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Tim ends his phone call with Bruce just in time for the power to go out, leaving the Tower lit only by the dim emergency lighting. He sighs softly and turns away from the windows. He needs to check the nearest console, try to see what’s wrong with the system. He’ll probably run into the others (at least, anyone still awake) doing the same, and if it’s serious enough, they’ll all head down to the main computer terminal in the basement to solve whatever the problem is.
The first hint of unease skitters up his spine when he realizes it’s too quiet. He doesn’t hear any of the team moving around or talking to each other like he’d expect to. Maybe this isn’t just a power failure.
Tim is wearing comfortable, casual clothes, and is not carrying anything that could be used as a weapon if this is an attack. He doesn’t even have shoes on. But he knows the Tower, and an attacker won’t. He can get to the staff in the gym, or the one in his room with the rest of his gear and weapons-
Heavy footsteps echo down the hall, getting louder as they get closer. Sneaking away to find weapons or backup is likely out, then. The best he can do now is ready for a fight.
“Hello, Replacement.” The mechanized voice precedes its owner, hidden in the shadow save for a glint of moonlight off something red.
“Red Hood.” Tim places him even before he steps into the room. “You’re awfully far from Gotham. Did you get lost?”
“I’m exactly where I want to be, Robin.” Tim’s not in the suit, but he doesn’t bother trying to deny it. If Hood came all this way for him, he’ll know better than to believe a weak bluff. “And I was here first. You’re just a pretender, taking what isn’t-“
“Seriously? I know you’re a crime lord, but transphobia is a new low, Hood.” The half-joke slips out before he can think better of it. Hood stops.
“What?”
“Although I’ve heard worse than ‘pretender’. You’ll have to try a little harder if you want to hurt my feelings.” Tim adds air quotes around the word, and Hood huffs.
“No, not like that. As Robin, dumbass. You wormed your way in to take what wasn’t yours. You have parents, you went to private schools, you have a nice big house to live in. But you’re greedy, so you had to-“
“And now the greedy bisexual stereotype? Very original.” Tim scoffs.
“Shut up! If you don’t let me say my piece, I’ll just skip to the fight!”
“I can’t believe you’re attacking me during Pride Month. This is practically a hate crime.” Tim lays it on thick, seeing how his previous banter had tripped Hood up. “Wonder what that’ll do for your reputation in Crime Alley.”
The helmet’s vocoder doesn’t hide Hood’s frustrated growl.
“Don’t mess with the Alley, Tim Drake. People like me don’t take kindly to people like you.”
Tim ignores the use of his real name as well as he can in order to keep talking, keep stalling.
“People like-“
“No, don’t, I heard how that sounded.” Hood grumbles. “I meant spoiled rich kids.”
“You know, most Alley residents upset about class disparity just try to mug me. Is this supposed to be a mugging?”
“No, it’s supposed to be a fucking beatdown!” Hood’s clearly agitated, but Tim has that classic Robin “don’t know when to quit” attitude.
“So it is a hate crime. Guess you’re not having a very happy Pride Month.”
Hood’s hands are clenched in fists at his sides, and he visibly takes a deep breath.
“Look. I’m not here to kill you, but I might if you keep talking. I’ll be back next week, when it’s fucking July. Tell Bruce there’s nowhere he can hide you to keep you safe from me.”
And the rising crime lord that has Batman nervous just… turns around and walks away.
That was easy.
Tim follows Hood at a distance to make sure he really does leave, and then he checks on the others and finds them all unconscious but unharmed. Guess this really was personal, he thinks as he works to get the power back on. He’s not as concerned as he probably should be.
Bruce makes up for it by being over-concerned, in Tim’s opinion. He’d already wanted to bench Tim until they knew whether the Red Hood was a serious threat, and he’s considering the intrusion (Tim wouldn’t exactly call it an attack) at Titans Tower confirmation of that threat.
Tim, like the Robins before him, doesn’t take well to being benched. He sneaks out to patrol on his own when he can, and hangs around in the Cave when he can’t, training and spending more time on casework.
Hood keeps his word. As soon as June turns to July, he’s back, following Robin on an unauthorized solo patrol until he stops on a rooftop to let him catch up. Better to choose the arena and be ready to meet an attack than just hope he’ll go away.
“I’d say it’s nice to see you again, but it would be rude to lie.” Tim says.
“I have to thank you, Replacement. This might be a better set-up than the Tower. It’ll really drive home that Batman can’t keep his Robins safe when they keep leaving the nest all on their own. Guess you’re just as disobedient as the last one. I hear that gets you killed.”
Tim wants to scowl at the flippant reference to Jason’s death, but he keeps his expression carefully neutral to avoid revealing a weakness. (But who is Hood to talk about keeping Robin safe? It’s clear now this isn’t just about Tim, but he hasn’t missed the malice directed at him.)
Hood charges at him. Tim jumps aside, staff already out and in motion, but Hood blocks the blow with his forearm and swings for Tim’s head with his other fist. Tim ducks under it and gets in a punch of his own before Hood kicks him across the roof with a heavy boot to the chest.
“What if we reschedule again?” Tim suggests as he rolls back to his feet, dodging his own staff in Hood’s hands. “You wouldn’t fight a guy wearing a binder, would you? You know it’s bad to exert yourself while binding. Wouldn’t be fair.”
“Fair?” Hood growls. “Was it fair when you stole a dead boy’s colors? His family? And why the hell are you binding while patrolling?”
“I didn’t steal anything! And maybe I was feeling dysphoric!” He’s sure feeling the impact of that decision now, though. Between the compression of the binder and that kick to the chest, breathing is kind of painful. Bruised ribs, at least.
“I’m here for a fight, Replacement, not to watch you damage your own lungs.”
Tim can almost picture him rolling his eyes under that helmet.
“What, are you jealous you don’t get to do it yourself?”
“I’ll be back. This is your last chance. Be ready next time, or it’ll be over quickly. Now go home and take the fucking binder off.”
And Hood leaves again, grappling from the edge of the roof down into the alley below, where he gets on a motorcycle and drives away.
Tim does as he was told for once and heads home. He really does need to take the binder off and ice his ribs. He lays in bed with an ice pack, alone in Drake Manor, and thinks about his two encounters with Hood. The man’s interest in Jason doesn’t sit right with Tim. It doesn’t make sense. Tim decides it’s time he started looking into Hood himself, regardless of whether Bruce wants to let him in on that particular case.
He goes down to the Cave during the day while Bruce is out on Wayne Enterprises business to see what progress Bruce has made without him. It’s not hard to find and access the Batcomputer file on Hood (if he didn’t want Tim to read it, he should’ve hidden it or locked it). There’s nothing concrete in it, just notes on Hood’s operations in and around Crime Alley, and a few lines about the danger he poses to Robin. It’s what’s missing that’s conspicuous: theories, evidence, any kind of strong lead. There’s no way the “world’s greatest detective” doesn’t have something on this guy by now, which means… what? Is Bruce hiding the info? Why?
He takes a picture of the information on the screen with his phone, deletes the access record for the file and leaves the Cave to put together his own file on his laptop at home, where no one will ask questions. It starts with a copy of Bruce’s notes, followed by a summary of Tim’s reports from the times he’d met Hood.
Tim considers what he knows. Hood cares about Crime Alley, is working to clean it up. Hood knew how to access Titans Tower, how to cut the power and block communications. There hadn’t been any sign of forced entry. Hood has something against Tim specifically, had called him replacement, pretender, thief, greedy. He’d been angry that Tim was Robin after Jason, or maybe that Batman had another Robin at all. He knows Tim and Bruce’s identities. He’d been offended by the suggestion that he was transphobic (or biphobic). He’d let Tim go twice when he seemed to have arrived intending to hurt him. And very importantly, Bruce is hiding something he knows or suspects about Hood.
Hood could be a resident of Crime Alley who’d known Jason, mad at Batman for his death and Tim for taking up his mantle. But that wouldn’t explain his knowledge of the Tower and their identities, nor does it seem like the sort of thing Bruce would be keeping to himself like this. Unless there’s some personal connection? Tim knows his predecessor well enough to know Jason didn’t have any siblings or other close family members around the right age, but would an old friend of Jason’s be important enough to Bruce that he wouldn’t even put his name down in that file?
Tim almost feels a little bit crazy when he connects the dots, like maybe he’s missed the picture they’re supposed to make and created his own nonsensical shape in its place because it shouldn’t be possible, but he can’t help but compare everything he has against the theory once it clicks, and it all fits. What if… Hood is Jason?
It hurts to realize that one of his childhood heroes apparently hates him. That Jason is so angry that he’s Robin, when he’d always secretly hoped Jason would’ve been proud of him for pulling Batman out of the darkness. But Tim shoves those thoughts aside in favor of strategizing. If Hood is Jason, Tim can find a way to bring him home, for Bruce and Dick and Alfred and even Jason himself. If that means he has to step back when the time comes and see everyone less to stay out of Jason’s way, he can do that. It’s just like an extension of his original mission to help Batman. He opens a new document and gets to work.
Hood (Jason?) shows up at Drake Manor this time. Tim is alone there, as he so often is, but he isn’t ready to see Hood again.
“Ready for your last chance, Replacement?” Hood asks in Tim’s living room. Tim stays where he is, laying facedown on the couch. Bruce had taken one look at him when he showed up for patrol and told him it was okay to take the night off. That’s how pathetic he is. He can’t enact the complicated plan he’d come up with like this, so either he convinces Hood to leave or he’s getting the shit beat out of him tonight.
“Nope, sorry. I’m on my period, I can’t fight today.” It’s the same kind of excuse that had worked before, so even though he really could fight if he needed to, he feels bad enough to give it a try. “You can still do your speech if you want to.”
“I’m not here to deliver a monologue, brat.” Hood’s voice is low, a warning of danger, but Tim plows ahead.
“Will you get the heating pad out of the hall closet for me, then?” He turns his head enough to open one eye and look at Hood, attempting a sad one-eyed version of the puppy dog eyes Dick taught him. “To prove you’re not transphobic?”
Hood grumbles something that sounds like swearing and “might as well happen”, but he stomps out into the hall. Tim turns his face back into the couch and listens as he rifles through the closet until the heating pad is tossed onto his head.
“You have to plug it in. There’s an outlet at the end of the couch, there.” He waves a hand vaguely in the right direction, voice muffled by the couch cushion. Hood actually does bend down and plug it in, so Tim wiggles the thing beneath his stomach and turns it on high. When it starts to warm up, he feels like he could melt into it.
“I don’t think you’re supposed to put weight on top of it.”
“Whatever.”
“I thought you had parents.” Hood says, and Tim shifts to open his eye again. Watches him look around the room, like he’s looking for something.
“I do. They’re in Chilé.” Tim mumbles into the couch.
“Then why aren’t you next door with Bruce?” Hood, Jason, says his name with some kind of emotion the vocoder flattens into unrecognizability.
“I don’t live in the Manor, I have a perfectly good home right here. I’m not going to bother Bruce every time I’m mildly inconvenienced. No one would put up with that from the neighbor’s kid.”
“You’re Robin.” Hood says, like it’s an obvious rebuttal.
“Only because I forced my way in. You were actually right about that, but it was only because Dick wouldn’t come back.” Tim closes his eye again to avoid making Jason feel too scrutinized. Or maybe to avoid feeling that way himself. “Batman needed a Robin, and I didn’t know what else to do.”
“Batman doesn’t need-“
“He did.” Tim interrupts, a little sharper than he’d meant to. He turns his head fully to the side to look at Jason with both eyes. “Losing you destroyed him, Jason. He was going to get himself killed, and he didn’t even care. Not to mention all the petty criminals he was sending to the hospital in the meantime.”
“He told you who I am, then?” Jason reaches up to unlatch and remove his helmet. He’s wearing a plain black domino beneath it, but the anger and hurt in his voice is clear without the vocoder. “Did he tell you how disappointed he is that I came back wrong? That I don’t play by his rules anymore?”
“He didn’t tell me anything. I figured it out myself. He doesn’t even have a full file on you as Hood. I think he probably knows, but he’s afraid to type it up and see it spelled out clearly.”
“Afraid of what?” Jason scoffs, and Tim shrugs.
“That he’s wrong and you’re not really back. That he’s right, but you haven’t come home and he doesn’t know why. I dunno.”
“Oh, I think he can figure out why.” Jason says, and it’s not like Tim can’t hazard a guess or two at what he means by that.
“…Did you know Bruce tried to kill the Joker, and the government had to send Superman to stop him?” He asks quietly, hesitantly. “It was before I… but I’ve read about it. I think he really would’ve done it, if not for the helicopter crash.”
Jason is silent for a moment. Tim can’t read his expression.
“He should’ve tried again.” He finally says, clearly aiming for dismissive, but he just sounds hurt again. “That’s why I’m going to make him do it right. If he won’t, I’ll do it myself. The clown won’t slip away again.”
Tim latches onto that little admission, a hint to Jason’s plans. It doesn’t sound good. Trying to force Bruce to kill the Joker won’t bring Jason home and fix things between them. He has to step in, even if it doesn’t quite align with his own plan.
“Can… can I help you?”
“What?”
“With your whole revenge scheme. Can I help?”
“…What?” Jason repeats. “Why would you want to do that? You think I’m going to let you spy on me for Bruce?”
“I wouldn’t be spying, I promise.” It’s true, his ulterior motive isn’t sanctioned by Bruce at all. But he’s going to have to be more convincing if Jason is going to let him in. He needs to give him a reason to try and trust him. So even though it’s embarrassing to be honest, he sucks it up and does it anyway. For the greater good. “I just… you were kind of my hero. As a kid. I used to follow you on patrol and take pictures. And I always imagined if I ever got to meet you for real, you might… want to see them? And hang out with me.”
He isn’t going to share the way he’d fantasized in his early days as Robin about Jason helping him train, teaching him some of his own tricks the way Dick had. One vulnerability is enough.
“You were like twelve when I died, there’s no way you were following me around and I didn’t see you.”
“I just said I have pictures, I can prove it.” Tim is a little annoyed by the (admittedly reasonable) doubt. “And you were like twelve when you started as Robin, don’t be a hypocrite.”
Jason actually laughs at that. It’s just a little chuckle, but it feels like a good sign.
“Fine, I’ll look at your pictures sometime. But I’m not letting you in on anything, and it isn’t ‘hanging out’.”
It’s as good as Tim’s going to get right now, so he’ll take it.
“Okay. When should I expect you back for another attempt at attacking me? I can bring a photo album.”
“I’m done with that. You’ve already wrecked that part of the plan. I mean, look at you. You’re just a kid, just like I was. And apparently a fanboy. Of course you’d jump at the chance to be Robin, to have a family.”
“I have parents.” Tim reminds him, but he waves it off.
“Whatever. The point is, it’s Bruce who was the adult in all this. He knew what he was doing, and he’ll be the one to face consequences for it.”
“…If you’re not coming back, should I come to you? To show you the pictures?” Tim asks, ignoring the whole revenge thing for a moment.
“Y’know what, sure. You know where I operate. But you’re only getting one free pass. You come alone, you don’t tell anyone, and I don’t want to see you or any other Bat in my territory for any other reason. Got it?”
“Got it.” He can work with that. He’s already mentally reworking his plan, and this actually cuts out a few steps. He can have Jason at the manor with his family by Thanksgiving.
“Why are you making that face?”
“Just thinking about which pictures I want to bring.” He smiles innocently, and though Jason looks skeptical, he doesn’t press.
“Nerd.” He mutters as he puts his helmet back on. Tim chooses, magnanimously, not to point out that Jason is also a huge nerd.
“Bye, Jason!” He stays on the couch until Jason is out the window, listening for the sound of his bike starting and waiting until it fades into the distance before he pries himself up and reaches for his laptop on the coffee table, resituating the heating pad in his lap. He has work to do.