Chapter Text
Tim Drake was someone that knew a lot of people, both in his civilian identity and when wearing his mask. He was someone that knew a lot of people, but not someone that people truly knew. Sure, there were people in his life that knew bits and pieces of himself, but no one knew everything and very few knew the same things if he could help it.
He was a puzzle that only himself held the answer key to.
It was something that everyone within the family knew well from the first time that they saw the boy show back up in Gotham wearing a new costume altogether, an assassin at his side, with Ra’s al Ghul of all people on his tail, hunting him for some wrongdoing that they never did get to know.
That didn’t mean that it wasn’t frustrating watching the boy change with time, from the small child that they had all first met to the teen with such a cold gaze that sometimes it made Bruce stop in his step upon seeing it the very few times that the boy had stepped foot in the Cave since he had returned from being lost within the timestream.
It didn’t mean that sometimes they weren’t shocked with the lengths that the teen was willing to go to.
It was one of the rare times that the bats found themselves outside of Gotham and fighting alongside other heroes, when they were reminded of this fact. They were in Metropolis of all places, having been called in to help as an unknown alien species had sent down fleets of robot soldiers to fight and conquer for them instead of their own soldiers. They weren’t the only family there of course. The supers, as expected, were flying through the sky, the archers of Star City placed atop the rooftops of the tallest buildings in the city to snipe any threats that they could long before they met the ground forces. The speedsters were zipping about, covering blind spots where needed, and the Amazonians were fighting alongside the bats. The only true deviations in this sort of formation were the core four that had formed the former group known as Young Justice.
Superboy was on the ground, Red Robin close to him as the teen ran at the taller boy, bo staff in hand. There were five robots coming straight for the pair, enough that Red Hood, when spotting this, had his gun raised to cover for the second youngest in their family should he need it. And truly, he had thought that Tim was going to, but instead he watched as the teen launched himself off of the super’s already prepared hands, up into the air. Within a moment there was already a bot crumbling down to the ground, its head having been severed from its artificial shoulders with a speed that the man hadn’t known the younger truly capable of.
Tim launched himself off of the bot that he had just destroyed, taking out the one next to it, as streams of red took out a third, and two blurs took out the last two, Wonder Girl grabbing the falling boy as he came back down to the ground. The team was already in a huddle, their backs all pressed to each other’s long before the highest of what had been the five bots fell to the ground.
The way that they all worked together reminded Jason of the ways in which he worked with the Outlaws, each covering one another’s backs because no one else was going to do it. They were family to one another after all, he’d had no one else to stand by his side and take him as he was and then there had been Roy and Kori, neither caring of the blood on his hands or their own. They had become his family because he knew that the bats wouldn’t want him truly for who he was now, he thought that the same could be said for the four before him, though he had no idea why Bat’s perfect little soldier needed such a second family at all.
That wasn’t all though.
Jason had never seen the younger teen use such lethal tactics before, Bruce had always frowned upon them with his whole damned no kill rule, but he couldn’t help but think that they suited him much better than the way that the other teen usually fought. It was as if they came to him much easier than any style of fighting that most of the vigilantes within Gotham typically used.
(It reminded him a bit of the way that Cass moved, the few times that she was in town, lethal acts coming to the girl much easier than the non-lethal no matter how much she hated that simple fact)
Hood didn’t give the scene too much more thought, couldn’t as another bot came for him and stole his attention once more.
He hadn’t been the only one to see the display though, the other bats and birds had as well. The reactions to it were mixed among the group, but something that they all knew was that the boy had never worked so easily (or comfortably) with any of them before.
It was because of this display that they were watching when Red Robin dove away from the other three at his side, Impulse and Superboy moving instinctively to turn their formation into a triangle, as Red Robin sprung to his feet with the gun of a fallen bot in his hands and already aimed at the sky and shooting down another swarm as it came for the four. There was a hard set to his mouth as he fired it up at the sky with an aim that none of the rest of the family knew that he had, shooting each of the incoming bots in their false heads as they flew down. They were the last of the bots that had been sent, and the four took them down with ease as the other three covered what Red Robin’s quick and lethal shots could not.
When he finally lowered the gun, Superboy was quick to be at his side taking the weapon from the other teen’s too limp hands in the manner in which one might steal the trigger for live bomb away from someone that had just agreed not to set it off. The way that the clone passed it off to the speedster, and Impulse ran away with it in a blur only seemed to heighten this particular visual.
Anyone with eyes could see that the three were trying to comfort the former Robin, though from what no one in the batfamily truly knew.
“It’s fine, Rob,” Superboy said, speaking a bit louder than he seemed to think that he was. “It was necessary.”
“That’s what he said, Kon,” Tim replied (cause he was Tim then, shoulders hunched as if to make himself small), his voice filled with some sort of anger and disgust that none of them understood… none but the other three around the boy.
“You’re not him, Red,” Impulse said, his hand settling in the teen’s left hand as Wonder Girl’s was tangled with the boy’s right, and the clone held the former Robin’s face. It was a display of affection that none of the bats thought that the teen would still tolerate these days. Yet here he was.
“I’m more like him than you think,” Tim admitted in the way that one might confess their sins just before being executed.
The wounded noise that the demigod made almost seemed to agree.
“Come on, Rob, let’s go back to the Tower, yeah?” Kon asked, his voice impossibly soft.
It was only then that the four seemed to notice that the bats had been unintentionally moving closer since the start of their little display of affection. Everyone of the bats saw the way that the group’s walls went straight up, Superboy spinning to meet the bats that had settled behind them. It was only Tim though that spun away from the direction that all of his friends were now facing, as if sensing something else altogether.
“Everybody get down!” the teen screamed, but it was much too late as a flash of light encased them all.
—
When the world became clear again, the core four members of Young Justice and the batfamily found themselves in a room that only five of them recognized, only four of them having ever stepped foot inside of it.
“The Nest?” Tim asked as he and everyone else glanced around the room, “but we were just in Metropolis. This should be out of the realm of teleportation for any one meta. Though even if its not, why would they…” the teen trailed off, his thoughts becoming silent as Kon, Bart, and Cassie spread out around the room, turning things up and peeking in cabinets. As far as they could tell everything was the same as it ever was.
“Where are we? What is the Nest, Drake?” Damian asked, his voice a bit unsteady since he didn’t have adequate information for his taste, and yet the weakest Robin knew more than he did. No one mentioned the fact that the child had his sword drawn, as if in comfort.
“My home in Gotham,” Tim answered almost distractedly before turning sharply on his heel and heading towards what the bats could only assume was the front door. They watched as he opened it, only to reveal darkness beyond it instead of the hallway that should have been there. “Just as I thought.”
“Answers already, Boy Wonder?” Kon asked fondly, appearing at the boy’s side, pressing in close to the thoroughly touch - starved teen.
“Of course,” the former Robin said, something in his frame loosening at the other boy’s touch.
Tim turned back to the rest of the bats, and found them all looking at him, their gazes heavy as if there were so many things that they - a family of detectives - wanted to ask, but knew that now wasn’t the time. There were a rare few times that any of them had tact, it seemed that this was one of them.
“Tim?” Batman asked, cause he was Batman then even with the cowl pulled down, his voice cold even with only one word spoken.
“We’re not actually in my apartment,” the boy answers, almost dismissively. It was a tone that the boy had been taking with the Bat a lot more recently, their relationship a lot more frosty than it had been in the past. “But in a magically created realm that merely looks like it, likely my mind or something of the like if I were to guess since it resembles my home and not somewhere like the Cave, Tower, or Manor which would appeal to more people.”
Bruce felt his expression shift minutely as his son referred to his apartment as his home for the second time in as many minutes instead of the manor, but there were priorities to be met.
“Why your mind, Drake?” Damian asked, his voice a bit colder now.
“I don’t want you here either, Demon Brat,” the teen said back, the chill in his voice neatly matching the younger’s.
“He does bring up a good point though, Tim,” Dick started, ignoring the hurt that came when he said those placating words and the teen only became even more closed off than he was before, “why your mind out of all of ours?”
The silence that Tim gave was telling, showing to everyone in the room that he already knew the answer, but just didn’t want to tell it.
“You think it's Moriarty, don’t you?” Cassie asked, her voice more worried than annoyed, though that was there too.
“Him again?” Bart asked with all of the annoyance that the demigod lacked, flopping down on the couch with a whine. “I hate it when you have to deal with that man.”
“Don’t we all,” Kon muttered darkly as he led their leader over to the couch, holding the boy’s wrist comfortingly as he could as they walked together.
Cassie joined the three boys, making it a tight fit but not one that any of them minded, each presence comforting.
“Moriarty? Like the Sherlock Holmes villain?” Jason asked as he followed the younger teen’s lead and sat down on the couch across from them all, Dick joining him as the demon took the eldest brother’s other side and Duke took Jason’s open side.
Bruce, Cass, and Steph followed the eight’s lead as well, and took the three chairs that sat at the end of the two couches, like a bridge between them. It was definitely more furniture than Tim truly had in real life, but if this were a construct being created to mirror his home then it made sense that there would be extra furniture to accommodate the extra people within his home that would never have actually stepped foot in it otherwise.
“Codename,” was the short answer that Tim gave before turning back to his friends. “It makes sense, don’t you think? You know that he was unhappy with the events of his Reichenbach Fall a little while ago.”
“A proper Reichenbach Fall would have had him falling too,” Kon said unhappily that this hadn’t occurred, the teen sitting back on the couch with his arms crossed, even though his side remained firmly pressed into the non-meta’s.
Bruce couldn’t help but be concerned at the implications that the teen’s were speaking about before him. He may not have Jason’s love of the classics, but he did know about that particular Sherlock story where the detective and the villain of the story fell from a great height and were both thought dead after. Only Moriarty truly dies during that altercation, but it was worrisome that Tim had been in a situation mirroring it all, more worrisome still that Superboy had wanted another to join his son.
“You think that would have killed him?” Bart asked, having not been there himself then, but sounding too hopeful for a good deal of the bats’ taste.
“One can only dream,” Cassie muttered darkly, though not quietly.
The bats, for the most part, looked at the four teens with surprise in their eyes at the conversation that had just occurred, before Jason let out a low whistle.
“Damn, Pretender,” the man says with what could almost be appreciation at the scene before him, “I didn’t know that the next generation was so bloodthirsty.”
“Some people deserve it,” Tim defends, his voice strong. He had thought that of Ra’s long before Paris, and the sentiment had only grown since then.
“Tim,” Batman says, a warning in his voice.
“Don’t worry, B, I remember the lecture,” Tim harshly, not even looking at the man.
Jason couldn’t help but raise a brow at it all. He glanced at Dick for answers, but the older brother didn’t seem to hold them either.
“Ra’s al Ghul,” Cass said, her soft voice filtering through the room and bringing attention to the quiet girl.
“Grandfather?” Damian asked, fear slipping into his voice at his mention. Dick shifted to comfort the former assassin.
“That old man is Moriarty in this analogy?” Steph asked, having followed the prompt from the other girl.
“You got involved with Ra’s al Ghul enough to have a codename for the Demon’s Head?” Bruce asked, a bit of horror slipping into his tone.
“It's not like I’m the first one here to do so,” Tim says, defending himself quickly and reminding the man of his own involvement with the head of the League of Assassins.
“When?” Bruce asked quickly, concern leaking into his tone more than most of his children had ever heard before.
“We can get to that later.”
All of the vigilantes in the room stilled as the disembodied voice filled the room, with no source behind it as far as they knew. Tim was the quickest of them to recover, slumping down on the couch a bit with the low groan of annoyance.
“Fucking telepaths,” the boy complained.
“Correct as usual, Red Robin ,” the voice continued, “ Master had said that you would be the first to piece it together.”
I’m bombing more of his bases when I get out of here, the teen thought, already picking out the locations and just how much supplies he would need, and how best to split the work between himself and Pru. Might just go ahead and hit them all depending on how this goes.
“So it truly is the old bag of bones then?” Kon asked, not having doubted his Robin, but having hoped that for once the teen had been wrong.
“Know anyone else that goes by master, Superboy?” Steph asked, having already resigned herself to a very unpleasant evening from the set of Tim’s shoulders alone.
“ The task that Master is giving you is simple enough ,” the voice continues over them all. “ You’ll watch fifteen videos, all of which showing events from Timothy Jackson Drake’s life in the form of songs, and then you will be free to go .”
“Song?” Jason asked, with a false mirth in the man’s voice that was clearly attempting to lighten the mood within the room, “you a secret theater kid, Red?”
“If anyone here is a theater kid then its you, Mr. Tear-away Suit,” the teen snipes back, a bit harsher than needed.
Bart snorts at Kon’s side.
“ We’ll begin now. ”