Chapter Text
The Joker is dead. Batman is dead. One of those things is good and one is bad, but she’s not sure which is which right now.
There’s a child sitting on the floor between them, laughing hysterically. That’s an easy one—bad.
She looks around the room, and spots a flashing red light in the corner.
“Today, the world learns Batman’s name,” Joker had said this morning.
Shit, she thinks. She goes to the corner, and pulls out a camera. “Shit,” she says, out loud. They’re live.
Batman is dead, and Robin killed him. On live television.
He didn’t even tell her he was filming.
Well, since when does he tell her anything?
Robin. Robin. She’s gotta get this kid out of Gotham. Quick.
“Robin.”
He doesn’t react.
“Tim.”
Nothing.
“Junior.”
He looks up at her. Stops laughing like flipping a switch. Oh, that’s not good.
That’s a problem for the other since of the border. She may be crazy, but she ain’t stupid. Presidential elections are in less than two weeks, and a teen hero turned psychotic killer is exactly what Lex Luthor’s anti-vigilante campaign needs. Bastard’ll probably adopt the kid, spend the next few years parading him around. It’ll be a fucking nightmare.
Tim’s had enough of those.
Batman is dead. She hasn’t seen Batgirl in months, or Nightwing in weeks. That leaves her or Lex, and maybe she’s biased, but she’s pretty sure she’s the better option.
She crouches down in front of the kid, between the two cooling corpses. She can feel the blood on her knees.
“We gotta go, honey. Right now. You gather up the big guns, empty out the fridge. Load everything in the white van. I’ll handle the rest.”
She’ll have to leave Bud and Lou.
It’s fine. She leaves them every time she goes back to prison, and they always take care of themselves. Tim’s not gonna.
-
The camera must not have been linked to their location, or things would never have got so far. She calls 911 and gives the address before throwing her phone in the harbor. She doesn’t want the bodies to be—she just doesn’t want things left, like that.
Tim’s asleep, thank whatever gods are taking requests from fucked up circus rejects tonight, by the time they reach the city limits, by the time all the Bat’s identities are blasted on the radio. She turns down the volume, but she can’t turn it off—she needs to know who’ll come looking for them.
Kid’s got a black eye he didn’t have earlier tonight. She doesn’t know if he got it from his dad or Mistah J. Doesn’t really wanna.
This isn’t how it was supposed to go. She doesn’t know how to do this. There’s an abused kid in the passenger seat, and she’s the one who abused him. Where the fuck does she go from here?
She helped the Joker torture a child. What the fuck was she thinking? What the fuck is she going to do next? Batman is dead. Batman is Bruce Wayne. Is there—is there other family? Bruce Wayne hasn’t adopted another kid since the last one died—he hasn’t adopted Tim. Does he have an actual family somewhere?
Does it matter? She can’t hand the kid over to his family when his identity is public. Especially if Luthor wins the election.
Get the kid out of the country. Wait for election results. Go from there.
She can do this. She has to do this.
-
It’s a long, awful few days. She drives until she can’t drive anymore, then sleeps on the side of the road. She wakes up to Tim laughing or staring at her. He never asks about his family. He never says a single word.
She keeps the radio on.
There's a lot of speculation about her and Tim, about what she might be doing to him now. A lot of talk about the riots in Gotham, which must have started just after she got Tim out of town. Interview after interview after interview with Luthor and his team. Harley listens in real time as public perception shifts under Luthor's influence, as people go from blaming the Joker to blaming Batman.
Look, Harley was dating the Joker, and even she knows this mess isn't Batman's fault.
She glances over at Tim, staring out the passenger window, apparently unbothered by Luthor's current rant about how a normal child, not already corrupted by over a year of vigilante work, would never have snapped under the pressure of three weeks of torture and killed two men. A normal child, apparently, would have waited quietly for rescue, then gone to therapy and been fine. Unlike Tim, who will require special rehabilitation that Lex, an expert in the dangers of superheroes, is uniquely qualified to provide.
The other heroes are, apparently, just as much to blame as Batman. Where, Luthor asks, was Superman? Where was Nightwing? Where was Wonder Woman? Where was the Flash?
Probably, Harley thinks, busy with the two alien invasions and several natural disasters that have happened over the last month. And Nightwing hasn't been sighted in weeks.
She steals less distinctive clothes for Tim from a gas station—all they had at the base in his size were the Robin suit and the Joker suit. She gets their food from drive thrus and sneaks Tim into gas stations to pee. They sleep in the car. They have plenty of money to get them to where they’re going, but it won’t last forever, and she doesn’t dare to leave the kid alone for longer than it takes to pump gas. They use the family restrooms. She tries not to sleep when he’s awake, but somehow he’s always up before her. Staring at her. He doesn’t talk.
He killed Batman. He killed the Joker. She wouldn’t be surprised if he killed her too.
He’s asleep. She can get them a little farther tonight. (It’s a 36 hour drive from Gotham to Mexico—she checked before trashing her phone. But she’s lost count of the hours. She just keeps going south.)
She turns up the radio a little. She’s so sick of the news, and she’s not sure how long she can manage to be responsible. She hasn’t been sane in a long damn time—she should not be in charge of a kid. She’s holding it together, but she can feel—she knows—there’s something shadowy in the corner of her eyes that probably don’t exist, and shit’s gonna get bad soon.
“—parents of Tim Drake found dead this morning in—”
She slams the power button on the radio, but it’s too late.
Tim makes the same sound he did the first time he was electrocuted.
She parks the car and reaches toward him, careful, not sure if he wants her comfort. He throws himself into her arms, then climbs practically into her lap, and she spends an hour holding a sobbing child, and she has no idea what the fuck she’s doing.
He falls asleep. She keeps on driving with him still in her lap. They reach the border that night, and she gets a motel room, carries him inside and to bed. Tucks him in.
He has parents. He had parents, and now they’re dead.
To get back at Tim for killing Batman? To get back at him for killing the Joker?
She should have done more research, she should have—
No. What good would giving him back to them have done? He’d have just been killed too. Maybe if she’d kidnapped the parents and brought them along for him?
It doesn’t matter. It’s too late now.
She leaves Tim in the motel, asleep. She doesn’t like to leave him, but it’s easier this way. She unloads the van. She drives it over the border, makes sure to get her picture taken.
She finds a closed pharmacy, breaks in, steals anything that might—might—keep her a little steadier. It’s a lot of stuff. She’ll do more research later. She finds the security camera, makes sure it gets her. Here she is, in Mexico.
She abandons her car, crosses the border again more stealthily—no one ever expects how good she is at sneaking around. Everyone will be looking for her in Mexico, but she’s not stupid. She and Tim aren’t just white, they’re unnaturally pale, and she stopped taking Spanish in seventh grade.
No, she has another border to cross.
She buys a crappy minivan, cash, as discreet as she can. She goes to the store and buys two boxes of hair dye, both in the color Tim’s was before they bleached it and dyed it green.
It would be better if she could get him a different color, make him look a little different. But she doesn’t think he can pull off anything but brown, without it being very, very obviously not natural. She doesn’t want to call attention to him, any more than she can help.
Which reminds her. That smile. What is she going to do about that smile?
Tim is still asleep when she gets back to the motel, hours later. Not surprising—it’s the first time he’s been in a real bed since she helped kidnap him.
What was she thinking? He’s a child.
She lets herself sleep in a real bed, too, just for a few hours.
Tim wakes before her; he’s sitting there, staring, when she sits up.
“Tim?”
He doesn’t answer.
“Junior?”
He leans forward a little.
“Okay, honey. Okay. Breakfast, then we have a quick project to do, and we’ll be on our way.”
Dying two heads of hair is not actually, in any way, a quick project.
She gets half a banana into Tim, which isn't much. But she didn't eat breakfast at all, so it's not like she can judge. Her stomach's been feeling weird—stress, probably. But she's a reasonably healthy adult, and she can skip breakfast if she wants. Tim's been pretty much starved for three weeks, so he can't.
"Tim? Tim? Junior? Can you look at me please?"
He does, though he stops just short of making eye contact, gaze settling around her nose.
"Can you talk to me?"
He blinks once, twice, and doesn't speak.
"Can you—can you give me something, buddy? Anything?"
Just—she just needs him to do something other than sitting there and following orders. She needs him to act like a person, and not just something the Joker made. She needs to know—to know exactly what they've done, and what they have to work with.
Tim sits there, and stares at her nose, and gives her nothing. He eats one more bite of banana, then lets her move him around like a doll to do the hair.
He had so much fight in him as Robin. He never stopped fighting, and he never shut up, and how—how did they do this to him?
She does his hair first, the dye and then a haircut, a style a little different from what he had before. She lets him sleep in the bed while she does her own, the same color, a part on the other side of the head, eight inches off the bottom, bangs. She carries Tim out to the new van, still asleep, when it’s done. They have a long, long drive ahead of them, and she doesn’t plan to stop at another motel anytime soon. Tim needed the rest, after—after his parents, and she needed a place to put him while she did her work. And she wanted to be noticed, yesterday. She can’t afford to stop and hold still for so long again.
They drive for four days. Tim never speaks, only alternates between sleeping and staring. On the fifth day, she stops at a public library, looks up an old classmate—a plastic surgeon who got his license revoked last year.
It’s easy to find an address.
“He's gonna fix your face, Timmy,” she says, and hopes she’s telling the truth.