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Tim is a precocious kid.
He knows because that’s what the school councilor told him after he skipped two grades and immediately asked to skip another, because he already knew the material in the syllabus. She’d laughed when she said it though.
It doesn’t matter though! She also said that he could skip it if he could finish all of the coursework for that year and the next before next school year. Tim handed back all of the course material to her when they had their next monthly meeting because his teacher wouldn’t take it. He’d been frustrated by that at first, but since he’d made the deal with the councilor not his teacher, he brought the work to her instead.
Now though, he was sitting in the principal’s office, and was, for some reason, in trouble. They’d called his parents, but they haven’t been in the country in 37 days. Tim is sent outside the office to sit in one of the chairs next to the secretary’s station while the principal makes more calls.
The secretary is an old woman named Miss Josie, she’s normally really nice to Tim. Calling him smart and good. She even gives him hard candies sometimes. They’re gross, but Tim keeps a collection of them in his closet. He likes to look at them after his parents leave. To remember that someone thinks he’s good. Now though, she frowns and she shakes her head at him. It hurts, and Tim doesn’t understand.
Tim hates not understanding.
-
Tim doesn’t live alone anymore.
After no one could get ahold of his parents CPS came to collect him three hours after school let out. He spent a long time telling different adults about his parents travel itinerary, and how important their work is. How some times they don’t have reception, and others they’re doing something very important. He tells them how he hasn’t needed a nanny since he was six because he’s very mature, and Mrs. Mac always leaves microwave meals for him.
The adults collect every way to contact Mrs. Mac and his parents. He has to talk into a microphone that doesn’t make his voice any louder. They give him watery hot chocolate and an old donut, and they’re the best things he’s had in a long time.
He spends the night in a police station.
-
Tim spends his nights outside the group home.
It’s too loud at night. He’s too used to silent nights in his parent's manor, and after the first month he figured out how to get in and out without anyone noticing. Tim had always wanted to have more people around, worried about him, but it’s stifling to have so many people looking at him. His caseworker checks in on him every day. His case is high profile, so everyone is checking in on him all of the time. Tim thinks she’s just worried that someone is going to try to ransom him to people who still haven’t come back to Gotham.
They’re not scheduled to come back for three more months. Tim knows he can wait that long. They’ll come back and clear everything up, and they’ll tell the school he didn’t cheat on the coursework. He’ll skip two more grades into middle school and won’t ever have to look at a disappointed Miss Josie again.
When he looks up from where he’s crouched on top of the brownstone the group home is in, he spots a flash of color. Then someone laughs from the alley below. Tim peaks his head over the edge, hoping it’s not the Joker.
Below him he sees an attempted mugging, that he didn’t realize was happening, be foiled. Robin quips and flips. Laughing at his own jokes. The mugger is soon trussed up and Robin offers to walk the woman he saved home. This. This could be an amazing thing for Tim to focus on now that school doesn’t believe he’s smart anymore. Instead of focusing on that, he can spend his nights looking for Robin, and just sleep in class.
Tim crawls back inside, he has plans to make.
-
Tim becomes a ward of the state.
His case worker sits him down to explain that his parents had decided to cut ties in the US entirely, and were in a non-extradition country. They had been doing some high tier white collar crime by the way of millions of misappropriated dollars. They had also been smuggling most of the artifacts they brough back from digs, selling them in illegal auctions. Tim reasoned they had bigger problems than to worry about what happened to him.
It's ok though, Tim just focuses harder on the things that really matter. After he’s moved to a downtown facility it’s much easier to sneak out and spot Robin. After the school year finishes up he’ll have the summer to do whatever he wants. Next year he’ll go to a public school, and he bets he’ll have even less oversight.
Tim’s name begins to fade from public mention.
-
Tim figures out Robin’s patrol routes.
This consequentially leads to him figuring out The Batman’s patrol route too. After he almost gets caught by suprise, Tim also makes sure to keep track of the rogues' movements. This was a hobby. Birdwatching. It’s not supposed to be dangerous. Tim doesn’t have a death wish.
Sometimes Tim thinks he might know more about what’s going on in the city than Batman does. Sure, Batman and Robin seem to always be in the news for foiling some big corporate scandal or taking down the big-name rogues. Sure, sometimes they even do something about the organized crime in the city. Most of the time though, the real people in the city get forgotten about.
Tim doesn’t understand how Batman and Robin can ignore how much most of the people are struggling. Robin doesn’t know that the thug he just punched has a wife at home that’s struggling to afford the blood transfusions she needs for her thalassemia. Batman doesn’t know that he just broke the leg of a man who just got his two-year chip, and was trying to get an honest job.
Then robin does a quadruple backflip, and something itches in Tim’s brain. He heads in that night and writes down everything he noticed in one of his cipher books. The next day he goes to the library and watches acrobatics videos on the public computers. Eventually he comes across a YouTube documentary on the Flying Graysons, and Tim hesitates, remembering that awful, wonderful night from when he was three. Then he pushes play.
Tim knows who Robin is.
-
Tim doesn’t follow Robin for a long time afterward.
At first it was because he had an unreasonable fear that Batman would know that Tim knows who he is. Before long Tim’s brain starts chewing on the information he’d discovered. Batman wasn’t a hero. Not really. Looking at all of the things that Batman has done over the years takes weeks to compile. By the end of it, Tim is horrified to realize that for everything the Batman has done for the city, Bruce Wayne has ended up benefiting, or it was a preventative measure that took care of something that would have ended up hurting Wayne or his company.
Robin even came at a time when Batman was receiving even more vitriol than usual over his harsh methods. Robin ‘tempered’ his image. This recontextualizes a lot of the interactions Tim had seen between the teen and the Bat. Robin wasn’t just a rebellious teenager. Richard was a young man fighting with a man who had taken him in after his parents had been killed in front of him. Richard was pushing back against the man who had turned him into a child soldier in order to benefit his own public image.
By the time Tim had put all of this together, Richard wasn’t Robin anymore. He wasn’t even in Gotham anymore. Tim applauded him for the achievement, and even sent a graduation card to his new apartment. He’d had to hire one of the street kids he recognized to write, ‘Congratulations for graduating from being a child soldier!’ on the inside before sending it. She even adds a smiley face to it, which Tim thought was a nice touch.
Tim started making plans on how to really help Gotham.
-
Tim wants to be mad when he sees the new Robin.
After watching the new Robin patrol with Batman, it quickly becomes clear that the new Robin is from Park Row. He fights dirty and goes after the real criminals. Abusers, molesters, people who push drugs on children. Robin becomes someone who is kind to addicts, working girls, and the street kids. If ever Gotham needed a hero, this new Robin is it. He even brings out a softer side to the Batman that makes Tim take a second look at what the man’s motives are. Maybe Bruce Wayne isn’t as self-serving as Tim thought.
Tim puts his plans to fix Gotham on hold.
-
Tim finds out with the rest of the city when Jason Todd dies.
He immediately begins research into what happened, Bruce’s bullshit story can’t possibly be how Robin really died. It doesn’t take long to get a bit of the picture. Joker is not subtle with his boasting, and Tim expects someone to do something. Then he finds out that Superman stopped Batman from doing just that.
Batman turns all of the rage and pain that he wasn’t able to use against the Joker, and instead forces in onto the people of Gotham. Batman becomes feral. Wholly unconcerned with both his own wellbeing, and the carnage he leaves in his wake.
Tim sends a compilation of the worst of it to Superman, hiring one of the street kids to handle all of the materials and to write, ‘either you fix the problem you started, or Gotham will’ this kid doesn’t add anything else, but they do look squeamish over the pictures, so Tim makes sure to pay them extra for pain and suffering.
Tim digs up his old plans.
-
Tim would never call himself a hero.
He likes to think he’s done good things for the city though. Gotham’s underworld now has rules that Tim likes to think Jason would have been proud of. The man he hired to pretend to be him does an excellent job of being intimidating and thinking on his feet during the times Tim can’t be contacted.
The Wren Syndicate runs Gotham and enforces its rules efficiently. No one has ever gotten away with breaking the rules. With all of it’s men being taken care of better than any of the old gangs ever managed, the crime rate in Gotham has gone down dramatically in the past year.
After Joker’s violently dismembered remains are found on the front steps of the police precinct, the rogues activity died down in the city. Many people still thought that the Batman had done it, but the Batman knew differently. One of the many unidentified street kids had delivered an envelope to Bruce Wayne that had a scribbled image of a bat on the back. When he opened it after extensive testing, he found a disturbing and artful rendering of the Joker’s fate with, ‘You need to stop your rampage, or you will meet the same fate at the hands of Gotham’ written on the back.
Tim was surprised when the Batman finally reemerged after months of nonactivity.
-
Tim graduates quietly.
He immediately takes up a secretarial position for the man he hired to act as the Wren Syndicate’s head. The best part is that the man doesn’t know who he’s really answering to. All he knows is that communication now comes through the fourteen-year-old that's began working as his right hand.
The city continues to improve regardless of Batman and his shenanigans. Tim now has his own vigilante that observes the old man’s movements for him. Spoiler is chaotic, but she understands why making sure that man doesn’t fall back into wanton violence is so necessary. She’s also grateful to the Wrens for their help with her mom.
Tim’s life falls into a pattern.
-
Tim gets a message from the ‘head’ of the Wrens.
[just got an invite from an anonymous sender telling me to go alone to one of the unused warehouses in two hours]
[some of the other ‘heads’ of the families got sent something similar]
[please advise]
Tim gets a bad feeling.
[keep on your guard]
[tell the others to do the same]
[i’ll use the time until the meeting to figure out who sent it and why but plan on going unless I come back with something]
[sounds like theres a new player in town that doesn’t know the rules]
Tim then sends Spoiler a pin to the warehouse and a series of messages.
[new player in town]
[sent an invite to the family heads to meet here alone]
[might be your kind of party]
Tim then uses his backdoor into the systems that all of his people use to try to trace who might have sent the message to them. Before he can get too far along, he hears a scuff from behind him and he drops. A machete whistles over him, right where his head used to be.
He rolls further away so he can get his feet under him and see who managed to get into his high-rise apartment. Tim presses his emergency button that will drop his location to Spoiler as he stands. When he scrambles to his feet, a large muscular man with an odd red helmet on his head is standing there with his head cocked.
“You know I was wondering who would put so much security on the windows of a high-rise apartment, but you’re just a kid aren’t you?”
Tim shifts his posture and face to highlight his youth and affects a stutter. “Y-yeah, and every, everyone knows what happens to, to people who go after k-kids.” He takes a measured shuffling step toward the window behind him.
The other man shifts his weight onto one leg and lazily gestures with his machete. “Oh yeah? What happens to people who go after kids?”
Tim takes another slow shuffling step and feels his button softly buzz. Spoiler is five minutes out. “A-ask the Joker!”
This causes the other man to shift into a ready stance that radiates danger and Tim stills. Any amusement from before is gone from the other man’s voice when he asks, “What happened to the Joker?”
What? Against his will, Tim is sure he makes a face at the question and the other man growls and takes a step closer. Tim puts his hands up in surrender and takes a step away to match. “S-sorry! Sorry, its just, really public knowledge?”
“What is?”
“Gotham shredded the Joker and left him on the steps of the police precinct the first time he returned to her streets after, after Robin.”
“What do you mean Gotham shredded him?”
Tim’s button vibrates again, and he turns and runs, jumping out the window right as Spoiler is swinging up.
-
Tim gets a message from the Wren ‘head’ ten minutes later.
[meeting is apparently cancelled]
Tim takes a deep breath from where he’s perched on the counter on another, shabbier apartment he keeps for emergencies.
[I think I just met our new player]
[hes going to research the new rules before trying to play again]
[i’ll tell the others something to that effect]
It’s so good to have good people. Speaking of, Steph stands across the room and is whispering into her comm, explaining away why she’d suddenly disappeared from her regular patrol route, and yeah, “oops just helping a civilian get home, no I hadn’t realized my tracker had turned off, yep I’ll head back so it can get looked at.” can be heard coming from the purple clad girl.
Tim hops off his counter and makes his way to the stash of trackers that just had a loose internal wire to explain why Steph’s had turned off. He walks over as she cuts her com of and hands it over to her trading it for the one she’d smashed so she could get to him without an escort.
“Thanks for the assist Spoi.” Tim says before she can open the window to leave.
“Course boss, let me know if you need help with the takedown, or if you want Bats on the case.” She says with a two fingered salute before disappearing into the night. Tim closes the window behind her and resets to traps on it. He takes a moment to look out the window before closing the blinds and making his way to this safehouse’s computer set up.
Tim was going to find whoever that tacky dumbass was.
-
Tim is kind of crushed.
He stares blankly at his ceiling and tries to come up with a way that he’s wrong. He’s not, but he really wishes he was. Just the hour before Tim had tailed The Red Hood to his safehouse, and oh how that name had angered him. The dumbass hadn’t even chosen to close the curtains before he took his stupid helmet off.
Jason Todd had come into full view through Tim’s binoculars as well as the video feeds from the bugs left in his bolt hole. Tim’s heart raced at the memory, still in shock over the revelation that the only real hero of Gotham had come back. Tim groaned and lamented that the ass had the gall to come back stupid.
“This must be why they say never meet your heroes.” He says into his empty apartment.
Tim sits up and pulls a laptop closer to himself. There has to be some way to figure out how Jason had come back. Maybe it would explain why he came back wrong, too. He starts watching the footage from Jason’s safehouse noting the white streak of hair and green eyes. Tim hadn’t found any bleach or supplies for contacts, so doubted that the changes were simple cosmetic affectations.
Tim opened a different laptop and began sifting through his resources on the supernatural, that green looked familiar.
-
Tim was going to kill Constantine.
“You owe me, you English fuck! I literally got you an audience with Lady Gotham, and you said that you owed me a favor. Well, this is it pal! I’m not even asking you to raise anyone from the dead, just to help clear out the corruption from the Lazurus Pit that was left behind.” Tim ranted into his phone.
“Look, kid. I don’t even know where to begin with something like that. I can’t help you. Your best bet is contacting the holder of the pit.” Constantine has the gall to sound bored as he responds.
“I don’t know if you know this, but ‘the one that hold the pit’ is Ras fricking Al Ghul! He’s why this guy got corrupted in the first place. So, either he can’t fix it, or he wants the undead idiot to stay corrupted! If you can’t help me, you can pay your debt by finding me someone who can. Otherwise, I start researching the occult myself and we both know you don’t want me to do that. You have until either my patience runs out, or this undead dumbass does something stupid.” Tim hangs up before Constantine can say anything else.
Tim immediately brings up his files on known paranormal experts with even partial credibility.
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