whetstonefires:

Thanks, this is a great ask! It turned out to be really challenging for me to write because I had to work through my hangups about Tim’s characterization before I could resolve it to my satisfaction.

Everyone who I owe fics to, I promise it’s an ongoing process! orz Getting this out of my mental queue should help. ^^;

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Tim lowered his binoculars. The
fight he’d seen shaping up along the waterfront had resolved itself, which was
nice to see but meant he really needed to get back on patrol. He and Steph and
Bruce were out tonight, which was enough force to handle anything short of a
major crisis, but that didn’t mean he could slack off. There was always more to
do.

He always missed Gotham when he went
away, but sometimes he wondered why, when he came back.

His patrol route for tonight swung
west, out of the stockyards and into the industrial area, and then back toward
residential. It was sort of grueling in the wintertime because it covered a lot
of ground without much in the way of chances to warm up, but it wasn’t usually
challenging–there were little scuffles like the one he’d almost intervened in
and other minor problems sometimes, but mostly there weren’t many people out
here at night, so anything you did find tended to be serious. Complex schemes
and major villains, hiding out.

That was why they patrolled
this area, because otherwise there’d be no one to notice when an old warehouse
turned into a headquarters or a factory was converted for some nefarious
purpose. But if you didn’t run into any of that, odds were you wouldn’t run
into anything.

It made it hard to keep up any sense
of urgency on this route, but if you maintained a sense of urgency at all times
you’d just go crazy. Dick wasn’t actually wrong about that.

The next roof west was only three
feet higher than this one, and ten feet away. Tim bet himself he could make it
without a grapple. He’d just give himself a bit of a run-up, and….

Nailed it.

“Guah!”

Tim spun, staff telescoping to full
length in his hand, at the startled sound, coming from much closer than
anyone had any business being when he’d thought he was alone. To find a small
figure mostly covered in a black cape, having evidently fallen facefirst over
the decorative cornice at the far side of the roof he’d just left. Flashes of
color showed from under the cape–leaf-green, blood-red, canary yellow.

Robin.

There was only a split second where
Tim’s brain told him it was Damian–snuck away from his special bonding time
with Dick to harass Tim, a stupidly plausible and profoundly infuriating
scenario–followed by another split second of wild seesawing emotion at the
revelation that after three years, he now equated Robin so completely with
Damian that he expected anyone in a Robin suit to be the little monster, no matter
how firmly all other cues spoke against that.

Then he put all that behind him and
focused on what was. A dark-haired child, stealthy enough to watch Red
Robin from a hidden spot on the same rooftop, clumsy enough to trip, goofy
enough to make a ridiculous noise when he did so.

Brash enough to stalk a Bat while
dressed up as a Robin.

Tim’s chest hurt, and he clenched
his teeth and set that aside too. It had been over a second. The kid was
pulling himself together, hands under chest, about to get up.

“Maybe go back to gymnastics class.”
He planted the butt of his staff on tar paper. “The position has been filled.”

The kid popped upright, onto his
knees, outrage written all over him.

Tim recognized the costume before
the person.

That was ridiculous, possibly, but
they were over a hundred feet apart, and the boy was wearing a mask, and he’d
studied and memorized the costume with much more attention than he had the
face.

My suit, he thought, a possessive clench going through him because
he’d labored over that design, him and Alfred, practical adjustments and
stylistic embellishments, everything it took to make a Robin that was his,
was Batman’s partner without trying to step into Jason’s place.

The green tights were especially
distinctive. In retrospect they looked a little garish, but considering what
they’d been replacing they’d been a pretty square choice.

“Yeah!” the Robin in his costume
said. “By me!”

And Tim did know the voice.

He didn’t believe it
instantly, but he listened to himself more carefully than he looked, and he’d
heard recordings often enough to compensate for the difference outside your
head.

He squinted. He opened his mouth,
slightly. Closed it again.

He wanted to say, this is a trick.
But who would bother with this kind of trick? A tolerable number of
enemies had some knowledge or suspicion that Red Robin had been the Robin
before the crazy stabby one, and most of the Justice League knew exactly who
Tim was. Most of them hadn’t met him at this age. The list of people with the knowledge
and capacity to do this was very short even before you looked for motive.
But why impersonate Tim to Tim? He of all people obviously knew it
wasn’t him.

The way their lives worked, a
prepubescent version of someone popping up and being endearingly childish might
very well be able to convince everyone he’d been de-aged, and that might
actually be a good dodge in some circumstances for getting in an infiltrator,
since being the wrong age could cover for a variety of errors that might ruin
an attempt at a more subtle replacement, and natural protectiveness would bias
adults in the ringer’s favor.

But it didn’t make sense to try that
against the party being replaced. And if you were going to use one of the
former Robins get close to Batman, you wouldn’t pick Tim.

Tim sharpened all his senses,
scouring the nearby roofs for any of the signature hints of hologram technology
or concealment devices. It was always possible the child himself was the entire
ambush, of course.

He wasn’t close enough to do much
ambushing, unless he pulled a gun, though who knew what was under the cape. The
kid had folded his arms now, so he could be palming practically anything.

On the other hand, he’d just fallen
flat on his face, but too much caution was usually better than too little.

“Who are you supposed to be?” The
boy was doing his best to sound authoritative. His best was pretty good,
considering he was about thirteen, but it gave Tim retroactive embarrassment
anyway. He remembered Shiva roasting him, on that ridiculous adventure they’d
wound up on when he was just starting out, for being a typical arrogant white
man. She’d been letting him off easy; she could have pointed out he was a
precocious little boy merely attempting to be a typical arrogant
white man.

He snorted softly. “Guess.”

The Robin’s masked eyes shuttled up
and down, stuck on the hawk’s-head insignia, and back up at the cowl.
“Batbird?”

Tim snorted again, this time trying
not to laugh.

The child’s mouth twitched, and he
moved froward a bit across the roof, enough that they could speak at a more
reasonable volume. “Seriously, though. Batman doesn’t have a lot of patience
for freelance vigilantes in his town.”

“He knows better than to try to stop
me.” It was a joke, but it was true, too.

Robin put his eyebrows up. He was a
really good mimic.

“You make it sound like I should’ve
heard of you,” he said, “but man, if I should have heard of you I would have
heard of you.”

“Why don’t you call Batman and ask?”
Tim said.

Robin scowled, suddenly. “You know I
can’t.”

“I do know,” Tim agreed. “But I’m
kind of surprised to hear you admit it.” If he was going to pretend to be Tim
to Tim in the first place, why stop?

“What’s the point in pretending I
haven’t noticed you’ve jammed my radio?”

And…that was even more surprising.

If he hadn’t been the spitting image
of Tim at that age, Red Robin would have taken this for a real child who
urgently wanted to be Robin and might have some actual talent. It sort of hurt.

“Like I said, go practice some
more,” he said. Aggravating someone into breaking character was a tried and
true method. “You can’t have a Robin who trips over his own feet.”

“I didn’t trip!”

“Mm-hm.”

That was the weird part, honestly.
Because Tim wasn’t egotistical enough to pretend he’d never fallen flat on his
face in his life. He was very aware he didn’t have Dick’s natural grace or
Jason’s ridiculous reflexes, or for that matter Damian’s weirdly acute
proprioception. Let alone Cass’ perfection of motion.

But he wasn’t a klutz, either, and
he’d snuck around Gotham spying on Batman and Robin without getting himself
noticed for a while without any formal stealth and maneuver training. A perfect
replication of himself in his first year or so as Robin shouldn’t have tripped
over itself like that. But otherwise he hadn’t noticed any flaws.

“I didn’t.” The tiny Tim Drake
narrowed masked eyes up at him. “Are you going to come clean or am I going to
have to beat some truth out of you?”

Red Robin couldn’t help finding this
funny. “I’d say I’d love to see you try it but you know what, I have a patrol
to finish.”

And just to see what the little
mystery did about it, he turned and sprinted toward the far end of his roof.

“Wait, no-!” The mystery kid
shouted, with such real alarm Tim glanced back over his shoulder as he went. In
time to see Robin pitch straight over the edge and into the ten-foot gap
between buildings, arms pinwheeling desperately.

It made him a sucker, he was aware,
but he dashed back anyway. Made it to the edge in time to see his tiny
doppelganger finish using a desperate combination of kick-flips back and forth across
the gap and his own telescoping bo staff to slow his descent enough to hit the
ground seventy feet down in an uninjured crouch.

He stayed there, seemingly gathering
his breath and affirming that he had actually survived, before standing up and
tipping his head back to aim another look at Red Robin on the edge of the
building above. “How are you doing that?” he demanded.

…Tim was starting to believe this
was not a nefarious infiltration scheme. At least, not one the kid knew about.

He threw out a grapple and dropped
down to join Robin on the ground. “You said I was blocking your comms,” he
said. “What did you mean?”

Robin studied him, trying to decide
whether to treat it as a serious question. “I tried to contact Batman after you
popped up. It didn’t go through.”

Hm. Experimentally, Tim engaged his
own comm. “Status?” he asked.

“Clear,” grunted Bruce in his ear.
It sounded like he was in the middle of a fistfight, though evidently not a
serious one, so Tim left him alone for now. The important thing was that he was
still there. He closed the comm line. Looked down at the boy, and his dubious
expression.

Of course, if this was time travel
he wouldn’t be able to get through to anybody. They updated their
encryptions regularly. They weren’t even using the same comm system anymore.

Tim asked, “What about Agent A?”

Robin shook his head. His posture
had changed, because Alfred’s code name wasn’t bandied around enough to be
known about much outside their own circles. Red Robin had just tagged himself
either an insider or a truly dedicated stalker, not just a random interloper on
the cape scene.

“Oracle?” It was Barbara’s night
off, he shouldn’t be able to reach her, but if anyone was impersonating
her to this little Robin it was possible they didn’t know that.

“Who are you?”

Red Robin planted the end of his
staff in the dirt, mirroring Robin’s stance without even having to make an
effort to imitate it, because that was still one of the most natural ways for
him to stand. He was more than a foot taller, and he’d filled out a little
more, but really, he hadn’t changed that much. Even with a cowl over his hair,
it wasn’t impossible to tell. “Do you really have to ask?”

Gazing up at him, Robin shook his
head very slightly—another person might have wondered whether this meant no,
you’re right, I don’t or no, I
don’t believe what you’re suggesting, but Tim knew it was both.

“How much did you notice?” Red Robin
asked. “I’m surprised you didn’t head straight back to the Cave when you
couldn’t connect.” At that age he’d still been anxiously, justifiably worried
about Bruce’s wellbeing, and concerned about making sure Bruce didn’t
have to worry about him, which hadn’t exactly made him careful but had
occasionally made him protectively clingy.

Not that keeping eyes on the person
he suspected of nefarious intent didn’t sound like him, too. He wouldn’t have
wanted to lose track of the suspect.

“Prove it.” That grip, that shift in
his weight—Robin was prepared to unleash the full extent of his abilities in
the attempt to neutralize him the second he decided he was a threat.

He still had that bad habit of
leading with his left foot even when it weakened the strike, because when
people weren’t expecting it, it gave him better odds of getting through their
guard. Not a bad tactic, but bad to fall back on every time. His gauntlets
weren’t optimized for gripping the staff yet, either. Tim knew exactly how to
disarm his little self in one move.

“Shiva didn’t teach you all there is
to know about staff work, you know,” Tim told himself. Both because she hadn’t
had time, within the scope of their training, and because she didn’t know it
all herself—it was hardly her specialty, as incredibly skilled as she was at
combat.

Of course this did not constitute
proof. It wasn’t widely known the third Robin had studied under Shiva, but it
was hardly a secure secret—Shiva herself could have told anybody, for one
thing.

He sighed.

“Before I gave Dick back the
pictures I stole from his album right before I became Robin,” he said, “I made
copies.”

Robin’s mouth twisted, and Tim kept
talking.

“I still thought it was going to be
a one-time thing then, stepping into my heroes’ lives to convince them to look
after each other with Jason gone. I wanted a souvenir. That was why I took them
at all, instead of just snooping to track him down, which was maybe wrong but
done with good intentions. I don’t have any good excuse for that part. It was
selfish.”

He’d always been selfish, he knew
that. Wanting his parents to change their lives and personalities to
accommodate him. Seizing the opportunity to live a childhood daydream, when he
realized his plan to get Dick to help Bruce through his grief wasn’t going to
work out even if they reconciled, and he didn’t know anybody else to ask.
Giving everything he had to being good enough as Robin because he couldn’t bear letting anyone down.
All that time trying to get Steph to stop risking her life in the field because
he’d blame himself if she got killed, and he’d encouraged her. Trying to clone
Kon just to have him back. Expecting Dick to forgive him for pressuring him
into becoming Batman, and be his partner. Selfish.

Even when he risked his life for
people he cared about, wasn’t he secretly hoping that if he proved himself
enough times he’d deserve to have them care just as much? Wasn’t it just a ploy
for attention, at heart?

He hated that childish, needy
self-centered core of him sometimes, especially the way no matter how
disciplined and logical and impartial he tried to be it wormed its way back in
and started affecting his decisionmaking, but here and now he found he couldn’t
hate the thirteen-year-old kid on the cusp of the true challenges of his life,
staring up at him. Couldn’t even hate that need in him.

It was okay, wasn’t it? For a child
to want to be taken care of? That was forgivable, wasn’t it. And seeing this
new-minted Robin from the outside, he was so clearly…just a child.

“You could have figured that out,”
said the little Robin, who had never told that to anyone. “The copies are with
the other stuff, under my bed.” Not exactly the Fort Knox of hiding
places, it was true.

“Do you think I did?”

The child Tim had a thinky face on,
lips pursed and dragged to one side. “…no,” he admitted at last.

“Okay,” Tim said, and then waited,
because he obviously wasn’t done.

“But, hey. Pop quiz time.” The Robin
with his voice was grinning, a wicked teasing thing that looked a lot goofier
but also a lot more charming than he’d always figured he did. “A few years
ago—my time, obviously—I used to sneak off into the attics at boarding school
for alone time sometimes. What did I do with the big stuffed great horned owl
somebody’d stored up there on top of a grandfather clock?”

Tim closed his eyes, longsuffering.
He wasn’t actually all that embarrassed. He wouldn’t even be embarrassed, really,
if people found out—he’d been ten, it was the kind of thing a ten year old did. But heaven forbid Damian learned. He’d been the kind of ten-year-old that
casually dismembered his enemies and spat in death’s eyes.

“I used to pretend it was Batman,”
he said. “I’d reenact scenes from action movies. Or imagine Batman was in
trouble and Robin couldn’t help, so I had to step in.” He’d felt bad about
those games, a few years later, when Jason really
couldn’t help. But not so bad he hadn’t fallen back on their premise when he’d
run out of other ideas, and Dick and Bruce’s comms went out in an exploding
building.

There had been a few times he’d seen
them in need of a hand in reality, even before what had happened to Jason,
during summers and other vacations back in Gotham, when he started following
them on patrol. He’d never stepped in like he had in his attic pretend games,
with a grin and a one-liner to bask in Batman’s gratitude, because he wasn’t stupid. He’d been entirely aware that
putting an eighty-pound eleven-year-old with a white belt in karate into the
middle of a fight would pretty much always
pose more of an obstacle to Batman and Robin than it would to anyone they were
fighting.

“What did I do that time I saw
Batman go down to Killer Croc while Robin was out of town?” he asked, a final
test.

Robin was grinning again. “In real
life? I threw a brick through a window.” That momentary distraction had been
all Bruce needed to turn the tables. “And what did I do that time Batman and
Robin both got caught trying to infiltrate Poison Ivy’s lair?”

Tim realized he was grinning back.
“I called the cops. And you’re in that suit now because Batman…”

“Needs a Robin,” finished the kid,
with all the grounded certainty of saying something he both knew and believed.

Red Robin put out a hand, and little
Robin in his softer glove took it. “Welcome to the future. Let’s go get to the
bottom of this.”

!!!!!

AHHHHHHHH!

I, I, I, WORDS. I need WORDS. It’s Tim-centric, it’s by YOU, it’s part of Till-Then, it, it, it is TOO GOOD Kieron! I want to run around flailing but Eldest isn’t in bed yet and I’d need to explain and that would be too much work. There is much hand-flapping happening, as I try to calm down enough to write this.

They ENJOY EACH OTHER! Tim needs to be with people who enjoy him. You threw in that HORRIBLE bit about how he thinks he’s selfish. I want to punch you for that – it is too in character and I hate it. But he was able to enjoy his other self, and be charmed by the younger version’s charm, and trade stories about Owl Adventures. I am so HAPPY.