage and grief. She lunged for him, angrily slamming her fists down on his chest like a child having a tantrum, shrieking. The armour he was wearing took the brunt of her furious but undirected rage, although one of her blows landed squarely on his poorly patched, soaked stab wound. The world whited out from the pain of it, the spike of agony going clear through to his spine.

When the world came back into focus, Tim could hear screaming. He thought for a second it might be him, goodness knows he hurt enough for it. But no, this was a lot of voices. And it was punctuated by a lot of explosions.

The Joker was doing what he did best – chaos and mayhem.

Weirdly, the sounds of destruction and terror seemed to bring Sheila back to stable, or whatever stable was for her. “Ooooh, the fun has started without me!” she squealed, panting, eyes gleaming. Then her lips thinned. “You know what? I haven’t got time for someone like you. A boring little robot who never feels anything,” she sneered. “God, that’s brat’s consciousness was a complete waste anyway if that got him all hot and heavy. He should be glad he was chosen for greater things than you! But you were mean to me, so you know what? I’m not gonna knock you out. You can stay awake for this. And while your limbs come off and your organs come out one by one, while you scream and beg for it to stop, I want you to remember this ,” she leaned close viciously. “You were never going to save him. Never, ever, ever, ever. Know why? I put the trigger in him, not the Joker. And I’ll never take them off. So, if he ever does try to take back his body, BOOM! And I made sure it’ll be a big boom. You are nothing but a failure , Tim Drake! Oh yes, I know who you are. I might send Bruce Wayne your heart in a jar, just to remind him who he f*cked with when he had my licence revoked! But that’s just for funsies. He might be grateful; after all, what do all the pundits whisper where they think you can’t hear? The Dynamo, the Demolitions, The Dynasty,” she smirked nastily. “Remind me what your nickname was?”

Tim gritted his teeth, reflecting that she’d had at least a little psychological training.

“Oh yeah, the Disappointment. Wasn’t that what everyone called you behind your back? The only Wayne son not a Prime? So hey! Here’s your chance to finally do some good. Someone might actually get some use out of that heart in there,” she ironically tapped his chest. “After all, it’s in pristine condition. Never been used! Toodles, Disappointment! Have fun! For a little while, at least.”

She left, laughing madly.

But she’d left him alone and awake, which was what Tim had wanted.

Unfortunately, while he was now in a position to plan, he didn’t actually have any plan to enact.

The robot arms dropped almost delicately into position, jigging and correcting their position but a hairsbreadth this way and that. They looked curious, but Tim knew there was no AI at work here, no humanity at all. This was pure, cold programming, all the usual failsafes switched off. They wouldn’t register him as alive. They couldn’t comprehend ethics or empathy.

Worse still, between the seeping wound in his torso and the damn sedative still in his veins, he had no ability to move, no energy to push through it. He’d come in at the last of his reserves as it was. Whatever false time he’d bought with caffeine and sugar was long burned out. He might as well have been an everyday person off the streets, a null.

He was helpless.

The screaming was getting fainter and fainter. Either the Joker was going deeper into the hospital or he was leaving it. Either way there would be bodies in his wake.

Tim was recalled from his grim prediction when the lights – the lasers – at the end of the arms all lit up at once. He couldn’t stifle his terrified scream if he tried as they swooped over him left and right. His heart felt like it was being rent out of his chest, it was pounding so hard.

But it was a false hope before the real terror, he realized, wet with sweat. It was a full body scan. He had a minute, maybe, while they decided the best and most efficient way to dismember him and then, that was it.

And Jason would be trapped with that psychotic clown forever.

Tim clenched his teeth. He could move his arms a little. The sedative was wearing off. For once he could celebrate with perfect joy his weird ass metabolism that meant his drug reactions were all over the place – yet another happy result of being designed by the cheapest genetic designer his parents could find. It wasn’t wearing off fast enough, though, not soon enough to get him off this table and away from the horror looming over him. He could maybe move his right arm; his left shifted the muscles in his chest wall where the stab wound was. Too much agony and he’d pass out, and that would be that.

Think, Tim , he told himself fiercely. Power means nothing. You always, always, believed that ingenuity was better than Talent.

The machines’ deceptively gentle humming was amazingly distracting. He tried to regroup his scattered thoughts, shove the pain of his wound and his soul twisting worry for Jason deep inside of him. He wouldn’t be able to do anything if he didn’t survive the next few minutes.

Okay, they were machines. They were stupid machines. No AI, no adaptation abilities, these were production line drones, made for a morbid but necessary act no one wanted to think about much. One little disruption, one little obstacle they didn’t understand, and they’d stop and wait for new instructions.

Okay, so he needed a wrench to throw. If he’d had the juice, he’d just yank out a motherboard, even just a chip – it wouldn’t take much. Tim couldn’t even access quantum sight. Maybe the armour would confuse them; it was basically blast proof. Tim was not of the opinion holding his breath to see if taking too long to slice through his armour would make them pause was a winning strategy.

Green light, green light, red light, green light… f*ck, the scan was nearly complete. On top of that, that little red light meant at least one of his organs had been badly compromised. It couldn’t be his lungs and probably wouldn’t be his heart. He was in shock, but he probably wouldn’t be conscious if hit somewhere that vital. It wasn’t much of a comfort, though. Something inside him was badly lacerated enough to reject for organ harvesting, which meant there was every chance he was bleeding out, just slowly.

Think, think, think! Tim screamed at himself. It’s either come up with something or hope for the best with his armour… wait! The comm. He could still vaguely feel it his chest holster past the numbness of the sedative. It was a field comm – they were famously robust. Dick used to joke that they could take a hit from a bullet or a blaster…

Tim hoped he wasn’t exaggerating

He could kind of move his fingers. He spidered his hand up the slick side of his armour, feeling like he was dragging the dead weight of his arm along. He fought the paralysis tooth and nail, teeth clenched. He jerked his left shoulder as much as he could. The pain would help. The pain would give him adrenaline.

The arms were bending in. They were all green, curled inwards, mindless intent.

Tim forced his arm to move.

He reached the holster.

The plasma cutter charged up with a whine.

Tim screamed.

There was light.

Then pain.

Chapter 20: 00:01

Chapter Text

Drag. Stop. Breathe. Stretch. Grip. Drag.

Repeat.

Tim hauled himself along, using the wall as a crutch, leaving bloody streaks along it as he went. He was going roughly the pace of an arthritic snail. Any faster and he’d strain his already fragile wound site, lose more blood, pass out and fall over, or he'd fall over, curl up from the agony of straining the wound site, lose more blood and pass out. Even being in the middle of a hospital wouldn’t guarantee his survival now.

It was chaos. There were bodies everywhere. The moving ones were panicked and upset enough that an empath in the next state could likely pick up on it. The unmoving ones, if they were lucky, were still recognisable as people.

The Joker had picked up the method of Jason’s microkinesis damn fast.

It was such a bloody ruin, so much chaos everywhere as people simultaneously tried to give aid and tried to get people evacuated from the crippled and cracked building that the small, staggering form of Tim didn’t so much as blip on anyone’s radar.

It was fine. They didn’t need to help him. Tim had worked in the hospital for months. He knew exactly where to go. Not to the ER, not to the pharmacy, but to the doctors’ lounge, now empty.

The thing about Arkham was that, no matter the good intentions, they always seem to attract certain kinds of people. It took him a depressingly short time to find a cupboard with stolen supplies in it — drugs, high end nano-patches, smaller but expensive hospital equipment. They hadn’t bothered to hide it because who would be surprised at anyone working at Arkham running a small but lucrative cottage industry of stolen medical supplies? Certainly not Tim, who had let them be just like any good Linear denizen, but had certainly noticed.

He crumpled to the floor, dragging one of the boxes down with him. Bits and bobs scattered everywhere, and he blearily poked through the wreckage until he found a pre-dose local anesthetic and jabbed it straight in the wound site. Then he ripped open a nano-patch and jabbed it straight in the wound, the little single purpose nanobots doing the good work of sealing and maintaining the structure of whatever was damaged in there. It wasn’t a fix, but it did give him time.

Then he slumped back against the cupboard frame. He had to stop. He had to. His body wouldn’t let him go another inch. The very last of his reserves — more than he rightly should have had in the first place — had burned out getting the comm out of his pocket and into the path of the first laser arm.

Dick had been right. They could block a blaster. They could block it so well they could redirect a cutting laser right back at itself. Having one of their brethren’s head explode was more than enough to shut the rest down. Tim was spotted in tiny burns from the sparks that had flown up, but he was in one piece.

He was alive, which was good. But he literally had nothing else, no fuel to get him upright and get him outright. He couldn’t even claim to have fumes. All he could do was sit here, dull and limp, and wait for some doctor on their break to finally find him, hopefully before hypovolemia kicked in. Tim stared at his shaky hands, feeling useless. Jason was trapped inside his own brain while the Joker took his body for a joy ride. His mother had been the one to sell him out. Tim had helped them both, unwittingly and stupidly. Hindsight was the only cognition he could claim and boy did the sting of that irony bite down now.

He had to fix this. But how? Even if he could even stand at this point, how the hell was he supposed to undo what Sheila Haywood had done? He wasn’t a powerful enough telepath to give Jason back control of his body, not if the Joker was fighting him. He might be able to reach Jason telepathically if he could get skin-to-skin contact; after all, his touch telepathy was involuntary. But then what? Sheila might be nuts, but Tim didn’t think she was lying. The triggers were all still there, waiting to blow if Jason’s consciousness took control. Tim cursed the psycho clown in his head; he was as sane and as sober as the next person if it gave him the opportunity to be cruel.

Tim felt frustrated, angry tears leak down his face, too tired for self-control. What could he do? He’d unlocked whole new kinetic methods and run halfway across the world and back and after all that he still couldn’t escape the fact that he was just a winged donkey. Just a stupid, lost kid. He suddenly wished with all his heart that he hadn’t been so quick to cut ties with his family. What they thought of him shouldn’t matter. They had the power to change this situation. They were Primes. They were Pegasus.

But as his heart contracted at its lowest ebb, instead of the perfectly preserved memories of all his failures parading past as they always did when he gave in to self pity, a flash of Jason’s face, alight with happiness as he listed all the things he wanted in the waking world, caused an unexpected tremor in Tim’s sense of worthlessness. Jason hadn’t looked at him like something defective, something ill-formed, something incomplete. Jason had looked at him like he was absolutely and wholly himself, perfection because of his flaws.

That memory was as real and as clear as anything else Tim knew.

He wasn’t giving up.

He was going to save Jason, no matter what it took.

Still, as he slumped back again, he was forced to ruefully acknowledge that determination was all well and good, but it wouldn’t put blood back in his body, or energy back in his brain. He was past the point of endurance. And if he could even move right now, what was the plan? How the hell could he ever separate Jason from the Joker?

Come on, Drake, he told himself. You may be an engineer, but you know a hell of a lot about neuroscience. Hell, Tim knew a hell of a lot about Talent in general. He’d studied it, all its various manifestations, all its genetic expressions and developmental quirks. Mostly, he acknowledged, so he could see if there was a way to somehow improve his own. He busted the problem down to its component parts to see if there was any flaw he could exploit.

Okay, so… the Joker was at the wheel of Jason’s body, but he likely wasn’t finding it easy to drive. The neural pathways were extremely Jason-specific, organized by Jason’s own experiences and memories. The Joker was a square peg jammed badly into a round hole. This didn’t make a tonne of difference; the Joker could still make the body respond to his consciousness and the lunatic was so off his rocker that he likely was ignoring any of the motor neuron effects or slowness of thought, if he was capable of that level of introspection at all. Tim couldn’t imagine spending years as a cut off little fragment of consciousness, parasited into a foreign neurological net, had done wonders for his cognitive abilities in general. The problem with the Joker was that wouldn’t slow him down like it did other people.

Okay, so the Joker was still crazy, but he’d probably lost a whole chunk of cunning and smarts in his bid for body snatching. His consciousness was likely not very powerful — which would explain why he struggled so much with Jason’s Talents. He probably couldn’t even create an instinctive or intuitive shield. He had the acceleration power of a turbine and the braking power of a matchstick.

It was Jason’s body. Jason’s body had formed around Jason’s needs and training. Jason was the only consciousness on the planet that could actually use the full potential of his Talent, because his neural net was distinct to him.

All this meant was, if Jason could take command over his body back, the Joker would be relatively easy to cast aside. Jason had the home ground advantage, and the Joker wasn’t exactly playing with all his resources at his disposal.

Okay, so, stopping the Joker was doable, under the right circ*mstances. Tim wasn’t exactly sure, but he felt like Jason had no idea the Joker was taking his body for a joyride. No matter how hopeless or angry he was, Tim just couldn’t buy the thought that the Jason he knew would let that psycho go off and perpetrate murders with his Talents. Joker must be keeping him trapped somehow. God knows the only thing the Joker always did well was mind f*ck people. But if the Joker was the ugly shell around that precious consciousness, then Jason wasn’t in any position to actively keep Tim out of his head anymore. All he had to do was get his hands on Jason — a brief touch would be enough. Then he could slip into Jason’s mindscape and convince him he had to fight.

Even though a spark of energy manifested itself in the light of having a plan, Tim felt a dull throb of hopelessness try to ebb up past his deconstruction of the problem. Sheila or the Joker, who knew or cared which, had an iron clad contingency to deal with the possibility that Jason might try to wake up and take the reins. He supposed for the Joker it was pretty much the same outcome either way. Either he got to gleefully murder a massive swathe of people or Jason would do it for him, no doubt having to listen to the Joker’s laughter in his brain as he did so. The Joker thrived on cruelty, and he didn’t much care what form it took.

Tim felt his helplessness rise. What could he do? Did he convince Jason to fight, knowing the consequences? Did he find some other way to incapacitate the Joker? It wasn’t like he could send the Joker into a coma. Even had Tim had that kind of telepathic power, the Joker was awake now. He wasn’t likely to go quietly.

Did he… did he go back to the Waynes, a supplicant, and beg for their help? They’d likely do it, but… Bruce wouldn’t gamble with the threat of the Joker’s continued existence, even if it meant he got his son back, would he? Tim hated to admit it, but Bruce was far more likely to send both Jason and the Joker into a permanent coma, faced with his options. Tim was willing to allow that it would likely haunt Bruce for all the rest of his days, but he’d still do it. Bruce was a pragmatist. It was never personal for him. He’d never let it be personal.

Tim was, he felt, fundamentally a very selfish person. He would make it personal. He wasn’t going to let Jason die. He also wasn’t going to let him live the way the Joker would force him to live; in torment, powerless and alone.

So, he had to… somehow get up from here, wounded and exhausted as he was, find some reserve inside, the location of which was a mystery, and go out and find the Joker in Jason’s body and somehow, he didn’t know how, find a way out of this seemingly unsolvable paradox of either the Joker being the steering consciousness and therefore a gleeful force of pure destruction or Jason at the helm, where the destruction wouldn’t be gleeful but would stretch to the horizon.

Tim huffed a bitter laugh at himself. “Is that all, Drake? How about I solve world hunger and build a spaceship out of twine while I’m at it?” He hated every part of this. He hated that there was no solution. He was supposed to be the resourceful one. And here he was, slumped on a hospital floor without even enough energy to rise again.

At least I know I’m not going to die here on a hospital floor, he thought to himself. He’d patched himself as well as he was able, and if he was bleeding inside it wasn’t showing in anything more than the shocky tremors of his hands and the numbness of his fingers. His wound didn’t even hurt that bad. Someone would stumble in here eventually. There was too much chaos out there for anyone to ask questions about where he’d come from and what had happened. Mass evacuating the hospital — and really, what else could they do at this point — would be taking up the attention of anyone who would even remotely care.

No, his fate was grander, according to Damian, he thought with bitter irony. So horrible and final that even Bruce had been moved to seek him out, to actually beg on his knees for Tim to return.

Then he blinked.

The junkyard. Explosions. Dust.

The thought he had then was so momentous that it actually propelled him to a ramrod straight sitting position. He’d been so caught up in hearing about the stupid pre-cog he hadn’t once stopped and considered the fundamental bias of all pre-cogs; nobody saw everything .

Tim knew dust. He moved dust.

He moved things a lot smaller than dust.

How big, exactly, was a consciousness?

Tim’s heart hammered against his chest, hurting and overworked, but the elation hit him in a wave. There was an answer. And Tim was literally the only Talent around that could even consider pulling it off.

He grimaced as his body protested even his slight change in elevation. Right, he had to deal with that, too. But he had no time for a twelve-hour nap. The Joker was primed to do so much damage. He had done more than enough already.

“Okay, Tim, resources. What have we got?” He shakily swept up auto injectors and blister packs from the floor. The really good thing about effectively running the show at the Institute for so long was that Tim had a fairly broad, encyclopedic understanding of Talent culture and Talent lore. He’d had to deal with a lot of odd situations brought about by teen Talents being stupid when they went into Gotham to party. Mostly things like disorderly ordinances and bail amounts, but also things like how various illegal substances interact with the lightning storm in a jar that was a Talent’s still developing brain.

And right at his feet was a pharmacy of all the street drugs that Talent kids would run afoul of.

Okay. Morphine was out, he couldn’t afford to get sleepy. Epinephrine was his friend here. He grabbed some more local anesthetics and more nano-patches. Tim was aware his wound went deep into the viscera. If he was going to move as fast as he suspected he’d have to, the patch he had now couldn’t possibly maintain a stable state. He’d have to patch and re-patch as he went. Blood thickener; it wasn’t anywhere near as effective as an actual transfusion but it would give him enough blood pressure to move without passing out. Then he was down to the real money makers; stimulants and steroids, stuff that could make a Talent brain light up like a plasma engine and burn it out just as quickly.

But for a short while, temporarily, it would be a massive power up to his system. Enough to propel his body through a steel wall. Enough for one last teleport. Hopefully all he’d need is the one.

Tim was well aware that this was a stupid plan. It had almost zero chance of working and even if it did he might be dying of a heart attack afterwards.

Well, he’d tried being smart for sixteen years. He’d tried being rational, being useful, being controlled and mature. f*ck that noise, he was owed some stupid. He was owed the chance, just once, to be an impulsive teenage moron. Especially for the sake of love. He grimly shot himself up, one injector after another, breathing hard and sweating. They were fast acting; he felt his heart rate skyrocket to an almost painful degree, extremities shaking and sweating like mad. But he was awake and alive, sensing each molecule he breathed, every mote of everything around him.

It was an untenable state long term. But it would last for long enough.

He got to his feet, hitting himself with another nano-patch as the wound wrenched and howled its protests. No painkillers; he couldn’t afford to blunt a single edge.

Goodness knows what his face looked like but when a random medic or a doctor stumbled in, clawing at their comm, covered in dust and contusions, she froze at the sight of him, at the look in his eye. “What are…” Her baffled eyes wandered downwards and widened at the sight of a) bloodstains and b) a scattered collection of used paraphernalia. “What are you doing?” she gasped.

He shook himself. No time for any pleasantries. He managed a single “I’m sorry,” before darting past her, wrenching the comm from her hands as he went by. He’d replace it, he promised himself, but for now he needed it. She yelled for security, but her hopes for that were dim as a burnt out bulb. Who was available to help her in the chaos? The hospital was a warzone, literally. The Joker had gleefully tested Jason’s kinetics on as much as he possibly could on the way out and that meant a lot of blood, pain and bodies. Those that weren’t desperately trying to triage those still alive were trying to organize the evacuation of the building itself, the walls crazed with cracks. No one, not even the imperturbable Linear folk, could pretend that this building was anywhere near safe to be in.

Darting like a bird between patients being treated and more still being rolled or lifted out of any door, window or hole that would fit, Tim spared a moment’s kindly thought for his fellow scut workers — the janitors and orderlies and food service folks — all of whom were working diligently and with immense selflessness to help patients get to safety. He’d spent months alongside them, not interacting very much but nevertheless with a sense of fellow feeling for those at the bottom of the pecking order and down in the grime and grit. To see them here, pitching in with as much dedication and care as any professional, was a momentary boost to his morale.

But he had a mission and had to leave them to it. Blitzing out the door at a dead run, he ignored the police copters and cruisers coming in at mad speeds from across the bridge. They would be here for disaster relief efforts; they would not be concerned with a BOLO on a suspected rogue Talent. Hell, Tim was so plastered in dust and grime right now he doubted whether the most sensitive flash scan would recognize him.

He dialled a number on memory. “Pru? It’s me,” he said when the line went through.

“Red?” she grumbled. She sounded half asleep. “What the f*ck? Are you calling in your marker already? Shut up, you dingleberries!” she yelled at the background noise. “I’m talkin’!”

“I guess I am,” Tim pushed past incoming people who were rushing to the hospital to help. “I need you and Z and Owens to get everyone you can clear of the junkyard. Everyone, Pru.”

Silence. Then, “You want us to f*cking what now?!”

“Pru, listen to me!” Tim dodged and wove and… yes, there we go. There were copters diverting to the train station. More walking wounded, more frightened people were coming from that direction. “You need to get everyone out of there now!”

“Why?!”

“Because I’m about to drop a bomb into the old ACE Chemicals plant and I don’t know if the containment field is strong enough to actually contain it! If it goes, there’ll be nothing but rubble for miles around. No one will survive it. You need to get them out, just to be safe!”

“You’re dropping a bomb f*cking where? What bomb? Hey!”

There was a scratchy, thudding noise and then Z came on the line. His tone was as brisk as his one-word statement. “Report.”

“Ra’s was right,” Tim was full on running now. Even as he neared the station he could see the twisted wreckage of the platform buildings. The rails, though, were still intact. Had the Joker taken a train somewhere? “The Joker was still alive. He found a way to download his consciousness into a new body. A Talent. A Prime. He’s got enough kinetic juice to level this city. I’m pretty sure I can turn it against him though, if I can reach him. Maybe. There are other factors at play. But if I do, he will blow, literally. Big damn boom. The containment field around ACE is the only thing I can think of that might contain it.”

“Well… f*ck," Z said eventually.

“Tell me about it,” Tim replied grimly. “Hey! Hey!” He grabbed one shellshocked looking guy running past. “Did you see which way he went?”

It said something that there was absolutely no question of who the ‘he’ was. “He was f*cking crazy, man! He got on the f*cking train and made them book it out of the station!”

“Which way?” Tim barked. “South or East?”

“East, man,” the guy quavered and then appeared to notice Tim was wearing an Institute field uniform. “Towards the Linears! Hey, why didn’t you people see this comin’? Ain’t that what you’re supposed to do?”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Tim replied, the words automatic after so much repetition. Then he left, looking around frantically for any sort of trans— ah! He pounded his way up to an automated skimmer bike rental yard. “Why the hell would he be headed to the Linears?”

The question was mostly to himself, but Z and the rest of them were still on the line. “Makes sense,” Owens chimed in while Z and Pru squabbled over evacuation procedures. “That psycho hated the Linear folks. They kept him out. Ruined his fun. ‘Sides, if all he’s looking for is a body count, that’d be the place I’d pick. High population density, low law enforcement. And the Talents don’t see so well in there. He’s crazy, not stupid. He don’t want the Bats on his tail. He could probably hide down there. Timeline?” he asked grimly.

“No idea.” Tim keyed in his field agent override code, which gave Institute personnel access to certain perks while on police business. Wonder of wonders, Babs hadn’t yanked it from the system. He tapped his foot impatiently, waiting for the skimmer bike to be cycled down by the robot arms. “Assume it’s minutes.”

“f*ck me,” Owens cursed resignedly, and hung up.

Tim all but ripped the skimmer bike off the charge point, booted her up and clambered aboard. He had to pause and hit his wound with another nano-patch spray. The twisting movement of alighting had ripped it open again. He could feel the agony of it, even marinated in drugs and adrenaline.

Gritting his teeth, he took off, blitzing a straight line through the sky and ignoring the skyway grid, to the general chaos and confusion of other pilots in his way. He had no time for niceties.

It took him ten minutes and another nano-patch to get him to the Linears. He’d mostly followed the line of the train track and it wasn’t that hard to spot where the Joker had gotten off. The train was smoking in the station, one side of a car blown to nothing, leaving a gaping hole and plenty more wounded to contend with. He ditched the skimmer at the station; there was no way to fly that thing in the narrowness of the Linears under the ground. Also, the only way he’d find the Joker is to cold read his psychic tracks. Owens was right; he was crazy, not stupid. If he was trying to go to ground in the Bowery or the Alley, he couldn’t afford to leave a trail of bodies wherever he went. There had been a mass exodus from the station and its surrounds because if the Linear folk knew one thing, it was what trouble felt like when it came. After the ruin of the train, the Joker hadn’t left any physical sign of where he was going.

As for psychic signs…

Tim concentrated, then grimaced. He didn’t know if it was a product of a consciousness housed in an ill fitting brain or if it was just the Joker, as he was. The flashes of memory he got were twisted and distorted, cracked and crazed impressions of laughter and intent. It cut a groove layers deep through other memories stored in the landscape around him, making the trail a ripple of psychic white noise, easy to follow but dreadful to feel.

Tim ghosted into the Linears, a place he’d thought he’d known pretty well. This part of it was now a ghost town instead of an overcrowded tangle of too many people in not enough space. The usual denizens were either hiding or had fled for whatever safety they could find deeper through the levels. The Linear folk had long memories where the Joker was concerned. Even as he went deeper in, panting and sweaty and jazzed up like a junk addict, there was a furtive, strained air. Nothing moved faster than rumours in the Linears, not even the speed of light.

The grating feel of the trail of memories the Joker left behind were bad enough, but Tim was also getting a sinking feeling he knew where the Joker was heading. The Cathedral.

It wasn’t really a cathedral. Such actual faith churches that survived, grim and stubborn, amongst the crime and despair were tiny things, little altars tucked away in forgettable corners. Ministry was a one-on-one affair; priests, priestesses, shamans, rabbis, imams, various and sundry proclaimers were wanderers and doorknockers, they were ration traders and walking confessors. Called folk in the Linears were working folk, going where social services could not or would not.

But that wasn’t to say they didn’t have a bent towards mass gatherings. For people starving and struggling, salvation was the headiest of drugs, and there were more than enough would-be saviors willing to capitalize on that desperate addiction. There weren’t many places a lot of people could mass together down here, both because of living space physics and objections by riot police. A stampede or a frenzy down here in the narrows was a deadly event. But there was a gap or two where walls had been bashed out, legally and illegally, to make space for markets and things, but mostly they’d made spaces for soap boxes. There wasn’t a day of the week some revival or gathering wasn’t happening in these gaps, these Cathedrals. The savviest denizen usually understood that the ‘preacher’ was mostly just out to get your money, and if not that then your girls and your children for the traffickers. Still, many went; for ethnic or social reasons. Still more for that heady possibility of being saved; from what and to what they could sometimes barely articulate.

The Joker liked audiences. He also, at this juncture, needed capital. Jason was a Prime with a Prime’s metabolism and there were people in the Alley so disassociated from fear that even the thought of the Joker wouldn’t scare them into hiding him for free. Extracting cash and valuables door-to-door was too time consuming and would make the Joker too easy to track, but skimming funds from a crowd that probably already had funds available to give to whatever speaker promised them glory in exchange was both quick and relatively easy.

His deduction proved true in the worst way. A flood of people, a proper crush, came at him in a screaming, mindless wave as he got close to the nearest Cathedral on the level he tracked. There was no stopping it. There was no helping the people who fell and were lost under running, relentless feet or were crushed against the unforgiving steel and concrete of the narrow Linear corridors. All he could do was go to the walls, jump up, brace by the tip of his toe on the frame of a holo display and grip the top edge by his fingernails, hold on and pray. There would be no surviving it if he fell, or if someone knocked him off. The worst thing was there was barely any actual screaming, at least not from those mindlessly tearing past. This was sheer, terrified intent to get as far away from whatever was behind them as possible.

Tim held and held and held, wound open and bleeding again, dizzy and too hot, until the last of them staggered past, mostly walking wounded that had miraculously survived earlier falls and were now limping grimly after the rest. There were plenty of bodies in the wake of it, both moving feebly and not. Tim let go and dropped to the floor. He hit himself with another nano-patch, resealing the wound once more. He felt sick looking at all these people. He couldn’t even stop to help, not if he wanted to stop the Joker. All he could do was activate his old panic beacon and leave it there, to bring aid straight in. He had no doubt the Linears were about to see more medics and health workers in a day than most of them had likely seen in years, thanks to this.

Ignoring the fallen and his own screaming conscience, he pressed on. The Cathedral wasn’t far. The Joker’s psychic trail was thick and recent.

That was when he found her.

He thought she might be another victim of the stampede of people who’d escaped, at first. The victims of that had thinned the closer to the Cathedral he got, probably because the way in to the Cathedral was blocked with collapsed wreckage. The Joker had sealed himself in with whomever hadn’t had the sense or the means to run away fast. He could hear the lunatic now, his cackles echoing through the wide space, almost but not quite drowning out the agitated and frightened murmur of whoever was trapped in there with him. It was probably hundreds, and possibly up to a thousand. The revivals were big gatherings, usually filling the space end to end in a massive crush. That’s why the police hated the Cathedrals so much. It wasn’t like frenzies and stampedes hadn’t happened before.

But even as he walked by, the shoes flashed out at him. Nobody, but nobody, in the Linears was going to wear heels like that.

Sheila was on her back, sprawled out like a fallen leaf, stomach and gut a bloody ruin. She looked like she’d been hit point blank with a shotgun. Tim really thought she was dead, but she moved and mewled weakly when he came closer. Of course, of all the Joker’s many tastes for cruelties, a slow, painful death was the most delicious to him.

Tim knelt grimly by her side. “You told him where you kept all your research, didn’t you?” he said softly.

Tears flooded down her cheeks. When she sobbed, bloody foamy steams dribbled down her chin. “He was supposed to love me,” she moaned. “I loved him so much! I d-d-don’t understand,” she wailed. “H-h-he’s an empath now! He can f-f-feel!”

Her childlike grief was unexpectedly irksome. “The problem wasn’t the f*cking Talent, Sheila,” Tim barked at her irritably. “The problem was the Joker. Any six-year-old could have told you that!”

She cried harder. Her eyes were less green now, and more blue. Jason’s blue.

Tim took a breath. Sheila cut too pitiful a figure to really get mad at. She was just another victim of the Joker and his infectious madness, just another damned soul chewed up by Gotham’s relentless, uncaring maw. Like Jason. Like Tim, too.

Besides, she was dying. Even if there’d been a full medical team right here right now, there was no saving her. The damage was just too severe. What the hell punishment could be dealt out that was worse? “I’m going to stop him,” Tim told her grimly. “I’m going to save Jason. This is your last chance, Sheila. Is there anything I need to know? Please,” he pleaded. “Jason is your son. He loved you. He never did anything to hurt you; not like the Joker did. Please help me make this right.”

“Sleep my little babby doll, my funny little honey…” Sheila crooned softly, blood leaving stripes against her fair skin. “Mama’ll give you everything…”

Tim sighed. “Sheila?”

“A diamond ring, a chance to sing…” Her voice was getting fainter. “He’s all lost, my funny honey. A sapling planted amongst old roots… t-t-takes time to groooooow up,” she sobbed again. “Takes time to fiiiit in. You’ll p-p-protect him, won’t you birdie bird?”

Tim wasn’t sure if she even knew who she was talking about. “Always have,” Tim promised. “Always will.”

“Hmmmmmm,” a wet giggle bubbled to the surface. “G-give h-h-him a guh-guh,” she choked. “Gift. From… me.”

Her hand shot out and grabbed his head with shocking, clawed strength. Too startled to countermove, Tim was dragged in to a fierce, ugly, bloody kiss. He could taste the foamy, coppery death on her. He could feel…

Holy f*ck, he suddenly felt as alive and healthy as if he’d had a weeks’ sleep, twenty meals and fifty coffees. Energy surged through his system, almost electric, almost personal. He pulled back enough to disconnect from the socket, though Sheila’s hand was still in his hair.

“He… deserved… better… than… … me…”

Her hand slipped away, her eyes already clouded and dim.

Tim reeled back, wiping his blood-smeared mouth with the back of one hand. His Talent, and there was no other word for this, fizzed inside of him. All systems were online, nearly to the point of overload. He could feel every air molecule around him, reams of information easily and neatly at his fingertips.

Was that Sheila’s ultimate Talent? Was she some kind of augmenter? A signal boost to other Talents? Whatever it was, it worked. The chemical boost Tim had given himself would have netted him one good jump, maybe, and not a long distance one. It was synthetic energy, artificial and quick to evaporate. This was pure energy. He suddenly felt powerful enough to teleport to Mars and back.

There were screams beyond the rubble wall. He didn’t have to go that far. Nodding sadly at Sheila’s body, he closed his eyes. Quantum sight had never been so clear. He could see everything. The mass of people cringing as far away from the centre as possible. The twisted and inert clumps of the victims the Joker had already taken. And there in the centre, the Joker. It was never clearer than in quantum sight just how ill-fitting the Joker’s twisted mind was with his stolen body. They were absolutely two distinct things in quantum sight, easily identifiable. Easily separated.

Tim jumped.

He landed in the open space, between a mass of terrified people crushed back against walls and blocked exits. A hail of armbands and jewellery were scattered thickly over the ground, being gathered up by crying children. The children all shrieked when they saw him appear, but it wasn’t like he was trying for stealth.

The Joker took one look at him and bust a gut laughing. “Well, well, well! You’re a tougher little lovebird than I thought! That useless woman! I’m not sorry I killed her now. Well, I was never sorry, really, but now I’m even less sorry than I was! Hey! Did you hear the one about the sweet little bird tweeting on the windowsill in the mornings, singing its little heart out? IT GOT KILLED DEAD!”

The Joker whipped out a blaster he’d acquired from goodness knows where. Destructive objects just seemed to find him. But when the plasma pulse beamed from the gun, it passed harmlessly through a tranquil Tim, who had just enough skill and more than enough power to hold his molecules in a phase-like state. It stung and made him stagger, but really, it was pure energy – the smallest unit of measurement there was. The Joker would have had better luck with real bullets.

The Joker’s face twisted up. “You’re no FUN! NO FUN AT ALL! Arg!” He clutched his head. “ALL YOU co*ckROACHES! STOP FEELING AT ME! HA! HA! HA!” He fired a couple more blaster shots at the crowd but then was forced to drop the blaster and shriek when their terror overwhelmed his synapses.

“You, on the other hand, are great fun,” Tim said, maintaining a cheerful, relaxed face through sheer force of will. Some part of him quaked, but that part was locked in a vault behind the Discipline. “Look at you! You’re like a frog on a hot pan, leaping and croaking every time that new fangled empathy starts to sizzle. Do you have an overextension migraine yet? They’re a bitch of a thing, aren’t they?”

“Oh, I admit the joke’s on me, there, birdie.” The Joker’s face was a mask of sneers. “But the bigger joke’s on you, isn’t it? Poor, sweet, lovelorn birdie, here to save his best boy… only,” the Joker chuckled breathless. “You CAN’T, can you? HA! HA! HA! Those triggers,” Joker twiddled his fingers obscenely at his temples, eyes a poisonous green. “Such inconvenient little suckers. Just like you. You were once a helpful little sucker. Without you none of this would even have been able to happen. Hear that!” he yelled to the crowd. “ None of this would be possible without dear sweet widdle Timmy Drake, so lonely and underappreciated, so ready for someone, anyone to love. So desperate he let me loose while he was interfering with a corpse, little necrophile that he is. Ain’t that the biggest joke you’ve ever heard. HA! HA! HA! WELL?! WHY AREN’T YOU LAUGHING?!”

There was a smattering of noise from the crowd, but you wouldn’t call it laughter.

“And best of all,” Joker chortled. “You can’t take ‘em off! After all, they weren’t mine! My little squirt flower, they were her work! She can’t help you, she’s a little bit dead right now! HA! HA! HA!”

“And yet,” Tim’s eyes narrowed. “You’re still not making me go boom. Have you really burned yourself out already? God, are you really that pathetic? You really are a weak carbon copy of the real Joker, aren’t you? The real one would have turned me into a fine spray by now. Hell, the real one was actually, occasionally, funny.”

“SHUT UP!”

The kinetic blow hit him on the shoulder. Even seeing it gear up like a nuclear reaction in quantum sight didn’t help him dodge it fully. And yes, it was nowhere near as powerful as Jason when he really got going, but it still f*cking stung having layer of armour along with a layer of skin stripped of like it had in a fight with a power sander.

The Joker shrieked, clutching his own shoulder. “AAAARG! I hate this STUPID BODY! WHY DID THAT IDIOT PICK THIS STUPID FEELY BODY!” he shrieked stamping and squirming.

Tim grinned. “You don’t like it? Let me help you with that.” He lunged forward, eating up the distance between them in a Discipline fuelled sprint. The Joker cackled and fired off another blast, but even as his thigh took the brunt of it, Tim could see the sweat pouring off the Joker’s face, his shaky hands. The Joker had never been a Prime – thank goodness, because his Talent had been bad enough. He didn’t realize the burdens that placed on things like neural centres and metabolisms. He was a cheap beer man drinking triple distilled whiskey for the first time and wasn’t prepared for what that would do to his body. Tim needed him tired, he needed him strung out. He needed him as close to unconscious as he could possibly get.

The Joker, though, was not going easily. He was a canny and vicious fighter in the way real crazy people were. Case in point, he ducked around Tim’s open swing and jabbed Tim’s wound site with cruel fingers, giggling madly. “Robin Redbreast!” His teeth gleamed in his stretched grin.

He smiled less as Tim, forcing his way through the whiteout of agony, whipped his body back around and smashed his elbow into Joker’s jaw.

The Joker’s expression melted away. “B-Baby Bird…?”

Tim, damn him, hesitated.

Then the Joker’s knee came up into his solar plexus, Tim’s arm wrenched up in a claw-like grip before being spun around and flipped over, getting an extra kinetic blast as he was slammed down into unforgiving concrete. Tim lay there amongst the cracks, cursing himself. The Joker was a liar. He was a convincing one.

“Oh, maybe this body ain’t! So! Bad!” He kicked and kicked and kicked Tim’s torso with his heavy boots while Tim tried to protect his head, spitting up blood. “It’s got some good muscle memory, I’ll give it that! HA! HA! HA!” He kicked and kicked and kicked again.

Tim curled up weakly under the onslaught, trying to manage the pain, trying to find a countermove against the suddenly madly fighting demon… wait.

Tim stopped trying to manage anything.

He lay back, spayed himself out bodily to mirror what he wanted his mind to do, breathed in what air he could past the rack of agony that was his ribs… and dropped all his shields.

Pain, anger, disappointment, betrayal, fear.

Determination. Rage. Hope. Love.

He poured it all out. He didn’t analyze, he didn’t compartmentalize, he didn’t slice off all the inconvenient, ill fitting bits and tuck them away. He felt it all.

“AHHHHHHHHHHHRRRRGGG! STOP IT! STOOOOOOP IT!” The Joker sank to his knees, nearly tearing his hair out trying to get away from it.

Tim clenched his teeth and made himself roll over. He dragged himself to the Joker as he shrieked and writhed. His hand shot out to grab one of the Jokers’…

Flesh coloured gloves?

The surprise gave the Joker the opportunity to grab him and kinetically slam him back again, this time with his hands pinned above his head.

“Aww, little birdie forgot,” the Joker taunted, spit dripping from his mouth in sticky strings. “He forgot I know all his tricks! Little birdie’s told his lovebird everything. And who was there to listen! GOOD OLD UNCLE JOKER! HA! HA! HA!”

The Joker pressed a fingertip to his jugular. Tim could feel the charge sizzling on the tip of it. “I don’t need very much, do I? One little pop and the birdie’s head goes pop!” the Joker chuckled. “I’d much have preferred your body. You don’t let anyone in. You’re a cold little fortress. You’re practically empty anyway,” the Joker smirked. “No wonder nobody ever loved you.”

Tim choked out a laugh.

“What’s so funny, little birdie,” the Joker drew a line over Tim’s neck, flesh parting slowly and horribly. “Quick before I RIP YOUR THROAT OUT. What’s the joke?”

“You’re going to lose,” Tim grinned. “The pre-cogs have all seen it. You were never, ever going to win.”

“Oh?” Joker gave his toothy grin back, leaning in close. “Why’s that? True wuuuuuuuuuuv?” he sneered with extra saccharine. “Now THAT’S a good JOKE! HA! HA!”

“Nope,” Tim smiled. “You’re going to lose because you’re a f*cking idiot.”

Then he heaved up and kissed the Joker full on the mouth.

Skin to skin.

And time worked differently in the mental realm.

By the time the Joker even had a thought about what Tim was doing, Tim was already inside his head.

Chapter 21: 00:00

Chapter Text

“Jason!” Tim yelled, looking around him. “Jason!”

The warehouse mindscape looked very different than it had before. Before it had been glaring and sharp edged, but pristine and ordered. Jason had tried, in his own way, to manifest some semblance of control over the environment, the last vivid memory he took with him when he dropped out of the waking world.

This warehouse was dank, filled with grit and stains, the crates no longer neat rows but stacked and scattered haphazardly. The precious library with all the remembered solace of books was gone.

Tim kicked and fought his way over crates. “Jason? Where are you? Jas—” He stopped, breath ripped out of him as he finally saw the centre.

It was a Pollack in vivid red, spatter mixing muddily with the dusty concrete. There was a crowbar, filthy with misdeed, laying on the floor.

In the epicentre was Jason, crumpled on the ground like a leaf in winter.

“Oh my god,” Tim croaked, before running for the scene. It didn’t matter that it wasn’t real. As a memory, it was more than real enough. He kicked away the crowbar with one angry blow and then kneeled by the huddled Jason, turning him over as gently as he could. God, he looked so bad. Bloody and bruised, his face swollen past the point of recognition. “Jason?” Tim stroked his hair gently. “It’s me.”

Jason’s eyes squinted open. They were bloodshot, the pupils dilated. He blinked slowly. “B’by B’rd?”

“Jason, you’ve got to focus on me,” Tim urged him. “You’re trapped in a memory. I know it hurts so much, I know to a part of your brain it only happened minutes ago, but it’s not real. The pain you feel isn’t… your body healed. It healed a long time ago. Just breathe with me, okay?” He took one of Jason’s battered hands in both of his own, pressing it to his chest. “In, out. In, out.”

Jason’s breath slowly turned less ragged, the choking edge of it smoothed away. Tim pulled the larger body as close as he could as Jason levelled out. When Jason relaxed a bit and pulled away, Tim was heartened to see his face no longer looked all beat to hell, although judging by the red marks crisscrossing his face, the memory was still achingly close to the surface.

Jason stared at him. “Tim,” he said slowly. “Are you real?”

That was a needle straight through his heart. “Oh, Jason. Of course I’m real.”

“But,” Jason struggled his way up, eyes dark and haunted. “Were you ever real? Were you always real? Nothing in here ever felt really real. It drove me nuts.” His face fell. “Maybe I am nuts.”

Tim grabbed his head and turned it towards him. “Jason Todd, you – even you - have never in your life had enough imagination to make up the kind of situations I got myself into while I was trying to help you.”

Jason stared at him. Then he barked out one wavery, watery laugh. “It’s true. I couldn’t have come up with anything that f*cking crazy by myself. Anything I imagined would have to make sense.” His face twisted up, the marks getting darker and purpling as his eyes caught the scene he lay in. “This is the realest thing in here, this place. I built so many walls between me and it, but I could always feel it there, waiting. Waiting for me to remember. I don’t want to be here,” he turned to Tim, eyes full of pain. “I don’t want to be here anymore.”

Tim sucked in a breath at the sheer youth he saw painted on Jason’s face in that moment. It was a mercilessly sharp reminder that Jason had been younger than him when he’d been brutally beaten into a coma, alone and helpless. A kid. Just a kid. Just like Tim. “I can get you out,” he croaked out past the lump in his throat. “That’s all I’ve wanted to do from the moment I met you.”

Jason’s eyes dimmed. “No you can’t. No one can. Not even Bruce can. Why else would he have left me to rot?”

“Bruce didn’t,” Tim cut in. “Jason, believe me, Bruce had nothing to do with it. I know that for a fact.”

“How? You talked to him?” Jason sat back, away from Tim, pressing disconsolately against a metal stanchion. “Bruce lies. He never tells anyone what they want to know. He never lets anyone get that close,” Jason added bitterly.

“No,” Tim shook his head. “I went to Ethiopia. I went to the warehouse.” Jason looked up at him sharply. “The warehouse wasn’t there anymore, but the memory was still there, clear as crystal. Every moment. Every blow.” Tim shuddered at the phantom sense of those blows raining down. It had felt like an eternity just in the memory alone. “There’s something… Jason, there are things happening out there. You’re not going to understand unless I show you what I saw.” Tim bit his lip. “The memory of what happened.”

Jason shuddered all over. His face and body seesawing between battered and healed, young and old. “Don’t make me go back there,” croaked the battered fifteen year old, eyes swollen and agonised. “Please don’t make me do it again.”

“Not that memory,” Tim promised. “I’d never make you go back there. But you never saw what happened after and… and you need to know, Jason. I don’t think you’ll believe it unless you see it for yourself. I’ll be here,” Tim grabbed his hand. “I’ll be right here the whole time. I won’t leave you.”

Jason stared at him and then sagged. “Okay,” he nodded. “f*ck it. Okay.”

Tim meant what he said when he promised Jason wouldn’t go into the worst of it. But trauma wasn’t an obliging act; no matter how much Tim tried to control what happened here, too many of Jason’s perceptions were woven in too deeply for him to avoid the mine field entirely.

In front of them, the memory flickered to life. The warehouse bathed in daylight from the open dock doors. There was a pickup cargo cruiser mostly covered in a tarp. In the middle there was the Joker and Jason, achingly young.

Crack. Crack. Crack.

HA! HA! HA!

Jason flinched at the vision of himself going down one final time under the crowbar the Joker had used while the Joker smiled beatifically and laughed. Sheila was there too; tied to a pole but bent almost double, sobbing.

The memory-Jason stopped moving. The Joker kept hitting.

Jason flinched every time. Tim held on.

“Why,” Jason whispered. “Why this?”

“Just watch,” Tim told him quietly. “Watch her.”

Memory-Joker straightened up. He was spattered with Jason’s blood, but underneath even that charming makeup, he didn’t look well. He had a hollowed out, gaunt look. He also glowed obscenely in his post violence state, like a man coming off a brilliant climax.

Sheila was still there, sobbing.

Except the funny hiccups and chokes didn’t sound pained anymore. They sounded happy. She was laughing. “It worked! It worked! I told you, honey! I told you he’d stay to protect me! Now quick, untie me! We haven’t got much time!”

“Right as always, squirt flower.” The Joker cheerfully untied her. “Are you sure we had to rough him up so bad?” The Joker looked puzzled but unconcerned. “I mean, isn’t this a bit like setting fire to your house and then moving in? That’s a pretty good joke, though! HA! HA! HA!”

“What the f*ck?” Jason had gone rigid beside him. When Tim turned to look, his face was grey. “What the… why the f*ck is she helping him?”

Tim squeezed his hand tighter.

Memory-Sheila was all business. She hauled the tarp off the cruiser and grabbed down what looked like a wheeled suitcase. The tarp almost slid off entirely, revealing the tungsten bomb, deceptively small. “Hurry! We haven’t got much time! We’ve forced his consciousness into his subconsciousness and I have him enough juice to be extra-receptive. We have to effect the transfer before the neural pathways cease transmitting.”

“Stop being all sciency,” The Joker grumbled, helping her with the equipment grudgingly. “I don’t care! I just want to know if my new body will take me!”

“It should. It will,” she corrected hastily. “His Talent is receptive. And he’s a Prime. His neural net is a good genetic match for mine. It might take a while to get you settled in, but your consciousness can transfer. We’ve seen it!”

“Yeah, for a minute,” Joker glowered. “I’m not doin’ this to come back for a minute, squirt flower. You promised me a new body!”

“You’ll get one!” Sheila assured him. “I wanted to refine the chemical reanimator serum a bit more but… honey, you don’t have that sort of time. It might take a while to get you back, but I can definitely send you. I’m augmenting the brat now,” she tapped her temple. “Making sure his pathways are wide open and ready for you, funny honey. You did the hard bit and made sure he was driven deep in. That’s important. Otherwise he’d take control back.”

“Yeah, that was the fun bit,” Joker grinned nastily. “You always come up with the best date night activities, squirt flower.”

Sheila grinned back, all teeth. “I’m a fun times kinda gal, honey.”

They laughed as they set up the equipment. It looked like a distant cousin to a Goosegg, with dual sensor torque set up. One was jeeringly jammed over memory-Jason’s battered head while they laughed at the indignity of his flapping open mouth. The other was placed like a crown upon the Joker’s brow. He’d taken a seat next to the pillar that Sheila had been tied against, twitching impatiently. “Are you sure this will work, squirt flower?” he asked.

“Oh honey, of course it will,” she purred, straddling him. “I made sure. I wouldn’t want anything to happen to my funny honey.” Then she choked.

The Joker seized her by the throat in one quick move. “It BETTER, squirt flower, or you’re not going to enjoy the reading of my last will and testament. I had a special clause put in there for you. HA! HA! HA!”

He let her go and idly waited until she stopped coughing. “I promise, it will work! I love you! I wouldn’t want you to die!” Sheila said fervently.

Jason, by Tim, sucked in a breath like he’d been punched in the gut.

“It’s a shame, you know,” Sheila commented wistfully as she drew a syringe out of her pocket. “I’m gonna miss this handsome face.” She ran the fingers of her free hand over his face as she popped the cap on the syringe.

“Oh, don’t fret, sweetgums. You won’t miss it for long,” the Joker leered. “One last kiss for this face, though? How bout it?”

Sheila kissed him, fervently and passionately. She didn’t even pause in her tongue action when she jabbed the Joker in the neck with the syringe.

“HA!” The Joker burst out. “THIS WILL BE THE BEST JOKE EVER! HAHAHAHAHAHA! HA! HA! H-chk!” The Joker started to convulse like an epileptic, mouth foaming and lips stretching to his widest and maddest smile yet. His whole face distended, going purple as he choked and huffed and tied to draw air.

And failed. With a final, wet rattle, he went still.

“What the f*ck?!” Jason yelled. “Did she just f*cking kill him?”

“Yes,” Tim grimaced. “And… no. See the monitor on the machine? It’s like a Goosegg. It’s mapping two sets of brainwaves, see? Watch the lines.”

They watched. Sheila abandoned the Joker’s body, grabbed another syringe and jabbed memory-Jason with it. Then she dumped the refuse and grabbed him by his battered head. “Come on,” she hissed, watching the screens. She was sweating; she was clearly exerting herself through her Talent, though the effects were invisible to them. “Come on! Take it, you worthless brat! Come on!”

Slowly, surely the two sets of lines on the monitor started to synch up. They started to merge.

“Yes!” she crowed when the monitor flashed green. “Yes! Yes! YES! It worked. I have unlocked immortality! Suck it, Ethics Board, you bunch of useless, asslicking f*ckers! I did it! I transferred a living consciousness.” Her victory dance was joyous; her boots stained with her own son’s blood were obscene. She was literally crying from happiness as she knelt down next to Jason’s body. “Don’t worry, honey. Mama going to take good care of you. And when you wake up, you’ll know I know you,” she kissed his forehead. “You’ll know how to love.”

Then she got busy. The next few minutes were a flurry of unloading the bomb and loading Jason’s body onto a stretcher and onto the cruiser. Then she was roaring out into the daylight leaving behind the tungsten bomb and the Joker’s corpse, grinning madly at the bomb like it was the world’s best joke.

Tim let the memory flicker away, leaving them with the echoes and shadows of it. He turned back to Jason, heartsore. “Jason?”

“But she’s my mom, Baby Bird,” Jason choked out. “She’s my mom.”

Then he burst into tears, whole body crumpling inwards and heaving with the force of them. Tim didn’t think, he just grabbed a hold of Jason and held on as tight as he could. He might have been crying too. He didn’t know and couldn’t care. All he cared about was Jason.

It felt like hours until Jason had fully cried himself out. Tim just rocked him and petted him and desperately tried to think of anything he could say to make him feel better. This was agony. Facing the family was nothing compared to the pain of this. “I’m sorry,” was all he could offer, the words feeble and inadequate.

Jason snuffled against his neck one more time before drawing back. Even though he managed to sit without support, every line in his body was slumped with defeat. “So… that Joker that was floating around inside my head all this time… that was the real Joker.” His voice was hoarse and his eyes bloodshot.

“Yes,” Tim replied miserably. “Or a close enough copy as makes no difference. Sheila,” Jason flinched at the name. “She got your body back to Gotham. I think she had more trouble trying to fix the coma than she anticipated. When I got that Goosegg, I gave her the means to rectify the situation.” Tim shook his head, disgusted with himself. “It was all planned. The Joker was dying and he didn’t want to, so he and your… Sheila came up with a way for him to get a new body.”

“They needed a receptive Talent,” Jason said bitterly. “And guess which dumbass kid went looking for her. She was so happy to see me. It was nice. Br-Bruce never seemed happy with me then. But sh-she was so happy to see me and I loved that. I thought finally…” Jason tailed off, tears leaking down his face.

Tim reached for him again but Jason just huddled back, body curled and defensive. Tim could only watch helplessly as Jason rocked back and forth, trying to grapple with the grief and the betrayal by someone he’d trusted. Some of the perverse sympathy he’d felt for Sheila in her dying moments evaporated; even though she’d helped give him his final boost, enough to face the Joker, Tim couldn’t find much softness in his heart for anyone that put that lost expression on Jason’s face.

Eventually Jason uncurled again, like he was coming out of sleep. “The Joker… he’s out there, isn’t he?” he asked dully. “He’s in the driver’s seat.”

Tim nodded.

“What about her?” Venom dripped off the word.

“She’s dead, Jason,” Tim replied softly. Jason turned to look at him. “She gave the Joker everything and he turned on her. Just like he does to everyone.”

“Ha!” Jason’s crow was so shattered and bitter that Tim winced to hear it. “sh*t, I coulda told her that would happen. Any f*cking six-year-old from the Linears could have told her that. We all knew what the Joker was. God, how could she be so… so stupid.” His voice wavered.

“She was in love,” Tim said in a small voice. “People do crazy things when they’re in love.”

Jason opened his mouth, took in Tim’s huddled up figure, and closed it again. Suddenly he slumped down again, whatever fire his bitter hatred had ignited in him snuffed out. “The triggers,” he said. “They’re still there, aren’t they?” His voice held a waning hope.

“Yes,” Tim replied dismally. “And Sheila was the one to put them on. There’s no way to take them off now. At least, not without months of therapy.”

“f*ck…” Jason muttered. “Just. f*ck. f*ck! f*ck! f*cking f*ck!” He rose to his feet, shouting. “f*ck EVERYTHING! He’s… he’s f*cking won.” Jason punched a pillar, despairing. “He’s won, Baby Bird. With my body – with my Talent – he can kill whoever he likes! I can’t stop him without hitting the surface, then BOOM! That f*cking asshole.” Jason punched again, weakly. “He f*cking knows it. He f*cking knows I can’t win. He can kill everybody, or I will. And you’re out there!” Jason pointed an accusing finger at Tim. “You shouldn’t have come here! You should have gone away, far away! As far as you could run! How could you put yourself in danger like that? You should have left.” Jason sagged, face crumpling again. “You should have gotten somewhere safe. I can’t even surface and make it quick, not with you there! That f*cking clown f*cking won.”

Then he yelped in surprise as Tim’s hand caught him in a cracking blow across his face.

“Listen up, asshole,” Tim growled. “Do you know what I’ve been through in my quest to help you? I’ve run away from home, given up all access to my fortune, suffered through my tactile gifts in a small, overcrowded and violent district which I had to call home, I’ve worked for gangs for pay, taken combat janitor rates to sweep floors and scrub toilets for twelve hour days, spent what little I was able to save on black market parts to expand your reading list, I’ve stolen, hacked, lied and been accused of interfering sexually with a corpse, I’ve survived a short walk through the Alley and a long walk through the Graveyard, raided a madman’s laboratory, been attacked by (former!) assassins, survived being attacked by assassins, watched someone get impaled, done first aid for said impalement, met a living legend, had to reckon with everything I’ve ever known or ever loved being a lie, tapped actual arcane energies to restore one of the most sensitive and delicate pieces of machinery in creation, lost my job, my apartment, my security and every penny to my name, faced down half the f*cking Primes in my former family and survived that too, I’ve been turned into a wanted fugitive, I’ve nearly been blown up, choked to death, I got stabbed, have been psychologically tortured, nearly bled to death, nearly had my f*cking organs removed while I was awake and paralyzed, had to deliberately induce a near drug overdose, nearly got trampled to death in a Linear stampede and,” Tim sucked in a breath. “I kissed the Joker full on the mouth. On the f*cking mouth, tongue and everything!”

Jason’s jaw was hanging open.

“I didn’t go through all of that,” Tim declared fiercely. “To give up on you now, Jason Todd.”

Jason’s mouth snapped shut. Then he frowned. “Wait, you got stabbed?”

“Jason, focus!” Tim waved his hands exasperated.

“I am focusing! I’m focusing on the bit where you get stabbed!”

“Joker. Body snatching. Body count.” Tim reached for him and shook him. “We don’t have a lot of time!”

Jason grabbed his hands. “To do what? If I go up, boom, remember? Everything turns to dust!” He reached out to touch Tim’s face, eyes frightened. “Everything.”

“You turn things to dust,” Tim snapped. “And I remake things from dust. Dust is my damn specialty!”

Jason stared at him.

“I can fix this,” Tim insisted. “I told you I if you give me enough time, I can fix anything. I can fix this, Jason. We can get rid of the triggers and the Joker. I can teleport your body to a safe place, somewhere there’s no people to hurt.” Well, there shouldn’t be. Tim crossed his fingers the three former assassins were having an easier time of it than he was.

“Except you!”

“Well, it’s either just me, who has a chance,” Tim replied. “Or a whole bunch of innocent people who don’t.”

Jason’s face twisted up. Tim could tell he didn’t like it. “And you think… are you sure you can put us back together? Are you sure?”

“No,” Tim confessed honestly. “I’m not. I’ve never done anything on this scale before. I’ve never let myself believe I ever had that kind of power before. But I believe it now. I’m willing to try.”

“Baby Bird…” Jason looked devastated.

“I know I let you down,” Tim blurted out. “I’m sorry I lied to you, that I kept things from you that you had a right to know. I know that,” Tim sucked in a breath. “I haven’t earned your trust. But I’m asking anyway. Please. Please just… trust me. Believe. You were the only one, I think, who ever believed in me, no questions asked and no conditions set. That’s why I love you. That’s why I’m trying. Why I’ll never stop trying.”

Tim felt the weight of the words leave him, hang in the air between them. They were easier to say than he’d ever thought they would be. It was hard to say them, knowing that anyone you said them to might never say it back. And didn’t, sometimes. But Tim loved Jason enough that the idea of Jason’s not loving him back wouldn’t change the way he felt one iota. The peace of having that knowledge took away all the fear. It was like finally knowing you were flying, rather than just believing you could.

Jason stared at him. Slowly, surely, a smile started tugging at the corners of his mouth. “I dunno why you’re bothering to ask, Baby Bird. I know you,” he cupped Tim’s face with his hands and raised an eyebrow. “You’ll just do it anyway.”

“Well, yeah,” Tim admitted. “But it’d be a lot easier with your help.”

Jason laughed sadly.

“We should, um, probably get going,” Tim murmured at the silence stretched and they kept on staring at each other.

“We’re on the clock huh?” Jason’s mouth twisted ruefully. “Seems like it’s always ticking down when we’re together.”

“I know,” Tim said wistfully. “I wish we had more time too.”

“Tim,” Jason breathed. “Just in case—”

“Save it for the other side,” Tim told him hastily. “I’ll be there. I’ll wait.”

Jason paused, then smiled. “Okay.”

“Are you ready?” Tim asked him. While he had little awareness of what was going on outside this twisted mindscape, he had enough to know their grace period was running out. Time passed slowly out there, but not that slowly. “We’re out of time.”

Jason leaned in. “We have time enough.”

And kissed him.

The memory-bomb counted down to zero.

There was a bright light.

Then darkness.

Then the real world with all its gritty pains and physical discomforts crashed back down on Tim. He drew back from the kiss to see the Joker still looming over him.

“What did you…” a variety of expressions, most of them baffled, crossed that face. Tim could see the set of the jaw changing, the turn at the corner of the eyes, the fleck of blue shade into the eyes. With both nothing changing and everything changing, Jason’s face settled back into its rightful home.

Almost. It twisted up again as the Joker lurched off Tim staggering like a drunkard, tearing at his hair. “No! No! No! No! This isn’t funny! This is a terrible joke!” the Joker screeched. “You can’t do this! It’s NOT FAIR! I paid the mortgage, I took the keys! You should be GONE! GONE! GONE! ARG!” He clutched at his temples and tried to claw at his face, but his hands wouldn’t obey.

“You can f*ck the f*ck out,” Jason’s tones overlaid the Joker’s crackling madness. “You… body… snatching… nightmare… inducing… unfunny joke of … a f*cking clown!”

The Cathedral shook, not like the great heave of an earthquake but a more insidious, low vibration that Tim could feel all the way through his body. Above, below, on every pillar, ever alter, every surface that could be seen a fine layer of dust started sloughing off. Jason must be holding it off with everything he had, but it wasn’t enough to stop it.

“You LOSE, ” the Jokers cackled madly. “HA! HA! HA! YOU HAVE TO GO BACK IN OR YOU LOSE, YOU LOSE, YOU LOSE. BOOM! BOOM! BOOM! GET BACK INSIDE! THIS IS NO JOKE!” the clown tried frantically, turning to the crowd so he could show the fear on their faces. “GO BACK! GO BACK OR WE PLAY POP GOES THE WEASEL. WITH THE WHOLE DISTRICT. HA! HA! HA!”

It would have been terrifying and menacing, but Tim could hear the desperation in it. Despite all his claim that he was free from the madness of sanity, that he obeyed no sense, that he conformed to no instinct except doing whatever he wanted to get what he wanted, in the end the Joker in a corner was just another animal, as desperate as any other to stay alive.

Tim felt his lips peeling back into a fierce smile, all his teeth bared. He breathed deep and went into the Discipline, and into his quantum sight, easily. From this point of view the difference between Jason and the Joker was as easy to discern as steel and spaghetti, as distinct as the earth and space. The Joker was nothing more than a cracked, crippled overlay, a kind of ugly fungus, growing over the bright whiteness that was the supernova of Jason, one brief slip away from being burnt to ash. A lacquer. Less than a lacquer. A formless ghost.

He focused on the Junkyard, the sinking hole right in the centre where ACE chemicals once stood. It would be nice to call it the epicentre of all evil, but really, Tim knew evil was everywhere and in everyone. ACE was, just like the Joker, just another fixed point here, here and here in space and time.

“I told you,” Tim breathed out. “That you were going to lose. And I don’t even have precognition. Now that’s a good joke!” In a flash, he was in front of the foaming, flailing, fighting Joker. He wrapped the body up in a bear hug, teeth flashing. “Joke’s. On. You.”

And jumped.

It was hard to describe what it felt like to it, how it was both a molecule away and also at the edge of eternity. Tim wouldn’t be able to adequately convey the struggle it was to hold Jason – every single glittering mote that was Jason – in his memory. There was no language yet invented that could communicate how they became a boiling mass of light, a galaxy being made in the space of a breath as the triggers got fully hit.

Tim was only peripherally aware of hitting the dirt on the other side. He was too busy clinging on for dear life as the whump of pure psychic force struck.

He held on to himself, he held on to Jason, all by the cobweb fine strands of memory as they were both torn apart, molecule by molecule, in the blast. Tim would later dream of the moment, dream of the telepathic scream flying past him and a shrieking 'nooooooooo!’ as whatever was left of the Joker dissolved into flying motes of dust, gone in a way no one would ever be able to put back together. A part of him knew that was impossible, there would be no organized consciousness to understand that it could communicate let alone actually doing so.

Still, if there was some scrap of emotion left of the Joker, something that went into a more metaphysical realm than Tim had ever given much thought to, then he couldn’t say it was impossible that he had picked up something in that moment.

But it wouldn’t matter afterwards and certainly didn’t matter now. Tim was desperately holding onto himself, onto everything he was, everything that made him, and holding onto the supernova that was Jason as well.

He held and held and held and remembered things like bones and skin and muscles and smiles. He remembered feeling and thinking and knowing. He remembered it all.

And with every last bit of himself, pulled.

Tim woke up.

His body felt heavy as lead, so sucked dry of energy that all he could do was lie there, panting and coughing in the dust.

And boy, was there dust. There was a fog of it rising in a massive, murky column that stretched up into the sky, dissipating like a slow mushroom cloud. It was everywhere around them like a dirty fog. Tim soaked it in. He felt the dust in his bones.

Suddenly, his brain re-orientated itself. Jason!

He forced himself to rise up on his arms from where he lay face down on the last dregs of whatever energy he had left. He was…

He was lying on top of Jason, he realized. Jason was half buried under the dust like a body in a shallow grave. ACE chemicals was gone — there was simply nothing left of the Joker’s stronghold but dust.

Jason’s eyes were closed. He was still.

“Jason,” Tim croaked, trying to get his clumsy fingers to work, brushed at that grey coated, statue like face. His wound pulled and he felt the dampness mingling with the dust to form a clotted mess, but the pain was so distant that he barely noticed. “Jason?” He brushed more dust off, trying to get his bleary, overstressed brain into gear.

Suddenly, Jason’s lips moved; a wondrous shade of pink of his gums showing up starkly amongst the all over grey. A puff of air sent a small bloom of dust billowing up from his mouth. He gasped in a jagged breath, then another, hacking and coughing.

Tim managed to writhe off Jason’s body, trying to give him space to breathe. “Jason?” he whispered. “Can you hear me? Jason?”

A soft groan. His eyelids flickered. Tim held his breath as they slowly blinked open, Jason’s pupils dilated and his eyes some kind of weird mid-shade between green and blue. The Joker had managed to leave a mark, it seemed.

“Jason? It’s Tim,” Tim breathed. “It’s Tim, Jason.”

Jason’s brows scrunched up and he blinked rapidly. “Wher’m I?”

“The Junkyard,” Tim replied. “We’re in the Junkyard. In Amusem*nt Mile.”

Jason’s brow wrinkled some more, puzzled. “G’th’m?”

“That’s right,” Tim said, then had to stop to cough. His ears were ringing and kind of packed with dust, but he thought he could hear voices yelling somewhere beyond the containment field.

Jason blinked again, clearly struggling to stay awake. “B… Bru… Bruce… where’s….?”

“Bruce is coming,” Tim reassured him. He was pretty sure every police cruiser and copter was beelining for this place. It’s not like anyone anywhere would have missed the explosion. If Bruce wasn’t on one of the ones in front, he’d eat his armour. “He’s coming, Jason. Just hang on, okay? Stay awake. I’m right here. I’m staying with you.”

Jason managed to turn his head enough to take in Tim. His face got even more confused as he looked at him, eyes dull and lost.

“Jason?” Tim blinked at the puzzlement he saw there. “Are you okay?”

Jason blinked. “Who are you?”

Chapter 22: RESET

Chapter Text

Three months later.

“You find anything yet?” Tim called over the junkyard stacks.

“Nah, I got sh*t!” Owens yelled back. “I swear I saw a Buick chassis around here somewhere!”

Tim wiped sweat from his brow. “You keep looking. We find a working gear box, that’s weeks less work and another five large in the can. I’ll go and take her apart, see what we’ve got to work with.”

Owens waved at him from atop the mountain of debris he’d climbed.

Tim turned to get down off his own pile. The sun was high in the sky and had a way of turning this labyrinth of concrete and steel into a self-shooting solar death ray. It was hot. Hot and dusty.

From his vantage you could clearly see the crater where ACE Chemicals had been blown to smithereens – to literal dust motes. The containment field had held, at least long enough to contain most of the blast radius, although the shockwave had still shaken the world as far south as the Mid Island. It had taken a month and intervention by federal emergency relief departments to finally start to get rid of all the dust that had smothered the city, overtaking even Gotham’s famous fog.

Tim felt a twinge in his chest.

Part of it was his scar, still pink but mostly healed now. Z, Pru and Owens had walked into the dust and found him staggering out of it, bleeding badly but clearly trying to get away from all the copters and cruisers that converged to the scene. No strangers to the desire to duck the watchful eyes of the authorities, they’d bundled him up and carted him off to Old Tom in the Alley. Tim had woken up two days later, missing a spleen but still in possession of vital signs. Leslie had told him bluntly that he’d still have a spleen, except he’d had a whole bunch of things going wrong and the spleen was the least of it.

Her exact words were, “I thought you’d make it longer without a spleen then you would without a heart.”

Tim hadn’t cared about the spleen. He still didn’t. As to his heart, he wasn’t at all convinced that the status of that organ was something to write home about, either.

Hence the twinge. Partly his spleen, but mostly because… he got those a lot. It wasn’t even the reminder of Jason; Jason was always right there, in his thoughts, in the corner of his awareness, that Tim could no more set aside than he could stop thinking. But every once in a while the tides would well up inside of him and it would hit him anew what he’d lost with such piquant ferocity that it would take his breath away.

Tim resolutely forced himself to breathe through it anyway and trudged back to their makeshift – Tim would like to call it a prototype – workshop. They’d only worked on and sold one restored classic so far, and that was through the dark net because they were all illegals. Still, it was capital enough to acquire more tools and parts and set up their dingy little shed, and get to work on a discarded Buick Riviera.

The work was, compared to the bleeding edge R&D of the Institute, fairly humdrum, but he’d settled into it more peacefully than Tim from a year ago would have thought possible. Sure, he didn’t get the thrill that came with pushing a boundary or making a discovery that would change the face of the world, but there was something fulfilling about working on these very basic machines using only his hands and comparatively primitive tools. Teasing out that hidden former glory, getting a once broken thing to hum again, satisfied Tim’s vicarious need to fix every broken thing.

It was the vindication that came with overcoming an emotional challenge, rather than a mental one. After everything that had happened over the past year, Tim was getting used to the idea that sometimes he just had to stop . Stop, and breathe, and not push himself, but just slowly walk through the easy things, step by step.

What a way, he thought with some bittersweet melancholy, to learn the value of self-care.

He ran his long, grease stained fingers over the old wreck. If they registered as a legit business, they’d make more cash. They’d get grants a-plenty for daring to try to make something of this wasteland. They’d be able to purchase plot after plot for a pittance. Tim would be able to get by as a black market junker dealer, anonymous and unknown out here if he wanted, but getting by was as good as it would get. Going legitimate would be the only way to really rise up and make something better of himself.

But to do that Tim Drake would have to go back into the world and be Tim Drake on paper again. His seventeenth birthday had come and gone without notice while he was lying in a cot in Leslie’s clinic, staring at the walls and teaching himself to breathe through the grief. Tim was raw all over still, even with three months of careful healing under his belt. The thought of going back to Gotham proper and facing all the people that would inevitably come out of the woodwork didn’t fill him with anticipation.

However, flip side to that, Tim had had a dream with Jason. A part of him wanted to fulfill that dream, to make it real. To show the world tangible evidence of an all-encompassing, world changing thing that only he could remember.

It hurt that Jason wasn’t here with him. It would hurt not to have him there for it if he built their shared future plans. But Tim reasoned that it would hurt either way. It would be better to make something than not. Something positive. Something that wasn’t a crater in the ground, filled with dust.

That mantra made it all sound so optimistic. Like his peace wasn’t fragile, like there weren’t still days where he didn’t want to get out of bed, didn’t want to eat, or interact with any living thing. Like there weren’t still nights he cried himself to sleep. But Tim couldn’t deny those bad moments were becoming shorter and less frequent. Like the scar on his abdomen, the pain no longer bled freely, but merely pulled sharply if his thoughts turned in the wrong direction. Tim was not frail. He wasn’t at the mercy of his Talent. He didn’t feel the same insatiable need for approval that had once wound him up like a clockwork toy. The lesson he’d learned, above all, was that Tim Drake was capable. He could adapt. He could cope.

He’d have to. He couldn’t magically make the subconscious start storing memories the way the conscious mind did. The chance of Jason ever remembering anything they shared was infinitesimal.

Of all the things to forget, Tim thought ironically, he couldn’t believe that basic facet of neurology he’d researched since he could read was one of them.

The workshop roller door squeaked open.

Tim’s slow crawl out of grief hadn’t been alone. Z, Owens and Pru had taken him into their home, after a long bitch session regarding blowing up a lot of it. They weren’t the kind of people who gave a single thought about the phenomenon of someone crying themselves to sleep. They’d all done it more than once. They also weren’t the kind of people that put up with any self-pitying bullsh*t. If Pru wanted Tim out of bed, she was damn well hauling his mopey ass out of it.

“Hey Red! Got a surprise for ya!” Pru said gleefully. She came hurrying up with Z and a sweaty Owens in tow.

“You found the gear box?” Tim replied.

“Naw, not yet.” Owens scrubbed his face with a towel. “Found an old Impala though, might be worth hauling down to have a look.”

“Tim,” Z rumbled, interrupting Pru’s opening mouth. “Have you been back in the Linears lately?”

Tim blinked. “No,” he shook his head. “Not since my last follow up with Leslie.”

“Hm,” Z looked at him speculatively.

“Come on, Zed, we gotta tell ‘im,” Pru grinned.

Z nodded. “Come with us to the Linears,” he said to a surprised Tim. “There’s something you need to see.”

What he needed to see, after a quick supply unload, a drive through the Graveyard, and a walk to the Bowery, was “An Institute Recruitment Centre?” Tim raised an eyebrow. “Seen ‘em. I helped outfit more than a few. What’s this about?”

Z nudged him forward. “Watch.”

Tim raised an eyebrow as the Institute logo flashed up on the TRI-D as he came within range of the sensor. “The whole Institute recruiting pitch? I’ve seen it. Seen them all.”

But, Tim admitted to himself, he hadn’t seen this one. It was new.

It had all the same familiar beats. A history of the discovery of Talents, a little bit about what Talents needed to thrive, some long shots of the extensive Institute grounds, which was a big selling point because most people in Gotham had never seen trees, plural, outside of the biodome in Robbinsville Park.

But then they hit the Talent showcase sections and… well, it was different. Instead of a montage of the showier looking kinetic Talents, there were clips showing the diligent pre-cog database technicians, looking after pre-cog Talents in the hazy post-vision disorientated state. There were the engineers, working on the emergency broadcast system. The therapists and the teachers, the intake office with its huge information centre. There was Babs in her library, her bevy of telepathic and empathic students in both training and research. There was barely any mention of kinetics, even though the gestalt circuitry was the latest new craze.

Tim noticed that a lot of these clips showed him . Sometimes just in the background but he was in damn near every shot, a startling reminder of just how much he used to do around the Institute.

Even the spiel had changed. Instead of the Brucie Wayne sales pitch, calculated to charm and enthral, the voice over was a lot of different voices, telling a lot of different stories. “There were days I was sure I was crazy, all the voices yelling in my head. It wasn’t until I found the Institute that I finally got my life back on track.” “It was rough before. I didn’t think there would ever be anyone like me. I mean, I was a freak! But they came and they helped me.” “The people here… they just saved my life. They straight up saved my life. I wouldn’t be here today if they hadn’t reached out, if they hadn’t been there to take care of me.” “It’s just… so good, you know. Knowing you aren’t the only one. Knowing you aren’t alone.” “I got a job. And a place to stay. I’ve got hobbies and stuff I can do for myself. It’s like being home, you know? It’s like I walked out of my crummy life and found a home.”

“Well, okay,” Tim said slowly. “I mean, it’s nice and all. It’s good they’re not hyperfocusing on kinetics anymore…” In truth, Tim was a little bit moved. How long had he kept saying that kinetics weren’t the only Talent they should be focusing on? How many years had he patiently tried to convince every board member and their mother that there were a range of Talents on offer, others just as purposeful and useful as moving things from A to B. That they sold themselves and Talent itself short by only going after the more tangible end of the spectrum. He was aware there was a certain irony in this point of view now that he had unlocked his own kinetic potential, but nevertheless, seeing the Institute’s change in tune was a vindication of long, weary hours of work.

“It ain’t over yet, Red,” Pru told him. “Keep watching.”

Okay, so the recruitment spiel ended and the Wayne Institute logo flashed up, all of it long past the point where people would have either dismissed it or gone into the recruitment office. But, startlingly, the TRI-D didn’t power down.

Tim felt his heart in his throat as a holo-recording of Bruce Wayne himself flashed up. His dress and posture were as polished as they ever were, but his face was nothing like the shiny mask you’d usually see in the spiels.

“Tim,” the recording started. Tim felt his jaw drop. “If you’re watching this, I just wanted you to…” a sudden spasm of frustration passed over Bruce’s face in the recording. “I had a speech prepared,” he started again, shoulders dipping and hands rubbing against each other. A nervous tic Bruce Wayne wouldn’t ever show to the public normally. “I wrote it up, I must have had about fifty drafts of it. I practiced it over and over again, I had beta checkers and took suggestions… and now I don’t want to say a word of it. It’s just another way for me to not speak from my heart, and bitter experience should have taught me long ago that I need to do that more. So, uh," Bruce hesitated. “Where to start? Perhaps an apology, because you have more than one owing. Tim, I am very sorry for what I did,” Bruce said heavily. “I know that must sound so feeble and trite to your ears, especially when I say again that I did have reasons, good ones. But you are absolutely justified in your anger and hurt nonetheless. I betrayed your trust in me, a trust that was so earnest and given so freely. I will never be able to express to you how much I wish I could go back and make better choices than the ones I did.”

Tim stared at the recording, heart beating too fast.

“You were… you are my son. Every bit my child, every inch of you precious to me. You have been from the day you stumbled to our doors, starving to death for all sorts of things. I told you then that I could not let you into my heart, and it was a lie, Tim. Mostly to myself. Who could look upon the goodness and the earnestness of you and not want to keep you? You… I… I was able to finally wake up from my grief, sharing the joy you took in the memories of Jason, brighter and clearer than anything I could remember. No Prime, no kinetic, no single person in this world has ever done me a greater service. Had I been a better and wiser man, had I noticed that you took that cowardly lie to heart, I would have thanked you for it every day. I would have said," Bruce took a breath. “That I loved you, every day.”

Bruce on the display closed his eyes and sighed, a more vulnerable and tired mien than Tim thought he had ever seen him show. Tim was flabbergasted. This display was showing in public. Even if it was just on the Linear offices, someone, some stranger, probably more than one, would have seen Bruce Wayne like this – no longer the society darling or the patrician Prime, but a tired and melancholy man, willingly stripped of his masks.

“I realize that saying this all now to some holo-recorder on the off chance that you might see it is the very definition of too little too late. But on the remote possibly you are seeing this Tim, I wanted to ask… to plead; please, come home. I know I don’t have the right to ask, but, god help me kid, I’m a selfish man. I’m still going to ask one more impossible thing from you. Come home. If only long enough for me to see with my own eyes that you’re alright. And… I’ll tell you everything you need to know. Everything I should have told you long before this. And then you get to decide what to do from there. Whatever it is, however you want to live or whatever recompense you think is owed to you, that will be up to you. I’d pay every dime to my name if it meant knowing that you were safe and well. And Tim?” Bruce seemed to look straight at him. “Maybe it won’t change how you feel. Maybe it won’t fix anything at all. But if I were in your shoes, even knowing that, I think I’d still want to know the truth. I think you do too, kiddo, maybe even in spite of yourself. And if…" Bruce took another breath. “If it’s too soon, if… if even getting to know the reasons why aren’t enough to extend even the frailest trust to me ever again, well, I suppose I understand that. I don’t blame you. Just… be safe, Tim. And know that we’ll be waiting at the Institute, if you ever decide to come back. We’ll wait until the end of time. I love you, son.”

Then the holo dissolved.

Tim rocked back on his heels, too shocked for words. His heart felt like it had been ripped clean out of his chest.

“Whoo-ee,” Pru shook her head. “I’ve seen marriage proposals less starry eyed than that.”

“Shut it,” Z nudged her before turning to Tim. “Apparently it’s been running for over a month, according to my sources. It’s big news in Gotham. The Lost Wayne Heir.”

Tim breathed out. What the hell response could he make to something like this?

“So what are you gonna do, Red?” Pru asked. “’Cause it’d be a lot easier for our junker-fixing business if we were, you know, legit.”

“Pru, seriously?” Owens raised an eyebrow. “He doesn’t give a f*ck about the business right now.”

“Well, he should,” Pru replied stubbornly. “He’s got a golden ticket. He’s got an identity, a record. He shouldn’t waste it just ‘cause his family are a bunch of assholes. Plus, f*cking wages, man! This is our ticket into legit too.”

“You.” Owens shook his head. “Are appalling.”

“Thank ye kindly,” Pru grinned. “I learned from the best.”

“Both of you, pipe down,” Z stepped forward. “The kid already knows what he’s gonna do.”

Tim turned to him. Z nodded.

“One thing I could always say about the Master,” Z told him. “No matter what else you could say about him, the Demon Head knew how to read people. He read ‘em like picture books. He knew what drove ‘em. Bruce Wayne was his finest student, once. I figure he’s got you pegged dead to rights. You want to know.” Z’s voice was devastatingly calm. “Even if you won’t do you any good, you still want to know why. You might as well go find out. You might as well end it, kid, whatever it is. It’s better than living with it hanging over you.”

Tim sighed.

*

The next day Tim was on the northbound line, heading up to the Estates. The so-called Talent Express, where all the people who’d wanted to get tested for Talent ability had been forced to come before they’d started seeding recruitment offices. Even now it was considered a kind of pilgrimage that every Gothamite took at least once in their lives.

Tim wished he could figure out how he felt about it. When they crossed the Kane Bridge into Estate grounds, he could see acres of green, dotted with forests and lakes outside the train windows. He remembered the regret that lingered the most when he’d struggled to settle into his new life in the Linears had been the lack of space; being forever jostled by the crush, at the mercy of what flashes of memory or thought he constantly picked up. The Linears had been good for his self-control in their own way, but Tim had missed the space, perhaps if only because the loss was clear cut, with no murky emotional tangles. He’d been free to simply miss it, with no added complications.

Still, the swathe of green, while dearly missed, now felt vast and uncomfortable. After living cheek-to-jowl for so long, Tim could understand the resentment some people felt for the Estates better, for eating up what could be more living space for others who were in desperate need of it, even though he knew that Talents really did need that space.

All too soon the train pulled up at the terminal, the sprawling visitors centre that encompassed the museum and the convention centre, and the huge office block that was Testing and Intake. It was a Bruce Wayne special, shot through with huge holo-displays and Grecian stone aesthetics with no expense spared.

North of it, miles and miles distant, where no one without special permission was allowed to go, was the Manor, the ancestral stronghold of the Waynes. Various residences and academies were scattered distantly in the green, but the Manor was and remained a private residence, accessible only by a few.

Tim wasn’t sure if he had that access anymore. If they’d been sensible and followed security protocols like they should have done, his profile should have been yanked. Unwilling to risk causing a fuss if that was the case, Tim squared his shoulders and headed for the Intake Centre. There would be someone there that could contact the Waynes, or at least, the head office. Hell, Tim had been intimately involved in the day-to-day in Intake when he was here; it was likely being manned by someone who remembered him personally.

It sure was.

The TIM! Hit him like a sledgehammer, even with his shields up and engaged. “Holy sh*t, ex-boyfriend, where the hell did you come from?” Stephanie Brown shouted.

“Steph? Why are you working In-urk!” Tim was summarily yanked all the way over the counter with a touch-telekinetic assisted lift from Steph’s hand and smothered in a huge hug (thankfully not Talent assisted, because she would have broken his bones). “Arg, Steph! I’m happy to see you, but what the hell?”

“What the hell me? What the hell you, ex-boyfriend!” Steph retorted to him semi-furiously. “I got back from training one day to get told that you’d taken off and no one could find you! Nine damn months, Boy Blunder, and what, I don’t rate a comm call or a message or a f*cking holo-card?” She let go of him.

“Um,” Tim eyes darted around the atrium where there were always at least a few dozen people hanging around. They were drawing stares.

Steph noticed. “Oh, fine, come on.” She grabbed him by the arm and more or less dragged him out of the atrium and deep into the testing area, picking one of the empty exam rooms with its requisite Goosegg set-up at random. She slammed and locked the door, before turning to him, arms crossed. “Well?”

Tim shrugged. “I don’t know what to tell you, Steph. I had to leave. I had to. I couldn’t stand it anymore.” He hopped up on an exam table, drawing his knees to his chest. “It felt like I couldn’t breathe.”

Steph softened a fraction, but she still looked angry. “Okay, I get wanting to get away from B and the Demon Brat, I even get wanting to get away from Dick and his weaponized obliviousness, but Tim,” Steph glared at him, some of the hurt starting to show. “Why didn’t you come to me? I know we didn’t end things very well, but I thought we were still friends.”

Tim hesitated. “Steph,” he said slowly. “I didn’t think… we were exactly in a position to share secrets anymore.”

The instant he said it he regretted it, watching her face fall and turn red. The jab had been unintentional and uncalled for. During the dissolution of their relationship they’d both done some pretty sh*tty things to one another, just like all dumbass teenagers do when the world doesn’t go the way they expect. It had been humiliating to have Steph broadcasting things he’d told her in confidence to the world at large, but he’d used his psychometry and touch telepathy to cross all sorts of lines too. Teenage drama was epic enough on its own; add Talent and a shady interpretation of ethics to the mix, and you were lucky if all it turned into was a total catastrophe.

Steph swore up and down she hadn’t done it intentionally. It was probably true. Tim couldn’t have said the same about his own actions, which had been as coldly calculated as everything else he did, including officially citing her for ethics violations with the public oversight board, a black mark on her record that would take years to erase. She had every right to be mad at him for that; as CEO he’d let a lot of bigger teenage Talent infractions get handled in house.

“That wasn’t… I didn’t mean it like that,” Tim told her hastily. “I forgave you ages ago. I hope you forgive me for the sh*t I pulled too. It’s just… we never saw each other anymore,” Tim pointed out sadly. “I didn’t know what was going on with your training. You seemed really happy under Babs at the Clocktower,” Tim shrugged. “I didn’t think I had the right to unload my problems on you.”

“What the f*ck is that bullsh*t?” Steph snapped at him. “I would have been there for you. I’m not that sh*tty a friend! I’d have helped you if I’d known about it! God, you’re just like Bruce; always playing so close to your chest, never letting anyone in! sh*t, are you really that addicted to being lonely and misunderstood? It’s almost a fetish for you!”

“I know!” Tim snapped back, a nerve unexpectedly hit. “I never ask for help! It’s a problem, okay? I was raised by a f*cking AI and my parents didn’t even come to face me when they gave me up; they just signed a form and dumped me like a broken holo-display on the side of Bruce Wayne’s road! And he didn’t even want me either! So forgive me for getting the idea that help with no strings attached doesn’t happen for people like me!”

“Oh, so poor little Timmy fixes everyone else’s problems and silently stews in his resentment even though he won’t let anyone fix his?” Steph asked angrily. “You’re a total hypocrite!”

“Hey, you were happy enough to take advantage of being the CEO’s girlfriend when it suited you, Miss Executive Band Account holder! Extremely happy! Just like all the rest of the piranhas gnawing away endlessly at whatever I gave them, never stopping to notice I was dying inside! A bunch of f*cking Primes no less!”

Steph gaped at him, then deflated. “I… “ She looked horribly guilty, like she’d thought a lot about that in the last year they’d been apart.

Tim deflated too, pinching his nose. “Look, I didn’t come here to fight with you. I’m glad to see you. Can’t I just be glad to see you? Can’t you just be happy to see me back?”

“I am,” Steph retorted staunchly. “I really, really am. I just… I lay awake at nights wondering why you didn’t trust me enough to come to me. Was I really that terrible in your eyes? Did you think I’d be petty about it and run off to Bruce?”

“What? No,” Tim was taken aback. “Of course not. Steph, why do you keep acting like this whole thing was planned? Like I timed it down to a moment and had my exit strategies all numbered. If it had been, yeah, I absolutely would have come to you, no question. But it wasn’t,” Tim shrugged under her surprised look. “Seriously. I was standing there at that crime scene. Damian was saying nothing he hadn’t already said worse. I’d had to cold read far worse scenes even. I just… I don’t know,” Tim sighed. “It just hit me that I didn’t want to be there anymore. I had four meetings to get to after fieldwork, I had reports to look over and I was taking an Intake orientation tour round that day. I woke up that morning fully ready to do all of it and when I was standing there it just hit me that I’d rather die than do any of it. I’d rather die than stay one more second.”

“You nearly did die.”

Tim looked up at the uncharacteristic smallness of Steph’s voice. “Jesus Tim,” she looked like she was about to cry. “You almost did die, you f*cking idiot! The only sign we’ve had for months that you might be alive was a f*cking blood trail out of a disaster zone! We couldn’t find you! You almost died and for all we knew you were dead and the last time I saw you I was telling you how much I hated you and I,” she surged up, grabbed him and shook him. “I had to live with that.”

He hugged her. He felt remorse for the pain he’d caused her and all the rest of the people he’d left in the dust, with no answers, nothing to do but wait and worry. That had never factored into his considerations for more than a fleeting thought this entire time and he knew that made him a selfish asshole. Hell, if any of his family had disappeared for six months and then been MIA after a major cataclysm for three months after that – as good as that – he’d be pissed at them too.

Still, when he drew back, he had to own his selfishness. “I know I hurt you and I cut you off and I’m sorry,” he prefaced. “But I couldn’t stay, Steph. That first moment, when I sent back the skimmer and sent all the paperwork and then walked into the Linears with just the clothes on my back? I was terrified and ignorant and I already missed you… but that’s the first time I remember ever really being free. Free of expectations, free of burdens, free of pressure. I couldn’t go back.”

Steph gave him a long look. “Wow,” she said at last. “It really must have been bad if it made you run off without even a plan.” She seemed sympathetic. “You literally never do that. Still, at least a holocard would have been nice. We worried about you. I,” she corrected. “Worried about you. A lot.”

“Knowing Babs like you do, would you have risked it, in my shoes?” Tim asked.

She had to allow that. “It was… kinda crazy around here without you, you know,” she told him. “Like, I’ve never seen it like that before.”

Tim frowned. “There were more than enough people to take over my duties…” he started.

“No, you doofus,” Steph rolled her eyes. “I don’t mean everything collapsed, although the first week was hell on wheels when they realized just how much stuff was on your calendar to get done. I mean the family. Forget war mode, all of them were straight up panicking.”

“What? No way,” Tim snorted. “They’re Discipline trained. They don’t panic.”

“Are you kidding me? B lost his damn mind,” Steph insisted. “Seriously! Well, I mean, not at first. They were mostly just calling around for the first few hours, you know. They didn’t tell anyone what happened, I found out all this later. I guess they thought you’d come back when you’d cooled off but when night fell and you still hadn’t called in or come back… f*ck, suddenly it was like the world was ending. B called the police, he called every pre-cog and finder on the register, he had all the psychometrists out on the scene trying to track you down. It was a f*cking madhouse. Everyone was on call, Tim. Everyone.”

Tim gaped. “All that? I hadn’t even been missing for a day!”

“Right! And they didn’t stop, even after they hit the dead end at the Linears. Bruce has been breathing down the necks of the finders and pre-cogs every day since you’ve been gone. He even called on the Jerhatten Institute to help, and you know how much he hates asking ap Owens for anything. Almost as much as she does him,” Steph snorted. “Oh, and he benched Damian. Like, full on banned him from field work. We definitely heard about that!” she grimaced. “At least, we definitely heard the demon brat’s response to it, and so did the people on the space station, I bet.”

Tim winced. He could imagine how well that had gone down. “This doesn’t make any sense,” he frowned as he thought about it. “I mean, I get they would be looking for me, but to put the whole Institute on Defcon because of one teenager who ran away of his own free will?”

Steph blew out a breath. “Look, you moron,” she grabbed him by the tunic front. “It is really so hard to grasp that we f*cking care about you?” She shook him for emphasis.

“No, of course not!” Tim denied. “It just seems a little disproportionate. I mean, I’d run away but it wasn’t like I was dying. Damian hadn’t had his vision then; or, maybe he hadn’t told the others about it yet. I know he kept it from them for a little while.”

Steph abruptly let go of him, lips pursed. “Not a damn clue, but it was really f*cking weird. You’ll need to get the whys and wherefores out of Bruce, because he was the one leading the charge. We all knew there was something fishy going on, but he wouldn’t admit to sh*t. Even Babs couldn’t make him talk… although…” Steph considered. “I think she suspected there was more to it than met the eye. Speaking of which…”

“They’re already here, aren’t they?” Tim asked resignedly.

“Hey, don’t look at me,” Steph replied. “I’m pretty sure Babs would have known you were on the train here long before it arrived. I’m kinda amazed you made it to Intake without getting mobbed.”

Tim sighed.

“Oh, suck it up,” Steph told him, not without sympathy. “You were the one to leave and make the rest of us fret and worry for months. Not even a holo-card, remember? Of course they’ll want to see you.”

Tim accepted that, since it was kind of true. He unenthusiastically squared his shoulders and went out to meet his fate.

They’d brought the big guns, too. “Alfred?” Tim stopped once he reached the atrium to stare at the familiar face. It was indeed Alfred, in his excessively neatly pressed and incredibly old-fashioned suit, looking greyer and older than Tim could remember him being before.

His smile was warm enough. “Master Tim,” he said. “It’s a pleasure to have you back with us again.”

Tim couldn’t do anything but stride over and give the man a hug, dignity be damned. He’d missed Alfred. He carefully tried not to pick up anything from the older man when he touched him, but he did get a flash of surprise, confusion anyway, along with a snippet of thought that went. That’s odd. Where is…?

“Yeah, I know,” Tim gave a lopsided smile. “I don’t have a spleen anymore.” Alfred’s healing hands, a Talent close cousin to psychometry, would have picked up the discrepancy in his body.

“What?!” Dick yelped.

Tim belatedly realized that the atrium had been cleared of other visitors and the other members of the family were dotted about the room, being aggressively nonchalant.

Well, most. Damian wasn’t there, which wasn’t a surprise. Bruce wasn’t either, which was.

“What do you mean you don’t have a spleen anymore?” Dick demanded, marching over. “Why don’t you have a spleen anymore?!”

“Dick,” Babs was the very essence of wry patience as she floated up on her one-of-a-kind skimmer chair. “You remember what I told you about doing this slowly and carefully? There was a presentation and everything.”

Tim had no time to react to that because he was suddenly tackle-hugged by Cass, who had shadowed up behind him without so much as a psychic ping to give her away. TIM! My Tim!

“Hey Cass,” Tim squeezed her tightly, burying his face in her hair. There weren’t words for how much he’d missed her. He’d missed Steph too, but his and Steph’s relationship was tangled up in a lot of old regrets and things unspoken. Cass he’d simply missed; a dull ache that never faded.

Glad to see you! Cass sent to him. You’re… very hard to talk to now. Her nose wrinkled, like it was more funny than annoying.

Tim smiled. Typical Cass. They’d yet to find a classification that could even begin to explain the depth of her empathy, or how she was able to use it. Her kinetic abilities were none too shabby, but it was the sheer, world-bestriding empathy that made her powerful. “Yeah, I know,” he tugged on one red tendril hanging down over his face. “It’s the dye. Neat huh? Talent-nullification microbes.”

“What now?” Babs came forward, all curiosity. “There’s a hair dye that can block—” she stopped as her automatic scan hit Tim’s static field. He was pretty sure that if Babs were to bring her not inconsiderable power to bear she’d push through it, but to be able to block even a simple scan of hers was no small feat. “Wow, kiddo!” she grinned. “I am impressed! Is there more?”

“It’s all over the place in the Linears,” Tim shrugged. “I think that’s the other reason it's so hard to scan down there. They had to find their own ways to keep rogue Talents out of their heads and skull caps are expensive.”

“Tell you what,” Babs grinned. “I’ll reinstate your record on the Institute bank if you can get me a sample. That’s fascinating, and I can think of more than a few ‘paths that would need it.”

Tim smiled sadly. “No thanks, Babs. I mean, I can get you a sample but… I don’t really want to work for the Institute anymore.”

The atmosphere changed considerably. Tim could see their stances deflate ever so slightly, the muscle on the sides of their eyes tighten a little bit more. Everyone except Cass, but then he wasn’t going to bet good money on being able to read her with any degree of accuracy.

“Tim,” Dick said quietly when the silence stretched awkwardly. “You know you can stay here, right?”

“Dick,” Babs said unhappily. “We talked about this.”

“Yes, I know,” Dick ran his fingers through his hair. “I know you’re an adult now and everything,” he told Tim. “You’re free to live wherever you want. I’m not saying you have to. But… you know you can live here. You don’t even have to live with us,” Dick allowed, looking miserable about it. “At the Manor, I mean. There's a lot of space, there’s residences all over the Estates. You’ve got options. You don’t… you don’t have to live in some poky one-room or a shelter cot in the Linears just because… we haven’t earned your trust back yet. I know that would have been hell on earth with your psychometry. Really, Tim,” Dick held out his hand and then remembered himself, folding back meekly. “You don’t have to even see us at all, if you really don’t want to.”

Tim winced internally. This whole thing was unspeakably excruciating, but he only had himself to blame. It was easy enough to wrap himself in bitter self-righteousness at a distance; here, facing them, the months of strain and worry writ large on their faces, he couldn’t pretend to himself that he hadn’t been missed. He couldn’t neatly square away the consequences of his actions.

But Dick was right. He was an adult now. He was, hopefully, a wiser adult; one who didn’t bury his needs under work, and one who was not quite so compulsively eager to please others, even at his own expense. “It’s not about that, Dick,” Tim shook his head. “I’m not angry anymore. I don’t want to be angry at you. You’re right, it’s going to take time to regain trust, but that’s not why I’m not coming back here just yet. I’m happy, Dick,” Tim confessed. “I’m happy out there. Yes, I was happy here too, but it was always conditional on something. There was always some job I had to get done, some accomplishment I had to achieve so that I could justify my existence. I don’t blame you,” he said hastily as they all opened their mouths. “That’s mostly on me. I spent my whole life trying to prove my worth. Courtesy of my parents, I suppose. I didn’t know when to stop, didn’t know that I could ask to stop. I guess we all kind of fell into bad habits with each other there, didn’t we? For a bunch of psychics, we sure have a lot of communication problems,” he added ruefully.

The pressure in the atmosphere decreased slightly from the levity, but Tim could see the questions in their eyes. The Institute was luxurious, spacious and fully equipped with every amenity. Thanks to the finance pool from their ludicrous consultancy fees with insurance companies and the more-than-generous capital from the Wayne Family Trust, they wanted for nothing here. At the risk of casting aspersions, there was no finer place to live just about anywhere in the world, let alone in Gotham.

But one thing Tim had learned on his journey was that fulfilment was a tricky beast to track. “I know you don’t understand this,” he said softly. “I don’t know if I can really explain it to any of you. You’ve all always been so sure of who you are. It was only after I left this place, left all the protection behind, that I really got the chance to find out who I am. Good and bad, right and wrong. I’m still not sure I know it all yet. And until I do, I can’t come back here and be truly happy. It won’t be forever,” he surprised himself by meaning it. “But I need more time. Besides,” he gave a brittle smile. “Seven straight years of being the Good One means I’m due a little rebellion. I think I’ve earned that.” He looked Dick square on the eye. “Don’t you?”

Dick looked at him for a long moment before nodding, a faint smile relaxing the corners of his lips. “I guess you have, Timmy.”

“Always know you are welcome here, Master Tim.” Alfred came forward to lay his hands on Tim’s shoulders. “There will always be a place waiting for you whenever you feel the need to return.”

Tim felt himself relaxing finally under the older man’s obvious approval. “Thanks Alfred.”

“While I do hate to break into this lovely reunion,” the butler added apologetically. “Master Wayne does wish to speak with you.”

Tim felt his stomach contract slightly, his newfound peace shattered once again. “Yeah, I know.”

Alfred squeezed his shoulders reassuringly. “Please come with me.”

Chapter 23: RECALIBRATE

Chapter Text

Tim had been sure he’d be on a skimmer and heading for the Manor, which was miles distant from the visitors area. It was one of the most secluded areas in the Estates. But events proved him wrong; Alfred led him up the cobbled road through the tree lined park behind the Intake building to the Headquarters, where the real work of the Institute happened.

Tim was grateful for the brief walk through the green. It was good to see trees again and it helped him calm his nerves a bit, something he was a hundred percent sure was intentional on Alfred’s part.

“Alfred,” Tim asked quietly. “How’s Jason doing?”

There was an infinitesimal pause in Alfred’s stride, telling for Alfred, before he replied. “He’s doing quite well, Master Tim. Very well indeed, as a matter of fact,” Alfred’s voice was rich with emotion. “It is good to have him home.”

Tim sat with those words for a while, feeling like he was imploding and exploding at the same time. “I’m glad. The others didn’t even mention him, that’s all.”

Alfred stopped and turned. “I believe, young Master, that Master Dick and the others wished to convey how happy they were to see you. They did not mention Master Jason because they did not want to give the false impression that they were merely there to thank you. It is surely not outside the realm of possibly that they missed you terribly,” he added dryly.

Tim grimaced, feeling himself flush. Alfred did have an unclassifiable Talent for hitting upon certain truths with deadly accuracy. “I’m sorry, Alfred. For leaving the way I did. I just… when the time came that I should have gone back, or I should have at least called in, I…” Tim couldn’t explain it. That crushing sensation within him that if he went back to the Institute, beaten and contrite, that he really was just a kid and would always be the kid. The weak one, the defective one. The disappointment. The not-Prime all the Primes protected. He’d only realized days and weeks afterwards that he’d have died rather than go back. It had taken him that long to interrogate his own unhappiness.

“You left, as all children leave,” Alfred replied, not missing a beat. “Before anyone was ready for it; either you or your family. But that’s life, Master Tim. You go out before you are ready because the process of adulthood is all about learning to be ready. You flew the nest rather earlier than the others, but you always were independent, always trusted to do for yourself and learn for yourself without help. If that was the trait Master Bruce chose to foster in you more than the others, well then, he only has himself to blame for the consequences. I told him as much.”

Tim stared at him, genuinely shocked.

“You are a capable young man, Master Tim,” Alfred replied to his gaze. “You have much to offer the world. I had no doubt whatsoever that you’d make something of yourself. I had no inkling it would mean you brought one of my lost children home ,” Alfred smiled. “But as I said, you have always been capable. Even of the impossible, it seems.”

Tim lunged forward to give the man a hug. Suddenly, it was worth every discomfort, every confrontation, every torture, if it meant Tim just got to hear those words. It meant as much to hear it from Alfred as it would have to hear it from Bruce. Bruce might invite them in, but Alfred was the one who made them stay.

“You have gained much, Master Tim,” the old man murmured. “Much more than you lost by leaving.”

Tim felt a glass shard twist inside his chest, the constant dull ache there briefly sharp as a knife. Almost without meaning to, his eyes flicked towards the Manor. But he said nothing. Alfred didn’t know what Tim had lost. “Is he really okay, though? Jason, I mean?” Tim asked, withdrawing from the hug. “He was in pretty bad shape after, uh … the last time I saw him.”

“He still has a lot of therapy to go through,” Alfred chose his words with care. “He doesn’t like being in the coma, but he will make a meaningful recovery.”

Tim felt himself go white. “Bruce put him back in a coma?” His voice came out shrill. “But the triggers are gone! He doesn’t need to be in a coma!”

“Ah, perhaps I put that badly,” Alfred patted his shoulders reassuringly. “It’s not a permanent state. You might rightly call it a cycle of comas; he goes under, then is slowly pulled out. It’s the least traumatic way we could think of to regrow his neural pathways and heal some of the damage to his conscious mind. Five years in a persistent vegetative state is not an easy thing to recover from, even with all the stimulation equipment that was being used on him.”

Right, right. Tim started breathing again, feeling like an idiot. He knew that. He’d even researched it, way back when getting Jason’s body out of the hospital had been a contingency he’d had to consider. You couldn’t go from that level of unconsciousness to awake, all cylinders firing in one go. That was next to impossible; moreover, it was dangerous and potentially permanently damaging on a fragile psyche. The Joker had done it, but the Joker hadn’t cared about going crazy, had he?

“He’s not alone in there, is he?” Tim asked anxiously. “He was all alone, all that time and—”

“I assure you, Master Tim,” Alfred cut through his anxious babbling calmly. “He is never alone. There’s always a telepath or one of the family sitting with him. I believe he might be quite sick of company by now,” Alfred’s voice was wry, but his eyes were on Tim’s face keenly.

Tim felt a blush rise. He’d probably just given away far more than he’d meant to. “I’m glad he’s okay,” he mumbled lamely, not looking the butler in the eyes.

“Thanks to you, Master Tim,” Alfred said kindly, gesturing ahead of him. “Shall we? Master Bruce awaits.”

Right, Tim grimaced. And then there was that.

*

Whatever calm Tim had found from Alfred’s welcome benediction and the even more happy news that Jason really was recovering, eroded like dust in a windstorm the second he crossed into the HQ. This complex – massive, sprawling and gleaming – had been his, in a sense, for the years leading up to his departure. He knew the people in it, how all the cogs connected, how everything they did here kept Talents safe, employed and supported.

It felt weird to walk in knowing he wasn’t the boss anymore.

He knew he was attracting stares – you wouldn’t have to be a Talent to sense them. But he kept his chin up and his gaze unwaveringly at Alfred’s back as the butler cut a swathe through the curious gazes, imperturbable.

Tim felt his anxiety climb at the same rate as the elevator up to the executive suites. He was, in a way, grateful to meet Bruce here rather than at the Manor, since this was a more neutral ground, but he couldn’t help wondering what it all meant.

Look at it this way, Tim reasoned with himself dryly. It’s not like you can’t escape at a moment's notice anyway. His teleportation practice had been slow, careful work over the last couple of months, hampered by his long recovery and general ill health, but he was reasonably confident in his ability to leave the building if anything went egregiously sideways.

But that was the worry. That was where his nerves were set alight. He didn’t know how the hell this was going to go.

He was, he admitted grimly, going to go in anyway. He wanted answers.

The initial phase of the ordeal – meeting Bruce in the flesh – was reassuringly anticlimactic. The man was waiting in the anteroom that connected up the various single executive offices. Tim’s office was – or had been – off to the left. He wondered if they’d cleaned it out, or left it to gather dust.

“Here we are,” Alfred announced, impervious to the thick tension in the air as Tim and Bruce first laid eyes on each other. “Master Tim, as requested, sir. I shall leave you to it. Would you like some refreshments?”

Bruce said, “Yes, thank you, Alfred,” in the same moment that Tim said, “No, I won’t be staying, thanks.”

They both stared at each other, the awkwardness factor rising steadily.

Alfred, wisely, bowed without obeying either and left.

Bruce sighed. “Please come with me,” he gestured to his own office, ushering Tim inside.

It was largely unchanged from what Tim remembered. Same old-fashioned wooden desk with holo-screen built in at no expense spared, same holo-wall showing data from the latest finance statistics to the latest vision reports from the pre-cogs, same shelves covered in gewgaws and bottles, meant to give the false impression that Brucie Wayne was a bit of a magpie who collected shiny things. Bruce had spent an entire lifetime cultivating ways to not frighten people with his godlike levels of Talent, most of which boiled down to acting far stupider than he really was. People will more readily accept a bumbling god over a focused one.

It occurred to Tim that so much of Bruce was an act that maybe even Bruce himself wasn’t quite sure where the act stopped and where the real Bruce began.

“Sit down, Tim,” Bruce told him, taking a seat at his desk. “You look tired. Are you feeling alright? Are you sure we can’t get you anything?”

Tim blinked at the barrage of questions. “Bruce,” he said slowly. “What am I doing here?”

Bruce grimaced and sat back, some of the weird tension that gripped him dissolving slightly. “Straight to the point, as usual,” he observed ruefully.

“I’ve got nothing against small talk, I just think we’re a bit beyond it at this point,” Tim replied defensively. “You said you had things to tell me.”

“You got my message, then?”

“Yeah, I saw it,” Tim nodded, hoping he wasn’t conveying as much confusion as he felt about it. “Half the Net’s probably seen it and I’m sure almost everyone in Gotham is talking about it. It’s not often the Waynes are the ones airing their dirty laundry in public,” he pointed out, because that was the weirdest thing about it. Bruce Wayne protected his privacy like a dragon protected its hoard. To put himself out there like that was wildly out of character for him.

“I don’t care who else saw it,” Bruce told him. “I cared that you saw it. I… I meant every word in it. Every word, Tim,” he insisted.

Tim shifted uncomfortably, saying nothing.

Bruce sighed and sat back. “I just can’t fathom it. I don’t understand how you got it into your head that I thought less of you for not being a Prime. And I’m not even sure that’s true anymore, but that’s a separate matter for another time. Tim,” he said earnestly. “You’re my son. You’ve always been my son. It wouldn’t have mattered to be if you’d had no Talent at all, that would still be true. I don’t understand why you’d ever think otherwise.”

“Because I went off the evidence,” Tim’s voice came out unexpectedly sharp. “For three years, Bruce, you trained me and helped me with school work and put me to bed at night. I didn’t know anything about what a real parent was supposed to do, but that seemed about as close as I would ever experience. But then the Prime diagnostic changed and I wasn’t considered a Prime anymore,” Tim shrugged. “And then Damian showed up. It was only days after that everything started to change. Suddenly, I couldn’t train anymore. Then I couldn’t go out into the field. I couldn’t join you on missions. I couldn’t even leave Gotham, not even into space, you know, that place that I always dreamed about going, that you knew how badly I wanted to see.” He tried his best, but some lingering bitterness over that whole fiasco made itself known in his voice. “You didn’t even hug me anymore. But Damian? He got all those things from you. Dick even gave him Robin. I, apparently, was only good for shovelling paper in your eyes. All of it happened after Damian and after the diagnostic. They were literally the only things that changed, because I was working as hard as I ever did. What the hell else conclusion did you expect me to draw?”

Bruce stared at him. Then he sagged, wearily running his hands over his face. “Tim, that’s not… I… I understand why you might have come to that answer,” Bruce allowed wretchedly. “I wish you’d told me this, how you were feeling. I would have—”

“Lied?” Tim asked him, voice a naked blade.

Bruce winced. “I would have talked to you. I would have told you… it had nothing to do with the diagnostic at all. Damian… is involved, but only tangentially, not in the way you’re thinking. I wasn’t choosing him over you. I would never do that. It had nothing to do with your Talent, it had nothing whatsoever to do with my love for you. That never changed.”

“But something did, though,” Tim cried, exasperated. “For f*ck’s sake, Bruce, can you stop dancing around this? I’ve done hard labour, I’ve reinvented micro kinesis, walked through Crime Alley, survived assassins, taken on the Joker and brought your son back to life! Can you please stop treating me like I can’t f*cking handle sh*t? I’m not f*cking fragile! I was never f*cking fragile! You once trusted me with your life, for goodness sake!”

Bruce gaped at him. Then he blew out a breath, eyes resigned. “You’re right. I keep doing that, don’t I?” He sat back, rubbing his temples. “I’m sorry, Tim. I promise, I’m not doing it on purpose.”

Tim felt his annoyance deflate a little. He’d told himself that he’d at least give Bruce a fair hearing. It was easy to believe, living alone, overworked and stressed in the Linears, that Bruce’s actions had been purely selfish. Given time and space over the last three months to really digest the matter, to really and truly come to terms with Bruce coming down off his pedestal, Tim had been forced to reckon with the fact that Bruce hadn’t put himself on it in the first place. Tim acknowledged he had a disciple’s blind spot where his mentor was concerned. The truth, therefore, was likely far more complicated than it seemed.

Bruce took a breath. “Do you remember,” he asked softly. “When Damian first came here and you offered to spar with him that first time?”

Tim blinked. “He put me in the infirmary, Bruce,” he replied dryly. “Yes, I remember that. Vividly. It’s hard to believe I was so ready to welcome the kid, once.”

Bruce winced slightly. “Yes, well. Damian came to us with a lot of problems, both induced by others and… personality wise. I was caught off guard by how hard he went for you. You have no idea how terrified I was, running with you down to the infirmary. You were in cardiac arrest. I was sure he’d flat out killed you.”

“Commotio cordis,” Tim shrugged. “He nearly did. Bruce, I don’t understand…”

“Wait,” Bruce held up a hand. “I’m getting there. We got you to the infirmary and got your heart going again and it was fine. But… it also wasn’t,” Bruce’s face folded into the grim lines of Batman on the field, faced with difficult and inescapable facts.

Tim felt a thrill of unease crawl steadily up his spine.

“We did an in-depth scan and found… you could call it a flaw, I suppose,” Bruce told him. “There was a defect in your heart. It was very small, not something that would be picked up by a surface scan. It was… genetic,” he admitted. “Your parents’ offspring designer wasn’t… well, whoever they were didn’t check their work very well.”

“… What?” Tim’s voice came out tinny and strange to his ears.

“I won’t go into the myriad of failures that led to such a defect slipping past the usual neonatal screenings,” Bruce continued, watching Tim carefully. “It hardly matters. The fact was, your heart had the potential, not a huge one but not a small one either, to blow out and just stop. In an ordinary person this wouldn’t have necessarily been a huge deal, it would have been manageable. But for a Talent, still growing, whose body would suffer greater physical exertions because of their gifts… it was an active danger.”

Tim grappled with the sheer weight of this revelation. “What… why didn’t you tell me?” he demanded when he could finally coherently speak.

Bruce looked heartbroken. “I wanted to. Very badly. But I was… I was concerned about it becoming general knowledge because of Damian. His upbringing in Ra’s Al Ghul’s cult had left him so twisted up. He’d been conditioned and reconditioned, brainwashed if you will, to believe in the rightness of his superiority. He had no context for empathy, not even a dim grasp of ethical principles. I worried that if the defect were to become known to him, he would use it to destroy you. He… he had no concept of right versus wrong when he came here, Tim,” Bruce pleaded for understanding. “And it was hardest on you because you were the target of his anger. He’d been telepathically conditioned to eliminate all other possible heirs to the Wayne fortune. Ra’s Al Ghul might speak grandly about new world orders but he’ll take the money just like everyone else. Damian couldn’t find out about the defect, or he would have found a way to make you exert yourself, make your heart fail. He wouldn’t be able to help it. He wouldn’t have even understood the ramifications of it. His conditioning was really that profound.”

Tim got up from his chair to pace angrily. “I’m so glad,” he said in a low voice. “That you took Damian’s circ*mstances into consideration.”

Bruce flinched at his tone. “I know how it sounds, Tim,” he said beseechingly. “But it really wasn’t about him. I was trying to save you. Your safety was uppermost in my thoughts. Damian is a Prime-level telepath with no ethical comprehension. He slipped into other people’s minds, everyone’s minds, without any concern for privacy. I was the only one he couldn’t read. So I deleted the scans from the medical record and everything else that might have recorded it. I was the only one who knew. Damian would never be able to break through my nulling Talent. I just thought…” Bruce ran his fingers through his hair. “It would be for a short while, just until we could break through Damian’s conditioning, so that he no longer saw you as a threat. Then it would be safe to tell you.”

“And what, that hasn’t happened yet?” Tim asked incredulously. “After three f*cking years? What about the rest of it? What about the goddamn conditioning you did to me, you giant f*cking hypocrite!”

Bruce looked wretched. “Tim I…. you don’t understand, just because you were safe from Damian didn’t mean you were well. The defect was always there. Your heart could have stopped at any moment, from any kind of exertion you put on it. It didn’t even have to be accessing your Talent, it could have been anything. I… I panicked,” Bruce admitted. “Every time you got onto the mats to spar, every time you and Damian fought, every time Dick or I would run you through your paces, you were putting pressure on your heart I wasn’t sure it could stand. I lived in fear day after day that one day you would just drop and we’d never get you back. So… I wound back your training. I thought that would assuage my anxiety about it but you and Damian catalyzed one other. You were so determined to not let him leave you in the dust. You started pressing harder into your Talent-training instead to try to keep up with him and that was another stressor on your heart and then you ended up back in the infirmary over it and… and my heart couldn’t take it. I knew you wouldn’t stop, even if I asked you to. I don’t blame you,” Bruce added unhappily. “I understand now what your view of the whole matter was, how much it must have looked like Damian was replacing you. I’m sure Damian’s attitude didn’t help. You were determined to prove yourself and I was so frightened you’d kill yourself doing it, Tim. I just…” Bruce looked away, mouth twisted unhappily. “I did the only thing I could at the time to keep you from hurting yourself.”

“By crippling me!” Tim retorted angrily.

“Temporarily,” Bruce stressed. “It was only ever going to be temporary. I was never planning to keep you from your full potential, Tim. Not from travelling or field work either. It just… it wasn’t safe . If your heart failed you on the Estates, well, at least here we had stasis chambers and all the medical assistance we would need. Your odds were good, if you stayed here. The further out you went, even if it was just into Gotham, for field work, the lower your odds got. I just… my only intention was to keep you close, just for a little while, just until we could fix the defect. I had to… restrict you. I swear I wasn’t trying to hold you back, Tim. I just needed you to wait,” Bruce’s eyes pleaded with him. “Just a little while. I gave you all the freedoms I could, the most challenging work I could find. You’ve always had such an amazing mind, such excellent organizational skills. I thought you’d blossom into yourself running the Institute. And I wasn’t wrong. You were the youngest and most successful CEO any Institute could claim. I was so proud of you, of everything you accomplished.”

Tim was struck mute by the sheer nerve of that declaration. “Really?” he said when he could find his voice, or any voice. “Because that’s fresh off the TRI-D stream to me.”

Bruce winced at his tone. “I know that I should have said it more. I know that,” he looked haunted. “You took on a lot of burdens when you should have been able to go out and have fun. I didn’t want to keep you from everything. It just wasn’t safe. I didn’t want you to get hurt.”

Tim went silent for a while. A part of him wanted to refute this whole ridiculous situation, but a lot of little signs and signals were suddenly blazing brightly in his mind. Bruce keeping him too busy in the office to go on fun runs anymore. Bruce getting antsy every time he had to go into Gotham for yet another weary round of lobbying, always insisting he came straight back. His persistent chest pains while he was living in the Linears and all his other adventures, which had always happened when he’d overexerted himself. God it was all so clear now. All of it. “The mandatory medical scans,” Tim said, voice as bitter as winter winds.

Bruce’s brow wrinkled. “What?”

“No wonder I couldn’t go to the space station,” Tim ground out. “In-depth medical scans were mandatory pre-flight. They’d have caught it, wouldn’t they?”

Bruce’s face was a picture of remorse. He nodded. “I know it broke your heart, being told you couldn’t go.” He looked devastated. “It broke mine to have to order you not to. I should have told you then.”

“Why didn’t you?” Tim asked, voice thin and tight. “Why the f*ck didn’t you? You told me I’d have my chance! Why compound all your others sins with a f*cking lie like that?” He slammed his fists on Bruce’s desk. “I’ll never forgive you for that!”

“It wasn’t a lie!” Bruce replied earnestly. “It wasn’t! We were working on fixing the defect! I handled it badly, I know. Tim please sit down! Please, just, try to breathe and stay calm. Please,” Bruce pleaded, looking genuinely alarmed.

Tim realized he was halfway into a panic attack, leaning furiously over Bruce’s desk, his short nails digging into the antique wood. He was a boiling mess of emotions, all of them seething and transmuting too fast for him to parse them out. He sat back down, hands clenched around his knees, and tried to steady his breathing. “You said you should have told me then,” he said lowly when he could trust his voice again. “Why didn’t you?” The words were sharp and accusatory.

Bruce was watching him like a man watches a tightrope walker without a net. “I should have. I thought about it. I wanted to tell you, but we were so close, sweetheart, so close to fixing it! I didn’t want you to lose hope like… like you’re doing now,” he concluded, voice wavery and uncertain.

Tim choked out a bitter laugh.

“You wanted to go into space so badly. I didn’t want you to ever think you couldn’t, or wouldn’t, one day. I didn’t want you to think it would be never. I thought it would be easier if I had something tangible to show you, some plan or timeline we had for fixing the defect. Mark my words, Tim, the day the defect was fixed I’d have taken you into space personally, myself. You’d earned that. You’d more than earned it. Hell, it wasn’t something I thought needed to be earned. I thought it would be better to learn about the problem when we already had a solution in place. I know just telling you about it with no solution in sight would have devastated you. It would have destroyed your hopes and dreams and I… I couldn’t bring myself to do it unless I’d tried every other option.”

“Yeah, and that worked out so well, didn’t it?” The sarcasm was laced with chilly venom.

“I know. I was a fool,” Bruce agreed. “When we were standing there, having that screaming match over it, the first time I could ever remember you really, truly yelling at me, that was when I realized the depths of how unhappy you were being confined to the Institute. That being challenged mentally and kept busy wasn’t enough, not nearly enough, for you to be happy. I tried to find some other way. I started the space engineering program and said it was your baby, that you could design spacecraft for the Institute, remember? I thought that would buy me a little more grace, just that little bit more patience that I kept asking of you, because I only needed just a bit of extra time… but then you just handed it off to Damian,” Bruce was bewildered. “Like it was nothing.”

“A consolation prize,” Tim snapped. “Given out of guilt.”

Bruce grimaced but didn’t deny it. “That was when I knew,” he said heavily. “I wasn’t keeping you at arms length anymore. You were actively slipping away from me. I suppose I can’t blame you. You didn’t know why you were being excluded and you didn’t have the context to explain my… physical withdrawal. I couldn’t even hug you anymore,” Bruce said unhappily. “I hated that. But I was so frightened that your touch telepathy would pick up something of the truth. You were really the only one I’ve ever known able to even read me, even slightly, after all.” Bruce’s big hands clenched on the desktop. “And Damian was still so... so confused and spiteful. I couldn’t risk it.”

Tim blinked, because that was news to him.

Bruce sighed at his expression. “I asked too much of you, Tim. I presumed upon your trust and your kindness when I should have told you the truth. I know that now.” His face fell into sad lines. “For what it’s worth, when I realized the damage my actions had caused, I did try to fix it. I tried to give you some taste of space with the shipbuilding arm, but you rejected it. I tried taking over some of your duties at the Institute, I thought it would give you time to reconnect with your friends and peers, but you interpreted it as an indictment against your capabilities. You were so angry about it that I couldn’t make you understand it wasn’t that at all. I got so desperate I reinstated your field agent status. I knew how much you still missed going out. It was a risk but,” Bruce looked at his hands. “I thought as long as you were out there with me, then it would be fine, the concession would help ease some of your feelings of confinement. I guess we all know how that turned out, huh?” He slumped, the attempt at humour falling flat against Tim’s cold silence.

“You tried everything,” Tim said slowly. “Except tell me the truth.”

“I know,” Bruce nodded, voice coming out smaller than before. “I knew you’d be so hurt when you found out. I thought that if we could just… just get a treatment plan in place, then the blow might be softened, even just slightly. I don’t have any other explanation for you except that I was a… a coward. I didn’t want to face your anger. I just… I wanted to have something to show for it all.”

Tim sat in silence for a while. “So that’s it. After all of that pain, all the lies, all the gaslighting and violations,” he looked up at Bruce, eyes blazing. “And you’re still not f*cking sorry!”

“I am,” Bruce replied swiftly. “Tim, sweetheart, I am, more than anything! I’m sorry I let my fear control me and I’m so, so, sorry you ever went a second thinking that you weren’t a member of my family, a precious and important one. I’m sorry I didn’t see your unhappiness for what it truly was. That I didn’t let myself see it,” he admitted miserably. “Please just tell me how I can fix this,” he pleaded. “Whatever you want, whatever you need, please just tell me and I’ll do it. I’ll do anything to make this right.”

“Make this right?!” Tim snapped incredulously. “You took advantage of my trust to lock me in a f*cking cage!” he yelled, snapping to his feet.

“I couldn’t let you die!” Bruce retorted, rising too. “I’m sorry, I’m so sorry that you got hurt but I can’t apologize for saving your life Tim! You’re my son!” He held out his hands helplessly. “What else could I do?”

“Anything would have been better than what you did do!” Tim shouted. “Which was to push me away and leave me to work myself to death alone and not tell me,” Tim’s voice cracked and lost all force. “Not tell me what I did wrong. Why you didn’t love me anymore.”

Bruce fell back like Tim had just punched him. “Tim, I….”

“Nothing was keeping you from saying those words to me, Bruce,” Tim fired back over his shoulder at Bruce’s horrified expression. “ Nothing. Three f*cking years and you never said them to my face. Not once.”

He slammed the door behind him and fled, even as Bruce, white faced, desperately yelled at him to come back.

Chapter 24: REACTIVATE

Chapter Text

Tim didn’t think about where he was going. His main thought was away. He just had to get somewhere quiet, where he could think, where he could breathe. Somewhere away from people.

He ended up stumbling into the elevator and hitting the highest level he could get to. This turned out to be the rooftop garden on top of the HQ. The staff rarely came up here. It was mostly used for al fresco business meetings, where they could impress visitors by wining and dining them surrounded by the green vista of the Estates; a rare experience even to the wealthy.

Tim stumbled out of the elevator and onto the lush, verdant green grass next to the tables, trying not to throw up. He focused on his breathing.

He couldn’t believe this was happening. He’d known that he probably wouldn’t like the answer he got, but for all the ugly truths he’d been bracing for, this one was so far out of left field there was no way to cushion the shock.

Breathe, he told himself. Think about it after you breathe.

He did that, trying his hardest to ignore his (apparently defective!) heart jackhammering inside his chest. He tried to pick apart the tangled feeling inside him, but the hurt was so snared in the anger, the shock tightly knotted up with the fear that was a helpless morass he couldn’t hope to make sense of.

Funnily enough, it didn’t occur to him to just teleport away. He couldn’t clear his mind enough for that. Even the Discipline couldn’t help him. All he could do was curl up and breathe, and breathe.

He came back from the violent thunderstorm of his thoughts with the quiet rustle of feet on the grass. For one panicked moment Tim was sure Bruce had managed to follow him, quick as he’d been. He wasn’t sure he had it in him to face Bruce right now.

But no, the feet that stepped into his blurry field of vision were certainly too small to be Bruce’s. There was also a Talent nulling cuff strapped around one ankle, which was surprising enough to draw Tim back all the way back to the here and now.

“Drake,” Damian said quietly. “Do you require medical assistance?”

Tim blinked. Sheer force of habit had him pulling himself together enough to croak. “No. No, I’m fine.” He knew he wasn’t, but one didn’t show vulnerability in front of Damian Wayne; a lesson Tim had internalized over the last three years.

He wasn’t surprised by the frankly skeptical look he got in return. “I can see no evidence of truth in your claim. I shall summon medical aid.” He got out his comm.

Tim’s hand snagged his wrist in a vice. “Don’t you dare,” he glared. “I’m not in the mood to deal with anyone right now, least of all you. For once in your life, grow some mindfulness and try to get that.”

To his surprise, Damian hesitated rather than bristled. “You are… you have clearly suffered an immense shock. That is… not desirable, given your physical health.”

Tim took a second to run that through his Damian-Human translator. “You know,” he surmised, voice flat. “Somehow I’m not even surprised. What did you do, listen at the keyhole?”

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Damian retorted, sounding much closer to what Tim remembered. “The Institute will be my legacy one day. I hardly need to employ such tactics as that. What Father knows, I know.”

“In other words, you hacked your way into his lab and snooped,” Tim shot back.

Damian reared back in surprise, but it was his annoyed scowl that told Tim he was on the money.

Tim looked him up and down. “How long have you known?”

Damian shifted, uncomfortable. “A year. Perhaps a little longer.”

Tim barked out a bitter laugh. Of course all the pain and heartache Tim suffered for Bruce’s machinations was ultimately all for naught. “Of course you have.” He got to his feet. “I have to admit, you were onto something when you ragged on me about being inferior, demon brat. This must be so validating for you. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ll be going.”

“I didn’t know!” Damian burst out, looking both genuinely alarmed at Tim leaving and deeply disturbed at the route the conversation was taking.

“What?” Tim squinted at him.

“I mean,” Damian angrily fumbled for words. “I knew about your condition. But I didn’t know that you didn’t know. I thought Father had told you!”

Tim tried to parse that out. Damian seemed to be trying to tell him something, but whatever he was trying to convey was lost on Tim. “So? So what?”

Damian fidgeted. “I was angry when I found out,” the boy admitted. “I could never understand why Father would… why you were so admired by him. It seemed to me you were an interloper who had ingratiated himself into the Manor and Father was just… indulging you, perhaps for political reasons.”

“So, what, you thought I was there just because I had some sh*tty connections to high society?” Tim asked incredulously. “My parents dumped me on his doorstep like an unwanted kitten! What the hell kind of political clout could I possibly have wielded as a starving eleven-year-old?”

“I was not… made aware of your circ*mstances,” Damian said stiffly. “You were not a Prime, so Grandfather’s dossier on you was not extensive. But, because you were not a Prime, there did not seem to be any other reason for you to be at the Manor, or close to the Waynes, but for political gain.”

Tim snorted. “Right,” he said sourly. “It couldn’t have been because I was just another problem to solve. Bruce sure loves solving puzzles.” He wished he could take the words back, but they burst out of him from some deep, dark, frightened place.

“Don’t be ridiculous,” Damian snapped. “Father loves you.”

Tim said nothing.

Damian’s face grew more pinched. “You are an imbecile if you think differently.”

“I’m an imbecile to you no matter what,” Tim laughed cheerlessly. “Or an imposter, or useless, or a waste of space. Inferior. God, what is this? Do you really feel the need to grind the bootheel in when I’m as down as I can get? Is the conditioning your excuse this time?”

Damian leaned back slightly. It was clear he hadn’t been ready for the bitter resignation in Tim’s voice. “That’s not… I’m not…” he scowled as no eloquence came to his aid. “I had never been off the compound before!”

Tim blinked slowly. “What are you talking about? You’ve been off the Institute lots of times. You’ve been to space, even.”

“No, I mean,” Damian angrily clenched his fist as if he could order the words to obey. “I mean my Grandfather’s compound. Before I came here.”

“Oh, you mean the Demon’s Head cult compound,” Tim realized. “Is that supposed to be news to me? It wasn’t exactly a secret that you were poorly socialized.”

“I mean never Drake,” Damian said. “Never. You think I mean that I lived there most of the time, but I went out into the city sometimes. That I saw people that were not other members. I didn’t. I never left the compound. The only people I had any meaningful interactions with were devout members of the cult, all of them adults. All of them Primes, or close enough. There were other, newer members, neophytes, families who joined… but I was never allowed to meet with them. I didn’t meet another young person until I was eight. And that was only because… because we were expected to do battle with our Talents, to hone our skills. All of them were older than me. I was taught to win , Drake. To lose was to be sent out into the world, disgraced. Assuming you survived at all.”

“Kicked out of a violent death cult?” Tim raised an eyebrow. “That doesn’t seem like much of a dishonour.”

“For us it was,” Damian bit out. “We’d been raised to believe that there was nothing worthy outside the compound. Nothing but pain and degradation by the unworthy who had not evolved a Talent. To be made to leave was a fate worse than death. Do not think my pedigree granted me any special immunity; my mother and grandfather were harder on me for it, not easier. When they would choose their favourites in the endless race for their esteem, and I assure you it was seldom me.”

“Okay, this is all very sad,” Tim told him. “But I knew a lot of this, so what…?”

“Before I came here, I was taught that only the victorious deserved a place in the world,” Damian explained. “I thought that what happened in the compound happened everywhere. I had no knowledge, no context, for anything else. I assumed Father was… was testing me by favouring you, like Mother and Grandfather used to. I had to prove my worth to him.”

“By eliminating me,” Tim sighed. “You’re still not telling me anything I don’t already know, Damian. It was made crystal clear to me what you thought of me in relation to Bruce. I guess,” Tim allowed. “That, knowing the back story, it makes more sense than it did before.”

Damian scowled, as if Tim was the one making no sense. “I had no context for what I was seeing, for what I felt and heard through my Talent. It was all… foreign to me. I did not understand at first that I was… misreading the situation. I do now.”

“Damian,” Tim told him, arching an eyebrow. “You had three damn years and whatever else I can say about you, you’re not stupid. You’re a keen observer. Even with a bunch of conditioning, telepathic and cultural, you had to know that testing you by apparently picking me for his heir was not what Bruce was doing. Even if you couldn’t read his mind, I’m damn sure you were dipping into Dick’s pretty freely. You had to know that he wasn’t lying to you, yet you still had it in for me even up to the day I left. This whole ‘cultural misunderstanding’ excuse is a bit disingenuous.”

Damian’s lips pursed. “When I found out about your… health issues, I found something else. Something which made me hate you. I did not show as much discipline over my emotions as I ought to have done.” Damian looked away. “It made me so angry that I lost all self-control. For this I will apologize.”

Tim narrowed his eyes. “What was it that you found that made you hate me that much? Because I’m a hundred percent sure it was nothing I did.”

“Proof,” Damian replied heavily. “Proof that I had lost. That I would never win.”

Tim stared at him. “… what?” he asked, baffled.

Damian turned to leave. “Come and see for yourself.”

Not entirely convinced this was wise, Tim followed him back to the elevator. The immediate shortcomings of his decision were made manifest, because it meant he was now stuck in a small box with an angry Prime who hated him but with whom he had, at some point in the last few minutes, somehow brokered an awkward cease fire with. The silence wasn’t a comfortable one.

“What’s with the bling?” Tim broke eventually.

Damian blinked at him.

Tim tapped his leg, indicating the ankle cuff on Damian’s.

“It’s a Talent-suppressing cuff,” Damian said tersely, keeping his eyes forward.

“Yes, I know,” Tim rolled his eyes. “I designed them. The question I’m asking is, why are you wearing one?” Tim wouldn’t have believed Damian would ever let someone put one of those things anywhere near him. Not without blood being shed.

Damian made a face. “The… incident at the train terminal was highly publicized. There was a surge in anti-Talent rhetoric as a result, as well as protests and some anti-Talent attacks as well. Father thought it best if we allow court proceedings to go ahead for my role in the disaster, lest the public lose confidence in Talents. The public board deemed that my actions did not merit criminal charges, but they did put forth recommendations of mandatory Talent therapy, to ensure there were no more triggers left. This,” Damian made a disgusted face at the ankle cuff. “Is a part of that. I will wear it until the therapy is complete and I am judged to no longer be a danger to myself or others.”

Tim’s eyebrows rose. “How long is the therapy mandated for?”

“A year,” was the short reply. “You may dispense amusem*nt at your leisure,” Damian added sourly.

“I don’t think it’s very funny,” Tim replied to this, surprising both Damian and himself. “A full year? That’s way past the recommended usage for that thing. That’s rough. I hope the appeal goes through.” No way would Bruce have failed to appeal that, media storm or not. He didn’t care that much what the normals thought.

Damian said nothing more for the trip down.

Tim had to admit that he felt a small swell of pity for Damian. Going from a high flying Prime to a winged donkey was a long way to come down. It probably felt a lot longer for Damian, who had been raised to see worth only in the amount of power he had and how he could bring it to bear. And to suffer such a humiliating downgrade for up to a year? Even Tim didn’t think he deserved a punishment that steep, especially not for something so performative as to make all the anti-Talent politicians feel vindicated in their dislike.

Tim said nothing, though. Damian may have lowered his knives, but Tim greatly doubted the boy felt kindly disposed enough to accept sympathy from the likes of him.

Tim was so caught up in his musings, he almost didn’t notice when they got off on one of the R&D floors and down towards the WayneMed wing. Tim frowned as he looked around the controlled, high tech busyness of the labs, though Damian bypassed them silently, not sparing them a glance. They went for the quieter end, down the corridor to the most heavily locked door in the place.

“This is Bruce’s lab,” Tim said when they reached it. Technically all of it was Bruce’s lab, since Bruce owned WayneMed, but this section was Bruce’s lab, his private one. This is where Tim had lost him every day when they hit the main building after five minutes of awkward small talk; Tim had gone to the executive offices and Bruce had, by and large, been here.

“You said you had never been inside it,” Damian said after breathing on the DNA reader and punching in a code. “I checked the records, like you said. Your claim was accurate.” The door seals unlocked with a hiss. Damian turned to Tim, expression curiously flat. “Here’s your chance.”

Tim felt uneasy. “What are we doing here, Damian?”

“I told you,” Damian said, stepping inside. “Proof.”

Frowning, Tim followed him.

It was smaller than he thought it would be from his vague imaginings. There was enough space for some bleeding edge equipment; electron microscope, some heavy duty DNA replicators and a bunch of other stuff Tim would have expected to see in a pathology lab. There were entire walls worth of holo-screens, interactive, that lit up as they entered, showing DNA sequences and myriad of other data. One screen was crisscrossed in Bruce’s own handwriting, scribbled all across the space in wild, ever expanding formulas and theses. Tim picked out chemical DNA structural facts and allusions to various gene therapies from the mess.

And there, at the back, where it could clearly be seen, was a holo-still. Him and Bruce, smiles eternally fixed in light. Tim looked around at the data; most of it was what he’d probably classify as medical information. “This is me,” he said, going up to one of the screens. “This is my medical file!”

“It’s all you,” Damian said, shifting uncomfortably. “This is what Father did all day when he was here at the Institute. He was researching genetic therapy, no doubt in order to treat your condition. WayneMed was created specifically as a front for it.”

Tim stared at him.

“Cold read the room if you don’t believe me, Drake,” Damian told him waspishly. “I am not lying. This is all you.”

Tim turned and hesitantly brushed a countertop. The past unfolded. He saw…

Bruce reading, Bruce at the holoscreens, at the equipment, peering into the scopes, scribbling madly on holoboards with grim determination, going through ream after ream of research…

The mad, frustrated tantrums, where styluses were thrown and hypothesis’ were abandoned. Conferring grimly with other experts on the comm lines, Bruce’s face flat and determined as they teased out some other avenue to explore…

Bruce, every day, finding some reason, to look up from the sea of medical jargon that broke a person down into component parts and stare at the holo-still, staring at the image of Tim, looking tired and sad and determined…

Tim reared back from the past, yanking his hand away, eyes rimmed in white. “What… what the f*ck…?”

“Now you see,” Damian said grimly. “Proof. You cannot deny it. He loved you. I hacked in here, thinking I could get involved in Father’s work, that I could somehow make myself indispensable to him,” Damian hands clenched. “That I could join him as an equal, as you had the privilege of doing. But it wasn’t innovation that drove him here. It was you,” the boy’s voice was bitter. “That’s when I knew I had lost. He loved you. He loved you. How could I compete? What power did I have to make him love me the same way he loved you? Who cares about space stations if he was just going to come back here and spend his days on you, the most inferior of us?” Damian made a face. “Or so I thought at the time.”

Damian was looking at the floor, scowling at if reality itself was chastising him for his presumption.

The presumption that anyone would willingly love him.

Tim shook himself, trying to focus on the now. “You didn’t lose when you found this,” he told the boy. “You lost when you assumed it was a competition at all. Dami, do you really think that Bruce wouldn’t do the same for you? For any of us?” Tim added hoarsely. “Because he would have. He absolutely would have.”

Damian shook his head. “That is not the way the world works.”

“Is that Damian Wayne talking, or Ra’s Al Ghul?”

Damian looked up sharply at Tim’s arch tone.

Tim met his gaze challengingly. “That’s what conditioning is, Dami. It’s not exploding all over a train terminal, it’s not the urge to do harm. It’s that little voice inside your head that tells you no . It tells you a story – a lie – about how the world is, and you listen because you think it’s you. And you know what? That little voice is bullsh*t. f*ck your grandfather, kid,” Tim told him. “f*ck him, f*ck your mother, f*ck anyone who tells you the world isn’t built and doesn’t turn on people helping each other out. On you helping them, on them helping you. It’s not a f*cking war. It’s not a contest. I’m sure your grandfather would like it to be a contest – not because he’d win, but because he can inveigle himself into a position where he’s the guy that sets the rules and we all run over the board, slaughtering each other for his amusem*nt. f*ck that noise. Don’t play his game anymore. When you cease to play, what is he? Just another crappy little cult leader, with his crappy little compound in the middle of nowhere. He’s nothing,” Tim bit out. “He doesn’t get to tell you who you are or how you live. Stop letting him.”

Damian stared at him, open mouthed.

“You didn’t lose,” Tim told him. “The minute you stop thinking that, you win. Bruce loves you. It doesn’t matter how many other people he loves. He loves you. Nothing will change that. Not even me.”

Damian shuffled, not at home with emotional discussions. “Well… logically then, he must love you too, Drake. Perhaps he was wrong to keep this from you, but surely you must admit he does love you.”

Tim sighed. “Yeah, he does,” he admitted wearily. “But that’s the thing. Sometimes love just makes the lie hurt worse.”

Damian looked frustrated, like Tim was being difficult on purpose. “It’s still better than not being loved at all. Being needed, being elevated, being praised… none of these are the same as that. You ought to be glad of it,” Damian told him stiffly. “You ought to be grateful anyone would love you so, and that you are even capable of believing in it when they did. That, I assure you, is rare.”

Tim supposed that from this abused and brainwashed assassin child’s point of view that was absolutely true. Knowing you are loved and having the tools to accept that love were different things. Damian was still fumbling through the latter in his stilted way. In some ways, being a Prime was of no help to him there. “I suppose that’s true,” he allowed. Tiredness suddenly hit him in a wave. “I have to go and… think about things for a while, okay? Alone.”

Damian looked at him through narrowed eyes, but appeared to accept Tim wouldn’t have the temerity to drop dead on the spot as soon as he was out of Damian’s eyeshot. “Very well. I shall leave you, now.”

As Tim turned around to somehow… process the mess the memories stored in the room had done to his psyche, Damian voice piped up behind him.

“That… technique you used,” he asked. “At the terminal. I saw footage of it.”

Tim turned back around. “You mean the teleporting?”

Damian nodded. “Yes, that. Could you… would you…” he shifted on his feet, weirdly tentative. “Can you teach it to me?”

Tim felt surprise bubble up inside him. Damian’s voice was sincerely hopeful. “Um… I don’t know? I mean, not that I wouldn’t, I’ve just never had to teach it to anyone. Maybe?” he hedged. “It’s micro-kinesis. As far as I know, your Talents are mostly macro-kinesis. But,” he shrugged. “Maybe it’s all relative. It’s certainly possible that you could do it, with training.” Tim snorted, pointing at the Talent-nulling cuff. “Ironically that thing might help you. You’ll have to learn to focus your power down to an extremely small level to make it work. The cuff is not going to give you a choice there. Work on moving dust motes, kid. Once you’ve mastered that, come and see me and I’ll see what I can do.”

Damian nodded. “I agree to your terms. I will update you on my progress as it happens,” he said, before sweeping away.

Huh, Tim thought as the door closed behind the strange kid, rendered stranger still by his sudden sincere respect for Tim’s Talents. How about that?

Chapter 25: RESTART

Chapter Text

Tim didn’t stay in the lab for long after Damian left him. The echoes stored there were too big, too overwhelming for him to digest. He more or less fled the area, trying to find some way to process everything that was happening, all the revelations that kept hitting him today.

Maybe it was a mistake to come here, he thought to himself dismally. He’d come for answers, for clarity, but everything now felt murkier and more impenetrable as ever. Who was Bruce? Who was Tim? Was anything he had once stood on, any foundation at all, ever really stable, unchangeable? Tim couldn’t sort out the tangles in his thoughts or feelings enough to even answer that.

Seeking some kind of quiet, dark place, his feet lead him away from people, deep into the bowels of the physical archives where no one really went. It was a honeycomb of rooms that stored old pre-cogs, either fulfilled or prevented, and all the old paper research other miscellanea that no longer had a use but to keep a record. Here in the quiet, cool, sound deadened place, Tim wandered aimlessly, trying to get his thoughts into some sort of order.

He didn’t want to face the family like this. He didn’t want to face anyone. He felt wrecked. He didn’t even know what to think about all this. His skin felt too small, like he was trapped, like he was going to explode.

He didn’t know how long he wandered when he found the room. He’d been walking in a kind of daze, thoughts running in wild but futile circles, but when he saw a room filled with what looked like… stands covered in static sheets. It was unusual enough to draw him from his thoughts. This was a records archive; any art assets the Institute owned were stored in the museum.

Frowning, he went into the dark room, the lights automatically responding to his presence. It wasn’t a huge room, but it was filled with stands covered with static sheets and crammed into every available space. Tim pulled one aside and promptly dropped it on the floor.

The painting was of him.

He was, from the point of view of the observer, upside down. Or, more accurately, it was a painting of him falling from a height head first. His arms were outstretched. His hands and most of his arms were cut off on the bottom of the canvas, but his face was clearly rendered. His eyes were closed, almost like he was asleep. The picture had a weird, surrealist quality to it; he was bathed in light on a lumpen and ugly grey background, but the edges of his body were blurred and leached of colour, blending with the grey in a million tiny brushstrokes. Like he was dissolving.

Turning to dust.

Tim felt a chill run down his spine when he looked around the rest of the room. Almost not wanting to know, he started tearing sheets off the rest of the stands.

They were not all the same picture, but it was certainly all the same subject. Him, falling, grey dust. Some showed his figure as smaller, from a view further away. Some were close ups, just his face or just his hands. Some of them the artist had clearly tried to bring the background into focus, managing to paint the hodgepodge mountains of old washing units, skimmers, old cars and other junk. On certain ones blurred license plates had been circled in red by someone else after the paint had dried; a reference point for pre-cog researchers, Tim knew.

In some, a precious few, it showed Tim holding on to someone. But the figure was indistinct, the lines increasingly frustrated as the artist tried to capture the subject but wasn’t given enough information to render it.

“You never actually met Jason, did you Damian?” Tim murmured. Holos and the like were all very well and good, but pre-cog visions weren’t nearly as clear as them. They weren’t viewed at a distance, objectively and at one remove. A pre-cog was often right in the thick of it, only able to see certain details clearly. That’s why so much of their time and money was spent on pre-cog analysis; you really did have to do a lot of work to make any sense out of what any pre-cog got. One thing pre-cog generally saw the clearest were places and people that they already knew. Damian had only seen Tim clearly because he knew Tim. Jason had been an unknown factor.

The swell of pity he felt for the boy before turned into a rushing tide. He must have been seeing this, working on it, for months on end. Even for someone as desensitized to violence and death as Damian was, that was a lot to contend with for a kid. Seeing someone die, or seemingly die, over and over again wasn’t something Tim would want for him, even with their problems. “Poor kid,” he muttered softly. He really had been through the wringer while Tim had been gone.

“He was,” a soft voice agreed.

Tim was pretty inured to shock these days, but he still jumped.

Mind you, Cass was, as demonstrated, the foremost expert of the stealth pounce.

She grinned at him. Tim huffed out a breath and rolled his eyes at her.

She sat down next to the wall and patted the floor next to her imperiously. Tim took the order in good grace, flopping down next to her and taking her hand.

He felt a wave of relaxation hit him; gently and slowly, like a small wave rather than a tsunami. Not demanding he accept it, but there if he needed it.

God, he’d missed Cass.

Missed you too, Cass sent telepathically. They always spoke better like this.

“Sorry,” Tim told her, throat unexpectedly growing tight. “Sorry I left without saying goodbye. For making you worry.”

Cass shook her head and then leaned it against Tim. I wasn’t worried. You are strong. Far stronger than you were allowed to know. I worried about Bruce. About Dick. About the rest. They were all so frightened. But not about you, her hand tightened. I knew you’d come back. I had faith.

He leaned his head back against hers. “Thanks Cass,” he croaked.

They were silent for a while staring at the multitude of paintings, showing his knife edge brush with death. So much had changed. Tim almost felt like his past pre-leaving was a whole other lifetime, lived by someone else. Now that he was back here, despite his experiences living in the crush of Jerhatten, this place felt ill fitting, like a pair of shoes that were slightly too small. The feeling was weirdly unsettling in its own way. He’d always, in his heart, believed that he could go back. He hadn’t wanted to, but he knew he could have. He’d always assumed the Institute was immortal, unchanging in the fundamentals.

The Institute, Cass broke into his thoughts. Is not the world. Her hand squeezed his. You deserve the world. Even Bruce believes that.

“Bruce,” Tim snorted. Even past all the calm, his feelings around Bruce were all knotted up. He still loved Bruce. He knew Bruce loved him. But he was just so angry, still.

Bruce made a mistake, Cass said with the mental equivalent of a shrug. A big mistake. You are allowed to be angry about it. You can also love him for it too. For meaning well. You don’t have to forgive him today. Today, you can be angry about it. He’s not going to leave you over it. He’s not your parents. He won’t abandon you for being inconvenient and emotional.

“God, I missed you, Cass,” Tim huffed. As usual, she tracked the thread all the way to its origins. A lot of what he did found its emotional basis in that niggling fear. Jack and Janet Drake were still out there somewhere, on endless rounds of parties and travel, likely not even remembering they once had a son. If Tim Drake couldn’t even squeeze love out of his parents, what chance did he have with anyone else? Why would they stay with him, unless he was somehow useful? That he wasn’t a bother?

Jack and Janet Drake, he realized, really were just sh*t human beings. It really had nothing to do with him at all.

Yes, they were, Cass agreed. One day, we’ll meet. The most evil smirk in the world briefly painted itself across her face. One day.

Oy. Turns out Tim could dredge up a sand grain of sympathy for them nonetheless, though no more than a grain. Cass was the one everyone feared. Even Bruce.

“I guess Bruce told you guys,” Tim said heavily as the levity drained away.

We have been asking for answers for months, Cass nodded. He said he had to talk to you about it first, but then he said he’d tell us too. Damian might have told Dick accidentally first though, Cass added. When he came back from seeing you. He thought Dick already knew, I think.

Tim frowned. “I’m surprised Damian made that kind of mistake.” Damian usually took great pride in knowing everything everyone around him was thinking.

He doesn’t scan without permission as much as he used to, Cass told him. He feels safe enough now to not feel like he has to. Dick wasn’t happy with Bruce. Neither was anyone else. There was a lot of yelling. I left them to it and came to find you.

Tim winced. He couldn’t blame her. “What about you? Are you mad at Bruce?”

A little, Cass admitted. He should have known keeping secrets wasn’t going to turn out well. And I don’t like that you got hurt. So I’ll be a little mad today. Tomorrow will be different. But I don’t think any of us will punish him worse than he is already punishing himself. He is hurting very deeply, Cass added, mental voice laden with sighs. He takes too much pain into himself sometimes. It’s very silly.

Tim focused on the paintings for a while. If Cass said Bruce was in pain, then he was in pain. The knowledge didn’t give him one iota of satisfaction. He couldn’t muster the necessary vindictiveness to deliver a hearty serves-you-right, even in the depths of his own anger. All he felt was a tired kind of grief at the rupture of one of his closest and most dearly held relationships.

Who knows? Maybe that meant there was still hope for them.

Maybe it didn’t mean anything except that he was exhausted by it all.

Maybe, he thought, looking at the paintings, these dozens of paintings with Jason cut out of the frame, maybe it just didn’t matter, in comparison to the rest of it.

Cass put her arm around his shoulders.

“I saw Dick, you know,” Tim murmured after a while. “Down in the Linears once. He was looking for me. I remember thinking that if you had been there, there would have been nowhere I could have hidden where you wouldn’t find me. But I never saw you,” Tim tilted his head to look at her. “You never came looking.”

Cass looked at him. I wasn’t worried. The others looked at all of these and saw death. I didn’t.

“What did you see?” Tim asked.

Love.

Tim felt tears prickle at his eyes when he looked at them, at the precise rendering of his face in careful brushstrokes. There was no stress in the lines, no clench in the jaw. At best, you could see the sharp delineation of his brow; not anger, but pure determination. Someone who was going to the end of the world with a loved one in their arms and hanging on with everything they had. So tightly that the whole universe couldn’t tear them asunder.

Somewhere, only miles away, as close as that, Jason lay as Tim remembered him; in a sleeping world, carefully coming back to the waking one. The fulfilment of all Tim’s hopes and dreams coming true.

And when his eyes opened into daylight, he wouldn’t remember Tim. He wouldn’t remember this strange boy who’d wandered into his world and changed it forever. He wouldn’t remember all the moments, the good times, the kiss, that Tim carried with him every day.

Maybe it was better that way. Jason had loved him in those last few seconds absolutely, but that didn’t mean he’d forgiven Tim. He’d never said so.

What right did Tim have to be mad at Bruce? Hadn’t he done the same? Hadn’t he kept knowledge Jason had had a right to from him under the aegis of protecting him, as if Jason was some child who couldn’t live with the truth? So what if the scale was smaller? The mechanism was exactly the same.

Tim felt his heart hammering in his chest, all the other griefs and regrets falling away in the face of the biggest, most unendurable one of all. The one Tim would never be able to fix. The one he couldn’t even get closure for, not like he would for the others.

Cass’ arm tightened around him. She wasn’t drawing it out of him. She was just letting him feel it, in his own way and at his own pace.

“I thought he was a time bomb, you know,” Tim rasped, letting the tears fall. “I was against the clock. I had to save him before the timer ran out. And all this time it was me,” Tim sobbed. “It was me. I was the time bomb.”

Cass said nothing. She just held on as Tim cried himself out.

*

Eventually they had to go back to the visitors centre. Tim could have, theoretically, just teleported home but he a) refused to leave Cass holding the bag and b) was self-aware enough by now to realize that running from his problems would just make more problems down the road.

He was just kind of glad he got to do this in the visitors atrium and not the Manor. He should probably thank Cass for that, since he was sure she’d been the one to tell the family where they were going to be. And she wasn’t the type to take no for an answer from any of them.

The opening hours had ended by the time they made it back, so the visitors centre was free of any people. The last stragglers were probably down at the train station, waiting for the last train back down to Gotham for the day to arrive. If Tim hurried through this, he’d probably make it in time to catch it.

That, of course, meant dealing with the thick, cloying tension in the atrium once he arrived. There was a sharply delineated no man's land between most of the family and Bruce when Tim arrived, though Tim wasn’t sure if Bruce’s exile to the far reaches of the atrium was self-imposed or not. Dick kept shooting him nasty looks. Steph was passive aggressively working behind the counter, probably finishing up the records for the day, and not acknowledging him. Babs was with her; far more serene but also far more pensive. Alfred was absent, which was likely the wisest course he could take. Damian was also there, shuffling uncomfortably, exactly midway between Bruce and Dick. Tim felt for the kid, he really did.

“Tim!” Dick all but launched himself over when Tim hit the floor. This time Tim allowed the hug, because Dick looked all kinds of wrecked and sad. “Are you okay? Where have you been? You don’t feel sick, do you?” Dick asked anxiously.

Tim rolled his eyes. Yep, there was Mother Hen Grayson, right on schedule. “Relax Dick, I’m fine.”

“No offense ex-boyfriend,” Steph raised a disbelieving eyebrow. “But you don’t look it.”

Tim reflected that, yeah, her observation was kind of valid. He probably looked like a wreck that had recently cried his guts out. But the whole act had been a magnificent purge. His mind felt as clear as bell and his feelings felt stable, at least for now. Good enough for him to fend off their well-intentioned smothering. “Gee, thanks, Steph. Love you too,” he retorted with cheerful sarcasm. “It’s been a hell of a day. I had a lot to digest. That doesn’t mean I’m actively dying.”

Not the most well-chosen words he could have used. The atmosphere noticeably dimmed.

“Let’s go up to the Manor,” Babs suggested. “I think Alfred should take a look at you, kiddo. Just to be safe.”

“I can’t,” Tim shook his head, tucking his kneejerk hell no reaction deep inside. “I’ve got to get to the station before the last train goes.”

The rest of the room stared at him in wide eyed consternation.

“Drake, you fool,” Damian piped up, sounding baffled. “Your condition requires constant medical intervention! You will not survive in the Linears!”

“Hey, I survived six damn months in the Linears,” Tim protested. “And three more in the wastelands. And, in case you forgot, I also kicked your ass in the middle of that too.”

Damian gave him a constipated scowl.

“Besides,” Tim added before it could turn into an epic snipe fest. “My heart’s fine. Better than it ever was before.”

Everyone – even Bruce, all looked at each other. Tim would call it a wordless conversation, but he had no doubt actual telepathic words were being exchanged. What a bunch of Primes, he thought.

Eventually, Bruce stepped forward. “Tim. Son,” he looked genuinely scared at the thought of Tim leaving. “I know what I told you was difficult to hear and… you might need some time to process it but the defect is absolutely still there. You survived far more strain than I ever thought you could, but it’s still there, Tim.” He pleaded, “Please, just, stay the night at least. Let us give you a check up to see how it’s going. Just… just give me some time to set up some kind of monitoring system, if you really don’t want to live at the Institute. Please sweetheart. Don’t put your life at risk over my mistakes, please.”

“He’s right, Tim! You can’t leave!” Dick burst out. “We need to know how bad this is. We need to start some kind of treatment! We just…” he slumped. “I just… don’t want you to die.”

Tim pursed his lips. “I get that you’re worried, but you don’t need to be! It’s better now. After the—”

“Tim, seriously?” Babs was staring at him. “You’re the most rational person I know. You can’t wish illness away. I know you have issues with the Institute and the people in it,” she shot a look at Bruce. “But that’s no reason to put your life at risk.”

“I’m not—!” Tim gaped.

“Tim, seriously, if you don’t want to live with these assholes,” Steph jerked her thumb at the various others in the room. “You can stay in my mom’s apartment in mid-town. At least you’ll be near a hospital. Come on, don’t cut off your nose to spite our faces.”

A cacophony of arguments rose up.

“Will all of you SHUT UP for just a second!” Tim yelled above the din, effectively silencing it. “I can’t believe this,” he added incredulously. “I can’t believe I’m on this rollercoaster ride with you people again. This whole mess started with you not listening to me! Will you damn well start listening to me now!”

They all froze at his tone.

“Right. Thank you,” Tim said in a calmer voice while Cass silently laughed behind him. “As I was saying, my heart is currently healthy. Not because,” he held up a hand at Bruce’s opening mouth. “Of some kind of self-denial magical thinking. My heart’s fine because when I lived in the Linears I found Leslie Thompkins. Remember her?” Tim asked a startled Bruce. “I guess I know why you wanted to find her so badly now, huh? The microkinetic that can literally rewrite genes. Anyway, I was hurt pretty bad after the whole explosion thing. Some friends came in and found me in the dust storm afterwards and took me to her to get patched up. She could have regrown my spleen. She didn’t. Know why? Because you only get one genetic reset from her, and she chose to fix my heart. I’ll check with her, but I’m pretty sure my heart is now a hundred percent defect free.”

Having a clear mind was a wonderful thing. It had given him the space to really think about things as Cass and he had made their way back to the visitors centre. When it had hit him, he’d stopped and laughed for a full five minutes, Cass looking on in bemusem*nt.

It also gave him the rare opportunity to fully appreciate the sight of Bruce Wayne full-on gawking at him. That did not happen every day.

He didn’t enjoy it for very long though, because Bruce’s face transformed the minute the news hit him fully. “Tim… are… are you sure?” he strode forward and put his hands on Tim’s shoulders. “Are you absolutely sure?” his face was alight with almost vain hope, as if he didn’t dare believe it.

Tim looked him in the eyes. “Yeah B,” he smiled. “I’m sure.”

He was promptly swept up in a massive hug from the man himself. Three damn years of living in fear, carrying the burden of knowledge, swept away in one massive damn burst of news, was a bit much for even Bruce Wayne’s celebrated self-control. Bruce held onto him tightly, murmuring “Thank god, thank god, thank god,” into his hair and a little bit inside his head. Bruce’s sheer relief was a palpable thing, filling the room from edge to edge. Tim felt soft beads of moisture in his red-streaked hair and couldn’t deny he felt a certain wetness return to the corners of his own eyes as a result.

Bruce loved him. It changed nothing and everything.

Eventually, after an aeon had passed, Bruce reluctantly let go of him. The tall man smiled down at Tim in a way that caught Tim right in his heart; proudly and lovingly. “I’m so glad,” he murmured. “I’m so proud of you Tim. I… I love you. You’re right, I never said it nearly enough. I should have. I will more, I promise.”

“Eh, you’re basically omniscient,” Tim shrugged, scrubbing his face as discreetly as he could. “Sometimes you forget that other people don’t know what you know. That’s why you adopt so many sassy, disobedient kids. It’s our job to remind you.”

Bruce barked out a laugh.

Tim looked over at the others, and sighed to see Dick giving him the most tragic sad puppy look the world has ever seen. “Alright, Dick, fine,” he said with mock grumpiness. “You can have a hug too.”

Dick pretty much pounced on him and wrapped him up tight. “Love you, little brother,” he declared quietly, emotions projecting into the air. “I know we’re not… we’re not all good yet. But I’ll fix it, I promise.”

“Yeah, I know,” Tim said gently, because he knew Dick meant it. “I know you will.” Dick let him go.

There was a slightly awkward silence. It was always a little embarrassing to have emotional upheavals around Talents. You couldn’t pretend that they didn’t know exactly what was going on under the surface. Tim shrugged through his discomfort. “Um… It was good to see you all. I should probably get going if I’m going to make the train.”

“Stay,” Bruce asked him. “For dinner, even. We never got to celebrate your birthday. You can go back in Gotham tomorrow,” he added, though it was clear that it wasn’t his preference. He wanted Tim at the Manor, back home.

Tim willed his smile not to turn brittle.

Jason was at the Manor.

He might even be in the waking part of his coma therapy.

There might be a day, somewhere in the future, where Tim could see Jason, feel the hammer blow of Jason’s eyes empty of recognition when they fixed on Tim, and not shatter into a thousand pieces. It would always be a devastating blow no matter when it happened, but there might be a day when Tim was strong enough to take it, to feel like he might be able to rise up and go on afterwards.

After all the world-flipping, psyche destroying, emotional unravellings he’d had, today was not that day.

He couldn’t tell them the truth. He wasn’t even strong enough for that. Instead, he said what was as close to the truth as he could get. “I need more time, B,” he said quietly.

He took the blow of the sadness that suffused their faces as well as he could. It was true, but it still stung. Like an old junker car, some things needed a lot of time to fix them.

“Can we,” Dick swallowed. “Can we come and visit you sometimes?” His face was a mingled wash of hurt and hope.

Tim smiled a little more authentically as Cass put an arm around him from behind. “Sure. I’d like that.”

It wasn’t everything. But for the time being, it would have to be enough.

Chapter 26: 00:01

Chapter Text

Tim felt a slow bead of sweat drip down his brow. His eyes didn’t waver, his stance was steady, coiled like a spring. With no warning, he exploded into movement, lunging on the attack towards his opponent, thrusting his makeshift staff forward and parrying the block, pivoting his body and sliding the staff down and across, striking one knee. His opponent managed a bruising strike to his abdomen on the backhand, but Tim was already reversing position, tangling the staff under the larger man’s armpit and using it as leverage to flip him. He hit their makeshift rattan mats with a thump and a groan.

“Christ, O, you are sh*t at this,” Pru cackled from the sidelines.

“Good,” Z nodded to Tim as Owens flipped Pru the bird from the ground. “You’re still telegraphing on the left side though. Your opponent will be able to see what you're thinking when your eyes flicker.”

“He doesn’t,” Tim pointed out, grinning at a scowling Owens.

“That’s because he’s sh*t at this,” Z replied calmly.

“Hey!” Owens grumbled. “Unlike you losers, I never have to kill up close and personal.” Owens had his signature finger gun and left a hole in the busted washing unit that Pru was sitting on, making her laugh and swear at the same time. “ I was an assassin. Like an actual one, not someone who got lost on their way to a bar fight!”

Tim grinned as Pru and Owens started yet another epic round of snark. It was true – Owens was the long distance sniper, so he had a surprising lack of close combat skills. Tim was pushing hard into expanding his own. There was no reason to waste months of training and effort was his reasoning, and besides, while the wastelands were surprisingly non-violent, the Alley certainly wasn’t and Tim had to go back through there on the regular. Starting a business required a lot of meetings and paperwork.

“Up,” Z told Owens inexorably. “Again.”

Owens grumbled but rose to his feet. The two combatants circled warily within the roughly delineated combat circle. Mindful of Z’s advice about telegraphing, Tim kept his eyes trained on his opponent. Discipline steadied their breaths and gave Tim a faint overlay of glittering molecules, which danced subtly on Owens and Z in the background, but didn’t show up on Pru at all.

The quantum sight had turned out to be quite a useful, versatile Talent in its own right. For example, it allowed Tim to see the gathering motes drawn towards Owens fingers as the man’s eyes narrowed cunningly. When he unleashed the bolt – concussive, but not penetrative – Tim was ready. He flickered out of the line of fire and flashed back behind Owens, even as Z shouted gruffly, “No Talents, you pair of misbegotten idiots!”

But Z’s plea for sense was far too late. Tim was already in full strike mode, looking to immobilize his target from behind. He forgot, in his eagerness, that while Owens wasn’t their close combat specialist he did have eyes that saw everything. Tim was privately of the opinion that he had a latent, unconscious pre-cog Talent. How else could he unerringly fire exactly where someone was going to be?

Like now. Tim had been so focused on the front fire he’d missed Owens pointing the finger of his non-dominant hand behind his back, ready for Tim’s teleport. Tim managed to phase through the worst of it, but it still sent him spinning off his targeted grapple grip. He jumped again, landing just long enough to get a solid right hook in Owens jaw before jumping out again. Owens’ follow-up to his sneaky stealth shot at Tim went hilariously awry, hitting the old washing unit the cackling Pru was using as a chair and sending her flying backwards, ass over head, cussing them out and laughing all the way.

“Oh, you wanna fight, eh?” Pru bounced up from the ground with a bloody nose and a glittering, sharp smile.

“No, they don’t,” Z said, though his tone was resigned to the inevitability of what was coming.

“Alrighty then,” Pru drew her shiv. “I’ll give ya a fight!” She threw herself between them with wild abandon. Unlike Owens, she really was a close combat specialist.

Z sighed and went to sit down on a broken cooking unit, content – or at least, accepting – to let them tussle it out for a while.

Tim was getting good, but a three-way Talent art battle royale was nothing but messy. If Tim wasn’t ducking a swing from the reverse edge of Pru’s shiv, he was dancing around Owens’ blasts. He used teleportation like a champion though; mostly because it was so much fun to whap Pru over the back of her bald head when she was standing next to Owens and flicker out again before she could catch him, causing her to punch Owens and then have Owens furiously enact vengeance. They were complete idiots, they always fell for it, but probably only mostly because they existed in a state of pitched battle for most of their interactions anyway.

When they worked together, they were a well-oiled machine, though. Like right now, as Pru swiped his legs out from under Tim so he lost his jump-teleport-land advantage and was duly grappled by Owens in what Tim had to admit was a much-improved restraint hold.

“Good,” Z nodded, because he would take what he could get. “Press your foot into his knee joint and keep him off centre, and keep his arm up along his back. There, that’s a restraint.”

“Arg, not that hard,” Tim advised as his arm was wrenched upwards to the point of pain. “Not unless your goal is to pop a joint!”

Owens got as far as, “Whoops, sor—” before the ground at his feet exploded. He went flying one way and Tim fell the other, ears ringing and adrenaline suddenly marinating in his body. He rolled to his feet, ready for anything.

A figure in armour leapt from the top of the junk heap they’d apparently climbed to get a view of their ersatz training ground. A kinetic Talent, Tim noted. He was a big guy at six and change. In addition to the body armour he was wearing what looked like an old leather motorcycle jacket and… a helmet? Tim was momentarily distracted by the helmet. I mean, sure, people wore helmets; it was your average, low-income thugs' way of trying to get around civil surveillance and only used by those who couldn’t just bribe a system worker. But they were usually skimmer bike-helmets – cheap and unidentifiable beyond a brand name. This thing looked like a custom job, well fitted, with reactive eye lenses. That would have been damn expensive.

Plus, Tim frowned, there wasn’t any surveillance to avoid, not out here. If it was an aesthetic choice, it was a damn weird one.

Tim shook himself and focused. The Alley’s troubles didn’t often spill over this far into the wastelands, but that doesn’t mean they couldn’t. This guy was probably looking for someone. They needed to…

“Hey asshole!” Pru said furiously, lunging for him, knife right side up this time. “Who the f*ck invited you?”

… not strategize at all, apparently, Tim sighed.

Pru was fast when she was taking a fight seriously. She could strike like a snake and also take a hit that should knock somebody her size flat. She was, it had to be said, something of a berserker, but some unsung hero of a combat master had managed to hone a fine razor edge of control out of the foaming-at-the-mouth madness that catapulted her into the fray. She was, in short, tough to beat.

The interloper met her weaponized, precise fury with liquid grace, parrying easily and matching her blow for blow. Tim added ‘Discipline-trained’ to his observations, and this guy hadn’t just taken the general course, either.

Tim readied himself to leap in even as he noted Owens scrambling back into the stacks to find a vantage point to shoot from and Z hefting from a junk pile what looked like a length of steel pole with a massive chunk of twisted rebar and concrete on the end like another person might lift a drinking straw. The three assassins remained convinced that Ra’s Al Ghul was still searching for his biggest defectors, that one day someone would come for them to mark their names off a list. Tim hadn’t been fully convinced. He was of the opinion that a lot of Ra’s’ power was of the smoke-and-mirror variety, and, with the world on the cusp of having Talents launch them into the stars themselves, the illusion itself was likely shrinking by the day.

The Demons Head Cult had based its foundations on inviting in Talents who were rejected by the normal world, to give them a safe haven and the panacea of being told that they were the ones destined to rule the world. With Talent acceptance getting more mundane and ubiquitous in the modern world, the attractiveness of the various Talent cults was fading.

Nevertheless, men losing power were usually at their highest level of petty spite. Al Ghul might waste his time with a pointless revenge against people who’d damaged his cult's reputation for being inescapable. Today, Tim thought, might actually be that day.

And Tim couldn’t deny Ra's Al Ghul had some of the finest combat Talents the world had ever seen. This guy was clearly one of them.

Pru was suddenly disarmed with a twist and flip combo.

Tim froze before he jumped. That move… he frowned at it. That had seemed awfully familiar.

He hesitated, stumbling over his own memories, long enough for helmet-guy to advance in the field. Pru was fine but sweaty, winded from where she’d been planted into the hard ground with a kinetic assist. Owens tried a rapid barrage of kinetic shots, but the helmet guy’s kinetic Talent was good enough to shield and disperse the bolts of force – and that in and of itself was pretty rare.

Next in his sightlines was Tim, with Z moving up the rear, makeshift war hammer at the ready.

Tim shifted into a fighting stance, hitting quantum sight and ready for the fight…

… only to nearly fall over in shock as the helmet guy got between him and Z, showing his vulnerable, if armoured, back to Tim and blocking Z’s view of him.

… what?

Tim’s first wildly puzzled impulse was irritation. He wasn’t that bad a fighter to be disregarded like that. But even that faded fast as the guy backed up from Z once he was between Z and Tim, forcing Tim to back up too. Almost like helmet guy was protecting him.

Z narrowed his eyes. He’d seen it too. He lowered his makeshift giant cudgel slowly, neither giving ground nor gaining it. “Another one of yours?” he asked Tim archly.

Before Tim could do more than open his mouth the helmet guy said. “Hey asshole! You’re the ones who started the fight. I’m just evening the odds.” He held out his hands. “Come at me f*cker, if you really need to pick on someone that badly.”

Tim felt his confusion thrum higher. His instincts were screaming at him, but he was too taken aback to immediately realize what they were trying to tell him. “Uh… I think you’ve got the wrong…?”

“f*cking really?” Pru snarled, rising to her feet. “Another Institute brat? What the f*ck, how many of these assholes are gonna show up at our door, Red? What is this, grand central station?”

Helmet’s gaze flickered towards her. There was a faint hesitation in his stance now, like he was trying to get a read on the situation.

“In my defence,” Tim muttered. “I didn’t know they were going to show up the next day.” They had, much to his embarrassment. The last two weeks had been one long conga line of visiting Bats, one after the other, way too staggered to be anything but meticulously planned. It was like having to introduce your cool new friends to your seriously uncool family. He’d had to ask them to slow their roll a little. The people around here got really antsy about new faces. They would scuttle into their safe spots and would require hours of coaxing to come out again.

In short, Tim’s family was a little bit much .

Except Alfred. Alfred had a standing invitation to come anytime. The people here liked him because he bought food. Really good food.

Z was carefully putting the cudgel down. “I’m not interested in fighting you,” he said mildly.

“Oh yeah?” Helmet guy spat. “You sure seemed interested in attacking him, you pack of f*ckers!” He jerked a thumb over his shoulder at a surprised Tim.

Tim hastily came around him, hands raised. “They weren’t attacking me!” he explained. “Really! I guess it might have looked that way from a distance but we were just sparring. You know, combat training. I’m helping Owens. He’s sh*t at it.”

A distant and insulted, “Hey!” came from the stacks.

Helmet guy stared at him for a long time before relaxing his stance. “… Oh,” was his reply.

Tim felt his confusion rise, along with his sense of foreboding. “Do I… know you?” he finished in a croak, as it hit him there was literally one person in the Institute that moved the way this guy moved.

The guy moved to release his helmet.

No, Tim pleaded with the heavens. Please, no.

The helmet came off. Dark hair. Chiselled jaw. Blue-green eyes. And a shock of white hair at the front.

“I sure hope so,” said Jason.

*

Tim managed to get away from the three with Jason. They ended up all the way over at the Basin, sitting on what had once been a public bench seat near the water's edge, though at no point in the future would Tim ever be able to recall how. He was too busy staving off a panic attack. He was too busy trying not to just die on the spot. He was too busy trying not to just stare at Jason, to drink in the sight of him standing under the waking sky.

He wasn’t succeeding at any of these things.

To make matters worse, the silence between them was awkward as hell. Jason looked as discomfited as Tim felt, even though some of the tension had left him when they’d left the three former assassins behind. Tim’s shredded nerves were on fire. He couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

“What’s with the helmet?” Tim blurted when he couldn’t stand the silence any more. He cursed himself; the words were shrill and rude.

Jason looked down at the helmet tucked under his armpit and back up at Tim. “It’s a therapeutic aid.”

Tim stared at him.

Jason shuffled and then thrust it at Tim wordlessly.

Tim fumbled it in his hands and turned it over in them for lack of anything else to do. The internal set up, however, made him frown. “This is a sensory deprivation rig!”

“Yeah,” Jason admitted. “I still have some sensory issues, you know. Overstimulation and sensory spikes and sh*t. The helmet is basically so I can make the call on how much stimulus I’m getting.”

“Oh. Oh, right,” Tim replied, wincing at the lameness of it. Of course Jason would have those kinds of issues. Tim couldn’t even imagine the amount of new and raw neural pathways he'd grown inside his brain in the last few months. Rebooting a thinking engine was a complicated process. “Um, sorry!” Tim thrust the helmet back at Jason hastily. “Do you need it on?”

“… No,” Jason replied slowly, eyes darting all over Tim. “Not right now. I’m good.”

Tim looked away. He was terrified of looking Jason in the eye right now. Terrified of what he’d see in them. “Um… good, that’s good. Um. What… what are you doing here?” He tried to keep his voice level as he could. “Not that, um, I’m not happy to see you, or anything!” he added, voice climbing higher. “I just thought… well, I didn’t think you’d be up and about. Like, by now.” He squeezed his eyes shut, wishing he could just sink into the Basin and die.

“Uh, I’m not, really,” Jason admitted sheepishly. “I’m more or less here against medical advice.”

It was on the tip of Tim’s tongue to say Jason should probably go back if he wasn’t a hundred percent yet, but his conscience pointed out that he really was the last person in the universe who should really be advocating staying at the Institute when you really didn’t want to. He kind of understood the fond-edged frustration that pulled Jason’s mouth. He felt much the same when Bruce and the rest of them started showing up here in a careful but steady stream. I mean, Tim appreciated their eagerness to fix the cracks in the relationship, it did hit him in the feels, no question, but he also had to admit… they could be a bit much when all their attention was on you.

But, given that he couldn’t say that, Tim was at a loss as to what he could say. ‘You look well,’ sounded like the pithiest of pithy small talk. He still couldn’t bring himself to look Jason in the eye. “Um… so what made you come out to this pile of junk?” he asked instead

And immediately regretted it when Jason leaned back in sheer surprise, hurt and shock fighting for space on his brow.

“Not that I’m not happy you’re here,” Tim hastily tried to correct. “I am! It’s just… why here? You just got out of a coma. Surely there’s a world full of things you missed out on that you’d want to do first.”

Jason's mouth worked soundlessly for a second before he scowled. “To see you, you dumbass! What the f*ck… why the f*ck wouldn’t I want to come out and see you?” he asked, sounding honestly bewildered. “You saved my f*cking life!”

Tim, shocked into hope by Jason's declaration, felt a part of himself fall off a cliff at the addendum. He doesn’t remember, Drake, he repeated harshly, furious with himself for being irrational, for letting that irrationality ruin Jason’s first taste of the outside world.

He tried to force himself to speak levelly and clearly past the excruciating torture of Jason’s presence, but it was hard. “It… it wasn’t a big… um, you’re welcome,” Tim managed lamely after fumbling, his voice too choked to be natural.

He’d known it would be bad. But it really was a thousand times worse than anything he could have imagined. Jason was flushed, there was a fine sheen of sweat glittering just at the edges of his temples and if Tim tilted his head into the breeze just so , he caught a faint whiff of what was unmistakably another human being, all tangy and smoky.

Jason was real. He was here, and he was real in ways that he just hadn’t been, couldn’t have been, as a lost ghost trapped inside his own mind. Tim wasn’t prepared for the sheer, high definition reality of Jason. He couldn’t stand to look at him. He couldn’t stand to look away.

This was a nightmare.

Jason stared at him, open mouthed. “You’re welcome? You’re welcome ?!” he said incredulously. “What the f*ck even is…” Then he blew out a breath. “Look, maybe I should just go.”

Tim’s insides lurched. “No! I mean, why? You don’t have to!” he exclaimed.

“Because I’m making you uncomfortable,” Jason said, rising to his feet. “You can’t even look at me. I shouldn’t have come here and disturbed you with no warning. I’m sorry, okay?” he mumbled, looking pained. “I won’t come here again if you don’t want to see me.”

“No, wait!” Tim jumped to his feet. “I do want to see you. I’m happy to see you. I really am!” He couldn’t stand the thought of Jason thinking badly of him in that way, like Jason was a nuisance.

Jason scowled. “Are you f*cking serious? You think what I’m picking up from you feels like happy?”

Tim faltered. Receiving empath, he remembered miserably. Of course his sadness was pouring all over Jason. He pulled in a breath and tried to rally, to get himself under control.

“Just lookin’ at me makes you hurt,” Jason looked away, fists bunched at his sides. “No wonder you never came.”

“… what?” Tim blinked.

“Up at the Institute,” Jason scowled at the ground. “The others wouldn’t stop talking about you. I thought you’d come up to see me. I really, really wanted to see you. I waited for weeks. You never showed.”

Tim stared at him, throat too tight for words.

“I didn’t get it,” Jason’s jaw tightened. “But I guess feeling what seeing me is doing to you, I do now. I just wanted…” he spasmed helplessly. “I just wanted to talk to you. I shouldn’t’ve sprung it on you like this.” He slumped. “I should just go.”

“Jason,” Tim reached out. “I did want to see you. Every day. Every single day, I wanted to see you. I’m happy you’re here. You’re awake,” Tim let all the awe he felt for that fact colour every inch of him, so he knew Jason would pick it up. “But there were all these other things going on and… and I just couldn’t. It was too hard for me.”

Jason looked him over, wan and shaken. “Yeah,” he said in a low voice. “Yeah, I get that. sh*t, this ain’t your fault, Baby Bird. I shouldn’t have pushed. I just… I just wanted to say I was sorry.”

Tim froze all over, vision tunnelling at the edges.

Jason went on talking, so determined to get the words out he didn’t immediately pick up that Tim had gone as rigid as a statue. “I’m sorry for those things I said,” he said, voice aching with regret. “When I said I didn’t love you, that you couldn’t be loved. I didn’t mean them, Baby Bird, I swear!” Jason looked up at him pleadingly. “I just knew… I thought there was no way out, that the only way I was going to stop the Joker was to pull my own plug and… and I knew you wouldn’t let me without a fight and… and I thought,” Jason’s face screwed up, like he wanted to cry. “I thought it would be easier for you if I could make you hate me. You didn’t, you never did, but once I started I couldn’t stop and… and I’m sorry,” he whispered. “I’m so sorry, Baby Bird.”

Tim stared at him in silence.

Jason slumped. “Well,” he said miserably. “That’s all I came to say, really.” He seemed to shrink in on himself as he turned away. “You seem happy here, I guess. I’m glad about that. Sorry for bothering you.”

“… what did you call me?”

Jason turned back to him, blinking at the choked whisper. “What?”

“What…” Tim was milk white and still frozen where he was. “ What did you just call me?” His voice came out shrill and tinny. He couldn’t even hear it over the pounding in his chest.

Jason looked at him worriedly. “Baby Bird?”

“You,” the word came out almost a sob. “You remember that?”

Jason looked baffled. “Remember it? Why wouldn’t I…” then he got it, the credit dropped. His eyes blew wide. “Tim, did you think I’d forgotten you?”

“But you did!” Tim burst out, hands digging bruises into his own forearms as he tried, almost physically, to hold himself together against whatever storm was going on inside. “You did before! I dug you out of the dust and you didn’t recognize me!”

Suddenly the tunnelling at the edges of Tim’s vision was a real problem. He lurched sideways and blindly tried to stagger his way back to the bench. His head was spinning. This can’t be happening, Tim told himself. It can’t be real.

He didn’t dare hope it was real.

Jason was suddenly in front of him like he’d picked up teleportation on the side, grabbing him and setting him down on the bench. “You need to breathe for me Baby Bird, okay? I just need you to breathe for me.”

The realness of Jason hit Tim like a hammer when he touched Tim. The warmth and the smell and tiny flickers of memory dancing right at the edges of Tim’s awareness, his brain too overwhelmed to process them. He shakily grabbed for Jason’s face, wanting to feel him; skin, blood, bone. Mind. “Jason,” he croaked, desperately trying to rally some kind of coherent thought. “ Jason.”

Is this real? Do you remember me?

A wave of tenderness suffused Jason’s face. He cupped Tim’s face, eyes watery and bright. “Oh, Tim,” he murmured, leaning in to press his forehead against Tim’s. “Of course I remember you. How could I forget you ?”

“But you did! ” And then Tim burst into tears, because it was either that or explode. Something had to give.

They weren’t wild, hysterical sobbing tears. They were quiet, shaken, ugly, wretched things, waterfalling down his face as his brain tried to make sense of this reality reset. It didn’t matter that it was good. It was too much. He felt like he was spinning in space, no point of reference, no anchor.

But then he was engulfed in Jason, who wrapped his arms around him and held on tight enough to hurt. It was enough of a focal point to keep Tim in the here and now as he tried to gather his scattered thoughts. Jason stayed with him, hardly any more steady judging by the fine tremors that wracked his broad frame.

“Jesus f*ck, Baby Bird,” Jason said hoarsely into his hair. “Have you been walking around all this time thinking I didn’t even remember you?”

“You didn’t recognize me,” Tim whispered, squeezing his eyes shut. “After the explosion. I looked you in the eye. You didn’t know me!” The words came out harsher than he meant them, an unspoken accusation even though Tim didn’t blame Jason. He was accusing the universe.

Jason drew back a little, just enough to lean back and look Tim in the eye. “Tim, I’d literally just woken up from a long term coma and then been busted down to my component molecules and then remade from my component molecules. I dunno, Baby Bird,” he gave a wan version of his devastating smirk. “I think expecting me to be compos mentis was a bit much, really.”

Tim choked on whatever spasm was happening in his throat, be it a laugh or a sob. “You jerk.” More tears dropped off his chin. “The unconscious mind stores memories differently than the conscious one. You shouldn’t remember. I don’t understand how this is even possible!”

Jason tucked Tim’s head into his neck and stroked his hair soothingly. “Maybe the whole busted down to component molecules and remade thing did something to the consciousness barrier,” Jason shrugged, his chest jostling Tim a little. “What the f*ck would be the difference between the unconscious and the conscious at that point? f*ck knows. Mind you,” Jason admitted, squeezing Tim again. “I was pretty f*cking scrambled mentally for the first few days. I probably wouldn’t have recognized myself in a mirror, let alone you or anyone else. Hell,” Jason mused, rocking Tim in his arms. “Maybe Bruce f*cking did something. He was the one mostly unscrambling me, getting my brain to recognize the order my memories should go in. Maybe he pulled a barrier-breaking rabbit out of his hat. I wouldn’t put it past him.”

Tim nodded and sniffled, reflecting that if this… this miracle had, somehow, been because of Bruce, even Tim couldn’t deny it was a hell of an apology. He felt too lightheaded and drained to try to untangle the threads of the mystery though. He just slumped against Jason and let him hold on too tight, like Tim was about to plummet off a cliff if he let go.

“Nearly right,” Jason’s lips were distractingly close to his ear. “I was scared out of my f*cking mind you’d just up and vanish on me. Teleport away. I had f*cking nightmares about that when I thought about coming up here. That you’d vanish and… and I wouldn’t be able to find you ever again.”

“I’m sorry I never came to the Manor,” Tim mumbled, feeling a horrible shame well up in him when he thought of his cowardice. “A part of me wanted to, more than anything. But there was so much other stuff I had to process and… and it was just too hard ,” he admitted, voice rasping in pain.

“Hey, hey,” Jason murmured gently, nuzzling his hair. “I don’t blame you, Baby Bird. Bruce f*cked up by being an uncommunicative asshole and, as usual, someone else had to wear the fallout. He always f*cking does this, you know? He did it to Dick, which is how we got Special Constable Nightwing. He did it to me, and I wound up as good as dead for five f*cking years. Three times is a f*cking pattern. You’d think he’d learn.”

Tim pressed his cheek harder into Jason’s neck. “I think he might have cottoned on this time,” he offered ruefully. “I heard a lot of people have been yelling at him. Maybe it finally penetrated.”

“Yeah, well, it oughta have done because I was yelling the f*cking loudest,” Jason grumbled. “The guy is f*cking nearly omniscient! He can’t be this stupid unless he’s actively, voluntarily, working it on some level.”

“Bruce flies too high,” Tim agreed, pulling his head up so he could smile at Jason. “He forgets that all the little things he sees up there are really f*cking big when you’re on the ground. Hopefully he gets the message in time to do right by Damian, because that kid doesn’t have the forgiveness in him that we all had for Bruce’s foibles.”

Jason smiled back at him. “Hell, the demon brat. You f*cking did demons a disservice lumping that hellion in with them.”

Tim snorted with laughter. Suddenly, for the first time in months, he felt as light as air. Like his wings were outstretched and he was taking flight. “I take it you’ve met him.”

“The little asshole is badgering me every waking minute for training in micro-kinesis,” Jason nodded. “Because ‘spawned from peasant stock or not, you have at least mastered one semi-useful skill’.”

Tim felt a wobble in his take off. “Jason… I’m sorry about your mo… about Sheila,” he said tentatively. He had no idea what Jason’s current stage of therapy was about that part of it, but he felt it had to be said, if only because he doubted any of the others would have thought to.

Jason grimaced. “She made her bed,” he said in a low voice. “I get that she was messed up. She was f*cking messed up before she even had me, seems like. Willis Todd sure didn’t f*cking help and the Joker definitely didn’t. But some of that messed up was purely her own sh*tty choices, and she made ‘em fully aware of how f*cked up it would leave other people. So, she made her own bed and she died in it. She’s a f*cking stranger to me. I’m happy to just leave her as that.”

Tim nodded. A clean amputation was really the best option for everyone still alive to be hurt. “I’m glad that… well, I’m not sorry she exists because… because it means you get to exist. I can be sorry about the rest of it, but not that bit.”

“Yeah, but I’m kinda glad Bruce had more input into parenting me than she ever got the chance to, even though me and him still have a pretty messed up relationship.”

“You’re fighting with Bruce?” Tim blinked. Tim would have thought death and resurrection would have at least gotten them talking.

“Yes. Well, no,” Jason corrected. “We don’t fight like we used to fight. We don’t talk at each other like before either. We… talk,” Jason admitted. “Got the air cleared between us. Having to unscramble my brains probably gave Bruce an insight into how much what he said hurt me before I ran off. I think it’s finally hit him that he and I fundamentally don’t speak the same language. Like, he keeps bracing himself to help me through the guilt of having killed the Joker and I just don’t feel anything remotely like guilt about it. How could I? And I know he gets it, he can understand the reasoning behind it but he can’t logic his way into feeling comfortable with that. I think he gets that I’m not totally aligned with him, philosophy wise. At least he’s not so hair-trigger sensitive about moral greyness now that he feels his only option is to give me the boot. But we both know that pre this fun little learning experience it definitely would have been on the cards. I think realizing that about himself really shocked him; that his supposed perfect moral line, can, in fact, from a certain angle, make him the one in the wrong was a pretty scary epiphany for him to grapple with.”

“I’m sorry,” Tim said, and meant it. Bruce had been as much of a hero to Jason as he had been to Tim. Tim knew how painful it was to have to reckon with Bruce’s flaws after admiring him so much for so long.

“Hey, it’s fine,” Jason ran his thumbs over Tim’s cheekbones. “Like I said, we talk. He’s willing to listen. For that alone B might have started to grow a little, just like the rest of us. I think he knows that I’m not really interested in falling in with any of his old plans for me. I think he’s at least willing to accept that, even if can’t bring himself to like it. He’s trying.”

Now finally able to look Jason in the eye, Tim felt a whole new kind of tension thrum through him. Jason was just as handsome as he ever was; perhaps even more so out here in the real world. It was a dizzying feeling to look upon him, his heart levitating into the coronasphere at the sight of him.

“So, uh,” Jason clearly felt it too, though Tim didn’t know if he was getting it from Tim or if it was something all his own. “I heard someone was starting up a restoration business in this place. And, you know,” Jason ducked his head bashfully. “I know my way around an engine or two. You think maybe they’re looking for new hires?”

Tim gave a half hysterical giggle of disbelief. “I don’t know if it’s the wisest career move. It’s not the most interesting work, really. The pay is kinda really good or really, really bad depending on the day. We live in decrepit old basem*nts on welfare rations and half the time we’re still choking on the dust anyway. It’s a sh*tty deal, working out here. You could have a lot more than what we could offer. You should,” Tim added softly, because it was true. The world, which had been denied to Jason for so long, was literally now at his feet. If he stayed at the Institute, he could have it. He could have space, just like he’d wanted. Tim didn’t have that to give.

Not yet. Not for a long time.

Jason’s face softened. “What if I don’t give a f*ck what I should have, Baby Bird? What if living in sh*tty squats and choking on dust and fixing up old wreckers is what would make me happy? Are you gonna say I shouldn’t choose what makes me happy?”

And yeah, Jason kind of had him there. “You still got therapy and stuff,” Tim mumbled shyly, but it was a half-hearted argument at best.

“Yeah, but not forever. A few more months, maybe. Then I gotta get on with my life.” Jason gave Tim a little exasperated shake. “I’m tryin’ to be all romantic and sweet here, Baby Bird. I’m tryin’ to point out that I’m happy where you are, wherever that is because… because I love you. I wanna build up the Drake-Todd & Co Aerospace and Plumbing, just like you dreamed because getting to spend the rest of my life with you is my dream. You might wanna be a little more helpful here,” Jason smirked. “Just saying.”

“Todd-Drake.”

Jason blinked, smirk evaporating. “What?”

“It’s Todd-Drake,” Tim murmured. “On the documents.”

Jason kissed him.

It was awful and awkward, his lips were chapped and Tim knew his breath was bad. Their teeth clashed. Two teens with no experience except what pure fantasy could teach them.

It felt like the merest whisper of dust sailing on the summer breeze. It felt like a supernova going off right at the heart of the universe.

It felt like everything and everywhere, all happening at once.

It was real. It was f*cking wonderful.

“I love you,” Tim said as they came up for air. “I missed you so much and I love you.”

Then they were kissing again.

They didn’t speak for a long time after that.

“… I guess you’ll have to get back soon,” Tim said idly later on, when the sun had started going down, turning the world into a haze of red twilight through the lens of the dust. It painted them in crimson relief, all stark red contrasts in the gleaming, coppery landscape.

Tim wished he had a camera. But then, he was a psychometrist. Capturing a moment was but a fingers touch away.

“Nah,” Jason pulled him closer. “I can stay a while. I got time.”

Tim turned his head onto Jason’s shoulder, waiting for the stars to come out and beckon them on.

Jason was right.

They had all the time in the world.