Chapter Text
It happens on a Tuesday night, on a rooftop in Gotham, the way so many horrible things do. One moment Jason has the Replacement’s throat under his hand and his blood is boiling with irritation and the kid’s wearing that irritating little smirk that means he’s got the information that Jason needs but he’s so desperate to show off about how he found out that he’s willing to take the risk of being strangled. The next moment he’s got a huge hand on his throat, gripping hard, and he’s short and his heart’s going like a rabbit’s and there’s a red helmet inches from his nose.
The next—
The next—
What the fuck.
He’s in a bedroom with a blue pastel ceiling. The window is open, cold winter air breezing in, white curtains billowing. He’s small, ridiculously small, and his ridiculously small hands are also ridiculously pale and ridiculously soft. The sheets have stars on them and he’s wearing blue striped pyjamas. There’s a bedside lamp in the shape of a spaceship, soft white light. He may not be a boy genius or whatever obnoxious thing Red Robin is calling himself now but he already knows what’s happened before he looks in the mirror that sits on the desk opposite the bed and the Replacement’s wide blue eyes stare back at him. He’s in Tim Drake’s body, and this Tim Drake is younger than Jason has ever seen him—eleven, maybe? Ten? Nine? The shrimp’s a shrimp but this smallness isn’t just about height. There’s baby fat on his cheeks and his skin is soft and clear as if the acne years have never come calling and his bones are as thin and delicate as the bones of a bird. Jason’s snapped the Replacement’s bones before and they were solid enough back then, his arms roped with muscle. This must be years before Robin, before Jason, before the Replacement’s blood splattered the floor of Titans Tower and his foot smashed into Jason’s ribs.
He turns his horrified gaze from the mirror and flops down on the bed. The sheets are cool cotton, expensive, but the bed’s badly mussed, the sheets hanging loose, still warm. What the fuck. What now?
There’s a clock on the wall above the desk, shaped like a bat. A Batman clock with pointy ears. According to this cursed object, it’s two. In the morning, Jason assumes, judging by the pitch blackness outside the window.
Okay. Tim Drake’s body. Tim Drake’s past. What, he repeats to himself, the fuck. How is he supposed to get out of this now? If he goes next door to the Bats, they’re not even going to recognise this kid, probably. It’s years and years too early. It’ll be Dick next door right now or maybe Jason himself, he doesn’t know. He doesn’t know enough about the Replacement to plot the timeline accurately. In his mind’s eye, suddenly, he pictures the Bruce who might be next door right now. Jet black hair without a hint of grey, no lines around his blue blue eyes, his smile wide and kind and fond as he looked at Jason. Maybe Bruce tucked Jason into bed some hours ago and read to him and turned on his nightlight and they’re both asleep now. Or maybe Bruce took him out into the Gotham night, flying—maybe they’re out there right now—Batman and his good soldier. His throat is suddenly tight and his nose stings but this body strangles down the tears surprisingly easily, with one forcible blink, like a reflex. Rage feels different in Drake’s body. Less of a burn in his blood and more of a cold clench in the pit of his stomach.
He sits up again and looks at the Batman clock. He hates this young Bruce even more than he hates his own Bruce, the old man who has disappointed him and disappointed him and disappointed him so many times in the last so many years. But he has very little choice. Batman’s the only person within reach who’ll be able to figure out what fucked up magic or tech or alien object from hell has done this to him, who can fix this and get him back to his own life. He’s got to climb out that window and go break into Wayne Manor.
He puts a knee on the windowsill easily, as if this body has done that a thousand times before. There’s a tree right there. And there’s someone in the tree, someone lithe and small and climbing, in a costume of green and red and gold. His mouth goes dry with horror. Robin. A Robin is in the tree.
He opens his mouth to yell or swear or just fucking howl with rage but no sound comes out of his mouth. A hand lands on the windowsill. A knee. The domino mask peers at him. His own voice, husky and fifteen, cuts through the still air.
“Hood? Is that you?”
”Who the fuck are you,” he says and hears how wrong the words sound in the thin little kid’s voice, in the Bristol accent, with the snotty little turn that the Replacement puts on his vowels to this day.
“It’s me,” his own voice says urgently. “Red Robin. We swapped.”
He climbs through the window and closes it behind him and now Jason sees the weirdness in the way he moves, the grating difference between his body, aged fifteen, and the Replacement’s prissy carefulness. Somehow that difference settles him. Even though he’s looking at his own unmarked face and unscarred neck and his own sky-blue eyes, as the Replacement removes the domino, it’s not fifteen-year-old Jason Todd who’s in the room with him. He’s not talking to a ghost or a memory. He’s dealing with just another Gotham fuck-up, on another Gotham Tuesday, and it’s just the fucking Replacement who he’s stuck with. It doesn’t matter that the Replacement has literally stolen his face and his skin and his suit this time. It’s still not him.
“How did we swap?” he demands. “And why—” he gestures wildly at the room. “The time travel shit?”
“I don’t know,” the Replacement says. “I was—I arrived here when you were. Just getting home after patrol.” His voice is shaky, a weird mix of Jason’s timbre and tone and his own accent and weighting of syllables. “I didn’t tell him. Snuck out.”
Him. Bruce. Jason grinds his teeth and then blinks at how strange that feels in the kid’s tiny jaw.
“Why didn’t you tell him?”
“I needed to check. If it was a swap like I thought, or.” He swallows. “Or just me.”
“It’s not just you.” He means it to come out as a growl but this Tim’s voice has barely broken. It wobbles oddly but the effect is anything but intimidating.
Something like a smirk forms on his own mouth and is hastily smoothed away. Jason had no idea his own smile could be so annoying.
”This is so weird.”
“The weirdest,” he agrees flatly. “How do we fix it?”
Tim fidgets.
”I don’t know,” he admits. “I thought about telling B but I don’t know what that would do to the timeline. I haven’t got,” he looks around the room in a harassed way, “much equipment here. Not at this time.”
Jason wants to raise one eyebrow and is annoyed to find that Tim’s face doesn’t know how to do that.
”What do you mean, equipment? Aren’t you, like, ten?”
”I’m twelve,” Tim snarls, and then looks a bit startled. Even at fifteen, Jason could do a better snarl than Tim had been prepared for. “I’ve got. Some stuff. A computer.”
He kneels and fishes under the bed. A laptop, black and solid, bristling with weird attachments. Tim types in a password and then blinks. Jason cranes his neck and sees—himself. A photo of Robin, himself as Robin, grinning, mid-flight.
”Fuck,” Tim says breathlessly. “Sorry, I’m sorry. I must have been editing the album, I—”
“Timothy!”
Tim shuts up and Jason feels a spike of panic in his own stomach that’s so sharp that it leaves him nauseous. The voice is a man’s voice, loud and angry and just outside the bedroom door.
“What the hell is going on in there?”
Without a word, in a single moment, Tim logs out, shuts the computer down, slips back out of the window and disappears back into the tree.
”Sorry Dad!” Jason calls back, making a reasonable guess. “I was just. Working on my computer and there was a video—I didn’t mean to—” His voice dwindles to nothing, without his permission. He’s terrified. His whole body is flooded with adrenaline. It feels like he’s about to die. He has no idea what’s going on with him, his body, with Tim. It’s just the kid’s dad, for fuck’s sake. Jack Drake was a jackass but no one’s ever said or even hinted he ever laid a finger on Tim.
”Open this door,” Jack says, more quietly now. His body flinches hard. His vision goes white. “Tim. Open the door.”
His hand shakes on the doorknob as he turns it. Jack Drake puts his hand on his shoulder as soon as the door is open and it’s a hard grip but it’s not painful, it doesn’t bruise, and Jason doesn’t understand anything at all about this situation because his knees are shaking like he’s about to be backhanded through the wall but nothing like that is happening. Jack slaps the overhead light on, glaring yellow.
”Show me this computer,” Jack says and Jason hears a rustle in the tree outside, like Tim’s twitched involuntarily. Jason points dumbly and Jack just stares for a long moment.
“Who gave you that?”
His voice is low. A shudder goes down Jason’s back.
”Bought it,” he bluffs desperately. “With—I got a summer job. In the summer. I bought it.”
Jack Drake looks at him. He’s a jackass with no brains, Jason reminds himself, but his head is spinning like crazy and he feels like he might actually faint under that cold disbelieving gaze.
“Are you lying to me, Timothy?” he asks quietly. “Do you want me to get your mother in here?”
“No.” His voice is almost a shriek. “I’m sorry, Dad. Please don’t.”
”Pick it up,” Jack says, almost gently. Jason picks it up with shaking hands. “Throw it out of the window.”
Jason’s hands close convulsively on the laptop like it’s the most precious thing in the world. Tim’s just outside, he reminds himself. He’ll catch it if I throw it. But somehow, to his body, that doesn’t feel like the point. His grip is so tight on the thing that his knuckles hurt.
”It’s up to you,” Jack is saying. “You can do as you’re told or we can take this—the stealing, the lying—to your mother. You decide.”
“I didn’t steal it,” Jason says and his whole body cringes like he’s missed a step and fallen down an abyss. Jack’s stare at him darkens.
”Are you calling me a liar?”
”No, just a moron,” Jason says, suddenly sick of this whole show, forcing the words out through a surge of panic so big it nearly drowns him. “You don’t know where he got the laptop from because you didn’t fucking ask.”
Jack does backhand him then, easily, like it’s happened a thousand times before. When Jason picks himself back up, his mouth is bleeding and there’s a darkening bruise on his thin jaw and there’s no sense of fresh shock in his body. His body had been expecting that blow from the beginning. How the hell did Bruce never notice any of this going on? How did Dick miss it?
Jack’s hand closes around his throat. He can feel his—Tim’s—pulse going under that grip, rabbit-quick.
”I don’t know where this insubordination is coming from, Timothy,” he says, “but I’m very disappointed. Your mother will be too.”
His stomach caves in. Your mother. Disappointed. The words land like kicks to the stomach, to the sternum. Jack shakes him, once, twice, then lets him go.
”Out of the window,” he says, almost jovially, and Jason tosses the laptop, hears it crash into the tree, sees the black-gloved hands grab onto it.
Jack puts his hand back on his shoulder.
”I didn’t like doing that,” he says untruthfully. Jason knows this type and can see how much he enjoys all this shit. For the first time, he sincerely mourns that Jack Drake is dead and gone and will never get to meet the Red Hood. “But it’s for your own good, Tim. You know that, don’t you?”
Jason says nothing. Jack touches his cheek.
”It’s for your own good,” he repeats and Tim’s head nods.
”I know, Dad,” he hears that high little voice say and then he’s being hugged, the scrape of stubble against his cheek, a smell of cologne and whisky. Jack’s gone, leaving a ringing silence behind.
After a while, Tim climbs back into the room. Laptop in hand. Domino back on, his mouth—Jason’s mouth—pressed into a thin white line. He sits on the bed and Jason sits down next to him as he opens the laptop and begins to hack into the Bat network and locate Zatanna. The silence deepens.
”So,” Jason says after a while.
”Please don’t,” Tim says dully, not looking away from the screen and Jason has ignored pleas from the Replacement plenty of times before but he just. Maybe not tonight. He works his bruised jaw and says nothing and in three hours’ time he’s back in his own body and Tim is back in his and they’re on a rooftop in Gotham on a Tuesday night. He’s got his hand on Tim’s throat, just as he had before. Tim’s face is hard and thin and strong, his body is wiry and muscled, and there’s no bruise on his jaw, no blood on his lips.
”Well, that sucked,” he says lightly, with that stupid little smirk of his, and Jason takes his hand off his throat and just looks at him for a long moment. The smirk fades as the silence drags on.
”What?” Tim says at last and Jason wants to—wants to—
“Dickwing,” he says into his comm and Tim jumps like he’s been shot. “Get over here. Red Robin’s hurt.”
”I am not,” Tim says in an outraged voice. “It was just a stupid spell.”
”What spell?” Dick demands in their ears. “Hurt how? Report.”
”Time travel,” Jason says. Tim’s gaze turns desperately pleading but Jason ignores it. “His old man knocked him around some.”
“He did not,” Tim says and his voice breaks before he can grapple it back under control. “That—it wasn’t even me.”
“I’m almost there,” Dick says, his voice breathless and bemused. “Don’t—Hood, just. Stay with him.”
Dick knows his little brother pretty well, Jason thinks, because the warning comes just in time. He flings himself across Red Robin just as he’s about to make his escape, wrestles him to the ground, gets his arms around him. The kid’s breathing is awful, sick and shaky, and it takes him whole minutes to get it back under control. There’s nothing Jason can think to say or do. He just holds on until Dick gets there and then he makes his report, as factually as he can through the green closing in on his vision; Tim writhes in his arms until it’s done and then he slumps, all the resistance going out of him, his eyes closing.
Dick takes hold of him but Jason, somehow, can’t bring himself to let go. They sit there in a weird knot of arms and tension, in something between a wrestling hold and a hug.
“Why does this even matter?” Tim says after a while. His voice sounds defeated. “He’s dead. He’s been dead for years.”
Dick runs his hand, tentatively, over the cowl.
“Because he hurt you,” he says. “I’m sorry I never saw it.”
“He barely hurt me,” Tim says. He’s trying to sound dismissive, defiant, but his voice is choked. “It was nothing. I’ve had worse from every goon in Gotham.”
”It’s different when it’s your dad,” Jason says. His throat is sore. “When you. When they’re supposed to take care of you. When you love them.”
Tim says nothing but his body goes slack with grief between them, just for a moment, before he forces rigidity into his muscles again.
“Okay,” he says after a while. “I understand. Good talk. Can you—let me go now?”
Jason has to snort. This kid. He slackens his grip and then it’s just Dick, holding on to Tim like he can’t bear to let go.
“Will you,” Dick says. “Will you let me. Will you talk to me? Later? If I let you go now?”
”Sure,” Tim lies and Dick doesn’t believe him, Jason can see that, but he has no choice. They can’t keep him here forever. Dick lets him up and he takes in one whooping unsteady breath, meets Jason’s eyes for one more fleeting second, and then he’s thrown his line and he’s gone.
Dick looks like he’s been shot in the gut. Jason considers leaving him, considers laughing at him, considers yelling at him, and then sits down next to him.
“That kid,” he says, heartfelt, and Dick groans and leans his shoulder into Jason’s.
“I’m not a good brother,” he says mournfully and there are so many things Jason could say—so many places he could cut, with the weapon that Dick’s just handed him—but. It’s been one hell of a night. He still remembers the look on Jack Drake’s patrician face, the pleasure he took in hitting where it hurt.
”You’re not so bad,” he says. “I called you, didn’t I?”
”Thank you,” Dick breathes and then his head is on Jason’s shoulder and Jason’s throat goes tight and his eyes prickle a little. Dawn is starting to break over Gotham. He looks over the city, ugly and beautiful and his, and maps it with his eyes. There’s the building where the kid has his apartment, his Nest, where he keeps all his beloved equipment and hides from his family. Jason will have to pay him a visit there, one of these days.