The Birds Who Smile, a Batman fanfic by Raberba girl
Alternate route: Never Adopted - Part 2 (rough draft)
A/N: Warning for violence.
o.o.o
The Waynes stared at the Batcomputer's screen in shock. The DNA test results reported that Warble was a complete match for Timothy Drake. "Is he a clone?" Dick wondered as Bruce pulled up a still shot from Red Hood's patrol footage and a photo of Tim from his early days at the manor for comparison.
To all appearances, it was the same boy. Warble looked exactly like Tim would if he'd been Jokerized and raised on the darkest streets of Gotham. The only reason Dick and Jason hadn't recognized him was because they hadn't been looking for a resemblance.
"What are we going to do about this?" Damian demanded, looking disturbed.
"First we find out where the hell he came from," Tim said grimly, pulling up records and news articles as searches worked in the background.
"We need to find proper caretakers for him," Bruce muttered, working on his own research.
With the Waynes' other responsibilities and open cases, the searches went slowly, and it didn't help that Warble was not officially connected in any way to the woman whose house he slept in. It was hard to track him before he'd fallen in with Penguin; as a street kid in an area of town with comparatively few cameras, he seemed to have showed up out of nowhere. Searching for information on Timothy Drake was only bringing up material about their own Drake-Wayne, and the laboratories Bruce looked into, despite being involved in other sketchy business, were dead ends as far as potentially creating clones of Tim.
Over the next few days, the Bats kept tabs on Warble himself. He worked like a slave in his 'momma's' house, apparently in exchange for little more than a roof over his head; ran a couple of messages for Penguin's men; boosted tires efficiently enough to impress even Jason; and usually spent at least an hour a day at the public library, researching the Waynes and the Bats and grimly practicing the ASL vocabulary videos he looked up on YouTube.
One day, Tim tried stepping into his path. "Hey. So I hear you're my clone or something." At the sight of him, Warble's face twisted with rage. He spat, and Tim had to move quickly to avoid the gross projectile. "You know, what I find interesting is that you act like you know me."
"You steal my name my face my life MINE! Go die!"
"Why is it that everyone always hates you on first sight, Timmy?" Jason laughed, ambling up to join him. "You're actually a pretty cool guy."
"Thanks, bro," Tim deadpanned.
Warble, meanwhile, suddenly looked nervous. He backed up a few steps, eyes darting around and up. When he saw Damian loitering down the street, he fled.
The Bats gave chase; Damian dropped down in front of Warble in an alley to cut off his route. The child immediately switched back, but Jason and Tim had caught up with him by then. Looking desperate, Warble threw himself at the wall and managed to claw his way up a quarter of it before he fell and landed in Jason's arms.
"Hey. We're not gonna hurt you, we just want to talk."
"Ba'man Ba'man Ba'man Ba'man," Warble started whispering in panic, twisting and struggling as he tried to get free and look around wildly.
"Batman's not here. He's not gonna get you, okay?"
"Wayne, no Wayne!" Then he started crying out frantically in bird sounds again.
"Let him go," Cassandra ordered when she came up to join them. "Too scared."
Jason reluctantly released the boy, who darted out of sight.
"He knew who we were," Tim said slowly. "As the Waynes, possibly as...the others. He thought B was here." (Bruce had known better than to accompany them in person, but he was listening through the comms.)
"Who is this kid?!"
The mystery was solved that night, when they tried looking up records of Joker victims.
"The Batpocalypse," Tim murmured, staring at his screen. "He was one of them? The man-eating Robins?"
Bruce's heart was beating quickly, because something had occurred to him (other than the crushing guilt of getting those creatures off his hands without bothering to perform any basic tests; those had been his sons, those had been his children he'd just blithely given away, it was Tim and Dick and Jason and he'd failed them all over again, all over again...!).
The older boys, the ones who resembled a Jokerized young Dick Grayson and Jason Todd. They had been given to social services along with the youngest boy. Where were they now?
While Bruce was looking that up, Tim was reading through the records of what had happened to his younger self. The child had been institutionalized for six months and then released into foster care at age seven. (On his alternate universe refugee paperwork, his age had been estimated based on his physical evaluations, and his 'birthday' matched the date of the newspaper where a grainy image of him and his 'brothers' had first appeared. His legal name was Tim Dake, as if whoever had been in charge of recording it had done a straight transcription of the child's mispronunciation.)
Young Tim had gone through three placements in four years. Reading between the lines gave the impression that the child had probably been abused and neglected in at least two of the homes. The last official record of him was a missing person report when he'd presumably run away at age eleven. It had been seven years since Barbados's attack on the multiverse; the boy would be thirteen now.
Meanwhile, Bruce had discovered, to his horror, that the other Robins had been permanently institutionalized at Arkham Juvenile Detention Center. He hadn't even known they'd been sent to a mental hospital at all. Arkham was for the criminally insane, but these children weren't criminals, they- Yes, they'd killed people, but they had been brainwashed and tortured, forced to kill by a sadistic madman.
Yet they'd been placed at the detention center within less than a week of leaving the Bats, and they were still there.
"My God," Tim said bleakly.
Bruce stared at the day old security footage of the nameless teenagers. (No one had ever bothered to run DNA tests on them, though even if they had, it would have matched nothing in the system, since Bruce kept his family's sensitive data heavily secured.)
The older John Doe lay naked and unbound on the floor in a bare suicide watch cell. He did not move at all except for when orderlies periodically came in to force-feed him, force medication into him, force exercise on him, or deal with his waste. The sixteen-year-old reacted to none of it, not even when some of the orderlies took the opportunity to mock and abuse him. It was like he had no mind and no soul, just an empty body subject to the wishes of its captors.
The younger John Doe was in a small, padded cell, bound with a straitjacket, headgear that included a muzzle, and cuffs around his ankles. When he wasn't lying in a stupor or slurping up liquid meals, he was screaming and hurling himself against the walls, sometimes for hours on end.
"We have to get them out of there," Bruce said faintly. 'Dick. Jason.' Even if it wasn't them, even if they were total strangers, they didn't deserve this torture. Bruce should have made sure they were properly taken care of from the beginning, not just expected the best simply because the social workers who'd taken the little Robins years ago had been smiling and seemed kind. "I'm a fool."
o.o.o.o.o
The arrangements had been made. The younger Dick and the younger Jason - whom the Waynes had begun calling by their middle names to distinguish them from their counterparts - were slated to be moved to Wayne facilities.
Bruce had a detailed plan for their rehabilitation. It frustrated him to know that he couldn't personally take the boys under his wing, but if Jackson's reaction to the Bats and the Wayne name was any indication, the Robins probably remembered unfortunate details from their captivity in their homeworld, and Bruce's proximity would only make things worse.
'It's all right, though. As long as they're safe and well-cared for, they don't need to be with me. All that matters is that they're safe...'
Of course Joker would pick that night to break out of the main Arkham facility, target the juvenile detention branch for hostages, and hole up with them in an abandoned toy factory on the edge of town. Of course John and Peter would be among the hostages. Because this was Gotham, so of course.
o.o.o.o.o
Something wasn't right. Joker had said he would call in with his next set of demands hours ago, but there had been no word from him, not even any wordless messages, gruesome or otherwise. Swarms of law enforcement had laid siege to the factory; the Bats were cautiously making their way in. They were occasionally startled by random, aimlessly wandering hostages, but there was no sign of Joker or his henchmen.
"Heads up," Barbara warned, "Bird 3 slipped past the police and got into the building."
"What the heck, why?! How?!"
"Must've been following the news," Red Robin pointed out. "He...might've seen his opportunity to help the other birds."
Red Hood, his back creeping, was the first one to find the right level. He stared for a moment, then sent a message to his siblings only. "It's...fine. Everything's okay now. Just stall Batman for me, will you?"
"Why? What's the situation, Hood?"
"Are John and Peter okay?!"
"They're fine. Can't talk; just hold him off, please."
"Joker's dead, isn't he."
Jason muted his comm without answering.
There was such a huge quantity of blood and gore that it didn't even look real. Henchmen were scattered, some lying still and silent where they'd been mauled, others whimpering in corners as they nursed wounds that looked like shark bites. The few hostages that remained in the room, like their fellows on the lower floors, wandered aimlessly, mostly unhurt.
John sat by the purple-suited corpse, coated with blood that didn't seem to be his. He was gazing into the distance, one hand idly occupied with something the way one would play with a booger. Upon further inspection, the thing turned out to be a chunk of squishy flesh, possibly part of a tongue. Maybe a tonsil.
"You okay, Johnny?" Jason asked quietly. Then, remembering that this boy would have responded to a different name once upon a time, "Dickie?"
John paused and blinked slowly, his eyes dragging themselves toward Jason. "...Ddd'ckkkiie," he finally murmured.
"Yeah. Dick John Grayson. John, that's you. Right?"
The only answer was a bit of soft birdsong. Jason nodded and turned when his own young counterpart came eagerly bounding up to the body. Peter slammed down the hammer he had found, wrenched free another one of Joker's ribs, and galloped off with it, howling a melody as he hurled the rib out the window. Jackson was chasing after his brother, looking exasperated and tense as he tried to get Peter's attention, casting occasional nervous glances at Jason.
"Okay. Geez, what a mess... Okay. Listen. I have to get you chickadees out of here."
John turned from a ghost to a beast when Jason tried to move him - he shrieked and scratched and bit until Jackson rushed over, at which point John latched onto him and quieted immediately, his face going slack. He moved like a zombie, clinging to his youngest brother and stumbling. Jason held on to Jackson's arm, and though the thirteen-year-old snarled and cussed at him, John didn't seem to be bothered.
"Okay...that's two out of three; oi, JASON! Get your crazy ass over here!"
Wrangling Peter was harder - Jason finally had to hack off a chunk of Joker and entice his younger self with it like it was bait. Peter followed, grabbing playfully at the severed ear. Hood felt like a grisly sort of pied piper as he made his slow way down to the ground floor, waving the ear, jerking Jackson along, and making sure John didn't lose his grip and get left behind. "Okay, almost there, almost there..."
Red Robin had complied with Hood's request and had a car waiting for them. Peter immediately dove for the bottles of nutrition shakes sitting on the back seat; Jackson, still cursing and twittering, spat at Hood and then started fighting his brother for a shake; John got dragged in his wake and collapsed at his brothers' feet, still lifeless except for how tightly he was clinging to their legs.
Hood shut the door on them and got into the driver's seat with a sigh. "Okay, off we go..."
TBC
A/N: See AO3 for more Breezy art!