Work Text:
Dick could feel a headache forming. “Tell me again what your name was?” he asked.
The girl who was his current source of stress couldn’t have been much older than thirteen. Well off, judging by the quality of her clothes, but dirty. Greasy black hair was pulled back in a messy braid. Muddy jeans and sneakers. A look of urgency in gray blue eyes. An overly-full backpack sitting next to her that looked like it belonged more with a jungle expedition than a school kid. Under normal circumstances, he’d assume that she was a runaway. After the mess of her sticking her nose in his investigation, he was pretty sure whatever was going on, normal wasn’t it.
The girl shook her head. “That’s not important.” She shoved a spiral-bound notebook at him. It had TOP SECRET written on the front of it in permanent marker. “Batman needs you.”
That would’ve been a bigger red flag if Dick hadn’t already opened the notebook to find it full of photographs, printed out and pasted in. They were all of Batman. Batman fighting a man with sword. Batman falling off the dam. Batman walking towards the Batmobile, obviously injured. He flipped through the pages quicker and quicker. There were more pictures, newspaper clippings going back weeks. The obituary of Jason Todd, carefully centered on a page all of it’s own. “My God,” he said under his breath, “Where did you get all this?”
The name on her birth certificate was Timothy Jacqueline Drake, but the only person who ever called her that was her mother. Everyone else — her father, her teachers, the endless parade of nurses and nannies — they just called her Timmi. The official story was tidy little thing involving a botched ultrasound and a dead great-grandfather that was trotted out at formal events and the few extended family gatherings that the Drakes actually attended.
Unofficially, well. No one ever Timmi the real story. She had to piece it together from dusty old documents hidden in the corner of Janet’s study, from fragments of conversation, from arguments and old stories. As best she could figure, it went down like this:
Back at Janet’s first job, the one at the university in California that she never talked about, she’d received the news that her application for tenure had been denied shortly before going into labor and spent the next 15 hours in pain and angry about it. There were official reasons given, vague platitudes, but she knew the real reason was her pregnancy, was the fact that she was a woman that spoke her mind and didn’t take the bullshit her older male colleagues tried to throw her way. The end result was that Janet looked at the little, screaming red bundle in her arms and decided that her daughter’s name wasn’t going to be Angela like they’d planned, it was going to be Timothy.
“If you have a boy’s name, they have to judge you to your face, they can’t just dismiss you out hand,” Janet had said once when she’d had a little too much to drink.
“You know how your mother gets,” Jack had said with a shake of his head when Timmi asked. “It’s easier just to humor her when she gets an idea in her head like that.
Timmi didn’t remember California. Shortly after she was born, Janet got a new job at a private university in New Jersey and they moved across the country to just outside Gotham. Sometimes she wondered what life would’ve been like if Janet had gotten tenure and she’d grown up as a girl named Angela in California. If she’d never heard of Gotham or the Batman.
Timmi had just turned thirteen when Robin died. Well, to be more specific, she had just turned thirteen and people online knew that something about Batman had changed. There were more hospital reports associated with him; fewer flashes of bright color by his side. At school, the whispered stories turned back to the monstrous and macabre. If you knew what you were looking for, and Timmi did, then it wasn’t hard to see what was going on. There was an obituary for Jason Todd in the paper. Robin was dead and Batman was taking that out on the world.
From there, all she could do was watch as the situation grew progressively worse and worse. Batman was becoming too violent. The batsignal hadn’t been lit in weeks. Online, the rumors were that the GCPD was going to go back to considering him a wanted criminal again if nothing changed. If nothing changed, then there would be no more Batman. If nothing changed, then all of the work he’d put into making Gotham better and safer would go down the drain. Timmi chewed on the end of her braid as she read post after post and news article after news article. It was a problem. A big problem.
“ And what are you going to do about it?” echoed Janet’s voice in her head.
The first step: Write down everything she knew.
Timmi pulled out a fresh notebook. After a moment’s deliberation, she wrote “TOP SECRET” in big letters on the cover before opening it.
The Problem:
- Robin is dead.
- Without Robin, Batman doesn’t have anyone to keep him from going too far.
- Gotham needs Batman.
- If Batman doesn’t stop, the police will arrest him and he won’t be able to help Gotham anymore.
Timmi chewed on her pen and read over the list again before adding one last bullet point:
- Nobody knows whats going on except me, and Batman probably.
Written down, everything seemed clearer.
Conclusion:
- Batman needs a Robin.
- I need to find Batman a new Robin
Course of action set, she turned to a new page in her notebook and began to write out what she dubbed “The Plan.” At it’s heart, it was simple. Batman needed a Robin. There happened to be a perfectly good ex-Robin out there who could come back and do his job again. All she needed to do was convince him. To do that she’d need to track him down and she’d need evidence.
There was a holiday coming up at the boarding school. It was easy to tell the school that she’d be spending it at home and to tell her parents that she’d be spending it at school. Timmi took a taxi down to the house and dug up the well-loved camera her parents had gotten her for her birthday a few years ago, all the money in her emergency stash, some practical clothes and shoes, a water bottle, and some snacks. She packed it all up one of Janet’s old expedition backpacks to capture the right sense of adventure, turned off all the lights behind her, got on her bike and set out on the most important mission of her life.
Timmi was ten when she figured out the Batman’s secret identity. There was actual footage of him by that point, though a stubborn half of the population was still convinced that he was some sort of elaborate scam put together by the tabloids. Timmi had always believed; she’d seen him with her own two eyes. That was how she figured it out in the end, that first meeting.
She’d been working on homework with the news on in the background. Jack and Janet were off traveling again — she was pretty sure they were somewhere in China this time — and her current nanny was talking with her boyfriend on the phone and not paying attention to the fact that Timmi had the TV turned to one of the shadier news channels (the legitimate ones still thought themselves above reporting on urban legends like the Batman). And then, right there on the screen, there was footage of Batman and Robin, taken from a shakey cellphone. Batman threw a punch, Robin flipped into the air, and Timmi found that she couldn’t look away as she traced the familiar arc he took back down to the ground.
Later, she’d think that she had to have been ten to come to the conclusion she had. Old enough to believe that she could figure out anything and young enough to not question the objective absurdity of her conclusions. At the time, everything seemed clear as day. Timmi knew the somersault Robin had just done. She knew that there were only three people in the world who could do it and that two of them were dead. (Another fact she might have questioned if she’d been older; every ringmaster wants to make out their act to be the best in the world.) Therefore, Robin had to be the third: Dick Grayson. And if Dick Grayson was Robin, that meant that Bruce Wayne had to be Batman.
There was more to it than just that of course. She’d learned about science in school, about the need to back up every conclusion with heaps of evidence. She dug deeper and the facts still lined up: holes in the stories Bruce Wayne shared with the press, the overlap between times when Bruce left Gotham and the times when Batman did, the neat coordination between Batman and the Wayne Foundation in their mission to improve Gotham. The conclusion seemed obvious and indisputable.
(Maybe if Jason had never died, if Timmi had never become Robin and had the knowledge confirmed in such an undeniable way, she would’ve outgrown that conclusion. Caught a case of common sense as an adult and realized that it was absurd to think that a millionaire notorious for being an idiot ran around the city at night dressed as a bat.)
There was someone crying in the girl’s bathroom. Timmi followed the noise to the handicap stall at the back of the room.
" Um, are you okay in there?” Timmi asked, knocking on the stall door.
“I’m fine.” Came the sniffled response. “Go away.”
“Are you sure?” Timmi asked, poking her head under the door. “You look upset.”
The girl glared at her with teary eyes. She was sitting on the floor with her back to the wall and her knees pulled up to her chest. “I said, go away!”
Timmi didn’t know her. She didn’t look that much older than she was, but she was wearing the high school uniform instead of the middle school one that Timmi was, so she was probably a freshman, just a year ahead of her.
“Do you have a problem?” Timmi asked, crawling a couple steps closer. “I’m good at solving problems.” Janet said that solving problems was one of the essential life skills that any young lady should have, so she’d had a lot of practice with it, just like she’d had with research and rhetoric and not letting other people walk all over you.
The other girl sniffed again. “It’s not the sort of problem you can solve.”
Timmi shrugged and then winced as she banged her shoulder against the stall door. “Maybe. You could tell me about it. Maybe you just need a another point of view.” She crawled the rest of the way into the stall and sat down with her back to the door.
“Fine, I was supposed to go visit my brother in Philadelphia tomorrow. But his car broke down and now I don’t have any way to get there.”
“Oh, is that all?”
The other girl glared at her. “I was really looking forward to seeing my brother! And now I can’t!” She started to cry again.
And, oh no, that wasn’t what Timmi had meant to do. “Sorry!” she said quickly. “I mean, that’s definitely frustrating but it’s really isn’t that hard of a problem to solve? You can just take a bus or something.”
“On my own?”
Timmi shrugged. “I do it all the time in Gotham. It can’t be that much harder to use them to get from one city to another.”
" I don’t know. I’ve never traveled anywhere on my own before.” The other girl sounded hesitant.
“I could come with you.”
“Really?”
“I’m not doing anything else this weekend.”
“Are you sure this is a good idea?” the other girl asked, she’d stopped crying though and she was looking at Timmi with interest.
Timmi grinned. “What could go wrong. My name’s Timmi by the way.”
“Isn’t that a boys name?”
Timmi shrugged. “It’s my name.”
“Oh. My names Lisa. How are we going to to do this?”
Timmi thought for a moment. “We’ve got to get tickets, so we should probably go to the library. We can use their computers.”
She stood up; Lisa did as well. The stall suddenly felt much more cramped than in had a few seconds ago.
Lisa rubbed at her eyes one last time. “Okay, let’s go.”
There was a bus that went from the boarding school to Crowne University for the students who went home to Gotham for the weekend. It wasn’t that hard for Timmi to talk her and Lisa’s way on it. From there, they just took a shuttle from the university to the Gotham greyhound station, a bus from the Gotham greyhound to the one in Philadelphia, and a local bus to get to Lisa’s brother’s apartment.
They got in trouble of course. Lisa’s brother called the school and there was the whole mess of what to do with Timmi and how to get them back that neither of them had really thought about when they first set out. Timmi couldn’t ever quite bring herself to feel guilty about it though, not after seeing the grins on both Lisa and her brother’s faces after things had calmed down a little.
The first step was collecting evidence. If Dick Grayson hadn’t come back to Gotham yet, then that probably meant that he didn’t know just how bad Batman had gotten. And if he didn’t know, then that mean that Timmi would need to show. It was a good thing that she liked photography.
Tracking down Batman wasn’t as hard as Timmi was afraid it would be. The Batwatch boards pointed her the right direction and after that, she just needed to follow the trail of violence. She caught up with him on the second night she was out, watching as he fought with none of the elegance she knew he possessed. The man in the cowl wasn’t the dark shadow who’d captured her imagination, the skilled fighter whom a younger, more foolish version of herself was convinced was ex-ninja. He was just a man hitting something over and over again until it stopped moving. He didn’t care about the damage he took or the broken bodies he left behind. Timmi took photo after photo, trying to ignore the way that the sights made her stomach turn. At the rate Batman was fighting, he was going to get himself killed. The thought caught Timmi off guard. Batman had never quite seemed to be mortal before.
She had the pictures developed at a drugstore the next morning and carefully pasted them between maps, newspaper articles, and printed out screenshots of the Batwatch forms in what she’d mentally dubbed her Batman notebook. It was a little thrilling to see it all come together. She only wished that the picture painted wasn’t quite so grim.
“Step one, complete,” Timmi whispered as she took one last look at the pictures before closing the notebook and carefully putting it back in the batpack. “Step two, find Dick.” She got up. Her bus was leaving soon.
At eight, Timmi discovered this internet and with it a whole new wealth of Batman knowledge. She’d always been a little bit obsessed with the Batman. When she was young, she pestered her nurses and nannies for stories about Batman before bed instead of any of the age-appropriate books on her shelf. That didn’t mean they actually told her stories; especially if her nightmares had been bad, most of the nannies were of the opinion that he wasn’t an appropriate subject to tell young children about.
Sometimes though, they’d relent and tell stories in soft voices of a demon in black with glowing eyes and a quest for vengeance. No one had ever met the Bat in person, but everyone had a distant cousin, a friend, an aunt’s butcher’s brother who’d been saved by him (or beaten down by him as the case may be, but those stories weren’t considered approriate for Timmi’s young ears.)
Later, she swapped stories with kids on the playground at recess, listening with rapt attention as one kid claimed that he had it on the highest authority that Batman was an alien from Mars and the Martian Manhunter’s estranged twin brother. Then another kid would say, no, that wasn’t it. She knew that Batman was a ghost and if you stood in front of a mirror in the middle of the night, lit a candle, and said “Batman” three times, he’d appear and steal you away to the cave he’d died in. Timmi almost tried doing just that, but her nanny noticed her trying to smuggle a candle and match into the bathroom and she never got the chance.
And then came the internet and she discovered that everything she’d though she’d known was wrong. Timmi had been so foolish as a child. Batman wasn’t a ghost or an alien, he was the government’s failed attempt at creating a super-solider. He’d fled to Gotham because it was the only city corrupt enough for him to hid in. She watched with rapt attention as people had fierce arguments over whether he was an ex-marine or an ex-green beret. Personally, she thought they were both wrong; Batman was clearly ex-ninja.
The spring before Timmi turned seven was the last semester Janet spent working for Crowne University. Back then, Timmi would sit with her back to Janet’s desk, trying and failing to read books high above her reading level, while Janet planned lessons, graded papers, and worked on her research.
“Timothy,” she said one long Sunday afternoon. “I think it’s about time we took a break.”
Timmi looked up from the book on Egyptology she was trying to read. It was by a French scholar and not even written in English so she was spending most of her energy carefully examining the black and white pictures of crumbling tombs and the shrunken, wrinkled figures of mummies. “Okay,” she said, and carefully set the book down before following Janet out the kitchen.
Janet poured them each a cup of tea, her own into a worn, handcrafted mug that she’d brought back from a dig in South America, and Timmi’s into one of the beautiful old teacups she’d inherited from her great grandmother.
Timmi liked drinking tea. She liked copying Janet’s posture, the way she sat tall and took long, deliberate sips. She liked staring at the intricate flowers painted on the bottom of the cup, the way they became clearer and clearer the longer she drank. She didn’t particularly like the taste, but that just came with drinking a real, grown-up drink.
Janet stared at the steam wafting up from her cup while Timmmi took a careful sip, her pinky finger sticking out in a vague idea of drinking tea in the proper way.
Finally, Janet took a long drink and, setting the mug down, she sighed. “Timothy,” she said. “The world will try to chew you up and spit you out.”
“Huh?”
Janet just kept talking as if Timmi hadn’t said anything at all. “Everyone wants something from you. Everyone’s trying to use you. The only person you ever rely on to get things done is yourself.”
“But what about Batman?” Timmi asked because at six and half, her Batman obsession was in full swing. “Batman helps people.”
“Batman’s an urban legend,” Janet said because she’d erased every part of the disastrous night at the circus from her brain and at the age of 45, she was too old to believe in a man who dressed up as a bat and fought crime. “Besides, Batman won’t help you when you do all the work and your coworkers take all the credit. Batman won’t make people respect you. He won’t stop people from whispering behind your back.”
“Oh,” Timmi said, still privately believing that batman could do anything.
“Women need fight for every inch of respect they get.” Janet sounded tired. “Do you know what that means?”
“I’ve got to be a ninja?” Jack had recently introduced Timmi to the wonderful world of Jackie Chan movies. Personally, she thought that Batman could beat Jackie Chan, but he was still cool. And she was pretty sure that Janet would agree that ninjas were real, even if she didn’t think Batman was.
Janet smiled, but it didn’t feel like a real smile. “It means that there will always be people trying to stop you. One day you’ll succeed where I’ve failed and that means that you’ll need to be stronger than I am. Smarter than I am. Better than I am.”
Timmi gave her best serious, grown-up nod. “Like Jackie Chan.”
Janet snorted. “You’ll understand one day.”
That summer, Janet learned that she’d been passed over for tenure again, this time in favor of a male colleague with an old Gotham name and that was the end of those peaceful days sitting together in her office. She began traveling with Jack on his business trips and sometimes, when they were gone, Timmi would sneak into the locked office, pull out a book, and try to read, but it was never the same.
In the end, the decision to become Robin was made with the same desperate calculation that drove Timmi to track down Batman and Dick Grayson in the first place.
The problem:
- Batman and Nightwing had left earlier that night
- It was 2 am and the only thing they’d heard from either of them had been an aborted homing signal from Nightwing
- They’d been going up against Two Face, not some common criminal; they could be in trouble or hurt or something
Conclusion:
- The suit she’d tried to shove on Dick earlier was still there
- Batman needed a Robin
The costume fit poorly: too tight in some spots and too loose in others. Timmi didn’t yet have the curves that some of the girls in her grade did, but the suit was still tailored to fit a fifteen year-old boy, not a thirteen year-old girl. She redid her braid, pinning it up with Alfred’s help. She would never pass as Dick or Jason if anyone got a good look at her, but in the middle of the night, it might just do the trick.
Alfred clearly didn’t approve of what she was about to do, but he was stopping her either so, on one level at least, he had to realize she was doing what necessary. He drove out to Batman and Nightwing’s last known location in a beatup old car tucked away in the back of the Batcave.
“Are you sure you want to be doing this?” Alfred asked as he parked the car by the side of the road.
“Batman needs a Robin,” she said. “It doesn’t have to be me, but if Dick won’t become Robin again, someone has to!”
“God willing, this doesn’t end with another grave,” Alfred muttered under his breath, but he stayed parked while Timmi put on the mask.
Timmi’s heart was pounding in her chest. She felt more nervous than she’d ever felt in her entire life but she had to do this. So she took a deep breath. She took a second to let the unfamiliar weight of the mask settle on her face and then she wrapped herself in the symbol that was Robin and steeped out of the car.
The decision to become Robin in earnest was made with adrenaline still rushing through her veins. Timmi felt giddy from the lack of sleep, from the fact that she had helped Batman to take down Two Face, from Dick Grayson thinking that she’d done a good job.
So when Bruce Wayne looked down at her and told her that he was willing to give this new Batman and Robin thing a try, of course she said yes. Was there really any other choice to make?
When Timmi was four, she watched the Flying Graysons fall to their death. It was the earliest memory she had: the fall, the sickening crunch, the stillness of their bodies on the ground. She watched Batman swoop down from the wings. Though she didn't know it at the time, this would set the course for her entire life. Death, the Batman, and her. The three would always be inextricably linked.