Chapter Text
The Dark Night had no light to guide him tonight, as he hadn’t for the last 4 months.
Everyone could see how hard the loss of Jason- or, as they knew him, Robin- was hitting the vigilante.
Especially Tim, the very small boy with the very large medical kit.
Tim hadn’t really known Jason, not actually, not how his eyes crinkle when he laughs know him or what he does with his hands when he’s excited know him, but he knew everything else about him. Like his secret identity, and how much joy helping the people of Gotham- his people- brought him.
Tim also knew how much Jason would have hated what Batman was doing to the city.
They’re just hungry, B! He’d protest, hands trembling with anger. Just tryna survive! That was me, a few years back! Would you shatter my pelvic bone for tryna eat, huh? Huh?
But Jason wasn’t around to protest with his too-bright eyes and his too-sharp mind anymore. And they both knew it.
And now Tim sat, under the cover of darkness, on wet cobblestones, breathing in smoggy air, with shaking hands covered in the blood of a homeless pickpocket.
He was three stitches in. He had forty-two left to go.
Tim didn’t let tears pool in his eyes- blurry vision could cost this man his life- and focused doubly as hard. The man choked on a scream.
“I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry I’m sorry-“ the words poured out of him in a string of babbles as he kept going, had to keep going, had to keep-
“Yer too young to be seeing allathis, kid,” the man beneath him whispered. “I can tell. Go home. Please.”
“I’m sorry, sir, but I can’t do that.” Two more stitches done. Keep going, Tim.
The man exhaled a gentle laugh. “I don’t think anyone’s ever called me sir before. You’re the first. Hooray, you get a prize.”
“My mother raised me to be polite, sir.” Keep going.
“I wasn’ gonna hurt ‘er, I swear. I- I’m not like that. She was real young. I don’t hurt kids. She just looked like she had some money, and I, I don’t, ya’know?” The man was babbling now. Tim wanted to cry. He couldn’t cry. He had to keep going.
“I know, sir. I believe you.”
“I didn’t wanna hurt anybody.” the words were slurred.
The man went quiet. His eyes fluttered shut.
“Sir?” Tim worked faster, risking sloppiness in exchange for sealing the wound and stopping the blood. “Sir? I need you to wake up. Please. Stay with me, sir.”
He moved his hand to the man’s pulse point. There was no pulse. He was dead.
Tim bent over and sobbed into his bloodstained hands for the man whose name he didn’t know, and for Jason, who would never have wanted this.
Tim cried for Gotham. Gotham cried with him.
Slowly, he stood. Vengeance was hurting more and more people. It was up to Tim to stop him.
***
Timothy Jackson Drake was not what you might call a... normal boy.
Yes, yes, he was small, and at first glance some might call him adorable, but he was unnaturally pale and his eyes...
His eyes were icy. It seemed he could stare at you for just a moment and learn all of your secrets and then some.
And, on top of that, every night, after he washed the blood from his hands and pretended it would ever truly leave, he worked on what he would call his ‘coping mechanism’ and others would call ‘disgustingly invasive’.
It was a facial recognition program, designed to access security cameras and online posts to find a person just by the bridge of their nose. He felt a little bad for disrupting people’s privacy, but it deleted any data it came across as soon as he was done with it.
Plus, he only ever used it on 3 people.
This, though... he was working to find footage of Jason Todd and make... a highlight reel, or something. Weird, but it might help him mourn, to see how much good Jason did before he- before he-
Tim added a line of code saying to never recognize footage from Ethiopia.
He made a few more tweaks, then hit search. The little bar he added that said ‘last sighted:___’ was taunting him. He knew what it would say, ‘September 15th, 4 Mo. Ago,’ and he couldn’t bear to see it. He shoved his face into his hands.
His computer made a little chirp! sound and he knew it was done. He just... couldn’t look.
He looked three minutes later, when the stench of copper on his hands became too overpowering.
Last Sighted: January 13th, Two Wks. Ago
What.
Tim checked and rechecked his code. It looked fine to him. He sighed and dragged his hands down his face, thinking for a moment.
It... couldn’t hurt to check the footage, could it? Just to see what his programming was doing wrong.
He clicked the little link.
It was footage from a.. hospital room? That’s what it looked like, anyways. And there, right smack dab in the center, was a boy who looked exactly like Jason Todd.
No fucking way.
Maybe it was a doppelgänger? Tim had read somewhere that there was 7 people in the world who looked exactly like you. Maybe this was one of those circumstances.
But what were the chances? Out of 8 billion people and millions of places, two doppelgängers happened to live in the same city?
Still. There was no way this was Jason. Jason was dead.
The boy’s face twitched. Tim paled.
He knew that twitch. He’d seen it countless times in classes he shared with Jason, usually first period. The first few times, he’d thought Robin was having a nightmare, but after a while he realized that he just did that. It was weird, but it was so Jason that Tim just accepted it.
That was Jason lying in that hospital bed.
While he was contemplating life, death, and warehouses in foreign nations, a woman walked onscreen. Not wearing scrubs like a nurse- instead, she was wearing a t-shirt that was clearly a size too small, hot pink, ill-fitting jeans, a chunky bracelet, and a backwards Red Sox cap.
Tim stared in disbelief. Was she...an undercover cop?
“Hi, my name is Tasha Smith.” The woman said.
Okay, her name was definitely not Tasha Smith.
First off, any Gothamite would be ashamed to have the last name Smith.
Second, her voice was all weird. She was trying to cover an accent, but she must have assumed all Gothamites said things the same way, because her t’s were from The Hill, her a’s were most certainly Park Row, and her S’s were distinctly Diamond District.
Third, no Gothamite would ever just walk into a room and introduce themselves. Sure, they’d probably tell you if you asked, but it always sounded like it was being tortured out of them.
“I’m here to take Jason home with me?”
Tim leaned in, watching the screen intently. Why was this not-Gothamite stealing Jason?
The nurses gave her various information, medical needs, symptoms, blah blah. She simply nodded and took it all in. Eventually, she patted Jason lightly to wake him up. He had a weird, blank look in his eyes. Pain medication? She got him standing, grabbed him by the hand, and left, nearly dragging Jason behind her.
Oh my god. Jason had just been kidnapped.
But it had been two weeks. Obviously, Batman didn’t know his son was still alive, otherwise he wouldn’t be on such a rampage. That meant there was no ransom. How do you have the kid of the country’s richest guy and no ransom?
There wasn’t any reason to kidnap Jason Todd if you weren’t getting money out of it.
Oh. Oh, god.
What if... she wasn’t kidnapping Jason Todd? What if she was kidnapping Robin?
Maybe... maybe the Joker figured out his identity?
But it couldn’t be the Joker, or any of the other rogues for that matter. They were notoriously dramatic. If any of them had kidnapped Robin, they would be shouting it from the rooftops by now.
Plus, the Joker was currently beat within an inch of his life.
This woman was a secret, third party. One the Bat didn’t know about. He rewound the footage and zoomed in on the woman’s facial features.
Turns out, he might be using his software for 4 people, after all.