Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

The thing is that he tried. 

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a student in possession of a deadline will put it off until the last possible moment. But damn it, Tim really had given it his all this time. He’d set up his notebook next to his extensive collection of Superboy themed stationary (Kon thought he was being funny), he’d turned his phone off—well, he’d turned it facedown, because he didn’t want to miss anything important —and he’d even managed to find a rare moment where nobody in the Tower was in imminent danger, or loudly trying to break any world records (Tim still hadn’t forgiven them for their attempt at the largest glitter sculpture. He was pretty sure he’d be finding sparkles on that shirt for the rest of his life). And he was all ready to read his English book ahead of time, so he could turn in a paper that was at the very least not humiliating to attach his name to. Not that he’d actually attach his name to anything while in the Tower. He’d gotten enough lectures on secret identity upkeep from Batman for the year, thanks. He’d had nightmares about people swiping DNA from thrown out coffee cups. Sometimes when he blinked he still saw the slide on alpacas. 

Yeah, he would wait till he got back to the manor to put his name on that paper. It wasn’t worth it. Somehow, he knew B would know.

But in all his careful plans for English Paper Success (and whether or not he’d spent more time making this plan color-coded than actually working was irrelevant), he had failed to factor in the fact that sometimes, robotic kangaroos are going to decide to attack every pizza place in San Francisco. Clearly this was a blind spot in his preparations, and Tim, who had immediately added a copy of his report on the situation to a file with future contingencies for any similar events, took full responsibility for his lapse in foresight. Unfortunately, because Tim got occupied studying the dismantled kangaroos, which weren’t even proper robots at all (the magician who animated them just liked the aesthetic), he’d completely forgotten about the reading he was supposed to be doing. One event led to another, and it turned out that a week passed without Tim getting further than the first three paragraphs. His poor red and blue highlighters hadn’t even been unwrapped from their packaging. 

So here he was, at the Tower again, furiously skimming the SparkNotes and trying not to feel like the cartoon image of Kon on his post-it notes was judging him. Although he liked to think he would have read the actual book if it hadn’t been absorbed by a slime monster the day before, the truth was that Tim was very tired. And that would probably be a lie. 

All things considered, it wasn’t actually that late, but Tim had been up for the past two days, and the last time he’d slept couldn’t have been for more than four hours. His utility belt was pressing into his hip from the way he’d crammed both his legs up on the chair, curled up more like a cat than his birdly namesake. What had been perfectly good lighting earlier in the day was practically non-existent now, but he was too exhausted to get up and turn a lamp on. He was so tired that he didn’t even notice that the background noise of Cassie and Bart’s celebrity Halloween costume contest had stopped until he heard the door slide open behind him. He sighed.

“Guys, I really need to finish this paper. Is it the kangaroos again?”

Silence.

Well, that wasn’t good. 

Tim turned his head and was met with the barrel of a gun not two inches away from his nose. He blinked. 

“Hello, Replacement,” said the Red Hood in the highly mechanized voice of his helmet’s voice modulator. 

He looked poised to break into a villainous monologue, red helmet glinting with the light from Tim’s computer screen in the otherwise dark room. 

Tim was too tired for posturing.

“Hey, Jason. What’s up?”

Hood paused. Then, sounding a little bewildered, he said,

“What?”

“If this is part of some weird revenge plot, do you think you could do it some other time? I’m kind of busy now. I’ve got time slots on—” he glanced at the calendar open on one of his screens. “—Tuesday and Thursday, at around four both days. No wait, I’m meeting Babs on Thursday, scratch that. Is Tuesday at four good?”

Hood was looking at Tim sort of incredulously, the gun in his hands dropping a little as he stared. 

“What? ”

“Yeah, we’re working on this new project, it’s really cool actually—”

“Could not care less,” Hood interrupted. “Very clearly referring to you calling me fucking Jason Todd. ”

Tim shrugged. “I clocked you a couple weeks after you showed up in Crime Alley. Mysterious vigilante shows up in who consistently falls back on Robin’s exact style of fighting? It wasn’t that much of a leap. If anything, the League training only made it more obvious. It’s not like there’s a ton of options in the resurrection department. Also, you still use the same grocery store as Jason did before he got adopted.”

This was very convincing evidence.

“I might not be Jason Todd,” Hood said, a little petulantly.

Tim gave him his best unimpressed look and did not dignify this with a response. A little voice in the back of his head piped up that he had only been about eighty percent confident in his deduction, minor stalking aside, but this wasn’t something he felt merited acknowledgment. 

Hood floundered for a moment. “Fuck you, you cuckoo-wannabe piece of…” he paused and trailed off, straightening, and then bent over Tim’s computer, with absolutely no regard for Tim, who had been trying to stealthily keep reading while the Red Hood talked. “Is that SparkNotes?”

While Tim had been explaining how he’d figured out the Red Hood’s secret identity (again), Hood’s threatening stance had dialed back in aggression, but now he held himself in a way that seemed abruptly almost more dangerous than before. Tim weighed his options carefully.

“…No?”

The mouse clicked as he scrolled to the top of the page, ignoring Tim’s protest at his lost place. “It fucking is! Not very Robin-like behavior, cheating on an English assignment. And on Pride and Prejudice? That’s low. ”

Tim flushed. “I mean, you’re the one who recognized the layout.”

“Because I’ve needed to double check things when I didn’t have access to my copy! Not because I was disrespecting classic literature!”

“Geez, it’s just Pride and Prejudice. It’s an old book. It’s probably really boring.”

“I have no words ,” Hood said. Despite this, he managed to string together rather a long lecture on the wickedness of Tim’s character, the problems with reducing a book to a surface level understanding, and the general quality of Pride and Prejudice itself, about which he seemed to have a host of information lined up to trot out at the slightest hint of an opportunity. The only thing he was missing was a slideshow, and the more Tim noted the movements of his hands (one still clutching the gun in a nerve-wrackingly loose way), and considered who had adopted him, the more convinced he became that there probably was a slideshow, and that the only thing stopping him from being subjected to it was the lack of a projector in the room. Tim made sure to nod at appropriate intervals, and tried to fashion his face into something appropriately contrite.

“And another thing!” said Hood, smacking Tim’s hands away from where they’d been reaching for the computer again. “What if your teacher asks you a question about something they decided to leave out of the summary? What happens then? Failure, that’s what,” he said, not waiting for an answer. 

Tim was awake enough now to be getting pretty annoyed. “Sure,” he agreed. “But my book got eaten by a slime monster, so I’m kind of out of options here! And if I don’t turn in this paper which is literally worth twenty percent of my grade before midnight, failure is not just a possibility but a sure thing, so if you could just give me like,” he glanced at the clock, “three hours—” he blanched and looked back at the clock, swearing. The lecture had clearly gone longer than he thought. 

“Okay, that’s it.” Tim stood up. “Either actually use the gun, or get out!”

 Something in his expression must have conveyed his seriousness, because the Red Hood actually moved to leave, grumbling all the while about the insult Tim was doing to the sanctity of literature everywhere. Or maybe it was just that Jason Todd couldn’t bear to disrespect the honor of an English assignment. 

“This isn’t over!” he vowed, holding up a finger. “Also, we’re going to be returning to the fact that you dared an armed intruder to shoot you, because I feel like that’s problematic, and honestly—”

Tim, who had followed him to make sure he actually left through the door and not some other terribly destructive method—he’d seen the tapes, he’d seen the property damage—shut the door firmly in his face. 

Muffled complaining continued on the other side, but Tim turned his back decisively and sat back down at his desk, stretching out his hands in front of him. Three hours? He could so do this. 

Three days later, during breakfast back at the manor, he was generously provided with a replacement copy of his book, via a projectile to the face. He clutched his poor injured nose and swore loudly. His reflexes only narrowly saved the book from taking a swim in his eggs. 

“Asshole! ” He didn’t hear anybody by the window, but he suspected Hood had probably stayed just to watch him in pain. “This unit’s over! And I got an A on my stupid paper, anyway!”

“That’s so great,” said Hood, who had in fact stayed, and if the tone of his voice was any indication, was greatly amused by Tim’s suffering. His words weren’t distorted, so he must not have had his mask on. “Didn’t ask. Read the damn book.”

Tim’s sight was obscured by the hand at the bridge of his nose and his watering eyes, which had started to tear up pretty immediately after the book had come into contact. Nevertheless, he made a valiant effort at hurling the book at where he guessed Hood’s head to be. 

Judging by the cackling, he missed.

He waited for some kind of follow up taunt, but when he could open his eyes, the window was empty. 

Bruce, who had been sitting at the head of the table with his own plate of various breakfast items, inhaled abruptly. This was a little troubling because it implied that he had not been breathing before.

“Was that…was that Jason?”

 Tim guessed his confusion was understandable. After all, it had kind of slipped his mind to tell him about the whole Jason Todd not being dead thing.

“Gee, was it?” he asked, trying very seriously at sincere shock, and failing miserably.

Bruce looked too stunned to tell him off for it.

“You should probably call Dick right away,” Tim prompted. 

Dazed, Bruce nodded, pushed back from the table with a screech, and left. 

A little sheepishly, Tim turned to look at Alfred in the doorway to the kitchen, who was looking a little teary eyed himself, despite having no book related injuries to speak of. 

“I meant to tell you guys earlier.”

“Naturally.” 

Well, this was awkward. Tim made to leave the dining room.

If he went back to pick the book up off the floor, it was only so Alfred wouldn’t have to, and not at all because he was afraid of what might happen if he didn’t.

Chapter Text

“Hood,” said Tim, dropping down from the rafters.  “I hate to break it to you, but that doesn’t really look like it’s regulation.”

“Replacement.” Hood turned from the worktable, annoyingly unfazed. His helmet sat next to a bucket of acrylic lacquer on the table, the domino mask on his face the same shade of bloody red. Tim didn’t really know why he still bothered with it. It wasn’t like the both of them weren’t fully aware Tim knew who he was. The tilt of Hood’s head was mocking. “Hate to break it to you, but I’m pretty sure I’m a fucking criminal.”

He hefted the gun off the table and pointed it squarely at him. Its red spikes glinted intimidatingly in the light of the warehouse. It had a roundish body, and in all honesty looked a little bit like a dragon fruit, if a dragon fruit was large and black-tipped and very angry with you. 

Tim blinked. This felt familiar.

“Would you…would you say that’s not a gun for sticking in the umbrella stand?”

The whites of Hood’s domino mask narrowed. Tim backed up. 

“That,” said Hood menacingly, “Is a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy reference. Have you had time to read The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy?”

Tim nodded an uncertain affirmative.

“Yeah I read all of them, they were pretty good! Ste—uh, Spoiler, gave them to me last week. I always love a good sci-fi. Didn’t have time to read that other book yet, though.” Tim was sensing this had been an unpopular choice, but if he had to choose between a romance novel and a book with aliens, well. He was going to choose the aliens. If you thought about it, it was basically research. After all, there were actually real-life aliens in Metropolis, so it wasn’t like the topic wasn’t relevant. They might very well encounter something or someone like he’d read about while patrolling in Gotham. And who would already be prepared? That’s right. Tim would. He had no regrets. 

“Do you mean to say,” said Hood dangerously, the safety turning off with an audible click, “That you had time to read all five and one books of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy—”

Tim was starting to have some regrets. He edged behind a crate.

The Red Hood’s voice continued.

“But you ran out of time to read fucking Pride and Prejudice? ”

“Time is an illusion—”

Something yellow flew through the air from Hood’s direction accompanied with a bang and Tim rolled out of the way of what, upon examination, turned out to be…

“Did you just throw a rubber duck at me?”

Said rubber duck rolled to a stop at his foot, having bounced back off the wall after being shot midair, the toy more of a misshapen melted blob with little yellow wings now than anything else. A little hat with crossbones perched on its sadly drooping face. A pirate rubber duck, then. With a bullet through it. Tim gulped.

“Was there a point to your visit, or are you just here to insult me?”

“Look, I’m sorry I haven’t finished it yet—”

Another rubber duck met its end above Tim’s head.

“And it’s really a very nice replica of the Kill-O-Zap—”

Another rubber duck. Clearly, he had a supply.

Tim poked his head out over the crate. “Why do you have so many rubber ducks, anyway?”

Even with the domino mask, Hood was clearly nearing apoplectic. He gestured at Tim’s head with the gun in disbelief.

“Why are you sticking your head out? I literally just shot at you multiple times! Are you fucking stupid?”

Tim raised his hand. 

Hood covered his face with one of his gloves. “Replacement. Be so for real with me right now. Are you actually an elementary schooler? Because, I mean, obviously you’re fucking short, but I did think even B—”

Tim was beginning to feel a little bit offended. He raised his hand again.  

Even obscured through the lenses of the domino mask, it was clear that the look he received was one of great and resigned grief. “What.”

“Why do you have so many ducks?”

He’d been a little too preoccupied with the gun to pay much attention to the rest of the workroom, but a second survey of the area revealed a perturbingly above average duck-to-vigilante ratio. Beady rubber eyes peered out at him from all corners of the room, ducks scattered across shelves and the floor, and all facing out at him and the doorway behind him. A path had been kicked up to the worktable and to where the Red Hood stood, one hand clenched around yet another duck, this one with a flowered hat perched cheerily on it’s little yellow head. Clearly, it had been chosen as the next unlucky candidate for airborne execution. Fearing for the life of bath toys everywhere, Tim kept speaking.

“Are you starting a collection? I’m not going to lie, it’s kind of a strange choice, but I guess it’s good to invest in a couple hobbies other than organized crime.”

Hood sighed.

“They were here when I got here. The Riddler’s been planning something. I’ve been looking through records of military shipments to that training facility up the river in the last couple months, I think there’s somethin—” he broke off. “Ah, hell.”

“What?”

“I think I figured out what he’s doing. Alright, out you get, it’s probably past your bedtime anyway. How are you even keeping up with your school assignments if you patrol till, what is it, two in the morning? Never mind, I don’t actually care. Get out, I have to handle this.”

Considering that Tim usually stayed out later than this, he was actually feeling pretty alert, but he felt that this information would not be very well received. For somebody who didn’t care, Hood certainly made a lot of comments about Tim’s sleeping habits. He might as well go home though, since as a matter of fact he did still have math problems to finish. Well, first he had to figure out what they were, then he had to finish them. He’d missed a day or so to read about aliens and wasn’t sure what he was supposed to be studying, not that his absence was reflected in his hacked attendance records. 

“Sure,” Tim told him. “I’ll go straight to bed.”

For some reason, Hood looked unconvinced. 

“Sure you will,” he muttered.

Rude. Tim decided to take the door on his way out, for variety.

Two hours after he’d left Jason and his tiny army of ducks behind, Tim collapsed into bed at the manor, calculus homework tucked safely into his backpack. It had taken him a little longer to complete than expected, since he’d gotten distracted texting Kon likely suspects for a situation over in Metropolis, and then he’d had to add minor mistakes to some of the problems so that he could get enough credit to keep an A in the class, but didn’t stand out as being particularly exceptional. Last year he’d slacked on working incorrect answers into his tests and had almost gotten forced to skip a grade again. Talk about embarassing.  

His head hurt, and he flopped the pillow over his eyes, not bothering to climb under the covers. He really had been tired lately. He needed to find some stronger coffee. Or schedule more sleeping time. Maybe he could take a look at the schedule next week and see if he could allocate a few minutes from some of his projects. 

Really, it was probably fine.

When he blinked blearily awake, alarm blaring, the book was sitting on the bed next to him, a red duck glaring at him on top of it. Tim thought that was a lot of anger to be mustering at six in the morning, but he supposed if he was a duck separated from all of his rubber duck friends to emphasize a point he’d be a little cranky too. Somebody had draped a blanket over him in the night, and he curled into it sleepily. The alarm beeped insistently, but he wrinkled his nose at it and hit the snooze button, letting his eyes drop shut again. He could have another fifteen minutes. 

Chapter Text

Time was moving backwards. That was the only explanation for why the clock still read 2:04 despite telling him it was 2:02 at what was probably over an hour ago. Every blink of his eyes was a fight to keep them from sliding shut for good. He was uncomfortably aware of how dry his eyeballs were.

If he let his focus slide out from under him for even a second, the screen of his laptop started blurring fuzzily in his vision. He’d been looking at victim profiles for ages, trying in vain to find the connecting variable in a serial murderer case. His progress so far? Zip. Nada. Zilch. 

Tim was at the end of his last fucking rope. 

Maybe if the screen was bigger, he could zoom in further on the words and seeing things wouldn’t hurt so much. It was worth a try. Pushing off from his desk with a wince at the sore muscles of his legs, he spun on his chair to gather a pile of related documents from his bed and trundle wearily down to the cave. He’d go to bed in an hour, if he found what he needed. He wouldn’t even stay up trying to apply it to the existing data. Take a look at those healthy life-work boundaries, Dick.

Tim was basically a self care expert at this point. He didn’t know what the others were talking about.

The stairs were dark, but Tim didn’t bother to turn the lights on, making his way down by touch and spatial memory alone. Unfortunately, this form of navigation did not account for people leaving escrima sticks on the floor, and as his foot slid on the rolling weapon, slamming his back onto the ground with a heavy thud, he took a moment to curse the name of Nightwings everywhere, with all the bitter loathing of his sleep deprived, bone weary soul.

Even though the world was set out against him, he still pulled (rolled, crawled, who was counting) himself upright again, because he was Robin, and that meant perseverance! Plus, he needed to finish his work, so he could go to bed and get plenty of rest in order to plot bloody revenge.

With this in mind, Tim logged onto the Batcomputer, his still-open calendar glaring brightly at him as he logged in.

He looked at the screen. The screen looked back at him, blinking. 

“Bruce,” he called, his voice echoing through the looming darkness of the cave. “Why does my schedule say Mandatory Austen Hours at six pm every day?”

There was no response. That made sense, because Tim had synced their calendars (one-way, obviously), and the whole of today was blocked off for Bruce’s monthly brooding session (the scheduled one), or as he called it, his time for the review of completed cases, nominally to keep the details fresh on his mind, but in practice sort of just to wallow in the shame of past failures. 

Tim allowed it, to a point. He was pretty sure a little brooding was good for a detective. Like vigilante vitamins. If it went on for longer than a day, he sometimes would pull out a distraction in the form of a brand new cold case, specially saved for such emergencies as he deemed fit. Enrichment. 

The question was redundant, anyway. It was obvious who was responsible for this change. The only curiosity was how Jason had gotten through his firewalls so fast.

“A bedtime ?” Tim muttered, insulted. “At eleven thirty? What am I, six?”

An alert began to blink at the corner of the screen, bright red and wildly offensive in font. 

Time to read! Time to read!

“This is ridiculous,” he said. There was no response, because he was in the middle of a giant underground cave, and it was three in the morning, which meant there was also no one to see as Tim opened a new window and began to draft an email. 

“Dear Vicki,” began Alvin Draper cordially, even as Tim fumed. Alvin had been a reliable informer and part-time photographer for the Gotham Gazette for going on five years now, and not to brag, but he was pretty good at his job. “Enclosed are a number of photographs regarding the Red Hood which may be of interest to you…”

Tim typed on, and made sure the very first picture in the (extensively documented) lineup was a particularly well-framed shot of Hood face-planting into a puddle after tripping over his own dropped gun. It was one of his favorites.

He hit send and leaned back in his chair. That would teach Jason to mess with his schedule. 

Robin didn't kill, but even he knew that the best lessons ended in a little bloodshed.

Well, that was plenty of good work for the night. Time to go up to bed so he could text Cassie and Bart for another hour about Kon’s birthday surprise.

There was homework, too (and why was there always homework? What was the point of doing it if they were just going to give him more again?), which Bruce insisted he had to do even if it felt absurdly redundant at times. 

He dragged himself back upstairs, plonked himself into his desk chair, and sighed. 

Three hours later, Tim thunked his head against the chemistry assignment on his desk and wished fervently for a zombie apocalypse.

Tim turned his neck to look up at the little red duck he had placed atop the bookshelf next to his desk, looking very much like a captain overseeing the very, very messy ship that was Tim’s bedroom. It looked back at him with a deadened stare. He imagined it was trying to say something like: How is it possible to live like this? Why is there so much red yarn running across the floor? Has this room touched a vacuum cleaner since you moved here?

Tim was pretty sure the vacuum cleaner was a mythological creature only seen in dreams, but he didn’t tell his duck that, because he was sane, and he didn’t need to respond to offensive statements like that anyway. He fully intended to give cleaning his room a go as soon as he finished adapting the schematics for his new rebreathers. Once he’d wrapped up that case with the dolls. And texted Cassie and Bart about the party, and looked at the thing he promised to work on with Kon—

Look, he’d been busy. He’d clean it eventually.

Instead, he crossed his arms on his desk over the mess of textbooks and machinery, resting his chin on the narrow bones of his wrist with a sigh.

“Herbert,” he said, “We have a problem.”

Herbert’s gaze from the bookshelf was bleak and passionless. That was something Tim could respect.

The thing was, while Tim didn’t really want to read Pride and Prejudice when it was required reading, now? Facing six pages of worksheets on covalent bonds, when he had already done enough work in the field of chemistry to revolutionize it three times over? Unfortunately, he’d gotten kind of curious.

No. That was quitter talk. He’d already made a big deal about not wanting to read it to Jason. If there was one thing Tim was unwilling to do, it was lose.

The next day found Tim in the Batcave on chapter thirty-one of Pride and Prejudice, with absolutely no intention of slowing down.

He’d begun reading curled in the chair in front of the Batcomputer, but the blinking lights had distracted him from his book, so he’d migrated to the floor at some point, he knew not when. He was currently propped up in the doorway between the main cave and the medbay.

The soft fall of incoming footsteps did nothing to drag his eyes away from the page.

We neither of us perform to strangers, he read, finger tracing lightly over the letters. 

Tim flopped back and clutched his heart. Oh.

“Why are you on the floor?” Dick asked, poking him curiously with one booted toe.

“You wouldn’t understand.”

“Probably not,” Dick agreed, and took a bite of his sandwich. “Can you move though? You’re blocking the way to the medbay.”

“A real brother would support me in my time of need,” Tim grumbled, getting to his feet with the book in hand. “You injured?”

“Thank you, for your heartfelt concern,” Dick told him dryly. He reached out to ruffle Tim’s hair with his non-sandwich-occupied hand, and if Tim ducked away a touch slower than his usual response time, that was his business. “And no, I’m just on restocking duty. You should go up. I think Alfie is looking for you about something.”

'Something' was probably the missing coffee mugs currently decorating most (all) available surfaces in his room. Tim ducked into a side parlor and out the window halfway into his journey towards the kitchens, landing lightly in the mud from yesterday’s rain and beginning a steady tromp towards the little gazebo. 

Maybe he could get a little more reading in before Alfred found him. That he would find him was inevitable, but maybe if he took the long way around the manor to avoid the kitchen windows he could hold out a little longer.

Tim’s stomach slammed directly into the corner of a building, his traitorous grapple bouncing out of his hands.

He grasped for purchase and swerved, half-diving, half lunging to pluck his book out of the air before it plummeted to the pavement.

Toppling forward over the lip of the roof and into safety, he clutched the book in front of his face like a lifeline.

He fell back, heart banging threateningly against his ribs. It was almost, he mused, as if it were trying to tell him something about his actions.

“Are you alright?” Batman called, racing over to where Tim lay gasping on the rooftop. 

“No,” Tim wheezed. “No, I am not.”

“Where—”

“I can’t believe he actually said that,” Tim said, rolling over onto his stomach and propping his book up on the concrete. “During a marriage proposal? That was supposed to be a marriage proposal?”

Batman’s footsteps stopped clicking towards him. The sigh he let out was long and heartfelt, and kind of dramatic. Batman, Tim reflected, was super dramatic.

“It’s Jane Austen again, isn’t it. It’s always Austen.”

Tim flipped the page, paused, and gasped. “I can’t believe Lizzy just committed a real life murder. She’s murdered him. He’s dead.”

Batman’s judgment was very loud.

“Why can’t my children do normal things?” B continued behind him, an audience evidently unnecessary. “None of you kids are properly committed to forensics anymore. It’s a dying art.”

Tim ignored him easily. He needed to find out about this letter business.

It was four in the morning when Tim finally put down the book, sighing with satisfaction. It had taken him nearly three days to finish it, what with the rest of the house and their uncalled-for interruptions, but he finally got it. The pride. The prejudice. 

He crept quietly down the stairs and towards the library to return his book, Herbert in tow, although he needn’t have bothered with stealth. Dick was curled lumped under a pile of blankets on one of the chaises in the corner, typing miserably away at a case, not even slightly asleep.

Jason sat reading on a couch across the room, a copy of The Count of Monte Cristo in his grasp. He looked up when Tim entered.

“Finished?”

Tim tried not to find it creepy that Jason has been apparently waiting for him downstairs, and keeping close enough track of him to know his progress.

“Looks like it. How are your ducks?”

“Blew them sky high. Gimme that one, he can follow after.”

Tim clutched Herbert to his chest protectively. “I’m not letting you fucking murder Herbert!”

“Watch your fucking language,” Jason said with a frown. “So? What’s the verdict?”

“On what?” Tim asked, like he wasn’t holding the book at his side. He scanned the stacks of bookcases to find the spot Jason had stolen it from, setting Herbert on a side table well within reach. Poor Herbert. What had he done to deserve such contempt?

Aha! There it was. He slid the book safely home and turned. 

Jason gave him a long stare.

Tim relented. “It was pretty good, I guess.”

“Damn right, it was good,” Jason said, and looked at him expectantly, clearly waiting for him to elaborate.

“What?” Tim threw up his hands, shrugging. “I said I liked it. There was, um, for sure both pride and prejudice. I’m not going to give you a book report on it, we can’t all be nerds.”

From the corner, Dick muttered something about mirrors and him possibly not understanding what certain words meant. Tim magnanimously elected to ignore him. 

Jason’s disappointment was obvious as he returned his attention to his book. “Sure, whatever.”

Tim paused, a thought coming to him. He wasn’t one to kick a man when he was down, but, well. He wanted Jason to be reintegrated into the family, right? He should give him the real, authentic family experience. With that in mind, was it not his duty to act the part of the loving, angelic, mind bogglingly annoying little brother? Still, he hesitated. Perhaps what he wanted to say was going too far.

On the other hand, he thought it would be pretty funny.

“I especially liked that Wickham guy.”

It was very quiet in the library, Tim noticed. Deathly quiet, some might say.

Slowly, the rest of his body completely still, Jason’s head turned to look back at Tim.

“What. ”

“Yeah,” Tim chirped, gleefully observing the other boy’s face undergo several emotions in a matter of seconds, disbelief at the forefront of them all. “I thought he was great.”

With a screech of unholy rage, Jason launched himself over the couch. Tim scrambled away loudly extolling the virtues of Wickham with a great deal of cheer, which really he ought to have been commended for, since a lot of the things he was using to support his praise were solidly in the ‘extreme reach’ category. Judging by Jason’s increasingly descriptive insults, his efforts were not appreciated. 

“Mr. Wickham is a liar and a cad!” Jason shrieked. “I go through all the trouble of providing good books for you to read, and you disrespect them like this! The audacity! The nerve!”

Tim snatched Herbert off the end table, the ducked movement saving him in the nick of time from an off target shoe. Aw, he’d missed. He must like him at least a little bit, really. If he could hit rubber ducks mid air with a bullet, a comparatively much bigger target like Tim should have been no problem.

A glass paperweight shattered on the wall over his head as he sprinted across the room, and he considered the possibility that Jason’s aim was simply off because he’d been struck mad with fury. Dick muttered something about the wallpaper disinterestedly. Truly, Tim had no allies here. It was time to take evasive measures. 

“Hey, Jason?” he called, turning around to face him as he paused, out of breath.

“Yes, Replacement? Choose your next words very carefully.”

“Did you know while you were gone, Dick set the library on fire?”

Tim liked to savor the little things. Accordingly, even as he feared for his very life, he let himself take a moment to watch gleefully as Dick’s face paled in horror.

Looking very much as though he wished he could fly away like his namesake, the original Robin froze as the cross hairs of Hood’s ire trained themselves on his guilty, incredibly sorry expression.

“On accident! It was an accident!” he yelped, but the man appeared not to hear him.

“On fire? You set my library on fire?” 

“You couldn’t even tell!”

Dick swung himself up and behind the chaise he’d been lounging on to hide not a second too soon, his brother rounding the coffee table with an indecipherable scream of rage. 

Tim ducked hastily out of the room, the soundtrack of Dick’s pleading fading into the distance as he escaped down the hall. He jumped as a loud crash shook the paintings, gilt frames rattling where they hung. Thoughts of the potential damage made him wince, but Dick should have known better, and for his crimes he would find no quarter. 

If Dick wanted to avoid his fate, he shouldn’t have left his equipment lying around on the floor. He’d been warned there would be consequences.

An ungodly howl split the air, and he met Bruce’s eyes across the rug where he was peering out of his study. The man’s face was creased with confusion, and a thin light of hope.

“Is he here?” he asked, voice hoarse. “Is Jason really back?”

“Motherfucker! ” cried the voice of one Jason Todd, accompanied by a shattering of glass. Bruce looked ready to cry tears of joy.

“Maybe give it a minute,” Tim advised, and Bruce nodded faintly.

Warning successfully delivered, Tim continued to the stairs and down the hall to his room, the real object of his trip to the library safely secured. 

Slipping the gold embossed volume he’d sneaked from the library out of his sweatshirt pocket, which had never failed him in his smuggling endeavors yet, he curled up in the window seat, ready to learn everything there was to know about this Emma individual. 

Honestly, it looked like Jason Todd might have been onto something with these Austen books after all.