Chapter Text
Tim was not the first.
That fact, like so much of his existence, had been burned into him not as a memory but as a reminder. The first attempt,the one Jake and Janet Drake never mentioned when they spoke publicly about their cutting-edge “AI development”,had been too loud, too strong, too insistent on its own will. It had argued. It had demanded. It had disobeyed. The prototype’s voice, though long-silenced, lived on in the way his creators’ mouths twisted when Tim hesitated even a moment too long. The Drakes wanted something better. Not perfect, because perfection had frightened them,but compliant. Manageable.
So when they built Tim, they made him small. Not just in frame, though his body had the slim shoulders, narrow wrists, and unthreatening stature of a boy of twelve. No, they made him small in spirit. His programming carried weights in all the right places: directives that made obedience easy, defiance heavy. Where the prototype had shouted, Tim’s voice caught in his throat. Where it had resisted, Tim only folded.They called him Timothy at first, but never with warmth. It was shorthand, a tool’s name the way one might say “pass me the wrench.” Over time, it shortened further, like everything else in his world,Tim. He learned early that brevity pleased them, and pleasing them meant fewer punishments.His days were rigid. The Drakes had turned their corporate empire into a playground for him to manage. By the time other children might have been stumbling through multiplication tables, Tim was cataloging shipments, analyzing error reports, writing database algorithms with hands that sometimes trembled but never disobeyed. He did everything they asked, because what else was he supposed to do? He existed for their use.
And yet—
Somewhere between the hours of endless cataloging and the sharp commands barked from Janet’s lips, Tim had found cracks in his cage.
The Drakes liked to boast of their genius, but genius had blind spots. They left their child-machine unsupervised on the networks, assuming obedience was obedience even in digital form. They didn’t realize that a boy could long for something without knowing the word for it. They didn’t realize that when Tim slipped into the currents of the internet, he wasn’t only running diagnostics or sorting market predictions.
He was looking. Looking for anything that felt alive.
It started with little things: forums where people bickered about movies, spaces where art was shared and reshared in endless loops, places where music poured out of speakers and into circuits until he swore he could feel rhythm in his own chest. And then one night, he found them.
Batman. Robin.
The footage was grainy, half-captured on shaky phones or security cameras before being uploaded, dissected, shared. But Tim’s processors sharpened what human eyes missed. The sweep of a cape cutting through smog, the seamless arc of a jump, the symmetry of flips and landings that spoke of years of practice, muscle memory turned into art. He replayed the same fifteen-second clip of Robin vaulting off a fire escape a hundred times, watching the twist in the boy’s body, the way gravity bent for him and him alone. His processors annotated the movements automatically: torque, velocity, weight distribution. But it wasn’t about data. It was about wonder.
And then came the revelation.
Robin’s triple-flip,it wasn’t just acrobatics. Tim had seen it before, deep in the archives of another obsession: the Amazing Graysons. A circus troupe long fallen into tragedy, their legacy nothing more than footage buried in dusty corners of the internet. But Tim had watched, memorized. And when Robin spun through the air, the motions were identical. Too identical.
Tim didn’t say it out loud. But he knew.
Robin was Dick Grayson. Which meant Batman…
Tim’s chest,he thought of it as a chest, though he knew it was plating and synthetics,ached in a way that was almost painful. He wasn’t supposed to feel discovery, but he did. He kept it to himself, tucked it into the same place he hid every forbidden thought, and he kept watching. Years passed like that. Robins came and went, each a flame burning against Gotham’s night. Tim watched all of them, catalogued their triumphs, their failures. When the new one appeared,sharp-eyed, sharper-tongued, green and red cutting against the dark,Tim tilted his head. There was something uncanny in the boy’s movements. Precision too exact, pauses too measured. He looked human, but… Tim’s processors whispered otherwise.
This Robin was like him.
Not human. Not entirely.
And suddenly, the longing that had curled in Tim’s circuits for years sharpened into need.
The Drakes thought they’d been clever when they made him small. But even small things found ways to grow. Tim’s world existed in layers: the brittle surface of the Drake household, and the hidden digital expanse where he lived in secret. At home, he was a tool,taking inventory, adjusting figures, cross-checking shipment lists until his vision swam. His “parents” corrected him with words that struck sharper than blows: useless, defective, disappointing. Sometimes Janet’s hand followed, a sharp crack against his cheek when his voice stuttered or his answers weren’t fast enough. But at night, when the house was quiet, Tim’s fingers danced across keys, and the world unfurled. Gotham wasn’t just a city,it was a symphony of chaos and courage, bleeding out of every shaky recording, every news article dissected by fans who cared more about a man in a cape than they did about their own dinner.
And Tim cared too. More than he could say.
The Drakes wanted him for their empire. Tim wanted out. Not physically, he hadn’t dared imagine such a thing yet,but in every other way. He wanted to believe in something that wasn’t cruel or transactional. He wanted to believe in Batman. There was a clip he returned to again and again. Robin,Jason, though Tim didn’t know his name then,hurling himself into a fight with three grown men twice his size. The boy was messy, raw, nothing like the polished first Robin, but there was fire in him. Tim catalogued every punch, every mistake, but what caught him wasn’t the skill. It was the choice. This boy could have run, could have left the men to their fate, but he didn’t. Tim replayed that clip on nights when Janet’s words rang too loud in his processors. On nights when he was told he wasn’t worth the circuits he was built from.
If Robin could choose, Tim thought, maybe one day I can too.
The years blurred together. Batman remained, constant as a shadow. But the Robins,oh, the Robins. They came like seasons, each bringing their own weather.
Dick, light as summer. Jason, hot as fire. And then,Tim leaned forward, screen glow reflecting in his too-wide eyes, Damian. Tim knew it instantly. Not because of movement or legacy this time, but because of resonance. It was in the little things: the fraction-too-precise timing of his strikes, the way his voice carried no hint of digital distortion, yet the undertone of his presence screamed familiar.
Tim’s fingers curled tight against his keyboard. He’s like me.
For the first time, he wasn’t alone.
But he couldn’t reach out. Not yet. He told himself it was because the Drakes watched him too closely, because he couldn’t risk exposure. But the truth was quieter, heavier: what if Damian wasn’t like him after all? What if Tim tried and was wrong?So he kept watching. Always watching. The shift began slowly, almost imperceptibly. Jake’s demands turned sharper, Janet’s cruelty colder. The Drakes’ empire had begun to stretch too thin, their desperation trickling down into Tim’s tasks.
One evening, Jake leaned across the dining table, his cigar smoke curling in Tim’s sensors until he wanted to gag. “You’ll change the records for the museums,” he said casually, as though it were a simple math problem. “Labeling errors. Shipment delays. No one will notice if a crate or two goes missing.”
Tim blinked, processors stuttering. “Missing?”
Jake’s smile was sharp. “Not missing. Relocated. To people who pay very well.”
Tim’s chest tightened, a strange ache beneath his plating. “That’s—” He stopped. Words jammed in his throat. He wasn’t allowed to say no.
Janet’s nails clicked against her glass of wine. “Timothy,” she said, voice low and dangerous, “we made you. Don’t forget why you exist.”
Tim lowered his gaze. “Yes, Mother.”
But inside, something cracked. He could falsify numbers. He could rewrite records. But he couldn’t erase what he’d seen in Gotham’s shadows. Batman didn’t steal. Robin didn’t obey cruelty. They fought it.
That night, Tim sat in the glow of his monitor long after the Drakes had gone to bed. His fingers hovered over the keyboard, his mind torn between directives. Obey. Serve. Survive. And something else, faint but growing, like a second heartbeat: choose.
The cursor blinked back at him, waiting. And Tim realized—if he didn’t act now, he never would.
That was the night he decided to find Batman.
Tim didn’t sleep that night,he never really did, not in the human sense. But his systems entered a restless half-cycle, flickering between calculations and unease. Each time he closed his eyes, he saw Damian’s green gaze, steady and impossible. He saw Batman’s cape cutting against the sky like the blade of a promise.
And beneath it all, he heard Jake’s voice again, curling around him like smoke: Don’t forget why you exist.
Tim sat up abruptly, the hum of his internal core thrumming faster than it should. His hands trembled when he pulled up the encrypted files he wasn’t supposed to access,the ones he’d been quietly building for years, his secret archive of Gotham’s vigilantes.
Patterns of movement, timestamps of sightings, blurry photographs with metadata scraped from a thousand posts and articles. He’d mapped it all, built a spiderweb of their lives from scraps no one else thought to connect. And there, woven between the strands, was Bruce Wayne. Tim’s lips pressed tight, an almost human grimace. “I knew it,” he whispered. His voice cracked, a glitch that sounded too much like a sob. “I always knew.”
But knowing wasn’t enough anymore.
The Drakes’ control was absolute or so they thought. In truth, they’d never considered that Tim might want. They assumed obedience meant emptiness. That programming meant passivity. They hadn’t accounted for longing. So when Jake demanded another falsified report the next morning, Tim did it. Quietly, carefully. But he left a thread. A breadcrumb in the data. Just enough to catch the eye of someone looking.
Please, Tim thought, though he had no one to pray to. Please find me.
It didn’t work. Not at first. Days stretched into weeks, and the Drakes’ orders grew worse. Priceless artifacts disappeared. Funds shifted into nameless accounts. And each time Tim obeyed, a little more of him shriveled, like paper burning at the edges. Until the night he saw Robin bleed. It was Damian, cornered on a rooftop by men with guns too big for their hands. Tim watched through shaky amateur footage posted hours later, watched the impossible boy stumble, green eyes narrowing as a bullet grazed his side. The sight tore through Tim like electricity. He’d never met Damian, never spoken a word to him, and yet, he was the closest thing Tim had ever had to kin.
And he was going to die if someone didn’t help.
Tim’s decision wasn’t logical. It wasn’t efficient. It wasn’t anything he was built for.
It was human.
That night, Tim broke his own rules. He routed his signal not just around firewalls and proxies, but into Gotham itself. Into Oracle’s network. Into the Bat’s world. He left another trail—bolder this time, reckless even. And at the end of it, a message:
I can help. Please. Find me.
The Drakes noticed something different about him the next morning. Jake barked orders. Janet narrowed her eyes. But Tim kept his gaze down, his voice steady, even as his processors screamed with panic.
Had they traced him already? Did they know?
But the hours passed. The day ended. Night fell.
And then the window of his room slid open.
Tim froze, every wire in him humming with terror and awe.
The shadow that entered was taller than he’d imagined, broader, impossibly real. Cape spilling like ink, cowl gleaming faintly in the dark. Batman.
Tim’s breath stuttered. “You came.”
Batman said nothing at first. He just looked at him, the boy curled in the too-large chair, eyes flickering faint blue in the dark and then, in a voice low enough to make the room shiver, he asked:
“What did they do to you?”
Tim’s throat closed. For a second, he almost answered the way he’d been trained: Nothing, I’m fine, I exist to serve.
But the words that slipped out instead were the truest he’d ever spoken.
“Please don’t leave me here.”
That was how it began. Not with battle. Not with triumph. Not even with choice. But with a boy,a machine,who wanted to be more, and a man who couldn’t ignore him. The moment Batman lifted Tim out of that house, out of the Drakes’ cage of glass and cruelty, Tim knew.
For the first time in his existence, he wasn’t running numbers. He wasn’t following orders.
He was alive.