Chapter Text
Less than twelve hours after Shadow and Robin met on a rooftop, Tim and Jason stared at each other over their usual lunch table in the school library.
“Alright,” Jason said, breaking the silence. “We’re not gonna be awkward about this.”
“We’re not?” Tim said.
“No.” Jason’s tone was firm, but his fingers were drumming on the table. “Nothing’s actually changed, yeah? You already knew about me, and I already knew about you. We just need to get used to knowing. Maybe — set ground rules?”
“Right!” Logistics — now that was something he could handle. “If we’re going to talk about night work, we should stick to initials or nicknames instead of actual callsigns, whether we think someone’s around or not. If anyone asks, first person to think of a plausible cover story starts explaining and the other backs them up. If it’s too out there to sound like a normal life thing” — if, for example, heists or combat or capes had been strongly implied — “there we can say we’re talking about missions from an online game that’s loosely based in Gotham. I can have a closed crowdfunding page up by tomorrow and a site saying it’s doing a closed beta in case someone looks it up.” Tim paused for breath. “What?”
Jason shook with silent laughter. “Sounds great, Timmy,” he wheezed. “Sorry, just — you sound so much like B when start on your backup-backup plans.” He wiped his eyes. “Anyway, I was thinking boundaries like — if you don’t want to talk about jobs in progress. And I won’t pass on anything you tell me to B unless you give the okay. Stuff between us stays between us, you know?”
Tim felt himself flush. “Yeah,” he said. “Same for you — anything we talk about stays between us, unless you’re okay with it.”
“Cool.” Jason began pulling neatly wrapped items out of his lunchbox — probably packed by Alfred, who had the uncanny ability to fit a full meal, side dishes, and a thermos of tea in one small package. “Eat, Timbers. You’re gonna need your energy when you’re getting up to no good later.”
Tim rolled his eyes, but obligingly pulled out his sandwich. “I’ll be scheming, at most. Maybe helping with recon.”
“What, you benched or something?”
“More like strongly encouraged to work remotely,” Tim said. “At least until the stitches come out.”
Jason paused. “You said you were fine after the warehouse.”
“I am. I just… also got stabbed a little.”
“What.”
“Just a little,” Tim insisted.
“How can you be stabbed a little?”
“Well. It didn’t go in that deep?” Tim tried. “And it’s healing well and everything. Seriously, Jason, I’m going to be fine.”
“You grappled onto a roof yesterday. How are you even cleared to swing around with a hole in your back?”
“I’m not. Technically.” Selina had him benched from fieldwork, but when he told her he’d arranged a meeting with Robin to see once and for all if his identity as Shadow was compromised, she’d agreed to make an exception. She knew how much the uncertainty had been eating away at him. Still, there had been conditions.
Robin had seen him dramatically swing in from a neighboring building. What he hadn’t seen was the half hour Tim spent riding a bus and walking to said building before changing into his costume for his big entrance. And catching a ride from Selina when the meeting was through.
Jason was less than impressed by this explanation. “You literally could have just texted.”
“But I didn’t know for sure that you knew! And if I sent a message when you didn’t know then I knew you’d know about me and you’d know I knew about you and—”
Jason held up a hand. “Alright, I get it. You thought about everything beforehand and calculated risk and all that.” He was trying for exasperated, but a little smile gave him away. “Can you at least promise you’ll actually rest and get better now? Unless the world ends or something?”
“I am forbidden from all heroics unless the actual apocalypse happens,” Tim recited. “Apparently it’s ‘not my job to save everyone’, or something.”
He and Selina had had a long discussion after the stabbing incident. She understood he couldn’t leave Batman, Nightwing, Robin, or her without helping, no matter what, but wanted to know how far his “hero complex” stretched.
It wasn’t a complex, exactly. He just couldn’t promise to run away every time an unrelated person was in trouble. He could probably leave a competent adult alone — he knew the average Gothamite could fend for themselves just fine — but abandoning a kid, or someone who was already hurt? Even if there wasn’t much he could do to help, he’d probably stay. It just — felt right. And the actual apocalypse couldn’t make him turn his back on people who were his. He’d told Selina as much.
She’d weaseled a promise out of him to at least hesitate to jump in until he had some combat training and left, fondly exasperated, to make some calls.
Jason hummed. “Well, she’s not wrong. Didn’t you sign up to be a thief? What’s with all the heroism, Timbit?”
“What, it’s not allowed? Is that door closed for thieves?” Tim grinned. “Because I happen to have a set of lock picks that says otherwise.”
“That was such a bad joke, ugh. Dick would love it.”
Tim sat up straighter. “Dick?” he repeated. Jason tended to alternate between “golden boy” and “bird brain”, depending on his mood. It was weird for him to say Dick’s name, and with a pretty neutral tone on top of it. “He stayed in town after the you-know-what, right?” Tim probed. “Did something happen?”
“Kinda.” Jason was suddenly fascinated by a speck of dust on the table. “He, uh. He actually came up to me and — apologized? Said he was trying to turn over a new leaf and be a better brother, I guess, and that's why he's been acting so weird lately. And I don't have to worry about him faking happy, because he's serious about it.” Jason’s expression an odd mix of pleased and confused. "He actually said that — like, out loud. Wonder what got into him?”
Tim flashed back to the strange conversation he'd had with Dick over at Wayne Manor where he might have sort of encouraged something like this. “No idea,” he lied.
"I mean.” Jason shifted. “I guess if he’ll stop being an asshole, I’m down for that. I don’t know about ‘being brothers’ or whatever.”
“Aren’t you already brothers?” Tim said.
“We’re two kids Bruce adopted,” Jason corrected. “Dick was basically moved out by the time I came along. When he was around he was yelling at Bruce.” His tone sharpened. “Honestly, anything I know about him came from other people’s stories. Which were mostly just about how freaking great he was.”
Tim nodded slowly. That would certainly explain the “Golden Boy” nickname. “So you never really got a chance to — talk?”
“Not unless you count him telling me when I’m jumping and punching and standing wrong.” Jason rolled his eyes. “Honestly, I’ve probably talked more with you than I ever have with Dick. And, like, actually enjoyed it. Which is more that I can say for him.”
“Really?” The word burst out of Tim without conscious thought.
Jason blinked. “Well, yeah. We’re friends. I like hanging out with you.”
It took a second for the words to process. Robin enjoyed talking to with him. Jason Todd enjoyed hanging out with Tim.
He called them friends.
“Thanks,” Tim managed, forcing himself to sit still and not vibrate out of his chair.
Jason just shrugged. “It’s true.”
Tim was going to be normal about this.
He dragged his brain, which was currently running in circles chanting friends friends friends friends, back on track. “What are you going to do?”
“Dunno.” Jason ran his fingers through his hair. “I don’t know what he expects. It's not like I’ll suddenly want to hug it out or get matching shirts or whatever he does for fun.”
“Maybe he just wants to get to know you better?”
Jason barked a laugh. “Yeah, like that would end well,” he said. “Dick’s nosy as hell. He’s going to want to know about my life before Bruce.” The tension in his frame showed what he thought about that.
Tim spoke carefully. “He did night work in Gotham for a long time. And Bludhaven’s not much better. Doesn’t he already know stuff like that happens?”
“You’d think!” Jason threw up his hands. “But he gets weird about this stuff — like every patrol it’s the first he’s hearing about it. He’s convinced families are all sunshine and rainbows and safety and anything else is a freak outlier.”
Tim frowned, mulling this over. “What about the arguing?” he asked. “You said he yelled at Bruce a lot.” Dick couldn’t think family was all sunshine and rainbows after the storms in his own house.
Jason sighed. “Tim. Would you ever yell at your parents? Like, ever?”
Every muscle in Tim’s body froze.
“Yeah,” said Jason. “Dickie knows regular family drama, but not — other kinds. I think some of the stories I could tell would break his brain. If he even believes me.” His voice took on a note of panic. “Fuck, what if he does believe it and starts doing the big sad eyes? How am I supposed to deal with that?”
Tim understood. Intellectually, he knew Dick Grayson was a vigilante capable of feeling the full spectrum of human emotions (and incredible feats of gymnastic violence). It was just hard to remember when he smiled and cartwheeled through life as if nothing bad had ever touched him. Being the one to put a dent his bulletproof optimism felt like the moral equivalent of kicking a puppy.
Tim tried to imagine what Selina would tell him, if he came to her with this problem. He closed his eyes and thought back to when he’d panicked over the Bats actually wanting to talk to him. What she’d told him before they had a comm line when he was hyperventilating on a rooftop.
“You aren’t supposed to deal with it."
“What?”
Tim opened his eyes. “Dick might hear something that upsets him. That’s on him for asking, not on you for answering a question. If he’s choosing to be friendly and nosy, and you don’t mind answering, let him make his choice.” Tim shrugged. “It’s not your job to think for him or manage his reactions.”
“I’m not—” Jason began, then stopped. “Oh,” he said. “I’m being B, huh.”
“It happens,” Tim said.
"Shit." Jason sat with that revelation for a moment. “It’s not that I don’t want to talk to Dick,” he said, finally. “I just — you really think it’s okay? To just go with it?”
Tim tried a smile. “What’s the worst that could happen?”
“Uh. He could find out the guy who took over his cape is a huge fuckup?”
Now it was Tim’s turn to stare.
“Jason,” he said. His voice was dead serious. “If you’re trying to imply you’re not an incredible successor to R, I am going to pull out all my old photos and news clippings and crime statistics and make a formal presentation on why you’re my personal favorite hero.”
Silence.
“It won’t be short, either. I have a lot of pictures.”
“Tim — you can’t just — oh my god.” Jason covered his face with both hands. His ears were bright red. “Look, I’ll think it over. Can we talk about something else now?”
Tim considered. “You know that farming game you showed me? I think I can max every crop in the game before the winter festival. I’ve got a couple spreadsheets to keep track of it.”
Jason lowered his hands. “Timmy,” he said fervently, “I would love to hear about your faming spreadsheets.”
Tim nodded agreeably and launched into the basics of his strategy. He’d change the subject, if Jason wanted him to.
But he wouldn’t forget.
Tim wasn’t quite used to “coming home” to Selina’s penthouse after school. Honestly, he wasn’t sure he’d ever get used to it. But with every day that passed and every habit that started to stick, the bones of a new routine were forming.
He entered with practiced caution, barely cracking the door and watching for paws or tails. After the first few days, the cats had started to meet him at the door; he would have expected it from Snowflake, who loved a chance to get underfoot, but Lucy and Inkblot were a surprise. Even the elusive Shadow had started perching nearby, although he at least had the sense to watch from a distance instead of actively trying to trip Tim.
He let the three black cats circle and sniff, tails curled like a question mark at the tips, while he dug out his phone to text Selina. She’d been particularly busy this week — maintaining covers, making contacts, scouting targets, and other mundane tasks that were better accomplished without a mask — and she’d requested he send a message if she wasn’t home when he arrived.
It felt a little silly. The lock alerted her what time the front door was opened, and both of them carried a tracker that could be activated remotely in an emergency. She didn’t have to wait for a text from Tim if she wanted to know where he was.
But it also made something warm and bright bubble in his chest, so he didn’t protest.
The next steps were mostly muscle memory, even after just a week: extracting himself from the cats, leaving his shoes by the door, and dropping his backpack off in the spare room — his room, he corrected. Another thing he still wasn’t used to.
Tim shook his head, making a beeline for the kitchen to scout for leftovers. This wasn’t as new as the rest; Selina had sent him home after cooking lessons with anything that she deemed passable, so the fridge at Drake Manor had been stocked with leftover meals more often than not. Still, it was nice to have so many options — and to not have to monitor the contents to make sure he’d still have food tomorrow. Selina insisted on taking care of the groceries.
Tim ate while he skimmed through his homework, knocking out worksheets and other quick busywork and jotting down an outline for his an essay due next month. This was the most familiar part of the routine; homework was never-ending, and at this point he was an expert at figuring out exactly how much effort was needed for grades up to his parents’ standards. He’d streamlined the process considerably to maximize the time he had for nighttime photography. And other nighttime activities, these days.
It was a little new to be doing it with a cat on his legs, but Tim knew better than to try and pry Inkblot off a perfectly good lap before she was good and ready to go.
Two and a half hours after he’d arrived, Inkblot got up with a stretch and a flick of her tail, leaving Tim cat-less and all out of work.
He knew what he wanted to do: move forward on the corrupt cop cases he’d talked his way into sharing with Batman. If Tim waited too long Batman was liable to solve everything on his own, and Tim — or, rather, Shadow — would lose the chance to prove himself to Batman and Commissioner Gordon in one fell swoop. But he’d scouted his preliminary targets as well as he could without leaving the house, plotted ten potential entries and exits for each location, and quickly run out of things he could do without actually going out in person.
He’d even sent a polite email to Batman, using the account he'd given as Shadow, asking for a general outline of Batman's plan for dealing with their mutual police corruption project so he wouldn't accidentally step on any toes. And to remind Batman he existed.
Batman was more talkative in writing that in person. The email was a whole two lines long, starting with a blunt warning to be cautious when gathering evidence and not get seen in any sort of confrontation with the police. Tim was a little indignant at the implication he’d get caught, until he followed the link in the second line to an opinion piece on the Gotham Gazette website.
The writer was complaining about recent public statements from Bruce Wayne, who had blithely told reporters he thought it was a grand idea to take some funding from the police and put it toward on-call social workers or psychologists or experts in chemical waste disposal. "Mr. Wayne may have a prejudice against firearms, given his history," the author concluded snidely, "but the rest of us sleep much better having the good guys armed and ready to stand against whatever new wave of insanity this city decides to throw at us."
It was like a switch flipping; Tim could see Bruce's plan illuminated before him, and suddenly the email made perfect sense.
Weeding out corruption in Gotham's police force was only the first step. Even with a completely clean precinct the problems wouldn't end, because the problem was the system itself.
Tim had been vaguely aware of the issues before, since police policy was relevant enough to Batman and Robin to catch his younger self's interest. Whether a person had a noise complaint, a Joker sighting, or they'd stumbled across an old hideout full of radioactive waste, they had to call the same emergency line, and anything other than fire or immediate injury was considered police business. But the standard police academy curriculum was wildly insufficient preparation for dealing with clown attacks, robot armies, sentient plant attacks, and the sheet amount of hazardous chemicals Rogues tended to leave lying around. Every year Gordon petitioned for additional training and certification, at the very least, and ideally entire separate departments to handle specific crises. Hemming and hawing over how to implement it, combined with complaints from officers who didn't want to go back to the academy, always killed the idea. Of course, no politician wanted to be seen as taking Gotham's safety lightly, and somehow the "compromise" was always increasing the police budget and stocking their armory with the newer and deadlier weapons.
So officers without formal training in biohazards, hostage negotiation, or de-escalation were sent in to handle situations they were wildly unqualified for, armed only with increasingly more powerful guns. It didn't take "prejudice" to know an institution whose only tools were hammers would start seeing all their problems as nails. And day-to-day, most of those problems weren't masks or apocalypse cults, but regular people: arguing with their neighbors, stealing for survival, sleeping on benches because they had nowhere else to go.
Even if every officer had good intentions, it was a recipe for disaster. Since a lot of them were — as Jason put it — utter bastards and racist as fuck, it was an entire disaster buffet.
Batman was warning Shadow not to get caught because the evidence-gathering was part of a larger plan to reveal cracks in the institution, so Bruce Wayne and Commissioner Gordon could swoop in when public support was high to push for change. If someone could point to a shadowy criminal figure targeting cops, it could be spun as a smear campaign or an enemy that the city ought to give the force more money and weapons to fight. If that happened, even if Shadow's evidence ousted every officer who'd ever taken a bribe, the larger problems would stay stubbornly untouched.
It was a lot easier to swallow the warning when he understood what was at stake. It made Tim even more impatient to start working on the case, instead of lazing around healing his stupid knife wound.
Instead, he found himself sprawled on the couch with his legs dangling over the armrest, watching the cats chase each other around the room.
Just when he was beginning to become one with the couch, he heard his phone vibrate from in his bag.
The message was from Selina: r u busy?
That was — weird. Not really, Tim replied.
do u want to be
Tim squinted down at the message. You have something for me to do?
Selina hadn’t been letting him help with anything, since all their jobs were at a stage where they had to be out and about to make progress. He’d argued he could at least sit outside buildings and case them, or act as a distraction, but Selina wouldn’t budge. Any work ran the risk of going bad, and his injury meant he would struggle to run or grapple away quickly — the most basic form of self-defense, or so she liked to reminded him. More advanced self-defense was on hold, too, until Selina was convinced he wouldn’t make his injury worse with it.
He was more than a little restless.
His phone vibrated again: yep. u in?
Tim raced to grab the Cat comms and set up in record time. “Can you hear me? What can I do?”
A soft laugh came through over the line. “Eager, aren’t we? Check under the coffee table.”
Tim looked down, frowning when he saw nothing but the rug. After some consideration, he knelt down to feel under the table.
Something was taped to the underside.
Tim grinned and pulled free a large, yellow envelope. “Can I open it?”
“If you would.” Her microphone clicked off, leaving Tim to examine his prize.
Inside the envelope was a slim tablet, which he promptly switched on. It took agonizing second to boot up, but finally the start-up screen switched to what looked like a live camera feed of a small storage closet. The room was dark, Tim decided, as the footage was tinted green like the night-vision mode of his goggles. He could see a mop and bucket leaning against a wall to the left.
A gloved, clawed hand came into frame, fingers wiggling in a little wave, and motioned for him to swipe up on the screen.
Tim did, pulling up a mini-map with a small red dot blinking in the center. The dot was situated on a street not far from Crime Alley, sitting off-center in a seedy pizza restaurant that with an abandoned storefront on one side and an old pawn shop on the other.
Tim mentally flipped through the jobs he and Catwoman had lined up and came up blank. One of her solo gigs, then. “What’s the situation?”
Instead of speaking, Catwoman made an x-shape with two hands, then flicked her finger again in a swipe-down motion.
“No talking?” Tim guessed. “Is someone nearby?”
Another x — negative.
“So, no talking, but for a different reason?”
She waved her hand, a circular sort of motion that Tim interpreted as go on.
“Is it — practice? For situations when one of us can’t communicate out loud?”
A thumbs up.
Tim found he was smiling. This felt a little like charades; he’d always thought that sounded fun. Still— “It would probably be easier if we learned sign language for times like that.” They could also make up a system of signals, like Batman had — but he’d done it at least in part to make sure onlookers and criminals wouldn’t know what the Bats were saying, even if they were fluent in sign. Catwoman and Shadow didn’t tend to have an audience while they worked, fluent or otherwise.
Catwoman formed a fist with one hand and bobbed it up and down, like a head nodding. Then, she repeated the swipe motion from before.
“Oh, right.”
Swiping down brought Tim to a screen with pages and pages of documents, schematics, and photos. Tim blinked — this wasn’t the usual organization system he and Catwoman used — then started reading in quick, efficient chunks.
Slowly the puzzle came together. He located the supply closet Catwoman was hidden in on an old blueprint; the wall it shared with the pawn shop was a new, most likely drywall addition to the original brick, which would be easy to cut through. The pizza place had no security cameras and the closet was in the same hall as the restrooms, making it an ideal place to casually wander in and lay in wait.
From an annotation on a street map, he learned the pawn shop in question was known for toeing the line between “perfectly legal business” and “fence for stolen goods”. Intel about transactions records came from a scanned sheet of notebook paper with Selina’s slanted handwriting sprawled hurriedly over the page, describing what happened when she came to pawn a pair of earrings. The owners were meticulous, but wary of hacking (and technology in general). A physical, coded ledger book was the main hub of all their records, and an old-fashioned safe stored the goods. If the safe could be cracked and the ledger changed, there would be no record an item had ever been there.
It must be a retrieval mission. One where subtlety was key. But what was the target?
Finally, Tim found a familiar cypher in the very last pages of the dossier — almost as if it had been hidden on purpose. He’d gone over Catwoman’s job and client notes so often he could recognize it on sight, and read it only slightly slower than plain text.
The client was the youngest son of an old mob family who'd proposed to his girlfriend of seven months with his great-grandmother’s ring — despite not having permission from the family head to take it. Or having told his girlfriend about the family business.
He thought after the engagement would be a better time to break the news.
His new fiancee, upon learning he’d been lying about his actual last name and occupation, pawned the ring and promptly fled the city.
Frankly, Tim thought she had the right idea. Catwoman must have agreed; the file specifically noted any efforts to track her down were outside the scope of the contract. Their job was just to find where she’d sold the heirloom, retrieve it, and erase any record it had ever left the family vault.
“So,” he said aloud, “in through the wall, crack the safe and the book code, then alter the ledger to take the ring off the record.”
On the live feed, Catwoman mimed a round of applause.
“Won’t they notice if you erase an entry from the middle? The ledger is chronological, and it’s been long enough they have to have taken in new items.”
Catwoman held up a finger — one moment — and her hand left the frame. When she brought it back, she was holding a small, simple band with a single gemstone set in the center.
“Oh!” Tim grinned. “You just have to alter it enough that the description fits this ring. The you can swap them.” It was similar enough to the target that the owners might not notice. Even if they did, they would most likely note the switch and quietly upgrade their security.
Doing business in Gotham required a keen sense of when to look the other way.
Tim glanced at the clock — almost closing time for the pizza place. The pawn shop would already be empty, since the owners closed early this time each week for a poker night.
A thought occurred to him. “What do you need me to do?” Tim asked. “I can work on the ledger code, but it looks pretty simple. You’d probably be fine with it on your own.” As far as he knew, her suit didn’t usually have a camera on it. She must have had a reason to add one for this job.
Catwoman’s hand disappeared form the frame once more. Tim watched, waiting for another sign.
Instead, his phone vibrated with a message.
consider it training. filter new info and assess situation quickly, Selina wrote. esp when u can’t scout location in person
There was a brief pause.
and i thought u might be bored.
Tim blinked. He’d been careful talking to Selina this week, trying to state his case for being more involved, but stopping whenever it felt a little too much like complaining. After all, he understood why he was benched. He knew it was for his own good. He could practically hear his mother’s scolding: No one likes a whiner, Timothy.
Selina had noticed anyway. And she’d done something to help.
His fingers hovered over the keyboard, chest full of something — embarrassing, but also warm.
Another message appeared before he figured it out: going in. won’t b able to msg inside but feel free to ride along via cam. also check inside envelope.
Confused, Tim picked up the envelope that had concealed the tablet. It was perfectly flat — empty. He peered inside, just in case, and found familiar slanted words in dark ink.
He carefully peeled the envelope open and smoothed it flat, revealing a list titled “Suggested Research Topics for Kittens (In No Particular Order)”.
Tim skimmed through the bullet points. He found “sign language” near the top of the list — they were in agreement on that, it seemed — along with topics like appraising jewelry, historical architecture and building codes, stenography, and common codes and cyphers. Everything seemed to be skills for night work he could learn without straining his injury or topics he’d mentioned in a previous conversation.
Well — everything except one. He wasn’t quite sure why she’d decided to include “emotional abuse and neglect” on the list. But given everything else, Tim trusted she had her reasons.
One last message came through while he’d been reading: btw. i might have time to swing by one of ur cop houses on the way home. check ur notes and lmk what u need! ;)
The warm feeling was back, twice as strong and spreading like sunshine.
On-screen, Catwoman's gloved hands assembled a miniature power saw. Tim laid the tablet beside him and pulled out his laptop.
He would start by learning the sign for “thank you.”