Chapter Text
Headlights, a screeching horn. A moment of inattention.
The impact is painless, for he is dead before he can feel his body come apart.
He jerks awake on a rooftop, of all places.
Puppeteering himself from third person, with spectral strings attached to his own limbs.
A camera is clasped in fingers pudgy with youth, and the model is bigger than he ever remembers his own being. He is looking through the viewfinder with experienced precision, lens fixed on a distant figure dancing across the rooftops. There’s a second shadow following close behind, a larger, darker figure compared to the smaller one’s vibrant costume. Because that is what it is. A costume.
It is with a gradual, gnawing horror that he watches the multicoloured figure launch themselves from a roof, grapple outstretched, and flip.
One, two, three, four.
Robin.
It’s a costume he’d recognise anywhere, given the notoriety and the stories attached. For he’d seen it a thousand different times in fanart and cosplays, of Dick Grayson and Jason Todd flying through the Gotham skyline with Batman hovering protectively behind. They’re from a webnovel, a very famous one at that, but this feels too real. The city itself doesn’t feel right.
The yawning disconnect between his body and mind slams closed, and his vision blacks out for a split second, nausea retreating as quickly as it came, leaving something much worse in its wake.
Toxic green and impossibly real, the screen hangs a mere arms length away. Four damning sentences, stark against the lurid background.
[SYSTEM ACTIVATION SUCCESSFUL! WELCOME TO THE WORLD OF {Dark Knights of Gotham}. BOUND CHARACTER (CLASS: Cannon fodder/Minor villain): {Robin III} {Timothy Drake} LOADED. STARTING R-POINTS: 100.]
It’s only thanks to the gradually fading dissociation that he doesn’t immediately start having a panic attack large enough to send him off the side of the random building he’s found himself perched on.
He was dead, and now he was alive.
Alive, and reborn in Dark Knights of Gotham, according to this… system.
Dark Knights of Gotham was a saga following the adventures of Jason Todd, an enterprising young street rat down on his luck, who steals from the wrong man. In a whirlwind of events, he gets adopted by the richest man in America, sucked into Gotham's underground vigilante scene, and debuts as one of the crimefighters he previously idolised.
It featured characters such as the legendary Bruce Wayne as Batman, a terrifyingly competent vigilante set on a path to destruction with an iron-clad sense of justice, Barbara Gordon, determined daughter of the police commissioner who is terrifyingly good at computers, and Dick Grayson, the distant yet mercurial older-brother figure with a grudge to bear.
In its early days, Dark Knights of Gotham was best described as a heartwarming tale between a jaded mentor and his plucky sidekick and their extended found family, melting hearts and kicking villain butt.
Of course, the writing was good quality, the characters were complex, driven and well-written, and the gallery of villains frantically seesawed between hilariously goofy and maniacally insane. Mix in the gradually strengthening found family dynamic, and was it really any surprise that Dark Heroes of Gotham rapidly gained a cult following?
That's fine and all, so where does Timothy Drake come in?
See, eventually the main issues were solved. Most of the main rogue plotlines were over, and there were only so many Arkham Asylum breakouts that could happen before the audience got bored. Most of them came for the angst, and then slow-burn found family. Which was fine.
But with Bruce, Dick, Babs and Jason finally on good terms with one another, the story began to lose what had originally bought in so many readers in the first place, starting a period fondly known in hindsight as the 'filler arcs'.
It gave rise to the popular saying, ‘if in doubt, Arkham breakout,’ because it happened so many times.
Put frankly, nothing really happened in the filler saga. Most considered it to be a shameless cash grab, trying to eke every last cent out of a dying story before it finally lost its appeal to wider audiences. Because it was losing its appeal with every aimless chapter.
And just when everything was looking neatly wrapped up, ready for a nice, domestic conclusion before the author tied a bow on Dark Heroes of Gotham and moved on with their life-
The author killed Jason Todd.
A single chapter, and everything fell apart.
Jason was six feet under, and without him, everything devolved to how it had originally been in the prologue, but worse. Barbara was paralysed from the waist down and trying to rebuild her entire identity, Dick isolated himself in the neighbouring city once again and Bruce, drowning in his grief, doubled down on his crusade to end crime in Gotham at the expense of everyone in his path. Now there was a palpable absence where Jason used to be, and they’d never been too good at hiding their grief, especially in the absence of Robin.
It was a spiral to rock bottom, and Gotham wept for his absence.
And that's where the character Tim Drake steps in, and unknowingly makes everything much, much worse.
And that minor villain is now the character that he has been ‘bound’ to. What does that even mean, to be bound? What does the system want from him?
He barely has time to mentally verbalise the questions before another screen pops up, as acidic green as the last.
[YOU HAVE BEEN BOUND TO THE ACCOUNT {Timothy Drake}.] it says.
[AS THE {Plot} UNFOLDS, OPPORTUNITIES TO EARN R-POINTS WILL BE UNLOCKED. IF THE TOTAL AMOUNT FALLS BELOW ZERO, THE SYSTEM WILL ADMINISTER PUNISHMENT.]
“Punishment?”
[USER WILL BE DEPORTED BACK TO THEIR OLD WORLD, INTO THEIR OLD BODY.]
“But didn’t I die?” he asks.
The system’s silence is damning.
In front of him, Robin (Dick Grayson!) does another multi-flip, the guiding shadow of his mentor following close behind. Tim blinks after them, letting his camera fall to his chest.
First of all, what the fuck.
Second of all, what the fuck.
Finally, fuck to the second power.
In literally any other context, getting transmigrated into a popular webnovel would be amazing! Changing his fate, taking advantage of plot points to come out on top, avoiding death flags and becoming OP! Sounds like a dream! Whether it’s into a villainess noble, mob character or beaten-down hidden talent-slash-protagonist, it’s time for them to shine!
According to the standard rules of isekai or transmigration, this would be the beginning of something new, something better than his previous life.
All that’s left is to write down everything he remembers from the original novel, complete with dates and timeframes before he forgets it all again, and plan extensively for what’s to come.
Ha ha.
Or not.
Tim never actually read Dark Knights of Gotham.
He definitely considered it, but that was before the author went positively batshit insane after Jason’s death and turned what was a perfectly good webnovel into angsty, rage-bait, room temperature IQ progfantasy drivel.
Numerous plot holes, foreshadowing that ultimately led nowhere, gaps in logic large enough to confuse even the most stupid of readers and plot armour so thick it could be seen from outer space, all compounded by a protagonist whose previous morals, character development and entire personality got thrown out the metaphorical window, letting it turn into scrambled eggs on the pavement below.
Jason Todd went from an inspiring, interesting and complex character to Sonic the Edgehog.
Yup.
The dude died painfully then un-died equally as painfully, had a certified Assassin Training Montage (TM), before proceeding to make it literally everyone else's problem.
And now Tim’s gotta deal with it.
The knowledge he has about everything is so superficial it can barely be counted as ‘foreknowledge’. It’s more like a vague chain of events, such as ‘Jason dies’, ‘Jason comes back to life’, ‘Jason training montage’, ‘Joker fight’, ‘drug bust’ and finally, ‘Gang war’. See? Very descriptive. Someone should get Tim an award for even remembering that much.
The main reason is because Tim's online haunting ground was three fandoms to the left of Dark Knights of Gotham, but it had a pervasive fan-culture that meant it popped up on his dashboard anyway. Crossovers, art, text posts, obsessed mutuals and memes alike, it was the kind of book where you already knew the ending, the plot twists and characters without ever interacting with the content itself, because you couldn't escape them as long as you were connected to the internet.
This didn’t mean that he was familiar with the plot or anything, only the vague outline and the poignant moments detailed in the very many rage-filled essays posted after the author decided that having a coherent plot was for losers.
He could have been reborn as someone else, literally anyone else, but instead, breaking every single isekai rule there was, he managed to get reborn into a minor villain that dies for the sake of someone else’s character development. Where’s his superpowers? What about his golden finger? He wants a refund on his afterlife!
The system doesn’t respond to his kind, patient requests for a new damn afterlife, so he’s left shivering on the roof of a random apartment building in a semi-foreign city after midnight.
But, strangely, as he stands, he acclimates.
It’s like his soul is syncing with the soul of little Timothy Drake, merging the memories in a spiritual override. He can remember what he (Timothy) had for breakfast this morning, and the winding route he took to ascend to where he is now, camera clutched in eager hands. It’s his memories, but they’re strangely foreign in a way that he doesn’t like to dwell on. That being said, his past life is fading.
Logically, he knows he was someone else before this, before waking up in this familiar-unfamiliar body with memories that he didn't make, yet belong to him regardless. He knows that he lived another life entirely, went to school, grew up, had friends and a family, but the experiences are inaccessible to him, like trying to watch tv through an opaque window. He can see the fuzz of colours, hear the muffled voices if he presses his ear against the cool surface, but anything more than the fact that it exists in the first place is out of his reach.
Every second he tries to push through that wall they grow fainter and fainter to him, and the memories of this body grow more prominent, fluidly replacing everything that used to be him.
It would be disturbing, if he wasn’t so very, very tired.
Retracing his steps home is strange, not just because Gotham’s seedier district are akin to an obstacle course designed by a sadist, but also because this body is what, nine years old?
He should have been playing video games, not stalking dangerous vigilantes through the dodgy parts of the city after sundown. This is not what the internet means when people say ‘touching grass’ is beneficial. Quite the opposite really.
Either way, after forty-five minutes tucked into the corner of a rickety bus and a mile-long walk from the stop to the unnecessarily long driveway of Drake Manor, Tim is ready to climb back in through his bedroom window and sleep on whichever horizontal surface he comes into contact with first, whether that is his bed, a cabinet or just the floor. He’s not feeling picky right now.
He scales the trellis below his window like he’s been doing it for years, and resolves that when he wakes next, he won’t take this second chance for granted. Starting with his parents.
Tim’s new parents sucked.
For absent, negligent background characters that only existed as a paper-thin excuse to prevent Bruce from adopting Tim-as-Robin, he really isn’t sure what else he expected. They got mentioned by name a grand total of, like, two times in the entire series, the first being their introductions and the second being their deaths.
The only reason Tim knows they die is because there were a bunch of angry posts about Tim Drake having perfectly alive parents and yet still trying to insert himself in Bruce’s family. And then after their death, they were mad about Tim moving on so fast and ‘not having respect’ for them before getting adopted by Bruce. Seriously. He can’t win. People on the internet could be crazy sometimes.
Either way, when Tim is fourteen, fifteen or sixteen (thanks to many conflicting posts about the absolutely scuffed chronological timeline) they die miserable deaths offscreen, Tim becomes an orphan, and then they’re never mentioned again. Classic.
In the book, they’d been negligent to the point of ridiculousness, somehow entirely missing their teenage son living a double life as a crime-fighting vigilante up until their deaths. And that is transferring across into real life.
He stares down the empty driveway, flabbergasted.
They’d been home last night, home for the last week and a half, and they’d left without even a goodbye? No wonder why novel-Tim had latched onto the neighbours so hard, these guys sucked at being parents! They’d told him three days ago that their next trip was to Jamaica for at least four months, so they could’ve at least dropped in to say ‘toodles, chap, we’re off!’
There wasn’t even a housekeeper!
Of course, the previous Tim hadn’t noticed anything untoward about all this, priding himself in being responsible for his age. Current Tim, however, had the experience of another life, and would like to file a refund. He’s only beginning to understand the extent to which he’s been scammed in this new life of his.
The only good thing about the entire situation was that the pantry was stacked, and both previous-Tim and current-Tim had mastered the Art of the Microwave though, so breakfast was macaroni and cheese, minimum effort for maximum cholesterol.
Standing in the empty kitchen, breakfast cooking in front of him.
“System?” he says aloud, feeling like an idiot for speaking to himself in an empty house. “Hello?”
[THE SYSTEM PERFORMS 24-HOUR SUPPORT.]
The box is as violently green as it was the night before, but now he has time to examine it properly, it appears to be more holographic than physical in nature. When he reaches out, his hand passes through it with only a chilled area surrounding the limb penetrating the screen.
But right now, he has more pressing questions.
“What do you want from me?”
[THE SYSTEM IS DESIGNED TO SUPPORT USER AS THEY PROGRESS THROUGH THE PLOT.]
Tim pauses. Because that’s not entirely true. Last night, the system had mentioned both punishment and deportation, and the fact it had those options in the first place signalled something more concerning than the standard LitRPG level-up system. And most importantly, Tim doesn’t want to progress through the plot. In the plot, Tim dies.
[YOUR ROLE IS TO PLAY AS THE CHARACTER {Timothy Drake}. YOUR PRIMARY OBJECTIVE IS TO ENSURE COMPLETION OF MAJOR PLOT POINTS. FAILURE OF THESE QUESTS WILL RESULT IN DEDUCTION OF R-POINTS. TOTAL DEPLETION OF R-POINTS WILL RESULT IN ACCOUNT TERMINATION AND USER’S SUBSEQUENT DEPORTATION. YOUR CURRENT BALANCE OF R-POINTS IS 100.]
Ah. There it is.
“How do I get these R-points?” His voice sounds youthful and plaintive to his own ears.
[R-POINTS, WHICH CAN BE USED AS A CURRENCY IN THE {Store} ARE USED AS A METRIC OF THE USER’S SUCCESS. USER WILL RECEIVE TASKS AND QUESTS TO COMPLETE, EACH OF WHICH WILL GIVE VARIOUS REWARDS.]
“There’s a store?”
[USER HAS NOT MET REQUIREMENTS TO ACCESS THE {Store}]
Well that’s entirely useless. All stick and no carrot. All he can really do in response to that is eat his macaroni and cheese, and sulk.
Here is a question.
What happens when you write over six hundred chapters of vigilante-themed found family fluff, reach the perfect ending, only to go SIKE before killing off the beloved protagonist?
As expected, the most common reaction was WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK BRO!?
Then the story went off the fucking rails.
Timothy Drake was supposed to be a deuteragonist, patching up the damage and letting the audience revel in the hurt Jason’s death had in those he left behind. He was supposed to be the second chance redemption, the outsider POV showing how much Jason’s absence really meant, before coming into his own as an independent character.
Alas, the Jason-stans (who were already relatively feral pre-death) had to suffer through graphic descriptions of their blorbo having quality time with the business end of a meat tenderiser, which meant that they were well into rabies territory by the time Tim came along. They were looking for an outlet for their rage, and they found one.
Tim Drake was originally written to be the near-opposite of Jason, presumably to show that anyone could be a hero, that it was the hearts that matter, not their origins. As all characters are wont to do, Timothy still had some growth left to do before he would emerge as a fully fledged character, but he never got that chance.
There was an imposter holding the mantle of Robin, an imposition stealing away Jason’s rightful place! Saying that the character Tim Drake was disliked was like saying the surface of the sun is merely lukewarm.
So, the author (TeenageMutantNinjaPurple) eventually held a poll.
Tim would either be shunted into the role of a villain or bloom into a true protagonist of his own right.
The final result was 15343 to 428.
So, Timothy’s potential was scrapped, his character was carelessly relegated to minor villain, and all his character quirks became flaws to be used against him. His parents’ wealth became a justification for being spoiled and sheltered, his paranoia and stalking went from being prepared and observant to being creepy, and his pursuit of Robin was justified by greed rather than a genuine desire to help where no one else would.
Then Jason came back to life after an assassin training montage with the Assassin League? Elite Assassins? (there was something about a Tania and a demon too, Tim can’t remember), and returned to find he’d been replaced and Bruce had learnt nothing from his passing.
It shouldn't have worked as well as it did.
But it did.
The fans went positively feral.
The genre changed abruptly (again), with the story taking on a much darker, grittier perspective on the streets he previously soared above, with gangbuilding and crime alley lore. A ruthless relentless protagonist taking on the mantle of his killer and doing some good, fueled by something called a Lazarus Pit (???) which granted him inhuman levels of speed, healing or whatever the hell he needed to be cooler than everybody else.
There was no logic to it. He needed to heal faster? Lazarus pit. Dodging a machine gun? Lazarus pit. Temporary flight!? Lazarus pit. Zero explanation and zero fucks given by the author.
At this point, long-time fans were beginning to point out the larger faults, the endless plot holes, the cookie-cutter goons and villains because what happened to the original masterpiece? The ‘super-powers’ (because the author kept on denying Jason had any despite many paragraphs of her own writing suggesting otherwise) became known as the ‘Lazarus pit scam’.
What was once a good quality, well-written webnovel, had devolved into a pile of steamed shit in front of the eyes of its devoted fans.
The only good thing that stayed was the lack of a harem, thank FUCK. If the author had tried to pair off their little meow meow with someone, there would have been carnage.
Either way, Jason came back all pit-fuelled and super fucking angsty, killed Tim in a tower (???), and everybody cheered.
Quite frankly, it would have been better to be a cannon fodder than to be Tim Drake, because then he could have just skated under the attention of the Waynes entirely and lived a quiet, normal life far, far away from Gotham.
Actually, what’s stopping him from doing that now? All he really needs to do is stop Jason’s death-
The system rectifies that misconception near-instantly.
[THE JOKER IS CRITICAL TO {Jason Todd}'S CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. DIRECT USER INTERFERENCE WITH {Warehouse Death} EVENT WILL RESULT IN TERMINATION OF USER.]
Nevermind.
But then, does he really have to be Robin? Batman doesn’t need an emotional-support twelve-year-old, right? He’s a grown man! He’ll be fiiiiiine-
[USER’S ROLE AS {Robin III} IS NECESSARY FOR {Jason Todd}'S CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT. FAILURE TO BECOME {Robin III} WILL RESULT IN TERMINATION OF USER.]
Does the System have a manager? Tim wants a refund for his transmigration experience, please.