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Bruce liked Tim. Bruce loved Tim, even. But sometimes, the kid was a bit much.
Bruce knew that Tim had started out as a photographer and a stalker. He had figured out Batman and Robin’s secret identities as a little kid. That was impressive. What as less impressive was the fact that he never lost that sense of wide eyed fanboy-ish wonder.
“Wow, Bruce,” Tim would gasp, peering into the Cave’s storage section. “I didn’t know you kept all your old costumes.”
And then Tim would spend his every free moment for the next three days breathlessly pawing through the racks of old Batsuits and disguises, dusty with disuse, for all that the dehumidifiers worked overtime to keep them dry and mold free.
He would also say things that made things awkward sometimes.
“Wow Bruce,” Tim would also exclaim, beaming files from the Batcomputer directly into his brain with only minimal interference via his eyeballs, "I didn't realize how much protection chin coverage actually provides. The chubby cheeks are worth it, for the jaw protection."
And Bruce would have to study his jaw self-consciously in the mirror to determine whether his face really looked chubby when he wore a cowl with chin protection.
Or, when Bat-Mite came around, and Tim would descend into giggles while whispering with the 5th dimensional pest. Tim never provoked Bat-Mite as such, but they shared identical looks of wide eyed bedazzlement when Bruce did something particularly "cool" or "interesting". After their first encounter with Bat-Mite, Tim started getting monthly deliveries of comic books directly to his room, courtesy of the fifth dimension, and started insisting Bruce call him "chum" and "lad".
Then, there would be the downright upsetting.
"Oh, don't worry about it," Tim would say, as he traipsed around the Wayne family plot at Gotham Cemetery with a bunch of sensors in hand. "Just monitoring for signs of people clawing out of their graves."
"And why," Bruce had asked, voice cracking half in bafflement and half in grief, "would people start crawling out of their graves?"
"You never know," Tim had said vaguely."No one stays dead around here. There's Lazarus Pits and Dionesium deposits and twenty curses in the foundations of Gotham, and sometimes people punch through reality too hard and cause glitches."
Robin and Batman had both been occupied with their own out of town apocalyptic crises when the sensor on Jason's coffin tripped. Alfred had rushed over, driving like a madman, but by the time he'd reached the cemetery, there had been nothing but am empty grave, with a coffin that had been clawed open from the inside.
"Two thousand and five," Tim had muttered, then clicked his tongue.
It took a lot of tracking and hacking before Bruce and Tim found blurry surveillance footage of Talia smuggling a seemingly catatonic Jason out of a local hospital. Bruce had a silent nervous breakdown, so Tim was the one who actually backtracked Jason's steps and figured out how Talia had found him. Then he started pinpointing League of Assassins bases and hacking Ra's systems, all before Bruce had finished working through his panic attack.
Jason crept through the Titans Tower silently, careful not to give any sign of himself away. Poor little Timmy would be learning a very important lesson today. On that could even save his life.
Jason found Tim where he was supposed to be, hunched over a laptop in his room. That Tim's room was covered wall to wall with photos of Batman and the various Robins, was not something Jason had expected. It was not the tangled but organized tool of an investigating detective, but the obsessed and frankly unhinged murder wall of a crazed stalker. Jason's own murder wall didn't have a tenth this many pictures. In pride of place, amidst signed Flying Graysons posters and a framed copy of the first interview that Bruce had given after he came back from his training, was an entire hubcap. It was the bat-hubcap that Jason had tried to steal from the batmobile.
Tim also had an entire glass shelf full of figurines, licensed and bootlegged both. Some of the figures were uncomfortably life-like, having probably been retouched from their factory finish. Batman, in various iterations of the batsuit. Robins through the years. Nightwing, in all his fashion disaster costumes. And then, at the end of a row of Jason-as-Robin figures, a fresh addition. The Red Hood, little red helmet carefully and painstakingly accurate to life.
Jason launched himself at Tim, knocking him out of his chair and pinning him to the ground by the throat. Tim struggled ferociously and almost managed to break free, but froze and fell still when he saw who it was that had attacked him.
"What the fuck," Jason growled. "Timothy Jackson Drake, what the fuck is wrong with you?"
Tim's hands came up to touch Jason's cheek, and his brow raised under the domino to give the impression of being wide-eyed with surprise.
"Jason?" His mouth hung open.
"What's with the murder wall, pretender?" Jason demanded. "This is seriously creepy."
Tim continued staring at Jason, surprised and a little breathless. There was wonder on his face.
"Jason," Tim gasped, hands covering his mouth like a movie heroine being proposed to. He looked just as ecstatically happy and in love. "You're here! It's really you! I... I don't know what to say, Jason. I'm such a big fan I. I love you...r work! I'm. I... Can I please have your autograph?"
Jason grimaced. This was not how he had envisioned the encounter going. He tightened his grip on Tim's neck.
"Wow,I didn't realize you were coming today," Tim said dreamily, hazy from being choked out but not fighting it. He touched Jason's cheek again. "I would have dressed up otherwise." He gasped and coughed as Jason's grip began exerting pressure on his windpipe.
"Are you insane, you little creep?" Jason demanded, giving the kid a shake. "Get up, I'm here to fight you."
"Noooo," Tim complained. "No fighting! Not near my priceless collection of figures. Hey, would you be down for signing-" Tim broke off wheezing, batting half-heartedly at Jason's hand. Jason awkwardly got his feet under himself, then stood, hauling Tim up via chokehold.
Tim just dangled in his grip, struggling half-heartedly even as he kept looking at Jason. Jason could just tell that Tim was giving him a big wet coweyed look behind the white lenses of his domino.
Jason dropped him.
Tim fell on his ass in a heap of flailing teenaged limbs, flailing. He stared up at Jason.
"So you're what the old man has replaced me with?" Jason demanded. "Pathetic." He unsheathed one of his knives and pointed it at Tim. "Get up and fight me."
Tim stared for another moment, coughing and panting. Then, without getting up, he started in inching sideways while still sat on his ass. Jason realized with some annoyance that the kid was trying to lead Jason away from his display of action figures. As soon as Tim had a clear shot of the door, he launched himself to his feet and started sprinting away while giggling. Jason had a moment to decide between chasing after him immediately and smashing his little dolls first. Tim slammed a door down the hallway. Cursing, Jason gave chase, leaving the display case to survive another day.
Tim was fast and slippery, like a little weasel. He twisted and turned through the hallways of the Tower, but for all that Jason was only a titan for a little while, he was still more than familiar enough with the layout. Jason idly wondered where the kid thought he was leading Jason to. He yelped when Jason landed a hit, but his teeth were white and his grin was broad as he sprinted through the Tower like some kind of madcap Tweety-Bird egging on road runner. Jason drew his gun and fired, again and again and again, careful to not aim for anywhere that would be immediately fatal. By the time that he was out of bullets, Tim had lead him through several levels of the tower. The kid was also covered in graze wounds. Jason holstered his gun and went for the shuriken and projectiles as they neared a part of the Tower that Jason hadn't ever really explored before.
Panting and exhausted, Tim stumbled into the Hall of Fallen Titans. He was bruised and bleeding and nursing what were probably cracked ribs, and would have one hell of a shiner tomorrow, but he was still beaming and letting out huffs of delighted laughter. He'd give Jason almost as good as he'd gotten. Jason followed after at a brisk, limping power walk. He took out a collapsible bo staff, having run out of daggers a few hallways ago and replacement League katanas a few weeks back. Tim ducked behind one of the tall statues in the memorial hall, attempting to gain some cover.
"It's not like Bruce to let his soldiers be cowards," Jason said, the cold simmering anger that had motivated this visit to the next Robin flaring into something white hot and irrational. The fallen titans were all memorialized here. Some were staple members much missed, others had only served brief stints, but were still given a place. Jason Todd was nowhere to be seen among their stony number. A lightning bolt of incoherent fury struck Jason somewhere between his throbbing temples. He paused from his pursuit to give the knees of Donna Troy a textbook perfect baseball swing with his staff. The stone let out a horrible splitting noise as cracks started forming. Jason felt no satisfaction, only hollow bitterness, and swung again.
"You know," he panted out, once Troia's likeness was so much rubble. "It’s pretty cold of you to sacrifice up figures of your dead friends to save your little collection of dolls, Drake.”
Tim shot a batarang in Jason’s direction. Jason ducked, but kept an ear out for the sound of Tim changing locations.
“I don’t mind,” said Tim, a smile in his voice. “Destroy as many statues as you want. Haven’t you heard of the Statue Rule? If you smash it, they come back to life. Keep an eye out for Donna, she’ll be around again soon.”
Jason leapt out and hurled a spread of shuriken at Tim, calculating the rebound to aim for the source of Tim’s voice.
“That doesn’t sound likely,” Jason panted, “where’d you hear that rumor?”
“The internet,” Tim said mildly. “Besides, it’s not more unlikely than Superboy-Prime punching the multiverse so hard that you glitched back to life.”
Jason stopped in his tracks. He stood there, perplexed.
“What?” he demanded.
“Superboy-Prime,” said Tim. “Punched the multiverse. Hard. And it glitched! And one of the glitches was that you were suddenly alive again.”
“H…how do you… Who told you that?” Jason demanded, more baffled than angry.
“I get my comic books from Bat-Mite,” Tim said beatifically.
“I…have no idea who or what that is,” Jason said.
“Um,” Tim hummed in thought, counting his fingers. “Huh! Wow. Hmm. He hasn’t been around yet since the reboot. So how did I meet-? Nevermind. Bat-Mite is a fifth dimensional being. Like Mxyzptlk. He’s a big fan of Batman. We bonded over being batfans. Now he sends me comics every month!”
Jason squeezed his eyes shut. For the first time in a very long time, he was having a headache that wasn’t tinged with the green rage of the Lazarus Pit.
“And do your Batman comics usually…” Jason began, then gave up halfway into the question. He didn’t know how to finish the question. He didn’t know what he even wanted to ask.
“They’re all pretty accurate,” Tim said beatifically. “I mean, I placed sensors over your grave but Talia still stole you away anyway, so maybe there’s some kind of narrative impetus driving us all, but the intel that you were going to claw yourself out of the grave eventually was accurate!”
Jason pinched the bridge of his nose.
“Is this why Batman obliterated the League of Assassins from the face of the earth?” he demanded.
“I wouldn’t really count it as obliteration,” Tim said doubtfully. “They’re all alive and kicking, aren’t they?”
“He blew up their finances and sent them all to jail, then destroyed every Lazarus Pit Ra’s had in reserve,” Jason said. “Talia’s had to go on the run.”
“Hey,” Tim said philosophically, “she shouldn’t keep his kids from him if she wants an amicable relationship. Plus, she won’t get as unhinged without more dunks in the Pits, so I feel like this is probably a net positive for Talia.”
Jason blew his breath out between his clenched teeth.
“Tell Batman to fuck off,” Jason growled. “And you! It’s you interfering with my drug deals, isn’t it.”
Tim let out an airy burst of laughter that bordered on a giggle.
“Stop trying to become a drug lord if you don't want people messing up your drug deals,” Tim said. “I’m not going to let my fave become a drug lord! A heel turn is very edgy and badass, but it’s not the 90’s anymore. Anyway, if you’re done with the fight then we can get a zeta back to the Cave for a cookie raid and to say hi to Agent A, but if you’re still down for an epic showdown I gotta warn you that my teammates are going to be back in about six minutes, and they’re going to be pretty annoyed if you get my blood spattered all over the pristine white marble. So just letting you know that I carry a pen and post-its if you need to leave an ominous message. Just FYI.”
“Wait a minute,” Jason hissed. He stalked over to Tim’s hiding place, now that the fight had seemingly come to a lull. “How did you know about the message in blood thing. Did you already read about this in those comics of yours.”
“Yeah,” Tim said enthusiastically. He cupped a hand over his ribs as he leaned on a statue for support, but the way that his head swiveled to stare into Jason’s soul showed no sign of weakness or pain, only a manic fixation. “You beat me within an inch of my life, then use my blood to leave a message over my broken body! It’s totally badass, but I’ll end up having to organize the cleanup, so, you know. Maybe you can keep the blood to just the floors. Or you could write it on on the floor, that would be cool too.”
Jason put his face in his hands.
“Well I’m not going to do it now,” he said petulantly. The haze of green left him in an instant, like someone turning a light switch in a darkened room to reveal that the scary silhouetted figure telling a gorey horror story was actually a tween girl in fluffy pink pyjamas. He was left feeling annoyed and jittery.
Tim made a noise of disappointment. “It’s totally badass,” he assured Jason. “It’s one of my favorite issues!”
Jason felt his face contort into a rictus of pain that even torture couldn’t elicit from him.
“Alright, you know what, fuck this,” Jason said, making the executive decision to retreat and regroup. He aimed a blow at Tim’s legs, and Tim, unguarded and open as he drank in the sight of Jason in his Robin costume with hyper fixated glee, didn’t even have time to flinch before he fell onto his face with a yelp.
“Jason,” Tim groaned. He clutched his shins. “Come back! Let me at least take a photo of you in your costume, it’s been so long since I’ve been able to take a picture of you as Robin!”
Jason power-walked out of the memorial hall as fast as he could while Tim tried to get back to his feet, only to find that he had a cracked shin.
Well, that was a bust. Jason made a beeline for the zeta tubes and programmed a trip to one of the hidden zetas in Gotham, a derelict back alley phone booth in Gotham not too far away from Jason’s base.
He took the necessary measures to avoid being tracked, but his heart wasn’t really in it. He hissed a curse as he walked past a dingy comic shop with peeling posters advertising years old issues of unauthorized Batman comics. The shop had long since gone under, the unsavory locale and the downturn in popularity of comics in general having served a double whammy of financial ruin, but the stupid leering face of the questionably legal depiction of Batman stared at Jason as he hunched his shoulders and hurried away.
“Tim,” Bruce said, the very picture of reason. He sat in the chair in front of the Batcomputer, fingers steepled like Sherlock Holmes with an interesting puzzle. His fatherly gaze of interrogative disappointment stabbed into Tim from underneath his cowl. “What have I said about dealing with Jason?”
“I’m not going to fight him!” Tim protested. “It’s Jason!”
Bruce broke. He ripped off his cowl so he could massage his temples. “Tim,” he said, for what seemed like the hundredth time. “Tim. You can’t just let him beat you up because he’s your… childhood idol. He kills people. He’s a crime lord.”
“He’s your son!” Tim protested. “He’s Jason Todd!”
Bruce rubbed his face with his palms.
“And if you were to be honest with me, Tim,” Bruce said wearily. “Would your aversion to fighting him stem from an overflow of brotherly affection, or from the fact that you have about thirty posters of him up in your closet, in the secret Robin shrine that you think Alfred and I don’t know about?”
Tim stuck his bottom lip out and did not reply.
“Tim,” Bruce said pleadingly. “I love Jason. He is my son. I am in disbelief that he has come back to life. I am devastated that he has turned to death and violence. I am also, for my sins, begging you to stop fanboying and to treat him like the threat that he is.”
Tim lowered his eyes. “Yes Batman,” he said morosely, like a scolded child who had been told that he wouldn’t be getting dessert.
“Good,” Bruce said, without hope that Tim was actually going to listen. “Now stop trying to sneak out to patrol and get back to bed.”
Tim glared at him balefully.
“You’re not my real dad,” Tim muttered under his breath.
“I am your legal parent and guardian,” Bruce replied, “and I have fully permission from Jack and Dana to ground you if you don’t obey your bedtime.”
“Jack and Dana aren’t here right now.”
“And if I broke witness protection and asked them whether I should ground you right now, I’m sure they’ll agree with me anyway,” Bruce said placidly. “Go back to bed, young man.”
Tim hissed like an angry cat.
“Fine,” he glowered. “I have stuff to do anyways.”
“And I’m blocking e-bay from the manor internet,” Bruce said. “Do your dark bidding when you’re not high on painkillers.”
Tim said a Kryptonian word that was so rude that Bruce was frankly puzzled how it had even survived the destruction of the planet. It was not the kind of word that Superman would be teaching to anyone.
Tim limped away on his Bat-crutches, muttering dire threats against the only two other serious Robin II memorabilia collectors on E-bay.
Just before Tim exited the Cave, Bruce caught a last whisper of Tim threatening to sell off all his Batman merch out of spite. Bruce would be beyond relieved if that actually happened. Tim’s creepy stalker fanboy tendencies toward Bruce and Dick had all but evaporated by the time that Bruce let him debut officially as Robin, having been redirected and redoubled into an unsettling obsession with Jason instead, but Tim still collected figures and merch as a matter of habit, and Bruce was tired of averting his eyes every time Tim left his bedroom door open and put the life sized Batman body pillow in its plexiglass standing case on display to any hapless innocents that happened to pass by down the hallway.
Jason returned to the Batcave on a Thursday. It was an unremarkable Thursday, nothing out of the ordinary. The Red Hood’s attempts at taking over the drug trade was limping along steadily, Batman’s attempts to capture the Red Hood were being avoided with regularity, and Tim was off bed rest and halfway through the standard mandated period of bat-physio to aide his recovery. Bruce was working on a case on the Cave computer, Alfred was serving up tea and a batch of fresh cookies, and Tim was decorating the display case that held Jason’s old uniform.
Jason appeared not from a Bat entrance, but from the stairs down from the manor. It was probably why the cave alarms hadn’t gone off.
“Bruce!” he bellowed, stomping down the stairs in his steel toed boots, all six feet something of his solid blocky form bristling with weapons. “Bruce! Control your pet bird!”
Tim looked up, startled, and dropped the pack of custom chibi Red Hood stickers that he’d commissioned from his favorite bat-fanartist on the internet.
Bruce set down his teacup and stood. Alfred merely smiled and started pouring tea into the third cup and saucer set on the serving cart.
“Jason?” Bruce said, voice blank to conceal his confusion.
“It’s Red Hood to you,” Jason said with a glower, “you’ll get first name privileges back when you control your creepy stalker child!”
Bruce’s head swiveled in Tim’s direction.
“Tim,” Bruce stated flatly, “why have you been bothering Jason when you’re supposed to be benched and recovering, in the safety of the Manor, away from the man who broke three ribs and fractured your tibia.”
“Um,” Tim said, “you phrased that like a question but I feel like that wasn’t really a question. There was no question mark.”
“Tim,” Bruce continued, just as flatly, “what happened to your promise to cease your… fanboying.”
Tim’s eyes flickered between Jason and Bruce. There was a wildness to the light in them that made him seem like a trapped animal.
“I’m a Jason stan til I die!” he cried at last. “You can’t change my mind! He’s my bestest and speciallest blorbo. No one and nothing is going to take him from me!”
“Have you been sneaking out.” It was fascinating how Bruce had mastered the art of stating interrogative sentences without asking a question.
Tim blinked at Bruce, trying to look innocent and wide eyed. Bruce narrowed his eyes back at Tim.
“Timothy Jackson Drake-Wayne.”
Tim’s shoulders hunched.
“I just wanted an autograph,” Tim mumbled looking down at the mess of Red Hood stickers on the ground.
“Your little bird,” Jason said slowly, voice modulated by his helmet to sound flat yet somehow anguished, “broke into my safe house with a life sized cardboard standee of me and asked me to sign it. He also attempted to give me fan mail. And cookies.”
“Tim.” Bruce’s face was stony and still.
“The fan mail,” Jason said, “was written on a handmade card. It was pink and covered in glittery red hearts. The cookies were drugged.”
“I just wanted to bring you home,” Tim said mulishly. “You belong here. At the manor. Where I can get to you.”
“How stupid do you think I am?”
“Tim,” Bruce said, addressing Jason, “has been a stalker since he was nine years old.”
Jason internalized this information silently.
“Tim,” Bruce continued, “has been stalking Batman and Robin since he was nine years old. I never noticed. Dick never noticed. You never noticed.”
Bruce sighed.
“Tim,” he said bleakly, “decided one day that he was going to be Robin, and convinced me to let him. My son had just died in the line of fire of being Robin, and he convinced me while I was in a spiral of grief and destruction that the solution would be to put another kid into the costume and into the line of fire. And I let him. I told him no more Robins, and he said one more Robin, and so now I have a Robin. I can’t control him, Jason. No one can control him. He listens to me when it amuses him, and I am just grateful that he thinks its cooler to be Robin than a teenage supervillain or the dictator of the universe.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” Jason demanded.
“It means,” Bruce said, “stop decapitating people, move back into the manor, and give the kid his goddamned autograph. Or whatever he does next is going to be your own problem.”
Tim let out a little giggle. He had been staring at Jason with laser point precision the very moment that Bruce had taken his eyes off Tim in order to address Jason. He wasn’t wearing a domino, so it was very clear to Jason that Tim hadn’t blinked even once.
“Jason,” Tim said, huge smile stretched wide across his face like a horror movie demon child, “I modded a special action figure based on your unique outfit at our epic Robin vs Robin showdown to commemorate our fight! Will you autograph it for me?”
“I beat the living shit out of you!” Jason cried, throwing his arms up.
“It was the best day of my life,” Tim replied, still smiling too broadly. “Thank you for punching me in the face and breaking my tibia. I’m going to frame my leg cast once it comes off. Will you sign my cast too?”
Jason let out a deflating noise that was turned into a growl by the voice modulator in his helmet.
“Jesus Christ, kid, what’s wrong with you?”
Tim blinked for the first time in several minutes.
“I’m just a really big fan, that’s all, Jason,” he said. He lifted the sleeve of his T-shirt to reveal a lean but muscular bicep, There was a heart tattooed on it, and on the ribbon underneath the heart where the world “Mom” should have been, was Jason’s full name. “Will you sign my tattoo too? It’s only a temporary tattoo, because Bruce won’t let me get a real one til I’m eighteen, but I reapply it every week so it’s semi-permanent anyways.”
Jason turned around and started power-walking up the stairs. He now had an uncomfortably level of understanding of how actors felt when cornered by weird basement dwelling dweebs at a comics convention. It was not a good feeling, and he wished he’d brought his goons so he could call security on the little gremlin. He idly wondered which cop he could bribe to put a restraining order out against the tiny pint sized creep.
“Jason!” Tim shouted, hobbling on his crutches as he struggled to follow. “Jason! Before you go, try my cookies! I promise they’re not drugged this time! Jason! Can I take a selfie with you? Bruce! Take a photo of us together, quick! I want to put it on my Jason wall next to the printouts of the surveillance footage from our epic Robin showdown.”
Jason walked faster.
"Jason! Please! Just one selfie!"
Jason started sprinting.