Archive of Our Own ^beta

The sounds moved closer, audible even over the harsh rasping of his rapid breathing.

Tim pressed himself against the wall, the sweat on his palms sticking his hands to the stone. His chest rose and fell at an abnormal, eccentric pace, the hyperventilating breaths matching it. Trembles shook his body, making him almost feverish. His eyes stayed on the corner where the white light glowed, unwavering and unwilling to look away from the danger.

The danger.

The danger that was a boy with no legs who glowed white.

The danger that had eyes that shone green.

A bright, illuminating green that pierced through the dark and emanated the promise of blood and pain. The green that had taken over his entire vision at Titans Tower and brought out the rawest, most broken-down parts of him. The green that had belonged to his personal torturer who slit his throat and left him for dead.

And it was slowly approaching him, inching closer and closer at a sickeningly slow pace, playing with him, toying with him.

Just one glance at the green, and Tim had completely lost it, running and running, not watching where he was going until he was trapped in this dead end, like a prey closed off and awaiting its death at the claws of the predator.

The white glow brightened as the boy with the green eyes rounded the corner. He had legs now, walking slowly and deliberately, hands up in front of him and a peculiar expression on his face.

“S— stay away,” Tim whispered, patting the side of his hip to find his bo staff. He felt the metal that was tucked away and hidden under his jacket and civilian clothes, and pulled it out. He extended it immediately and held it in front of him.

But he knew it was no use, those green eyes crinkling in amusement only proved it. The last time, the staff had been useless. More than useless—had been snatched away from him and turned into a weapon to be used against him.

“Stay away,” he repeated.

“It’s okay,” the boy with the green eyes said, taking another step forward. “I promise I won’t hurt you.”

“I promise I won’t hurt you,” Hood grinned, green eyes flashing hungrily, “I promise I will break you instead.”

“Stay away!” Tim screamed, staff held in a death-grip in his hands.

“Shit,” the boy muttered and stopped moving closer. “Hey, uh, Jazz? He’s not responding well to my calm reassurances.”

There was silence, he tilted his head to the side like he was listening to someone.

Comms, Tim thought dimly. He must have comms too.

“What do you mean?!” he suddenly exclaimed, voice rising in pitch and making Tim flinch. “Of course they’re good reassurances. I’m great at reassuring. I am not at fault here.”

More silence.

“Okay, fine. If you think you’ll do a better job, then fine. Come here and do it yourself.”

He rolled his eyes.

“Oh, shut your snickering, Tucker.”

The staff in his hands was slipping with the sweat on his palms. He darted his eyes around his environment, trying to find a way to escape.

He was surrounded on all sides by brick walls, but there was a large bin a foot away from him, and a fire escape right above it. If he could somehow distract the boy with green eyes, he could jump over the bin and scramble up the fire escape to get on more open ground.

Flicking his eyes back to the boy who was now arguing with someone named ‘Sam’, he reached into his packet and felt around for his smoke bombs.

Finding one, he gripped it tightly in his fist.

“Okay, look.” The boy turned to him again. “Just stay put, okay? I’m sorry for scaring you, but I have a very respected wannabe psychologist on her way over and she’ll—”

Tim threw the smoke bomb and leaped over to the bin. Pouncing on it and gripping the fire escape bars, he hoisted himself up and dashed up the metal stairs.

He heard the boy coughing below him, and knew that he would also be too blinded by the smoke to follow him. Taking assurance in that, he lifted himself up over the rooftop ledge and landed on the roof’s stone floor. Without halting, he ran.

He needed to find an open window or something to hide before the green-eyed boy caught up to him. He didn’t know how he was able to glow white and make his legs disappear into a long thin wisp by will, but he could figure out the weird properties of the Lazarus Pit later. Right now, he just had to escape.

Ra’s couldn’t catch him again. He couldn’t.

And he couldn’t meet those threatening green eyes again, not again. His last encounter with Jason already went so disastrously, ending with him bleeding out with a batarang to his chest. This obviously wasn’t Jason, but the eyes were enough to send him reeling into a flashback and rendering him effectively vulnerable.

So Tim ran. He ran and ran, not stopping for breath.

He looked back, just to check, and found the boy only a few feet behind him.

What was more shocking was that he was hovering. An entire foot off the ground.

Tim almost missed the jump to the next roof in surprise.

He tripped across the ledge and barely managed to curl his fingers around the next rooftop ledge and pull himself up. He panted heavily and continued running.

“Wait!” the boy called. “I just wanna help!”

Tim didn’t listen. His breaths were getting shorter and shorter with the panic and physical exertion mingling to steal the air right from his lungs.

He looked back again, and found the boy stopping and freezing in his tracks, eyes widening in fear.

Confused, Tim slowed down. When he looked back in front of him, right in front of the edge of the building, was a large, flying figure with green flames for hair, and huge arms fitted with alarming technology.

Tim stopped, falling behind on his butt in surprise.

“Well,” the figure said, its skullhead grinning widely. “Haven’t you found yourself a twin?” He raised one of his arms, aiming it at Tim.

“Wait—” he heard the boy behind him say. “Wait, no.”

Tim only had time to bring his hands up in front of his face before a force struck him fiercely, throwing him off the roof.

Green threads of a net enveloped his body and Tim gasped as air rushed around him and he fell.

The last thing he saw before he blacked out was the boy reaching out towards him, a worried look on his face.

---------------------------------------------------------

Tim woke up with an agonizing headache.

He couldn’t open his eyes at first, the pain in his head blinding him. He groaned and tried moving other parts of his body.

His fingers twitched and his toes managed a feeble wiggle, which meant his spine was okay, thank God. He tried moving his neck and that was free too. Tim went to move his arm, but stopped.

He couldn’t. He couldn’t move his arms.

He tried his legs and they were the same.

Panic blooming at the back of his throat, he jerked his body, but something—something leather—held on tight to his wrists, ankles and torso. They dug into his skin and refused to let go.

“Hey, hey, calm down!”

Tim snapped his eyes open.

There were strangers around him. There were strangers around him and they had tied him to a medical bed with leather straps. Like he was an insane person. Like he was crazy.

“I’m not crazy,” he said, panic growing and spreading from his throat to his chest and to his stomach. “I’m not crazy.”

Bruce was alive, Bruce was alive, he knew it, Bruce was alive.

“Calm down!” a red-haired girl said. “It’ll be—”

Tim couldn’t listen. His head spun as the dread snatched his thoughts with its spindly, sharp fingers and refused to let go.

“I’m not crazy!” he screamed, struggling against the bindings.

Bruce was alive Bruce was alive Bruce was alivealivealivealivealive.

“Hold him down!”

“No, don’t!”

“He’s too unstable, we must have missed some ectoplasm, we need to hold him down.”

BrucewasaliveBrucewasaliveBrucewasaliveHewasn’tcrazyBrucewasaliveBrucewasalive

Multiple hands grabbed him and pushed him down. Tim was almost choking with fear.

Hewasn’tcrazyHewasn’tcrazyPleaseDickHewasn’tcrazy—

“I’m sorry this is gonna hurt.”

Something long and sharp and painful pierced his side and Tim almost lost his throat with the scream that erupted from his mouth.

His back arched and his muscles tensed at the pure agony that flooded his body.

NononononononoPleaseDickno—

“You’re almost there, it’s almost out.”

It was too much. It was too much. He couldn’t do this, please, Dick, he wasn’t crazy, get him out, please—

“Jazz, his heartrate—”

“I know.”

“Jazz, we need to—”

“Almost there.”

"Jazz—”

The pain was unbearable.

Tim’s eyes rolled to the back of his head and everything went dark.

---------------------------------------------------------

There were soft voices murmuring around him.

His first thought was Bruce? But the voices were too young and pitchy to be Bruce. It couldn’t be Dick either because Dick sounded older, and not like a teenage girl. It probably wasn’t Alfred either, or Barbara. Or Damian for that matter, the voices were not that young.

An involuntary grunt left his lips and Tim tensed as the voices stopped.

Only a few, brief moments of silence passed—in which Tim dared not move or speak again—when one of the voices asked, “Is he awake?”

Tim purposely kept his muscles and face relaxed, better they thought he was asleep, it would give him a better chance to escape.

“I think he is,” someone else responded. “Hey, we know you’re awake. Stop pretending.”

“Oh my God, Danny, could you stop being so insensitive? He has obviously been through a lot.”

“And? This is probably a normal night for someone like him. I’ve seen how advanced that bo staff was, and how insane was that suit under his clothes?”

They knew.

Tim shot up, grabbed the nearest object—a fork that sat atop a plate of fruits—and yanked the nearest person’s hair. He rested the fork near their eye.

The others in the room jumped in surprise, then immediately froze when they realized the situation.

Now that Tim had his eyes open, he could see the people in the room now. There were four of them. A girl with black hair and goth-style heavy makeup, another girl with bright, ginger hair and a worried expression on her face, and a dark-skinned boy with a red beret on his head. He glanced at the person he was holding hostage, and it was a boy with blue eyes and black hair with an unamused expression on his face (huh, Bruce would like him).

“Stop,” the red-haired girl spoke, looking very concerned. “Let him go please.”

“Preferably, without stabbing his eyes,” the goth-girl added, looking decidedly less concerned.

The red beret boy and the blue-eyed boy both didn’t show any worry though. What, being threatened by a vigilante stranger an everyday occurrence for them?

“Where am I?” Tim demanded, eyes taking in the grey, wooden walls and a mess of books, clothes and empty food wrappers that only a teenager could have. “Why am I here?”

“You’re in my bedroom,” the blue-eyed boy rolled his eyes (the fork was right beside his eyeballs).

“Can’t you tell by the mess and posters that screams ‘teenage boy’?” Goth-girl said.

“Hey! It’s an organized mess!”

The red beret boy laughed. “The only thing organized about this room is the underwear drawer. And that’s only because I know for a fact that there’s only one in there.”

Goth-girl scrunched her nose. “Tucker, what kind of weirdo goes through a guy’s underwear drawer?”

“The kind of guy that thought underwears belonged in the closet, not the fucking study table drawer. I was looking for a notebook I could borrow.”

“How funny, everyone knows Danny doesn’t own books.”

“Hello? I’m right here?”

“Stop!” Tim moved the prongs of the fork closer to the boy’s eyes. “I want answers.”

“Okay.” The red-haired girl put her hands up in surrender. Her voice was gentle, non-threatening. “We’re not here to hurt you. We’re here to help you. We’ll answer any questions you have.”

“Within reason,” the red beret boy—Tucker—added.

Tim swallowed, pushing down a shiver that threatened to crawl up his spine. “Why am I here?”

“You were attacked,” the red-haired girl said. “By a ghost called Skulker. He trapped you in a net that flooded a substance called ectoplasm into your body. We couldn’t break it except with special tools which was why we brought you here.”

“Where’s ‘here’, exactly?”

“I can’t really ans—”

“Fenton Works.”

The two girls and Tucker gasped.

“What?” the blue-eyed boy shrugged. “He’s a vigilante. He’ll probably be able to figure it out sooner or later.”

The three looked uncomfortable about it, especially the red-haired girl, but didn’t say anything.

Fenton Works. He didn’t know that company, but he wasn’t about to let them know that. “I don’t remember much,” he said. “But I recall one of you stabbing something into my side. What did you put in me?”

“Nothing,” goth-girl answered. “In fact, we took something out of you. Something that would have killed you if we didn’t.”

“Ectoplasm,” Tim stated, recalling the previous answer.

“Yes,” the red-haired girl nodded. “It would have taken over your body and made you susceptible to mind-control. This specific version anyway.”

Tim frowned. “What is this, Ghostbusters? Stop lying.” He needed to show that he was serious, that he wasn’t someone they could and should mess with. Unfortunately, to do so required some drastic measures.

He let go of the blue-eyed boy’s hair and gripped his arm and yanked it backward, stopping just before he dislocated it.

The boy cried out and his companions tensed.

“Wait, stop!”

“Let him go!”

“Don’t hurt him!”

Tim loosened his grip a little. “I want the truth.”

“This is the truth!” the red-haired girl insisted. She turned to the boy. “Danny, show him.”

“Really? The last time he saw me, he entered a full-blown panic attack.”

“Do it.”

The boy looked unhappy, but with a huff of indignation, he reluctantly declared, “Going ghost.”

He transformed.

Hands down, complete magical anime girl transformation.

His hair went white, his clothes changed, his eyes turned green, and he started to glow.

Tim stared.

He stared some more.

He blinked and stared again.

“‘Sup,” the now green-eyed boy said. “Mind letting go of me?”

Tim stared.

“That’s alright. I’ll just do it myself.”

Then the boy went translucent and Tim’s hands slipped through him.

“Agh—” Tim dropped the fork and scrambled away from him, almost falling off the bed.

“Danny Phantom,” the boy grinned. “Half-boy, half-ghost. It’s a pleasure to meet you.”

Maybe Dick was right, he had gone crazy.

---------------------------------------------------------

“So… let me get this straight.” Tim rubbed his temples. “The reason why you decided to ambush me last night was because I look a lot like you and so you thought you accidentally cloned yourself again and decided to chase me, accidentally sent me into a panic attack, then proceeded to chase me until a weird hunting ghost showed up and used me as a distraction to capture you, but you then defeated him with a soup thermos, brought me to your parents’ experimentation lab, restrained me to take weird, green fictional goop out of me, and then put me to sleep in your bedroom?”

The four teenagers nodded at him.

“You summed it up pretty well, I think,” the ghost boy—Danny, he now knew—shrugged.

Tim groaned and covered his face with his hands. Just his luck. This was just what he needed. Another crazy science fiction adventure to keep him from finding Bruce.

“I know it’s a lot,” the red-haired girl—Jazz—said. “And I’m sorry you got caught in the middle of everything. Is there anything we can do to help?”

“Yeah,” Tim laughed. “Wake me up from this bad dream.”

“Sorry,” Jazz smiled sympathetically.

“I have a question for you now,” goth-girl—Sam—moved closer to him. “What are you doing here?”

Tim sighed. “It’s a long story. But to keep it short, I found that there are a lot of anomaly clusters of strange energy readings here at Amity Park, so I decided to check it out. I’m here to find someone who people think is dead but I know is not.”

Tucker snorted. “Then you’ve come to the right place, then. Amity Park is filled with ghosts and dead and not-quite-dead people.”

“Oh yeah, I think you’ll find that there’s a lot to see here,” Danny said. “Who are you looking for?”

Tim paused before he replied. Should he tell them? Should he reveal his close-kept secret? Should he trust these people who are complete strangers, but also saved his life?

…For Bruce, he would do anything.

“I’m looking for Batman.”

The four teenagers reeled back in shock.

“You’re kidding,” Jazz gasped. “Batman? Like, the Batman?”

“Hold on— you’re Robin, aren’t you? Gotham city’s vigilante?” Danny squealed and rushed to his desk. “I’m your biggest fan! I literally keep up with every bit of news on you— hold on, I need to get your autograph.” He rummaged through the papers.

“No way, I’m getting your autograph first. I’m the reason why you manage to actually keep up with the news.” Tucker thrust a tablet in front of him. “Can you do a personalized message? My name’s spelled with a ‘c’ and a ‘k’.”

Sam shoved Tucker out of the way, holding out a book and pen of her own. “Get out of my way, hotshot. I’m getting the first autograph. If not for me, you two would still be wailing about how Batman’s uncool and boring and too emo and broody.”

Tim curled into himself at the overwhelming boisterous attention he was getting. “I— I—”

Jazz noticed his sudden withdrawing, and pushed herself between the three and him. “Alright, you guys, give him a break. The guy just got attacked by a ghost and this is how you treat him?” She turned to him. “You okay?”

Tim nodded.

“Sorry,” Sam apologized. “Got a little excited. It’s not everyday you meet the Robin.”

“I’m… I’m not Robin anymore.”

The four gasped.

“What?” Tucker yelled. “You’re not Robin anymore??”

“No. I’m Red Robin now.”

“The fast food chain?”

“No, that’s Red Rooster.”

“There’s a Red Robin too, you dolt.”

“No,” Tim scowled, annoyed. “Red Robin the vigilante. The Robin that goes places that the normal Robin wouldn’t dare, for the sake of finding and getting Batman back again.”

“But Batman’s in Gotham…” Tucker’s brows furrowed. “Isn’t he?”

Tim sighed, casting his eyes down. “No. That’s Nightwing in Batman’s suit. And he has a new Robin with him, who’s a jerk by the way. Everyone in the superhero community thinks Batman’s dead. But I know he’s not.” He looked up, determination in his eyes. “I know he’s out there. I have evidence, though it’s really small. But I know he’s out there. I’m not crazy.”

“We don’t think you’re crazy, Red Robin.” Jazz put a hand on his shoulder. “If Batman’s missing or kidnapping, that’s bad, right?”

“Yeah,” Sam sat on the bed next to him. “If he’s gone, even if someone is filling out for him, it still means that the world will basically go to even more shit than it is now.”

“We’re barely holding Amity Park together.” Danny joined Sam’s side. “I don’t want to have to worry about holding the whole world together too.”

Tim looked around at them. “What are you saying?”

“We’re saying that we want to help you,” Tucker replied. “A Team Phantom and a Red Robin team-up? That’s the best thing in the entire world!”

“If you’re looking for a dead man, then Team Phantom is the best place to come to for help,” Sam grinned.

Tim considered. “It’s really dangerous,” he put out. “There are dangerous people who are following me and are looking to put me in a grave. If they think you’re associated with me, they’ll probably want to do the same with you.”

“Oh please,” Danny scoffed. “No grave can hold my body down.”

Tim’s expression darkened. “This isn’t really a thing to joke about. They won’t hesitate in killing you.”

Danny smirked, green eyes glowing just a touch more intense. “I’d like to see them try to kill someone who’s already dead.”

“And we’re in the background,” Jazz said. “They don’t have to know we exist. Besides.” A smile played on her lips. “We’ve handled plenty of scary people ourselves. Heck, we just saved you from one.”

“We got this, man.” Sam punched a fist against his palm. “They won’t know what hit them.”

Tim looked at them, eager smiles on their faces. They hadn’t questioned him. Hadn’t assumed that he was just in grief and experiencing psychosis. Hadn’t threatened to send him to Arkham or taunted him or tried to kill him like his so-called “brothers” and “friends”. They hadn’t even asked anything in return for their help like Ra’s.

They were genuine. And they wanted to do it for the good of it.

Maybe… maybe he wasn’t so alone in this after all.

“Okay,” he agreed. “Okay, let’s do this.”

“Yes!” came the unanimous cheers.

“Do you have a starting point then?” Tim asked.

Danny smirked. “Oh yeah. Let me introduce you to something we call a ‘Ghost Portal’.”