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She is born Thea Drake, sole heiress to Jack and Janet Drake.
Janet looks at the small girl in her arms with critical eyes and decides to teach her how to use her sex to survive. Jack looks at his baby daughter and declares he doesn’t know how to raise a girl.
It’s fine at first. Thea doesn’t know any better. No one tells her that a young child shouldn’t be so concerned with their looks, and she doesn’t think to question things like sitting like a lady or keeping quiet and out of the way.
Thea is happy with her life even if she feels like a caged bird being poked to sing in her all-girls school. She has friends, and her parents praise her grades. She wants for no material object, and her health is good. It’s enough.
It’s enough until it isn’t.
Jack and Janet’s business trips take longer and happen more frequently while their expectations for little Thea rise higher and harsher. Her freedoms are slowly whittled away, and the list of extracurricular activities she’s forced to be in grows. Friends are replaced by more beneficial acquaintances, and complaints are punished.
Perfect, Thea hears in words not said, she must be perfect or else the Drake name will fall.
Life is a constant flurry of lessons and social climbing. Then, on a fateful night when she’s out on the balcony practicing with her new camera for photography lessons, the shutter of the lens catches sight of something bright in Gotham’s darkness.
“Woah,” little Thea says with wide eyes.
Robin, Boy Wonder, cartwheels off the roof of the building across from her. Her heart hammers as she snaps a picture of Robin without him knowing. The thrill that happens when the photo is developed in secret is the beginning of revolution.
She needs more, wants more of these moments hidden in the dark. Thea knows what she wants in life, and it’s not painting her lips to be the exact shade of wine being served.
Gotham at night isn’t safe for anyone, but there’s a special kind of unsafe for girls, her parents stress to her when she begins staying out too late. When she nods, they think it’s enough to dissuade her from ever attempting the inevitable.
So Thea cuts her hair short and creates Tim.
Tim isn’t a girl. He likes normal boy things and wears cheap and unflattering clothes because they’re comfortable. His parents don’t care how society views him because he’s never going to lose his last name to marriage.
Thea is still a girl, still gets butterflies when she looks at boys, still the normal, average young lady of Gotham that everyone says should be, but she’s starting to feel like her true self is the boy running around at night with a camera around his neck.
Tim has no one and is lonely, but he’s free in a way Thea can never be. He can go places she can’t and be whatever he wants to be. His goal in life is not to cater to others but to pursue his own happiness.
The obsession she develops with Batman and Robin is perhaps not so unusual when she looks back on it later.
Shortly after she turns thirteen, the second Robin dies, and Batman goes from being Gotham’s hope to its greatest fear. Maybe it’s hubris, but Thea tries to stop Batman’s fall with her own two hands.
The evidence she collects doesn’t tell her much about Batman, but having long figured out his secret identity, it’s easy enough to track down his remaining son, Dick Grayson a.k.a. Nightwing, in an effort to fix things. When she’s turned away, she decides to go to Alfred the butler next.
Thea knows Bruce Wayne doesn’t care for women, can’t even blame him with the way they try to collect his semen at every opportunity, so it is Tim, not Thea, who knocks on Wayne Manor’s door.
Her breasts are small, and her face androgynous. All she has to do is wear baggy clothing and spike her hair up to fool Alfred into giving her the Robin costume; she uses it to save Batman and Nightwing from their own recklessness.
Of course, Tim rescuing them from an ambush in a warehouse using only her wits isn’t what catches their attention.
“Nice tights?” Nightwing shakes off his injuries to stare at her bright red legs.
“It’s the strongest pair I had,” she says, trying not to blush.
“Boys don’t normally keep a pair of tights on hand,” Batman remarks, mind already slotting the pieces together.
And like that, the deception is pulled apart, but Tim only needed enough time to prove herself, to show that her gender and sex do not define her capabilities.
Her stomach falls as Batman looks down at her with thin lips and demands that she returns the costume and goes home.
Tim is not the good girl that her parents raised, so she waltzes into the Batcave like she owns it, designs her own Robin costume—tights are a must!—and refuses to leave. Bruce eventually gives in on the condition that she stays on birth control and remains Robin the Boy.
She agrees without hesitation.
“If you are going to be my partner, then know that I am not your father or guardian. It is your own responsibility to follow the rules and train like I schedule,” Batman growls at her.
“I understand,” she says, convinced that she is ready for any hardship, any hurdle that appears in her way of being Robin.
Bruce is angry and sad. He snaps at her for every little thing she does, tells her that Jason did it better. Tim says nothing and works harder to perfect herself. She soars on magic wings, and Bruce remains silent as if praise is beneath him.
It’s honestly not too different from how Thea’s parents treat her.
What she finds unexpectedly difficult is that every so often Bruce will pat her on the head or look at her as if she’s something truly precious. When she’s laid out on the floor and heaving from an intense workout, Bruce will go get her preferred sports drink and hand it to her with a tiny smile.
Tim doesn’t know how to react to this kindness, so she doesn’t.
When Robin proves effective at reigning in the worst of Batman’s impulses, Alfred tells her that it’s best for birds to be near their nest before casually mentioning that the mansion next door is up for sale. The next time her parents are home, Thea applies makeup to her eyes to give them a wider appearance and gives a thinly veiled sales pitch about moving next door to the Bruce Wayne.
“Don’t get any ideas. Wayne isn’t into girls as young as you,” Janet snaps at her.
Thea tries not to feel hurt about what her mother is implying. Her father catches sight of her downcast expression and tries to soothe things over in his own way.
“Come now,” Jack says amiably, “it couldn’t hurt to build a good reputation with him either. It’s safer in that neighborhood too.”
Janet chews over that throughout dinner and makes the decision that it would be a good chance to raise the Drake name up in status. They move into the newly named Drake Mansion, and Robin has a much easier time getting to the Batcave.
An easier time of grabbing a bite of Alfred’s food too, though Tim will never admit to her main reason for wanting to move.
Nightwing, the first Robin, stops by often to check on her. Tim looks at him with starry eyes and desires to be a worthy protégé. Maybe she tries too hard—it feels like she’s tripping over her feet while running after him—but Dick smiles and jokes with her like the older brother she’s always imagined him as.
She doesn’t see anything wrong with their interactions until she begins comparing the way Nightwing treats her to the way he treats his friends. It takes a bit of stalking him in his civilian identity before she can pinpoint the difference.
He’s casually flirting with her like she’s an outsider, she soon realizes.
“I’d bet you would look good with long hair,” Dick winks down at her while tugging on her chin length locks.
The flirting is innocent; Nightwing doesn’t look at her and see a woman to lie with. It’s playful and age appropriate. It is, she thinks, his way of reminding her that she is a girl as if she doesn’t already know.
“Long hair would get in the way.” Never mind the fact that she’s still pretending to be a boy.
“You should talk to Babs. Not only does she have long hair, but she even fights in heels!” Dick exclaims with hearts in his eyes.
All Tim hears is that Nightwing sees a little girl that needs to be a woman instead of Robin. It motivates her to work even harder to shine brightly as Gotham’s Robin. To be seen as such instead of a potential Batgirl.
Her efforts to get Dick to recognize her as a sibling to mentor never pay off, but they do have the effect of gaining Bruce’s confidence in her skills. He allows her to be Robin the Girl when she turns fourteen.
Robin the Girl, it turns out, is more-or-less Robin the Boy without the spiky hair and with the correct pronouns. Imagine that.
Eventually Batman urges her to join the Teen Titans in San Francisco. She’s nervous at leaving Gotham behind, but even Batman is learning to work with other heroes. She goes and doesn’t allow her heart to give away her anxiety.
She’s barely in the door before she’s overwhelmed with greetings and then promptly abandoned.
“Yo, oh my god, hi, you’re Robin! The girl one!” Impulse says beside her before vanishing.
“Yeah, hi, welcome to the Titans Tower,” Wonder Girl says before jogging off after him.
“Hi,” Robin says lamely to nobody.
A team of inexperienced, superpowered teenagers that have never met before should be a bomb ready to explode, but their first battle together is all it takes for the Teen Titans to feel like family.
“Bet I can take down more robots than you,” Superboy grins down at her.
“You’re on,” she grins back.
Without even trying, Kon becomes her best friend, and the sun of her life. He doesn’t care that she wears ratty hoodies and glitter lip-gloss together, doesn’t care that she flips through a catalogue of dresses while waving a skateboard ad at him.
If anything, Kon will criticize her taste and tell her that she can do better. That’s grounds for a pillow fight—that involves laser vision and explosions of course—but it’s all in good fun.
She’s never felt more comfortable in her own skin than when she’s beside him, whether that’s as Tim or Thea or Robin.
Bart quickly becomes her other bestie—the Speedster gets her in a way no one else does—but it’s just not the same as when she’s with Superboy.
Robin reports weekly to Batman, and it’s not until he aims an oddly worded insult towards Superboy that she realizes she’s experiencing the first love of her life. Her feelings towards Kon are all teenage hormones, and happiness that she’s never known.
Her happiness comes crashing down when Kon chooses Cassie over her. According to him, he never saw Tim as a potential partner to begin with.
“She’s sort of like one of the guys?” Kon shrugs awkwardly when anyone points out the weirdness of not getting together with the girl he’s practically glued to.
“I have better taste than that,” Robin says with disgust when they look her way.
Batman has trained her well, and her heartbeat remains steady.
Logically, it’s just a crush. First loves don’t ever work out, and it all comes down to hormones anyway. Relationships for teenagers are too unstable to last, and her feelings will disappear with time.
She distances herself from Superboy and waits for it to stop hurting. It never does, and her feelings never fade in the slightest. Before she can figure out why she isn't recovering from her heartbreak, Robin's time with the Titans comes to an end.
An intruder sneaks into the tower and ambushes her in her own room.
Robin, looking over documents and trying to piece evidence together, isn’t prepared for the metal pipe swung at her head. She only barely manages to avoid the worst of the damage by moving with the hit.
“Hello, Replacement.”
Rolling into a defensive crouch, Tim chokes because standing above her is Jason Todd, older and bigger than she remembers. He’s wearing his old Robin outfit—it’s too small and ripping at the seams—and waving a knife at her with a crazed grin.
The yellow tights are new, she thinks dazedly.
Despite her best effort, the fight is disappointingly quick and one-sided. She ends up tied to the bed, bleeding from multiple stab wounds, and gagged to prevent waking up the others.
“I bet he picked you up because you sucked his cock with that tiny mouth of yours. Is that how you got to be with the Titans? Should I follow their example?” Jason’s knife hovers over her throat before moving down to her tunic.
Jason goes on to insinuate that the only reason anyone pays attention to her is for sex. He continues to imply that she’s only in her position because she opens her legs. He threatens to treat her just the way she should be: as a whore.
She shudders in a pool of her own blood and waits for the worst. It never comes.
Jason rips off the R logo on her tunic and leaves her for the other Titans to find, throat sliced and costume in tatters. She doesn’t give him the satisfaction; Tim escapes her restraints, bandages her wounds, pulls out her spare costume, and gets Bruce on the emergency line.
Batman picks her up in the Batplane and takes her back to Gotham where she’s forced to undergo invasive tests despite her assertions that nothing happened.
Convinced the entire time that the Jason who attacked her is a fake, Bruce confirming her assailant to be the real Jason comes as a huge blow. The Jason Todd she remembers was the bright and brilliant Robin, not this sick pervert.
“It’s the Lazarus Pit,” Bruce tells her. “They can bring back the dead but at great cost. Search the computer for information on Pit Madness.”
Jason takes up the mantle of Red Hood and demands a showdown with Batman. She wants to help, but Bruce orders her under house arrest until the glow fades from Jason’s eyes. She uses the computer in the cave to help with what she can while the situation gets resolved.
Tim feels like a failure.
When Jason maybe dies and is maybe reborn again, he comes back saner and less likely to hurt her for existing. Robin goes back to the streets against everyone’s protests. Sometimes Red Hood helps her from a distance; the times he gets close, he keeps his hands up where she can see them.
Jason never apologizes, but he never threatens her like that again. Robin still has Impulse steal his genital cup so she can kick him in the balls hard enough to make him sing. She considers them even despite Dick’s insistence otherwise.
Once Cassandra Cain walks into their life, the focus moves from Tim and Jason to the silent assassin girl. Cass’s ability to snap everyone’s necks means that she doesn’t get treated the way Tim did at the beginning. Barbara takes the girl under her wing, and things go tentatively back to normal.
Robin is not quite happy with her life, but she is content. It’s enough.
Thea’s parents celebrate her sixteenth birthday by throwing a party meant to show off her too tight dress, padded bra, and extravagant makeup. She’s paraded as prime meat in front of hungry gluttons pretending to be men. She hates every moment of it. Bruce crashing the party to give her an escape is practically a gift in of itself.
Bruce gives her a new set of weapons, Dick her favorite book in a custom print, Alfred a magnificent feast and cake, Barbara a new computer, Cass an old silent movie—but age gives her something remarkably less pleasant.
Tim worries over her future, worries whether she will have to one day give up one of her identities. If she refuses to get married, what will her parents do? If she gets caught at being Robin before she turns eighteen, what will happen?
Then the biggest mistake of her life happens, and she has a very different set of worries.
Robin is flying through Gotham’s skies when she spots a woman being attacked in an alleyway. If she had been on top of her game, she’d notice that something isn’t quite right with the way both her and her assailant are acting, but a special weakness of Robin’s is sexual assault.
Without even thinking about it, Robin kicks the man off the woman and uses her staff to pin him against the alley wall. There is a prick on her neck, and she’s unconscious before she even hits the ground.
The nightmare begins.
Robin wakes up strapped to a table and stripped of her clothes. She can’t move her neck to see anything but the walls and the lights above her. The little she sees looks like the now abandoned Arkham Asylum.
“Little Birdy’s awake!”
Her heart beats in her throat as a familiar figure steps into her vision.
“I’ve got a big surprise for you. How do you feel about getting adopted?” The Joker grins down at her. He stands directly under a light, making it hard to see anything but his bright red mouth.
“Shame about your hoo-hah. Harley and I wanted a son. Bet you haven’t heard that one before, ay?” Joker wiggles his thin eyebrows suggestively. “But who says you can’t be Junior anyway? It’s a modern world out there!”
“Don’t worry, Puddin’,” Harley Quinn says from somewhere to her left, and the sound of elastic gloves snapping follow her words ominously. “There’s no one who won’t love our little girl once she’s all spruced up!”
The next—minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, she doesn’t know—are the worst of her life. The pain never ends. Once the way she’s tortured goes on long enough numb her to it, she’s switched to a new type of torture to keep it fresh. She screams and never stops.
Help Me.
“Shh, Mommy’s here,” Harley Quinn tells her before sticking a finger in between Robin’s legs. The gentle pistoning motion is soothing compared to the earlier snapping of her toes. “Be a good girl for Daddy, and I can make it stop.”
“Don’t touch me,” Robin tries to sob, but her voice is too torn up to do more than whisper.
“Aaaa,” Harley Quinn makes the sound of a gameshow’s buzzer, “wrong answer!”
The finger is removed, and the needles come out.
They want to break Robin’s mind, not her body. They keep her watered and fed, give her breaks to heal up her throat, so she can continue to scream. She urinates and defecates right there on the table, and they clean her up with baby wipes and mocking jeers.
She’s in hell, waiting for her angels to come.
“Who’s Daddy’s Little Girl?” Joker croons as he takes a blade to the sides of her mouth.
Batman, Nightwing, Superboy, Impulse, her friends—they’ll come for her, she tells herself. She just needs to hold out. Needs to remain sane and unbroken.
“Who’s Daddy’s Little Girl?” Joker laughs while tearing her nails out one by one.
“Go to hell,” she gasps.
“Who’s Daddy’s Little Girl?” Joker coos while spoon feeding her someone’s eyes.
She screams around the contraption holding her mouth open.
“Who’s Daddy’s Little Girl?” Joker sings, and the copper wires come down.
Electricity surges directly into her nerves, and she chokes on her tongue.
“Who’s Daddy’s Little Girl?” Joker asks, petting her hair.
“I am,” she breaks.
Robin’s angels never come, and Junior saunters her way into the empty shell left behind.
Junior loves her father and mother. Loves them with all the cruelty and surety of a viper moving in for the kill. The only way she can disappoint them, they tell her, is if she doesn’t Get the Joke.
And oh, how she Gets the Joke.
Deciding to take up the family business, Junior dyes her hair green and paints her face white. Bright red lipstick goes onto her lips which stretch to her cheekbones. Blue eyeshadow and red blush finish off the look.
Her parents coo at her and tell her how wonderful she looks. They take her to a warehouse full of clothing and have the minions create a functioning catwalk for her to use.
“Go ahead, muffin. Pick anything you want out of here!” Daddy tells her, arms wide and spinning in delight.
Junior spends a full day creating and discarding outfits while her parents watch. They “Ooh” and “Aah” every single time she struts down the catwalk. The minions clap and keep clapping unless they want to die.
Ultimately, she decides on a black and red outfit like her mother but fashioned into a suit like her father. A bit of femininity in the design—high heel boots that make her legs look long, lace for the tailcoat that resembles a skirt, a cravat that emphasizes her breasts—means no one can mistake her as their son rather than their daughter.
She’s never been happier.
A birthday party is what they decide on for Junior’s debut into Gotham’s eye. It’s her special day, so she decides to invite all of Gotham to celebrate. Mommy sets up the broadcast while Junior finishes writing out the invitation.
“A dress code,” Junior says firmly. “Men are to wear dresses, and women are to wear suits. Others shall wear half and half.”
“That’s my girl! Society’s rules were made to be broken!” Daddy laughs before snatching the invitation out of her hands and forcing it onto a trembling minion.
The minion delivers the message on live television and shows off the dazzling invitation to the camera; it blows up, taking the minion with it. The gore mingles in with the confetti beautifully.
Since Junior’s birthday party is all of Gotham, her parents grab a good old fashion blimp and decorate it with stars and smiles. She sits at her VIP birthday table with a cake made of dynamite powder and rainbow-colored cream cheese and waits for her guests.
She doesn’t have to wait long. Junior gets up to greet them with something between a bow and a curtsey. Two pairs of blank lenses stare at her, and a black boot nearly folds in on itself.
“Robin?” Nightwing whispers in disbelief as Batman continues staring beside him.
“Daddy, our guests are here,” Junior sings.
“Daddy?” Nightwing chokes. “What’s going on, Robin?”
“Who’s Robin? I’m Joker Junior,” she smiles. “Call me Junior.”
She holds her hands out like wings, and the floor beneath her breaks open. The last thing she hears as she falls into the sky is Daddy’s laugh.
The fireworks Mommy sets off for her birthday are so spectacular that she nearly forgets to open her parachute in time. She giggles as the sky changes color for what feels like forever.
The debut of the Clown Princess of Crime is a success, and her face is plastered all over Gotham, held with reverence and fear.
It’s a bit of a letdown that the next time the Bat People come for her, she’s in the middle of practicing for a magic show instead of something with more pizazz. Still, she must be a good host. She waves her minions from doing anything and greets her guests as best she can with her hands tied.
“Thea,” Batman finally says to her “you are not his daughter.”
“What a lovely name. Thea. Sounds like a good girl who lets the world rape her as good girls do,” she muses, trying to escape a pair of spiked handcuffs to no avail. Her wrists bleed profusely, and she pouts.
“You’re seriously messed up. That son of a bitch,” Red Hood says with disgust.
“Not as messed up as everyone else,” Junior replies airily before disappearing in a well-timed smokescreen.
Her magic show the next day goes off without a hitch. Batgirl tries to beat her face in only to accidentally hit one of the audience that gets swapped in through a magical box. It’s a good thing that audience member loses his head before he loses his head over the incident.
She moves on to entertaining people on the street with comedy.
“The rules are whoever shoots first gets to live. If no one shoots, well, they get a surprise,” Junior tells her participants.
A man and a woman face each other, tied to a chair and strapped with a bomb. Cloth gags keep them from pleading or screaming. A gun rests in their trembling hands.
Two guns go off at the same time, and the man falls over dead. The woman stares at the gun in her hand with wide eyes. There’s a flag in the barrel of the dead man’s gun, and it says—
“Bang!” She giggles.
The woman will have to deal with the knowledge that she killed an innocent man to save her own skin. If only she knew that the surprise was that if she refused to pull the trigger, they’d both get to live.
Such a great joke.
Her fun gets cut short once Mommy packs her bags and leaves. Junior returns to her Daddy’s side as he rages for days about being the one abandoned first. If only he hadn’t forced Mommy to dress up as Batman at night so much.
Daddy calms down once he realizes that Junior won’t follow after Mommy. His Clown Princess isn’t the henchwoman Mommy was, but she’s still better than anyone else to have at his side.
“Do you love me, muffin?” Daddy asks, pinching her cheek like he did Mommy.
“I do. Lots,” she chirps.
“Enough to have a junior of your own?” Daddy grins slyly.
“Can we start now?” Junior asks in excitement.
Nights become busy, and soon their family of two expands to three in just a handful of months. Junior takes her child with her everywhere she goes like a good mother, and Daddy beams with pride every time he catches sight of the swaddled child.
“This is Junior Junior,” Junior croons, showing off her aborted baby in a brightly colored blanket to a horrified audience.
“He looks like me!” Daddy laughs long and hard.
Junior Junior decomposes before they can throw it a birthday party. Daddy wants to try again, but this time he wants to make a true joke of it. They have to use all their smarts to make it happen.
They set a trap for a Batman, lure him to an abandoned hotel with a fake hostage, use his pride to cut him off from backup, and bring part of the roof down on him.
Junior ties the nearly unconscious Batman to a heart-shaped bed, and under Daddy’s guidance, rides him until there’s nothing left. She giggles over the screams in the back of her head, and Batman’s pleads for Robin to stop.
“I’m going to call this one Junior the Second,” she says, placing a hand over her stomach.
Batman does nothing but stare at her, and they leave him there, tied to the bed with his pants down.
Two angels appear one day from a portal. They look an awful lot like Red Hood and Nightwing but brighter and full of pizazz. She watches them stumble about, searching for something while trying to stay under the Bat People’s radar.
Her curiosity is piqued, and Junior follows them on silent high heels. While they never notice her trailing after them, it turns out they find her just as interesting as she finds them. Not Red Hood and Not Nightwing watch every video, read every article, and listen to every recording about her they can get their hands on.
She’s flattered to be honest, and Junior allows herself to be caught by them to see what they will do.
“Intel says you’re Tim, but I don’t see it. Who the hell are you?” Not Red Hood asks bluntly.
“I’m Daddy’s Little Girl, Joker Junior,” she says with her painted-on smile, “but you can just call me Junior.”
She swings her legs through the opening of the cage and rubs her stomach. The metal bars keeping her hoisted up in the air probably aren’t a good environment for the baby. She should really ask for some pillows.
“This is so fucked up,” the Not Red Hood says, staring up at her.
“Not as much as the rules that govern society,” Junior says airily.
They get her out of the cage only to put her in handcuffs which has a built-in spreader bar to keep her hands separated. They remove the lacy hat from her head, wipe the paint off her face, and take the green from her hair. She doesn’t struggle, curious to see where this is going.
“Oh my god, it really is Tim.”
She giggles at their horrified expressions. Sillies, that’s not her name.
The Not Heroes share a conversation in that silent language only Bat People know. It involves lots of eye twitching, head movement, and grunting. It is apparently a universal language. Fascinating.
“This isn’t our dimension,” Not Nightwing points out. “We still need to rescue our Tim.”
“Look at her! She looks just like him! Their faces are nearly the same,” Not Red Hood says with a wavering voice. “Are you seriously going to leave her like this?”
“I don’t want to, but we’re not equipped for this! It’s just us here!” Not Nightwing throws his arms up with a huff.
“Then we need to go get help.”
“You?” Not Nightwing blinks. “You are saying we get help?”
“This ain’t going away any time soon, and we can’t stay. There has to be someone who cares in this godforsaken hell.” Not Red Hood crosses his arms.
She learns that their names are Jason and Dick. Something about that tickles her brain—must not reveal them, never, codenames only—so she settles on nicknames for her new playmates.
“I’m going to call you Jay,” she coos to Not Red Hood. “Little Jay Jay. We match!”
“Hell no,” he shoots down immediately.
“And I’m going to call you,” she tilts her head at Not Nightwing, “Nick.”
“Nick?” He repeats in confusion.
“It’s short for Nightwing’s dick,” she says before bursting into giggles.
Daddy is off playing with Lexy out of town, so Junior is bored. She decides to remain here and be a good houseguest for her hosts. She tries to rip their throats out with her teeth while they sleep and attempts to entertain them when they get gloomy.
She’s not sure why no one laughs at her jokes; they’re hilarious.
“Why the hell does the Justice League say this is an inhouse problem?” Jay bursts through the door to their shack of a home, practically vibrating in rage.
“The Titans say they’re too busy at the moment for a low priority mission,” Nick says miserably. Junior is tied up like a worm in his lap, and he’s petting her hair almost without thinking. She tries to purr, but it comes out as a giggle.
“Low priority? This is low priority?” Jay screams.
“Junior hasn’t done anything big enough to interrupt a galactic threat,” Nick grimaces. “Looks like we’re stuck with the individuals we can convince.”
They go silent, and Junior tries to wriggle so she can lick Nick’s face. She doesn’t like their sad expressions. If she attaches blades to her tongue, she can make sure they smile permanently.
“We need someone strong enough to make a difference, someone who doesn’t mind stepping on Batman’s toes, someone who’d be outraged over Tim’s situation,” Jay says.
Their faces grow paler and more distraught as their list whittles down to nothing more than a handful of heroes. Joker tries to open her legs for them, but Nick gently pushes them close. Eventually a lightbulb goes off, and Jay and Nick look at each other.
“Wonder Woman,” they say in unison.
Getting ahold of Wonder Woman is hard for someone as busy as she, but Jay and Nick are confident she will get the message and come lasso swinging. Junior has no idea what they expect Wonder Woman to do, but she is interested in seeing what happens.
While they wait, Nick and Jay decide to play house. Junior tries to oblige them by being the best baby J she can be. The first time they go to bathe her, they stare at her lower abdomen with revulsion.
“These scars—are they—” Nick’s mouth moves but there’s no more sound.
“It’s how you have a baby!” Obviously. Everyone knows that you have to tear the child out with a hot knife.
“I’m going to throw up,” Jay says before doing just that.
Junior gets bored of playing house and escapes her handcuffs when her playmates aren’t paying attention. She goes prancing around on rooftops with an umbrella found in the trash. Her muscles burn so sweetly as she dances.
Her soon-to-be baby’s other Daddy shows up, appearing in front of her like a man pretending to be a wraith. She giggles at his attempt to blend into the shadows. He’s far too big to fit.
“Don’t touch her!” Jay appears to bat away Batman, who lunges forward to grab her.
“You don’t belong here. Go back to your dimension and leave things you do not understand alone,” Batman snarls at her playmate.
“Yeah? You have a fancy portal gun to shoot us out of here, old man?”
Jay stays between the two of them, keeping a sawed-off shotgun pointed at Batman. Junior wishes she had a gun to point at Jay so she can join in. She settles for swinging her umbrella like a pendulum.
“Get out of the way,” Batman demands.
“And what are going to do, if I do?” Jay tilts his red helmet like the curious bird he is.
“I’m going to stop Joker from using her to bear his children.”
Junior makes a face. She doesn’t like the idea of not being able to expand her family. She should probably go.
“You’re going to sterilize her?” Jay asks rhetorically, appalled at the idea.
Batman moves to beat up Jay, who fires into shoulder armor with his shotgun. The gun goes sailing past her head, and then fists fly with bone shattering crunches. It’s a dogfight if she ever saw one, and she doesn’t know why she stays to see who wins.
In the end, neither win. Nick descends from above like a god of wrath and knocks the Bat unconscious in a vicious series of strikes. With a snarl on his lips, he picks her up under one arm and Jay under the other. They’re taken back to the safehouse like prizes won.
She claps her hands at the surprise ending. What a show.
Junior isn’t let out of Jay or Nick’s sight after that stunt, but she’s having too much fun to care. She allows them to put a new set of handcuffs on her to begin the game anew.
She doesn’t understand the new rules just yet because Jay takes off his two faces so he can see her with green eyes instead of white.
“Tim, listen to me,” he says, grabbing her face and bringing it close to his.
“I’m not—” She begins.
“Quiet, Junior. Talking to Tim right now.”
Junior shuts her mouth.
“Tim, I’m proud of you. You are the best Robin I could hope for. No one could have done any better in your situation. Not Dick, not me, not Babs, and definitely not Bruce.”
Green pools drag her into their depths, and Junior feels like she’s drowning. She’s losing the game, she thinks with sudden terror.
“You deserve to be loved as you are, and fuck anyone who says otherwise,” Jay continues to say, voice thick with emotion. “If no one else in this godforsaken hellhole loves you, then I will.”
“As will I.”
“Wait your turn, Nicky,” Jay says with irritation.
“It won’t sound as impressive later,” Nick tells Jay before scooting him out of the way and taking his place. Warm hands move her face until she is staring into blue eyes. “Tim, you don’t have to be anyone else or prove anything. You are already the best little sister I could ask for.”
Junior doesn’t know why she cries; she doesn’t know why she buries her face into Nick’s chest to cover it in tears and snot. It doesn’t make for a good joke at all.
She feels drained and tired in a way she’s never felt before. Junior lies on her mattress at night and makes no attempt to tear anyone’s throat out or to paint blood on the walls in the shape of smiles.
Junior is depressed, she thinks, and that’s not good.
She makes her escape with no intention of ever coming back. The real Red Hood and Nightwing find her as she’s scrambling over rooftops as fast as she can go. She’s all for letting herself get captured by them—Daddy will bust her out of jail when he gets bored enough—but her playmates catch up.
Red Hood and Nightwing don’t take well to their doppelganger’s interference.
“You don’t know what she’s done! She needs to go to Blackgate!” Nightwing yells at them.
“That freak isn’t Robin,” Red Hood growls from beside him.
“You have a point, but so do I,” Nick hisses. “Which is: I’m going to kick your ass.”
Nick pulls out two escrima sticks, electricity cackling through them, and launches himself at them. It’s an unfair fight until Jay appears with a stun gun and manages to hit the tears in their suits with a high enough voltage to knock them out.
“Don’t you hurt them!” Tim screams through Junior’s lips, and the Clown Princess decides that killing her two playmates sounds like a solid plan.
“You snap back now?” Jay snarls before dodging her flying tackle.
Jay does what he can to not hurt her, but Junior isn’t as considerate. She manages to get her hand on one of his pistols and goes to town. She has Jay on the ropes until Nick ambushes her from behind. Junior goes down after two strong, precise strikes to the back of her knees.
They drag her to a new safehouse, hands cuffed and screams tearing out of her throat. Something shudders in the back of her head.
HELP ME.
Junior’s reflection in the cheap mirror is replaced by Tim’s. She looks are the scars on her face, looks at the lacey suit she wears, and the ragged strings of hair hanging around her eyes.
“This isn’t me, this isn’t me, this isn’t me,” Tim chants, tearing at her face.
She thinks she’s about succeeded at getting a good grasp on the fake skin when the door to the bathroom bursts open, and the other Jason wrestles her to the ground.
“Dick, help!” Jason cries out.
They put her in a straitjacket, and she rolls around on the ground screaming and sobbing. She needs to get the impostor’s face off. Needs it like she needs the blood beneath her fingernails.
“Let me go, let me go, let me go,” Tim sobs.
No matter how hard she tries to scrape her skin against the floor, it just doesn’t come off.
“Jesus,” Jason mutters before pulling her into a hug. Fingers run through her hair tenderly, and Tim puts her head on his shoulder and weeps.
She wants to go home.
She wants to never leave here.
She wants to forget everything that ever happened.
She wants this moment to last forever.
Tim isn’t well enough to be let out of the straitjacket, but she stops fighting her caretakers. She pleads with them to hold her while she shakes apart, and they hug her as tight as they can without hurting her. This Dick and Jason love her, and they make her believe it.
It’s enough for Tim, which is why it gets taken from her like always.
Joker comes for her when Jason and Dick make the mistake of leaving her alone. Tim looks up at his red smile and screams in terror.
“How’s Daddy’s Little Girl?” The Joker reaches down to pat her head.
“Happy now that Daddy’s here,” Junior smiles back.
Daddy frees her from the jacket and hands her a makeup kit, so Junior can put her real face back on. She leaves her hair black and styled like Robin’s because the punchline hits harder if she does.
Together they set up the Greatest Joke. Wayne Enterprises’ main building is turned from head-to-toe into a work of art worthy of the Joker’s legacy. The surrounding buildings blow up, leaving only their brightly shining stage as the center of attention.
They wait at the topmost floor to perform their grand finale.
It’s not long before their audience arrives: Batman, Nick, and Jay. Junior doesn’t tell Daddy that they aren’t this universe’s Nightwing and Red Hood, since all that matters is the Guest of Honor showing up.
“So who’s it going to be? Your former Robin or yourself?” Daddy asks, moving the spotlight to the center of the room.
With a giggle, Junior holds a pistol to her temple in one hand, and a pistol towards Batman with the other. She walks forward until she’s standing just out of arm’s length from him. Her fingers feel twitchy.
“Junior, be a dear and shoot old Bats for me,” Daddy asks sweetly.
Batman stares at her and says nothing. His cape blankets him like a shield. No doubt he’s using it to cover his movements, but it will do him no good. The moment that cape so much as twitches, she’s to shoot herself.
“Don’t do it, Tim,” Nick pleads. “You won’t be able to live with yourself!”
“You know what? Shoot those two stooges first. They give me such a headache!” Daddy moans, rubbing his temples.
“Tim, if you can’t toss aside the gun, then shoot me,” Jay says, throwing his arms wide open.
“Hood!” Nick gasps.
“Because I’ll come back.” Jay’s eyes somehow burn her through his helmet. “I promise. And then I’m going to come for you no matter what.”
He’s an angel, burning bright against the darkness of hell.
Junior moves the gun aimed at Batman towards Jay, and Joker cackles.
“Oh, yes, do shoot him. Watch as your kid kills your other one, Batman!”
Junior loves her parents, as does Thea, but it’s Tim who loves these two strangers more than life itself. She fires the gun, and Joker goes down mid-laugh.
Tears stream down her face, but Tim’s never felt so good in her life.
Junior takes her bow and exits stage left.
Batman does not take the Joker’s death well. He calls her a murderer, a sinner for saving herself. Batman goes for the body, and the thought that he’s going to use a Lazarus Pit to bring Joker back hits her.
Tim uses all her strength to latch onto Batman to keep him from returning her to hell.
“No, no, no, no,” she chants.
Batman looks at her and sees someone worth less than the Joker’s corpse. She’s tossed away by a strong backhand. When she attempts to strike back, she goes down from three solid punches: one to her stomach, one to her face, and then one to her neck.
She falls to the ground and thinks this is what death feels like.
“Tim!” Jason screams.
Jason pulls out a pistol while Dick crouches over her protectively with sticks out and a snarl on his lip. Batman palms a Batarang and tenses for the oncoming fight.
No one sees Wonder Woman coming, least of all Batman. He sure sees her when she breaks through the roof to stomp a high heeled boot into the back of his neck.
“Do not try to move, or you will find yourself praying for death,” Diana, Princess of War and Truth, exclaims. Her armor glistens with gold and blood, and the sword in her hand goes soaring into Joker’s body, pinning it to the floor.
“Apologies for being late,” Wonder Woman says, looking them over with a critical eye. “Getting the Justice League to interfere with Gotham was like convincing children to confront their worst fear.”
“They’re here?” Dick asks hopefully.
“Yes, they are cleaning up outside as we speak,” Wonder Woman nods. There is a brief scuffle as Batman attempts to break her hold over him, and Diana ends up using a German suplex to assert her dominance.
Tim bites her lip to keep from giggling as Dick gathers her up in his arms.
Batman is tied up with the Lasso of Truth to force him to behave while Wonder Woman flies off with the Joker’s body to toss into a volcano. One of her gods will watch over it to make sure he doesn’t come back.
Upon her return, Wonder Woman puts Gotham into short order with an armor-plated fist. This dimension’s Red Hood and Nightwing, injured and exhausted from fighting all the Gotham Rogues that Joker had banded together, don’t bother making a fuss about it.
Which is for the best because anyone who disagrees with Wonder Woman right now has their blood worn on her armor.
The other Jason is suitably impressed with this dimension’s Diana, and maybe somewhat in love.
“I love her,” Jason declares, gazing at Wonder Woman with glazed over eyes as she beats Batman up yet again to assert her dominance.
Scratch that, he’s definitely in love.
“Looks like our ride’s here,” Jason says, looking at his phone.
Tim’s angels are not from this world and cannot stay. She wants to beg them not to go, but they are still looking for their own Tim. She knows what it’s like to wait endlessly for rescue. There’s no way she can ask them to stop for her own selfish reasons.
“Can’t I go with you?” She whispers.
“Oh, Timmy,” Dick says before pulling her gently and slowly into a hug. “We have to go home now, but we love you, no matter where we are. Take some time and get better, okay?”
“That goes the same for me,” Jason tells her before threading his fingers through her hair.
“Okay,” she croaks, and it takes all her effort to say, “love you too.”
Wonder Woman waits until they’ve finished saying their goodbyes before scooping Tim up and carrying her out of Gotham. She looks down for any sign of a portal, but she’s flying too fast to see anything.
They arrive at Diana’s penthouse. Overflowing greenery lies against white walls, and small spiraling columns sprinkle the rooms along with beautiful pottery. The design gives off a feeling of peace and healing.
Tim is shown to her new room, and to her surprise all her stuff is waiting for her. Her computer, her photo albums, her ratty hoodies—all of it.
“You’ve work hard to survive, brave warrior. Come, rest and know you are safe here,” Diana places a fist over her heart. “I will defend you with my life even past the point where it ends, and the sun begins anew.”
“Why?” She whispers.
“We are now sisters, you and I, and that is all that needs to be,” Diana smiles at her.
Tim cries.
When she’s up for it, Diana brings in a doctor to look her over, and they confirm what she already knows: she’s suffered a miscarriage. Bruce unknowingly ended his child’s life before it could begin. It’s for the best, but for some reason, it still makes her eyes sting. She tries not to think too deeply on it.
Junior wanted to be mother. Tim is still a child in her own right. Her therapist sure has their work cut out for them, Tim thinks with a giggle.
The road to recovery is a long and hard one. Little anomalies begin popping up as Tim tries to return to normal. Things that make her and others deeply uncomfortable such as the giggling and newfound sense of humor.
While she likes wearing her old clothes, Junior’s are the only ones that feel right to wear outside the penthouse. It might be a byproduct of lingering feelings for the parental approval Junior gained for choosing her own outfit, her therapist eventually tells her.
Tim’s just thankful that she doesn’t feel the need for green hair or white face paint. She only uses a little bit of makeup to soften the scars.
When she’s well enough to be left on her own, Tim thinks about going back to Gotham, but aside from Cassandra, no one has asked for her to return. Though Wonder Woman wouldn’t mind her kicking it up in the penthouse forever, she’s getting restless.
It’s when she’s reading a theoretical paper on wormholes that she thinks of the other Jason and the other Dick. The ones who looked at her and said she was Tim, deserving of love and worthy of being Robin and Sister.
Could there be other siblings that need to be told the same? Other Jasons, Dicks, and Cassandras in need of rescuing? She hums to herself and begins searching for information on dimensional travel.
Maybe she can stop in and say hi to Jay and Nick while she’s at it.