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Tim wasn’t sure just how he had managed to go from having everything completely under control and according to plan to being locked in a holding cell in the motherfucking Batcave while all of his secrets were slowly unspooled around him in a single afternoon. Well, he knew how—happy, protected Jason-who-had-no-clue-who-Tim-was had suddenly gotten all of the memories of angry, overprotective Big-Brother-Red-Hood-Jason and had proceeded to kidnap him, just because he was apparently a ‘hazard to himself and reality’. But it had all happened so quickly that he was having trouble wrapping his mind around this new complication.
“You know, I’d finally gotten used to being an only child again,” he muttered, glaring at Jason through the glass. Cass had gone off to find Alfred and inform him about the latest developments and Bruce had stepped away to ‘make a call’, but Jason had refused to go further than fifteen feet away from him even after they’d locked Tim inside the secure enclosure. “Super inconvenient time for the universe to suddenly summon my brother from an abandoned reality.”
Jason paused his agitated pacing to scowl at him. “Yeah? Well tough shit, you little jerk. If death wasn’t enough to get me out of this family, then I’m sure as hell not letting you pull off self-sacrificial time travel.”
Tim let out an exasperated huff, but decided not to respond when he noticed Bruce making his way back across the cave towards them while pocketing his cell phone.
“Dick is on his way. He just finished cleaning up from his last class so he’ll zeta over shortly,” he announced once he was close enough to talk, before his eyes settled on Tim. “I didn’t give him any details, though. This… didn’t seem like the sort of thing you explain over the phone.”
Jason nodded, looking satisfied, but Tim furrowed his brow. “This is hardly a zeta-travel level emergency,” he said, only to earn twin glares from Bruce and Jason.
“I have a son who erased himself from my family,” Bruce said, his voice almost dipping into a growl. “Your siblings have a brother whom they forgot. If anything calls for an urgent family meeting, it would be this!”
“Hey, you all were better off witho—”
“If you say we were better off without you one more time, I will go find the bo staff that I’m sure you’ve got stashed somewhere and break it over your kneecaps.”
Bruce appeared mildly disturbed by Jason’s threat, likely because the Jason he was used to wasn’t nearly as vocal about the violence he wanted to commit, but Tim couldn’t help but feel oddly soothed. It had been a long while since he had heard his older brother threaten him with bodily harm that he didn’t intend to inflict, it was almost comforting. “Alright, alright,” Tim said, holding his hands up defensively. “I won’t say it again. It’s like, objectively, factually, and measurably true, but I won’t say it again.”
“Ok, that’s it, I’m going in there—” Jason lunged towards the control panels that would unlock the holding cell door, and was just barely intercepted in time by Bruce.
“Boys! Enough!” Bruce snapped, struggling to contain Jason’s newfound bulk that he also happened to have remembered how to use effectively. “Jason, do you need to go upstairs for a few minutes so you can cool down?”
“No. The idiot baby bird does not leave my sight until I’m convinced he understands what he did was wrong!” Jason nearly yelled, his voice getting suspiciously hoarse towards the end. Tim frowned; Jason was getting very upset, but not at the parts Tim had thought he would be most upset about. He’d breezed past the fact that he’d died, could now remember being murdered, only to fixate on the fact that Tim had had to remove himself from the Wayne family in order to save him. How very strange and unanticipated.
“I know it was wrong,” he offered hesitantly, which got both men to whip their heads around to focus on him again. It was all he could do not to flinch from the intensity of their scrutiny, but he chose to press on. “I am acutely aware that my actions were in direct violation to the Justice League Charter Section F Subsection 23 Lines 86 through—”
“Since when have I given a flying fuck about the Justice League Charter?” Jason snapped, earning a disapproving frown from Bruce and a shrug from Tim. “It’s wrong because—because! My kid brother should not be off living all alone and sad while I just go about my life as if he never existed!”
Tim scowled. “I don’t live alone, I have Fake Uncle.”
“He’s an actor!”
“That doesn’t change the fact that he lives with me!”
“You pay him!”
“Boys!” Jason and Tim both looked back over to Bruce, who was starting to get that little eyebrow twitch thing he got whenever his children had been fighting for too long. “Neither of you is happy with this development, that’s very clear. But repeating the same argument over and over again is going to accomplish nothing besides riling you up and giving me a headache. How about we all take a step back and have a moment to breathe while we wait for the others to arrive? Jay, you can go sit by the mats. Within sight of Tim,” he emphasized, stopping Jason’s protests with a pointed look. Once Jason pushed himself back and turned to stalk his way across the cave, Bruce looked back over to Tim, his face twisting in an odd sort of grimace. “Tim, you… stay put.”
“Kinda locked in a cell right now, B, but sure,” Tim said with a snort.
“Jason seems to believe that you could get yourself out of there with five minutes left alone, and that you only offered to be put in there to lull us into a false sense of security,” Bruce said, quirking a brow.
“It was also to stop Jason from tackling me again,” Tim admitted. “Pretty sure he bruised my tailbone when he knocked me down in your study. And gave me rope burn when he restrained me. And jammed my elbow when he shoved me into the trunk of his car. And—”
“I get the picture,” Bruce interrupted. “I’ll have a word with him about being more gentle with…”
“His future kidnapping victims?”
“Hey! I was un-kidnapping you! It’s totally different and I’m completely justified!” Jason hollered from across the cave.
“Well as someone who used to get kidnapped fairly frequently in another life, I have to say that ‘un-kidnapping’ feels oddly similar to actual kidnapping!” Tim yelled back.
“I suppose it was too much to hope that a mere fifty feet would be enough to keep you from arguing. You two really are brothers, aren’t you?” Bruce murmured, looking halfway between frustrated and impressed.
Tim allowed himself the relief of one exhausted sigh. “I mean, we used to be.”
“We still are! Brotherhood is nonrefundable, bitch!” Jason called, just in time for the cave’s zeta tube to whirl to life and spit out an anxious-looking Dick Grayson, whose mild confusion at Jason’s comment turned into downright befuddlement when he spotted Tim sitting in a holding cell and an unmasked Bruce Wayne standing nearby.
“Ummmm.” He glanced over at Jason before slowly making his way towards the holding cell. “What’s happening? Aren’t we all a little… underdressed for having a guest down here?”
“I thought I was a prisoner,” Tim said, tilting his head and nodding to the cell around him. “If I’m a guest, does that mean I can leave whenever I want? I’m supposed to take a calc test during last period, actually, so—”
“He’s not a guest!” Jason growled as he stomped back over to where they’d gathered at the same time that Bruce sighed and said,
“He’s not a prisoner. Despite his current location.”
Dick just looked even more confused, but Tim couldn’t help but smirk. “I guess that makes me a secret third thing.”
Dick looked him over warily, no doubt taking in his vaguely roughed-up appearance alongside his complete lack of concern about being in the Batcave with the city’s most prominent billionaire and sons. After a moment, his eyes narrowed suspiciously. “You’re someone who knows.”
Tim shrugged. “That too.”
Dick looked back over at Bruce. “So, what? We’re holding him for J’onn to take care of, or…?”
“We’re not mind wiping him! I refuse to be the only one plagued with knowledge of a previous timeline!”
“It’s a bad idea, anyway. If you wanted to remove my knowledge of your identities, you probably should have noticed me when I first started following your patrols and caught it then,” Tim added helpfully. “At this point, I’ve spent so long basing my activities around you guys that you’d be erasing a significant portion of my life starting from the time I was nine. So that’s at least seven years, plus the fact that I also remember a different timeline spanning from age twelve to age nineteen in which I was a proper vigilante with you all, so that’s another seven years that would have to go, and if I woke up tomorrow missing a cumulative fourteen years worth of memories, I’d probably get super paranoid and maybe go a bit evil if I figured out what you’d done. Seems like a bad plan. Timelines where I turn evil are never pretty.”
Dick appeared more concerned following Tim’s helpful explanation. “...Alternate timeline? I’m sorry, exactly who are you?”
“You’ve been following us on patrols since you were nine?” Bruce asked, eyes wide with shock and maybe horror.
“Only until I was twelve or so. Last time that was when I started my training and then after that I was invited, obviously. I stopped about then this time too after I saved Jason so that I wouldn’t risk running into you guys and giving anything away. Now I typically run my own investigations in whatever parts of town you guys aren’t at the moment,” Tim said before looking back over to Dick. “And I’m Tim. Tim Drake. Former neighbor, eternal fan of Nightwing and Robin and the Flying Graysons. It’s nice to see you again,” he admitted with a small smile, just because it was. The most he’d ever seen his oldest of old brothers outside of a mask in this new timeline was at a handful of galas over the years and the few times Tim had been in the audience for Dick’s performances during his brief stint of re-joining the circus. It was nice to be able to talk to him like this, directly and openly.
“Well it’s always nice to meet a fan,” Dick said, uncertainty lacing his voice. “Even one who’s apparently a bit of a stalker. But can we circle back around to this ‘alternate timeline’ business? Is it some sort of speedster caused split? And Jay, did you say that you know about it? Care to elaborate?”
Bruce and Tim both looked over at Jason, who crossed his arms and glared at Tim. “I explained it the first time, I think Timmy should have to fess up to ‘Wing himself about what he’s done.”
Well if Jason didn’t want to, Tim supposed he might as well go for it. And this way, he might even be able to introduce it in a way that kept Dick from crying on Tim too much, and maybe cry mostly on Jason instead. He took a deep breath and let it out slowly before presenting a succinct summary of the events: “I traveled back in time to save Jason from getting blown up in an abandoned warehouse by the Joker when he was fifteen like what originally was supposed to happen. And it worked! He lived to swoop around Gotham wearing the ‘R’ another day, mission accomplished, hooray. Now you guys get to be a big happy family, and you’re better off. And that’s it, that’s what happened. The end.”
Bruce and Dick appeared shell shocked by the casual way in which Tim had dropped the truth of Jason’s murder, while Jason himself looked stormy. Tim just leaned back against the cool wall of the holding cell feeling wholly unrepentant. Jason had wanted him to explain, after all, and he’d already told Bruce that he’d regret digging into things.
“Jason was… Ethiopia,” Dick breathed, his face going pale while he reached out and grasped Jason’s arm. Jason’s face twisted uncomfortably while he wrenched from Dick’s grip.
“Yeah, sure, I died, then I came back, it was a whole thing, whatever,” he muttered, refusing to meet anyone’s eyes. “Get on with the rest of it, dumbass.”
Tim pursed his lips. It was getting surprisingly more and more difficult to talk about the other stuff with each new distraught ex-family member he had to look in the eyes and confess to. “I’d rather not. I covered the important bits, the rest is just irrelevant background details.”
“If you don’t start cooperating, I’ll come in there and kick your important bits, how’s that—”
“Jason claims that before the timeline was altered, Tim was the third Robin, and more importantly, my adopted son,” Bruce cut in, his expression pained. “Tim has yet to dispute either of those claims and Cass believes Jason isn’t lying, so…”
Dick looked back over at Tim, his mouth falling open. “You’re our brother?”
Tim’s eyes flickered down and focused on the bland white, indestructible floor of the holding cell. “The formal adoption was mostly a tactical decision on Bruce’s part, but if circumstances would have stayed as they originally occurred, I may have eventually become something of a sibling-adjacent figure to you and the others, yes.”
Jason slammed a fist into the holding cell wall, managing to rattle it just slightly. “Fucking hell— you know I’d like to tell you guys he isn’t always like this, but he can be a downright infuriating little moron when it comes to the touchy feely family crap,” he growled. Tim could feel the heat of his glare even without looking up, and was briefly thankful that heat vision wasn’t one of the side effects given by the Lazarus Pit, or he was sure to be a pile of ash by now.
There was a soft whooshing of the holding cell door locks disengaging, and Tim managed to look up just in time to see Dick Grayson lunging into the cell before he was suddenly being pulled into his former oldest brother’s crushing embrace.
“Oh, Timmy—do I call you Timmy?” he choked out, voice gutted as he buried his face in Tim’s shoulder.
“Timmy, Timbo, Timtam, Timmers, Baby Bird, Little Red,” Jason started reciting helpfully as he slipped into the cell through the open door only to lean against the wall and glare menacingly. “And one time he answered to ‘King of the Dorks’, so. He’ll figure it out if you’re talking to him.”
“My hearing was fucked up from that explosion, I just knew your lips were moving and you wanted my attention,” Tim muttered irritably. “But yeah, you can call me Timmy. You used to.” Dick’s grip tightened around him almost painfully before loosening just enough that he could pull back slightly and look down into Tim’s face. He stared at him for a long moment before he spoke again, voice brittle yet resolute.
“I might not have any memories of you right now, but I can already tell that this isn’t ok. I—we need—we have to fix this, somehow.”
Tim blinked slowly, wondering how many times he would need to repeat the same information for them to start listening to what he was saying. “There’s nothing to fix, Dick. I already took care of the problem. I’ve taken care of every problem. I saved Jason and then I helped you save Cass, and Damian, and I made sure Steph and Babs were both ok too. Everyone’s ok now.”
“But what about you?”
This was getting to be too much. Dick’s eyes were glassy and threatening tears and his grip on Tim’s shoulders firm and uncompromising, his distress about Tim wholly genuine despite having no good reason to care so much, and Tim could tell that his own careful mask of objectivity that he wore as a shield in this new lifetime was slowly starting to get chipped away, and that just wouldn’t do because he’d come so far, had given up so much, had given up everything for them and he couldn’t let himself start to regret it now.
“You could argue that I’m better off as well,” he said, pointedly ignoring Jason’s disbelieving scoff and holding up his fingers as he started counting off the benefits to his new existence. “In this timeline, I’ve only had to mourn my parents, not my parents and Steph and Bruce and Kon and Bart and so many others. I still have my spleen, so I can get sneezed on without worrying about it killing me. Ra’s al Ghul has shown no signs of being interested in recruiting me, which uh, maybe I should double check nothing is brewing because if the Lazarus Pit restored Jason’s memory then maybe he’s also got his memories of me, but with the League of Assassins, no news is good news, right? So I’ll take the win. And I’ve yet to meet a version of myself from the future that becomes a fascist dictator in Batman’s cowl, so that’s always a plus. And none of my brothers have tried to murder me because I simply don’t have any brothers—”
“Oh, shut up,” Jason snarled as he barreled into Tim’s side, shoving him over on the low bench only to wrap an arm tightly around Tim’s shoulders and pull him into his side. Dick released his own grip on Tim, but remained crouched on the balls of his feet in front of him, looking up with pitying, heartbroken eyes and settling a hand on his knee so he could squeeze reassuringly. Then, before Tim could figure out how to get either of them to back off, Cass appeared, slipping around Dick to take a seat on Tim’s other side and pressing herself into the tangle, effectively completing Tim’s Former Older Sibling Sandwich.
This had to be the most affectionate physical contact Tim had experienced at once since, since before he’d gone back in time, and frankly it was doing all sorts of funny things to his insides. Entirely against his own will, he felt a lump rising in his throat as the tangle of longing, loneliness, and regret that he kept on lockdown thanks to rigorous self discipline suddenly burst free of its walls and sprang up, threatening to choke him with pain and tears. And that wouldn’t do, because those feelings were his own burden, only to be examined on lonely sleepless nights where the only person they could touch was him. He couldn't let himself fall apart here , now , because then they’d think he needed their comfort, that he couldn’t carry himself when he could, he did, he had to, because this was his choice, his problem, his family that he had to protect—
“Family’s a two-way street, dumbass,” Jason said into his hair, his voice wet and thick, and it was only then that Tim realized he’d been muttering aloud.
—And that really was just the worst bit of this whole thing, wasn’t it? What he’d missed the most? It wasn’t just the casual hands in his hair or on his shoulders and the teasing nicknames and video game marathons and movie nights that he was lacking. It was the fact that he spent all this time taking care of things for the others with none of them reaching back to take care of him in return. He’d thought it would be worth it. He’d thought he could do it, easily, because he was a hero, and what sort of a hero would he be if he couldn’t give up something as petty as his own happiness for the sake of those he loved the most?
“We never needed you to be our hero,” Jason whispered. “We just need you.”
Tim squeezed his eyes shut, feeling himself slowly letting go of the tension in his limbs as his body accepted the reality of a group hug. A small part of him he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge had known this was coming since the moment he’d locked eyes with Jason-Jason. A small part of him he’d refused to acknowledge had hoped this was coming since the day he woke up as a twelve year old with too many memories in his head and an aching loneliness that could only ever have been filled by certain Bats and Birds. Because—because what he’d done had consequences, for everyone and everything and that included for him, and he was honestly sick of dealing with them all on his own even though he could, because he didn’t actually want to. Tim wanted his family to be safe and happy, but he also wanted his family. He wanted them to help hold him up because otherwise he’d never be allowed to fall apart.
What he wanted for himself hadn’t mattered for years, but stuck in a cluster of the tearful siblings he’d tried his hardest to give up, he was starting to suspect that would no longer be allowed to be the case.