Chapter Text
Tim
The world ended twice.
The first time, it left enough of us alive to mistake survival for mercy.
I was twenty-two, close enough to twenty-three that Alfred had already started asking what kind of cake I wanted, and I had been back in Gotham for forty-three hours.
That last part was almost funny.
I had scarcely set foot in the city for years.
After Bruce’s supposed death, Dick gave Robin to Damian. I told everyone Bruce was alive. No one believed me. Dick did worse than disagree. He treated my certainty like proof that grief had finally broken something in my head.
So I left.
I found Bruce.
I lost my spleen.
I dismantled most of Ra’s al Ghul’s international network, survived several assassination attempts, and tried to rebuild my life.
Even though I brought Bruce back, even though I was right, vindication was not the same as absolution. Not from the things I had done, and certainly not for the things done to me.
Dick tried.
He called. He sent food. He invited me to Titans events, movie nights, patrols, and dinners that neither of us honestly believed I would attend.
I told him I had forgiven him.
At twenty-two, I finally understood that saying something and making it true were not synonymous.
We could work together. We could stand in the Cave and discuss a case without drawing blood. I no longer flinched every time he called me his little brother.
Well I did, but not because I still felt he didn’t deserve to think of me that way.
It took me years to admit to myself exactly why I didn't want him to think of me that way.
And several more, plus an apocalypse for it to come true.
It was slow going, but eventually the resentment began to fade, things were good. I dated Bernard, which was fine until it wasn’t, and our breakup forced me to confront feelings I had been trying to deny for longer than I cared to admit.
Feelings that once acknowledged made it near impossible to be around the source of them.
So I left.
Not dramatically.
I did not stand on a roof and deliver a speech about betrayal while lightning flashed behind me. I simply stopped staying.
There was always another case in Paris, Hong Kong, Moscow, or some country where my presence would be less complicated. I came back when Bruce required it, when Alfred asked, or when someone in the family was bleeding badly enough that ignoring the message would have been rude.
Then it happened.
I had returned to Gotham because Alfred claimed he needed help reviewing a discrepancy in the Wayne Foundation’s emergency infrastructure budget.
The discrepancy was real.
It also took me eleven minutes to solve.
The dinner waiting upstairs took longer.
Alfred had manipulated Dick into attending with similar ease.
He denied this.
Alfred was an excellent liar when he felt the situation justified it. He was also perceptiveas hell, I still don'tknlw how he knew that Dick had been the reason I kept leaving.
Dick and I spent most of dinner speaking to Alfred instead of each other. Dick asked about my work. I gave him answers that were technically informative and completely useless. I asked about Blüdhaven. It was awkward.
Alfred watched us with the patient disappointment of a man reconsidering several decades of employment.
Bruce called before dessert.
The Justice League had received a distress signal from a planet outside mapped space. It carried a WayneTech quantum signature that should not have existed anywhere beyond Earth.
Bruce went with them.
Superman. Wonder Woman. Green Lantern. Martian Manhunter. Captain Marvel. Several others powerful enough that their departure left the planet noticeably less defended.
The mission was expected to last six hours.
Bruce told Dick he would be back by morning.
He told me to remain in Gotham until he returned.
I considered leaving on principle.
Alfred served pie.
I stayed.
At 02:17, every Zeta Tube on Earth activated at once.
There were no coordinates.
No authorized transports.
No warning.
For twenty-three seconds, every tube opened into the same place.
Later, after we had recovered fragments of video from the Watchtower, we learned that the openings showed the planet where Bruce and the League had gone.
The sky there was black.
Not dark.
Black.
No stars. No sun. Nothing beyond the figures of the League standing beneath a field of red lightning while the ground split under their feet.
Then the network collapsed.
Every Zeta Tube burned out.
Every Boom Tube on Earth failed.
Most satellites dropped from orbit. The magical transit lines used by the League went dead. Communications systems failed in expanding waves that started in major cities and spread outward.
At 02:18, Gotham lost power.
At 02:19, the eastern flood barrier opened.
At 02:21, every cell in Blackgate unlocked.
At 02:24, the first satellite struck the Atlantic hard enough to send a wall of water toward the eastern seaboard.
We eventually called it Meridian.
At the time, we did not call it anything.
We were busy.
Bruce was trapped on another planet with most of the League’s heaviest hitters, assuming they were still alive.
The rest of the family was scattered across the world.
Jason was in Qurac.
Cass was in Hong Kong.
Damian was in Nanda Parbat.
Duke was in Kasnia with the Outsiders.
Steph and Barbara were somewhere in Europe.
None of them could get home.
For the first several weeks, we could not even confirm that all of them had survived.
In Gotham, there were three of us.
Dick.
Alfred.
Me.
The first section of the flood barrier failed while we were still in the Cave.
Alfred was at the computer before either of us moved.
“Master Richard, the Narrows. Master Timothy, the eastern power grid.”
Dick pulled on his mask.
“Tim, take the lower tunnels and meet me at Bristol.”
Something old and ugly tightened beneath my ribs.
It was not the order itself.
It was how easily he gave it.
How quickly we returned to Batman and Robin whenever the world became frightening.
“I’m not Robin.”
Dick stopped.
There were alarms screaming around us. The Cave lights had switched to emergency red. Somewhere above, the manor windows shook beneath the first pressure wave from the coast.
He could have argued.
Years earlier, he would have.
Instead, he nodded.
“No. You’re not.”
He crossed to the main display and brought up the failing grid.
“Red Robin, I can hold the Narrows evacuation route for maybe forty minutes. Tell me where you need me after that.”
It should not have mattered.
People were dying.
The city was flooding.
Bruce was missing.
It still mattered.
I stepped beside him.
“The lower tunnels are already compromised. If you go through Bristol, the pressure will trap you underground.”
“Alternative?”
“You take the aerial route and clear the rooftops. I’ll shut the floodgates manually and reroute power from the Diamond District.”
“Can you do that alone?”
“Yes.”
He searched my face.
Then he did something he had not done often enough when I was seventeen.
He believed me.
“Call if that changes.”
“You too.”
We ran in opposite directions.
Gotham survived the first night because Alfred turned the Cave into a command center, medical station, emergency dispatch hub, and temporary government.
He coordinated police units, hospitals, civilian shelters, and every hero still answering a comm.
He also found time to remind Dick and me to eat.
Neither of us listened.
He threatened us with a serving spoon.
We ate.
Dick spent the night pulling people from flooded buildings.
I restored enough power to keep Gotham General running, sealed two sections of the seawall, disabled the Blackgate security system before the inmates could turn it against the guards, and discovered that the communications failure was not technological.
Not entirely.
Something had damaged the rules that allowed different systems to connect.
Radio signals lost cohesion after a few miles. Magic bent toward the wrong destinations. Zeta coordinates slipped. Aircraft navigation failed whenever a plane climbed above a certain altitude.
The planet had not been destroyed.
It had been separated into pieces that could no longer reach one another.
By dawn, Gotham had lost several thousand people.
Globally, the number was already much worse.
Dick returned to the Cave with a broken wrist, three cracked ribs, and someone else’s blood covering half his suit.
I had a concussion and a piece of metal lodged in my thigh.
Alfred took one look at us.
“I see we have once again confused competent fieldwork with competitive self-destruction.”
Dick sat on the medical cot.
“Tim started it.”
“Did not.”
“You rerouted a live power station through your gauntlets.”
“You used yourself as a support beam.”
“There were people under it.”
“There were people in the hospital.”
Alfred removed the metal from my leg without anesthetic.
We stopped arguing.
For almost a minute.
Meridian did not end after the first night.
The floodwaters receded.
The fractures remained.
For the first month, we thought restoring the Zeta network would bring Bruce and the others home.
For the second, we thought magic might do it.
During the third, Zatanna managed to send a six-second message through one of the fractures.
We saw Bruce.
He was alive.
They all were.
They were trapped on the planet, and every attempt to leave returned them to the same place.
The signal cut off before he could explain more.
It took seven weeks to make contact again.
By then, the rest of Earth had begun reorganizing itself around the damage.
Air travel was unreliable.
Ocean currents had changed.
Sections of the planet experienced reality storms that could alter gravity, weather, or human biology without warning.
Heroes stayed where they had been stranded because the people around them needed help.
Jason became part of the defense network in Qurac.
Cass coordinated evacuation routes across several cities in East Asia.
Damian turned an abandoned League compound into a sanctuary and denied doing anything charitable.
Barbara built a communications relay from scavenged alien technology in Geneva.
Steph helped her steal it.
Gotham had Dick, Alfred, and me.
That became our whole world.
For the first year, nothing romantic happened between Dick and me.
Nothing.
We were not drawn together by one dramatic rescue or a single moment of revelation.
We did not kiss beneath a burning sky and suddenly understand the meaning of our lives.
We worked.
We argued.
We slept in shifts.
We spent weeks without leaving Gotham and months without receiving a clear message from anyone we loved.
We learned how to protect a city without Batman.
More importantly, we learned how to work together without pretending one of us was still Robin.
Dick stopped giving orders simply because he was older.
I stopped treating every disagreement like proof that he would dismiss me again.
He asked for my assessment and listened to the answer.
I told him when I was angry instead of disappearing to another continent.
We failed at both of those things regularly.
Then we tried again.
Four months after Meridian, the Red Robin suit was damaged beyond repair during a reality storm near Robinson Park.
I rebuilt it in black and red, removed most of the cape, and changed the emblem.
Red Robin had been the name I used while proving I could survive without the family.
I did not need to keep proving it.
I called the new identity Redwing.
Dick managed not to comment on the gact that I named myself after my bike for almost three hours.
It may still be his greatest display of self-control.
By the end of that first year, Nightwing and Redwing had become a recognized pair.
People painted both symbols on emergency shelters.
Children in the Narrows argued about which one of us was stronger.
Alfred sold neither of us out when asked.
He did, however, suggest that the correct answer was obviously him.
Without Meridian, Dick and I would never have gotten together.
I know that with more certainty than I know most things.
Without Meridian, I would have left Gotham again.
Dick would have returned to Blüdhaven.
We would have seen one another at family dinners, League emergencies, and whatever crisis required every available cape.
He would have kept trying to repair our relationship.
I would have kept assuring him it was repaired.
We might even have believed ourselves.
The feelings existed before the world broke.
Mine had existed for most of my life.
Dick’s were newer and far less welcome to him.
Neither of us would have examined them under ordinary circumstances.
There had been too much history between us, too many old roles, too much guilt.
The disaster did not create what we felt.
It kept us in the same place long enough to stop hiding from it.
Our first kiss happened one year and seventeen days after Meridian.
That date remained clear in my mind even after countless others became difficult to separate.
We had restored permanent power to the northern half of Gotham that evening.
Real power.
Not generators, stolen alien batteries, or a network held together by equipment Bruce would have called unsafe.
The lights came on one district at a time.
Dick and I watched from the roof of Wayne Tower as streets, hospitals, and apartment buildings reappeared below us.
For the first time in a year, Gotham looked like a city instead of a collection of isolated fires.
Dick sat on the ledge with his mask pushed into his hair.
“Alfred says you’re thinking about leaving.”
I kept my attention on the grid readings.
“Alfred says many things.”
“Are you?”
“The Atlantic corridor is stabilizing. Barbara thinks she can open a route to Europe if someone repairs the relay from this side.”
“That wasn’t my question.”
“It’s the practical answer.”
“I’m not asking for one.”
That was unusual enough to make me look at him.
Dick’s hands were clasped between his knees.
He had a healing cut across his mouth and silver beginning at one temple from prolonged exposure to chronal radiation.
He looked tired.
We were all tired then.
“When the route opens,” he said, “are you leaving Gotham?”
“Probably.”
His jaw tightened.
“Why?”
“Because people need help elsewhere.”
“People need help here.”
“You can handle Gotham.”
“I don’t want to handle Gotham without you.”
The words caught me off guard.
I covered it with irritation.
“You managed before.”
“Not like this.”
“You’ll get Bruce back.”
“This isn’t about Bruce.”
“It usually is.”
“Not this time.”
Dick stood.
He did not come closer.
That mattered too.
“I know what I did to you,” he said. “I know saying I’m sorry doesn’t put Robin back in your hands or change the fact that I didn’t believe you. I also know I spent years trying to fix it without ever asking what you needed from me.”
I looked back toward the city.
“I don’t need Robin.”
“I know.”
“I don’t need Batman.”
“I know.”
“Then what exactly do you think this is?”
“I don’t know.”
Dick laughed once, without humor.
“That’s the problem. I don’t know when this stopped feeling like something I could lose and started feeling like something I wouldn’t survive losing.”
My heart made one hard, painful movement.
“Dick.”
“I know how this sounds.”
“Do you?”
“Probably not. I haven’t slept since Monday.”
“It’s Thursday.”
“That explains a lot.”
I should have stepped away.
I had spent years learning how.
Instead, I asked, “What do you want?”
He considered the question.
Really considered it.
“I want you to stay,” he said. “Not as Robin. Not because Bruce is gone. Not because Gotham needs another mask. I want you here because I’m better when you’re here, and because every plan I make for after this has you in it.”
I had imagined Dick Grayson telling me he loved me in hundreds of ways over the years.
My imagination had never accounted for the end of the world, a damaged power grid, or both of us smelling faintly of electrical fire.
“That may be the least romantic confession anyone has ever made,” I said.
“It wasn’t a confession.”
“No?”
“I haven’t reached that part yet.”
“You’re taking a long time.”
“I’m nervous.”
That was honest enough to undo me.
I crossed the space between us.
I gave him time to move.
He didn’t.
“You should be,” I said.
Then I kissed him.
It was not elegant.
His split lip reopened. My comm activated against his shoulder and broadcast six seconds of us breathing into Alfred’s command channel.
Alfred disconnected without comment.
At breakfast the next morning, he placed a tin of peppermint lip balm beside Dick’s plate.
Dick turned red.
I considered walking into the sea.
Instead, I stayed.
The kiss did not solve everything.
It created several new problems.
We spent weeks arguing about whether starting a relationship during a global catastrophe was ethical, practical, or evidence of shared brain damage.
We talked about the age difference.
We talked about Robin.
We talked about Bruce, guilt, power, and whether Dick could separate the man I had become from the boy he remembered.
We talked until both of us were sick of hearing our own voices.
Then we chose each other anyway.
The world was still damaged.
Our love was not.
It was the best thing either of us had ever found.
Dick saw the person most likely to be forgotten in every plan.
I saw the structural failure that would kill them if no one accounted for it.
He stopped my strategies from becoming bloodless.
I stopped his hope from becoming self-sacrifice.
He could convince a frightened room that tomorrow was worth reaching.
I could build the machinery that got us there.
We did not become the same person.
We fit.
It felt like discovering we had spent our entire lives carrying opposite halves of the same map.
There were still arguments.
Dick left wet towels on the floor.
I forgot to sleep.
He hid decaffeinated coffee in the regular container once.
I changed every password on his equipment and made him solve personalized riddles to regain access.
He guessed all of them.
I hated how attractive that was.
We moved into a reinforced Blüdhaven safehouse during our second year together.
Dick called it an apartment.
I called it a strategically located operations base with inadequate countermeasures.
Then I filled the shelves with my books and started referring to it as home.
He bought two aggressively ugly cereal bowls from a market that reopened near the waterfront.
They survived longer than several governments.
So did we.
For five years, we built a life in the damaged spaces.
The world improved.
Slowly.
Not cleanly.
But it improved.
We restored reliable communication between most continents.
Barbara rebuilt the Oracle network.
Zatanna stabilized the worst magical fractures.
Wally mapped the dead spaces in the Speed Force and learned how to cross some of them.
Jason, Cass, Damian, Duke, and Steph were alive.
For years, we had only voices.
Then we had images.
Eventually, we had short-lived transit corridors that allowed supplies through, though not people.
Every failed attempt taught us something.
Every successful one brought the family a little closer.
Bruce and the League remained trapped on the planet Meridian had used as its anchor.
We could communicate with them for several minutes at a time by then.
They had survived.
They had built defenses.
Bruce had aged, though not at the same rate we had.
The first time he saw Dick and me together, he stared for almost a full minute.
Then the connection failed.
We never learned what he had intended to say.
Jason claimed it was probably a lecture.
Damian insisted Father would be pleased by any relationship that improved Grayson’s strategic performance.
Steph laughed for six uninterrupted minutes.
Alfred said he had predicted it years earlier.
By the sixth year after Meridian, we were close.
Closer than we had ever been.
We had constructed a return lattice capable of reopening the original path.
The scattered members of the family could come home through the same system once the main corridor stabilized.
The League could return.
The planetary fractures could be sealed.
For the first time since the sky went black, setting the world right was no longer a theory.
It was a schedule.
Eleven days before it all wemt to shit, we ran the first full-power test.
It worked.
For four seconds, the portal opened.
Bruce stood on the other side.
Dick laughed.
I remember that more clearly than the alarms.
We shut the portal down according to plan and spent the next eleven days correcting the remaining errors.
We did not know that the test had armed a failsafe buried inside the original Meridian code.
We did not know Vandal Savage had planned for the possibility that we might repair what he broke.
We did not know that every system we restored had become part of the weapon.
At 02:17 on the eleventh day, the second blow landed.
Every repaired corridor opened at once.
Not toward the planet.
Not toward one another.
They opened into the fractures Meridian had left behind.
Energy tore through the global network.
Safe zones disappeared.
Transit hubs collapsed.
The magical barriers around several cities inverted and trapped the destruction inside them.
Barbara’s channel cut off in the middle of a warning.
Jason’s signal vanished two seconds later.
Then Cass.
Duke.
Steph.
Damian.
The League’s planet disappeared from every sensor.
The Cave took a direct hit.
Alfred was at the primary station.
His last transmission contained three words.
“Get them out.”
Then there was nothing.
Nearly everyone died.
The people we had spent six years trying to reach.
The people who survived Meridian.
The people who had begun believing the world could be repaired.
Gone in minutes.
Dick survived the initial collapse because he pushed me out of the return lattice chamber before the chronal core ruptured.
The blast crushed his left leg, tore through several organs, and burned temporal energy across his spine.
I dragged him through the remains of Gotham while the city came apart around us.
He remained conscious long enough to complain about my lifting technique.
That was Dick.
Dying, but still concerned I might injure my back.
I took him to the Blüdhaven apartment.
Home.
Half the building was gone.
The kitchen remained.
So did one of the ugly cereal bowls.
I laid Dick on our bed and connected him to the emergency medical equipment.
The scanner gave him less than three hours.
He read the result over my shoulder.
“Rude,” he whispered.
“It’s wrong.”
“Tim.”
“The sensors were damaged.”
“Babybird.”
I turned away from him.
I had one option left.
It had started as a contingency Bruce would have disapproved of, which described most useful contingencies.
A chronal engine.
Part technology, part magic, and powered by a fragment of the original Meridian lens.
Zatanna had helped design the containment runes.
Booster had provided calculations and then made me promise never to use them.
I had built it in case the return lattice destabilized.
A last resort.
A Hail Mary.
eridian.
The lens had neither the power nor the stability.
Eleven days.
Eleven days was all I needed to fix this.
I could stop the full-power test.
I could remove Savage’s failsafe before it spread through the network.
I could prevent the worst from happening.
Everyone would still be alive.
Dick watched me pull the machine from beneath the floor.
“No.”
“I wasn’t asking.”
“Tim, that thing was never tested.”
“Neither was the return lattice. We still used it.”
“And look how well that went.”
“This is different.”
“That is what you say every time you’re about to do something horrifying.”
I connected the power source.
My hands shook badly enough that I had to restart the first sequence.
Dick saw.
He always saw.
“Eleven days?” he asked.
“Yes.”
“You stop the test.”
“I stop the failsafe before the test.”
“Then what?”
“Then this never happens.”
“What happens to you?”
“I'll be fine.”
“Liar.”
His voice was weak.
The accusation was not.
I crossed to the bed.
Dick raised one hand.
I caught it before it fell.
His fingers were cold.
“You don’t know what this will do to you,” he said.
“No.”
“You might replace yourself.”
“Possibly.”
“You might erase everything we had.”
That was the first possibility I had been unable to say aloud.
I lowered my head until my forehead rested against his.
“I know.”
“Five years.”
“I know.”
“The apartment.”
“I know.”
“The bowls.”
A broken laugh escaped me.
“I hated those bowls.”
“You loved them.”
“I tolerated them because you were emotionally attached.”
“Same thing.”
His thumb moved against my wrist.
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“You won’t.”
“Tim.”
“You won’t remember losing me.”
His eyes closed.
That answer hurt him.
It hurt because it was true.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“Don’t be.”
“Dick.”
“We spent years getting everyone back. You can still do it.”
He opened his eyes again.
They were the same blue they had always been.
“But if it misses,” he said, “if you land somewhere you didn’t mean to...”
“It won’t.”
“If it does.”
I could not make another promise I might fail to keep.
Dick tightened his fingers around mine.
“Find me.”
My throat closed.
“Wherever you land,” he continued. “Whenever it is. Find me.”
“I will.”
“Promise?”
“I promise.”
I kissed him.
It tasted like blood and peppermint.
Five years of mornings, patrols, arguments, laughter, and quiet nights lived inside that kiss.
Our first apartment.
His hand resting on my knee beneath conference tables.
My books mixed with his on the shelves.
Dick singing badly while making breakfast.
The way he reached for me in his sleep.
The life we would lose whether the machine worked or not.
When I pulled away, he kept his forehead against mine.
“I love you, babybird.”
“I love you too.”
I returned to the machine before I lost the ability to move.
I entered the coordinates.
Eleven days.
I checked them once.
Twice.
Three times.
Dick watched from the bed.
I placed one hand over the trigger.
“See you soon,” I said.
His smile was small, tired, and still the most beautiful thing I had ever seen.
“You better.”
I activated the machine.
Light filled the room.
The apartment disappeared.
Dick disappeared with it.
I had asked the machine for eleven days.
It gave me eleven years.