#his entire robin run was just everyone not seeing him as a child but bruce thinking that the 19 year old was the actual child

[mikakuna]

tortured by the thoughts of what if bruce was just a slightly better person towards jason. he took in a homeless child and wasn't the adult for him he should've been. what if jason sometimes thinks about who he could've been if a different adult took him in? would he have been safer, happier? do you think, after he becomes red hood, he wonders why robin was too dangerous for 19 year old dick but fine for 12 year old jason?

[krilati]

Tim, who is not Robin, but still feral

Okay, let's say Tim's parents decide that even if their child doesn't need a nanny, they want someone to check on their son's well-being. So Tim is required to go to the doctor once a week. And after he tried to bribe his first one to just tell his parents everything was fine. Janette decided it would be someone else each time.

Tim gets a car once a week that picks him up to see a doctor he doesn't know.

That way he doesn't have time to search for dirt, and he can't bribe anyone, since everyone drinks his mother more than him.

So after Nightwing turned Tim down (Dick later claimed the boy was black-haired and blue-eyed, but since he was often hallucinating Jason at the time, even he wasn't sure). The guy realized he couldn't go to Batman and insist on being Robin. The first fracture (which is 100% likely to happen in the early days of jumping on roofs and kicking angry adults) and the doctor would hand him over to his parents.

So Tim came up with a Plan.

Batman was angry, for a month now someone, every patrol, has been standing up for criminals. If he's lucky, he manages to land 5 hits (dude, your 1 hit can put a person in the hospital, Tim just has short legs, he still needs to run to the edge of the necessary roof) when someone distracts him.

Last time, they poured a bucket of paint on his head, it became almost impossible to see through the mask. Another time, they shot paintballs at his head until he left.

There was another memorable incident when something small landed on his head, and the next moment he was attacked by bats.

But today he finally cornered the attacker, it was a child whose face was hidden behind a mask that completely covered his face, and his hair was hidden behind a hood. He slowly approached the boy, he needed to find out who he worked for. Who decided that they had the right to interfere with him punishing criminals.

Only when Batman grabbed the attacker by the shoulder he felt dizzy and then everything around him went dark. Tim quietly patted himself on the head for the backup plan of the backup plan.

After waking up, Batman did not feel calmer, on the contrary, this meeting ignited even more rage in him.

How dare this child run around Gotham so carefree when his son was killed, how dare he protect criminals when one of them killed his son, how dare he..

That day, a file on a new criminal with high priority appeared on the Batcomputer, Alfred only reproachfully pursed his lips.

By the time Red Hood escaped from Talia (Yes, he escaped here, I don't know for sure, but I think Talia was pitting Jason against Tim to ensure her son had direct access to Bruce's legacy). Batman and Tim's confrontations became legendary.

Tim even had his own name and merchandise! Several names, actually, he was called Gotham's Whisperer, the Soul of Shadow, or Little Shadow. And in various Gotham stores you could find little figurines of him with various weapons that he demonstrated during this time.

Nightwing adored the little guy, although he had never met him in person. In fact, no one except Bruce had ever encountered the kid. And although Oracle never officially supported the boy, she never warned Batman if she saw a small dark silhouette through the cameras. Although Dick really wanted to know where the kid got the sniper rifle with tranquilizers, or how he hacked the Batmobile to put a sleeping Bruce in it and send him to the Cave, or how he got so many incriminating photos of Batman that he scattered all over the city when Batman didn't take one of his threats seriously.

Simply put, Nightwing was a fan, and had wanted the kid's autograph ever since the kid evacuated an entire alley, including Bruce, by playing the sound of a pack of rabid dogs approaching.

Batman, though he had passed the peak of his rage, still made Gotham afraid if he was spotted trolling alone.

Red Hood was furious, not only did his father not have the courage to avenge him, but he also dared to splash out his aggression on anyone who was not breathing smoothly on HIS Alley of Crime.

[elizabethemerald]

Don't Sneak up on People with Swords

@im-totally-not-an-alien-2 made a prompt about Danny sneaking up on Jason Todd and @sky00asara made a comment in the tags about what would happen if Danny did that to Talia. So here is my version of that! Enjoy.

Talia al Ghul watched her beloved from afar. He was out, again patrolling his city for those he considered wrong doers. Her son was by his side. She scowled at how Damian’s fighting style had changed, softened in the company of her beloved. Despite her love for the man under the cowl, he had a tremendous ability to take even the most ruthless of killers and change them to spare the undeserving. He had even tried it with her. 

She was hidden on the roof of an abandoned tower nearby. The tower had succumbed to fire and was now condemned until the city got around to destroying it properly. For now it made the perfect place for her to observe her beloved and her son work undisturbed. 

“Excuse me?” 

Talia whirled, drawing her blade as she spun. Her blade moved fast enough to almost cut the air itself yet the small shape ducked under her stroke and back-pedaled quickly to move out her range. 

“Jeez! Why is everyone in this city so jumpy!” 

The voice more than anything made her realize that the person who had somehow snuck close enough was an actual child. Their black hair and blue eyes made her wonder if this was another of her beloved’s adoptees. Except surely this boy was too young to catch Bruce’s eye? 

“Well maybe you should not sneak up on people?” Talia hissed, her voice soft yet stern. To say nothing of how a child who couldn’t be older than five had snuck up on her at all. 

“Well maybe you shouldn’t brood on the roof of my home!” The child snarked back, just like one of the Bat’s brood would, completely unafraid of the blade still in her hand. Talia raised an eyebrow at him then looked around at the burnt skeleton of the building they were standing on. 

“This building is not fit for human occupation.”

“Neither was the last place I lived.” He said dismissively. “This place hasn’t even killed me yet, so it’s practically a paradise.” 

She was tempted to take the child’s words as sarcasm, yet something in the way he spoke made her think he meant it more truthfully. 

“You’ve died before?” Talia asked. She relaxed her hold on her blade, allowing it to rest at her side. 

“Oh yeah, I die all the time.” He said, then he looked at her curiously tilting his head first one way, then another. “You’ve died too, huh?” 

She nodded, now examining him closely, looking for the signs she would recognize. She could see the hint of a scar on the boy’s palm that might have caused a death. 

“What is it with this town that so many people have died and come back?” The boy asked, apparently rhetorically as he didn’t let her answer. “First the stabby Robin, then the stabby Batgirl, then Batman, and even Red Hood. It’s like everyone I run into is contaminated.” 

Talia’s eyes widened. 

“You can sense those who have utilized the Lazarus Pits?” She would have to inform her father about this child. He could put the entire League of Assassins at risk. The child before her just shrugged. 

“I have no idea what that is. Red Hood mentioned some kind of pit as well, but I’ve never seen anything like that. I just know y’all are contaminated with ectoplasm, though not enough to make a core.” 

“What is this… ectoplasm?” Another name for the Lazarus Waters? Had there perhaps been a Pit outside of League control? In the midwest somewhere based on the boy’s accent. 

“Oh it’s this stuff.” He held his hand out and Talia couldn’t help keep her expression of shock withdrawn despite all her training as his hand filled with the glowing green light of the Pits. He held the Pit Water in his hand then tossed the glowing orb to his other hand in a half juggle as if he weren’t carrying the League's greatest secret and weapon. 

Nevermind telling her father about this child, he could never learn of him. If Ras had the power this child had under his control the world would never survive. There was only one option. She needed to train this child to wield this strength. With the stealth he displayed in sneaking up on her and his power over the Pits themselves he could make an assassin like the world had never seen. He could be the next Head of the Demon under her guidance. She knelt down to the boy’s level, slipping her sword back away as she did so. 

“Tell me, young one. Are you living in this death trap of a building all by yourself?” 

“Yeah, but don’t worry, I’ve got it taken care of. I know I’m little, but that just means people are less likely to notice me. I’m able to steal all the food I need from that big box store down the street.” 

“Oh of that I have no doubt. My name is Talia al Ghul. What’s yours?” 

“Hmm. I’m Danny.” The boy seemed hesitant to trust her, which to be perfectly honest was probably a very smart thing to do, but at least she had a name for this gift of Lazarus. 

“Danny, how would you like to come live with me? You won’t have to steal any more, or worry about food ever again, and I could train you how to fight even better than the Bats.” 

He narrowed his eyes at her, looking her over closely. 

“Would I get a sword?” 

“If a sword is what you want, then once you were trained in its use I would acquire one for you.”

Danny looked like he was about to nod, but then he froze, his head tilting to the side as if he was listening to something. His eyes widened and Talia tensed. 

“Uh-oh. Fruit Loop incoming. I gotta go.” 

Talia half turned as she heard the sound of one of her beloved’s grappling lines catching on the building’s edge. By the time she had turned back to face him, Danny had completely vanished. She hadn’t even heard him leave. She stood and scowled as her beloved landed on the rooftop next to her. 

“Talia.” He grunted at her, glaring all the while. 

“Beloved. Must you ruin every nice thing in my life?” Talia snarled back. The boy, Danny, had the gift of Lazarus at his beck and call and Batman had scared him off. 

Bruce looked momentarily stunned at her fury, but quickly hid it behind his mask. However Talia couldn’t care less about her beloved right now. She just needed to lose him so she could return to find the boy. The boy who would change the world with his power. 

[vinelark]

khoa & tim fake uncle postfic

because i’m thinking about tim’s fake uncle again and because i’m also thinking about ghostbat: au (loosely inspired by this) set during tim’s early robin era where tim does a version of the Fake Uncle thing, which coincides with minhkhoa khan sneaking into town to spy on bruce.

the thing is, khoa has been off the grid for a while and just learned about jason--both that bruce got another kid, and that said kid had a fatal run-in with the joker. bruce had told khoa to stay out of gotham years ago, but khoa isn’t about to let that stop him once he catches up on the news and pieces together bruce’s grief spiral that only recent calmed down with the appearance of a new robin. a new robin who is, conveniently, posting a veiled job offer for an? uncle?? on the internet, and doing it entirely on his own.

so khoa fashions himself a fake struggling-but-not-too-struggling actor identity and lands himself the position of tim drake's uncle. it’s a perfect way to peek at bruce’s life while flying under the radar, because this tim kid is very eager to keep his fake uncle as separate from bruce as possible. khoa expects to be in and out of this job in a month, maybe two, as soon as he’s sure bruce is stable and not going to crumble because bruce cares so much and khoa knows it’ll be his undoing one day and—anyway. it’s a temporary gig. the kid’ll have to come up with a cover story when khoa inevitably disappears, but that’s not khoa’s problem. and tim probably shouldn’t be making up fake relatives anyway, so khoa will be teaching him a valuable lesson. (the lesson: always make sure you have collateral on someone before trusting them. you’re welcome for the parenting help, bruce!)

except. it’s not so easy to leave.

after just two weeks khoa starts realizing that:

tim is bonkers

like, off the wall bonkers

and brilliant

bad combo, khoa knows from experience

tim desperately cares about bruce and dick and alfred

but does not see himself as part of the family (hence the fake uncle thing)

khoa also realizes that tim keeps secretly patching himself up at home (because he’s downplaying any injuries after patrols) and eventually khoa is like. “okay. i don’t care what happened*, but you do have to stitch that up properly. my fake self can’t be in trouble for child endangerment.” and he patches up a surprised and wary tim. this becomes a routine.

*(khoa knows what happened, he was stalking batman on patrol that night. like most nights.)

ANYWAY. basically what i’m saying is: identity shenanigans where bruce’s ex is lurking around gotham pretending to be tim’s uncle and tim doesn’t know about the ex thing and bruce doesn’t know about the uncle being fake thing and everyone is keeping secrets from each other. and khoa goes from “this is a convenient way to spy on bruce” to “if anything happens to this unhinged baby robin i will kill everyone in this room and then myself” and ends up co-parenting tim without bruce realizing.

also in between having concerning realizations about tim’s self-preservation skills and spying on bruce, khoa finds time to have fun with it. like imagine a parent-teacher conference at tim’s school. the school calls bruce to schedule because his contact info is still on file from when tim was staying with him. but obviously khoa catches wind of this and decides to also turn up, in full uncle disguise, and spends the whole time fucking with bruce and having a blast.

like bruce was kind of checked out last year when the conferences happened and now he’s starting to claw out of his grief enough to be present and engaged. especially now that tim is staying with his “uncle” bruce is like wait. wait. and is trying to make more of an effort, so he shows up to the conference. and then at the conference khoa is just lounging in his chair like, “tim fell asleep in class? good for him, i’ve been telling him to get more sleep” and bruce is trying to be Even Better Dad to compensate while his eye is just constantly twitching.

[parent-teacher conference shenanigans with contributions from @cairoscene, @90kon, & @mammutblog:]

teacher: i won't sugar coat it, tim is very nearly failing literature

khoa: ah. a ridiculous subject anyway.

teacher: i notice tim is very... isolated. he doesn't seem to engage much with his peers, even when they try to initiate conversations with him

khoa: well children are idiots, i don't blame him

teacher: tim got in a fight—

khoa: did he win?

khoa: oh tim’s getting an A in science? we should celebrate. i’ll take him to get ice cream for dinner. we usually do that anyway but this time he can have extra sprinkles

bruce: that’s not— [deep breath] in my experience tim has trouble remembering to eat a balanced diet when left to his own devices, which is important to his growth at this age.

khoa: yeah of course. that’s why sometimes we get frozen yogurt instead

bruce: tim is lactose intolerant

khoa: [pulls out a packet of lactaid] i know

anyway!! after a bunch of shenanigans and awkward actually-taking-care-of-tim moments, something big happens where bruce and tim are in deep trouble and khoa breaks cover to burst in and rescue both batman & robin and all secrets come out. tim is shocked that he didn’t figure out who khoa was (in tim’s defense, he’s had a Lot going on) and bruce is soooo mad he didn’t see through the disguise, but also bruce is. grateful. that khoa has been there for tim, especially when khoa finally gets to do a full “get your head out of your ass” rant about the various ways tim has been pretending to be way more okay than he is.

khoa: if you’re going to CARE about people so much the least you can do is! pay attention to them!! this kid is your problem, act like it!

bruce: sounds like he might be Our problem now

khoa: only because i don’t trust you to get the job done 😤

(ALSO because khoa is literally there to lurk and observe he notices the league slipping into gotham and they end up rescuing a resurrected jason early.)

anyway i just think the concept of khoa being tim’s deus ex machina adult is so fun. like tim is on some international mission with young justice and it seems like all hope is lost and then freaking ghost-maker swans in and takes out all the enemies and gives tim a whole rant about How Is Bruce Letting You Run Around Like This, Does He Know What You’re Getting Up To In Your Spare Time, Where Even Is He. the vibe is ghost-maker dropping a (carefully patched up) robin on wayne manor doorstep with a sticky note on tim’s forehead reading TAKE BETTER CARE OF YOUR THINGS.

(bonus au of this au from aubrey where bruce DOES see through khoa’s disguise:

Tim: Bruce, this is my uncle--

Bruce: ANTON?!

Khoa: 😘

Tim: oh my god DID YOU FUCK MY FAKE UNCLE, BRUCE?)

also please look at this khoa and tim art again for the vibes

[bitterrobin]

regarding Chris and Damian as foils... I'm always peeved when some people minimize what could be interesting about their relationship to "a child who only values his biological family and hates his adoptive family vs a child who renounces his bio family and embraces an adoptive family." This brief summary/discussion always tends to boil down to Damian is an evil child who must learn to appreciate his adoptive siblings from Chris, who's a perfect boy who loves his adoptive parents and hates his abusive bio parents. When really, that screws both of their characters.

Damian has a complicated relationship to say the least with Bruce and Talia, but neither of them taught him that blood is everything. When written well, Bruce should be stressed and neglectful but deeply loving and Talia shouldn't be an abuser but a sorrowful mother who wasn't able to give him a free life that she wanted for herself.

I should stress that the "blood son" rhetoric that pops up around Damian existed only in his first appearance and the animated movies. In pretty much all of the comics afterwards, Damian was disparaging of Dick, Tim and Cassandra, but he didn't point out his "biological superiority" unless it was specifically in service to Tim's own storylines. His character evolved from an annoying brat that exists to challenge Bruce and Tim for a couple issues to a full child character whose insecurity within a family leads to him lashing out at everyone he deems closer to Bruce than he could ever be. Moving on to Chris Kent, his entire first storyline revolves around building a relationship with Clark and Lois and finding the resolve to fight back against Zod and Ursa. In the end he makes the sacrifice to return to the Phantom Zone in order to ensure that his bio parents can't return to Earth. But in the end, he's just a kid. He struggled with fitting in on Earth. Unlike Clark, he didn't understand why he had to hide his powers. Had he not been sent back to the Phantom Zone to wrap up the story arc, I would've really liked to see Chris struggle with pretending to be a human kid after so long being taught the opposite by his bio parents. Later on when Chris reappears aged-up (deja vu) he's still pretty much the same character but notably more cocky and impulsive to contrast against Thara Ak-Var.

Damian and Chris's potential interactions should be preceded on how similar they are - not on how superior Chris is because he's a loving kid, and Damian is too traumatized to express the same kind of trust and affection that people expect from child characters. Besides, they have entirely different situations. Damian is a child suddenly being dropped into a large and well established family with complicated inner dynamics and rituals, while Chris is a child being brought into a small and simple family structure consisting of Clark/Lois, Kara and Clark's parents. (Pointing out here that Jon didn't exist and Kon-El was killed in Infinite Crisis months prior to Chris's appearance). Chris's bio parents are cut and dry neglectful and abusive, and Damian's parents are a complicated jumble of neglect, ooc abuse, angst, and love. Damian had to contend with the frankly insane plots and history of all the Bat-characters while Chris was confined to one plot line in a fairly consistent Superman run. I don't think I have to spell out how mentally unstable and grief-stricken a lot of the Bats were when Damian became Robin versus the relatively normal lives of Ma, Pa, Clark and Lois when Chris showed up. When exploring what their interaction could've been, I think Damian would one-sidedly hate Chris, who would try to avoid him. Damian would resent Chris for being everything he isn't: a child whose flaws are accepted and embraced, a child with a complete loving family and support, and a child that allowed to be a child. Chris probably wouldn't like Damian at first for being Robin when he got used to Tim being Robin, and he'd be discouraged at how snappy and anti-social Damian is. He's a kind child, but he's not a saint. Chris would have the usual child hang-ups about interacting with mean kids and socializing outside his family. They'd accept each other the way that they are, but I don't think they'd become friends until Damian matures and Chris acclimates to human society as his own individual. Maybe eventually they grow to trust/confide in each other like Bruce and Clark - but until then it'd probably a lot of Damian making rude comments and Chris going :/

[dairy-farmer]

Thinking about Tim being a very fertile slut and using it to his advantage. He uses pregnancy and having babies as a form of power and control over the men he fucks

At 13 he swells up nice and big with Bruce's baby, and the mixture of blackmail (getting his 13 year old sidekick pregnant is hardly a good look for Batman OR Bruce Wayne) and looming fatherhood calms him down in the wake of Jason's death

Tim gets pregnant a few months after that baby is born bc he rides his dad, who is still confined to a wheelchair when Tim first sits on his cock. By the time he's nearly due, Jack is up and walking around. If he didn't have Tim's pregnant pussy to chase around, he never would have taken to his PT so quickly, nor would he have quit his drinking

At 15, Tim gets fucked full of the Red Hood's baby, and it serves not only to calm Jason down a bit, but also kind of reintegrate him into the family. Despite having 3 babies from as many baby daddies, Tim is a devoted mother, and so his children stay at home in Wayne Manor a majority of the time, and so Jason has no real choice but to rejoin the batfam if he doesn't want to be a deadbeat (and if he wants to fuck Tim while he gets bigger and prettier with Jason's baby)

At 16, Bruce has just died and Dick is Batman. Tim is quick to get pregnant from his oldest brother, but by the time that baby is born, he has to find Bruce, he can't just leave the father of his first child to die in the timestream! So knowing his 4 babies are in Alfred's capable hands (and knowing that Jason and Dick will both step up with their respective child), Tim runs off to find Bruce. And he does! Red Robin leaves Gotham 6 weeks postpartum and returns 10 months later, nearly 9 months pregnant with the child of none other than Ra's Al Ghoul

Bruce returns from the timestream in time to be there with Tim when he gives birth to baby 5 at 17, and Tim can't resist letting Bruce knock him up again a few months later, just bc he missed him so much. Meanwhile all of his other baby daddies (save his own father, may he RIP) are clamoring for Tim's attention, desperate to fuck his sweet pussy again, begging for the chance to see Tim swell up heavy and fat with their child once more

Whether he lets them is up to you, or maybe he finds more men in positions of power to have the bastard of (Superman would be a good tool to have under his belt, maybe even Lex Luthor, too. Aquaman is an entire as king to an underwater kingdom, Tim might as well have his fingers in every pie - or more accurately, have everyone's buns in his oven). But Tim figures he might as well put his fertility and reproductive health to good use, right? He's always wanted to be a mom, anyways

!!!! tim manipulating otherwise powerful men around him to make sure plans he has work out (plus he gets to be a momma!!)

[celaenaeiln]

Hi! I really love all your takes and character analysis. I'm new-ish to Batman so these are always so educational for me 😅 I was wondering, in your opinion, of all the batkids, who would you say would make the most terrifying villains? And who, canonically, would you say exercises the most self control to prevent exactly that from happening? Like every day, they have to work to prevent themselves from crossing that line.

...(Is it Dick? I feel like you're going to say Dick)

Thank you!

You got me!! Those are good questions!

I had to think a lot about this honestly.

So for most terrifying villain, I would say Dick. Mostly because it's just canon. When Dick was the villain both times in New Order and in DC vs Vampires, he practically eradicated the world based on who he felt needed to go. In DC vs Vampires he didn't care for anyone so by the time he was done there were no humans left. In New Order he lost it when the heroes accidentally killed Bruce and thus destroyed the entire justice league and remade himself as the head of all military operations under the government. Dick also knows exactly how to kill Bruce and he's terrified of it (Nightwing: Knight Terrors). Kory once told him during the Teen Titans (2003?) comic that Dick could stack up all the Titans and could take on the Justice League if he wanted to but Dick states that he knows and that's exactly why he's scared.

Also the way he manipulates every single person in existence in both his typical Nightwing runs is just a hint of the brilliance. Many times when his partners want to chase after a villain, he makes them let them go so that he grab the lizard, its hiding spot, and its family rather than just the tail.

Grayson Annual #3

Dick is not reckless in anyway either, he plans and analyzes and calculates as he moves which makes him a fantastic strategist, detective, and doer all in one.

Or actually I change my mind, I choose Cass. I forgot about her initially. Cass can beat everyone in the world (except Harley). Batman has admitted it too.

Detective Comics (2016) Issue #951

She's unstoppable. So unless the Batfamily sends in Harley, in a straight fight where no one runs away *cough* Batman Issue 137 *cough*, then Cass would win. After her though, in a tactical and fighting sense combined it would be Dick.

Jason is canonically the one who struggles with self-control everyday. But unlike some people, I don't think this a fault of his that should be changed or erased. To me, each robin represents a certain characteristic of society.

Dick - the hope of the people.

Jason - the anger of the people.

Tim - the morality of the people.

Stephanie - the safety of the people.

Damian - the rights of the people.

Dick says the meaning of robin is helping the good. And all the robins do this in their own ways.

Jason's robin represents the rightful anger by the people against the injustice. Like the Boston Tea Party against Britain's taxation, Jason was born and raised in Gotham so his love for the common people on the street is overwhelming. He wants to help every woman and child find a better life and survive because it's reflective of the life he and his mother were forced to face. So when he sees a man sexually assaulting a woman or beating a child or selling drugs, his anger bursts out. And in Gotham, there's a lot of that everywhere. So take a good person and put in him the skills and fuel for hurting the bad and you get Jason Todd. That's why from his Robin days he has struggled with self-control.

"He was a drug dealing pimp."

Batman (1940) Issue #645

"I'm sorry...but that doesn't mean he didn't deserve it."

Furthermore in the Batman Urban Legends comic also in the Batman and Robin Eternal comic it shows that Jason's greatest wish is the Joker's death and that coupled with the Gotham War and Selina's interference, Jason has the most trouble with self-control. But I believe it's rightfully so.

I think after Jason it's Dick who struggles with self-control. Not as robin but as Nightwing. Especially during his darkest days of the Nightwing (1996) comic and the Outsiders comic, Dick has been shown to forcibly stop himself when someone hurts his friends or family.

Okay, the difference between Jason and Dick's struggle with self-control is that Jason feels it all the time because his motivating factor is ever present while Dick only struggles with it when someone hurts the people he loves because that's Dick's motivating factor.

Damian is the one who has the most trouble after that. Then Stephanie, Tim, Cass, and Duke. Although if you're including Stephanie's robin days, she would be tied with Jason.

[sleepingontheclouds]

i did a rant for Jason, now I’m doing a rant for my favorite superhero and occasionally morally grey person <3

I’m going to put a trigger warning here and now for the majority of this post. Discussing Dick Grayson for me means talking about very sensitive moments for his character, I will be mentioning and talking about some non-consensual events that happened to him in certain comic canons and one underage event. Please if this can/will trigger you, click off or skim over the parts where I mention it. I will highlight the parts where I actively speak about situations like that in red. Thank you.

Titans

I’ve watched to season 3 of Titans so far and I just gotta say, Dick’s character got a downgrade and an upgrade. Let me elaborate.

Firstly, I love what the writers did and how they characterized the boy wonder in season one. He was an authority figure, a protector. Literally the first time we are introduced to Robin and the first time we see Dick in the Robin suit, he’s brutalizing child abusers.

Throughout the entire first season there are multiple instances of Dick being very protective towards children and very aggressive with people he believes to hurt children.

In a later episode of season one, Dick tracks down a man with Kori after Rachel runs away with Gar. Once he realizes that the man has seen Rachel, let alone in the woods, he immediately goes into attack mode. At that point he believed that Rachel was alone, he didnt know about Gar and he didn’t know that she was with anyone. He punches the man and starts asking if he did anything to her, he goes protective and is very close to breaking that guys nose before his daughter runs out of her room and sees what’s going on, making Dick stop.

Personally, I loved that aspect of his character. It’s not only foreshadowing at the fact that he’s going to become an older brother, I personally think it also hints at a very traumatic event that happened to him in the comics.

It made me so sad to see him lose that aspect of himself after season one. I suppose the overprotective violence faded along side his other more regular violence.

I loved his violent characterization throughout the first two seasons, it really helps understand his character and him as a person.

In the first season, whenever he’s wearing the Robin suit he’s physically incapable of stopping himself from getting too violent, no matter how much he may want to without the costume on.

He stabs people, breaks peoples noses, nearly makes people bleed out, stomps peoples faces in, everything under the sun except kill them. That’s the whole reason he left Gotham, that’s the whole reason he held a grudge against Bruce in season one.

The journey we go through with Dick in season two is an amazing depiction of his character.

The literal order of events just screams mental breakdown to me and the episodes following made me think he had a psychological break, then we find out that he’s just like that.

The events go like this. First Dick starts seeing hallucinations of his father figure which he hates and that’s apparently just a normal thing that happens in Dick’s day to day life? Then he goes Robin mode, hurting a man he used to work with because he’s annoyed with the hallucination of his father. Then he goes to a dance club and nearly kills a man that works with Slade because he has a secret he needs to hide?? Then his traumatized nineteen year old brother tries to kill himself and what does Dick do? He trauma dumps all over Jason hoping that it’ll make him feel better and not want to die. (It doesn’t) then everyone he loves leaves him. He then decides to go visit the mother of the kid he thinks he got killed and finds himself talking to Slade. My guy then books a flight across the world because the fucking assassin with one eye who killed his own son said that he needed to repent by being in isolation?? You know what this dude does instead of going to Japan like he’s supposed to? He assaults two police officers to get himself seven years in jail. You know who he doesn’t tell? Gar. The teenager he left in charge of watching Superman’s clone with no other orders than, ‘call Bruce if he wakes up’ when he knows Bruce will not answer.

Then the dude breaks these gang members out of jail so they don’t get deported, that gets him thrown in solitary. You know what he does in solitary? Hallucinates his dad, fights him in his imagination, and then breaks out of jail.

When Dick eventually grows into his own person after all that insanity, when he becomes Nightwing— he forgives Bruce. It’s another aspect about his characterization that I love. Dick is forgiving, in a good and bad way, until he isn’t.

Dick doesn’t care what people do to him, it’s one of his biggest flaws. He lets himself get hurt over and over again and he just takes it. He lets his peers absolutely bash him and openly hate him, but he’s always still there for them. He always still supports them.

He knows Bruce turned him into a weapon, but he still went back. He went back and tried to ignore everything and forget about all the awful things Bruce did to him. He never directly talks to Bruce about it, sure he’s passive aggressive during [redacted’s] funeral dinner in season 2 but he never actually talks about anything.

The only time he snaps at Bruce is after Jason dies.

After his brother, who he didn’t treat like a brother, dies, he’s trying to cope. Everyone is. He knows Bruce copes in a different way and he respects it, what he doesn’t respect is the fact that Bruce is trying to rope in another child to be Robin. He’s trying to replace Jason right after he dies. That’s when Dick loses his temper.

Even after everything, it takes someone else being hurt for Dick to speak his mind. He never really stands up for himself, he stands up for other people and bottles in his emotions.

Comics

In the comics, Dick is much similar. He bottles up his emotions until he physically can’t.

He’s always trying to be happy, even Nightwing isn’t serious. For Bruce, Batman is a way to let out his true self. Batman is the real Bruce, Bruce Wayne is the mask he hides behind.

It’s exactly the opposite for Dick. Dick Grayson is the caring older brother who has no trauma and exists to help, Nightwing is the funny vigilante, he’s the protector of Blüdhaven who cracks jokes and never breaks a smile while fighting. Either way, Dick just trades in one mask for another.

The only times it’s genuinely him, is when he’s at his most vulnerable. When he isn’t around his family, his brothers, Bruce. That’s when the real him can come out, his real genuine emotions.

In a certain comic run that I’m unsure if it’s still canon or not, Dick gets assaulted. It’s before he has his facade, it’s right when it’s starting to develop. He’s sixteen.

Dick gets in a horrible fight with Bruce, it results in him either running away or getting kicked out, either way he isn’t with Bruce. The sixteen year old is left to fend for himself, then a 21 year old woman who’s targeting Wayne enterprises comes along.

She manipulates Dick and takes advantage of him (along with her husband I think) all to get to Bruce.

He never talks about it.

!! I WILL BE REPLYING TO THIS IN A REBLOG CAUSE THIS IS GETTING VERY LONG AND TYPING IS GETTING SLOW !!

[nari-writes]

Tim Drake has Problems and Issues, and Batman is a capital-B-bad word. (ft. Jason Peter Todd, The Second Robin and Incorrigible Creature of Sass and Child Protection). aka. Blogging (and other dangerous activities likely to get you adopted by the Batman) chapter 2 (HECK). Part one | Ao3 Link

Tim finds out the next morning that the hecking Batman stole his camera’s memory card. He hadn’t even seen Bruce take it! Granted, part of his distraction had been the dark and the late hour and the suddenly-woken-from-sleep by what could probably be constituted as someone’s sleep paralysis demon, but wow. The slight of hand required, when Tim’s attention had been worriedly and entirely focused on his camera? He’d been paranoid that Bruce would take the camera as punishment for his photos - but he hadn’t even noticed Batman stealing his SD card. 

He’s prepared to write it off as the price of his identity being discovered - because he’s got two others and can fetch a third next weekend for backup - when he has the sudden, horrified realisation that he hadn’t finished formatting the card last night. It had been cold and he’d wanted to make Jason smooshing into a snowbank into a gif for his blog, and by the time he’d finished that and posted it, his eyelids were basically shut and he’d still needed to pull the other photos off the card. He thought he’d have time to format it this morning because his dad had a golf thing early, and Tim and his mum were only going later for the brunch and the mingling after everyone had finished playing, but-  

But he doesn’t have time. Because Batman had stolen the card. The card he hadn’t finished formatting, and last night he’d been playing around with slow exposure shots and taking pictures of Wayne Manor. He'd been playing around with the long lens he doesn't get to use often because it was too bulky and he'd been taking pictures of Wayne Manor. 

Oh he’s so doomed. He’s got to get the card back before Bruce has time to look at it, if he hasn’t already. The photos are definitely going to be called creepy at best and at worst they’ll highlight Tim is well aware of his neighbour’s nighttime activities. Thankfully, the lack of alien mind-probing and Bruce Wayne at his doorstep at least indicate Bruce hasn’t had time to go through the photos. Yet. 

Probably.

Freaking heck, he's so screwed.

Plan one is to just...break into Wayne Manor. It's a stupid idea, so he doesn't even put it on a back burner to muse over and discard later because there are way too many problems with it. How is he going to break into a) the home of a billionaire and b) the home of the literal dang Batman, most paranoid and prepared person on planet Earth? It's not happening. It would be nice if it was that straight forward, but it's not happening.

Plan two is his parents. They are technically home this week, and he's pretty sure he can get them to invite themselves into Bruce Wayne's house if he pretends Bruce wants to talk business. He knows how to get into his dad's emails, and if he acts fast enough he can get them to organise some sort of business meeting before his parents jet off again at the end of mid-semester break. It's still dependent on his parents staying till the end of the mid-semester break, though, and also on Bruce not being suspicious that Tim Drake, guy he just stole a camera from and also threatened, is coming to his house. It’s a pretty bad plan.

Plan three makes him feel kind of slimy, but it's the one that's most likely to work if he can't get around his parents. 

Jason's self-defence classes, the ones Bruce totes as an ‘anti-kidnapping measure’, are run by the same person who teaches Tim’s classes on the other side of the city. He’s built up enough goodwill with her that he’s pretty sure if he looks dejected about his parents not being able to come to his Tuesday class to see his progress, she’ll let him join Jason’s Thursday class as a temporary measure, even though that class got booked out a day after Bruce’s kidnapping commentary.  

From there it’s just a matter of prior parkour practice making him a fun match for Jason and Jason’s Robin training, and then Jason enjoying his company enough to chat to him after class so they’re still together when Alfred or Dick comes to pick Jason up, and Tim then letting on that he lives next door and oh no, looks like his parents aren’t picking him up, would it be at all possible to be dropped off? Then pretending to forget his key and his parents not being home to let him in - which, at least, is the part of the plan most likely to succeed, and it makes him a bit miffed that there are so many other points of failure - and getting himself invited to stay at Wayne Manor until his parents are free to pick him up. 

On Thursday he’s pretty sure they have a dinner date with the Khadirs, and they actually like each other. It means his parents won’t be home till eleven at the earliest, which will give Tim plenty of time to search the manor. 

Unless, of course, Bruce didn’t take the memory card into the manor and has instead stored it in the Batcave, which Tim knows exists but has never been able to access, or he’s given it to Dick or Oracle to look into, or even just Tim not being enough to keep Jason's attention-

God, he’s going to have to figure out how to make plan one work, isn’t he. 

There just isn't time for plan three, because Bruce will totally have free time between now and Thursday and so much of it hinges on Jason wanting to talk to him when Tim's three years younger and five feet shorter, and it runs the risk of Jason recognising him from jaunts in Gotham. Plan two is better, but not by much, and he's concerned that Batman's legendary paranoia is going to have negative effects on Tim's success rate.

Plan one…maybe he can pretend to be selling cookies for the girl scouts? He's young enough to get away with it - but there's no way Mr. Pennyworth will let him inside, unless maybe it's raining. That'd be a weird situation to get into though - to walk between their properties when there's a better road, and to lug behind whatever eclectic collection of cookies he can find, and then invite himself into their house to get out of the rain. It'd look totally suspicious. And what respectable girl scout would sell things without the rest of their troupe? Or supervision. Or checking the weather. What respectable Gothamite would go out without checking the weather?

He would need it to be raining - which, to be fair, happens often enough in Gotham - but not have the day be dreary, so he has an excuse to have forgotten his umbrella. And, as everyone knows, when it rains on a day that's not dreary, it's normally acidic, and Tim's not keen on dealing with the raindrops burning scars into his scalp.

Scratch that, no girl scout impersonation is in his future. He could try and just break in and pretend a friend had dared him? But that wouldn't give him a lot of time to investigate, and no access to the Batcave.

Although. Why does he have to break into Wayne Manor? 

Tim's eyes narrow in the mirror, lips twitching upward. Why not use Batman's paranoia against him? If there's the risk his memory card will be in the Batcave, why not start in the Batcave? He'll have two perfect excuses either way - there's likely no way to tell the Batcave is under Wayne Manor, so he won't be risking his knowledge of their identities - and Batman stole his memory card, so why wouldn't he track down Batman to get it back? Plus if he needs to go upstairs to find the card, he can always claim pre-teen prankster status, or even just leave and get back into Wayne Manor some other way. His parents will kill him if he gets caught in Bruce Wayne's house, but he'd rather be 'grounded' for the rest of the break then let Batman realise Tim's a stalker. 

…Okay he probably already thinks that, but still. Tim’s not letting the Batman know about his collection of Wayne family photos. He'll never be able to walk around Gotham again. 

He’ll never want to walk around Gotham again, on account of the fact that he’ll be dead from embarrassment. 

So…now he just needs to break into the Batmobile and get himself driven into the Batcave. He's totally got this.

—-

Several hours later he’s still sure he’s got it, even if it’s not at the same level of total assurance it was that morning. He’s followed Batman and Robin around all night and neither of them have caught even a glimpse of him, and he knows they were keeping an eye out because they swung past his usual haunts twice. As if he’d be dumb enough to use the same spot after it’d been blown. He’s young, not dumb. 

He’s also not dumb enough to beeline straight for the Batmobile the first time they leave it unattended, either. A few carefully thrown rocks from the fire escape reveal no perimeter alarms summoning Batman and Robin back if someone gets near the car, and even the ones he lets very carefully - he didn’t throw them hard at all, and made sure to stand closer he could aim better! - hit the tires and the door didn't set off an alarm. 

It’s kinda stupid, actually. When Tim gets his SD card back he’s gonna send Commissioner Gordan a message about it so the Commissioner can use the information to make fun of Batman. That’ll be a good revenge for taking Tim’s stuff. 

The lock’s harder than testing the perimeter alarms, though. His palms are so sweaty he has to keep wiping them on his hoodie to stop himself from leaving marks, and every noise makes him scamper back to hide behind a group of stacked cardboard boxes, just in case it’s Batman or Robin. It takes forever before he can get the trunk unlocked, but when he does he sighs in relief and quickly scampers inside. 

There is…very little space. It makes sense, all things considered - what's the best use for a car, bar travelling storage space? - but Tim's thankful he's small and flexible enough to fit around all the junk. His mother’s yoga obsession is serving him well right now, because he's got one foot pressed against a spare tire and the other wedged by his ear, and if he were any less dedicated to Dick Grayson’s gymnastics routines he'd have already started to cramp.

He really hopes they have a short patrol tonight. It is a Monday, so chances are good that Jason at least will be sent home, and Bruce at least visits the Manor to (presumably?) put Jason to bed and (probably?) drop off evidence, but that still means at least two hours of this squished discomfort.

Except also it’s winter break, so Jason doesn’t technically have to be back at the manor for school the next morning. Tim scowls at the realisation that he’s probably gonna be here for ages. He breathes deep, trying to relax so he doesn't cramp up, and then pauses.

How does the trunk of Batman's car smell better than his dumb gloves? 

There's a faint motor oil smell, but mostly it's just clean carpet and mint and a vague smoke, like the remnants of a campfire. It's nice, way nicer than the other times Tim has been shoved in a car boot (though at least he normally had more wiggle room when being kidnapped, even though handcuffs had made it impossible to utilise) and Tim's got plenty of time…his blink feels a little too long, but he doesn't bother to fight back a yawn. At least if he can get some sleep it'll make the time go faster and he can finally get to looking for his memory card.

His neck spasms, and Tim hisses between his teeth, awkwardly shifting his arm to try and ease the cramp. Sleep hovers out of his reach, but thankfully the pain eases and he slips into a drifting lull, the muted noise of late-night traffic enough to mimic the trees that normally rustle outside his bedroom window. 

By the time the engine rumbles under his cheek, Tim's stumbled through half-dreams of Robin and long exposure shots and his knee is stiff enough that he knows getting out of the car is going to be difficult. Still, he's been lucky enough so far that Batman hasn't found him, and he's not about to trade a sore leg for a frogmarch back to his parents. 

The pull of acceleration makes a tire press against his ribs, but bar the squish of things moving around, the actual drive is surprisingly smooth. He can't hear anything from the front seats, but it's still making his heart rabbit in excitement; he's so close to Batman and Robin, and they have no idea. 

…No wonder Rouges pull plots all the time, if this is the amount of giddy adrenaline that hits you when you get away with something under Batman's nose. Tim feels like he's going to jitter out of his skin, and it's only the lack of space in the car that's stopped some excited hand flapping and gleeful wiggles. He can’t help it. It’s just so exciting to know he’s so close to Batman and Robin, the shadowy vigilante heroes of Gotham. He’ll never be able to talk about it, but it’s exhilarating to know his classmates will never experience anything like this.

The car rumbles through Gotham, her engine a purr of power, and Tim feels every corner and twist, even if he can’t figure out the road they take back. It doesn’t matter, though: he still knows where he’s going, and he knows his plan for when they arrive. 

He needs to be careful. He has to wait. Tim tilts the edge of his watch towards his face and manages to wiggle it into the light coming through the brake light. It's just after 2am - but that doesn't mean Bruce has finished up his work as Batman. He'd made himself promise he wouldn't leave the car until 10am, which is when he normally sees Mr. Pennyworth drive Bruce into the city, presumably for work. 

Theoretically he could get out earlier, but he knows 10am is the only verifiable time, and points of failure decree that he should limit them with available evidence whenever possible. That's rule number one in making sure your plans work with minimal adjustment - and he's already gonna have to do major adjusting when he gets out of the car. Like, for example, do they have cameras? How will he access them to hide his presence? What if Jason or Dick is in the Batcave instead of the Manor? Tim will probably hear them, but things are pretty muffled in the car. 

Then the SD card itself - would Bruce put it somewhere logical, like near the computer? Should Tim check the computer to make sure no files have been copied across? Is what Tim considers logical going to be what Bruce considers logical?

And finally, getting out. Sure, they'll be way easier ways of getting from Batcave to Manor than vice versa, but what if someone sees him? Or what if there are extra cameras upstairs on a different security system? 

He hates not having every point of information available for easy access, but there's nothing he can do here but his best.

Which. Disgusting. He hates that he just said that to himself but it's all he has to combat his nerves right now so unfortunately his best will have to do. After all, it's not within his power to get a blueprint of the Batcave, or he'd have just hacked the batcomputer and deleted his photos manually.

He sighs to himself longingly at the thought and hears the tires change from pavement to stone, and then an echoing reverb of machinery. The Batcave; it must be. He’s in the freaking Batcave. His heart pounds in his chest and he grins to himself, a tiny noise of excitement squeaking out of his throat. This past day-and-change has sucked in terms of his stress levels, but holy heck the fact that he’s currently in the literal Batcave has almost made everything worth it. How could it not, when Tim is in a sanctum so very few get to see? He’ll never be able to tell anyone, but that’s just par the course at this point - and he likes getting to keep his secrets. 

Who cares if his parents never ask about what he’s been up to, when Tim can hold in his heart the knowledge that he is one of the privileged few that knows the Batman’s identity?

Sure, Bruce didn't tell him, but isn't it even cooler that Tim figured it out by himself? He'd only ever admit the daydreams on threat of telepath, but sometimes he's thought about Bruce finding out Tim knows and being impressed with him. Bruce would compliment him on his discovery, on the deductive reasoning and the evidence he collected to prove it; what else would impress the greatest detective in the world but someone of similar calibre? 

It'd be amazing to have Batman invite him into more secrets, impressed by his faithfulness, but...

Tim's not stupid. Kids are a seen-and-not-heard subsection of the human species, especially kids like him, and Batman would likely only be pissed at Tim for being an uncontrollable liability. Better to make sure that, like everything else Tim thought important, it was kept his own personal secret. No need for Batman to get involved with Tim Drake if Tim Drake is a normal kid, and no need for his parents to drop him off at another boarding school for bringing trouble to their door in Gotham. 

There's a sudden click, and Tim startles, head twisting as the trunk lifts. It gets him into the perfect position to be blinded as the trunk opens, and then-

“Ah,” he says, staring up at the cowl and cape, before swallowing thickly. “Hello.”

“This is breaking and entering,” says Batman, and Tim can't stop his scowl. 

“That's super hypocritical. You literally broke into my house yesterday.”

“Your window was unlocked.”

“That's not an invitation!”

Batman makes a noise in his throat, and Tim tries to wiggle out from around the spare gear and the tire he'd wedged himself around. His attempt ends when Batman takes him by both biceps and physically pulls him from the vehicle, sitting him against the ledge of the trunk when he's free. 

“I think breaking and entering requires you to not have driven him here,” says Jason, his voice a drawl of sarcastic displeasure, and Tim flushes and looks down at his shoes. Batman had known the whole time? He'd just…let Tim stay in the boot for the whole drive, and not done anything to stop him? How humiliating, to find out his oh-so-clever plan hadn't even survived first contact.

Batman's looking at him. Tim can feel eyes resting heavy on the back of his neck before Bruce says, “The Batmobile is well-outfitted with sensors and cameras to prevent theft or tampering. Prior experience assisted in advising me of the…issues with my security system.”

Jason's weight shifts, like he knows he's the ‘experience’ that highlighted the Batmobile’s weak spots, but Tim's stomach just feels wobbly. 

“Do you enjoy lying?” Batman asks, and Tim's head snaps up.

“What?”

His stomach no longer feels wobbly. Now it just feels…gone. Like it dropped into his feet and took his guts with it. Is his face pale? It certainly seems like it should be, with how his fingers have begun to tingle, the too-hard pulse of his heart depriving him of oxygen. 

“I distinctly remember you saying that I wouldn't see you out again at night-”

“You weren’t going to,” Tim says, feeling light-headed, the sentence cut off by his own recognition of a pitiful defence. Bruce’s mouth is a hard, flat line. 

“Did you or did you not understand the intent behind the instructions I provided, Tim Drake?”

“Yeah,” he mumbles, shoulders hunching. Because yeah, he had, but Batman hadn’t caught him in three years and he’d figured that his lucky streak would continue. Especially if he didn’t post anything on the blog, and Batman had no further proof of his existence and/or his defiance of Batman’s rule. 

“Then, with that in mind, do you understand that your behaviour directly violates the rules we discussed, and additionally endangers your safety?”

He’s been scolded before. It still hadn’t felt like this, with humiliation making heat prick at his eyes. Batman's impassive, but you never look at Batman to know how he feels: you look at Robin. Tim chances a glance and sees Robin’s shifted on his heels, looking awkward and unhappy. 

Bruce must be so mad. 

“We didn’t discuss anything,” Tim says softly, his throat tight and his hands shaking as he tries to keep his emotions under control. “I’m careful. You just - you just ordered me around, but you don’t know me.”

“Kid,” Jason says, and Tim’s nails bite into his palm. “It’s our job to protect the people of Gotham-”

“You stole my stuff! You stole my stuff and deleted my archive and do you know how many people were upset? Twitter blew up about it. They like you! They like seeing you. It was important to them! It was important to me.”

…But why should Batman care? Tim’s long since learnt that things that are important to him don’t get to be in plain sight - his dad has broken his stuff before, and Tim’s not let that happen to anything he actually cares about for so long that he’s forgotten what it feels like. The feeling that he’s stupid for letting it get to him, when it doesn’t even really matter, the helpless, melancholic kick of being unable to change anyone’s mind-

“Aw, kid, hey,” Robin’s kneeling in front of him now, hands on Tim’s shoulders, and Tim’s mortified to realise he’s been sniffling. Can this day get any worse? Bad enough that his clever checks and foolproof plan were literally ignored by Batman so that Tim would stay out of the way tonight, now he’s crying? Like a child too emotional to be up past his bedtime? “Come on now, squirt, B-man’s an overbearing prick but the translation here is he’s terrified for you. It was dangerous for the site to stay up. Your photos were amazing - but you were so close to us. ”

“I wasn’t,” Tim says, wiping his runny nose across his sleeve, and then suddenly a black handkerchief drops into his eyeline. He pauses, tracing it up to Batman’s hand, and then pettily says, “...if this smells as bad as your gloves I don’t wanna use it.” Jason snorts and mumbles something that may have been a proud, I told you so.

(He still takes it. He’s not petty enough to refuse having a handkerchief from the Batman. This night has been a nightmare - at least he can still have the world’s most pity-present souvenir.)

“Distance,” Batman says softly, “was not the problem.”

“Okay,” Robin says, when Tim’s expression takes on a mutinous edge, “think of it this way for me, yeah? There’s a blog that’s gotten crazy popular because it’s started semi-regularly posting really good photos of us. Batman and Robin. And you, you’re Penguin or Riddler or Marone, whatever, you wanna know how the blog gets good pictures of us. Wondering how the photographer knows where we are. You start thinking maybe Batman’s trying to drum up good PR and then suddenly you’re thinking: hey, maybe this blogger knows the Bats.”

“I don’t!” Tim says quickly, and Jason looks over his shoulder at Bruce. Tim, desperate, follows his gaze, and-

Batman’s holding his SD card. 

“Don’t you?”

[cyb-by-lang]

I kinda already commented and it felt weird to do it again? So I thought I’d ask here instead:

I just saw a post on tumblr that Batman did try to kill Joker and Superman stopped him??? And it was because Joker was somehow linked with Iran, and couldn’t be killed cuz it would start a war. And other Batkids also tried to kill Joker???

I’ve honestly always thought Batman didn’t kill Joker cuz he’s too popular a villain so it was just sort of waved off because of ‘Batman rules’ and publication reasons.

Is Batman almost killing Joker included in your fic? I have very little knowledge of the comics and hearing about newer versions overwriting previous stories makes me even more confused.

Congrats to you for having unlocked a secret level of rambling through deciding to send an ask rather than a comment. This would totally have ended up on AO3 below your comment. :p

And it is going below the cut because it's long as hell.

The scenario you've heard about was from the original run of A Death in the Family, which is the story arc where Jason was killed back in the 80s. In the aftermath of Bruce finding Jason dead (and Jason's birth mother dying shortly thereafter), he hunts for the Joker after realizing that the warehouse explosion didn't, in fact, kill the clown. Somehow (racism!) the Joker ends up being appointed as the Iranian ambassador to the UN. This was later retconned to the fictional country of Qurac, because even DC realized that was a step too far. In the scene after that fun little reveal, Superman is on hand to try and keep shenanigans to a minimum, the Joker predictably tries to gas the entire UN assembly chamber anyway, and then flees via helicopter. Batman, who has been trailing along this entire time in a rage, pursues.

He's planning to kill the clown. Superman, for reasons related to "we don't whack ambassadors and start wars," has been holding him back for the arc thus far. Helicopter pursuit turns into a helicopter fight, during which the Joker's henchman fires a spray of bullets that kills the pilot while everyone is on board and having a bad time. Batman exits the aircraft alive, intact, and furious, and doesn't give a single shit if the Joker died when the chopper hit the sea.

And then a month later the fucking clown comes back again like nothing happened. Only the entire setting has undergone a serious tone shift since Jason's death, which means you're gonna see a lot heavier, dramatic stories that have more significant body counts. Batman cannot get over the death of his son, because no, and eventually Tim Drake pops up in the middle of that death spiral with a hypothesis: "Batman needs a Robin."

He's not wrong.

He also doesn't go about it super gracefully, including an attempt to convince Dick to come back to the Robin mantle that goes nowhere, but eventually he convinces the Dark Knight to take on a third Robin. Unlike Dick and Jason, Tim is locked the fuck down for training and not allowed out in the field willy-nilly. And when he does go out, he is ferociously competent.

Incidentally, this is because the writers/editors realized that after the child murder storyline they'd just done, Batman had to have one hell of a reason to ever take on another kid sidekick. And they needed to try and drag the Robin role's popularity back up, since killing a kid sidekick was also a symptom of DC's tanking sales at the time; the whole thing was ultimately a publicity stunt. It was a bad idea and now we just live with it.

So Tim is, broadly, never portrayed as incompetent in any aspect aside from maybe high school socializing. I don't think he gets kidnapped even a tenth of the number of times Dick did during his decades-long career as Robin. Certainly never falls for a honey trap plot or anything like that.

But yeah, the meta reason why the Joker never dies is because he's an iconic villain who drives plots. But unless you step out of the main continuity, he's also never just been a "no-frills funny" villain since.

ANYWAY.

As far as the rest of the Batfam taking a swing at the Joker, there's one incident that I can recall off the top of my head.

Dick Grayson, currently Nightwing, wasn't especially close to Jason while he was alive. During Jason's original run, they had a cordial (if brief) relationship, but they basically didn't get any storylines together, so it's hard to really tell how strongly they bonded. After Jason died, Dick began experiencing...I wanna call them chronic night terrors. The idea is that a boy in a Robin costume is falling, and falling, and Dick can never save the kid.

I'm sure it has nothing whatsoever to do with his dead brother, no sir.

So, some time later, the Joker gets told he has terminal cancer by a psychiatrist who assumes that if the clown was convinced he was going to die, he might try reforming or something. A terminal turnaround. Lots of people do that, right?

He assumed wrong.

The Joker goes on an utter tear, doing all sorts of escalating villainy that starts with gassing everyone he can get his hands on, including other Arkham inmates. Somewhere amid this rampage, Robin III goes missing and the Joker cheerfully tells Nightwing that yeah, he killed the kid. And he has the gall to bring up Jason in the middle of all the gloating. By name. (The Joker knows Jason's name due to some nonsense involving Crane and Fear Toxin hallucinations and Batman in a prior story arc.)

And Dick

fucking

SNAPS.

Pummels the Joker right there on the floor. Barehanded. No sticks, no pausing, just beats him to death.

Two seconds later, a very alive (if hurt) Tim manages to get there and go "oh god what happened." Because Dick is not doing well! He has a crisis about killing a dude, no matter how terrible. He never thought he'd go that far.

Batman swoops in and resuscitates the clown. In the time between Jason's death and The Joker's Last Laugh, he has apparently decided that it's more important to keep Dick from suffering a breakdown than it is to kill the clown. DC editorial was gonna keep him alive either way, but whatever.

And now for the third part of my ramble.

As for Under the Red Hood, Jason's death is seriously streamlined for the film. In this version of events, none of the UN chicanery happens. Ra's al Ghul hires the clown for a distraction job while trying to crash the world economy (again) and whoops, the clown killed Batman's son. Crowbar, bomb, whatever. Before Jason's body can be buried, the League of Assassins steals it, hucks Jason into the Lazarus Pit, and now he's alive again!

Except, given how he died and how long he spent dead and how that interacts with the magic, he wakes up as a berserk ball of rage and pain, kills two of Ra's al Ghul's guards with his bare hands, escapes, falls into a river, and disappears.

...So much for making that whole thing up to Batman. The League of Assassins just quietly lets Bruce bury a latex dummy and doesn't ever bring it up.

Cut to Gotham, years later, when Red Hood is tearing up the place and Batman goes "Ra's al Ghul, what the fuck" and the whole story comes spilling out.

In A Ninja's Guide to Gotham, Jason's dropped hints in his narration that he was actually with the League of Assassins for a while, even before going 'round the world training with assassins and stuff. The Lazarus Pit just got him back to full functionality. So, you can assume it leans more on the comics' "spontaneous resurrection" scenario.

If Bruce ever tried to kill the Joker while Jason was dead, Jason doesn't know about it. And because we haven't been in Bruce's head, there's no indication either way.

(Bruce makes mention of how easy it would be kill the Joker in the film, but that he could never come back from doing so. It is not specified if he made the attempt or just thought about it a lot.)

I've been holding back on Jason's and Bruce's accounts of events because they're both owed a moment of dramatic catharsis (and shouting). You can generally rest assured that it'll be more likely to be a mix of events than a pure account of any one take on what happened in the warehouse that day.

Thanks for setting off an exposition bomb~

[rubydubydoo122]

Batfam Band Au

Jason Todd and Tim Drake are so Conan Gray coded. Proof? here,

Maniac - Jason: 'People like you always want back what they can't have, but I'm past that and you know that so you should turn back to your rat(bat) pack tell 'em I'm trash' Jason to Bruce after Bruce victim blamed his death Tim: 'Tell all of your friends that I'm crazy, and drive you mad, that I'm such a stalker, a watcher, a psycopath' Tim's speaks for itself, but like... probably Tim to everyone

Fight or Flight - Jason: 'something's gotten into you, you don't really look at me the way you used to' Him to Bruce. no explanation needed, 'Every single rumor that I've heard of you say, you were out with someone that I don't know' Jason when he saw the pictures of Tim as Robin 'fight or flight, I'd rather die than have to cry in front of you. fight or flight, id rather lie than tell you I'm in love with you' him with bruce. Him With Bruce. HIM WITH BRUCE. Like god, he's just a scared kid that wants his dad, but he'll never admit that, 'Now there's someone at my door, someone i've not met before, they've got, eyes like mine, a pretty smile and they've been crying for a while, cus they also didn't know' Jason with Tim after Damian became Robin (or a while after that ig, whenever they started to get along)

The Cut that Always Bleeds - Tim: 'Oh I, can't, be, your lover on a leash, every other week, when you need, oh I can't be, the kiss that you don't need, the lie between your teeth, the cut that always bleeds' Tim realizing that maybe being Bruce's emotional support child is no bueno for his mental heath. 'Say you love somebody new and beat my heart to black and blue, and they leave and it's me you come back to' Because Tim became Robin to essentially be Bruce's crutch until he could get back on his feet after Jason's death, and the problem with that is Bruce will never really get back on his feet because he's still limping from his parents death, 'But even though you're killing me, I need you like the air I breathe, I need, I need you more than me, I need you more than anything, please, please.' and that's kinda the case for all the Robins. Bruce pushes them so hard, almost to the point of breaking, and when they want to break away, Bruce gives them a sliver of validation creating a never ending cycle of them craving Bruce's approval.

Astronomy - Jason: 'cus socially speaking, we were the same, with runaway fathers and mothers who drank' Jason to Steph probably 'From far away, i wish i'd stayed with you. but here face to face a stranger that I once knew. I thought if I wandered, I'd fall back in love, you said distance brings fondness, but guess not with us' Jason to Bruce during UTRH, because Jason's death changed both of them so much, to the point where they can't recognize each other anymore . And maybe Bruce missed Jason while he was dead, but now that he's alive...'Stop trying to keep us alive, you're pointing at stars in the sky, that've already died, stop trying to keep us alive, you can't force the stars to align, when they've already died' Him to himself about continuing to forgive Bruce and running back to Bruce time and time again after all the shit Bruce has pulled

Footnote - Tim: 'I say if I waited, could that maybe help, you told me that patience won't change how you felt, for me' Tim to Bruce, knowing that he'll never be Jason, yet still yearning for that father/son dynamic (sh sh, Ik Tim doesn't actually see Bruce as his dad, but lets shift slightly into fanon) 'So I'll just take a footnote, in your life, and you can take my body, every line, I would right for you, but a footnote will do' Tim's entire Red Robin run, mainly to Dick, who is a little too busy trying to balance grieving and a feral child 'You taught me a lesson, that feelings are reckless, it's just like the novels, side characters end up alone.' Tim after loosing almost everyone he cared about within a year and turning cold and distant.

Winner - Literally this whole song is for the both of them and their parental issues Tim: 'Packed my bags at 14, I hadn't planned on leaving, but you haven't been back home for days' Like... we all do agree that Tim's parents were neglectful. They were literally never around. 'You don't really wanna hear the truth, do you? it's obvious to anyone who ever knew you. that all you ever want is to be right, even if that means you gotta lie to do it,' This is probably more fannon, but like Janet and Jack Drake Jason: 'Bask inside your victory, my heart that once was beating, bleeding in the palm of your hand' Under the Red Hood. batarang to the throat, 'Yet you have the nerve to miss me, how do I somehow feel guilty? when you're the one who let it get this bad' JASON TO BRUCE LIKE, TELL ME I"M WRONG. Bruce will claim to miss Jason, but then blame him for his own death in the same breath. "You don't really wanna hear the truth, do you? it's obvious to anyone who ever knew you. that all you ever wanted was to FIGHT. I WAS ONLY TRYING TO SURVIVE YOUR CHAOS!! WELL LOOK AT HOW IT"S PAID OFF' Jason got caught up in Bruce's "war on crime" AND HE DIED. HE DIED FOR IT. HE DIDN"T SURVIVE BRUCE"S CHAOS, HE"S STIL STUCK IN IT AND HE CAN"T GET OUT.

Family Line - THIS ONE!!! THIS ONE!!! I LITERALLY CRY EVERY TIME I HEAR IT BECAUSE IT FITS THE BOTH OF THEM TOO WELL Jason: 'My father never talked a lot, He just took a walk around the block, 'Til all his anger took a hold of him, and then he'd hit. My mother never cried a lot, She took the punches, but she never fought' Willis and Catherine. 'Scattered 'cross my family lineI'm so good at telling lies, That came from my mother father's side, Told a million to survive,' Father meaning Bruce. Lies meaning Robin and secret identies and stuff 'Scattered 'cross my family line, God, I have my father's mother's eyes,' Sheila's 'But my sister's when I cry, I can run, but I can't hide, From my family line' Do I have to explain this? Tim: 'It's hard to put it into words, How the holidays will always hurt, I watch the fathers with their little girls, And wonder what I did to deserve this, How could you hurt a little kid? I can't forget, I can't forgive you, 'Cause now I'm scared that everyone I love will leave me' I can just imagine little baby Timmy following Batman and Robin, and then casting a glance at a family lighting a minorah, while he knows his family's minorah is sitting in the closet because his parents still haven't come home from their trip. Jason: 'Oh, all that I did to try to undo it,' All the crimes he did to survive, made him try so hard as Robin to undo that, 'All of my pain and all your excuses, I was a kid but I wasn't clueless' Maybe it's how he feels about Sheila now that he's grown. Jason was alone on the streets before Bruce. He even empathized with Sheila, and tried to help her. Jason was optimistic, not naive. Tim: 'Someone who loves you wouldn't do this' Jason: "All of my past, I tried to erase it,' His time on the streets, his time as Robin, Sheila's betrayal, The LOA, his villain era, 'But now I see, would I even change it?' Because all of those things shaped who he is now 'Might share a face and share a last name, but We are not the same' He would've never done what Sheila did, he would never do what Bruce did, or Talia, or Wilis or any of the other adults in his life who have let him down.

Anywho, yeah, Conan Gray writing music for Jason and Tim is on my mind a lot.

[flashfuture]

do you think Damian is being regressed again?

Genuinely no. And I know people compare it to Batman and Robin right now and say see look. But what Batman and Robin shows us is Damian wants to work with Bruce so badly. Damian's solo run as Robin showed us he was willing to go to a tournament of death to prove himself. Siding with "Batman" over all his siblings is just him further trying to prove himself. The only way Damian is 'regressed' is if you want him to be an adult already. Every single Robin has a lost identity inside of Batman and Robin. Every Robin struggles with who they are outside the mask.

Dick had 44 years to be Robin. He defined redefined and undefined what it meant to be a kid sidekick. And becoming Nightwing was his answer out. There were quite literally no child sidekicks around before him he invented the concept of the role and nothing his brother's go through isn't anything he hadn't thought of doing already.

Jason had ~5 years if you count his pre crisis self and then he Died. And Jason is barely even over that so his entire 19 years of returned life is about who is he really did he come back as the same boy.

Tim has been a version of Robin for 35 years. Tim defined who Robin was without Batman. And so they still don't know what to do with him. Because Damian came on the scene while he was still alive and still a pretty popular character. So for the past 14 years they've been trying to juggle both characters on top of outrageous retcons and reboots. And it's true Tim could use Something to do outside of Robin but they don't know what that is yet.

So Damian is 14 and is going to make mistakes because DC does not have their child heroes be good. Dick was knocked unconscious and kidnapped every other issue till he became Nightwing at like 19. It's a tried and true sidekick tradition to suck until you're an older teenager. And everyone in this run has been beyond dumb as rocks letting that robot run around but hey we just have to go with it

[starwalker03]

I’m running out of questions so here is fanfic literature analysis that has been rummaging in my brain. in WMLP all the captured and enslaved characters were replaced besides for M’Gann. Robin’s been replaced twice over. Superboy and Aqualad’s mentors had actual sons. Green Arrow went back to Roy after losing Artemis. So much amo to get under their skin. And I bet it’s already under Dick’s. Dude hates the JL now and Slade would not miss the chance to show him Bruce replacing him.

Oh yes. Slade would have used Dick's replacement many times to destabilize him. and every other member of the batfamily, because before Dick there was no more family members. For all intents and purposes, it looks like Bruce only decided he cared for company and family after losing Dick, which Slade uses against him often. Dick hates the family he didn't know because of this, but ostly he knows it's not their fault. it's all Bruce's fault.

Roy's return to Oliver is a situational thing for sure, and anyone who knows them and knows the issues they've had can tell as much. Roy has to find his original, and also the team. He blames himself partially for everything that's happened. the easiest way to find and save everyone is to go back to the JLA and work with Oliver again. Artemis knows this is likkely how it went about. And she's happy for them. glad that they were able to get over differences. glad Roy was not so entirely swept up in his searching and forced himself to be alone.

At least Mera was already pregnant when Kaldur was taken. Lois, though? not as far as anyone was aware. When Conner found out he probably was so heartbroken that he would likely never meet this child. Moreover, Clark finally had a real son. Why would he care for the clone he lost when he has a baby to care for? and yet when COnner next sees Clark he looks just as upset to see Conner in his position. Conner can tell he is still missed.

M'Gaan has not been replaced, I suppose. But the current state of Beast Boy's existence in the world is a bit of a spoiler for an up coming chapter so we'll leave it there methinks.

[roobylavender]

i know you’ve talked a bit about your own version of events that diverge primarily concerning damian’s origin (if i recall correctly) but i’m interested in how you would handle tim? would he still be robin, what would his arc look like, do you think he should’ve been robin at all ? (just cause i know some people believe he shouldn’t in canon)

i actually really enjoy tim's introduction as robin bc (next to jason) it's the perfect example of how ludicrous robin is as an entity. with dick while there's a day-to-day life he lives that we get to see in parallel in earlier comics, a lot of it is taken in jest. bruce and dick's adventures in the golden age and even parts of the silver age are mostly comical and there's little continuity to speak of so there aren't really any consequences to speak of until dick goes to college. with jason's run we only really get to see hard-hitting consequences once he dies, and most of his run prior to that is plot driven with very few moments spared to showcase what his civilian life is like (most of which can be attributed to mike w. barr). what i appreciate about tim's robin run (and what i imagine other people comparatively find mind-numbing and boring) is that it delves into all of minutiae of being a teenager and a vigilante at the same time. the bizarre sudden absences, the sleeplessness, the school situation, the danger, the rift with your parents because they don't know where you are or what you're doing, the pressures of keeping your identity secret from your peers when you're only a kid and you want to have relationships but you don't know how to maintain them. tim being an outsider to bruce's family is precisely what makes his robin run so striking and revelatory. unless it runs in the family (and even then there are problems) it's hard to be a kid vigilante. delusional almost. and this status quo is even more exaggerated for tim bc he happens to become robin at one of the worst period's in bruce's (and consequently gotham's) life. a thirteen-going-on-fifteen-year-old is led to believe he is one of the only pieces of duct tape holding all of this shit together to the point his activities merit his father moving them to an entirely different city for a while. it's crazy! and eventually, it is going to get to him! it literally did! and personally i think it should have stayed that way

tim became robin not as part of a long-form response to trauma (albeit the trauma of what happened to his parents obv factored into some things) but bc of his own misconceptions as to what gotham needed to survive. he was a child, acting like a child, thinking like a child, etc. and albeit along different parameters the same would apply to jason as well. robin was more like a temporary phase for either of them than it was necessarily as a central identity around which to develop themselves entirely (a la dick). it should not have been permanently in the cards, and while the concept of legacy within dc is certainly interesting, this is one area where the compounded history, imo, should have espoused every reason why not to continue the robin identity's existence. every question and concern posed at the onset of tim's transition into robin should have been resoundingly answered rather than forgotten and left to the wayside as he was plunged deeper and deeper into the abyss of vigilante violence and death. he was a kid! he had a misconception about his own place in the world. and little by little he realized that while he would always have an inclination towards saving others he wasn't sure that this was the way he wanted to go about his life. i'm not opposed to tim staying connected to bruce and everyone else, but i don't think he has to remain a vigilante to do that. in fact, that to me is one of the greatest crimes of modern batman canon in general: the idea that every relevant connection bruce maintains has to be a masked villain or hero of some kind. bruce used to be friends with socialites! reporters! doctors! and it's not to say he isn't still but they're certainly more severely peripheral than they used to be. every other major dc hero has a significant civilian cast but for some reason bruce's own collective either steadily dwindled or was recharacterized and manipulated into playing a part in the grand game (think vicki finding out bruce was batman and the whole blackmail and death shtick that happened after)

so. to address your first question. i do want tim to be involved in that time period in everyone's life, but i want him to be involved as tim. not robin. as someone coming to terms with what he's been through and what he can do going forward. kind of like a singular greek chorus if you will. an observer to the party who occasionally interjects with striking gravitas. someone who enters and exits the story at leisure. that guy over at the manor on a saturday while all hell breaks loose in the parlor (they've found damian, they know he exists, what are they going to do, what do they even say). that guy committed to his new life as a boring and ordinary teenager with a video game addiction but also a perpetual itch to scratch who breaks his abstinence rule one night to stalk the red hood and ask what the hell, man? you know bruce still loves you more than anyone, right? while jason (bewildered, bereaved) tells him to buzz off before he puts a bullet through him (he never would). that guy who meets up with cissie the first friday of every month to talk about what it's like to live with this void where they feel like they're doing nothing even though they know the horrors of picking it all up again are worse. that guy who has to sit with this weird pit in his stomach while his girlfriend comes to terms with her own place in the world bc he knows now that he can't do it for her any more than bruce couldn't do it for him. that guy who still visits barbara in the watchtower and does homework while they trade jokes and jibes about whatever gotham's got going on and maybe sometimes he gives a stray opinion. that guy who has to convince his dad that there's nothing out of the ordinary happening to explain why suddenly he's always here, he's answering phone calls, he's showing up for dinner. that guy who finds his old corkboard with photographs and newspaper clippings and pushpins and red string and goes to the store the next day to buy a camera bc hey, maybe there's no reason to stalk batman anymore, but he still likes the feel of a camera in his hands and someone told him last week there's an internship for a junior photographer at the local newspaper with vicki vale. maybe this is how he helps. maybe this is how he feels useful without sacrificing so much of himself in the process

[dairy-farmer]

Damitim + Past Brutim (Bruce Whump)

Inspired by your previous asks, Tim always being devoted to Bruce always at his beck and call. Bruce is aware of Tim’s devotion but always leads him on but never commit for various reasons. Bruce wanting to test Tim’s devotion, publicly has flings and relationships as both Bruce and Batman while always looking at Tim’s reaction and reception. Tim never shows any emotion or reaction in front of Bruce but the everybody else sees Tim’s heartbreak starts to pity Tim for being in love with a man who would never give you what you want. It reaches the point of cruelty when Bruce marries Selena, but spent the entire ceremony staring at Tim especially during the exchanging of vows. Bruce loudly proclaims to the entire reception about having fun with adding a new member to the Wayne clan. Everyone tries their best not to look at Tim’s reaction, but everyone was sure that this was the breaking point. Tim does not break.

Cut to Bruce’s return from his honeymoon, ecstatic to his ducky again and wondering if depriving Tim of his presence would make his ducky insatiable. Only to find Tim and Damian curled up near the fire place with all of the Wayne pets surrounding them. Odd, Bruce had thought that the relationship between Tim and his son wasn’t improving, but he’s too blinded by Tim’s presence, he doesn’t give it another thought. Bruce tries to convince Tim to fool around again, but Tim is adamant to only fool around with Batman, not Bruce since he’s a married man. Bruce assumes that this is his Ducky’s payback for the marriage ceremony so he abides by Tim’s conditions. He will gladly put on the suit for Tim pussy any day.

Cut to a year later at a Justice League gala, Damian publicly professes his love and devotion for Tim and proposes to him. Everyone isn’t surprised by the announcement and congratulates the happy couple, except for Bruce who is speechless. His Ducky getting married?? He stares at Tim, who is radiant with the biggest smile on his face, and his bastard son’s arm around his Ducky’s waist. He doesn’t notice Selena standing up and calling everyone’s attention. She announces that she’s expecting, and everyone starts talking about how prosperous the Wayne family has been for the past year. Bruce doesn’t even give the announcement a second thought, he just stares at Tim who is looking at him with genuine joy in his face. This is not what meant to happen, this was just supposed to be a test for his Ducky. His ducky who was always at his beck and call.

Bruce desperately tries to get into contact with Tim, but he’s always so busy with the wedding planning so Bruce spirals. He desperately tries to convince Talia to talk to Damian into not marrying Tim for the betterment of the League, but she’s actually for their marriage to solidify Damian’s right to the throne. Bruce also actively starts neglecting Selena and their child by being so hyper focused on Tim. One day, when all the heroes are together, Tim announces that’s he’s retiring indefinitely and everyone starts questioning why would Red Robin who is on his way to becoming one the premier heroes is suddenly taking a break. Tim standing next to his towering fiancé announces that he’s pregnant. There is a roar of congratulations on the first ever batfam baby until there is a loud bang and objection from Batman. Bruce has lost it. Everyone was shocked since Batman was usually so collected and brooding. Batman removes his cowl and for once everyone could see the intensity of emotion in Bruce Wayne’s face, shouting at Tim about wasting his body for an unnecessary baggage, and how he was being selfish and the deaths of the people during his break will be on his hands. (Very reminiscent during Tim’s early robin years) Bruce stops when he finally notices the silence and the movement on his Ducky’s face. Tears were running down Tim’s face, this was it. Finally, a reaction from his Ducky. This is what Bruce wanted, right?

this is so angsty and sad😢😢😢!!!!!!!! BUT ALSO SO PERFECTLY DRAMATIC AND GOOD!!!!!!!!!! bruce 100% does not deserve to "get" or "win" back tim no matter how hard he tries or grovels or apologizes!!!! he treated tim the same way a little boy treats their toys and now he's angry that damian is playing with HIS toy!! he acted like nothing he did would have consequences, like tim getting married and having a baby with someone he loves was somehow a betrayal of HIM even though bruce was already married to selena and had shown that tim was his...mistress or 'side chick' at best. he doesn't respect tim and he most certainly doesn't respect selina because she was only ever a way to make tim 'jealous' and 'spice things up' for them.

when selina finds out of course she's pissed and takes off with HER kid. not that bruce notices or even cares because it was never about her. because bruce is too focused on desperatly trying to fix things with his ducky. he made his ducky cry- he made his ducky start to sob and damian that traitor had to be held back from punching his lights out for upsetting his soon to be wife. people are severely disappointed in bruce, especially his family, clark, and diana.

clark just sighs and shakes his head when he brings bruce out of the room he had his freakout in to calm down. he's blocking the door and not allowing bruce to go back inside. bruce ends up pacing like a tiger in a cage.

"we thought you'd grown out of this bruce....but it's time someone puts their foot down.... it is beyond cruel what you did to tim."

bruce is agitated and distressed and thinking of his ducky's red eyes and hot tears streaming down his cheeks as he cries from bruce's raised voice. bruce screaming at him hasn't made tim cry since he was robin. it must be the pregnancy hormones and the thought just makes bruce even more distressed because tim can't....he can't be carrying another man's child.

bruce is half listening to clark and grunts something about apologizing to the guests and tim. that's when clark grabs him by the shoulders and forces him to look at his frowning face.

"no! what you did just now is not what i'm talking about!" clark looks furious. like he could just shake bruce to death from how frustrated he was getting. "i'm talking about what you've been doing to tim for years!"

clark's voice seemed to echo for miles.

"the way you've toyed with him and made him promises you never had any intention to keep, the way you've strung him along while we all just stood by and watched and you know what? it. was. wrong. nobody should've ever let you get away with treating tim like that for as long as they did but we all stood by because....because you were our friend bruce! you were going through a hard time! and so what if you were a jackass to tim? but that thing you pulled with marrying selina and- and....showing off? that's cruel bruce."

disappointed doesn't even begin to describe how clark is looking at him. he looks at bruce like...like he's a stranger. clark shakes his head.

"if i were tim i don't think i'd ever forgive you."

the thought sends a chill down bruce's spine. clark runs a hand down his face, palm pressed so hard to his skin it's like he wants to wipe it off.

"for the love of god bruce just....just leave that boy alone, alright? you've put him through enough so just...leave him alone."

bruce can't. he can't. tim is...his...his..

tim is just his.

nobody seems to get that. for months bruce tries to reach tim.

bruce tries going to tim's apartment one day, certain the car he'd monitored the night before that arrived at the residence contained tim. instead he is greeted by jason who raises a brow at the flowers bruce has in hand.

"really? you're going to try and win tim back from his fiancee and the father of his child with daffodils?"

bruce flinches at the reminder of tim's pregnancy. if it were just another man then bruce could compete with that. he could beat that.

but a baby?....tim had always talked with bruce about wanting a baby, wanting to be a mama. bruce had promised him one day they'd have one. but...if bruce was honest he'd just said that because tim let him fuck him really hard afterward.

bruce wasn't one for babies. he barely had an interest in the child he had with selina. it was too loud, too messy, it took away too much of her time and bruce hadn't liked how big she'd gotten because it made it difficult to have sex. which bruce had wanted less of with her because tim...hadn't been there for him to get aroused to before joining selina in their bed.

but...if it was tim. if it was what tim wanted. bruce would give him a baby. if that's what he wanted.

every step of the way he's redirected, turned away, straight-up lied to. tim doesn't answer his calls, his texts, doesn't listen to his voicemails.

bruce is beginning to get desperate when there's a knock on his door.

it's damian. bruce would be angry if he wasn't so tired from checking under every stone in gotham for tim.

damian isn't smug like he normally is. he isn't taunting bruce, making fun of him, or proclaiming his victory.

he's staring at bruce the same way he would a bug.

dispassionate, unemotional, a little disgusted.

damian asks bruce how he's been doing but bruce is tight-lipped. he inquires about the health of his wife, selina, and the newborn child bruce hasn't even held and isn't sure he knows the name of.

bruce says nothing because selina ended up leaving with her child at some point after it was born and bruce was so consumed with his search he hadn't even noticed.

not until damian brought them up.

for some reason bruce doesn't feel any devastating loss at their absence. maybe because he's half certain the baby wasn't even his. selina had allowed his extramarital affairs and indulged in her own because she was hardly some poor pathetic wife that got cheated on.

and bruce was always careful when they had sex. the only person bruce ever came inside was tim because he was the only one who ever deserved it.

damian is talking, going on some long spiel about how bruce had taken everything for granted, how he never appreciated tim, his devotion and love. that bruce didn't deserve someone like tim because he would never stop testing tim to see if he'd leave him, he'd always try and test the limits until he broke tim down to an uncontrollable sobbing mess.

tim was never going to be enough for him.

but he was for damian. damian loved tim. would take care of him and protect him in all the ways bruce hadn't and refused to.

tim was in good hands. and bruce needed to back off and let damian give him the life he deserved.

bruce doesn't get a chance to say anything back or argue. damian turns his back on him and leaves as swiftly and quietly as he came, leaving bruce in his big empty house filled with nothing inside.

[ailelie]

I'm supposed to be packing, but as I was double-checking that I could toss an old notebook, I found this snippet. So I figured I'd type it up so that I could toss the rest.

---

At age 10 Tim was stalking Batman and Robin during a Scarecrow attack. Batman kept sending the affected to Leslie's clinic. When Robin questioned whether they should send people elsewhere, Batman said Leslie could handle it. In one universe, Tim trusted Batman to be right. In this one, Tim did not. Instead, Tim darted to the clinic and offered up his help.

Leslie tried to turn him away, but they did need hands and Tim pointed out that it was more dangerous for him to leave. So Leslie tasked him with getting everyone's names. Then with running supplies. He was still there long past his self-imposed curfew when Batman dropped by. He hide before Leslie could introduce him. He didn't need Bruce wondering what he was doing there so far from home.

Luckily he caught the last bus home, more exhausted than usual. The next day while trying to hone his detective skills, he thought about the chaos of the clinic and how Leslie had remained a center of calm the entire time. He wondered if she knew the secret.

That night, while following after the Dynamic Duo with his camera, Tim watched Batman bind a bullet graze on Robin's arm. It wasn't anything he'd never done before, but this time the simple action reminded Tim of a gaping hole in his own education: first aid. Deciding to kill two birds with one stone, he quietly withdrew and found his way to the clinic.

It was busy, but not packed. Tim grabbed a chair, took out his phone, and settled in to wait.

After an hour or so, Leslie was standing over him. "You're back. Do your parents know you're out this late?"

"No," Tim answered truthfully. His parents were in Argentina.

"Are you hurt?" Her gaze moved over him searching for an injury as he shook his head.

"I want to talk with you."

Leslie's gaze hardened. Then she nodded. "My office." Tim followed her back. "So what do you want?"

"To learn first aid."

"Take a class."

"I need more." Tim glanced around the office looking for a clue, an idea for how he should proceed. Then he saw a photo of a younger Leslie with a child Bruce Wayne smiling at the camera. "Batman trusts you."

"What makes you think that?"

Tim pointed to the photo, his heart pounding. If he was wrong, if he screwed this up--Leslie followed his pointing hand and her brows flew to her hairline.

"So?" she asked, her tone careful.

"Just think that's cool, s'all," Tim said, refusing to give more than he already had.

Leslie sighed. "Come back tomorrow. Daylight hours. Maybe our benefactors will be more inclined to hand over funding if you're with me. I mean, what kind of monster says 'no' to a kid?"

Tim smiled, relieved. "Will do."

"I'll call you a cab and walk you out."

"I usually--"

"Cab," Leslie interrupted, firmly. Tim set back, protests dying.

About 10 minutes later, they were standing together in front of the clinic. As the cab pulled up, Leslie asked, "How long?"

"About a year," Tim answered, realizing immediately what she was asking.

She swore and bundled him into the cab.

During school the next day, Tim could barely concentrate. Leslie would make him tell Bruce. He should have anticipated that. As soon as school ended, Tim was out of the door and darting to the clinic.

The attendant waved him back to Leslie's office. She joined him not long after. She glanced at his uniform, but didn't say anything. "C'mon," she said instead. "We're going for a drive."

To his surprise they didn't drive to either Wayne Enterprises or Bristol.

"So you've known for a year."

"Yeah."

"Why?"

Tim blinked. He hadn't expected that question. "I didn't try to find out, but once I knew, I knew."

"And it took you a year to find me?"

"No. I've been taking pictures of them. At night."

Leslie laughed. "I'm half-tempted now to tell him just to see his face when he learns you've been following him."

"You're not going to tell him?"

"Tell me about yourself."

"Me?" Again, Tim was surprised by the turn in conversation. "I'm just Tim."

"I'll be the judge of that. Why don't we start with a surname?"

Leslie was patient in her questioning and jumped topics without warning, leading Tim to explain more than he might have otherwise. She followed a question about his favorite school subjects with, "How do you sneak out?"

"Through the front door usually. My parents are rarely around to notice."

Leslie frowned, but instead of pushing, she asked where he'd gotten his camera.

And then apparently I have a different version of the above even more not!ficcish. I must have written this one first.

"I can be useful," the child insisted. His gaze as fierce and set as another's--a child she had failed. Leslie had hoped Bruce's certain failure would end his folly. Now he stalked the city like a nightmare.

Maybe she should keep Tim close.

"How?" she asked, stepping back and letting him in. She led him to her living room and turned off her television.

"You're short-staffed."

"A volunteer application form is on our website."

Tim was a proto-Bruce, but he was still a child and she wasn't going to do anything with partial information. And when he tried to bluster another excuse, she told him as such. He wasn't a bad liar, but Leslie bet he did most of it at a distance.

She'd known a girl like that in college. Girl could spin and inhabit an alibi like no one, but catch her face-to-face and point blank her tells bled through.

"If you don't want to tell me, I'd rather you say that than lie. If I push after that I'll explain why."

Tim still stalks the Bats, but he does so to keep Leslie prepared for what's coming. When Bruce asks, she's tempted to say 'a little Birdie told me' but instead she fixes him with a look. "People talk. I've gotten better at listening." It was a better response because it carried a guilt trip. Bruce listened to no one except Alfred sometimes.