Archive of Our Own ^beta

The sound of a bullet ricocheting off a dumpster and raucous laughter was hard to ignore. He flinches before he can stop himself. His grip on his staff tightens. The wind had been blowing in just the right direction, and the sound of the gun going off sounded so close that, for a second, Tim thought it had gone off right beside him. Even if he’d wanted to turn a blind eye, which he very rarely did, the combination of children's laughter and the sharp, piercing sound of a gunshot set every alarm in his head blaring. 

Tim drops down from the nearest fire escape that overhung the alley, landing heavier on his feet than he ought to, despite being careful not to move too close to the scattered trash cans, his landing is off — only by a few inches, but it's enough to send a shooting pain from his ankle up his leg. 

“Focus,” he mutters to himself.

The wind rustles loose papers as he lands, masking the gentle splash of his feet landing on the sodden ground. He moves into position with a precision that used to feel effortless, but now feels overly practised. If he had learned anything over the years as Robin, it was how to move between shadows without being seen, how to become the shadows themselves. 

At the centre of the gaggle of kids, chattering in hushed voices, stood a kid who looked twelve at most. Echoes of their whispers bounced off the narrow walls, poorly disguising their awe and excitement. He looked only a year or two younger than Tim was, but the weight Tim carried as Robin made him feel years older. He had dealt with things most boys should not, and so in that moment, despite their ages being so close, Tim saw a kid; something he could never really be. The boy stood with his feet apart, holding the glinting metal thing with both hands, a smile on his face, but a nervousness about him.

He waits. Wet asphalt under his feet, graffiti-stained walls to his back. The group of boys huddling at the far end of the alley are bouncing with energy. This wasn’t a confrontation. They certainly weren’t hardened criminals, at least. Tim was thankful to find himself dealing with small-time juvenile detention centre wannabes — with his current track record, this was more his speed — but he couldn’t exactly overlook the lighthearted attitudes bouncing around the alley. The ricochet had sounded sharper against the brick walls, making the alley feel impossibly small. For now, it was one stray bullet; all it would take was one bad shot for that bouncing excitement to turn into a ricocheting bullet wedged in some kid's chest.

The kid at the centre of it all raises his arms again. Goaded on by his friends, directing him to shoot at the beer cans lined up along the top of the dumpster. Robin hears the faint click of a round chambering. And that's when Tim calls it time.

He steps out of the shadows, mustering his best attempt at an imposing presence, like the ones he’s spent years trailing around after.

“I would put that down.”

The kid freezes. Tim’s approach was deliberate, careful, but fast. In one smooth motion, he plucks the gun from the boy’s hands, directing it safely toward the empty alley wall — just in case he hadn’t moved faster than the kid’s finger on the trigger.

The whole group panicks instantly. Curse words spill out, loud and unfiltered, words that kids that age should not have known yet and really shouldn’t be so comfortable saying, but then again, if they had found themselves a gun, maybe poor language was the least of Tim’s concerns. They stumble away, tripping over each other in their haste to make a break for it, a stray can falling off the dumpster and clattering against the asphalt in their wake. Not a thought spared for the friend they had left behind with Robin.

Tim is surprised when the little gunman doesn’t try to make a run for it himself. It takes him a second, but eventually it dawns on him. The kid is hoping he will get his gun back. 

“Come on, what do you need with a gun?” He keeps his voice low and steady, the sort of voice that tries to be older than it is.

He receives a scowl for his efforts. “It's none of your business!” the kid snaps, trying to appear not threatened in the slightest by the older teen. His voice comes out higher than he’d clearly been intending. 

“Well–” Tim steps closer, and with that one step, he gets a better look at the kid's face with the nearest streetlight highlighting the things he hadn’t noticed before: the busted lip, the bruise under one eye. He doesn’t really have to ask, but he does anyway. “What would you do with it?”

“It was for my stepdad.” He hadn’t been expecting the brovado to hold up. To extend to such blunt honesty. The admission lands between them, and the kid doesn’t bother giving Robin time to answer. “I don't like how he talks to my mom.”

“And you think this'll make things better?” Tim lets the disbelief out like a breath. “If you hurt your stepdad with this, all that's going to do is get you taken away and get your mom in a whole lot of trouble.”

The alley feels too still, disturbed only by the sounds of distant traffic that fills the silence. 

“I guess.” His voice is small all of a sudden. Tim hadn’t expected that either. 

“Made me feel better though.” He swallows. “Made me feel safer. Like it didn't matter what he did, I could stop it if I wanted to.”

The statement clings to him, heavy with a truth he hadn’t thought he would agree with. In that moment, he understands a little too well: the logic, the allure, the dangerous appeal of the weapon. Power. Control. The sudden, clean line between threat and action. A shiver runs along his spine, and it makes him uneasy in a way he hadn’t anticipated.

Safer, huh.

Tim exhales slowly. “Go on, get out of here. I’m keeping this. End of story.” He says it firmly, waving the gun around in a motion to show it off that is likely a bit hypocritical. 

The kid disappears into the darkness, a fleeting shape swallowed by the alley, leaving Tim to stare after him, unsettled.

He hadn’t realised how tightly he’d been holding his breath until now. One of his first solo patrols since everything, since the Tower, since Jason, and he still isn’t sure if being back out here was a sign of progress or denial. Maybe both.

The alley remains quiet

. 

Tim lingers a moment longer, his mind already running a mile a minute. Later, he’d ask Batman to help track the kid down, maybe find a way to intervene, to guide him before the choice got any worse. But for now… The alley remains quiet and heavy with possibilities.

He had meant to hand it over to GCPD. Really, he had. He will, actually. He's planning on it— just not right now.

The night stretches on, as is so often the case when he’s out on patrol. There's a mugging to stop, a break-in just one district over, a frightened old lady on a street corner while sirens wail a few blocks away. Batman’s voice crackles through the comms, gruff and commanding as ever: “Robin, report to the Narrows. Suspicious movement near the bridge.”

So he goes.

When the Bat calls, the Birds come flying.

When he finally walks through the threshold of his bedroom door, it's just a few hours short of dawn. The city outside doesn’t sleep, but he needs to, every so often at least.

He hasn’t handed in the gun.

He sits on the edge of his desk and peels off his gloves, one finger at a time, because these wretched things don’t just tug off easily, despite his complaining that they ought to. That would be a security risk, Robin. The air feels cold on his hands, and the skin feels damp after being confined for so long. He reaches for the gun.

It’s heavier than he’s expecting.

Obviously, he’s held one before— held this one just hours earlier. Tim knows what a gun feels like; it's not like he hasn't held hundreds over the years: knocked them out of hands, wrestled them from dumb criminals, disarmed them, redirected them before they go off into his shoulder. 

The point is; he's not unfamiliar with guns. He’s felt the recoil in someone else’s grip. Hell, he can’t count the number of times he’s felt the shock of metal grazing past him. You would think at some point bullets would stop shocking him, but they never do; that’s why he doesn’t like them— setting aside Batman’s no-kill rule, that’s a big reason he doesn’t like them. But Tim supposes that, on principle, Robin or not, he doesn’t like them.

This gun is different, though. It has a story attached. Tim knows that, realistically, a lot of guns have a story, but he’s never held onto any long enough to think about it much. He remembers a kid’s shaky hands, a bruised cheek, and a voice that said, “It made me feel safer.”

He turns it over in his palms. Feels the metal on his skin rather than through the toughness of his gloves. He studies the dull shine of the barrel. Despite the no-killing rule — the one line Bruce makes sure they all know is not to be crossed — it's part of Batman's training, knowing how to handle a gun so that one never gets the best of you out on the field. Because fear only works if you know what you’re afraid of.

Tim studies it, almost reverently, tracing the contours, imagining its history, and feels the chill of responsibility settle across his shoulders. A gun in the hands of someone scared, someone angry, someone desperate— it’s more than metal.

He sets it down on the desk, but his hand doesn’t leave it right away.

Right, yes. He’s never liked guns. He thinks of the fact that gun crime is an aggressively high statistic in Gotham. They’ve taken the lives of far too many people, far too many innocents. Tim had read the stories in old newspapers at the library about the murder of Thomas and Martha Wayne. He hadn’t needed to ask why Bruce had been so insistent on being equipped to prevent a lethal encounter with firearms. He wonders, perhaps not for the first time, whether the rule against killing was ever meant to keep Gotham safe, or just to keep them from turning into the city they were fighting.

A door slams down the corridor. The gun stays where it is, caught under the light of his desk lamp. Tim tells himself again that he’ll hand it in tomorrow.

He means to. He really does.

The thought follows him long after he turns the light out, long after the room has fallen still. He closes his eyes, but the darkness doesn’t bring rest.

The nightmare doesn’t begin; it simply continues. 

Sometimes it wears Jason’s face.

•·················•·················•

Since his return from beyond the grave, Jason's been everywhere. And Tim has just had to put up with it.

A waking nightmare. 

Raining down on him with a fury Tim couldn't have ever fathomed. 

His nine-year-old self could never have predicted this.

He had always wondered what his predecessor would have thought of him; Jason Todd, the second Robin, the reckless one, the one who mattered. Tim had wanted to live up to that ghost. Batman hadn't chosen him, not like he’d chosen Dick or Jason, so he'd tried to be enough by pushing himself harder, by pushing himself twice as hard even. He had convinced himself that so long as he could continue to prove his worth, that was as close to enough as he would ever be. 

Now, though— Now, he’s scared that he never would be. 

Jason’s return solidified that feeling.

It’s been months and he still can’t outrun it. Despite his best efforts.

Far too often, it hits him without a warning; he can’t escape the moment he stopped being sure he was a good Robin, was good at any of this in the first place. When he still had a solid handle on all his duties. When all was as it should be.

When Jason tracked him down in Titans Tower—

—wearing that mock version of the Robin suit Tim almost thought nothing of it. He was sleep-deprived, overworked, and hopped up on caffeine, as he too often was. His predecessor had been on his mind of late; he and Batman had had a disagreement the night before. Bruce’s silence afterwards had said everything. So when the late Robin appeared in the doorway — older, broader, the familiar red and green getup darkened by shadow — Tim’s brain made a short jump to the simplest conclusion: hallucination.

It made sense. For as long as Tim could remember Robin existing, he had been in his dreams. 

From the minute Tim had uncovered Batman and Robin’s identities at the age of nine, Jason, specifically, had been the Robin of his dreams. Sometimes it was nice, a comforting presence conjured by his mind, the image of the Robin Tim had known growing up, following him through life, both as a waking dream and as a subconscious phantom.

Sometimes it was less nice. 

There were a lot of things about being Robin that weren’t so nice. 

After Tim took up the mantle, Jason had always been there, in flashes, bleeding into walls, glaring from the edge of Tim’s peripheral vision. This wasn’t new. The Jason Todd conjured by Tim’s mind sometimes stared at him with a critical eye; how could he not? He was a product of Tim’s own mind after all.

“Figures,” Tim said, vaguely directed at the familiar figure standing in the doorway, with tired resignation dripping into his voice. “Of course you’d show up now.”

And then that older version of Robin, his Robin, the Robin, closed the distance between them with a speed Tim hadn't expected. He moved fast, fast enough that by the time instinct told him to dodge, the dead Robin’s hand was already around his throat. 

Tim hit the desk hard. 

His body dug into the solid edge. His first thought was still that this wasn’t real. He didn’t fight. Why would he? Hallucinations didn’t bruise. Dead Robins didn’t come back angry. But then Jason’s grip tightened, cutting off the flow of air to his lungs, his nails biting into Tim’s skin. That’s when it occurred to Tim to panic.

Hallucinations didn’t hurt like this.

As Robin, when fight-or-flight kicks in, his first instinct is to fight; maybe it hadn’t always been his first impulse, but his training compensated for that. Not this time, though. This time, he froze.

His muscles tensed, a gasp catching in his throat just as the hands around his neck first squeezed. Tim’s eyes widened, his vision sharpening on the figure towering over him.

An all too familiar domino, masking a vicious gaze.

He couldn’t hear anything over the roaring in his ears, over the sound of blood rushing through him. He rose to latch his hands onto the constricting hold, clawing at the gloved fingers around his neck to no avail. The person under the suit was warm. 

Jason was warm. Jason— 

Jason’s knee drove into his stomach; Tim’s vision blurred, every nerve in his abdomen screaming. He tried to gasp, tried to speak, as he buckled over from the sudden hit. The pressure on his neck was gone, but no respite came. Tim was being wrenched back by his hair, the sharp stinging in his scalp almost enough to make him cry out before he was slammed down into the floor, right by the foot of the work station he’d been hunched over shortly before, the one plastered with photos of the team, of Batman, of every impossible standard he’d ever tried to meet.

As if the hit wasn’t enough to knock the breath out of him, his sudden contact with the solid ground pulled a dry wheezing sound from of him. Vertigo slammed into him momentarily, the world tilted, and his sense of up and down slipped.

In the split second following the collision, Tim catalogues any information available to him, but when he tries to move on to the next rapid-fire stage: analysis, he finds his mind is blinded by a disorienting disconnect between his mind and body. The result: he is unable to keep up with reality.

“Replacement.” Jason hissed.

The word hit harder than the floor had, landing somewhere deep, somewhere raw.

Tim’s jaw clenched, and his next breath tore itself out of him, tightening in his chest. His hand slipped, his nails scraped frantically on the tile floor. 

Before he could move, the older boy yanked Tim’s head back, planted a boot between his shoulder blades, pressing down hard enough to make the floor creak, or were those his ribs? Tim’s hands scrabbled against the tile, his breath coming in sharp, useless bursts. 

He doesn’t remember what he was thinking at the time. He would rather not remember any of it at all.

Jason leaned in closer, his breath hot against Tim’s ear. “You wear my colours, my name, my life— And you think you can replace me?” 

Tim tensed.

For the first time since seeing him, Tim’s body moved before his brain could catch up.  His body flooded with adrenaline, his heartbeat thudded in his throat as he twisted beneath Jason’s weight, gasping, kicking, desperate to claw his way out of the nightmare that wasn’t in his head at all. 

What was this? What—

Tim’s fingers scraped against the floor, searching for anything, his staff, a tool, hell, even a chair leg, but he caught nothing except for the slight ridges of the grout between the tiles. Jason’s boot shifted, grinding meanly into the space between his shoulder blades. A warning. A reminder of who was in control. Of who was under whose boot.

“Don’t bother,” Jason said, voice calm now, almost conversational. “Although… It is sweet. Watching you try.”

Tim coughed, tasting copper. His face must have hit the floor harder than he had thought. “You– You’re not real.” His voice came out shakier than he expected, disbelieving, almost desperate.

A sharp, mocking huff of laughter sounded above him.

The sound jolted through him. It was wrong, too human.

This wasn’t Robin. Robin had been a lot of things: fast, reckless, laughter in the face of danger. Jason Todd as Robin had been a spark in Gotham’s darkness, the light that clung to Batman’s shadow. Robin had been magic.

Not this. He could never be this.

The pressure against Tim’s back blurred into something familiar: the weight of expectation, of failure. For a moment, Jason’s voice wasn’t Jason’s. It was Bruce’s, low and cold and tired. You should have known better.

Jason bent low, fingers fisting in Tim’s collar, and with one sharp motion, wrenched him over onto his back. The world spun. His spine hit the floor, air leaving his lungs in a strangled gasp. Jason leaned over him, pinning him to the floor by his neck, the familiar domino mask gone, tossed aside somewhere.

“Look at me,” Jason ordered.

Tim tried to turn away. His fingers fisting in Jason’s cape in an attempt to gain purchase, to brace himself on anything and push away.

The older, towering boy wasn’t having it. His hand clamped around Tim’s jaw, forcing his gaze upward. And there it was. Tim stilled, snapped to attention and was unable to look away. Jason’s eyes, glowing an unnatural, vibrant green that couldn’t be real. Couldn’t possibly be real. But something deep in Tim’s gut, the part that always knew before the evidence came in, whispered that they were.

Jason’s expression twisted into a grin that was anything but humorous. “What’s wrong, replacement? Don’t like what you see? You wanted to be Robin so bad, here’s what it gets you.”

His mind raced for a retort, but found nothing. He had nothing, not a word, not a breath, not a clue what Jason was going to do to him.

Well.

Tim had an idea, an unnerving, nightmarish idea that clawed at him. 

The Robin reborn above him laughed, short and sharp, like a bark. Tim’s skin crawled at the sound, “You’re nothing but Bruce’s rebound. Didn’t go looking far, did he, found himself the nearest sad neighbour kid and called it a day. You thought you could wear my colours?”

Tim blinked hard, once, twice, trying to force the image to dissolve. But it didn’t. His hold on the older boy's cape loosened momentarily. The green light seared the edges of his vision. Tim was sure that if he looked away, the green would follow his gaze, permanently burned into his retinas like a scorching memory. Maybe Jason wasn’t the hallucination after all. Maybe he was.

Jason’s grip loosened just enough for Tim to drag in air. He coughed, eyes darting toward the workbench where his staff leaned. Too far. Jason followed the glance and smirked.

“Calculating, Huh? I guess after last time, B wants his good soldiers to be smarter.” He reached for his belt, the movement smooth and deliberate. “Let’s see if your smarts make the cut here.”

The sound of metal leaving leather was small, but it carved through the room like a gunshot.

And then Jason’s smile widened, slow and casual. 

The knife was there, between them, raised to his throat with deliberate calm.

Tim froze. Cold surged through him. The shriek trapped in his chest wouldn’t come. Every instinct told him he should have run. Every nerve told him it was too late.

And then—

Light fractured. Time folded in on itself. For a moment, there was only the sound of his own pulse, a flash of silver, a burn of air and the feeling of blood in his throat.

•·················•·················•

He blinks. Shoving that line of thinking back somewhere deep inside where he hopes it will stay, but it never does.

Rain had drenched the streets, making every puddle a mirror for the neon glow above. Robin moves through alleys and across roofs like a shadow, his senses stretched taut. Every sound — the slam of a door, the distant rumble of a patrol car — makes his body jerk, a reflex he doesn’t bother suppressing anymore.

The scar running along his neck itches. The itch is irrational; he knows this, but even so, his mind can’t seem to let him forget its existence, and that means plaguing him with imaginary itches. It serves as a constant reminder of how close he’d come to being helpless, how quickly things could turn violent when Jason was involved. The memory of that night hovers at the edge of his thoughts constantly. It pokes at him, sharp and uncomfortable, like a splinter under his skin.

He can’t help but feel that he had just got by, by the skin of his teeth, one more time.

Tim closes the door to the fire escape on the roof behind him and leans against it, chest heaving, cheek stinging from the punch he hadn’t expected. Not from Jason, technically, but it might as well have been. His vision is annoyingly still swimming a little; the world is sharp and jagged at the edges, and he can feel the adrenaline and frustration — that should have worn off by now — still pulsing in his veins. Gotham had a way of reminding you that it didn’t care. And Jason… Jason had a way of reminding you that no one did.

He had been hoping tonight's patrol would be easier. Easier than all the others in the last month since he’d been cleared to return after his recovery, since Batman had relented to him being unbenched. It had, decidedly, not been easier. 

There had been an attempted car theft. Some older guys in their twenties were trying to hotwire a car that, in Tim’s opinion, wasn’t nice enough to be worth stealing. 

Robin had been handling it. 

But then Hood had appeared. Not outright threatening, but, after everything that had happened, undeniably unnerving. Disruptive. He just stood there, leaning casually against a lamppost on the opposite side of the street, watching like it was entertainment, and he was thoroughly entertained. 

Tim couldn’t stop himself from constantly glancing back at him out of the corner of his eye. He had to, for self-preservation's sake. A learned instinct that he now lived by.

The helmet caught the dim orange streetlight. The flash of red in his peripheral vision was too much like the flash of a predator slinking by. 

When the carjackers’ attention shifted to Robin, they didn’t pose a threat to him at first. He was well-trained after all, a few lousy carjackers weren’t going to get the best of Robin, even if he had been off the streets for a while. Rusty or not, this shouldn’t have been a difficult altercation to put an end to. But then Hood has started calling out tips to them.

At first, Hood said nothing. Just stood there, arms folded, silent, infuriating, unsettling.

Then, right as Robin disarmed the first guy, Hood decided to get involved.

“Left side, genius. He always drops his guard there,” Hood called, voice echoing down the empty street.

Tim froze for half a beat, thrown by the command.

The thieves opposite him hesitated too, confusion flashing between them. And then realisation dawned on them.

Jason laughed. “No, no, not like that! He’s fast, but he’s predictable. Hit low. Sweep his leg.

The next few moments devolved fast, and not in Tim’s favour. The usual ebb and flow of the fight — that Robin would normally have a firm grasp on — slipped away from him. Every move he anticipated, they countered, not because they were skilled in the slightest, but because Hood was calling plays like some deranged coach from the sidelines.

Bitterly, it occurred to Tim that Jason was good at it. Maybe in another life—

“Good! Now go for the ribs. You’ll hear a crunch if you do it right.”

“Would you— Shut. Up.” Robin shouted in Hood's general direction, fury edging into his tone.

That second of distraction was all it took.

The guy closest to him took advantage of the opening, using the momentary distraction to connect his fist solidly with Robin’s face. Right in the eye. A sharp flash of pain burst across his cheekbone and behind his eyelid. For a moment, all he could see were splintered shards of light.

Jason’s laughter taunted him from across the street, lazy and amused. “Guess the kid’s still got some learning to do.”

By the time Tim blinked the spots from his vision, the carjackers had scattered and thankfully, left the car behind, half-sparked and abandoned with nothing but a broken window.

He stood there for a long moment, breathing hard, hand pressed to the side of his face. He could have done without the aching pain in his face that was sending shooting pains up through his temple. The ache in his face was an unwelcome reminder that even minor fights could escalate when Jason was around.

Robin hunched over on the side of the street, more out of breath than he should have been. Hood's laughter echoed somewhere nearby, a phantom gnawing at Tim’s sanity.

His fingers itched for the familiar forbidden weight at his side. He had hidden it weeks ago, convinced himself he’d hand it in. But tonight… knowing that tonight would be another solo patrol, tonight it had felt necessary.

When he snapped his head up to stare at Hood, at Jason, his fingers had been brushing again the special compartment he now had on his utility belt specifically for the cold metal he now couldn’t go anywhere without, feeling the reassuring heft of the gun in his disguised holster. He could have fished it out. But when he looked up, Hood was gone.

The city around him was still, rain starting to mist down. It had briefly stopped, the sky offering Tim a quick respite as it deemed him sufficiently challenged as is. He’s now sure how much worse he would have fared had rain been clouding his vision. Now that Hood was gone, the rain returned, his luck in that regard finally running out. 

Across the street, Tim bore his good eye into the spot where Jason had stood, taunting gleefully like he hadn’t made a bad night worse.

Get a grip, jeez.

The rain started coming down harder after that, washing the street clean of everything except Jason’s laughter.

By the time he moved, the street was empty. Just him, the rain, and the steady metal weight at his side, now colder than it had been before.

The fire escape of the apartment building he’d snuck into,  for a brief reprieve from the hectic streets, is damp. Water drips from the ceiling, but it isn’t nearly as bad as the downpour outside. The smell of wet concrete and rust is thick in the air. 

Tim’s breaths come unevenly, his chest rising and falling as he runs through the ordeal of the night in his head. Trying to take note of his surroundings isn’t lowering his stress levels as much as he would like it to. Jason was gone, at least, had disappeared an hour ago after that whole stupid fight, but Tim still feels rattled, and he resents it.

He shouldn’t have brought the gun with him. He shouldn’t still have it. What’s wrong with him? He absolutely should not be running around with it on patrol. If Bruce found out he’d been holding onto a gun — an unregistered gun that he basically stole from a kid — then that would be enough to have him benched again. Or worse, told to step down as Robin.

His chest tightens, heart hammering, as he imagines, paradoxically, what could happen, and what he would do if he didn’t have it. Jason had been tame tonight, but some nights he wasn’t.

His gloved fingers wind into his hair and tug as he holds back a gasping breath that is dangerously close to being a sob.

Things have been… rough, to say the least. 

A strangled sense of normalcy had fallen on them all. Red Hood was out there. Sometimes, Robin caught glimpses. Sometimes, Batman warned him off from certain locations over the comms. Tim didn't need to ask why; he knew what it meant when Bruce told him to steer clear of a seemingly random street in Gotham. Red Hood was about, and they'd all learned the hard way what happened when Robin found himself in front of Red Hood.

Being knocked into a brick wall makes for a bad concussion. Being pushed off a roof with a broken grappler gun makes for broken bones. And no amount of training or moves to get himself out of a sticky situation would cut it when the man he was trying to evade had been taught all the same ducks and rolls. It's hard to avoid a flying fist when that fist knows exactly the move to anticipate.

It was a small blessing that Hood had taken to never coming at Robin with a weapon — at least nothing sharp, nothing lethal. He didn’t need a weapon to cause pain; he was all too adept at inflicting it bodily. Part of Tim wonders if it’s because Jason knows he wouldn’t be able to do anything other than freeze if ever faced with a blade in Hood’s hand.

An offhand comment from one of their altercations crosses his mind. It’s only fun if you fight.

So when Batman tells Robin to steer clear, Robin takes his orders and grapples elsewhere.

Somehow, mindlessly, his hand finds the gun again.

He flexes his fingers around the grip, thumb tracing the contours almost absently. Scenarios spin around in his mind: dark corners, the glint of a blade in the shadows, Jason’s mocking smile, the scar across his neck. Tim isn’t even sure half of it was real. Sometimes he is so sure he is only hallucinating Jason, or maybe that's just what he wants to believe, because hallucinations can’t hurt him. Or maybe they could, he’s made that one near-fatal mistake before. He knows some of it is real. The scar on his neck is real.

He imagines Hood cornering him, unpredictable, fast, violent. Every instinct screaming at him to be ready.

Since he’d started patrolling again, he had rarely been left alone. Batman was almost always there, and when he wasn’t, Nightwing was. But sometimes Robin had to brave the night alone. Those nights — nights like this one — were all too often absolute hell.

No, he doesn’t regret bringing the gun.

The gun feels heavier now, not just in his hand but in his mind. It’s no longer a piece of metal. It’s a lifeline.

It’s not for killing. That isn’t an option; it hasn’t ever been. But protection… Yes. Protection makes sense. Protection makes him feel… alive. Safe. There is a razor-thin line between fear and control, and for the first time in hours, he feels like he might actually have a weak grasp of the edge of it.

Tim’s breathing finally settles into something that isn’t all-consuming. He can hear the rain pounding down on the roof above him again.

Maybe demanding that Bruce let him back out on the streets again so soon had been a mistake. With how tumultuous Jason had managed to make his recovery, he should have known that being back out on patrol would be a challenge.

Maybe he isn’t ready. But it’s too late now. If Tim listened to what Jason had to say, he'd never be ready.

Jason could break a lot of things, but he couldn't break Tim's resolve.

He draws in one last shaky breath and winces. The sound of it— ragged and wet in his throat, is too similar. Too much like— 

• ·················•·················•

—the frantic gasping for air that won’t go down. 

He had lain there. Gurgling. He couldn't breathe. His throat filled with blood; it was in his mouth, in his teeth, on his hands, under his nails where he tried desperately to grasp at the gaping slash in his neck.

The air wouldn’t go down. Only the blood did.

You're pathetic, Replacement.

That’s all Tim could remember following the dreadful moment after the blade slit his neck. Just the voice: law, scornful, echoing through the frantic haze in his brain, the sound of his own choking.

When he woke up in the medbay, it was to find Bruce slumped forward in a chair beside him,  lying with his arms crossed on the side of Tim’s cot, head resting in the crook of his elbow. The sight almost didn’t register. Bruce wasn’t one for choosing sleep over duty, not one for looking human. Even when he was Brucie Wayne, he never was quite human — more performance than person.

Tim didn't move for a while, just stared. At the rise and fall of Bruce’s shoulders. At the faint lines etched into his forehead that somehow Tim had neglected to notice until now. He stared at the father figure for whom he would never be enough and wondered, numbly,  why they'd gone through the trouble bringing him back from the edge of bleeding out.

He swallowed, and immediately regretted it. The feeling was awful: the pull of the stitches against the soft skin of his throat, the faint burn that ran all the way up to the back of his tongue. He wanted to cough, but even something so simple hurt. It hurt like hell. 

His shuddering cough was what woke Bruce.

When Bruce stirred, his eyes softened in that rare, unbearably quiet way. 

For a moment, his eyes were dazed, not with fatigue, but with something close to panic, the kind he never let anyone see. Then his focus landed on Tim, and the hard lines of his face eased just a fraction.

“Don't speak.” He paused, his voice quiet, but it carried that tone, the one that left no room for argument.

Bruce hesitated, his jaw tightening. “Your vocal cords are–” He stopped, looked away briefly as if the word itself was difficult. “You won't be able to speak for a while, Tim.”

The way he said it wasn’t clinical. It certainly wasn’t the tone Alfred used when giving a prognosis. It sounded personal. Apologetic.

Tim’s throat ached like fire.

He raised a trembling hand, intending to touch his neck, to feel the damage. But before he could, Bruce snapped into motion, sitting upright. 

The suddenness of his movement startled Tim, and Bruce surprised him even more with the gentleness of his fingers as he wrapped them around Tim’s wrist, steady but careful, drawing Tim’s hand away from his neck.

“It's best that you don't touch it.” He said quietly.

All Tim could do was nod faintly, and he regretted that small motion the minute it happened. Everything tugged at his skin uncomfortably.

In a strange sort of way, it felt like Bruce truly cared; not just about the mission, not about Robin, but about him.

Tim’s vision was starting to swim again. His body felt foreign, like it was heavy in all the wrong places and weightless everywhere else.

He was stubborn, always had been. The minute Bruce left to get Alfred, Tim was already trying to stand. The IV tugged at his arm. His legs wobbled. His vision blurred at the edges. He felt hollowed out, like he'd woken from a thousand-year sleep. His muscles tensed with the effort of simply staying upright.

When he made it to the nearest mirror in a bathroom where neither Brice nor Alfred were likely to come bustling in, and promptly shoo him back to the medbay, Tim finally got a look at his own reflection.

It was a haunting thing; he looked like he should be dead. If Jason had had his way—

His hair was greasy, and it was limp against his forehead. His mouth felt awful and tacky. His teeth felt thick with that unclean sensation, like he hadn’t brushed them in weeks. Tim didn’t know how long he would have been out for, but given how woozy he still felt, it must have been a while, if the nausea and IV drip were anything to go by. It had been long enough for his body to forget what strength felt like.

He pulled his lips into a grimace, expecting to see the telltale yellow tint of neglect. Instead, he stumbled back in shock. 

Congealed blood stuck in the crevices of his teeth. Dried in the corners of his lips.

Gnarly didn't even cover it.

Of course, they'd washed the blood from his hands, his neck. But not his mouth. 

The realisation hit him harder than he expected. He stared at his reflection: his skin was too pale even for him, his eyes sunken, his neck bandaged, and bruises that seemed to go around most of his throat inched out from under the dressing. 

He looked like the ghost of someone who had died and hadn’t decided yet whether to come back or not.

Taking in a slow, uncomfortable, steadying breath, he braced his hands against the sink to stop himself from swaying. His head hadn’t really stopped feeling fuzzy since he woke up, and he wasn’t sure if it was from the blood loss or the sheer exhaustion that was clawing at the edges of his mind.

It dawned on him just how close to death he must have been by the time they'd got to him, how long he had lain there before they found him. Maybe, long enough for his body to stop fighting. He must have stopped gasping for air that wouldn't go down by then.  

Tim wasn’t sure what scared him most between Jason, and how easy it had been to let go. 

After that, the days blurred. His recovery was a haze of sleep, painkillers, and the quiet hum of the medbay machines. Once he was back in his room, sometimes he would wake and catch the tail end of muffled voices: Bruce’s low growl, Alfred’s steady calm, and Dick’s frustrated whispers. Sometimes it was too much effort to butt his head into the conversations he knew were about him, so a lot of the time he simply pretended not to hear at all.

Recovery was supposed to mean moving forward, but mostly it meant waiting. Waiting for his voice to come back, for the tremors to stop. Waiting for Bruce and Dick to stop looking at him like he might break. They thought he was blind. Every time he caught them exchanging those quiet, careful glances over his head, it made him want to crawl out of his skin.

The worst part was that he was fragile. He could feel it under his skin; it was like his body had forgotten that it belonged to him. 

The cut started healing, the stitches came out, and the pink, ridged scar stayed in its place.

Even after it had healed, the scar tugged when he swallowed, and it hurt. He knew rationally that it couldn’t be physically hurting him, but his mind seemed to be convinced otherwise. Sometimes when he closed his eyes, he could still feel the sharp edge of the knife, that precise pressure at his throat, and the rush of air leaving him too fast.

Somewhat conveniently, throughout all this time, his parents had been away. Their longest excavation gig yet. They had been home for one meagre weekend a few months ago, back when Tim was still in the midst of his recovery and couldn’t speak. He’d worn a turtleneck, listened attentively, they’d spoken about work, and 48 hours later, they were out the door before dawn on their way to catch another flight.

That was the only time Tim had returned to his family home in the months since the attack. He had been too scared to spend time in the house alone, and Bruce had been good enough to suggest he take up a more permanent residence in his room at Wayne Manor while he recuperated.

It had been a blessing. Tim’s not sure how he would have fared in the Drake family home on his own, regardless of whether or not Jason came for him there.

Tim didn't see Jason for a long time after that. 

Even once he had recovered, Bruce kept him benched for a while longer than Tim kept insisting was strictly necessary. The fact that he couldn’t speak for longer than was expected of his recovery period was unnerving to them all and did nothing to win Tim any arguments. It wasn’t just the injury; it was what came after.

He could force sound out, but not much. The words were thin, breathy, and cracked when he pushed himself too hard. Alfred had said it would take time, and Bruce hadn’t said anything at all.

It was completely irrational, he knew it was. He wasn’t afraid to speak; the words just wouldn’t come. It was as if his brain and body had disconnected somewhere between intent and execution. A temporary selective mutism, he told himself. Something clinical, detached. Tim found it easier to label things than to feel them. But every time he opened his mouth and nothing came out, that familiar frustration coiled in his chest, sharp and humiliating.

It made everything worse.

Jason's stunt hadn't gone down well with Bruce or Dick, or so he had been told. There had been too many arguments to count. Voices raised behind doors that locked him out. Discussions between the older Bats that Tim was infuriatingly not privy to, despite his scribbled assurances — which he wrote scratchily on a notepad with an annoying stuntedness that the speed of his normal speaking voice would have never hindered him with — that he was fine. He had dealt with the worst of it. He wanted to be in the know. 

The look of concern Dick had levelled him with in answer — all creased brows, eyes that conveyed too much pity for Tim’s liking, and hesitant gnawing at his lip; it all spoke of the doubt the older man felt. Tim knew that look too well; it was the look of an adult looking down at a child whose judgment couldn’t be trusted.  It was too much like an older brother's look for Tim’s comfort. It was protective. It was patronising. A look that told Tim, without any words being said, you’re not ready.

It was enough to make Tim want to scream and shout, but he couldn’t.

He had been furious at the refusal to sit in on the earlier meetings. They were talking about Jason. About Hood. About the person who had slit his throat open and left him gasping on the floor. He deserved to know what was happening. He was still Robin— wasn’t he?

Well. Maybe.

In the silence of the manor, when he had gone too long without being useful, without contributing to the current investigation, he caught himself wondering. What if Jason wanted Robin back? What if that was why he wasn’t allowed to be a part of those meetings? Maybe, now that his predecessor was back in the picture, Tim’s trial run was over, and it hadn’t just been inconclusive; it had been a let-down. A lethal one.

He caught fragments of the shouting behind closed doors, snatches of things they didn’t mean for him to hear. Much as Bruce shut Tim out, and Dick tried to shield him from the so-called harsher realities, details slipped through the cracks.

They were tracking Hood.

Nightwing had suffered injuries from an altercation with Hood, which was intended to be some kind of negotiation that quickly went south. They couldn’t hide that from him. Not when Dick had come home bruised and quiet.

Two safe houses had been compromised in the last month. Valuable tech that was in development had been stolen. Someone had been in the Batcave. 

That last part had ripped the air out of Tim’s lungs.

They couldn’t prove it was Jason. But they knew. They knew.

Jason was here. 

Jason was in the Manor. Just as easily as he’d broken into the Batcave, he could have crept up the stairs undetected. Could have walked the same halls, silent and sure-footed. Could have found his way up to Tim’s room. Found his way to Tim. And finished what he started.

Something inside him broke loose at that thought. A sound clawed its way up his throat, raw and hoarse, not quite words. The room tilted.

The door had opened then, and Dick was there. 

He didn’t usually tilt his head that much to look down at Tim — not like that. But he did now. Tim must have fallen without noticing. Dick’s arms came around him, warm and strong, voice a low hush against the ringing in Tim’s ears, uttering quiet promises that it was alright, they wouldn’t let Jason come for him again. 

Tim wanted to believe him. Wanted to stop shaking. He felt pathetic in that moment. As though he was proving them all right; proving to Dick that he was too young to handle it, proving to Bruce that he was too weak to be Robin.

Bruce had appeared in front of him, silent and imposing. He crouched down in front of them both. His hands were steady as they reached out for Tim, cupping his face and brushing his fringe out of his eyes. As he brushed away the stream of tears running down his face — because, as if it wasn’t already mortifying enough, of course, Tim was crying — and spoke to him quietly but with that firmness he usually reserved for Batman, “Tim, he will not hurt you again. I promise you, I will not allow that.”

Tim wanted to believe him too.

He had been surprised but relieved that they would keep their distance from Jason for what he'd done, after that. Relieved to know that, at least for a short time, they were angry too. He knew it wouldn’t last. The fault lines were already starting to form. The grief. The longing. The way Bruce said Jason’s name with an unintended reverence that sounded like regret. The way Dick couldn’t talk about him without his voice stuttering, caught somewhere between love and disbelief.

He wouldn't have blamed them for forgiving Jason anything. Not when he was the prodigal son returned. Before Jason came back, Tim had been sure he would have felt joy. Joy for Bruce, for Dick, for all of them. But Jason did return, and it brought Tim no joy.

He didn't blame them when they did forgive him. Though he wished it didn’t hurt so much to watch.

By then, Tim could just about talk again, quietly and never for too long. The cut on his neck had healed into a clean, pale line. Long, thin as a thread, and undeniably the mark of a knife.

The next time Tim saw Jason, it was in the study. 

He wasn’t supposed to be there. Bruce would have warned Tim had he invited Jason into the manor. He would have at least given him that courtesy.

The room was half shadow, lit only by a small desklight, illuminating Jason like a downcast spotlight, casting dark shadows across his face. The faint ticking of the grandfather clock marked the seconds too loudly. The ticking resonated in his throat like a harsh swallow.

Tim froze in the doorway. 

Jason was standing by a bookshelf, head tilted contemplatively as he ran a gloved finger along the spines.

At that moment, Tim thought his mind had conjured the image. But then again, he had allowed his mind to convince him of that once before and look how that had ended. The truth revealed itself for him. Jason turned, casual, alive, real.

For a fleeting second, something flashed across Jason’s face. Not anger exactly, but a flash of something too raw to be disguised. The crimelord's jaw clenched, breath catching like he’d been struck. His gloved hand flexed once at his side before curling into a fist. It was gone as quickly as it came, replaced by that cruel, practised smirk. But Tim had seen it. That flicker of restraint. That moment where Jason might have torn the world apart just to unsee him.

The younger teenager’s breath caught in his throat. He wanted to shout. For Dick, for Bruce, anyone. But when he opened his mouth to call out, all that came out was a hoarse scrape of a sound. 

Jason grinned at him, slow and cruel.

“What's wrong, Robin? Little bird can’t sing anymore?”

Tim flinched. His throat burned. He wanted to turn and flee, be the coward. But for some unfathomable reason — pride, paralysis, who knew really — he didn't. He stood and stared.

Jason flicked through the pages of the book he plucked off the shelf, for a few seconds longer, thumbing through the pages with the same easy disinterest he might give a weapon he didn’t need to use yet. 

“One thing I missed while being dead,” Jason murmured, voice low and conversational, “B always did have a fucking fantastic collection.”

Tim startled at the sound; at the casual profanity, at the way dead rolled off Jason’s tongue like a joke only he was allowed to tell.

Jason moved then, slow and deliberate, closing the distance between them. He stopped beside Tim. Leaned into his space, so close that Tim could feel faint warmth radiating off of him, as well as the smell of the city on his jacket; oil, asphalt, rain. Blood.

Every nerve in Tim’s body screamed at him to lean back, to move, to shove him back and reclaim the small space between them. But he didn't dare; his body wouldn’t obey. He was frozen. His eyes darted across Jason's threatening figure in silent panic. He catalogued the weight of his jacket, the faint glint of metal at his belt, the twitch of his jaw. He was broader now, heavier, more solid than he ever was as Robin.

Jason leaned in a mere inch. It was already too much. He was close enough for Tim to feel the warmth of his breath in the air of the cold study when he spoke. “Relax,” he said, amusement curling at his mouth. “Not here to slit your throat again. Promise.”

Tim’s pulse stuttered. His throat spasmed on a half-breath. He couldn’t tell if Jason meant it as a reassurance or a cruelty. Likely both.

The taller of the two huffed a small laugh and stepped past him, brushing close enough that Tim felt the movement but not the contact. No touch, no violence. Just proximity.

Then he was gone.

The study felt colder.

A sleep paralysis demon. That’s what it was. But this was no nightmare. Jason wasn’t something his mind had conjured to haunt him. He was real. And worse yet, he had walked out the front door.

•·················•·················•

When he isn’t out on patrol or writing up reports on the computer in the Batcave, Tim spends a lot of his time holed up in his room. He doesn’t feel up to facing Alfred and Bruce most of the time. And with Dick spending a disproportionate amount of time away from Blüdhaven for the sake of loitering around the Manor under the guise of watching out for Tim, leaving his room is a surefire way of being subjected to scrutiny. His performance as Robin has been subpar lately. Tim knows it. Bruce certainly knows it. And he isn’t ready to be confronted on that basis yet.

He is trying to be up to standard; he really is. He has been out solo patrolling for weeks now, and it has been months since he started patrolling with Batman or Nightwing after his recovery period had ended.

As time goes on, the more “up to standard” feels like a moving target. Nowadays, post patrol reports mean cataloguing his mistakes like evidence at his own trial.

Not to mention the yellowing bruise painted across his cheek and under his eye that makes his face look like boot mush. He’s still bitter about the carjacking incident. Another mortifying ordeal to add to the list of times he'd come back to the manor with a busted face and feeble excuses.

Bruce is being relatively restrained on that front by making minimal comments. The result is that he feels the weight of his disappointment like a sentence already passed. His failings aren’t even worth addressing any more.

A gentle knock sounds at his bedroom door before it slowly creaks open, inch by careful inch. “Hey, Timbers,” Dick says from the doorway.

“Hey,” Tim answers, not looking up.

“Alfred’s set out a late dinner.”

He nods as his eyes dart across the screen of the laptop that sits in his lap. Fingers skimming over the keyboard efficiently. “Right. I’ll be down in a second.”

Dick is lingering.

And that gives him pause for thought. It clicks in his mind that Dick’s casual tone had been perhaps just a little too easy-going.

Tim looks up then. “What is it?” and just as Tim meets his eye, Dick looks away.

The teenager squints at his not-quite-brother suspiciously, taking note of his shiftiness; the way he can’t seem to decide which leg to lean his weight on, the pointed way he looks around Tim’s room with, frankly, unrealistic levels of intrigue from where he stands at the door.

Dick smacks his lips in an awkward attempt at stalling. The noise annoys him.

“Dick.” Tim prompts impatiently. 

Heaving a sigh, the twenty-odd-year-old darts his eyes to Tim, “Ah, well…” And then just as quickly darts them away again. “Jason’s here.”

And there it is.

His stomach drops.

“Right.”

It’s okay, his world is only falling out from under him. Nothing too bad.

“Thought you’d like a warning,” Dick is speaking in that too casual tone again. The one that makes Tim feel like skimming a knife down the length of his limbs and unpeeling his skin from his body, maybe, isn’t such a bad idea. He could do with an airing-out.

He doesn’t voice that, though. It wouldn’t go down well, not in his experience with Dick, at least. Tim sucks in his bottom lip,  his mouth thinning into a grim line. 

“Yeah.”

The concerned hovering is doing his head in.

“Sure you still want to—”

“It’s fine.” He says abruptly. The sooner this conversation ends, the sooner Tim can go down to dinner and get it over with. What did Dick expect him to say, really? This was Jason they were talking about. Tim couldn’t ask them to cast him out of their lives. Besides, it's not like he hadn’t already been visiting the Manor more often as of late.

Tim hadn’t felt it was fair to put a downer on Alfred’s joy at being able to invite his Young Master Jason home for afternoon tea.

Dick hesitates, then nods. “Okay.”

When Dick leaves, the silence that follows feels heavier than before.

Tim stays seated on the edge of his bed, staring at the floor. He could already picture the table: Alfred’s careful attempts at normalcy, Dick’s forced brightness, Bruce’s silence cutting through the room. Jason in his chair, watching. Always watching.

He exhales, slow and even, and straightens his posture the way his parents drilled into him well before Bruce started calling any shots over his parenting. No shaking hands. No visible tells. Nothing that could be mistaken for weakness.

The months Tim had spent living full-time in Wayne Manor rather than the Drake Family home felt less and less real. 

All of that seemed irrelevant now. Because here he was, supposedly in the safest place for him, and Jason hadn’t even had to break in this time; he only had to walk through the front door upon invitation.

He heaves a heavy sigh.

If he looked fine, they wouldn’t ask. If they didn’t ask, he could keep going out on patrol.

He reaches under his pillow; the place he’d taken to hiding what had become his secret. His little way of assuring himself that if push came to shove, he had an easy out.

Well, not easy, exactly. But a guarantee.

Breathing out, he closes his fingers around the cold shape hidden there, and tells himself it’s just dinner. Just another test. He repeats it like a mantra, a mantra that weighs heavily in his gut.

Then he gets up. 

By the time he walks into the dining room, the gun is tucked away safely in his hoodie pocket, where he can hold it and put his mind at ease. Most kids have plushies. In his defence, most kids aren’t vigilantes. He rests a finger along the trigger guard, not to aim, not yet, but to remind himself that control still exists somewhere, and that it could be in his hands.

Seeing Jason at the dining room table is strangely not as jarring as it could have been. The older teenager inhabits the space as though he had never left — one hefty arm thrown over the back of the chair casually, his fingers tapping rhythmically on the table as he looked up at Dick, who stands beside him, clearly attempting his first round of casual conversation.

However, Jason fills up the space differently than he must have done before. When Tim knew Jason as Robin, he had been far more slender as a fifteen-year-old than he was now. His lanky frame had grown into a broad, imposing figure.

He keeps his hands hidden deep in the pocket of his hoodie, gripping at the cold weight of the gun tightly until he can sit and keep it out of sight, trying desperately to conceal its unmistakable shape that would show very visibly through the fabric of his hoodie pocket if he wasn’t too careful.

A hand lands firmly on his shoulder, and Tim jumps, ripping his eyes away from the reminiscing brothers to look up at Bruce. His grip on the gun in his pocket tightens as he pulls it up into his gut, his shoulders hunching in on themselves in the hopes that his posture will disguise the offending object from the World’s Greatest Detective's inscrutable gaze. His sudden change in posture must have conveyed an emotion to Bruce that Tim hadn’t intended, as he receives a comforting squeeze to his shoulder.

The older man smiles kindly at Tim, levelling him with a look that the younger teenager can’t quite decipher.

“Take a seat, Tim,” Bruce murmurs softly. Tim is almost weirded out by it — all the more when he catches Jason’s sharp stare.

Bruce and Dick take their seats at last, and finally, the youngest slides into his seat beside Dick. It doesn’t escape Tim’s notice that these were not the usual seating arrangements. Bruce took up the head of the table, which was fairly standard, but Tim had been left to sit between the head of the Wayne household and Dick, with Jason having a whole side of the table to himself.

Tim pulls his chair forward and feels a relieved breath escape him, loosening his hold on the gun a little, going so far as to lift one hand to sit on top of the table. He takes the opportunity to readjust the silverware that isn’t quite positioned as parallel to each other as he would have liked them to be.

Tim’s eyes linger on the straight lines of his knife and fork, tracing their edges with a careful precision. Each adjustment was a silent attempt to impose order on the table, and, by extension, on the chaos he could feel boiling up in the room. He can feel Jason’s presence nearby, large and heavy, and the quiet anxiety it stirs in him makes his fingers tighten briefly before he forces them to relax. The effort it takes not to look up at the other when he feels Jason’s eye on him causes an uncomfortable shiver to run down his spine. The clinking of glass against glass as Bruce serves himself a drink seems impossibly loud in the tense quiet that has settled, a small battlefield of sounds and movements where all Tim can keep control over is his cutlery.

“That’s a nasty bruise you’ve got there. What happened?” Jason asks, cutting through the quiet with a mock kindness in his tone that causes Tim to mentally raise his hackles.

His black eye is almost gone — yellowed at the edges, fading, but still very much visible.

Tim snaps his eyes to Jason sharply, not being able to mask his indignation. “You know what happened,” he answers bluntly. He had expected provocation, but nothing so jovial.

Infuriatingly, Jason grins. “Oh, right. Silly me.”

Bruce’s eyes flick between them. Sharp, assessing. He levels Tim with that look — the one that means report.

Tim’s voice goes flat. Embarrassment washes over him, and he has to fight not to mumble, “I was preventing an auto theft when Hood arrived. He began…” He pauses, realising that he had been fiddling with the forks beside his plate. He pulls his hand back and finds the rest of his words. “He began giving the carjackers instructions on how to counteract my moves. They got in a hit.”

A cursory glance around the table faces him with Jason’s smug look and Dick’s careful sip of wine, a diplomatic retreat. Before Tim looks back at Bruce.

The older man at the head of the table looks distinctly unhappy, and Tim resists the urge to shrink into himself a little, to explain himself before he was asked to.

That’s how you do it, Tim. Yap too much and put your foot ri—ght in it.

“Hood’s presence wasn’t included in your original report,” Bruce said judiciously, each word measured.

Before Tim could so much as open his mouth to give the answer he hadn’t even yet fully formed, Jason tsks softly. “Bad protocol, Replacement. That’s how Robins lose their wings.”

The word Replacement lands like a blow.

Heat floods his cheeks, hot shame flooding through him and colliding with anger in his chest. The rush of it is so sudden it makes his breath stutter. In that moment, he can’t decide if he wants to disappear under the table or throw something across it. 

Bruce says nothing.

Okay, ouch.

Tim is embarrassed on his own behalf that he had seriously thought Jason might hold his tongue, might spare him this one time, here, of all places. At no point had the older boy shown Tim any kindness; he wasn’t likely to start now. It was stupid to expect restraint, to be caught off guard by the cruel choice of words, even in front of Bruce. Especially in front of Bruce. 

Even Dick — over-protective, brotherly, Dick — stays silent. Dick, who always jumps in with a joke or deflection, is staying quiet. Watching, his eyes flickering between them with his jaw tight. That hurts more than it has any right to. The lack of defence cuts sharper than Jason’s words. Because wasn’t that silence damning. Wasn’t it blatant proof that the first Robin saw Tim as nothing more than a stand-in, along with the rest of them?

The insult slices through him, reopening an old wound, too similar to the laceration Jason had dealt him all those months ago.

Tim’s heart sinks.

The blessed sound of approaching footsteps breaks the awful stillness. Alfred enters the dining room, setting a tray down with practised grace, the silver glinting under the light.

Just like that, everyone took up their respective roles as if the tension in the room didn’t have them in a chokehold moments prior.

As they’re plating up, muttering quiet requests to pass dishes around the table, Tim keeps his head down, dreading the inescapable awfulness of this whole ordeal. He would rather have taken another punch to the face.

“So,” Dick spoke up brightly, stabbing a fork into his mashed potatoes. “Anyone catch the game last night?”

Silence.

The silverware clinked slightly out of sync.

“Right,” he mutters, “of course we didn’t. Because none of us have normal hobbies.”

“When you asked that question, did you even know what sport you were talking about?” Jason asks leisurely, humouring him with a raised brow as he scoops carrots onto his plate.

Noticeably, Dick does not dignify that with an answer.

Miraculously, it’s Bruce who tries to pick up the slack. “Alfred says the vendor on Fifth still sells those raspberry tarts you like, Jason.”

“Yeah?” Jason doesn’t look up. “Did Alfred write your talking points?”

Tries and fails. Bruce’s mouth thins into a pinched line.

The table is laid beautifully, as it always is, Alfred’s care visible in every folded napkin and gleaming glass. But under the soft light of the chandelier above, which casts a mellow, golden light that doesn’t quite reach the corners of the room, leaving long shadows that shift with every movement, the arrangement feels more like a display than a meal. Everything looks composed, civilised. It’s the kind of order that only makes the silence feel sharper.

Sensing a gap that Bruce couldn't fill on his own, Dick paved the way for all Robins yet again by diving in headfirst. Chattering away. Filling the silence like it was his true calling, and vigilantism was but a side gig.  

He launched into a story about his work at the Blüdhaven Police Department. Giving what was most likely an ethically questionable number of details about a new case he was working on: a smuggling ring, low-level stuff. “You wouldn’t believe the paperwork,” he said with a laugh. “They’ve got me listed as Officer Grayson. Officer. Can you imagine?”

“I’m shocked they haven’t fired you yet. You’d think all that vigilante training would make you a walking HR complaint.”Jason grins over his glass.

Dick mulls it over, not exactly disagreeing. “They're pretty desperate for competent officers.”

“I don’t know, man. If I pulled half the crap you did in the field, I’d have been fired twice by now.”

“Right. Because you’re the gold standard for fieldwork.” Tim huffs quietly into his plate, forking another mouthful of potatoes into his mouth. It was probably delicious, but Tim wouldn't know; the act of chewing was proving to be far more difficult than it ought to be.

Unfortunately, Jason apparently had hearing like a hawk. 

He leans back in his chair, still grinning over the rim of his glass, although the nature of the smile has changed. “Hey, at least when I screw up, I own it. I don’t write a twelve-page debrief about my learning experience.”

Swallowing is an act of sheer willpower. The potato feels like paste on his tongue. The clatter of his fork against the plate is far too loud.

“It’s called professionalism,” Tim states adamantly, ignoring the clawing at the back of his throat.

“It’s called overcompensation,” Jason clips back just as quickly.

Tim's jaw clenches, his grasp on the weapon in his pocket tightening under the table. He can feel how the ridges are likely leaving imprints on the meaty palm of his hand. 

“Okay, you know what, maybe we could—” Dick tries to cut in, only to be waved off by Jason.

“Nah, let him talk. You got something to say, replacement? Go ahead.” 

Bristling at the use of that word again, Tim can’t help but begrudge the other men present for not disputing the title Jason has assigned him. They all just let it hang there.

Nor can he stop himself from glowering at Dick for choosing that moment to try and deflect, to be the diplomat. His face hardens, resolving to stand his ground. 

“Don’t call me that.” He grits out.

The intensity of Jason's stare meets Tim’s head-on. Too green for Tim's liking. Too harsh. Too potent. It makes his skin crawl, not because of the colour, but because of what it represents; the Lazarus Pit, the impossible. Just like that, the tension in the air isn’t quite so casual, and the youngest Robin isn’t quite so sure that he is as safe at that dining table as Bruce and Dick wanted him to believe he is.

Tim can feel it in his hands: the slight tremor, the tension that makes his fingers smooth over his hidden defence under the table. His fingernail catches on the safety. It would be so easy to flick it off.

“Why not?” Jayson’s grin was sharp again. “You were the replacement. You practically begged for the job. Please, Mr. Wayne, I can fix your sad little Bat problem—”

“That’s not what happened.”

“Sure it isn’t.” The older teenager's voice hardens. “You just showed up one day in my colours, sitting in my chair, eating my food—”

“You were dead, Jason.”

The words snap out before Tim even knows he’d raised his voice.

A clock ticks, slow and deliberate, marking the seconds like tiny gavel strikes. Bruce’s gaze was fixed on them both, unblinking, his posture rigid, hands resting on the table as if the wood itself could anchor him. Even the subtle creak of chairs shifts into prominence, echoing in the hush.

Jason stares at him for a moment, the grin faltering. When he speaks again, his tone is flatter, heavier. “Yeah. Funny how that didn’t stop Bruce from finding a new charity case.”

“Jason,” Bruce warns, voice low and stern.

“What?” Jason snaps back, turning his snarl on Bruce, who meets his intensity with a steady emotionlessness, like facing off against a wall. “You don’t like hearing it out loud? You picked him. You trained him. You replaced me.”

Tim’s fist slams down on the table before he can stop it, causing the cutlery to jump and the plates to rattle. “You think I wanted to replace you?” He snaps. “I stepped up because Gotham needed Robin, and you were gone. I did the job you couldn’t finish.” He sneers.

The air goes still. Dick’s eyes are darting between them, wide, searching for a foothold that doesn’t exist.

Tim didn't mean it like that. He wants to think that Bruce knows he didn't mean it like that, but Bruce’s expression doesn’t give him anything back. Only more of the same cold, unreadable calm.

Nevertheless, he doesn't take it back— doesn’t blink, doesn't stand down.

Horrifyingly, that was when Jason's smile returned. Big, manic, and absolutely delighted. “There it is.” His voice is low and mocking. “Took you long enough to show some teeth.”

“You keep poking people just to see if they’ll bleed.” Tim shoots back.

Jason leans in slightly, eyes flashing. “And you keep patching yourself up so no one sees you already are.”

“Guys—” Dick’s voice cuts through, soft but useless.

No one moves. 

Jason sits back in his chair, a smirk curling at the corner of his mouth. The tension doesn’t break; it only sharpens.

Tim focuses on his knife, tracing a groove in the wood of the table, thinking that he’d rather face gunfire than this conversation.

“Master Jason,” Alfred interjects, smooth as ever but with the faintest warning under his tone. “I trust the roast is to your liking?”

Jason chews slowly and swallows before speaking. Forever wary of the Butler’s table manners talk. “It’s meat, Alfred. You know me, I’m easy to please.”

“Indeed,” Alfred replies dryly. “However, I thought we’d all agreed to keep ammunition out of the dining room.”

Dick chokes on his drink. Jason grins. Tim grips his napkin so tightly his knuckles ache.

A low, steady exchange passes between the Wayne Patriarch and its true Patriarch at the head of the table. The words are calm and measured, but they fail to reach the youngest in the room. Their voices are steady and deliberate, the way people talk around a wild animal. But to Tim, they might as well have been underwater for all that everything sounded muffled, meaningless even.

The sound of silver scraping against porcelain, the faint creak of chairs, the soft tap of knives on plates, all become exaggerated. A soundtrack for the growing storm behind his ribs and spiralling up his chest, up his neck, up to his head, where it settles and bellows

Blood roars quietly in Tim’s ears. He bites his tongue hard enough to taste iron. Every muscle is coiled, ready to act, yet held in check. For a fleeting second, the thought surfaces unsolicited: the gun, tucked beneath clothing, the cold weight pressing into the palm, the click of the safety. The imagined sound of its discharge, the heat of it in the palm of his hand, a gaping hole in Jason’s head and the sudden bloom of red— instant.

Tim stares down at the tablecloth. He stares until his vision swims. White. The tablecloth is white. It would soak up… everything.

The thought makes his stomach lurch. The few mouthfuls of food he’d forced down over the course of dinner threaten to come back up. The table edge bites into his fingers; the white cloth creases beneath his nails. His brain loops — pull it out, don’t pull it out, pull it out, the weight, the red, oh fuck, the red— don’t— his breath hitches on each repeat. 

A flash of metal across the table catches his attention. A flash of light from a knife.

Tim watches as Jason flips it once, catches it easily, and starts cutting into his steak with it.

It gleams under the light tauntingly.

Tim knows that knife.

He knows that knife intimately.

Suddenly, the air is gone. His chest constricts, his lungs burn, his chair skids back before he can stop it, scraping harshly across the floor.

Dick looks up sharply. “Tim?” his voice cuts through the static, alarmed.

He imagines everything: the recoil, the fire in his hand, the blood, the chaos, the shouts he can’t make himself hear even as instinct screams at him. His fingers twitch for the gun in his pocket before he has even registered the thought. 

“What’s wrong?” Bruce’s voice follows, controlled but cutting.

He imagines eyes on him, accusing and disappointed. He has too— He can’t—

Tim’s throat locks, his breath stuttering. 

“That’s— the knife— he—”

Voices only just cut through the haze. The room is suddenly smaller, tighter, and every breath is a fight.

Alfred’s hand flies to his mouth. “Master Jason!”

Jason doesn’t even flinch. “What? My knife was blunt.”

Dick’s voice hardens, no longer the peacemaker. “Yeah, I’m sure that’s all it was.”

The sound of that knife carving against the plate makes Tim’s vision spark white. Nothing anchors him. The knife gleams again. He wants to move, wants to shout, wants to disappear. He wants to vanish. But he can’t.

He can’t.

Jason shrugs, still smiling. “He’s overreacting. This is the kid you replaced me with? He can’t even stomach a bit of silver—”

He can’t. 

“Enough,” Bruce says, voice like gravel.

Jason’s grin widens, splitting into something ugly. “Oh, sorry. Am I ruining family dinner, Bruce? My bad.”

Bruce grips the edge of the table. Knuckles white. Jaw locked.

“Enough,” Bruce says again, quieter. “Jason. With me.” And through the haze, Tim hates him in that moment — hates the weakness in his voice, hates that Bruce chose that moment to lean into fatherhood right when Tim needs Batman.

Jason pushes back his chair with deliberate slowness. The knife remains in his hand.

He doesn’t look at Tim as he stands. Doesn’t need to.

The scrape of the chair legs echoes through the room like a threat.

He follows Bruce out.

Tim’s eyes trail his movements. The way the knife catches the light, the easy swing of his arm, the space he leaves behind like a wound that won’t close.

Something inside Tim snaps.

He lurches up. The glass in front of him shatters under his hand, shards scattering like ice across the table. He barely feels the sting until he sees the blood.

Dick’s already on his feet. “Tim! Hey, hey—”

Out of the corner of his eye, Alfred is already darting from the room, muttering frantic promises about a first aid kit, but his voice is swallowed by the roar in Tim’s head.

Every sound sharpens. Plates scrape against the table. Glasses clink and topple. Tim grabs one and hurls his plate toward the seat Jason had occupied all evening, the place where the sneers and the insults had all felt too much like a blade running across his skin and slicing inwards deeper than he could bear.

The shattering drowns out the night’s unpleasantness. For a moment, he only hears the fragments, flying, breaking, and feels the jagged edge of release, the rawness of his anger poured into motion.

Dick’s voice rises again, desperate. His name becomes a mantra on Dick's lips, and he doesn't want to hear it. That’s when Dick grabs him by the shoulders.

Tim still doesn’t hear him. Instead, he starts shouting.  

“You let him— You just let him say that shit to me.” Tim cries, his voice cracking, high and raw. He pushes back against Dick, rage spilling out in shaking bursts. His whole body is trembling, every nerve is on fire. “You just sat there and let him say those things!”

He takes another step forward to shove Dick back again, and the older man takes it. Doesn’t push back.

Tim shoves again, harder this time. “Why won’t you say something!”

Panic flickers in Dick’s eyes. Tim has never allowed himself to be seen like this— Dick has never seen the calculation gone, replaced with something desperate and cornered. It occurs to Tim that he’s scaring him. Scaring big, brave Nightwing of all people, with his hysteria.

Tim’s chest heaves. His hands are in his hair now, pulling until his scalp screams.

Dick catches his wrists before he can claw at his own hair, his voice gentles as he untangles fingers from dark locks, whispering placating words, c'mon, none of that of that Timbers, none of that, pulling him into his chest.

Tim collapses against him, trembling. The scent of aftershave and sweat, the solid warmth, the rough wool of Dick’s sweater, the steady beat under his ear; it’s grounding and unbearable all at once.

For a moment, it almost works. Then Dick’s voice wavers. “Tim… what is this?”

Tim follows his gaze down. The gun is undeniable in his pocket, halfway to falling out, already slipping free. The younger Robin snatches it before it can fall. Just like that, Tim’s heart is in his throat again. Because now he’s really messed up. Shit. He didn’t mean for him to see. Not like this. Not ever—

“Tim, you know we don’t—”

He knows they don’t.

“We don’t use guns, Tim. Why—”

“Leave me alone,” he whispers.

He can see the panic spread across Dick’s face, his wide, searching eyes, his hands twitching like he’s not sure whether to grab the gun or grab Tim.

“Do you have that because of Jason?” His voice cracks on Jason’s name. 

Tim can’t answer. His mouth opens, but only a shaking breath comes out. He’s always been so eager to impress Dick; he doesn’t know what to do.

“Have you been this scared this whole time?”

And just like that, Tim is outraged that Dick even has to ask the question. He swallows harshly, thinking of just how desperate Dick has been to have Jason back — to have his real brother back — that he could so easily ignore Tim’s suffering was something so small, something he could pretend didn’t exist.

“You think this’ll make it better?” 

Tim flinches, remembering his own words being unknowingly thrown back at him.

“Would you stop brothering me already?” Tim snaps. His voice breaks again, half a sob. “Go after Jason. That’s where you really want to be.”

Dick flounders, “Timmy, no—”

But Tim’s already retreating, pulling free, staggering back, face streaked with sweat and tears and blood from the cuts on his palm. Dick reaches for him again, and Tim flinches at the motion, guilt washing over him at the hurt and taken aback look on Dick’s face at the reflex.

The sound of their breathing is the only thing left.

He doesn’t go back to the Drake family house.

He considers it, but can’t.

Despite everything, this — this mess, this broken family — is still better than that, he couldn’t bring himself to go back there..

At least here, the people who don’t want him are close enough to fight with.

•·················•·················•

Later—  Alone, he presses his palms flat to his desk until the tremor in them stops. He focuses on the feeling of the surface beneath his hands, the solidity of it, the proof that the world hasn’t completely slipped.

Something has to change.

Tim is aware that what he had suffered over dinner was a psychological break of some description; the culmination of months of sustained fear and emotional isolation. 

He is mortified. 

Robins aren’t supposed to crack, aren’t supposed to have fits worthy of Arkham.

In the aftermath, he details a seventeen-page account, analysis, reflection, and damage report of the event. Bitterly rejecting the voice in his head that mocks him for turning another breakdown into a debrief. He categorises it clinically, labelling it as a malfunction. Nothing more.

Over the next few days, he sets to work addressing the database on the Batcomputer. Bruce may well be neurotic about organisation, but Tim can be worse. He cleans, files, logs, and fixes mistakes and corruptions. Anything that can be put in order is. Anything that drowns out thought.

It wasn’t anger. It was a psychological breach. A system failure.

After the first time he catches Dick approaching him in the foyer, Tim turns on instinct and retreats back up the stairs as inconspicuously as possible before the man can call out to him. Dick hasn’t told Bruce about the gun. He knows this because, had he done so, Tim would not still be allowed in this house, he would not still be Robin. But it’s only a matter of time, and Tim dreads it. He dodges Dick more effectively than he’s dodging attacks from criminals out on patrol.

He considers taking action before it’s taken for him.

In the meantime, he ensures his contributions are meaningful so that when he is inevitably given the boot, at least the documentation of his last few days or weeks of work will reflect his dedication as Robin, rather than the emotional spiralling he’s afraid he is rapidly becoming known for.

Eventually, it’s too much. The tension in the Manor becomes unbearable. Alfred leaving dinner trays outside his door only feeds the guilt for being evasive, shadows catch in his peripheral vision, the constant flashes of Jason in dark corners of the Manor, but the last nail in his coffin is Dick’s attempts to talk to him. He just can’t do it. Not yet. Maybe not ever.

So he enacts his next contingency.

He doesn’t go back to Drake Manor, even if he could bear the silence of his neglected family home, Dick would know to go looking for him there. So instead, he goes to one of Bruce’s safehouses. He doesn’t leave a note; he should have, but ultimately, Tim knows that Bruce knows where he is; he always does.

Bruce doesn’t stop him. That confirms to Tim that Bruce agrees that he’s not fit to be around the family.

In the following week, Tim began patrolling ritualistically. Just like he always has, but this time every factor is meticulously taken into account: everything is measured, deliberate, and mechanical. Control becomes the only thing standing between him and collapse.

He ensures he’s completing daily logs to compensate for his limited visits to the Cave, documenting every patrol down to the minute: timestamps, trajectories, minor injuries, weapon maintenance. The reports are immaculate— too immaculate. They read like machine output. His equipment is polished daily, even when it doesn’t need to be. Batarangs lined edge-to-edge on the workbench, smoke pellets re-sorted by manufacture date. A system within a system.

The gun is cleaned last, always last, the final piece of the ritual. Not as a comfort. Not even as a precaution. Just as proof that something in his hands still obeys him.

He starts tracking his own sleep patterns in the margins of the reports — noting hours spent unconscious, frequency of interruptions, and physiological readings. The numbers stay low, and the numbers are safe. Numbers don’t judge.

When he speaks to Batman, he keeps it strictly to protocol.

Mission summaries. Tactical briefings. No small talk.

If Bruce asks about him, Tim pretends not to notice.

He suspects Bruce is concerned, knows he hears how the tone of his voice has taken on a clipped, sterile cadence. Even so, Bruce makes no comment, Tim knows he wants to, can identify the pauses in his sentence that he wants to fill with questions Tim isn’t willing to answer, but ultimately he doesn't. And Tim is thankful for it.

When he isn’t patrolling or writing, he’s maintaining his gear. When he isn’t maintaining, he’s cataloguing. When he isn’t cataloguing, he’s running drills until his muscles tremble. The repetition of it all gives structure to his days. He doesn’t have to feel them passing if he fills every second with motion.

By week two, his routine starts to eat its own tail. The more control Tim exerts, the more cracks appear in the veneer. Precision becomes compulsion.

The gun becomes the axis of it all.

He checks the weight before leaving the safehouse. He checks the chamber. He checks again. He tells himself it’s about preparedness, but the ritual outgrows logic.

He dismantles it nightly, cleans each component until the metal glints blue in the low light. At this point, he could almost certainly reassemble it blindfolded if he needed to. It’s not comfort, it’s reassurance. Proof that one object in his world still functions exactly as intended.

He starts sleeping with it within arm’s reach. Some nights, he wakes halfway through and feels for it — the shape, the cold weight of it — just to steady his breathing.

It’s always right where he left it. Reliable. Contained.

Outside, the world feels less so.

He keeps catching glimpses of movement and things that don’t exist. A flicker of red here, a reflection shaped like Jason’s grin there. The paranoia sharpens. He tightens his patrol routes, rechecks rooftops he’s already cleared.

He patrols without Batman more often than not. Bruce lets him, but only because he still calls in for backup. Bruce accepts that backup means him, never Nightwing. Bruce does ask him about that, but when Tim doesn’t answer, Bruce doesn’t push. He feels bad for playing on the guilt he knows Bruce feels over the family dinner incident.

“I’m sorry I put you through that,” he had said. Tim hadn’t answered, hadn’t asked what Bruce had said to Jason when he pulled him into another room while Tim destroyed the Waynes’ fine china.

Sometimes he hears footsteps in the safehouse hall when no one’s there. He tells himself it’s the pipes, the foundation settling, the wind sneaking in. 

He starts logging these incidents in his reports. Not the hallucinations themselves, but coded references: “visual interference,” “auditory disturbances.” The words keep it clinical. Safe. Manageable.

Numbers don’t lie, even when his senses do.

He knows he has been more prone to irritation as of late. Reluctantly, he acknowledges that it’s affecting his performance. Patrol becomes harder to separate from aggression.

The first time it happens, he barely notices. A mugger goes down too fast, too hard. A second later, there’s blood on the pavement, more than there should be. After that, it happens again. And again. Criminals start talking: Robin’s not holding back anymore.

He doesn’t know how he hasn’t been benched yet.

Doesn’t know why Robin is still his.

He knows Bruce will see the footage. He half-wants him to. Maybe that would count as an intervention. Maybe it wouldn’t. He’s already been deactivating comms more often. What difference would cutting the footage make?

Still, when he returns to the safehouse, he cleans the gun before touching anything else. The click of the chamber closing is the only sound that feels honest. He hasn’t been using it, but its presence is an imperative requirement to his peace of mind.

A few weeks in, the routine stops keeping him grounded.

He still goes through the motions; logs, gear checks, patrol routes, but it’s feeling too rehearsed, too mechanical. Less about the mission and more about moving forward while standing still.

He takes longer routes on patrol, leaves comms silent. Stops checking in with Oracle. There’s a comfort in the isolation — a kind of white noise that drowns out thought.

He begins courting danger under the guise of efficiency: chasing leads alone, cutting response time by skipping backup. If the job hurts, it means he’s still there.

The bruises start piling up faster than the reports. He forgets to patch some. He forgets meals. Sometimes, after patrol, he sits fully suited in the dark for hours before realising he hasn’t taken off the mask.

When he does speak to Bruce, it’s short, almost polite. Under control. Nothing to report. The words sound distant, like he’s listening to himself through a wall.

It’s not fear driving him anymore.

And somewhere in that quiet, between his heartbeat and the sound of static, he realises he’s stopped expecting to come home at all.

Within a month, the system collapses.

He misses a check-in. Then two. 

One time, he shows up when Batman calls for backup, bleeding and half-conscious. Batman doesn’t yell; he doesn’t have to. The silence is enough.

That’s where Bruce draws the line.

Next thing he knows, he’s back at the manor. He doesn’t remember driving there. Bruce just says, “Either you sleep here, or you hang up the suit,” with an edge to his voice that Tim doesn’t have the presence of mind to read into.

Tim knows a threat when he hears one.

And despite expecting it and preparing himself for it, when he’s given the choice, he still wants it.

So he stays.

He occupies his neglected room, keeps his door locked, and keeps his voice low. Pretends it’s temporary.

But every night he hears footsteps outside his door; steady, deliberate, patrol-like, and Tim knows Bruce isn’t trusting him to keep himself alive anymore.

He can’t decide if that feels like punishment or mercy.

Bruce doesn’t leave it at that.

He starts managing Tim the way he manages patrol grids; quietly, relentlessly, without negotiation.

Every morning, there’s a mug of coffee waiting on the kitchen counter when Tim drags himself downstairs. It’s not Alfred’s doing, surprisingly, it’s Bruce’s. The brand is the same one Tim kept in the safehouse. The gesture might have been one of kindness, but it wasn’t just that; it was a data point. Proof that Bruce knows exactly what Tim’s been living on. And he’s not sure how that makes him feel.

The spare Batmobile keys disappear from the rack. Missions get reassigned before Tim can volunteer. Oracle suddenly has new protocols that conveniently lock him out of solo runs.

When he skips meals, Bruce starts eating in the same room — not talking, just there alongside him. 

There’s a morning when Tim just can’t do it. He sits there for an hour in front of a bowl of oatmeal that has long gone cold, and he just can’t do it. It was a waiting game, and he and Bruce were at a stalemate.

At this point, he wants to, he really does, but he just can’t bring himself to do it.

It’s too much, being wedged between a literal bowl of oatmeal and a hard place, because in this endeavour, Bruce is definitely not gentle— until he is.

When he cracks, and the tears start coming, crying over a stupid bowl of oatmeal, what the fuck Drake— Bruce is on his side of the table in an instant, pulling him into a warm chest and putting an immediate end to all internal discourse with the sheer surprise of feeling a large, battle-hardened hand petting through his hair. He melts.

After that, Tim eats, eventually, because not eating becomes a form of defiance, and Bruce never loses those battles for long. And maybe, after he does, he earns himself a warm shoulder squeeze or that same rough hand ruffling through his hair.

It’s suffocating. And somehow stabilising.

Tim can’t tell which infuriates him more — the intrusiveness exerted by a man who isn’t his father, or the fact that it’s working. He had forgotten how it feels to have Bruce be pleased with him.

When Dick is around, Tim can’t quite look at him.

While before, he had almost wished Dick would just say it, just get it out in the open, so that he could face the fallout. Tim knows now, that he doesn’t want that.

He desperately doesn’t want that.

He catches a glimpse of the barely restrained longing look on the young vigilante’s face one night, and Tim’s stomach sinks. He didn’t know why Dick hadn’t told Bruce about the gun, and he’s too scared to ask.

One morning, Dick joins them for breakfast, and Tim makes a point of passing him the chocolate spread without Dick having asked. The relieved smile is too much for Tim to handle, so he avoids eye contact, but nevertheless, the olive branch has been extended. For whatever reason, Dick doesn’t share his secret, and Tim is thankful.

He sleeps a little more and keeps the gun locked in his nightstand instead of under his pillow. Some nights he still reaches for it, but his fingers stop short of the handle. He tells himself it’s because Bruce would notice. But that’s not all it is.

Bruce never says it aloud, but Tim knows: this isn’t forgiveness. It’s containment.

He’s being kept, not trusted.

Batman can’t have his Robins running around Gotham, wreaking havoc in the name of the Bat.

Even so, when he wakes to the sound of boots in the hall, steady and certain, he doesn’t reach for the gun.

For now, that’s progress.

It doesn’t last.

Just when Tim thinks he’s improving, returning to healthy patterns and coping mechanisms, under Bruce’s moderately hypocritical guidance, no less, not abusing the escapist nature of the job — another batarang is thrown in the works.

He’s running diagnostics in the Cave, cross-checking surveillance feeds, a nervous habit more than a task, when one of the feeds flickers. Camera 12, Jason’s room. 

No one goes into Jason’s room, except for Alfred, but he wouldn’t be there at this time of night. Despite living with the Bats, the Butler somehow manages to maintain a semblance of a healthy sleep schedule.

Tim tells himself it’s a glitch. He tells himself a lot of things lately.

Except then the glitch moves.

He rewinds the feed. Pauses. The pixelated blur shifts again. It’s not random, not mechanical. It’s Human.

He leaves the computer behind, heads up the stairs to the manor and finds himself wandering down the hallway to Jason’s room. Every step closer feels wrong. He ignores that this may well be an incredibly, stupidly, bad idea.

Then he sees it.

The door at the end of the hall, Jason’s old room, cracked open.

In hindsight, he should have known better. should have turned around when he found himself outside Jason's door. Jason hadn't been there since the day he'd died, but that didn't matter; it was still Jason's.

Everything inside looks untouched. The same bedsheets, same posters, same scuff marks on the wall where a younger teenage boy once kicked his boots off after patrol. It’s a shrine frozen in time, and Tim feels like an intruder just standing in the doorway.

He doesn’t have time to process anything else before his eyes land on the figure standing in the shadows.

Jason.

Except it’s not the Jason Tim has come to know over the last few months; condescending and rude, mocking and always prepared with a sharp jeer on the tip of his tongue. Most importantly, restrained, despite it all. This one looks carved from rage and ruin, skin slick with sweat, eyes glassy and wrong— Lazarus-green. 

This is the Jason who attacked him at Titans Tower.

“Jason?”

For a heartbeat, neither of them moves.

Then Jason sees him. Really sees him. The trespasser. The Replacement.

“Shi—”

With all the times he’s found himself in this position, Tim doesn’t trip, doesn’t stumble, he spins where he stands, and he runs because he'd been a fool many times before; at some point, he'd had to learn when not to be one. When faced with too-green eyes, that was Tim's green light to flee.

The one time he doesn’t have the gun.

The one time.

He takes the corner with speed, bracing his hand on the doorway to take the corner quickly. He darts down the corridor, feet padding on the carpets and sliding on shiny hardwood floors. Behind him, Jason's boots thunder after him, heavier and louder, and despite his size, faster. 

Frantically, he realises: he’s not fast enough. 

A hand tightens around his ankle, and just like that, he’s falling face-first into the floor. His cheek hits the hardwood, and he cries out as he goes down. Shouts die on his tongue as he’s dragged backwards in a scrape of fabric and breath, no no nono, fingernails scrabbling for purchase that isn’t there.

Tim fights like a cornered thing, too sharp and desperate. For once, he’s not holding back either. 

He twists, he kicks — anything. 

“Stop, Jason! Jay—”

Before he can grab on to anything else, rough fingers wind their way into his hair and pull his head back, his neck painfully stretched, but not as painful as when his face is smashed back down into the hardwood floor. Pain fractures through his nose— white, immediate, blooming heat. The sound it makes is wet, it’s so viscerally loud that he hears it over the sound of his own outcry.

He gasps, sees double, feels blood on his lips.

Stop. Stop. Please stop, please.

When Jason hauls him onto his back, Tim reacts on instinct, sliding to the side just in time to avoid the fist that creates a splintered dent on the floorboard instead of his skull. He takes the opportunity that split second dodge offers him. He drives his palm upward into Jason's nose. It connects with a sickening crack.

Blood for blood. 

It’s just enough of a distraction for Tim to kick the older boy off him. Tim scrambles, unsteady, breath ragged, nose pouring red down his chin. He runs.

Fuck. FUck.

“Bruce!” His voice cracks. “BRU—”

The word cuts off as his collar jerks him backwards. Tim chokes as his forward momentum is suddenly snapped to a violent stop, pulled back by the collar of his shirt. 

The world slams sideways. His shoulder hits the wall with Jason’s arm crushing his windpipe. He scrabbles desperately, trying to dig his fingers between Jason's forearm and his neck, his nails scraping skin and leather. It doesn’t help.

It’s always the neck. 

Tim kicks his feet up, blindly and indelicately aiming for Jason's shins because there was no room for finesse. Gasping breaths escaped his mouth, his mouth wheezing out a feeble “Br—” that wouldn't come out loud enough. 

Jason’s hand covers his mouth, smothering him.

He’s actually going to do it this time. No knife needed.

His vision starts narrowing in on the domineering figure crowding in on him, black edges closing in. How many times would he find himself in this exact position before it was the last? 

It looks like this is the last.

Then just like that, the pressure vanishes.

Jason’s grip rips away, and without anyone there to hold him up against the wall, Tim collapses to the floor, gasping, the room spinning. He looked up just in time, eyes wide and blurred and wet from the exertion of staying conscious, to see Bruce, immovable and standing between him and Jason, one hand still outstretched from shoving Jason back several feet down the hall away from the crumpled heap he’d left on the floor.

“Jason.” 

The word is low, dangerous. A warning and a plea at once.

Jason freezes where he stands, chest heaving, eyes still flickering with that unnatural glow.

Bruce speaks menacingly. A father standing between his son and his assailant. A father facing off with his own son for the sake of another. “Jaylad?” Bruce says after a moment, quietly, too hesitantly.

Tim winces. The tenderness in Bruce’s voice hits somewhere deep and unpleasant, a sound he rarely ever hears directed at him, even now.

Jason stares back for a while, not at Tim but at Bruce, heaving in breaths just as harshly as Tim. His expression fractures. His breathing stutters.

“FUCK!”

The shout rips down the corridor, raw and unfiltered. Both Bruce and Tim flinch. 

Jason tears his gaze away and latches onto the nearest thing, an ornament stand beside him in the corridor, sending it crashing to the floor along with the ornate vase it had been displaying.

The vase falls to the ground with a loud shatter, scattering across the floor. As Tim braces against the wall, heaving in gasping breaths, shards scatter, one skittering across the hardwood until it stops at his socked foot. 

He stares at it — small, sharp, glinting red in the hall light — and shudders, unable to stave off the visceral feeling that that vase could have just as easily been his skull.

Bruce doesn’t move from where he’s stood between them.

Jason backs away, trembling, expression flickering between rage and confusion, until the glow in his eyes dims to something merely human again.

And Tim, still on the floor, blood on his face and breath tearing out in ragged bursts, realises that whatever progress he thought he’d made, whatever illusion of stability Bruce had forced around him — it’s over.

The system has failed again.

And this time, it’s not just his.

•·················•·················•

The frustrating thing was that for a while, he had felt safe again.

Bruce’s efforts had not been in vain.

He had felt safe enough to start believing the worst was over. Safe enough to slip the gun into the locked drawer where it belonged. Of course, it couldn’t last.

The hallway incident had been weeks ago, but no amount of insistence on Bruce’s part that Jason was “getting better,” that it wouldn’t happen again, was ever going to be enough to bury Tim’s fear. And Tim couldn’t help but be annoyed by Bruce’s attempts to convince him it would be.

He had sat through Bruce’s lengthy monologue, he had nodded appropriately, he had taken his instructions, and he had played along. And then, privately, he had returned to his own contingency plan.

After that, the locks didn’t matter. The nightstand didn’t matter. The gun belonged on him again. 

Just in case.

He told himself it was only a precaution, a habit he took up again to be on the vigilant side. It was not a relapse. A way to breathe easier when the Manor’s corridors felt too quiet.

Bruce hadn’t just sat him down the once. The older man was clearly rattled by the experience. Tim could understand; ripping your murderous son away from a protégé you deemed yourself responsible for would most likely raise a man’s blood pressure somewhat. From where Tim was standing, it was clear his faith in his judgement was faltering.

Batman didn’t repeat himself. He gave orders, and they were to be followed. So for Bruce to come back on his word, repeat himself, to overexplain— it reeked of uncertainty.

And when Batman was uncertain, Robin had to be sure, whether Bruce was aware of that or not.

So when Bruce had sat him down not long after the hallway attack, trying to explain Jason’s return in clinical terms; the “rehabilitation” plan, the family’s responsibility, the need to tolerate and observe. Months too late, Tim thought to himself. He had already learnt what tolerance got him.

Tim had said nothing during the talk. His eyes were fixed on the floor, his body taut, every muscle tense and coiled for escape. Words weren’t enough. Trust wasn’t enough. Not yet. So he’d resumed carrying the gun everywhere, a rigid line of control he could cling to.

He was trying to believe Bruce’s narrative: that Jason’s recovery was ongoing, that this was all part of some careful process. But his body hadn’t gotten the memo. He still startled at the slightest hint of movement. Even the echo of footsteps in the Manor sent a jolt through his chest just like it had before things were briefly better. Now, a shadow passing over the kitchen tile could make him flinch.

It didn’t take long after the hallway attack for everything to crack again.

Tim was still on edge — too quiet, too still — the gun back on his person, the one thing he could finally control.

He’s in the kitchen, half-leaning on the counter, drinking his coffee and trying to remember that with all the time he has spent in Wayne Manor, he really ought to feel more at ease than he feels right then. Easier said than done when the source of too many of his troubles was on the property.

They had gone through the trouble of putting in place a separate security notification feature on Tim’s phone, which pinged whenever Jason was within a certain distance of the manor. Tim designed it, and Bruce found a way of implementing it.

So when Jason walks in, like a shadow moving where there shouldn’t be one, the youngest Robin has known for a quarter of an hour to expect his predecessor’s presence any moment now.

The older teenager ignores him as he goes up to the counter and helps himself to the coffee pot. Tim had come downstairs for caffeine, assuming he’d have company. He takes note of the stiffness of Jason's shoulders, the careful way he’s not looking directly at Tim, and the abnormally thoughtful glower twisting his features.

The scene would almost be domestic — fresh pot of coffee, slippers, the recently filled fruit bowl set out on the table by Alfred in the hopes that one of them will suddenly take up healthier snacking habits — if it weren’t for the fact that one had tried to kill the other, and neither of them would be able to forget that anytime soon.

And it makes sense. The inevitable, orchestrated, event is upon them.

Jason’s come to apologise. Under Bruce’s orders, no doubt.

The thought makes Tim’s jaw clench, grip on his coffee mug tightening as well. What total bullshit.

The older of the two lingers by the counter for a beat, eyes flicking over to his silent observer. He approaches, and the minute he takes that first step, Tim’s whole body tenses; he can’t help it. His mind flickers to his secret, stuffed in the back pocket of his jeans, only just hidden by the oversized sweatshirt he’s wearing.

Jason notices, of course, he notices. Whatever remorse he’d rehearsed vanishes in an instant. “Still jumpy, huh?” he says. “Jeez, do I need to schedule my coffee runs around you now too, Replacement?”

Tim freezes mid-breath. The world goes razor-sharp.

He can feel the cold press of metal digging into his skin through his jeans, where its wedged between him and the counter.

“Say it again.” 

The challenge comes out of his mouth before he can second-guess himself. He sets his coffee mug aside.

Jason tilts his head, testing. “What, Replacement?”

He’d asked for it, but the word still lands like a trigger pull.

Before he even realises it, his hand is already on the gun.

The click of the safety going off cracks the silence in half.

A short, mean, and disbelieving laugh bounces around the kitchen. “You’re joking.” Jason’s laughter turns into an outright cackle, and he has to put his coffee mug down on the counter to avoid spilling it.

Every bubble of laughter is like a stab — an oppressive weight on his ribcage, constricting something deep inside him that screams to lash out. It’s like a knife wedging itself under his nails.

The urge to grab onto something and snap gnaws at his nerves, so much that his hands tremble with the intensity of holding still, to relieve the sensation, his hold on the gun tightens impossibly.

He hadn’t thought Jason would, so when the older boy makes a move to come closer, Tim makes his threat all the clearer, finally aiming the gun directly at his assailant.

“Back off.” Despite wanting to, Tim can’t hide the fact that his voice shakes, but suddenly his grip doesn’t. “Jason, I swear—”

Jason takes a step closer anyway, the way predators do when they’ve decided you won’t bite. And Tim resents that Jason thinks he won’t do it, even if Tim himself doesn’t believe he’ll do it. In subconscious retaliation, his focus hones in on that spot just a little to the side of the sternum. What if—

“You gonna point that thing at me? You don’t even know what to do with it.”

The older boy is too close. Far too close. Tim flinches back, raises the gun, and without thinking about it presses it under Jason’s jaw. 

All of a sudden, neither of them can breathe.

Jason’s eyes harden, glancing at the finger hovering over the trigger. 

In retaliation, Tim shoves the gun up against Jason’s neck aggressively, ensuring he can feel the ridge of the muzzle imprinting on his skin. He wonders if Jason is imagining the more permanent imprint it could make.

Under any other circumstances, this would never have happened; Hood would never have allowed someone to get this close with a weapon pressed to his skin. It’s a testament to just how much he underestimates the new Robin.

Up until now, maybe he had been right to.

After a moment, Jason speaks up, almost softly— with how close they are, his voice doesn’t need to carry far. His voice goes flat. “This is hilarious.” The tone says otherwise.

“Don’t move.” Tim grits, not taking his eyes off of the older teenager.

Despite watching closely, his reflexes aren’t as fast. Jason grabs the barrel — Tim gasps at the sudden movement, panicking at the idea of shooting unintentionally, and a strangled noise escapes him when his hand is pushed towards a broad chest.

He stares wide-eyed at Jason. What are you doing, he wants to hiss. When he meets his eye, he sees it— sees how he’s daring Tim to shoot. 

“Do it, Replacement. You want to be me so bad—prove it.”

The world blurs. He almost does. The finger tightens — a millimetre from firing.

Tim’s hands are trembling. His heart hammers against his ribs. He doesn’t want this, he thinks, he’s almost sure he doesn’t want this. 

“Stop— Jason, I don’t want—”

Jason jerks the gun higher again, right over that spot that Tim had first honed in on. He’s close enough that Tim feels his breath. “Then don’t miss.”

Panic detonates.

With a jerky motion, Tim rips the gun out of Jason's grasp, taking an uncoordinated step back in his haste to get away.

The sound that follows isn’t a word or a thought. It’s instinct breaking loose.

Bang.

The flash blinds him. The recoil snaps his wrist.

Jason staggers back, shock overtaking rage, eyes wide. His hand flies to his side — red blooming through the fabric of his shirt, dark and fast. He hadn’t been wearing his suit. He backs up against the counter with a strangled breath that’s halfway between pain and disbelief, holding himself up with too many years of experience taking blows for a kid of eighteen.

Tim’s ears ring. The gun hangs from his fingers. His whole arm shakes. He’s still staring when he realises he’s the one making the ragged, broken noise in the air.

He meant it.

God, he meant it.

Jason looks up at him, not angry now, just stunned. “You actually… did it.”

The younger boy swallows hard, his voice barely audible. “You made me.”

With laughter that comes out wet and disbelieving, “Guess that makes us even.” Jason shakes his head. He tries to push himself up, but slips. There’s blood streaking the floor.

Through the panic, Tim processes his words and feels heat boil up inside him above the flood of nausea. “Not even close.” He replies, finally glancing up from the blood to look the older boy in the eye.

Jason’s mouth twitches — not quite a smile, not quite regret. 

Then, they hear the footsteps.

Smart dress shoes pound down the hall. The heavy sound of someone running echoes for long seconds before he makes it to the kitchen

.

“Tim!” An all too familiar voice shouts, sharp and close.

Tim turns, startled, just as Bruce rounds the corner, eyes finding the gun first, then the blood, then Jason. The world seems to stop between each glance.

“What did you do?”

The words aren’t shouted. They’re worse; low, guttural, afraid.

There you have it, folks, his mind supplies, World’s Greatest Detective stumped by Young Master Timothy in the Kitchen with the Revolver. 

Tim looks down at his hands, at the smoke curling from the barrel. He can’t even speak.

Sinking down to the floor against the counter, Jason hisses in pain, half-laughing still. “Told you, your protégés had issues, B.”

How is he still finding amusement in all this?

The expression on Bruce’s face barely shifts, just sets. He moves fast: one hand pulling the gun from his youngest’s limp fingers, the other pressing down on Jason’s wound to staunch the bleeding.

“I told you to stay away from him,” he says finally. His voice isn’t angry, it’s tired. It occurs to Tim that the instruction could have been addressed to either of them.

Jason scoffs, clearly thinking the same. “Guess we both ignore your orders, huh?”

Bruce doesn’t answer. He looks at the gun in his hand. The weight in his palm is the same as the weight in his voice.

The tension in the room has shifted. It’s no longer a question of what the Robins — past and present — can do to each other, but rather, what Batman will do with them. 

In another life, this scene could have been different; there would be no blood on the floor, no gun cooling on the counter, no history of violence shaping their every breath— there would still be a stupid mistake, maybe a shattered window. Bruce would still scold them, the way fathers do, resigned and weary. Alfred would hand them the broom along with a lesson about responsibility, something on the nose like “mopping up one’s own messes”. Maybe they’d have passed the blame back and forth, like brothers do. They would have cleaned up their mess together.

That would be the end of it. 

In another life, it wouldn’t be this.

“We don’t use these,” Bruce mutters under his breath, but it’s too late — the rule has already been broken, the line has already been crossed.

“For once, it wasn't fucking me who used it,” Jason announces jovially.

Tim stumbles back, chest heaving. “I didn’t— I wasn’t going to—” 

“Yeah, thing is,” Jason rasps, not putting up with another one of Tim’s fits, “you did, Timbers.”

Tim stares back at him in disbelief. Dick’s nickname for him, on Jason’s lips, is so unbelievably foreign. Surely he hasn't already lost that much blood.

Their mentor looks at Jason sharply. “Is it yours?” he demands, his accusing tone catching both boys off guard.

Jason hesitates, jaw flexing. “No. I don't know where he got it.”

For the first time in a long time, he looks like something other than the vicious Crimelord he’s become. He looks eighteen. He looks like a son being reprimanded by his dad.

The image startles Tim, but not as much as when Bruce looks up, at Tim, at the gun, at the mess of both his sons; one bleeding, one trembling. His voice is quiet and heavy with something the youngest can’t name.

“Get upstairs,” he says finally. “Now.”

Tim doesn’t move.

Bruce’s tone sharpens. Batman speaks, not Bruce. “Now.”

And for the first time in weeks, Tim takes his order without a second thought.

•·················•·················•

The manor had gone still in that heavy way it did after a disaster.

Somewhere down the hall, the grandfather clock ticked tauntingly, an everyday sound that was out of place in the aftermath of something terrible.

Tim sat on the floor against his bed, back pressed to the frame, still in the clothes he’d been wearing when it happened. He hadn’t bothered to shower or change. The acrid metallic smell clung to him anyway, no matter how faint; it was a reminder that soap wouldn’t fix anything.

The gun was gone. Batman had made sure of that.

Bruce had not been entertained by Jason’s offer to “take it off Tim’s hands,” either.

The house creaked with the special kind of silence that only followed yelling or blood. Or both. Tim didn’t know where Bruce had gone after patching Jason up — probably to the cave, probably to think and brood. 

Alfred hadn’t come by. Tim didn’t blame him. In all likelihood, the Butler had probably simply been too busy attending to his resident medic duties to come attend to the physically unharmed boy hiding in his room upstairs. But Tim could convince himself it was something more personal than that.

When the door opens, it’s quieter than expected. Dick knocks with much more bravado than that most of the time. Tim shrinks in on himself at the change in behaviour, at what it surely entailed

The original Robin hesitates in the doorway, his shoulders drawn, trying to read the room before crossing the threshold. The smell of antiseptic from Jason’s treatment downstairs still lingers on his clothes. If Tim could smell it from here, it must be bad

Despite being met with silence, Dick steps inside anyway.

“You okay?” he asks softly, voice trying for warmth. No time for greetings when the little psycho you begrudgingly allowed into your house shoots the bigger psycho you grew up with.

The question catches Tim off guard. Had it been him, that’s not the first question he would have asked. It certainly wasn’t the question he deserved.

“Yeah,” Tim says automatically, the same way you say you’re fine when really you’re not sure you know how to breathe anymore.

Dick doesn’t call him out on it. Instead, he just crosses the room and sits himself down on the floor beside Tim like he’d been here before, like he had the script memorised.

“He’s gone,” Dick ventures after a beat. Tim knows he's talking about Jason. Boy Wonder, always ready to play mediator. “Didn’t take your head off, so I’m calling that progress.”

Tim almost laughs. It comes out as a cough.

“And you're not taking off mine…”

That earns the ghost of a smile from Dick. And for some unfathomable reason, he knocks his shoulder against the teenager's, meeting his eye with a look of sympathy Tim doesn’t think he deserves.

“At first, I thought I could save him, you know. Jason.”

“You still might,” Tim murmurs in reply.

“Nah,” Dick says softly. “All I can do is make sure he doesn’t take you down with him.”

Tim looks up. “He didn’t.”

“No,” Dick says, glancing at the faint bruise on Tim’s throat, the even nastier one under his eyes from the broken nose, “but he almost did.”

The silence after that is long. Even Dick doesn’t seem to quite know how to fill it, and that weighs on Tim. It tells him just how badly he’s fucked this all up. 

Between the pair of them, his room reeks of antiseptic, but gun oil is there too, faintly, like a poorly hidden secret. It was a poorly hidden secret. He hasn’t bothered to turn on the lights; the only glow comes from the hallway, a thin stripe cutting across the floorboards and the hem of Dick’s jeans. Dust drifts lazily through it.

Tim draws his knees closer to his chest. The fabric of his shirt sticks slightly to his back where he’d sweated through it earlier, hours ago already. The faint ache in his wrist from the gun’s recoil still lingers. It’s not painful so much as it is a reminder.

“I didn’t mean to let it get this far,” he says suddenly, voice barely audible.

“I know,” Dick answers, equally soft. “It wasn’t really in your control, though.”

Tim huffs a laugh that sounds more like defeat. “Guess not.”

“You were trying to survive him,” Dick says it softly, with an understanding that Tim knows extends far before the events of today.

That lands. Tim doesn’t answer.

Dick watches him for a moment, in that studying, measuring sort of way that they all can’t help but do. Then he exhales, his expression easing into something gentle, almost hopeful.

“You’ll both figure it out,” Dick says finally. “Well, I hope you do.” 

Tim tilts his head. “Don't want to pick a side, huh?”

The question is a rhetorical challenge of sorts. It doesn’t matter that he thinks he’s being unfair to say it out loud; he can’t help it. Bitterness has been eating him up for months, after all.

Dick inhales sharply before letting out a long sigh. “No… No, I don’t.’

He sits back on his heels, rubbing a hand over his face. The movement makes the shadows shift across the wall, long and uncertain. When he drops his hand again, he looks older. He looks tired in a way Tim rarely sees.

“Why didn’t you tell Bruce?” The younger of the two asks after a while, again not being able to help himself.

“...About the gun?”

The question has been plaguing him for weeks— nearing months. All this time, and Dick said nothing. Tim evaded him, left home, nearly got himself killed out on patrol without any input from Jason — and Dick would have known all of this — and still Dick said nothing to Bruce.

Tim nods.

“I didn’t think— I knew you were scared. Jason being around has been hard on you–”

Tim cuts him off with a snort. 

“Okay, yeah. Understatement of the millennium.” he pauses, collecting his words. “I didn’t say anything because Bruce’s special brand of parenting wouldn't have helped you then. Not with that at least.”

“He doesn’t parent me.” Dick gives him a sad look. “I mean, I'm not his son…”

“Oh, Timbers.”

Timbers.

“What?”

“You really think that?” 

Tim shrugs, the movement small and defensive. 

Dick sighs. “Well, even if you don't see your relationship with Bruce that way, I hope you know you’re my brother.”

Tim stares at him, bewildered. The word brother sounds foreign in the room, too big to fit in his mouth, too fragile to grab hold of. 

Dick levels him with a soft look, “You are my brother. And I didn't tell Bruce because I didn’t think you would actually shoot Jason.” 

Tim looks down in shame, he’s done it again, disappointed Dick— disappointed his brother. 

And Dick, seeing the look on his face, quickly rushes to put his mind at ease, “Not that he didn’t deserve it,” he adds quickly, lips quirking into a rueful half-smile.

That almost earns a smile from Tim, almost. His mouth twitches but never commits. The air in the room feels too heavy for laughter anyway. It presses down on him: guilt, the remnants of adrenaline, the echo of Jason’s voice still rasping in his head.

“You think I did the right thing?” he asks after a long pause, so quietly he’s surprised Dick doesn’t miss it.

“I can’t say it was the right thing,” Dick admits. “But you did right by you.”

Tim nods faintly, eyes fixed on the floorboards. “Bruce is mad.”

“Not as mad at you as you’d think.” Dick’s voice, somehow, becomes even gentler, like he’s afraid of startling a wounded animal. His shoulder brushes against Tim’s again. 

Tim scoffs, but it lacks heat. “He sent me to my room, Dick. Like a ten-year-old.”

“Yeah, well,” Dick says, glancing toward the door. “That was him keeping himself from saying something he’d regret.”

Tim frowns. “Since when does Bruce not say stuff he regrets?”

“Since Jason came back,” Dick says simply. He stretches his legs out, sitting cross-legged now on the floor beside him. The sound of the studs on his jeans grating against the floorboards is soft but grounding.

After a moment, Dick pushes off the bed and stands, pacing once before turning back. “He’s not the only one who scares Bruce, you know.”

Tim looks up, startled. “What?”

“You heard me. You scare him too. Not in the same way Jason does—” Dick catches the flash in Tim’s eyes and adds, “—don’t look at me like that. I just mean… You do things he doesn’t see coming. You don’t yell. You don’t break things. You just—” He gestures vaguely, searching for the right word. “Explode inward.”

Tim’s throat tightens. “Guess that didn’t really work out this time.”

“Guess not.” Dick gives him a sad smile. 

“Bruce won’t tell you this, but you scared him for more than just that.”

Tim’s head snaps up. He doesn’t look away from Dick as he silently implores the man to find his words, to finish his thought.

Dick looks back at him, eyes gentle but unwavering. “Because for a second, he thought he’d lost another son.”

Tim flinches like the words are too sharp to touch. He opens his mouth, closes it, and looks away. His throat works around something unspoken.

“I’m not—”

“Don’t,” Dick says quietly. “You don’t have to finish that.”

So he doesn’t.

He ruminates, thinking about the fact that it had been his name Bruce called first. Not Jason’s.

For a moment, neither of them speaks. The faint hum of the manor’s old heating system fills the silence, underscored by the slow tick of the wall clock, one of those old ones Alfred refuses to replace because it ‘has character.’ The sound is steady, almost mercifully so, this time. Dick finds his way over to Tim’s desk, glances over the papers littering the surface, and runs his fingers over a Batman figurine Tim’s had for years, from even before he was Robin.

Finally, Dick speaks again, voice soft but firm. “I know we’ve put you through hell, bringing Jason back into our lives while he’s… like this.” He gestures vaguely, unable to find a word that doesn’t sound cruel. “You’re a kid trying to hold your own in the fallout of a tragedy Bruce couldn’t stop.”

Tim lets out a humourless breath. “Yeah, well. At least I’m consistent— collateral damage with a mask.”

“That’s not funny,” Dick says, but there’s no anger in it; there’s only exhaustion.

“I wasn’t joking.”

Dick runs a hand through his hair, staring down at the floor. “You’ve got to stop carrying the weight for everyone, Tim. Jason’s not your problem to fix.”

Tim huffs a weak laugh. “You sound like Bruce.”

“Yeah, but I mean it in a human way,” Dick says. He leans back against the desk on his hands, staring up at the ceiling for a beat. “You’re allowed to be angry. You’re allowed to be scared. You’re allowed to screw up. You’re a person, not a suit.”

Tim doesn’t answer right away. His eyes are glassy in the dim light, and he’s biting the inside of his cheek like he’s trying to keep himself from unravelling.

After a moment, he mutters, “You should go check on him. Jason.”

“I already did.”

“And?”

Dick sighs, the kind of sigh that comes from years of knowing how little he can control. “He’s breathing. He’s angry. He’s… Jason.”

“Sounds about right,” Tim murmurs.

Dick steps away from the desk and comes back over to crouch in front of Tim. He reaches over, ruffles Tim’s hair gently, and lets his hand rest briefly on the back of his neck. “You’ll both figure it out eventually. Not today. Maybe not for a long time. But you will.”

Tim nods, but the motion feels mechanical. He’s too tired to believe in things like ‘eventually’.

As Dick stands, the floor creaks under his weight. He hesitates by the doorway, one hand braced against the frame. The light from the hall catches the edge of his profile, all the exhaustion and affection that comes with being everyone’s big brother written plainly across his face.

“Get some sleep, Tim.” Just as he’s about to step away, a thought occurs to him, and he takes a hesitant step back. “...If it gets this bad again— you ask me for help.” He stays silent until Tim looks him in the eye, and then finishes. “I’ll be there.”

He remains until Tim nods his understanding. And miraculously, he doesn’t even have to pretend. He knows— if Tim needs him, Dick will be there.

And that makes it all a little less terrifying.

•·················•·················•

Tim finds Jason first.

He tracks him by intent. It makes him feel oddly nostalgic. He follows bootprints in wet grit and eventually finds a shadow leaping across the gaps between rooftops. The city is heavy tonight, clouds pressing low, its air thick with the hum of rain that never quite falls. Gotham feels like it’s holding its breath. Or maybe Tim’s just projecting.

Jason stands at the edge of a high-rise, looking down at the lights that bleed through the fog. He doesn’t turn when he speaks.

“You following me again?” His voice is flat against the wind, gruff through the modulator of his helmet.

Tim stops a few paces behind him.

Again. And it clicks in Tim’s mind that in all the research Jason must have done to track him down all those months ago — and enact his revenge — that just as Tim had come to know everything about Jason as Robin, Jason had come to know everything about Tim, even before he was Robin.

He remembers nights trailing Batman and a younger Robin, the thrill of hanging precariously off the sides of fire escapes in the hopes of taking a photo of Gotham’s most elusive nighttime protectors. To most people, Batman and Robin had been blurs in the night; to a young Tim, they had been a puzzle he was desperate to solve, pieces of a world he longed to understand.

Now, he understands it all too well.

Under any other circumstances — in another life — Jason’s choice of words could have been an inside joke.

“You don’t make it hard,” he answers instead. “You like the dramatic skyline.”

Jason shrugs one shoulder. It barely counts as an acknowledgement, but Tim knows it is, just different to the way the older teenager usually addresses him. There’s no swagger, no menace. 

No performance.

And that’s what catches Tim off guard.

This time, Jason holds his tongue, spares him the pointlessness of asking him why Tim’s here. Hood knows. And that surprises him above all else. It’s bittersweet. When Tim has finally learned not to expect restraint, he is instead caught off guard by the absence of cruelty, where before Jason would not have hesitated.

Tim had been braced for taunts and viciousness; instead, he gets a silent pause that’s his to fill. An unexpected, small courtesy.

“About the other night,” Tim starts. The words feel rough on their way past his lips. They’re heavier than he expects.

He’s caught off guard again when Hood removes the helmet, opting to hold it under his arm as he gives Robin his attention. The hiss of the seals releasing sounds too loud in the quiet that exists only up on the rooftops of Gotham. 

Tim is almost stricken by the sight, faced with Jason behind a domino, not Hood under the helmet. It dawns on him then that he hasn’t seen Jason in just the domino since the first night they met— well, that’s one way to refer to the incident.

“You mean when you shot me?” Jason says.

“When you made me.”

Jason exhales through his nose, a vague sound of amusement. “Fair.”

Silence sits between them for a moment, the city humming below with car horns and distant sirens caught up in the wind. 

Tim looks at Jason properly: the line of his jaw, the bruise on his face that Tim himself managed to inflict, the old scars from a night that changed everything. 

He knows it’s naive because Jason has never cared to spare a thought for Tim as anything more than his replacement before, but after everything that has transpired between them, he can’t help but wonder if Jason looks at him and catalogues the same things: his age, the matching bruises, the scar that Jason gave him. 

Do they see each other now?

“I get it,” Tim says quietly. “Why you’re angry. Why you stayed angry.”

“Don’t do that,” Jason mutters. “Don’t make it sound noble.”

Tim doesn’t answer, doesn’t fight him on that.

Then, almost involuntarily: “You scared me,” Tim admits. “Not because you could kill me. Because I almost stopped caring if you did.”

Jason’s eyes flick to him with something unreadable there, something sharp but not hostile. “Yeah,” he says. “That’s how it starts.”

For a moment, the wind gusts hard enough to make the antenna above them creak. A billboard below flickers in and out, and the light paints Jason in fractured colour; red, then white, then gone again. Tim feels absurdly aware of the space between them, the possibility of closing it and what it would cost.

Jason tugs his helmet back on. The moment coming to an end. “You ever point a gun at me again, I’m taking it personally.”

Tim snorts, humourless and bitter. “No promises,” he says, and thinks to himself: hypocritical piece of shit.

Jason stares at him for a long second. Then, with a half-huff that might be a laugh, he takes a step back and starts to walk away.

“I won't miss next time,” Tim calls out before he can stop himself, before Hood retreats once more.

He receives a silent look in return. With the helmet on, Tim doesn’t know what Jason’s thinking— not that he could tell even with it off. 

“I don't think B could handle another gun-wielding son.” The voice that comes out is a digitally distorted rumble, and the abrasive sound doesn’t match the intensely personal nature of the words.

Tim almost swallows the reply, but it escapes anyway. “I'm not his son.” Dick’s speech hasn’t sunk in yet. Maybe. He can’t allow himself to make those assumptions. He’s been a son before, and it means nothing. He won’t put himself through the trouble of having those kinds of unrealistic expectations again, he thinks. Maybe he never will.

To Tim’s shock, the helmet comes off again. And the look on Jason’s face is hard.

For a second, Jason’s expression does something funny. He steps back into the light, close enough that the wind catches at his hair.

“Don’t be fucking stupid, Tim,” Jason says, and there’s nothing cruel in it. It wants to be a reprimand and a warning and, in some bruised way, care. “Makes me want to throttle you again, and apparently that’s not allowed anymore.”

The younger of the two exhales a laugh that’s half-anger, half-relief. The sound is small and terrible and somehow, reassuring.

Jason looks at him once more, then turns, putting the helmet on for a final time, and disappears into the darkness of the night as if he never belonged to the light, oblivious to the fact that none of them do. 

Tim stays where he is, fingers cold, heart still beating a hard, frantic rhythm, because despite the confidence he forced himself to wear for this interaction, he’ll never not be a little terrified. 

The weight of the gun has left his hands, but its memory lingers. He won’t be forgetting it anytime soon, and he’s sure that Jason won’t either.