Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

It’s dark, the world painted in shades of gray and blue. There’s a splash of purple occasionally, barely distinguishable from the blue, and shadows are inky blocks that absorb what little light escapes the gravity well of darkness. Gotham’s skyline looms, large, imposing, and crumbling as it stretches into the distance. Even the neon signs and lit windows are barely more than shades of grey, blue, and purple. All of this is because it is night.

Theoretically.

Nights in Gotham have always been dark, always been larger than life, but Tim swears it’s never been this dark. Without the night vision in his mask lenses he can’t see anything. Even the streetlights are struggling, clearly defined limits to their light. The single working streetlamp where he’s staking out flickers every so often, plunging the area into pure black. It’s unnatural. Unsettling.

Nobody else thinks so.

Nobody else has even noticed.

Tim isn’t sure when the night got so dark, when light stopped functioning as it should, when everything got a little grimier, a little grittier. It’s like he just woke up one morning to a world slightly to the left of the one he went to bed in.

He didn’t.

He checked.

It had to have been a gradual change, right? Slow enough that he wouldn’t have noticed until now because it’s so drastically different.

None of that matters, really, because he’s the only one who sees it.

He’s not entirely given up on trying to convince the rest of the Bats that something is wrong—on trying to convince the Justice League, Justice League Dark, the Titans, the Teen Titans, Young Justice, anyone that something is wrong. They don’t believe him. Nobody does, because the only evidence is his own memories. Memories that no one else can corroborate.

However.

Something is clearly becoming wrong with everyone he knows, too.

Nothing so big as one of them disappearing, no. Just small things. Little changes.

Like how the changes to the world around him must have happened, too.

For instance, the Nightwing costume doesn’t have any gold in it now. Just blue and black. Tim checked the change logs for the costumes as soon as he noticed, and there’s no log for this change. In fact, the last change was logged as three years ago, and that’s when the gold was dropped. The other’s costumes have shifted slightly, too, and all their logs read similarly. The only change he can’t verify as normal is Jason’s, because he refuses to log any changes. In the Bat logs, at least. He’s got his own private logs, like Tim does (though Tim updates the Bat logs with slightly edited blueprints), and Tim knows how to get into them.

He’s scared to.

It used to be easy to get in and out of Jason’s logs without him noticing, and even if he did he never got mad at Tim, but now? What if it’s changed just enough that he tries and fails? What if Jason notices and he’s changed enough to be furious? He doesn’t want to be the reason Jason is distant from the Bats again.

There’s a cramp threatening in this leg and he shifts slightly on his perch. It’s a gargoyle, which is normal for Gotham. It’s a demon bat, which wouldn’t be strange except that last week it was some strange horned dog. Still a stable place to stakeout, though.

He turned off his comms shortly after the beginning of patrol, having dealt with enough of the Bats’ shit. Sure, they’re not mocking and teasing him for trying to explain their shifting reality anymore, but the concern it’s morphed into is driving him crazy.

They’re all very concerned that he’s spent four nights hovering over a run-down, abandoned train station.

Tim is very concerned that they don’t remember that it was perfectly functional four days ago.

It’s not the only place that’s changed, and maybe not the place he should be most concerned about them not remembering its previous form, but this station was one of Gotham’s busiest. Now it’s half the size and, according to city records, went down in the sixties. That’s the change that’s gone back the furthest in time so far, and Tim’s banking on the idea that it means something. It has to mean something. There has to be something he can do.

There has to be.

Nothing happens at the station before the sun starts coming up and Tim flees back to the Nest. The Nest is not the same, hasn’t been for at least a week, but he doesn’t know how. For all he knows, the only difference is a single photograph on the wall. Maybe the paint color changed from eggshell to snow, or something equally as trivial. Maybe nothing’s changed at all and he’s just being driven insane.

He digs a clear push pin out of the plastic container on the side table next to the window and jams it into the wall, right next to the other four clear pins in the photograph of the station. Four nights of nothing. The rest of the wall continues on, picture after picture all jammed through with clear push pins. String connects some of them, gray and hesitant. All he has are theories, half-thought out, desperate whims all strung together. There’s no great revelation up on the wall, lingering around pins and strings. There’s nothing.

His bedroom is almost worse, with all the photos he’s taken and collected throughout the years stuck to the walls like his photo albums exploded. It started off somewhat methodical, though by the time he was obsessively pinning these ones up and desperately looking for any changes there wasn’t much method to his madness, but as it goes on any sense of organization is completely lost.

The Red Robin suit sticks to his skin as he peels it off. It’s been too long since he washed it. Been too long since he washed himself, too, actually. He should really take a shower.

The suit pools at his feet—the only suit unchanged, so far—and he just…he should put it away. Hide it somewhere, at least. The closet door is covered in photos and string. One of the photos slips away, drifting through the air to the carpet. The grey string that sat over it droops and drops, anchorless.

Tim drops onto his bed.

It’s softer than he remembers.

Chapter Text

Tim wakes up to a knock on his door and is reaching for the knife on his side table before he’s even fully conscious. His hand closes around empty air. Someone, the person who knocked, calls his name, but he barely registers it over the realization that the walls are bare. His pictures are gone.

This isn’t the Nest.

It’s too white, too clean, too nice.

It takes a minute before it hits him.

This is his old room in Drake Manor.

“Tim?” that’s Dick’s voice filtering through the door. What’s Dick doing here? What’s Tim doing here? “I knocked, and texted, but you weren’t answering.”

What the fuck?

Tim slips out of bed, silent, and takes a single step towards the window before hesitating. This is the biggest shift that’s ever happened, so surely someone else noticed? That must be why Dick is here.

This floor is way too cold on bare feet. He’d forgotten that, having been away from the manor so long. The door still has its single squeaky hinge, though. Dick smiles when the door’s open enough for them to see each other, wide and happy. His hair is longer, pulled up into a bun, and the scar from when he was shot in the head is gone.

“Are you feeling any better?” Dick asks before Tim can say anything, “That cold must’ve been awful for you to take the night off.”

“Cold?” he repeats dumbly. Dick’s here to check on a cold Tim supposedly had, not because the entirety of reality has just moved to the left in the most obvious possible way.

“Yeah, you called out of patrol last night for it?” he says carefully, going to put a hand on Tim’s forehead. Tim pulls away, ignoring the churning in his gut when Dick’s face falls.

Was there ever a moment where Tim had called out sick for patrol? He can’t remember one. This is the biggest shift—the only one that’s affected him like this. Is he in a different timeline? Maybe not with the smaller shifts, but now he has to be. Which means there should be a marker for it, not a batcode—those don’t include time travel until after Bruce gets lost in the timestream—but something in his body. Justice League Dark had said something about it once, so he just has to find them and everything should be able to get sorted out. Unless something happened far enough back and everything is so different that this counts as an alternate reality…there’s a batcode for that, right? Maybe not in this universe. If this is even a different universe.

How would he know?

There’s empty space on his hands where there should be scars. There’s hair brushing his eyes that was too short to do that last night. Drake Manor isn’t a rotting shell.

“Tim, what’s wrong?” Dick says, gently placing a hand on his shoulder. It’s easy to repress his flinch after doing it for so long, easy to keep physical reactions down.

Mostly.

After months of slowly going insane, of seeing changes nobody else does, of desperately trying to unwind a puzzle no one else even thinks exists with no place to start…

“Hey,” Dick crouches down, just below Tim’s eye line. That’s not right, Tim should be taller than that, “Tim, buddy, talk to me. Please?”

His eyes are a dark blue, like a stormy ocean. They used to be lighter, brighter.

Where is he?

“What…year is it?” he manages to dredge out of his throat, staring down at a brother he doesn’t recognize.

“It’s 2015,” he says softly. Kindly. Concernedly.

2015. Tim’s been Robin for a year. He’s still Robin, and sometimes he still trades off with Carrie while she figures out if she even wants to be a vigilante. Dick and Bruce are still fighting, everyone else is still running around Gotham somewhere. Or with the League of Assassins. Is Jason even alive yet? Hell, has he found Connor yet?

“Tim,” Dick says, brushing a hand through Tim’s hair. He searches his face, looking for something that he doesn’t find and Tim doesn’t know, “What’s wrong?”

Everything. He can’t say that, though. He can’t say anything. Dick won’t believe him. The only people who might are Justice League Dark. He needs to find them. They’re his last hope.

“Nothing, just…just had a nightmare. You woke me up.”

Dick’s mouth quirks up in a half smile, almost genuine, and pulls him into a hug. Tim just lets it happen. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No, I’m alright.”

“It’s alright if you need to take another night off, Tim,” Dick says, pulling away, “Batman can survive one night on his own.”

“Can’t you just ask Carrie to be Robin?” he asks, mind already turning to how he can contact JLD. He didn’t have any of their numbers in 2015, and there’s no guarantee the numbers are the same—especially if this is a different dimension. Captain Marvel is usually in the Watchtower, right? Tim can get up there and contact Dark through him.

“Who?” he frowns, confused.

Tim’s stomach sinks as he carefully asks, “Carrie? The Robin before me?”

Dick’s entire body tenses. “That’s not funny, Tim.”

“I wasn’t trying to be,” he says slowly. Are people disappearing now, too? If Carrie’s gone, who else is? He needs to figure this out. He needs someone to believe him; people disappearing is more than he can deal with on his own.

There’s a spark of anger in Dick’s eyes that makes Tim want to shy away. He refuses to show that kind of weakness, though. “Jason was the only Robin before you. You know that.”

Carrie’s gone.

Carrie’s gone.

“Sorry, I…must still be in my nightmare.” it’s a weak lie, he knows, but it’s all he can dig up as he starts to spiral. Is he displaced, or is everyone else? Is there another Tim in this universe that he’s stolen the place of? Surely he’s still where he was and it’s everything else that’s changing, right? That’s how it was before last night…right?

Okay. Take a deep breath, Tim. Figure out what you know, then figure out what’s changed. Everything else can wait until you get in contact with Dark.

“Some nightmare,” Dick mutters, studying him with narrowed eyes. He didn’t buy it, which is fair. Tim would have be suspicious if he did.

He just nods and sticks to his story, “sick dreams are like that.”

They just stare at each other for a moment before Dick sighs like the weight of the world is on his shoulders and gives Tim a strained smile. He feels bad for dragging up Jason’s death how he did, but how was he to know Carrie was, apparently, never Robin?

“Guess you’re not feeling better, then,” Dick says, “I’ll let Bruce know you won’t be going out tonight.”

“Yeah,” Tim agrees. Seeing as he’s not sick at all (which Dick has to know, but maybe he just wants him to take a prolonged break, anyway?), he’ll just use the time to investigate all of the changes using the computer in the batcave. Even in 2015, it was a beast of a machine. Anything he needs to check should be easily accessible from it, and the things that aren’t will just need a bit of hacking. Once that’s taken care of, he’ll zeta up to the Watchtower and hunt for a member of the Justice League Dark. “Thanks, Dick.”

“No problem. Rest well, Tim,” he turns to leave, “oh, and text me when your parents get home, alright? I don’t like knowing you’re home alone while sick.”

Tim frowns, “you broke into my house, didn’t you?”

“I didn’t break anything except the law,” Dick laughs, “just let me know when they’re back from work.”

“Alright,” he says, making a mental note to text Dick around six. Tim’s reasonably sure that, despite whatever changes have occurred, his parents are still off at an archaeology dig for who-knows-how-long. Just like the first time he went through 2015, he’s going to keep that a secret for as long as possible.

Dick waves and disappears down the hall, off to do whatever he’s meant to be doing right now. Tim listens to him leave, then waits another ten minutes to make sure he’s actually out of the house. The wait is necessary because of how stupidly large the manor is; by the time Tim stopped hearing Dick’s footsteps, he likely hadn’t even made it to the stairs.

Tim calmly walks over to his desk, brushes aside all of 2015 Tim’s homework, pulls out the notebook in the bottom desk drawer (ignoring that its cover is green instead of red), and slams it onto the desk. The clock on his wall ticks over to eleven, meaning he’s got at least eight hours before he can go to the cave without raising a concerning amount of suspicion. Time that’s best spent writing down everything he knows and comparing it to everything he can find out from here. Somewhere in the back of his head, he hopes that it might help convince someone in Dark that there’s a problem, but it won’t. This is just for Tim, to help keep him sane.

He grabs a pen, flips the notebook open to a blank page, and starts writing.

Chapter Text

When Tim finishes writing everything he remembers, he just sits for a moment and stares at the date at the top of the paper. It’s the one his computer gave him when he turned it on, June fifth. Six months after Carrie was captured by the Joker and her Robin was presumed dead by the city, and in a few weeks it’ll be six months since Tim blackmailed his way into the position. Except that Carrie’s not part of the family, so none of that is accurate. He brings his eyes up to his computer, stares at the search bar that’s been open this whole time. His stomach twists and knots at the thought of finding out she never existed at all in this version of reality. It only gets worse when he considers the possibility that more of his family has been written out, too.

But he has to know. He has to know because he has to fix this, and fixing it requires knowledge.

Tim can’t bring himself to start with Carrie, with his older sister, so he types in ‘superboy’ instead. It’s the second thing written down in his notebook, that he finds Connor on July third. There should be no results beyond people’s fan creations and the occasional unfounded tabloid speculation. The keywords there being 'should be', as the search returns with articles and links to videos and blog posts and every other possibility that goes on for pages and pages. He can’t tell if he’s relieved to know his brother still exists or terrified for what it means that he was rescued from CADMUS early.

The next thirty minutes are spent skimming through articles and clicking through pictures as his heart sinks lower and lower, until it must have escaped his body and hidden in the core of the earth. Somehow, someway, something went wrong in this reality when Connor was found. It doesn’t look like Clark took him in, which is consistent with how reality should be, but Bruce obviously didn’t take him in either. In fact, Tim can’t find evidence that anyone took him in. By all appearances, Connor is out there somewhere, entirely on his own. How the fuck did that happen? Why the fuck did that happen? Is it because he was found early? Was he found early because Carrie wasn’t here? What the fuck. He marks his note about Connor for further investigation at the Batcomputer and ignores the horrible, sickly feeling of dread climbing up his spine.

It’s impossible to tie together every event and its outcome, impossible to know what missing piece set everything out of order. He could spend hours going over every single thing he’s ever known and comparing it to what this world says he should remember, but what good would it do? Convince him this in an alternate universe or a different timeline? It already has to be. There’s no way there’s something just…altering everything and everybody around him. Somehow, someway, he’s ended up in a different world or a different time.

This world isn’t shifting, as far as he can tell. It’s just his own that’s sliding out of order. Justice League Dark doesn’t need to be convinced that their world is changing, because their world isn’t. He only needs to convince them to help him get home, where he needs to convince his Dark that their world is shifting. Yes. Yes, that makes sense.

Tim stares down at his notebook. It’s a pointless mess of scribbles, really, which is odd because he knows it was perfectly organized and legible a minute ago. His head hits his desk with a hollow thunk and he sits. Still. Silent except for his breathing.

He’s going in circles. He’s been going in circles since he woke up. There’s not enough information for him to come up with a plan besides “find a JLD member who’s willing to help”. He could spend the rest of his day comparing and contrasting his memories with reality and what good would that information do? There’s only three options, really, for what’s happened…what’s still happening?…and he doesn’t know how to figure out which it is.

He could be in an alternate dimension or an alternate timeline, and while he’s aware of the difference he doesn’t know how to distinguish them without highly specific technology or a magic user. If it’s either of those, though, his best bet for getting back to where he’s supposed to be is JLD. He shouldn’t need evidence for his displacement; he’s sure he heard Zatanna say that there’s a way to tell if someone belongs in the world they’re in. He’s sure.

God, he hopes it’s that easy. He hopes his family, his whole family, is right where they should be. That they’ve noticed he’s missing and are already trying to figure out what happened and how to bring him back. He hopes that Carrie and Connor are throwing a fit about him being gone. That Jason’s already checked with his extensive net of informants. That Dick’s going through Tim’s notes from the past few weeks to see if there’s any hints to where he’s gone while Damian begrudgingly helps. That Cass and Duke are sneaking through Gotham, following his patrol routes and scouring over every place he’s been. That Bruce and Babs are poring over all the footage they can get their hands on. That they’ll go to the JLD of their reality or timeline, the one he’s supposed to be in, and get him back.

Fuck, does he hope.

Because the other option…he doesn’t even know how to describe it. What could possibly shift reality around like this? What being, what power, is out there that can grab hold of existence and mold it like clay? What’s its goal in doing so? And why, why is Tim the only one who can see it happening? If it’s a shifting of reality, a change in existence, then there’s no-one for him to go home to. There’s no Carrie, no Connor, Duke’s parents are still able to care for him, Cass and Damian are still with the League of Assassins, Jason might still be dead and buried, and Dick’s eyes are the wrong color and Tim’s never called out of patrol sick before. If…if everything’s changed and he’s the only one who can see it, the only one who knows, there’s nothing…no. No. There has to be something he can do, even if it’s just him against the world. He’ll do it, and he’ll do it with all the flair of a former Robin and current Bat.

It’s still an “if”, though. Nothing concrete. The little ember of desperate hope that flickers in his chest isn’t very bright, but it’s enough to get him on his feet and pacing.

He needs to get to the Watchtower and find a JLD member, or someone who can find one for him. The nearest zeta tube is in the Batcave, but there’s two down in Gotham; one by the Clocktower and one in Otisburg, by the old S.T.A.R. Labs building. At least, that’s where they were in his reality, in his 2015. They might not be in those locations here, if they exist at all. The zeta in the Batcave is the closest thing he has to a guarantee.

He just has to get there with minimal questioning, because on the chance he’s not universal or time displaced, he doesn’t want to raise alarm bells. More so than he’ll have to with JLD, anyway. It’s mid-afternoon on a Saturday, so it’s not unreasonable to expect that Bruce is in the cave obsessing over something—his steps pause. There’s nearly always something to obsess over in Gotham, but if—

He rushes back to his computer and frantically wiggles the mouse around until it wakes up, then enters ‘Red Hood’ into the search bar as fast as he can. Millions of search results pop up and it takes barely a glance to know that’s Jason’s Red Hood in the most recent ones. He ignores the sickening twist in his gut—he doesn’t know when, in his reality, Jason came back to life but he knows Red Hood wasn’t active right now—and searches for the earliest mention of him. Two months ago a rash of news articles about a new rogue, one who announced himself with a duffle bag stuffed full with the heads of eight mob lieutenants, flood the results. Good to know Jason had the same idea between realities, he supposes. Better to know that Bruce is definitely holed up in the Batcave trying to figure out anything he can about Hood.

It means he has to wait until sundown, when Bruce will go out patrolling, to access the Cave’s zeta tube.

He doesn’t want to wait that long. He can’t. He needs answers, needs to know if he’s in another universe or a different time or if something has fucked everything up. He needs to know because he needs to solve the problem, and he can’t do that without knowing what it is. And he needs to find someone who can tell him what the problem is. Ideally a JLD member, because their whole business is knowing and dealing with this stuff, but he’ll take anyone with even a hit of magic knowledge right now. Which is why he needs to get to the Watchtower.

There’s still hours before sunset. Hours before he can gets answers. Except. He’s got hours. He can check the zeta locations of his reality. Maybe, just maybe, he’ll be lucky enough that one of them is still around. It’s a better use of his time than cross-referencing his memories, anyway.

Mind made up, Tim shuts everything down, throws his notebook into a desk drawer, grabs a jacket, his phone and wallet, and is ready to leave when it hits him. Does he have a driver’s license here? In the 2015 of his reality, he wasn’t old enough to (legally) drive, and up till now he hasn’t thought about his age here. He flicks his wallet open and is met with an astonishing lack of a license. Dammit. There’s a bus pass, though, and if the Tim Drake of this reality is anything like him, it’s already good to go for the month. If it isn’t, well. There’s no shortage of money at his disposal.

Chapter Text

Hey y'all,

Sorry this isn't an actual update, and really sorry that there's not going to be one for quite a while.

I realized that writing and uploading my fics chapter-by-chapter is not working for me. Aside from the stress I feel not being able to get chapters written in any consistent timeframe, I also find myself frustrated when I want to include something in a new chapter but it wouldn't make sense due to what I've already set up in a published one. That, and I feel what's been published isn't as good as it could be--partially because of the previous reasons and partially because, in an effort to get chapters out as fast as I can, I just...didn't properly edit anything unless it was giving me trouble.

I wish I'd realized this way earlier, because now I've got to put all my fics on pause until they're fully finished.

Well, I'm not pausing each fic until all of them are finished; I'm pausing each fic until each one is done. So, when I finish this one I'll start doing regular updates for it, even if the other fics I have up aren't finished.

I really don't know how long it will take me to finish this fic, so I have no idea how long it will be until there's a proper chapter update.

Again, I'm really sorry.

Thanks for sticking around so far, and here's hoping it won't be too long before I've got things finished up.

<3