Chapter Text
Given the number of times that he’s been stabbed over his vigilante career, Tim is basically a connoisseur of being impaled.
But, it’s also safe to say that this is by far the worst stabbing he’s had to go through. Not because of the pain, but because of the company he has when he wakes.
He wakes up in the Cradle (strike one), with Ra’s looming over his prone form (strike two) right next to the Lazarus Pit (strikes three, four and five).
Zero out of ten stars, would not recommend.
Which is why it’s not entirely his fault when the first thing Tim thinks when he jerks awake on the surgery table, registering the green luminance of the Lazarus Pit beside him, is not about his very recent very violent shish-kebabing.
It’s about whether he’s also stolen Jason’s shtick of being undead as well as the entire Robin thing.
Because, dang, they were just starting to get along after the entire Titan’s Tower thing, the murder attempts, the stabbing, and honestly a whole host of other issues. Tim would have given up five murder attempts ago with any other person, but come on. It’s Robin! A little stabbier, but that's a small price to pay for resurrection.
His head is still spinning from whatever drugs the League have him on, because Tim feels like he could probably fight Superman right now. But. Priorities.
First things first, figure out whether he’s about to become Jason Todd V2 Replacement Extraordinaire: Pit Edition.
He tries to twist around, get a glimpse of his surroundings, see if he could spot himself in a mirror. His hands aren't really cooperating right now, and when he moves a little too much, one of the assassin doctors says something at him, roughly reorienting his head straight.
Tim blinks at him. Everything sounds like it’s underwater.
Above him, Ra’s' toxic green eyes pierce into his soul. Tim looks back, because the ceiling is boring and he’s the most interesting thing in his field of view at this very second. His mouth moves into a cruel smile (or maybe it’s just a normal one? Tim has no idea) and begins to speak at him.
Tim estimates that he probably started with “Hello, Detective,” and then started monologuing about world domination or Batman or something but Tim is on the Good Stuff right now. He’s been awake for approximately two minutes, maybe less than, and he only woke up now because Tim’s gained a semi-tolerance to general anaesthesia through repeated and extensive use.
He is, as Dick would say, tripping balls.
Ra’s is still talking at him. Tim nods along. The language part of his brain hasn’t rebooted yet, and the only reason Ra’s hasn’t noticed that Tim doesn’t understand a single word coming out of his mouth right now is that he does the exact thing to Batman all the time.
“You’re taking needless risks!” Brain is off. Tim is mentally absent. Maybe he’ll text Kon later.
“Growing boys need more than four hours of sleep a night.” That’s nice, great, good for you. Where’s the nearest caffeine source?
“You need to stop drinking so much caffeine,” How about no.
Now he misses Bruce again. It makes his chest hurt.
Or maybe that’s the stab wound.
Eh. He’ll heal.
Ra’s finally finishes what is most likely an evil villain monologue. Tim blinks up at him blearily. Like, that’s nice, bro.
Ra’s stares down at him blankly. Says something that is most likely Tim’s name.
Tim gives him a weak thumbs up.
Now he’s tired again.
He decides to go back to sleep.
The next time he awakes, he’s feeling significantly more coherent.
He tries to ask Ra’s whether he died and got dunked in the Pit. It comes out like, “Shmeepf mugh gwa pit uagh,” with an accompanying line of dribble. Ra’s looks slightly off put, and motions for a poor ninja to mop it off his face.
Curse you, feeble mortal shell!
If only he was Kryptonian, or Amazonian, or literally any enhanced type of human. He would kill for an enhanced metabolism right now. Ra’s attempts to monologue at him again, but Tim is having none of it. He closes his eyes at the first “Detective,” he hears and falls asleep in three seconds flat.
Tim can’t escape the monologue the next time he awakes, unfortunately. They’ve taken away the good pain meds, because, ouch, he can feel it now. There’s a line of stitches down the front of his chest that ache like hell just under his heart, and they’re sharply pulling on the hole in his back he tries to sit up.
He’s awoken on the floor of an opulent hall, elegant yet ostentatious, like a throne room.
Oh wait, it was a throne room.
About ten metres in front of him sits Ra’s, on an equally ostentatious chair on a pedestal, surrounded by finely armoured guards.
Ra’s, with Tim as a captive audience, explains who stabbed him (the Widower), why they stabbed him (for fun, basically), and that if Tim works with the League to obliterate them as a team, he’ll gain all the League’s resources for tracking down Bruce. They’re okay terms. Tim already knows the fine print, like ‘betray us and die’ or, ‘includes a million different inescapable recruitment pitches’ or ‘free healthcare.’
Tim knows about the free healthcare. Ra’s has his spleen in a jar over there.
Which is not in him, being a functioning, important part of his immune system. Tim needs that, really really badly. He lives in Gotham!! It’s like, the ground zero of every disease to ever exist in the history of the universe.
Tim wants it back, thank-you-very-much.
Not just in him, but in general. The last time Ra’s got someone’s DNA he made Damian. A terrible thing to inflict on the world. Tim would very much like to avoid the same fate.
In the end, after some fancy wordplay, a lot of attempted and rebutted manipulation from both sides and some snide, below-the-belt insults, they come to an agreement of sorts.
Tim will get full access to the League’s resources, which he will use to annihilate the Council of Spiders, posthaste. He tried to get some buffer time in before Ra’s forced him to go assassin hunting, but Ra’s was firm. The casualties the League was suffering right now was at an unacceptable level, and it was beginning to affect their other business exploits.
Once the threat is gone, Tim will gain further access to the League resources on a global scale, which he is free to use as he wishes to retrieve Bruce from whenever he hell he is in time.
The plan is: help destroy opposing assassins, then use magic gizmos to get Bruce back, send him on his way, and go with him.
Why after? Because Ra's doesn’t trust Tim to blow everything up on his way out, Bruce in tow. He wants his part of the deal done first, and given that Tim is the one sitting on the floor in front of at least six heavily-armed ninja-assassin guards and heavily injured at that, he’s not really in a strong position to negotiate.
Tim does not want to have to deal with Ra’s for a single second longer than he absolutely has to.
They shake on it, Tim gets shown the tech available, the magic artefact room (both of which are waiting for him after he disposes of the other assassin group), and then his quarters, where Pru (and a very large supply of caffeinated beverages) is waiting for him.
Her eyes widen when she sees him, and she grins, signing enthusiastically at him. As it turns out, the Widower only nicked the important, life-threatening areas, and totally wrecked everything else. Her vocal cords are down for the count for now, but she’s healing well.
She’s a bit more worried for Tim and his impalement, but she still manages to bully him into sitting down and eating something substantial without a voice.
Neither of them mention Owens or Z.
She helps him rebandage his wounds, then they get to work.
Tim progresses. Slowly but surely.
He builds programs upon programs, shoring up the atrocious internal cybersecurity the League has, enough so that he can actually plan for a confrontation without them immediately being outed. He plays chess with Ra’s every few days, occasionally trains with his assassin guards. Pru bullies him, and he bullies back. His surgery site heals more slowly than he’s used to, and Tim attempts to get used to his newfound vulnerability to infection.
A month passes before he’s deemed sufficiently battle-ready. They haven’t let him anywhere near Bruce’s case apart from light reading. It’s making him antsy. Ra’s seems almost apologetic, but firm. Tim upholds his side of the promise, then Ra’s will.
The assassins sometimes bring him news from Gotham; something about an apocalypse, Hood starting another gang war, Stephanie being alive in general, Damian and Dick’s crusade against crime, etcetera. Pru’s throat heals up, and she starts vocal exercises. Her voice is gravelly from disuse and strain, but she enjoys being able to fully express her disdain for Tim’s plans. Sarcasm is way harder in sign language.
Tim executes his plans.
He likes to think he’s a practical kind of guy. Logical when the need arises, plans and contingencies for every event, that sort of thing.
He’s beginning to realise that there might have been a flaw in his logic somewhere.
Because, if he was as rational as he thought he was, he wouldn’t be here, playing clean up for the League of Assassins now, would he?
His mother would be turning in her grave if she could see him now.
Well, technically, if she could see what he was doing even when she was still alive, she’d be turning in her grave so much that they could probably hook her up to a generator and comfortably power the entire east coast of America. His mother cosplaying a rotisserie chicken in her grave aside, Tim was fully beginning to understand how terrible of an idea this all was.
Asking Tim to do this particular task. He had to admit, that was very sneaky of Ra’s. Sending him, a guy who refuses to kill, after very deadly, very highly trained assassin-killing assassins?
Anyone else could have done it in a quarter of the time.
Genius. Months of forced proximity, months to test his boundaries and build his tolerance to their aims and methods.
More importantly, hundreds of recruitment pitches. Tim’s kept count. Ra’s asked him once or twice a week in the beginning, but now he doesn’t need to. The League’s IT department has a shrine for him next to the coffee machine in the breakroom, and sends him emails detailing the working benefits daily. They even leave flowers and chocolates (unpoisoned!) on his desk twice a week.
Still, he isn’t swayed.
It takes them months and multiple attempts to finally trap and incapacitate each member of the Council of Spiders.
After the last showdown at the Cradle, Ra’s laughs and affectionately calls him, “My detective.” Tim cringes so hard that they drag him to the medical wing to check he’s not about to die.
Jokes on them, he did.
Inside.
Multiple times.
God, Tim wished he had’ve taken the opportunity to blow the Cradle sky high, preferably with him in it.
The fact that this was his only real option helped to soften the blow a little. Dick (and his worried fretting and large social circle) had made it clear to the Justice League and Co. that Tim was very much in denial about Bruce’s death and that he needed a lot of therapy before going back into active service again. He was officially their resident basket-case, and needed to be treated with caution, lest he try to stab himself or multiple other people.
He wanted to scream at them, show them the proof he’d found, the hypotheses he’d made. But he couldn’t.
There wasn’t enough time.
From his calculations, Bruce was travelling through time exponentially faster, and the window for collecting him was getting shorter and shorter. He doesn’t have the time to explain the whys and hows of Bruce living, nor about how he got this information to the Justice League, and it’s been made pretty clear that he’s all on his own.
A fairly large part of Tim runs on spite. He’s known it since his computer science teacher told him that learning to code was too difficult for children, or when he cornered Dick about being Robin again, and he’d said something along the lines of, “Just leave him be. What can a twelve-year-old do anyway?”
Well, sucks to be them, because Tim became really good at computers, and then became Batman’s emotional-support-child slash Robin.
He lives for the little I told you so's, which, to be completely honest, is probably why Jason tried to stab him a lot of times before they became vaguely friendly, and why Damian is still trying to stab him now.
Entirely valid responses, really.
But now, proving Bruce is still alive? Bringing him back, even? This is about to deliver the mother of all I told you so's to everybody back at home.
Everybody left, that is.
But nope, he’s not thinking about that now, ha ha. Not now, and not ever! Tim was trained by the undisputed master of emotional suppression, he wouldn’t have been a good protégé if he hadn’t picked up that skill! Batman doesn’t feel emotions, apart from rage and vengeance, and neither does Tim.
Sorta.
Tim doesn’t really get angry that often per se, so he just locks it all away. A level head is important!!
This, in hindsight, is probably why he’s depressed as hell.
Which is what led him to the earlier realisation that he probably isn’t all that good at compartmentalising if he’s ended up in this situation. So much for being a genius.
So here he is, locked deep in one of Ra’s weird tech basements tinkering with magic artefacts to get Bruce back.
Could be worse, if you ask him.
Fortunately, if you ignore the overly dramatic décor, the big threatening chairs and endless blah blah blah join me, detective blah blah blah I have your spleen blah blah blah insert evil monologues here blah blah blah, Ra’s Al Ghul is actually a pretty good ally to have. One of the many advantages of being one old, rich, powerful asshole with an army of disposable ninja at his fingertips, is that Ra’s has had centuries to get his grubby little hands on every little magic artefact he’s ever wanted in his life.
Translation: Surely one of these weird gizmos deals with time travel? Right?
And one of them does. More than one, actually. Then it’s just a matter of slapping together a machine with them at the centre, rigging a method of selecting the time and place for the device to travel to, incorporating another magical artefact to steal a particular person from said time and place, and make sure that they end up where Tim is, here and now, intact.
It’s a lot harder than it looks.
Tim would know. Even Pru had started to look slightly concerned after the fifth day of surviving on purely gummy worms, energy drinks, and excessive amounts of coffee. But hey, a great mind is at work and Tim is so deep into his research and construction binge that even Pru physically dragging him out from his little cave to force him to eat actual sustenance and shower can’t stop him from puzzling out the schematics of what he’s building.
He’s on a roll with all this. A big roll. An even bigger roll than what his mother is probably doing in her grave right now.
Pru had informed him an indiscernible amount of time ago (A day? A week? Time gets weird after more than three days without proper sleep) that if he didn’t stop drinking energy drinks, the caffeine would kill him before his lack of spleen and shit self-care could.
Too bad. Caffeine is amazing. Tim is doing amazing, if he ignores the way his vision blacks out at the edges, or the aching burns on the roof on his mouth caused by the combo of piping-hot coffee and acidic caffeinated beverages, or the way his abdomen aches something serious, he’s totally fine.
When he sleeps, he sees temporal analyses and magical theory behind his eyelids. When he wakes, he stays awake until Pru physically forces him onto a flat surface. He translates tomes on ancient runes, dissects the effect of the Lazarus pit on the ley line beneath them, learns how to use warding to create a magical isolation field, researches anchors and targeting and omega particles until he knows the textbooks and theoretical applications like the back of his hand.
Like this, his eighteenth birthday passes. To celebrate, Pru and him get rip-roaring drunk somewhere off the east coast of China, and gain consciousness in a pile under a conference table in a North Korean air base.
He borrows parts from Ra’s personal Hadron Collider in one of his bases in Iran, repurposes a rocket engine he stole from NASA, steals a LOT of purified uranium and figures out how to synthesise and stabilise what is probably the rest of the elements on the periodic table, and speedruns an entire Masters degree in electrical engineering at Harvard. A lot of other random shit too, but none of that stuff could be linked back to Tim, so they don’t count.
On the other hand, Alvin Draper is now wanted by Interpol for robbing multiple banks, Caroline Hill has a ‘kill on sight’ designation by a good part of the New York criminal underworld, and Iggy Pollaky has been charged with multiple counts of arson by the Venetian Police in an incident involving a water fountain, three chickens, a second century wolf pelt and a whole ton of men with guns.
It doesn’t matter anyway, because it’s over now.
From several PhDs worth of research on space, time, physics, magic, engineering and a whole other unconnected topics, Tim has created his new child.
In front of him, the machine sits, a hulking behemoth of magic and machinery. It has fancy lights and a ton of different coloured cords, a couple of different panels and dials and a big red button under a glass protective case. There's even some glitter and stickers on the metallic bits, courtesy of Pru.
It’s monstrous.
It’s beautiful.
All he really needs to do is stick a big red flashing countdown on the front of it, and it would be hard to distinguish between Tim’s new brainbaby and what probably could be the Joker’s first attempt at rigging a massive bomb.
It’s a mess.
Tim, on day six without sleep, dead on his feet and hallucinating flashing colours at the edge of his vision, is far past the point of caring about elegance or cleanliness or being streamlined; the machine works, pretty much perfectly at that.
The few tests they’d done (retrieving various objects from parts of history using some of his parents archaeological finds) meant that now Tim was the very proud owner of a few brand-new Qing Dynasty vase, a freshly crafted stone axe of Neanderthal make, and various other bits and bobs that were probably priceless in an auction. Useless stuff really.
Step aside, Cleopatra’s jewellery, Tim is about to yoink Batman through time.
The actual plan to rescue Bruce had gone something like this: steal Bruce’s genetic material from Ra’s and Talia. Tim knows they have more of Bruce’s DNA lying around, they made Damian, didn’t they? For this step, he has to hope Pru comes in clutch to save the day, because the rest of the plan isn’t going to make itself.
She does. Tim very pointedly Does Not go near it, apart to configure it into the machine. He ain’t touching that with a ten-foot stick.
Next, get a plane from Ra’s. Easy.
Tim wants a stealth jet.
Ra’s wants Tim’s personal autonomy and servitude.
With his own personal freedom on the line, Tim just has to play (and win) some of the most mind-boggling games of chess he’s ever had, on hour seventy-six of being awake. As an added negative, Ra’s won’t shut up while they play, chattering about world domination and how great Tim would be at it and how he’s squandering his talents by chasing after a guy whose coping mechanisms involved dressing up as a giant bat furry and punching people at midnight.
Tim kind of tunes him out. It’s a talent he’s painstakingly honed by being forced to listen to megalomaniacs monologue for the better part of five years, and perfected by tuning out Batman himself.
Anyway, he wins by a fraction, and Ra’s upholds his promise and gives him a stealth jet like promised.
From then, with the speed of someone who’s done a lot of interior modelling (the Nest was a travesty before he got his hands on it) he rips out most of the interior to make space for a very specialised isolation bay, complete with monitoring and other medical stuff. Bruce’s spontaneous trip to the annals of history had probably stabbed out his immune system as bad as the Widower had stabbed out Tim’s.
In the cockpit, he rehauls it with some nice Bat-Quality tech, puts kill switches on Ra’s trackers and sets the controls for home.
Now for the machine itself.
To start it, Tim needs to dribble some of his blood over Magic Artefact #2 (to set the return coordinates), insert Bruce’s DNA into the appropriate slot to set the target (Pru does this), then press the Big Red Button on the Machine he’s added for no reason.
Well, there was one reason.
Pressing a Big Red Button is more dramatic and he was nothing if not Bruce’s child in spirit.
Then, once he’s retrieved Bruce, they’ll stick him in the stealth jet, ditch Ra’s for Gotham, and remotely alert the rest of the Justice League and tell them I told you so. Loudly, repeatedly, and as many times as he can get away with.
Easy.
The first part of the plan goes off smoothly.
Unfortunately, Tim forgot to account for the simple and obvious fact that an adult human male, especially one as large as Bruce, is a lot more complicated than a simple piece of pottery, gold jewellery, or an axe made out of some sticks and strings and stone by someone with a room-temperature IQ.
The moment Bruce appears, a split second after the depression of the button, Pru is already hauling his prone figure into the jet, setting him up in the isolation bay, drawing blood and getting readings. Tim stares after them with wide, tired eyes.
With every test that comes back normal, Tim can feel the weight of the planet on his shoulders lightening, bit by bit.
It worked.
All of this, all the sacrifices, his spleen, the League, it wasn’t for nothing.
It worked.
The machine in front of him, painstakingly built over weeks, looms over him. Something rises in the back of his throat, in his eyes. They’re blurry now. He’s not sure whether it’s the overwhelming relief bubbling up, or joy, or grief. Maybe he’s finally beginning to process the hellish months he’s just suffered and all of this is just the suppressed emotions coming to the surface.
Or not. Tim’s wayyy too emotionally constipated for that, come on! He was basically raised by an empty house then by the poster child for emotional suppression!
But he’s definitely feeling something, that’s for sure. A lot of somethings.
He goes to drop his tired head into his hands, very nearly overwhelmed, before jerking back when the hands resting on his face don’t fit like they should.
He looks at his hands.
His teeny-tiny itty-bitty little baby hands.
They're short and stubby, unscarred and uncalloused, visibly lacking the years of wear and tear and hard use. He flips them, absently noting the lack of the scar Jason gave him during the Titan’s Tower fiasco, the missing line though his pinky where the Joker tried to cut it off once. They're bare, entirely uncalloused, he faintly notes amid the rising panic. And it’s not just his hands.
Oh no.
Oh no.
He slaps his hands on his face and feels chubby cheeks once again, looks down and his clothes hang off him like ill-fitting rags.
He instinctively looks up for Pru, and comes to eye level with her armoured sternum. Height spurt, wherefore art thou, he thinks desperately, looking up further. He has to crane his neck - something he’s never had to do to see her before - only to see her looking at him with an unreadable glint in her eye.
“Hey there, short stack,” she crows. “How’s the weather down there?”
“Uhh,” Tim says, cutting himself off when his voice sounds several registers higher than he remembers it. “Uhhh?!?!”
Oh dear, Tim realises, he’s been de-aged.