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The Tower was supposed to be empty. The rest of the Titans were at home, and Tim was there on a rare Tuesday to get through some routine maintenance without Luthor trying to hack the mainframe or robots trying to take over the city or an alien invasion. They usually kept those kinds of things planned for the weekend.
And then ten minutes after he sat down—armed with a fresh cup of coffee and everything—a signal beeped that someone had entered the Tower. With the codes, so no alarm. Through the front door, which was a cause for alarm.
Everyone had zeta’d out. Bart and Kon were fast enough to get to the Tower on their own, but Kon would’ve used the ceiling access, and Bart would’ve been next to Tim already, chattering his ear off.
Tim groaned. Fantastic. Another problem to deal with. He grudgingly vacated his chair, leaving the maintenance programs running—chances were that that this was either a malfunctioning door or one of the older Titans stopping by without notice—and snagged his bo staff as a concession to caution as he left the control room.
He had to muffle a yawn as he made his way down, pausing to check the alert system on every floor. Usually the couple of hours between school and the start of patrol was his nap time, but that had to be cut short today, and even with a cup of coffee, his brain wasn’t interested in being awake. His footsteps echoed loudly in the stairwell, and Tim absently tapped his staff against the railing as he went.
Aside from the maintenance, there wasn’t much else to do in the Tower. Bruce had been sending him here for a couple of days every week with the increase in gang violence in Crime Alley—after what happened to Steph, Bruce had dialed the smothering overprotectiveness up to eleven—and Tim was just waiting to be exiled semi-permanently. Steph and Cass had luckily managed to escape to Bludhaven, and Tim wondered if he could call Dick and ask to spend a week there.
The foyer was empty, the door shut, and Tim sighed. He’d have to stop the maintenance and do a full system check if the doors were malfunctioning. “Hello?” he called out without much hope, “Is anyone there?”
Something prickled between his shoulder blades.
“Hello?” Tim repeated, louder, drifting a hand up to make sure that his domino mask was in place. He shifted his grip on the compacted staff as he turned in a slow circle. The prickling intensified. “Is someone—”
There.
A figure so still they could pass for a statue, dark body armor, leather jacket, and a bright, gleaming red helmet. “Red Hood,” Tim said levelly, snapping his staff out to full length, “You’re a long way from Gotham.” What was a Gotham Rogue doing in San Francisco?
“I could say the same to you,” Hood’s voice crackled through a voice modulator, “Replacement.”
It was looking likely that Hood had come for him specifically. But why? “How’d you get in?” Tim asked conversationally, “Usually we have pretty good security.”
Hood lifted a hand to his helmet, and the latches unclicked loudly in the silence. Tim took the moment of distraction to survey his gear—he was in workout clothes, with nothing but his bo staff. The foyer was empty of easy weaponry. The nearest panic button was in the hallway, behind Hood.
In short, Tim was screwed.
Hood pulled the helmet off, and Tim met vivid green eyes in a familiar face. “You really should’ve taken my codes out of the system,” Jason Todd said unsmilingly.
Tim made a note of that. Possible security flaw—dead vigilantes coming back to life.
“You don’t seem very surprised to see me,” Jason noted.
Tim shrugged, “I live with the World’s Greatest Detective.” The Red-Hood-is-Jason theory had moved up to second place after they realized his grave was empty—first place still ‘another kid of Bruce’s we don’t know about’ because Hood’s daddy issues were distinctive—and the cautious excitement trying to bleed into his system was suppressed by wariness.
Somehow, Tim didn’t think Jason was here for a friendly chat.
“Funny,” Jason said, eyes almost glowing, “That’s what I’m here to talk to you about, Replacement.” His wrists twisted, in what would’ve been a showy move if they weren’t empty—and suddenly they weren’t, his fingers wrapped around hilts that had appeared out of thin air. “Well,” Jason smiled, slow and vicious, “Not talk.”
Tim mentally reevaluated his chances. Those were orange, fiery, glowing swords. Tim, in contrast, had an ordinary bo staff. It was a dismal evaluation.
“What’s the matter, Replacement?” Jason sneered, “You stole my shit. You should’ve been prepared to defend it.”
“Is that what this is about?” Tim asked. Jason stepped forward and Tim to the side, starting a slow circle. If he just got to the hallway—then what? How fast would they respond to his distress call? The maintenance programs still running would block access on and off, and make the Tower all but unreachable from the outside. “Robin? I’m sorry, Jason, but Batman needed a Robin—”
“Batman didn’t need shit,” Jason snarled, “Except to man up and permanently solve his problems.” Something in his gaze shifted to cold determination. “But that’s okay. I’ll teach that to him. Which makes you…entirely redundant.”
Tim was moving before Jason finished speaking, and still the sword nearly took off his head. Tim’s staff had a greater reach, but Jason was fast, and Tim did not like the way his swords sizzled.
“Not bad,” Jason hummed, slashing out again, both blades moving in eerie synchrony. as Tim ducked and dodged. “Where’d you learn that?”
Tim used a hand on a side table to lever himself up, and kicked out at Jason’s arm. Jason stumbled back, and Tim swung his staff forward, only for Jason to catch it against the flat of his blade and let it slide off. “Lady Shiva,” he said, breathless, immediately putting more distance between them.
Jason laughed coldly, “It’s getting to be a pattern, B letting his children be trained by assassins.” Tim couldn’t exactly disagree. He slid down as a sword slashed harmlessly through empty air, and jabbed up with the staff, aiming for the armor.
It connected—Tim won a startled wheeze before Jason’s eyes turned to liquid green fire.
The next sword strike nearly took his arm off.
“Still doesn’t make you good enough,” Jason hissed, and Tim’s muscles burned as he was forced to throw himself into dodges. He blocked a slash with his staff—the staff didn’t immediately snap, which surprised him—and then another. And another. And another, yanking back as the sword impacted dangerously close to his fingers. “Because you never learned the most basic of assassin skills.”
Tim realized he was being herded into a corner when he was three steps away from the wall.
“How to finish the kill.”
Tim ducked the first strike, used the staff to block the second, but wasn’t fast enough to twist away from the third. His staff was still up, and the sword hit it with a ringing thud, his fingers right there—
Tim yanked back, his heart caught in his throat—but his fingers were fine. No blood, no pain. Jason had missed.
The wave of relief was forestalled by his back hitting the wall, and Jason’s expression fading from determination to malicious amusement.
“Nowhere to run, Replacement,” he grinned, and raised the copper blades. “Do you want to know what it feels like to die?”
Calm down, Tim told himself, deep breaths. Jason wasn’t going to kill him. Robin wouldn’t kill, would never, so this would hurt but he would be okay. The staff gave him enough reach to keep Jason at bay even while pressed back in the corner, and Tim fought hard—but he was tiring fast.
He was a second slow with a block. Jason slammed the staff aside with almost insulting ease, and drove the other sword forward. Straight. Into his heart.
Everything froze.
The world narrowed down to Jason’s bright green eyes and the hilt of the blade sticking out of Tim. The sword sticking out of his chest.
He couldn’t breathe.
His mouth was sticky and dry, his head filled with too many shrieking alarms, his breaths echoing in his ears.
Jason’s lips curved into a smile.
No, Tim said inside his head, distant and dull. This—couldn’t be happening. No. Jason hadn’t—Jason wouldn’t.
He dimly heard the bo staff clatter against the ground. He didn’t register letting go of it.
“Looks like we figured out who’s the better Robin after all,” Jason said, low and cruel. He jerked the sword down—down through Tim’s chest and stomach, slicing him in two—and Tim crumpled to his knees after it.
Jason—Jason was crouching in front of him. His expression was almost studying. Tim felt his face heat up, higher and higher until his eyes were burning and his mouth opened in a breathless exhale.
Dying, Tim registered with surprise, I’m dying. Everything was numb. He couldn’t feel a thing.
Tim blinked, and heat escaped his eyes, trailing down his cheeks.
“That’ll certainly teach you to steal my stuff without permission, you little shit,” Jason said contemptuously. He yanked the sword back and Tim fell forward on weak arms, his breath cracking into a high, terrified whimper as he braced for the pain.
It…didn’t come.
Tim waited and waited, but he couldn’t feel anything but the tears dripping off his chin and the ground against his trembling hands. Something’s wrong, chimed in his head, but the world was going dizzy as he sucked in useless breaths, and he waited, terrified, for the darkness to close around him.
That insistent voice was growing stronger. Tim shifted—his limbs were moving like he was stuck in molasses—and bit down on his lip, anticipating a surge of pain as he reached to press a tentative hand to the gaping wound. He’d seen the size of those blades. There was no way he’d be able to staunch the bleeding—
He couldn’t find the wound. He couldn’t feel it. He couldn’t feel the blood. He numbly pushed back to sit on his heels, and looked down—there was absolutely zero sign that he’d just been bisected by a sword.
Jason was laughing. “Oh, the look on your face,” he snickered, “I thought you were going to faint!”
Tim poked at his stomach again, trying to find any evidence of a slash or a cut or—the sword had been inside him, Tim had seen it, but there was nothing here.
Tim…wasn’t dying.
It was an actual sob now, shuddering through him as his breathing grew shallower, and everything went blurry as Tim gasped. He couldn’t stop pressing his uniform, searching for a wound that didn’t exist as relief and terror and shock shattered into each other.
He wasn’t dead. He wasn’t dying. Unless this was a delirious dream brought on by blood loss, a facsimile of comfort that his mind concocted to ease his final moments—
Arms tightened around him in an inescapable hold, and Tim’s instinctive struggle didn’t win him free. The arms were like steel bands and his brief spurt of adrenaline deserted him, and Tim slumped against hard armor as he cried.
“There, there.” A hand was patting his head. “The mean sword didn’t hurt you, you’re fine.” Tim was hiccupping now, tears streaming down his face. “You’re fine, you’re safe,” the voice soothed, “You didn’t get stabbed.”
But Tim distinctly recalled being stabbed. Impaled. “What—” he said weakly, “Your swords—”
“Magic swords,” Jason said, and let go enough to shuffle Tim to the side, still half-sitting in Jason’s lap. “Here,” Jason twisted a wrist, his eyes flashing, and his empty hand was now curled around the hilt of a sword, “Summoned in the presence of evil, and can only cut evil.” Quick as lightning, he turned the blade to slam it down into Tim’s knee.
Tim yelped and automatically jerked back. Instead of the sword ripping through skin and muscle and bone, his knee remained intact, and the sword kept gleaming copper red where it was sticking out of the floor.
“I just told you it only cuts evil,” Jason said, watching him with amusement, “So unless you’re the spawn of Satan, we have nothing to worry about.”
Tim blinked at him. Jason was speaking English, and Tim could understand the words, but he was struggling with putting them together in his head. His brain was still fixed on I’m not dead.
Jason sighed, loud and put-upon, and Tim found himself being lifted off the ground and carried like a child. Jason only went as far as the benches in the hallway and unceremoniously dumped Tim on one of them before crouching in front of him.
“You in there, Replacement?” Jason asked, before taking Tim’s hand and pressing it against Tim’s stomach, “See, you’re fine. Not bleeding, not dying. It didn’t cut you.”
Tim stared down at his hand, clasped to his abdomen. A single thought managed to break through the confusion.
“You attacked me with swords that wouldn’t hurt me.”
“Pretty much.”
Tim blinked, “Why?”
“I was getting bored in Gotham, and decided to visit the West Coast,” Jason shrugged, “Finding out if you were the Antichrist seemed like a way to kill some time.”
That raised so many questions Tim didn’t know where to begin. “Why would you think I was evil?” was the first one that made it out his mouth.
“You stole my suit.” Jason was glaring, but he was still crouched in front of Tim, an arm absently resting over Tim’s knees, so Tim chose to ignore the way his eyes flared green. He also didn’t mention that the suit had been Dick’s first, or that Jason had been dead and therefore couldn’t possess anything, or that Tim wasn’t wearing Jason’s actual suit. “But you’re not evil. Congratulations. You’re just an annoying little shit.”
Tim scowled, but there were too many things tugging at him. “Wait, you said the swords could only be summoned in the presence of evil,” he pointed out. Did they have another intruder?
“Turns out Lazarus Pits are demonic enough to qualify,” Jason smiled, eyes flashing, “It’s a neat loophole.” So that was what the glowing green was about, it’d been niggling at Tim.
Wait a minute—
“So, hold up, how do the swords judge evil and not-evil?” Tim scrunched his face up. Was it purely demonic vs non-demonic entities? Would Raven be cut by the sword? Was—
“That is a good question.”
Tim waited, but there was nothing more forthcoming.
“Did you seriously stab me with a magical sword before you figured out how it works?!”
“There wasn’t exactly an instruction booklet, Replacement,” Jason raised his arms in surrender, “Just let me know if you spontaneously develop horns, internal bleeding, or are summoned to a demon realm.” He was still grinning.
Tim was stuck between incoherent screeching and strangling him. “You’re an asshole,” Tim snapped.
Jason leaned forward and pinched his cheeks.
Tim’s bo staff was not magical, didn’t have to be summoned by the presence of evil, and was perfectly capable of being used on insufferable older brothers. Unfortunately, it still couldn’t make Jason stop laughing.