Chapter Text
Drake Manor had four thousand square feet, eleven bedrooms, a very good water heater, and, as of six weeks ago, exactly one occupant.
Tim was the occupant. His parents were in Portugal, or near Portugal — the secretary's last itinerary email had been twelve days ago and he'd long since learned not to treat those as real-time tracking data. Janet Drake called when she remembered, which averaged out to once every two months lately, give or take, depending on how interesting their trip was. Jack Drake's secretary sent the emails, along with occasional photographs of coastal views that Tim had started saving to a folder because he liked the composition, not because he was building some kind of shrine to his father's travel itinerary. That would be pathetic. He was simply a photographer who appreciated good light.
Once a week, usually Sunday nights, Tim ran a full check on the house. He'd started doing it at nine, after he started to follow the bats, and had stuck with it for the deeply unglamorous reason that it worked, and Tim could sleep well knowing Bruce Wayne wouldn't be able to spy on his ‘activities’. The perimeter sensors first — four of them, wired into the exterior walls, flagging any approach to the property. Six years of weekly checks and the only thing they'd ever caught was a raccoon with persistent and frankly admirable interest in the east garden. He still checked, because this was Gotham, and Batman was Batman, so confidence in the absence of problems was generally how problems got the drop on you. There had been enough odd situations to prove that.
Then the terminal under the library floorboards, third board from the left, which he had to re-centre under the rug every single time he replaced it because it always shifted by exactly two centimetres, which Tim had decided was the rug's personal vendetta against him. The terminal ran a synthetic occupancy signal between here and a server in Brussels, which meant Drake Manor looked, from the outside, like a place where people kind of lived and occasionally remembered they had a son. He'd built it at thirteen. He'd built a lot of things at thirteen. In retrospect that had been a very productive year for a kid who, by most metrics, should have been doing book reports and math packets.
After the weekly check, Tim partook in his favorite part of the morning: coffee. He drank his coffee at the kitchen counter, laptop open, with the overnight news playing. There were four sentences in the metro section about an incident near the northeast port, attributed to a routine GCPD operation. Tim had been monitoring the GCPD channel last night and could confirm it was not, in fact, a routine GCPD operation, but he supposed unidentified masked vigilantes disrupted an arms shipment didn't sell papers the way routine did. He closed the tab.
His father's secretary had sent an email three days ago with a photograph attached — a harbour, blue and grey, decent light, no caption. His mother had called a month and a half ago and left a voicemail asking if he was eating well, which he was. He meal-prepped on Sundays. It worked out conveniently with the house check, since he was usually up that night anyway, and it meant he could tell his mother, with complete honesty, that he was eating very balanced meals with lots of vegetables, please don't ask any follow-up questions about the coffee and energy drinks on the bill. Not that they looked at it anyway.
He finished the coffee and left for school.
…
By six in the afternoon he had four chapters of a pathology textbook finished, two English essays done, one problem set done, and a note in his surveillance files about a patrol deviation from three nights ago that he wanted to pull the emergency call records for later. He did his homework at the kitchen table because the kitchen faced west and was the warmest room in the house in the afternoons, on account of Drake Manor's heating system having apparently unionised against the concept of consistent temperature. Tim had two sweaters on. He considered this a practical decision and not, as it might appear to an outside observer, a sign that he should call someone about the furnace. There's no point, it's just very finicky.
The pathology textbook was excellent — good trauma diagrams, comprehensive index, exactly the kind of reading that would have gotten him a very interesting conversation with the school counsellor if anyone had known about it, which they did not, because Tim was careful, and also because the school counsellor's job appeared to consist primarily of handing out pamphlets about time management to kids who were, realistically speaking, dealing with somewhat bigger things than time management. He annotated in pencil, which he didn't usually do with books, except this one had come from a medical school library sale and the previous owner had beaten him to it. There was but WHY??? written in the margin next to a tension pneumothorax diagram in messy handwriting. Tim had written exactly next to it on his first read-through and had since added four more notes, which meant he was now in a one-sided ongoing correspondence with a stranger he would never know, who was, frankly, better company than most people he knew. He also wrote, in his personal notebook, about the best way to partially treat it until the actual medical services arrived.
He got to the section on hemostatic agents around two-forty, read a line twice without the second time doing much, looked at the refrigerator for no reason he could name, and got up to make coffee. It was time for more anyway and he machine was right there. He was not addicted, he was hydrating responsibly.
The refrigerator had: his father's harbour photograph held up by a museum magnet; a takeaway menu for a Thai place in Old Gotham that he kept meaning to try; his school calendar with kit restock (Thursday) in this week's block.
He made the coffee and went back to the textbook. The hemostatic agents turned out to be pretty fascinating, and he read the section twice and didn't think about much else for a while, except briefly to register that a fifteen-year-old having a favourite chapter of a pathology textbook probably said something about him, and to decide that this was a problem for a different, less caffeinated version of himself.
…
Suiting up was at eleven minutes now, which was something he was pretty proud of given where it had started.
Three years ago it had been twenty-two, back when he was still getting the wig wrong. He'd bought four before he got the right one — wrong shade on the first two, wrong cut on the third, and the fourth he'd actually gone outside in before an encounter with a streetlamp and a reflective shop window taught him something important about angles, lighting, and the gap between looks fine in my bathroom and looks fine to the general public. That one went in the bin. He'd started a checklist after that. He liked checklists. Checklists had never once let him down, which was more than he could say for most things.
The contacts had taken three brands to find a pair that would shift his eye colour convincingly without making his eyes red after four hours of wear, a process that had involved more research into ocular irritants than any sane fifteen-year-old should have undertaken. The accent had taken three weeks of bathroom mirror practice, and even then the first time someone had spoken to him in the field, he'd answered in his normal voice, and had then had to go home and sit in the bathtub for a while, reassessing several of his life choices. Not one of his prouder memories.
Charcoal grey — functional, unremarkable, mobile, nothing the eye was supposed to catch. The sewn-in pockets had taken three versions to get right, each component accessible in the correct order, tested until he could find all of it in complete darkness without looking. He was not a vigilante in the punching sense. Or a vigilante at all really. He wanted to be clear about this, at least to himself, because if anyone ever asked he intended to have the distinction extremely sharp. He didn't fight things. He did field triage, called 911, left cash if it was warranted, and went home, and his gear reflected that — built for mobility and discretion, not for looking cool in a fight scene, which was a genre of costume he had deliberately avoided. Then the wig, checked in the mirror and adjusted twice, sitting right at the angles that mattered. Contacts, then the mask — plain disposable grey, one of fifty in a box, the kind that didn't distinguish itself in any way, which was the entire point.
He looked at himself in the bathroom mirror.
Completely different person. Obviously. Unimpeachable disguise. He'd fool his own mother, if she were ever home long enough to be fooled.
He picked up his kit and went out the window.
…
The northeast port's warehouse district was what happened when a city made infrastructure decisions in 1974 and then decided not to follow through with them. Nothing out here except loading bays and concrete and chain-link and the occasional security light pointing at nothing in particular. Tim had been on a rooftop a block away from the target warehouse for forty minutes, long enough to take photos of seven personnel, two vehicles, one very optimistic plan for the access road, and a cache in exactly the location of the GCPD’s evidence management system.
He'd been in the evidence management system on and off for seven years. Their IT infrastructure was incredibly easy to crack, and they had lackluster security on pretty much everything.
He also had the Bats' encrypted comm channel on his scanner. He'd been working on decoding it since he was nine — it used to, and still particularly is, because he needed to know if Batman was out that night and if they made a deviation to their normal patrol schedule, but it continued because it had turned into one of the more technically interesting problems he'd worked on, and then continued well past the point where technically interesting was a sufficient explanation. He had a signal splitter, a camera, a cross-reference system tied to his patrol map, and could identify any of them by voice in under four words. Tonight there were five feeds.
"—said north entrance—"
Dick Grayson. East perimeter, mildly frustrated.
"I know what you said. You were wrong."
Jason. Access road side, unbothered, possibly enjoying himself.
"I was approximately wrong, there is a meaningful—"
"Nightwing." Oracle, clipped, from wherever her current setup was — Tim had theories, he kept them to himself, mostly because two of the three were probably illegal to think about out loud. "North entrance is obstructed. Red Hood is correct."
"Thank you," Jason said.
"Don't."
A beat of Dick-deciding-not-to-say-something. Then: "West entrance. Spoiler—"
"Scouted it two minutes ago, it's clear." Steph, slightly winded, entirely cheerful about it. "You're welcome. I took initiative, and I can be a team player."
"Your initiative compromised the timing window—"
"My initiative saved thirty seconds of checking, which I will point out you have not acknowledged—"
"Robin." Damian, with the formality of someone who has been waiting all night for this exact opening. "West entrance is clear. Spoiler's assessment is accurate. I entered from the south seven minutes ago, noted the obstruction, and adjusted."
Silence.
"...You’re not supposed to be out tonight," Dick said, carefully.
"Well, it seems none of you have done an adequate job of keeping me in."
"You could have mentioned—"
"I assumed a group of detectives would notice I snuck out." A pause, just long enough to land. "That was optimistic."
"Wow," Steph said. "Two for two tonight, Dick. You're really having a night."
"I am not having a night—"
"Focus. And Robin we will be having a discussion about sneaking out later," Bruce said, exasperated.
"He's not wrong, though," Steph added, somehow making it worse.
Tim uncapped the lens cap on his camera and started to set it up while listening to the Bats on their comms. He'd been listening to them work for six years, since before he'd started going out as Red, since before he'd really had a reason to monitor the comm channel beyond the fact that he'd started doing it and stopping had felt, for reasons he hadn't examined very closely, like giving something up. He knew their patterns the way he knew his own room and his surveillance files and his kit inventory.
Tim turned back to take photos of the warehouse and of the Bats he could see, turning down the noise on the comms.
Eighteen minutes. Clean until it wasn't, which how Gotham normally was. He tracked it through thermals and the now quieter comm chatter — east side finished, west side in progress, vehicles disabled, personnel down, Dick on the access road with the runner — and he was watching the south perimeter when the scanner picked up a heat signature between two freight containers that hadn't been there before.
That signature looked like how they usually did when a body stopped managing its own pressure — heat diffusing out from the core in an uneven bloom — and he was packed up and moving before the thought finished, which was the whole point of three years of practice. Thinking was for people with time.
Fire escape, three floors, thirty-eight seconds. The gap in the chain-link at the south perimeter that he'd noted arriving, because Tim always noted the gaps on principle. The space between the containers was narrow and cold and smelled like diesel, and the guard was there: private security, left arm and shoulder opened up, jacket saturated, on his side.
Conscious. Pupils even. Colour bad but not crashing.
He'd seen worse outcomes than this one go fine. This one would go fine too.
"Hey." The lower register, automatic now. "Stay still. I've got you."
The guard blinked at him. "Who—"
"Nobody important. Arms still." Kit open. He ran the assessment fast — airway, breathing, circulation, secondary — and got his shears. The jacket and the shirt both had to go, which was unfortunate given the temperature, but there wasn't a way around it, and Tim had stopped apologising for that part years ago. "Thirty seconds of uncomfortable. Count for me if you can."
The guard counted, halting. Tim worked. The gash was deep but manageable — no arterial involvement in the way that would change everything — and he packed the wound with hemostatic gauze and held pressure and watched the colour start to shift toward something he liked better. Counting served two purposes at once, neuro check and distraction, which Tim appreciated as a piece of design even though he hadn't designed it, he'd just read about it somewhere and stolen it shamelessly.
"Name?" Tim asked.
"Mike."
"Okay, Mike. Head alright? Dizzy at all?"
Mike did a slow internal survey, with the expression of a man being asked to audit his own brain in real time. "Head's okay. I think."
"Good. Bleeding's slowing." He moved to the pressure bandage, layered it over the gauze, secured the wrap. "You're going to be fine."
Mike watched him work for a moment. "Are you with Batman?"
Tim, finishing the bandage, trying to get the compression exactly right: "Do I look like I ever wore a mullet or traffic lights? Please. I have actual taste."
Mike considered the kit, the grey jacket, the disposable face mask, the complete and frankly insulting absence of any superhero visual language. He laughed, which was too loud for someone who had been bleeding in the cold for ten minutes, which Tim took as a decent sign, psychologically speaking.
"Fair point," Mike said.
"Keep your hand here." He guided it to the bandage. "Don't move the arm. When you hear sirens, you yell. Loudly. Embarrassingly, if necessary."
The 911 call went from the prepaid — location, injury, proper phrasing that would get the right equipment — and he left it running for the trace. Three thousand in an envelope next to Mike's knee, because America's insurance had never once shown mercy to anyone in its long and storied history, and Tim tried to mitigate the damage where he could. Over the chain-link, back to the rooftop, before the first siren reached him from downtown.
…
In the warehouse, Dick found the gauze wrapper first.
He'd been doing a final sweep of the south face when he clocked the guard sitting propped against the freight container with a pressure bandage that was better than any of them could have applied mid-fight, three thousand in cash in his hands, and a used hemostatic gauze wrapper on the ground. The brand was good. Not pharmacy-shelf good — sourced, ordered specifically, used regularly good.
"Batman," Dick said into the comm. "Did we have anyone on the south perimeter?"
"No," Bruce said.
Dick crouched and looked at the bandage. Then at the chain-link on the south perimeter, still moving slightly, the way chain-link moved when something had gone over it recently. He checked the gap and found marks in the concrete beneath it, scuff marks, someone's footing. Coming and going.
"Someone got to the south face before we finished the sweep," he assessed. "Treated a civilian. Professional kit. Gone before we wrapped up."
"How professional?" This was Steph, coming through the west entrance, and Dick held up the wrapper.
"Brand's not off-the-shelf." He turned it over. "Technique's good too, judging by the bandaging. Whoever this was knows what they're doing."
A pause on the line. Oracle's voice came through a few seconds later, measured: "This matches a pattern I've seen in the incident reports going back a while. Civilian treatment adjacent to your scenes, has a good kit, leaves cash, and then they're gone."
"How far back?" Bruce asked.
"Still pulling. At least a year. Probably longer." A beat. "Whoever it is has been doing this for a while. It was never suspicious enough for me to flag it."
"Flag it now then," Bruce said. "Everything you have." He was standing in the main loading bay doorway, and Dick knew from the particular quality of his stillness that this had already moved into the category of things Bruce was going to think long and hard about. "I want the full pattern."
"Already running it," Oracle said.
Steph, picking her way through the south face, stopped next to Dick. She looked at the wrapper and then at the chain-link. "Good weird or bad weird?"
"Not sure yet," Dick said, which was honest.
"The cash is interesting," Steph said.
"Yeah," he agreed. It was interesting. Whoever this was had good enough training to do field triage in the middle of an active scene, a decent enough kit to do it properly, and had left cash for the hospital bill after. That was a very specific combination. Dick stood there for another moment looking at the gap in the chain-link before Jason's voice came through the comm telling them to wrap up, and he shook it off and went.
…
Tim watched the ambulance from a water tower four blocks north and waited until Mike went in sitting up and talking, which was what he was waiting for. He watched until the Bats pulled out in stages — Damian first, then Jason, Steph, and then Dick, who'd been studying the south face for a while and came away from it with the look he got when he was actually interested in something, which Tim had catalogued without meaning to and now couldn't un-catalogue. Bruce last, standing in the loading bay doorway for a moment that went on long enough that Tim made a note of it.
It wasn’t great that this was the job that had gotten him marked by Batman, but Tim had an elusive enough presence because the people treated by him were usually injured enough to not really remember the encounter, or thankful enough that they wouldn’t rat him out to the Bats unless needed. If he stayed under the radar and made sure not to attract too much more attention, they would probably keep it on the back burner eventually.
The port at night was one of his better thinking spots. City lights scattered off the water, cargo ships moving in the middle distance with their running lights on, the red blink of the harbour markers on the far side, the whole ugly industrial stretch of it managing to be pretty if you found the right angle. Most people never looked at Gotham from up here. From up here it was a different city. It was one of his favorite spots to take photos when he had the time, and Tim had spent enough time on its rooftops to know most of the good angles.
He restocked the kit — gauze getting low, order by Thursday, one tourniquet to cycle out — added the notes to his phone, and let himself sit there another minute just because he could. He thought about Mike laughing, the too-loud surprised sound of it. He thought about the Thai place on his refrigerator. He was going to try that place this week. This was a commitment. He was making it, formally, to no one, on a water tower, like a man of his word.
He stood, rolled his neck, and started back toward the last Bristol bus.
…
The debrief was still running when he hit the rooftops north of the district, Dick being thorough about it the way he typically was, everyone else providing input at varying levels of helpfulness. He caught the tail end of Oracle saying she had a year's worth of incident reports flagged that matched the south face pattern, and caught Bruce's response, which was short and which Tim had listened to enough debriefs to understand meant he was going to keep thinking about this for a while with a cup of coffee in his hands.
He came in through the side door, which wasn’t considered important enough to have cameras. Shoes off in the back hall. Jacket on its hook. Kit up in his room’s closet with each component in its place. The arrangement made everything findable in the dark; it had to be in the right order. He walked back to the kitchen to put the kettle on.
After making some tea, he took it upstairs and changed into a sweatshirt that he stole from the pile of clothes his dad was planning to give away a few years ago, sat on his bed, and opened the pathology textbook to where he'd left off.
Past the tree line, past the stone wall, past a dark mile of Bristol road, Wayne Manor had the living room windows lit.
Tim found his page and read it, looking away from the Manor in the distance, and deciding to focus on his book instead.