The Till-Then From the Ever-Since

Chapter Twenty-Five

A/N: This chapter takes place in the context of a small prequel fic about the Tims I've posted separately as 'Chance Came In And Stole You (Back)', but is perfectly readable without that, so consume them in whatever order you please.

The two Tims Drake were out investigating, and Robin was trying to decide if it was especially weird to be holding onto himself from behind. Weirder than the rest of the time travel situation, that was.

They could have pulled a spare bike out of storage for him—there were always spares—but it would be one of Damian Wayne's spares and Tim didn't want to borrow anything from him. Maybe his older self guessed that, because he'd invited him to sit pillion behind him with a gesture and Tim had taken him up on it wordlessly.

Having more freedom of movement didn't matter much if he had to stay inside a certain radius anyway, and could potentially be disastrous if they got separated while riding and Tim was yanked off his bike by the mysterious tether at high speeds. That was definitely on his 'stupid ways to die' list.

They rode. It was quiet. Tim's older self seemed to like it that way—Robin kept thinking he'd obviously spent too much time around Bruce, over the years to come. Adopted his brooding habits. He'd chosen not to ask Bruce anything because he'd known everyone would be, and claiming Batman's time at a time like this wouldn't be very responsible partnership, but now he was finding it strangely hard to find a good opening to ask himself anything, either. Information wasn't the kind of thing he could just intuit because he knew himself so well, and yet…

It wasn't that there was anything wrong with silence, and so far the two of them hadn't necessarily needed words, but there was so much he wanted to know it was hard to even choose his first question.

Shouting over your shoulder while driving a motorcycle was pretty annoying, though, he knew from experience, even with an engine tuned this well and making very little noise. And it definitely wasn't a good way to have a private conversation, even if not a lot of people were out and about at this hour.

So Tim would watch the scenery, and let Red Robin drive without pestering.

It was easier than not pestering Dick tended to be under similar circumstances. It wasn't exactly boring to have access to his own future self, but it wasn't exciting the way having Nightwing's attention tended to be, even now.

(Dick at thirty looked almost exactly the way he had at twenty-one. He seemed calmer now, though. Harder to push until he snapped. Especially around Damian Wayne.

…he guessed that went to prove Batman needed a Robin.)

The city really had changed, more than eight years should account for. Earthquake. His grip on the armored sides in front of him tightened. How could you protect your city from a geologically improbable tectonic event? Even with forewarning?

Red Robin idled smoothly to a stop as they reached the nearest non-Cave site of manifestation, Jason's bus stop. The Viagra ad still hadn't been vandalized yet. They got off the bike and started scanning for clues. Red Robin had some sort of dimensional instability monitoring device that Tim didn't understand the principles behind at all yet; he-himself had a Geiger counter, among other things.

"What happened to Jason?" Tim finally broke the silence to ask, as each of them slowly quartered the street.

And maybe there was more to the silence than not having any need to speak, after all, because Red Robin was distinctly uncooperative in his tonelessness as he said, "You know what happened."

Tim gritted his teeth. "After that."

Red Robin frowned at his digital display for a few seconds, while in Robin's hands the Geiger counter's needle resolutely declined to jump. "We don't know. I think Talia al Ghul put him in a Lazarus Pit at some point."

"…those don't really resurrect the dead," Tim pointed out. Name notwithstanding.

…as far as he knew.

"Not usually," his counterpart agreed. There was something behind that qualification, some other complicated story that Tim didn't know about yet, and he tried not to get annoyed. "I'm fairly sure he really did die. He came back…wrong."

"He doesn't seem…" Tim said, because yes the adult Jason was at least half a supervillain, with guns and frothing rage and he murdered people, which was honestly awful, but…he was still Jason. Not a Monkey's Paw horror that needed to be put down.

"He's gotten better," Red Robin said. "I keep trying…I'm sick to death of holding out my hand to people and having it bitten off," he concluded briskly, and apparently the subject was now closed. "Have you found anything?"

"Zilch."

"Same." There had at least been energy fluctuations where adult Damian came through, even if they hadn't clearly indicated anything in particular, and Tim was irritated with himself for not thinking to check immediately, back when they'd gotten the young Bruce. There would be nothing to compare Damian's readings to unless they caught…Alfred, or Barbara or somebody traveling, too, and even then it would have been better to have a larger sample set, and more than one traveling from the same direction in the timestream.

Assuming they really were traveling in time.

"We'd better check my arrival point anyway," he said. Just to be thorough.

"Mm." Red Robin stowed his scanner efficiently away and headed back to the bike. "Steph's first, it's closer. Patrol along the way?"

"Well yeah," said Tim. He was curious about this Stephanie person. She seemed nice, and he didn't mean that in the lukewarm way it got applied when you couldn't think of anything better to say about someone. Her Batgirl version seemed reasonably professional, and sort of reminded him of Dick. She seemed like she would be fun to work with.

He had no idea how she'd gotten involved with the Bats. She was about his age, though, so it was probably coming sooner rather than later. The first Batgirl had been sixteen or seventeen, right?

He put his scanner away, too. "Maintain line of sight and let's try to keep to within one hundred feet, okay?"

"Pff. Teach our grandmother."

Tim snickered at that admittedly really shitty pun, and Red Robin flashed a grin.

Working with himself was pretty fun, too.

They broke up a mugging on their way to the building Stephanie had appeared on, but other than that patrol was uneventful. Tim's feelings on that were mixed. On the one hand, potentially-urgent ongoing recon mission, not admitting of delays.

On the other, he'd really like to hit something more than once.

You were magnificent, Bruce had said. So warm and so sad, and what did that mean? It was…almost more praise than he knew what to do with, and he couldn't help trying to analyze it, to break it down into a more nuanced critique even though he knew that wasn't what it was for.

It had sounded too similar to the way Bruce used to talk about Jason. Even though Tim wasn't dead.

He'd been struggling to frame a question about it since the decision to send him and Red Robin off together had been made. Hadn't managed it yet. Didn't manage it during this leg of the patrol, either.

Stephanie's manifestation point took a slight effort to identify, since they'd been given a street address rather than coordinates, and some of the streets didn't run quite where Tim remembered they did.

Earthquake. Just how bad had it been?

"I wonder why she was here," Red Robin said as they climbed onto the correct roof.

"Do we know that she was?" Tim replied, knowing his older self meant the younger version; Batgirl had obviously been passing through on patrol. It was kind of too bad they'd left before Bruce got the new girl into the spreadsheet, but he wasn't actually a fan of waiting around being useless—or, in Jason's words, totally supernumerary—and he didn't actually wish they'd postponed this expedition. "I mean, Bruce got slingshotted a little over a quarter of a mile from up by the graveyard to wind up in the Cave." The Manor grounds were extensive.

"Mm," Red Robin acknowledged, as they unpacked their various sensory devices. "But her family has a house over on the far end of Priest Heights. I haven't dug into her past in detail, but her father's name is on the mortgage, and her mother may not have the best judgment in the world but she wouldn't have done that after he went to prison, so they should have lived there since she was nine at most."

"Maybe she was out on a walk," suggested Tim. The flannel pants Stephanie had been wearing looked like pajamas to him, and she'd been wearing sneakers without socks, which suggested either a failure to do laundry or an impromptu sneaking-out. "She had a backpack. You don't know it was night when she came from."

"All good points. Whoa." The needle of his unnamed device had jumped violently, and the digital readout had changed color. "Okay, dimensional distortion readings are loud. Louder than we got in the Cave."

"Fifty-one minutes," said Tim. That was much longer than it had taken them to get around to scanning, after the extra Batman popped up. "Do we have another one of those things at the Cave?"

"Yes." Red Robin tapped his comm. "B? Check the landing point again for any change in the distortion frequencies. We picked up nothing at point J, but it's clocking at 70/120 at point S."

"Hm." Bruce was clearly running through the same calculations both of them had. Was the distortion fundamentally greater for Stephanie's arrival than Damian's or Jason's for some reason, and if so was it due to the order of the arrival, since Jason had come first? Was each new traveler putting more strain on this dimension? Or was the distortion at each point actually continuing to escalate up until the point it dropped off entirely?

Detective work wasn't exactly science. Even forensics were a little touch and go. You couldn't control the situation enough to do good science when you were investigating, not really. You just applied the information built up in proper scientific context to your situation as scientifically as you could.

The difference was important, sometimes. Like when there was totally insufficient precedent.

While Bruce calculated, and presumably went to scan things, the Tims were left with dead time. Robin gave Red Robin two sidelong glances before giving his courage a little zap and standing up a little straighter. He wasn't going to get a better opportunity, so if he didn't move now…

"Hey, me?" Tim asked, doing his best to sound casual. "What's up with…you and Dick?"

The negative energy that kept flaring up between them…worried him. They were obviously close—he'd seen them talking between themselves a couple of times now, and there was a little of that same automatic mirroring and instant communication he always saw between Dick and Bruce, except during their very worst fights. But his older self had been outright passive-aggressive a couple of times, most notably over Nightwing's abandoning his post during the rope mission.

It wasn't exactly that Tim didn't sympathize, but pointedly standing there and saying nothing while Nightwing wandered off to schmooze his emotionally unstable project Robin was a little much.

That negative energy shot up again. "Besides the obvious?"

Tim waited, because of course he meant besides the obvious. Besides Dick's obvious habit of favoritism, which he was sort of embarrassed to admit hurt him, too. Dick had accepted him awfully easily, after the first rage was over with; he mourned Jason, even if not as soul-crushingly as Bruce did.

It shouldn't be surprising that a kid who was actual family had become even more of a brother to him, even more easily.

Tim didn't even know if it had been easy. Damian had to be very good, with his genes and all the training they'd alluded to his getting; he might be surly and petty but for all Tim knew he'd saved everyone's lives five times over, with much more competence and panache than Tim had done on his first outing as Robin, and probably without needing Alfred to drive him out to the site of an emergency.

"I should be better about it," Red Robin said, as if agreeing with his thoughts. "I am, usually. Sometimes I can't help thinking it would help if he would just apologize, for letting Damian tell me I was fired if not for any of the rest of it. But it wouldn't."

Tim knew it wouldn't. Having people apologize after they let him down always bothered him, because in his experience something you did and then pretended you hadn't done, you were ashamed of, and might try not to repeat, the better to pretend it had never happened.

While if someone brought themselves to apologize for something, it usually meant they were comfortable enough with having done it to acknowledge it, and accept it about themselves, and make it a habit. Apologizing every time, and feeling absolved by doing so, so they saw no need to actually change anything.

He wouldn't have thought that abut Dick apologizing, but he'd…never had reason to be actually mad at Dick.

"Have you talked to him about it?" he asked. It was obviously too late for himself at twenty-one to go back to being Robin, let alone Dick's Robin. Just as it had been too late for Dick to go back at the same age. But pushing Bruce and Dick to make up last year had been worthwhile, even if they couldn't just wind their relationship back like a clock, the way he'd wanted them to. It had helped both of them.

"Stop," said Red Robin.

"Seriously talked, I mean?" Tim pressed.

"You don't understand the situation as well as you think you do."

"So tell me." Red Robin of all people should know how much the need to fix this would eat at him. Obviously sometimes Tim didn't know as much as he thought he did, but the missing pieces in this case were all right here, and—

"Robin."

The name cut a slash of silence across the roof.

Tim breached it. "Listen," he began.

"You're never going to belong."

Red Robin's voice was dry and cold as stone, like the markings carved into ancient tablets his dad had always loved to pore over. The inscription to follow the cartouche of his inherited name. Tim felt his stomach drop. "Wha—"

"No matter how hard you try, how carefully you plan, how much you intend to never let them down—you'll never be perfect, and you'll never really be one of them. Part of this family. You'll always know that they could give up on you and send you away at any time. You'll always be waiting for that, no matter what."

Red Robin tilted his head a little, and the smooth cowl made him look strangely alien, in a way Batman's long-eared mask never had Bruce. At least, not to Tim. "…that's what you're afraid of, isn't it?"

Tim tried to keep his breathing steady, even as the whole world seemed to spin out into a shadowy spiral pressing down all its weight on his too-narrow shoulders at the center.

He didn't try to argue. What would be the point? This was himself. They knew each other better than anyone else ever could.

His older self, remote and heartless, smiled slightly. The stone of him had stopped being granite and lime and instead became soapstone, the way the Egyptians carved it, dark and smooth. "You and Jason are weirdly alike for such opposite people," he said.

Tim found his tongue at last. "'You,' you keep saying…stop using second person pronouns. We're the same person." Unless, he thought abruptly, they weren't—unless the Red Robin he'd met tonight was a fake, some kind of magical spirit entity or reality-warping alien who was behind all of this, who'd impersonated him to himself; unless the reason they seemed to mirror each other so well wasn't the deep familiarity of sameness but because Red Robin was in his head—

The older Tim's shoulders sagged a little. "You're right," he said, and he didn't sound ancient or distant anymore. He sounded like Dick at the end of a long, wretched, rainy week.

"Take your mask off," Tim said. Then, realizing how harsh the imperative had probably sounded when Red Robin's lips became a little more thin, added, "Please." Waved a gloved hand at the surrounding roofs. "There's nobody here to see."

"You never know," Red Robin said, but he stripped the cowl back as he spoke, surprisingly long hair dropping out of it, and for the first time Tim saw his own face, older.

It hadn't changed much. Not the way Dick's had since he was thirteen, or Bruce's, or Jason.

Maybe he was just imagining that, picking up the familiarity in a face he'd watched change slowly all his life and knew in spite of it, and missing the differences—but no, there was his mother's chin, gentle curve and point of jaw, and the continuing lack of any of his father's heavy bone structure around the eyes. It was thinner, with less curve to the cheek, and it looked like he'd been getting less sun, and he had grown, but the proportions were very nearly the same.

Tim let his mouth quirk up a little. "Baby face."

Red Robin snorted. "You're the one who's going to be dealing with it in eight years." He shrugged. "I don't mind, really."

Yeah. The way he wore those long bangs that only softened the look of him suggested he didn't. Tim didn't mind either, not really. Especially compared to all the other things, the important things he was going to lose, or never gain at all. "Is it really that bad?" he asked, settling his stance. "Or were you just trying to intimidate me?"

Red Robin snorted again. "It's pretty bad," he said, looking away over the rooftops. "At least, bad things keep happening. I probably took some of it too personally—blamed myself for things I couldn't control, and made stupid decisions as a result." He glanced back at Tim, a bitter crooked cant to his mouth. "Of all the habits to pick up from Bruce."

"Could be worse," Tim said neutrally, and Red Robin's mouth jumped, tasting bitterness in the joke but finding it funny anyway.

"Yeah." Then he shook his head, not in negation but sharply, like a dog with an itch in its ear.

Tim's comm clicked. "Distortion has fallen to nothing everywhere but at point D here. We'll monitor continually for any spikes. Get to the final location."

Bruce was getting more terse the longer the mob of them were there. Tim wondered if he was fighting with Dick or the time-traveling Batman, or if it was just general stress. He was probably super worried the Joker or someone would pull something huge tonight and he'd have to figure out what to do about it with a thirteen-year-old civilian magnetized to his body. They'd figure it out, though. "You got it," he said cheerfully.

"Thank you, Robin," said Batman, with the sort of stiffness that said he felt bad for being too no-nonsense. "Red Robin," he added, even more awkwardly.

"Yeah," said the other Tim, and Bruce was gone again. Working hard.

Tim was going to have to navigate them to Point T, because he'd trailed Red Robin for a few blocks before the tether had pulled him out of cover onto his face and gotten him caught.

Both of them started toward the alley where they'd left Red Robin's motorcycle, but then Tim slowed to a stop. Rather than drag him, Red stopped too, and turned back with a question in his shoulders and the cant of his head.

Tim rubbed the back of his head. "You…okay?"

"I shouldn't have taken my issues out on you like that." Red Robin's head turned away and his expression barely changed, but his voice warmed wry as he said, "Cass is always telling me lately I need to be kinder to myself."

Tim's mouth twitched at the pun, but he asked, "Cass?"

"You'll meet her. Look forward to it," Red Robin directed, and that was probably the least pained smile Tim had seen his older self produce at anything that wasn't a joke, so far.

"Girlfriend?"

Utterly undignified noise, like Red Robin had started a laugh but choked on a snort of derision. "No, god no. I did date a different Cassandra, briefly, but this one is actually legally my sister. Bruce adopted her years ago. She's not around Gotham much these days, but." He let out a breath. "She's one of the good things.

"And there are good things, Tim, I promise. The whole universe. The kind of friends you never even knew you wanted, that you'd rip your heart out of your chest for if they needed it."

Tim wanted to think that he grew up morbid, but actually that ship had probably sailed. "That's something I want?" he asked doubtfully.

He knew he sometimes struck people as the loner type, especially as Robin, but he'd always had friends. People to share games with, eat lunch with, periodically go out someplace alongside. He got along with people. He'd occasionally been wistful about the closer friendships some kids his age seemed to manage, best friends you could and would spend hours with and tell everything to, but it had never really been…well. Rip your heart out of your chest.

"It hurts," Red Robin admitted, which wasn't much inducement. "It's like family. It hurts. But it's worth it."

Robin narrowed his eyes. He felt smaller and younger than he usually did, out on the roofs in this costume; felt uncertainty in his chest the way he never let it settle when he was hunting a clue or a culprit, when he had to stare down Shiva or punch a monster in the throat. But he was still Robin, and he didn't let his voice waver when he asked, "Is it?"

A muscle jumped in Red Robin's jaw. His eyes seemed to go a hundred miles down, the way Batman's did when he was thinking about Jason, or his parents, or any of the other things that had hurt him. "Yeah. It is." It has to be, Tim thought he could hear floating over the words.

Dick was worth it, was what Tim thought, when he tried to make it's like family fit into something he knew. Dick who called him little brother and did his best to rile him up, and was willing to stop and just…listen to him more than anybody ever had.

Dick who was going to let him down one day.

But Dick wasn't really his family, and it was hard to think of Mom and Dad as worth it, even if he'd never, ever have given them up if he'd had a choice. Even if he was never, ever going to let his dad go no matter how long the coma lasted, even if their stock kept collapsing and he had to take out a loan from Bruce or something to pay for the life support.

But his older self had been legally adopted into Batman's paramilitary circus of a family, along with at least one other person he didn't even know yet.

And Dick had picked the Wayne heir over Tim. That had been obvious in every move the three of them made around each other even before he asked anything, especially in the conspicuous berth Red Robin gave the other two when they were together, as if to say I'm not trying to compete. Tim was honestly still embarrassed on his older self's behalf because really, what had he expected? Obviously a lot had changed over the years, for him to get so grim. So much like Bruce.

His future self had a new family, and it hurt just as much as the old one, and what had he expected?

"Even when you doubt it?" he asked. "Even when you lose them?"

"Nothing lasts forever," said Red Robin. "And…sometimes you get lost things back. Just…make the best of the time you're living."

"Haven't we always?"

"Not always," said Red Robin, and Tim wondered.

"What's wrong?" he asked, just a little hushed, just a little—so he knew he would know it meant, you're scared, why are you scared, what….

He'd probably have denied it, to anyone else. He might have deflected even with himself, if he'd asked a little more outright. There was a silence, even so, but it wasn't stubbornness, just finding his place.

"I met an older version of us," said Red Robin. "Twice." The abstraction from earlier was still there, but it had gone brittle and cold, like the thin sheets of ice that formed over puddles sometimes in a hard, sudden Gotham frost. Tim braced himself.

"He was Batman," Red Robin said, and, "He was insane." And, "At least I like to think he was."

"What—" Tim began, but his other self was already shaking his head.

"I'm not going to elaborate. You don't need to know. It's probably not as bad as you're thinking, but it was enough to make me swear I'd never take the mantle."

Becoming Batman was frankly a weird idea that Tim had definitely never aspired to, but hearing it sworn off so grimly was chilling anyway, and made the smooth cowl over Red Robin's head look stranger. "Do you want me to swear that too?" he asked. "You realize if I stop existing when this is all over, that'll be redundant."

"Mm. But if I'm the one who stops existing, while you're off retrieving Jason like you already promised, I wanted to pass on the warning. I know you like to be in control. You trust your own judgment. That's fine." He sounded exactly like Bruce now, in spite of the fact that Tim's voice would apparently never drop below a throaty tenor. "Just remember. Batman isn't the only one who needs someone to stop him sometimes."

Tim squinted not-that-far up at adult him. "Did the older us not have a Robin?"

"…you know, he didn't. I wonder if that was part of why."

"What's the rest of it?" Tim asked, because Red Robin wouldn't have said part of if he hadn't already had a working theory.

"Oh, everybody died," Red Robin said, as if that much was just obvious.

Tim squinted. "…that's what happened to older Damian, too."

A muscle jumped in Red Robin's jaw, which was a tic Tim was pretty sure he didn't have yet or one of his teachers would have told him, so he could train it out of himself. "That's true."

"…but he had a Robin."

Red Robin stared at him for a second, then let his head fall back so he was staring at the smoggy sky. "How did I not think of that?" He seemed to be asking the cloud cover, or maybe the city in general. "How did I literally never think about how Batman needs a Robin and I didn't have one?

"To be fair it might not have helped," he went on, returning to briskness, and to looking down at Tim. "Raven had gone off the rails and was messing with everyone's heads, and whether my best friend survived or not doesn't seem to have made any difference, and you'd think it would."

"You'd think," Tim echoed. He wanted to ask who the best friend had been. So he could be sure of not missing them, mostly. But what if the way they met was so important that it would change everything; what if knowing that they were someone he could have as a best friend made him act weird and they never really took to him?

"Are they alive?" he asked instead. "Now? In your timeline?"

Red Robin smiled, and it looked like it hurt, but not because the question was a bad one. "Yeah," he said softly, like the admission was a delicate flower he feared crushing. "Yeah, just fine. We've been doing a lot of work in southeast Asia together lately, with Thorn—that's Deathstroke's daughter, she'll be joining the Titans…I think later this year, your time. Cass backs us up, sometimes. And some other friends. It's good. We're…good."

Tim thought he could read between the lines, that Red Robin tried not to be home too often because being around the current Robin was difficult. He thought it probably said something about him, that he came home at all. He wasn't sure what. "I'm glad," he said.

It was really unlikely, if he had a future and it was his own, as a separate self, and not the result of having his memory erased and being replaced in the timestream to make his way back to this point in time the slow way, that he would reach exactly this place in life again. He had too many plans brewing, plans to seek out Jason and convince him not to become a supervillain, plans to find Damian Wayne as a hopefully less obnoxious toddler and expose him to better influences, plans to convince Bruce to fortify Gotham against catastrophic earthquake.

But he was glad, that in spite of everything Red Robin was okay. He grinned up, through his mask, because he was Robin, for now, and it was his job to believe in things so hard they became real. Even things as simple as, it's going to be okay.

"I'm about to do something absolutely ridiculous," Red Robin said. And then he stepped forward, and pulled Robin into a hug.

He grew enough, apparently, over the course of his underwhelming adolescence, that Robin had to tip his head to one side to avoid having his face in one of the crossed bandoliers that had replaced his utility belt.

Tim pretty much never felt comfortable, being hugged. Always preferred to be the one doing the hugging, when somebody needed comfort. Hugs imposed on him hadn't happened terribly often, and it wasn't exactly that he didn't like them, but he always spent the entire time desperately unsure what was expected of him.

That didn't happen this time—he didn't know exactly why his older self was doing this, not the way he'd known how he was going to finish certain sentences or which way he was going to duck, but he wasn't worried about doing the wrong thing, or failing to do the right one; about having a gesture that was supposed to mean affection end in being given up on, when he didn't reciprocate the right way.

He didn't have to worry about what it meant, or what he should do…Red Robin's costume had awfully thick chest armor, he found himself noticing, and the arms around him were warm and strong and adult, even if the adult in question wasn't especially tall or imposing.

"It's so strange," Red Robin said quietly. "How I want to keep you safe."

Tim let out a breath and decided to hug back. The most understandable reason for hugs was always that someone looked like they needed a hug, after all. "You know you can't," he pointed out. There were more flexible armor plates on his sides and back, too.

"Never could," Red Robin agreed.

Tim wondered if he looked more fragile from the perspective of what had clearly been almost nine very stressful years. Or if he looked young and breakable to everyone, and they were just—ignoring it. Because he was Robin.

"I want to help," older Tim said, and Robin squeezed his ribs almost tight enough to hurt through the armor, and then let go.

"Well," he said, as his older self let him step back. Cocked his head, and grinned. They were running late. "While we're on our way back to where we started the evening, how about you tell me everything."

"Egad." The corner of Red Robin's mouth pulled up almost it seemed against his will. "I don't think we have the time."

"Just the highlights, then," Tim said, heading for the edge of the roof so they could mount up and roll out. "The things you wish you'd known. Either chronologically or in descending order of importance."

If he did get to live a future of his own, he wanted to take every advantage he could get.

He didn't have to explain that. Red Robin knew.