Chapter Text
“Another false alarm”
The terse words spoken in a calm tone indicated that Oracle was trying to stay professional, but Jason could tell that Babs was one hot minute away from raining hellfire down on B for diverting most of team Bat’s resources this week to a wild goose chase.
“Right there with you, Barbie” he thought as he shifted his weight to arc his motorcycle through a sharp turn, now speeding away from the latest rally point since the call in had once again turned out to be a dud.
He was pissed off enough by this latest example of B being a catastrophe minded bastard that he could feel the green kick up, eager to have a chance to get out and cause trouble. He kept his cool because this was not his first rodeo with the old man’s paranoia,but even with his iron fisted control, the Gotham street lights around him were buzzing with sparks of neon emerald.
The problem was that the JLA had just had big showdown with the Invaloids, who turned out to be a bunch of dimension chomping parasites that had their stomachs set on munching their way through the reality that Earth and about a billion other planets in their universe called home. Of course, the day was saved by Big Blue and his backup band, but some bright spark at Star Labs had thought it a good idea to give the public a list of all possible after effects that could spring up after the dimension eaters were sent packing.
Now the internet was filled with panicked accounts of houses caught in gravitational shifts and lost pets being sucked into quantum black holes, most of which had a zero chance of being a real situation. The official word from Star Labs was that almost all of the effects would be itty-bitty and only register on the quantum level. So there was no need for the peeps on the street to be up on the latest fluctuations in micro-gravity but the media assholes had seen a way to keep eyeballs locked on them and had run wild with the end of the world predictions.
Police and first responders had caught the full brunt of the hysteria and of course, the old man hadn’t wanted to risk even a small chance of missing a real threat in their own backyard. It was the third 24 hours span of an All Bats On Deck sitch which had most of them shadowing the GPD response units in rotating shifts and so far they had had zero instances of dimensional hijinks.
The thought of all of those wasted hours snapped the last of Jason’s patience with the whole charade.
“Fuck this” he snarled over the com “B, I don’t care how big a bitch fit you throw tomorrow, I’m not answering the call. I’ve got better places to be than watching Montoya’s people tell every asshole with an internet connection that the sky’s not falling.”
There was a moment of silence and then a heavy sigh on the com was quickly overridden with laughter from several sources until his brother’s voice broke through the fits of giggles.
“Oh my god, why did you last this long? Little Wing, you lost me $150”.
Even though he wanted to stay scowling, the hilarity over the com caused Jason’s lips to curve into a reluctant smile and he couldn’t keep his voice from losing its edge as he responded.
“What the shit is this now? I thought the pool was on which two bit crime lord would be the first to tell HolyBat that his stupid leg pouches look dumb as hell?”
Renewed laughter overrode Azrael’s petulant response but Batwoman had no problem being heard.
“We’re bats, muthafucker. There are bets within bets, that’s how we roll.”
Under his motorcycle helmet, Jason rolled his eyes.
“ First, fuck off Batwoman, you are nowhere near cool enough to get away with saying shit like that and second, fuck off Dickwing for being a disloyal d-bag and betting on your own brother ”
The smug grin in Nightwing’s voice was easy to detect.
“No, see, fuck off is what you should have said to B at the start of yesterday’s patrol. Then I would have won the pot and gracious winner that I am, I would have used my riches to bring a buttload of ice cream to the next training session ”
To Jason’s surprise, Steph’s indignant voice broke through the chatter.
“Wait, we could have had an ice cream party and you cost me $10? Boo, Red Robin, you suck!”
“Did you assholes let the baby squad buy in on this shakedown? And what the hell are you doing up and on the coms, kiddo? It’s a school night”
Steph’s scoff was way too loud in his ear and he shook his head in annoyance.
“Sorry jerk face, I’m 17, not 7. I can stay up as late as I want and if patrol is so boring, tomorrow I can take your place.”
It was Jason’s turn to sound scornful.
“Nice try, Princess Powerpuff, but no baby bats on the street until they’re 18, them’s the rules”
“Rules which you guys just totally made up”
Always up for a good rant, Jason was about to launch into reasons 1 through 100 of why you don’t want kids, especially non-Meta kids, to be fighting crime using his own history as bona fides when B finally couldn’t resist his urge to be a buzzkill any longer.
“No more chatter, we need the line open.”
His authority silenced the rabble for a good 15 seconds and then Jason was happy to hear that he wasn’t the only asshole getting booed that night.
When the derision finally died down, Oracle tried to be the voice of reason.
“B, please just let this go. Cyborg’s new monitoring system will be able to scan for any actual large scale events on the planet even if they happened days ago. It’s practically ready to go right now, I’m just running diagnostics and waiting for the rest of the network to sign on.”
Of course, the big Bat’s only reply was a skeptical grunt.
“Hmph”
That sound must have been Dickwing’s breaking point because his voice shifted away from good humor and into irritation.
“Seriously, come on B! The chances of anything happening here in Gotham are less than one in five million and those odds keep getting smaller every day. Come ooonnnnnnn….”
Jason gave a mental groan because he knew that N could keep up the whine for the rest of the night. He was debating if the hell he would catch by turning off his com was worth it when B finally let out another long-suffering sigh and responded.
“Fine. Oracle cancel the alert and tell the day shift to stand down. Let me know the moment the monitoring program is up and running. Everyone else can call it a night.”
Cheers came over the coms like B wasn’t the sole reason they had been spinning their wheels with nothing to show for it for three whole days and Jason scoffed loudly.
“Nice to see that not even Daddybat’s fat head can take N’s incessant nagging. Later losers, don’t try to call me before 8:00 tomorrow night unless you want to catch my fist with your face”
He decisively clicked off the com and switched his helmet’s HUD from Oracle’s display to a map that could track down his favorite late night food truck. A quick snack and then he could start catching up with what he had missed while tilting at the old man’s windmills.
Dawn was breaking as Jason was chatting with Lacey and the other girls on the corner of 5th when he heard the distinctive click which meant that Oracle was overriding his com’s settings.
“Are you there, Red Robin?”
Jason would have sighed if it didn’t mean that Oracle would tease him about sounding like B. He moved a few feet away from the women and responded.
“Yeah, yeah, O, I’m here. There better be a good reason for why you’re squawking in my ear. It’s deep in the ass crack of the morning and I need to catch some sleep at some point”
“So, you know how we like to pretend that the Bat isn’t always right?”
Jason threw back his head and raised his arms to the sky in despair before pounding his fists against his helmet and groaning in frustration. His dramatics caught the attention of the girls and at their questioning looks, he stopped and waved an explanatory hand at his ear, miming a phone call and then wildly swirling his finger at the side of his head to show how bugfuck crazy his family could make him.
Lacey raised an unimpressed eyebrow in response and turned away, which served as a signal to the rest of the group to break up and wander off. Waving goodbye, Jason started his motorcycle, lowered the visor on his helmet, and pushed away from the corner, feedback from the Pit turning the early rays of the sun into an acidic lime glow on the horizon
“Goddammit, this is going to make that asshole smug for days. Fuck! Fuck! Fuck!”
Digging deep into his soul for patience, Jason took a deep breath and pushed the green back into hiding.
“Why the hell are you even up and monitoring the chatter at this hour anyway?”
Oracle’s smooth, modulated delivery did nothing to hide the rueful nature of her reply.
“There might have been a minor, infinitesimal issue with the new monitoring system identified by the diagnostics I ran earlier. So possibly I had the police bands running in the background while I was texting Cyborg to discover why, hypothetically, his program throws up a blue screen of death whenever it runs at more than 20% of capacity. ”
Jason refused to think about how this could mean that the old man would reinstate the All Hands. That was tomorrow night’s problem to deal with. He focused on the road in front of him and got his head back in the game.
“Fine, tell me where and what.”
“Well the good news is that the where is five minutes from your current location”
Oracle took control of his helmet’s display and animated arrows appeared on the road, guiding his motorcycle to take a turn and head deeper into Park Row.
“So what’s the bad?”
Oracle hesitated for a moment and then replied
“It might not be bad, but from the reports we’re getting from eyewitnesses, there’s enough pyrotechnics involved that this could be a real Class Six event. It’s near the end of a shift for the GDP so they are going to be slow to respond. I’ve got B and N on route to you for backup. They will meet you at the site in thirty.”
Star Labs had created a tidy little classification system to categorize the potential intra-dimensional clusterfucks expected in the wake of the Invaloids’s defeat. Classes One through Four tracked micro events while classes Five and Six described possible large-scale occurrences.
Speeding through the deserted streets, Jason’s mind ran through the scenarios he had memorized during B’s briefing. Class Sixes were at the top of the scale in terms of potential impact and so far there had only been fifteen of them reported across the planet. The effects of Class Sixes could vary wildly. There was half of a city in Malaysia where anything within its borders weighed seven pounds less than in the outside world, while in Spain, a Class Six had caused a building’s worth of people to vanish for over twelve hours before reappearing unharmed and unaware of their missing status.
It was shit like that, combined with the media’s list of exaggerated doomsday scenarios that was fueling Gotham’s current hysterical frenzy, but more often than not Class Sixes had turned out to be great big light shows that sparked up and faded away within an hour. Sometimes it was just a bunch of pretty lights going incandescent in an empty space and sometimes when the lights died out, there was a person left behind.
Bruce had demanded that everyone watch the JLA press event where Star Labs had broken down what caused the people to appear but Jason had only listened with half an ear. It had something to do with an excess of dimensional energy as a result of the fight with the Invaloids and vacuums and the infinite number of probable universes that were constantly passing by their own universe. Blah, blah, blah. Jason didn’t really care about the causes, what mattered was the upshot, which in this case meant that every so often, a person who was dead in his universe but alive in a passing probability, would spontaneously be duplicated and brought over to his world by the Class Six event.
Everything about them, down to what they were wearing, would be an exact match to the version of their selves in that alternate universe, but now, without warning, these people were suddenly dumped into a brand new existence.
Somebody somewhere had started calling the displaced alternates the Fallen and that name had stuck. There was no rhyme or reason for who the Fallen might be and it didn’t seem to matter when they had died. So far a woman who had died in the 1970s had the record for being the oldest person brought over, while last night’s briefing had included a report on an alternative version of a kid who had died less than five months ago appearing at his family’s home
When a Class Six turned out to be a Fallen event, the placement of the lights matched the location of the alternate self in the other universe at the moment of the duplication. Having a Class Six pop up in Gotham’s inner city already seemed like an invitation for disaster, and if a Fallen was involved … Jason tried not to think about any of the wackjobs who could potentially be respawned in Crime Alley. It would just be Gotham’s luck if the fucking Joker came back.
His uneasiness had transformed to leaden dread by the time he realized where he was being herded by Oracle’s helpful little navigational icons.
The ruined husk of The Monarch Theatre loomed in front of him, the plaster remnants of the giant laughing and crying masks above the entrance serving as shadowy spectators to his arrival. Despite its decay, the old building held its secrets tight, only revealing the illumination of the Class Six through the gaping holes where the lobby doors once stood.
Jason had looked up the history of the place once and right before its abandonment, the Monarch had been a renovated movie palace meant to serve as the keystone in an effort to revitalize Park Row.
But then Thomas and Martha Wayne had been murdered in front of their son just a few feet away from the theater and all efforts to help the neighborhood had dried up and blown away. The Monarch had gone bust and been abandoned by it’s owners, becoming just another condemned building in Crime Alley that had trouble keeping the squatters out.
Jason had squatted there once himself, back when he had been a homeless kid trying to survive. It was where he had been living the night he saw the ostentatious monstrosity known as the Batmobile and desperately hungry, had decided to try for the hubcaps.
“Do you have eyes on the event?”
Oracle’s calm request broke through his thoughts and he shook off the distraction, refocusing on the situation at hand.
“Not quite, it’s inside the building. Holy shit, O, a little warning would have been appreciated. Tell me that you’ve given B a heads up.”
Batman’s voice rumbled in his ear
“O has updated me. Red Robin stay clear until we can get there”
Bruce’s tone of absolute authority grated against Jason's last nerve as deep-seated resentment drowned out any hesitation he felt about entering the Monarch alone.
For fuck’s sake, why did it always come back to this? The one lesson Bruce should have taken away from the complete shitshow that had been Jason’s teenage rebellion was that Jason would never be a good little soldier waiting to be ordered around.
“Wow, Big Bat, I didn’t think I’d have a chance to say fuck off to you twice in one night. We don’t know how long the fireworks have been going off. There could be a Fallen popping out any moment and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let some freak show get away because you have to be the one calling all the shots.”
“Guys, can we not do this? “
N sounded exhausted over the com and if Jason hadn’t had a front-row seat to Golden Boy’s own epic battle to get clear of the Bat’s shadow he might have felt bad for dragging him into the drama now.
He was dismounting the bike when B’s response caught him by surprise.
“Fine. Red Robin, use your best judgment to assess the situation. We’ll be there in twenty”
Looked like the old Bat could learn new tricks after all, or maybe he was as dog-tired as Jason and had decided it wasn’t worth the fight.
Either way, Jason took the win and responded as if he had not been about to beat B’s head in with another verbal smackdown.
“Roger that, I’m going in now”
Jason kept the helmet on as he quickly made his way over the keep-away fence that encircled the building, using the visor as protection against the glare of the Class Six’s unearthly light. He directed a small trickle of the green to flow to his right hand, fueling the sudden appearance of one of the All-Blades, while his left hand unclipped a high-powered flashlight from his belt, ready to be activated as soon as the lights died down.
The All-Blade hissed and spat reddish sparks into the air, humming with power as Jason walked through the lobby and into the cavernous auditorium. The theater was lit up with a white radiance that would have been blinding without the protection of the helmet and it only grew brighter as he made his way down one of the aisles. He reached the front row of seats and warily considered the stairs that lead to the narrow stage in front of the dilapidated movie screen. The Class Six was focused on the stage and it was clear by now that it was going to be spitting out a Fallen as soon as the light show ended.
He was on the second step when the switch flipped and the theater was plunged back into darkness. Jason activated his flashlight and hustled up the remaining stairs, the beam from his light hitting a swaying figure on the far left of the stage.
As the light played over the figure, Jason saw that the Fallen was male, shirtless, skinny, and young, probably in his mid-teens, The guy was obviously affected by something more than the stress of the transition but within seconds he had thrown up one arm to shield against the light while the other hand palmed something from the pocket of his pants. Lighting quick, he threw whatever was in his hand at the flashlight, knocking it from Jason’s grip.
Jason’ didn’t bother to go after the light as the reddish, hazy glow from the All Blade provided enough illumination for Jason to keep eyes on the kid’s position. The flashlight had landed facing the movie screen, so it gave no clues to the location of the exit, effectively trapping the kid at his current spot.
The kid was breathing rapidly, potentially hyperventilating, so Jason tried to sound as reassuring as possible.
“Hey, knock it off with the projectiles and listen. I know you’re confused and scared because everything around you just blipped out and now you’re someplace unfamiliar, but no one wants to hurt you. Just chill for a moment and I can catch you up on what’s happening”
Belatedly, it occurred to Jason that the giant flaming sword held ready in his hand might have undercut the sincerity of his message, so he wasn’t surprised when, instead of getting an answer, he was hit with a frenzied attack. Deftly darting in and out of reach of Jason’s sword, the kid launched a flurry of hits and kicks aimed at pushing Jason off balance for a potential stumble to the floor so that he could reach the flashlight. It was a skilled offense that might have worked if Jason didn’t have the height and weight advantage plus a whole heaping of League training. Despite his obvious desperation, the kid avoided any tactics that could lead to permanent injury, even though those were the only moves that had a chance of turning the fight in his favor.
Jason realized that he needed to get the kid out of attack mode before he could try reasoning with him again. Luckily, in addition to being a completely badass night light, the All-Blade came in handy when a fast KO was needed.
Dodging a leg aimed to wrap around his knee, Jason waited until he saw his chance. The kid was reaching the limits of his endurance and the speed of his assault slowed a fraction. It was enough of an opening for Jason to lunge his sword forward and into the kid’s shoulder, the force of the hit taking him off his feet and landing him face-up on the ground. The blade ran straight through the shoulder and anchored into the floor, not causing any harm but effectively pinning the kid in place.
Jason grabbed the light and pulled the casing up, transforming the sharp beam of the flashlight into the broader glow of a lantern. He turned back and saw that being trapped by the All-Blade was barreling the kid straight toward a full-blown panic attack.
Jason yanked off his helmet and made calming motions with his hand, trying to be as reassuring as possible.
“Hey, hey, kid calm down. It’s ok, the blade won’t hurt you, I’m just trying to get a word in edgewise here, I don’t want to fight.”
The kid wasn’t tracking Jason at all, writhing on the ground and drumming his feet into the floor in a desperate attempt to get free of the All-Blade. The struggle reminded Jason of the last gasp of a landed fish drowning in air and sickened by the comparison he grabbed the sword and pulled it from the floor.
The kid immediately scrambled back a few feet, closer to the shadows but not out of range of the light from the lantern. It was obvious that if he had the juice, he would have been up and out in a hot minute but he seem to be completely out of gas, to the point that even staying awake looked like a losing battle.
The com in his ear activated and for once, the rock solid confidence in B’s voice was reassuring rather than making Jason want to punch things.
“Red Robin, we’re here. What’s your position?”
Instead of answering, Jason kept his attention on the kid and tapped his locator so that it would give a real time ping of his location.
He cut off the flow to the sword, making it vanish as he edged closer, keeping his body language soft and open to show he wasn’t going to be a threat. To his relief, the kid seemed to relax ever so slightly.
“That’s it, just keep breathing nice and slow. Let’s just take a moment to relax. I have some friends coming and we’re going to get you to a safe place. I know you have questions and we’ll be able to answer them there.”
Jason slowly edged closer until he could get a clear look at the kid. The sharp corners of his collarbone and ribs showed that he had been living lean for way too long, but it was the fuckload amount of scars that truly freaked Jason out. What kind of nightmare had this kid called home?
The kid raised his head to meet his eyes and cold shock flooded Jason’s body as he realize that he knew exactly who had been brought into their universe by the Class Six.
The kid's voice wavered as his eyelids begin to flicker in a last ditch attempt to stay upright and aware.
“Robin?”
And then another question almost whispered
“Jason?”
The kid lost his fight to stay conscious and Jason hurriedly leaned forward to catch him before he could crumple to the ground. He held the kid tight to his chest as he tried to get his mind around what had just happened, unable to answer when he heard B and N call his name. Batman reached Jason first and crouched behind him, placing a hand on his shoulder, as he assessed the situation.
Jason tipped back his head and looked helplessly at his father.
“Dad, it’s Tim Drake. He’s come back.”
Jason saw his stunned astonishment reflected in his father’s eyes as Dick stepped into the circle of light and gave a gasp of recognition.
It was impossible to be true but the evidence was right there in his arms. Tim Drake was alive and Jason had no idea how to deal or what to do.