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Jason was ready to kill someone.
No, not in the literal sense, despite the hissing voice in the back of his head urging him to do just that. He’d gone down that road before and frankly it did not turn out pretty for anyone involved including him, so no thanks. He’d nearly broken his family beyond repair last time, and that was when he’d barely had a family to break apart in the first place. Now, he somehow had his relationship with his dad, Alfred, three siblings, and Damian’s personal zoo to think about, along with the assortment of close family friends they shared their lives with, superpowered and otherwise. There was a lot he stood to lose if he gave in to the worst of his Pit-inspired impulses, and that knowledge alone was enough to hold himself back. Well, that and all of the handy Lazarus Pit Coping Mechanisms that happened to arrive bundled up inside the rest of his original memories.
The one tiny bit of furious obsession he let himself indulge in was daydreaming about what he’d do when he tracked down whoever had stolen his mcfricken baby brother.
Because—because Tim! Tim was gone! Tim had—Tim had never existed in the first place? No, that wasn’t right, because in his new memories—old memories?—his murder-free memories, there that worked—in his murder-free memories, Tim Drake was there, but only ever on the periphery of Jason’s life. Just another guest at a gala or another student in the hallways at school, hardly even notable after he’d moved away from the estate next door. So Timothy Drake existed; but Tim, his brother Tim, did not. Except—except he did. Because Jason could remember it, could remember him. He could picture the third Robin sassing Hood while on a stakeout, could recall the wicked glint in the baby bird’s eyes when he slyly proposed Jason form an alliance with him and Cass to take out Dick and Damian during a family prank war, could catch the phantom scents of coffee and cave musk as he thought about late nights spent filling out mission reports in amicable silence. But most of all, he could remember with certainty the fact that Tim was his little brother, and Jason loved him. Jason was supposed to protect him. And now, somehow, he’d lost him.
This would not. Stand.
But what to do about it? He could ask someone for help solving this case, but without any proof to back up his claims outside of his own memories, he expected that he’d be subjected to examinations by Dr. Leslie and Martian Manunter and Zatanna and Constantine and every single other specialist in Bruce’s lengthy list of contacts before they’d begin to take him seriously and look into the heart of this issue. Jason might be ‘coping admirably’ with the Pit Rage, but he could tell his patience had been worn dangerously thin by the demonic kool aid bath, and he didn’t think he could take such a delay with anything close to grace. So, telling anyone else about the alternate timeline he suddenly remembered was temporarily off the table. Which meant his only option was to pursue the investigation by himself.
He figured he should start by compiling a list of everything that was different between the old timeline and the current one, the distinct lack of Timothy Drake-Wayne aside. If he tracked all the differences, that could help him suss out the motivation for altering the timeline, which could hopefully point him towards the identity of the guilty party. He snuck a spare cork board into an unused corner of the Manor, grabbed some blank notebooks, a laptop, and plenty of red string, told everyone he needed some alone time to practice his ‘mindfulness techniques’ that were keeping the Pit at bay, and then got to work on Operation Timmy Retrieval.
The number one difference for Jason was obviously the fact that he didn’t die. Much as he hated thinking about the event in question, he forced himself to go back over all of his memories, old and new, in order to compare the versions. The ‘how he survived this second time’ was a question answered pretty obviously: Batman had actually shown up to the warehouse in time, and he hadn’t shown up to the warehouse alone. Superman and Wonder Woman had been with him, and that had made all the difference. Superman had dropped Batman at Jason’s side before whisking away first the ticking bomb and then Sheila. Wonder Woman had torn the Joker off of him and proceeded to toss him around the warehouse like a ragdoll until Superman had shown back up to put a stop to the one-sided beat down. And B had ignored his metahuman colleagues entirely in order to administer first aid to Jason’s injuries, which were much less severe than he now knew they could have been. Fuck—they could have been—he could have, would have, was this fucking close to—
So anyway, a panic attack or two later, he had a very promising lead to pursue. Why had Batman brought the other heroes? He’d never actually asked his dad for his reasoning after the fact. At first he’d been in too much pain from his wounds and shock from his birth mother’s betrayal, and then it had just made B look like he was on the verge of tears if the subject got brought up, and anyway Jason hadn’t really felt a need to know much beyond the fact that he was grateful his dad had asked for help for once. Unfortunately, it was now potentially critical intel, so he had no choice but to force Bruce into the uncomfortable conversation.
Could he have picked a better way to start this than waltzing into Bruce’s study and opening with, ‘hey, remember that time a few years ago where I almost died’? Perhaps. But the damage was already done, and by the time Bruce’s face was done processing the entire range of emotion from grief to sorrow to fear to guilt, Jason was getting impatient enough again that he couldn’t be bothered to regret the bluntness.
“What… brought this up all of the sudden?” Bruce asked hesitantly, his expression settling somewhere between nauseous and concerned. “Did the Lazarus Pit trigger something?”
Oh it sure did, but they weren’t having that conversation right now. Jason shrugged. “I’ve just been thinking about how weird it is that Clark and Diana were there. Before that, you had never called on them to help you with anything less than a full on alien invasion. I just wondered what made the difference for you then?” Had Batman gotten a warning of some kind? Had he somehow gotten knowledge of what would have happened if he didn’t get to Jason as fast as inhumanly possible? If it was the first option, Jason would just have to track down whoever had warned him of Jason’s impending doom. If it was the second option… if Bruce somehow knew about Jason’s death, then he might also know about Tim, and hadn’t done anything about that. Jason really didn’t want it to be the second option, because if Bruce had somehow gotten the opportunity to essentially trade away Tim to erase Jason’s death, and then not snatched Tim up and brought him home to them anyway, especially after the kid’s parents died, Jason was going to—
“It… was an accident.”
“Excuse me?”
Bruce swallowed thickly and turned to stare out the window, his expression full of so much self-hatred and anguish that Jason almost thought he might as well have died anyway since not even him living had kept B from indulging in his ridiculous guilt complex. “I didn’t call them on purpose. My JL communicator glitched somehow and sent out an alert to summon the both of them back from their space mission early. Neither Barbara nor myself could figure out what had caused it after the fact, and frankly, it doesn’t matter. I just have to live with the fact that my son’s life is owed to a technical malfunction—”
“Thanks,” Jason said, standing up and heading towards the door with purpose in his steps. “This was helpful.”
“Jason! Wait—was that sarcasm?”
“No.”
And it wasn’t. Jason returned to his caseboard and rearranged his list of suspects. Bruce and a few others got moved towards the bottom. One of them got moved closer to the top.
Surviving the warehouse wasn’t the only thing that was different between his two lives either. There were siblings who’d shown up far too soon from what he remembered originally happening. Cass had appeared at least a year earlier than she had previously if Jason had gotten the timeline right. He hadn’t actually been around for her joining the family in the original version of events, but he remembered Barbara telling him about it. Damian for sure arrived early, coming to live in Gotham at age six rather than ten. And that was because some random reformed assassin had escaped the League and flagged down Batman and Robin on patrol one night to pass along a file containing the squirt’s medical history and prompted a rescue mission. The assassin chick had disappeared into the Justice League’s version of Witness Protection after that, and Jason hadn’t given her too much thought, but now he realized her identity was yet another piece of critical intel: Prudence Wood, who in another life was one of Red Robin’s allies.
Jason was starting to get a hunch—nay, a sneaking suspicion by this point, but he forced himself to hold back and collect more evidence before making any accusations. He cast his investigative net wider and examined the lives of heroes outside of his family as well as various civilians and villains whose fates he could remember from before. Steph’s father had been caught early, gone to jail and stayed there, and her mom had had a stay in rehab anonymously paid for before Bruce could even offer. Superboy was living with Superman and had a really good relationship with him, because somehow Superman had been forewarned of what awaited him in Cadmus’ labs and had the time to process the information before meeting Kon. Several tragedies that he could remember befalling the young heroes that would have made up Tim’s generation just straight up didn’t happen. More and more, he uncovered a pattern that people who would have been connected to Tim were suddenly much better off—but only because something had gone conveniently in their favor when it could have ended in disaster or hardship instead. Almost as if some benevolent puppet master was playing with the strings of their lives from the shadows unseen…
The defining piece of evidence for him was what he found when he finally turned his attention to the deaths of Jack and Janet Drake. Dick had told him about it once, after Jason had decided he cared enough to ask, and from what he remembered there had been some convoluted mess involving two different villains as the murderers, overseas travel, a year long coma and a bumpy custody situation for Bruce. When he looked it up now, all of the reports said they had both died in a car accident while driving during a storm somewhere in the Italian Alps. The news articles he dug up about the event mentioned that young Timothy had gone to live with his last remaining relative, his estranged uncle, and before long the reticent Drake Heir had quietly faded from Gotham Society’s sight.
—Except, here was the kicker, Tim Drake did not have a fucking uncle. He’d pretended to have an uncle last time, much to Dick and Bruce’s exasperation and horror. The fact that he had pulled literally the exact same cover to avoid foster care in both timelines could be a coincidence, but there were just too many other coincidences surrounding the lives of all of those Tim Drake cared about that Jason couldn’t make himself ignore his suspicions any longer: Tim Drake’s disappearance from the Wayne family had been caused by none other than Tim Drake himself. Frankly, a stunt like this was right up the baby bird’s alley, and Jason, while hurt and horrified and furious and a thousand other things, was not actually surprised by the conclusion he reached.
At this point he figured he had a few options. Number one, show Bruce or Dick or Cass or Alfred or really anyone else his mess of a red-stringed caseboard and explain why he was treating a teen they’d met half a dozen times who appeared to be living a perfectly safe and normal life like the highest priority missing persons case. (The ‘appeared’ was the key word here; there had been far too many convenient anonymous tips passed along from Gordon to the Bats over the past few years that Jason could see Red Robin’s distinctive hand in, now that he knew to look.) After explaining himself, they could help him figure out how to best approach the situation and decide whether they should confront Tim about what he’d done. Except they’d still probably think this was all a side effect of the Lazarus Pit, and he wouldn’t even be able to argue with that because technically it was but it was also all Tim’s fault. So he’d still have to go through the process of convincing them he wasn’t imagining the entire set of alternate memories in his head, and if that had seemed like too much to sit through before he knew Tim was behind this, now he was pretty sure it would result in some light maiming. Not ideal.
Another option he briefly considered was just letting it be. Tim had chosen this, had done this to himself, and he’d given Jason… everything. Fuck. Jason was a senior in high school. He had friends and a life and several college acceptance letters proudly displayed on the fridge. He had a future, one beyond that of an undead crime lord who couldn’t be in the same room as his father without feeling like a fucking ghost haunting the family he was supposed to be a part of. He could—he could talk to Bruce again without wanting to shoot someone. And all it had taken was… the sacrifice of Tim Drake’s entire life from the age of twelve onwards. For Jason. Shit.
He couldn’t actually do that, though. All it took was a glimpse of the skinny twerp sitting alone at a lunch table and sadly picking at the dubious lunch meat provided by the school to make all of Jason’s protective instincts come roaring to life. The kid looked like he barely ate and never slept, so clearly this fictitious uncle was a poor substitute for the Wayne family in making sure Tim was taking care of himself. Jason started subtly asking around to get a picture of what the baby bird’s social life looked like, and he was not happy with what he found. There were a few of his classmates that he talked to occasionally, but Jason couldn’t find any evidence that Tim ever hung out with anyone or did much of anything outside of school. And that made sense in a distressing sort of way; he was probably too busy secretly meddling in the lives of the superheroes he used to be friends with and the people he used to be related to, or scurrying around Gotham at night getting pictures of mobsters and drug deals to maintain healthy relationships. He didn’t even have any fellow vigilantes to connect with since he had apparently decided to go it alone this time.
So that left option number three: Tim was coming home first, everyone could ask questions second. Jason picked a day that he knew Bruce would be working from home, and that Dick only had morning classes so he could come over from Bludhaven and use his puppy dog eyes to guilt Tim into staying put. In the week that he’d been back at school, his baby bird watching had revealed that Tim was doing some sort of extracurricular research in the archival section of the Library during his off period. That was about as isolated as you could get in Gotham Academy so Jason figured it would be the best if he approached him there. All he was sacrificing was his history class, so it was no big loss.
He’d meant to approach him calmly, he really did. He’d done a deep breathing exercise to center himself before entering the library and everything. The idea was to invite himself into a conversation and then subtly drop hints until Tim figured out that Jason knew and showed his own hand accordingly. Just because there was still about a one percent chance that Jason’s conclusions might be wrong, and he wanted to know for sure before doing something drastic like tying Tim up and stuffing him into the back of his car.
But no! Point oh-one seconds of eye contact, and bam. Tim was off, sprinting away through the stacks, and that just wouldn’t do at all. Jason scowled as he ran after him, just managing to keep him in his sights as the kid tried to duck around the shelves and lose him in the stacks. Sucked to be Tim, though, because there were a few places Jason felt he had a home field advantage, and the fucking library was one of them. After predicting the most likely path Tim would take towards the door, Jason took a shortcut through the periodicals and managed to head Tim off, stepping straight into his path and causing the smaller boy to collide with his chest.
“What’s the matter, Timmy?” he said, his grin all teeth as he clamped his hands around Tim’s shoulders. “You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” Tim said, glaring up at him coolly. “Can you let me go? I just remembered I’m late to meet some friends, that’s the only reason I ran off.”
“You don’t really have those here, now do you?” Jason scowled, tightening his grip when Tim tried to pull himself away. “I’ve had my eyes on you all week, kid. You hardly talk to anyone, you barely eat, you keep your head down and you never get involved with anything. Honestly, if either of us is the ghost here, it’s you.”
“Sorry I’m not some sort of social butterfly, but I hardly see why a total stranger would suddenly care about how I live my life.”
Jason leaned down until his mouth was next to Tim’s ear so he could quietly growl, “but I’m not really a stranger, now am I, baby bird?”
Tim went rigid beneath his hands at the nickname. “Fuuuuuck,” he breathed out. “So you really did get your memories back somehow.”
“It would seem so,” Jason said, glancing around to make sure they were still unobserved before pushing Tim further back into the shelves so they were better hidden. “If I let you go will you bolt again?” he asked, looking back down at Tim and raising a single eyebrow. Tim quickly shook his head. Jason didn’t really believe him, but he also didn’t want to actually hurt Tim and he was afraid the coming conversation would piss him off enough that his grip would turn towards bruising, so he released him and took half a step back before crossing his arms.
“So,” Tim said, awkwardly running a hand through his hair, his eyes darting around and looking at everything that wasn’t Jason.
“So.”
“You, uh. Remember me.”
“I remember you and then some, short stack,” Jason said bluntly. “What the fuck, Tim? Time travel?”
Tim huffed. “I had a good reason,” he mumbled, gaze flitting up to meet Jason’s for just half a second before darting away again. “Look, if you remember what it was like before, then you also know that everything is so much better now. So could we maybe skip through this… whatever this is, and you can go back to enjoying your new lease on life?”
“My new ‘lease on life’,” Jason said dryly. “Is that it? That’s what you did with your chance to time travel, not like, setting yourself up for world domination or something?”
Tim finally looked up for real and nodded vigorously. “Yes! Jason, I did this for you, and for your family. I wanted everyone to be happy, of course, but I really wanted you to have a better relationship with your family and to get to finish school and to not have—ya’know, murder flashbacks and everything, and—I just! It was worth it, Jason. You can’t tell me it wasn’t worth it. You got everything you ever wanted, after all.”
Jason pursed his lips, considering. The almost reverent glow in Tim’s eyes combined with the utter bullshit coming out of his mouth was quickly pissing Jason off. He could tell that he wouldn’t be able to take much more of this ‘I did it all for you, your happiness is worth more than mine blah blah blah’ nonsense before he lost his temper, and the school library really wasn’t the place for that. He’d sort of hoped to talk Tim into coming to talk to Bruce willingly, but…
Desperate times, and all that. “Everything I ever wanted, huh?” he said slowly as he subtly shifted his weight back so he’d be ready to move. “You did a good job, I guess, but there’s just one other thing you forgot to give me.”
Tim furrowed his brow. “What?”
“I want my brother back,” he growled, and then he lunged.
Turned out it was a good thing Jason had snagged some of the escape-proof rope on his way out of the Batcave that morning.
…Bruce would probably end up having to pay off one of the janitors to ‘forget’ walking in on Jason hoisting Tim out of the supply closet window, though.