So, there are a bunch of POV switches in this chapter, just warning you, but y'all are smart and will probably pick up on it pretty quickly. Also, this chapter features a lot of characters' deductions, which probably aren't 100% defensible in court, but be sure to let me know in the comments how unrealistic it is. You feedback gives me life.

"We need to talk," Cordelia announced in a loud whisper, continuing her and Purdie's pattern of bringing up important matters first thing in the morning.

"About the fact that Tim disappeared last night again?" Purdie asked mildly, getting himself a bowl of cereal.

"No, I—" Cordelia stopped. "Wait, he did? Where did he go?"

Purdie shrugged. "No clue, as usual. But he came back earlier than he has before. And, apparently, he still hasn't gotten out of bed."

"Hmm." Cordelia took a seat next to Aruna, who slid over wordlessly to make room. "Interesting. Actually, I did want to talk about Tim. But not here. It's too public." Aruna looked intrigued, which was a rare expression to see on the girl's face.

"All right," Purdie nodded. "The library, then? After we're done eating?"

Aruna shook her head. "Chess," she replied simply.

"Right, Chess Club," said Purdie. "Okay, then. After lunch?"

Twelve hours after his breakdown, Tim found himself back in the Room of Requirement, although he was accompanied this time by Harry, Ron, and Hermione. They all sat down in a circle on the ground, snagging cushions for seats. They had ended up in the D.A. room, as it was what Harry was most used to summoning.

After about a minute of silence, Ron finally said, "Okay, so what's with the weird outfit? What's it used for?"

Tim took a deep breath, his heart positively pounding against his chest. "It's…it's for…"

Don't tell them, don't tell them, don't tell them—

"It's for crime-fighting," Hermione interrupted, and Tim choked on his words.

"What?" Ron and Harry both said, looking back and forth between Tim and her.

"You're a member of the Justice League of America," she continued, ignoring them and staring right at Tim, who was finding it hard to breathe. "And you're from Gotham City. You work with the Batman."

"I don't think that Tim is who he says he is," Cordelia said bluntly once they had seated themselves at a table near the Restricted Section.

Purdie blinked. "How so?"

"You said that Tim's been leaving in the middle of the night every so often, right?"

Purdie nodded.

"Okay, but some of the nights you've said he left, there were people in the common room who never saw him leave your bedroom. You even said that you've never seen him leave, only caught him sometimes after he'd returned."

"Yeah," he said.

"So, if he's not leaving through the common room, how is he leaving?" she posed, drumming her fingers against the side of the table.

He shrugged. "I'm really not sure. Like you said, I've never been able to catch him in the act."

"What if he's leaving through the windows?"

Purdie looked at Cordelia, raising an eyebrow. "What?"

She nodded at his obvious confusion. "Think about it. You'd never notice because it's always so drafty in Ravenclaw Tower. You'd never hear it if he stayed quiet, and the temperature would usually stay the same."

"But he left last night, and it was snowing."

"So he doesn't always go out through the window. But sometimes he does."

Aruna seemed pleased with this answer. Purdie, however, was still confused on multiple points. "So, what, you think he could scale the walls? That's would take some insane athletic ability—"

"—which we've seen him demonstrate in the D.A."

"True…" He nodded. "Okay, so he goes out a lot. That can't be the only thing you've found suspicious, is it?"

She grinned, pushing up her glasses, and pulled out of her bookbag a large piece of parchment covered in messy, multicolored notes. "Not even close."

Tim blanked out as Hermione started explaining the JLA to a very confused Harry and Ron. Tim himself was too busy trying to prevent an oncoming panic attack to listen to her.

She knew. She knew. How did she know? When did he slip up? How many other people were coming to similar conclusions around the school? How much time did he have to get out of here safely?

"—accurate, Tim?"

Tim snapped his wandering gaze back to Hermione, who was looking at him inquisitively.

"H-huh…?" he managed to utter, sitting up straighter.

Hermione's brows lowered. "Are you okay, Tim?" she asked, looking concerned.

"Huh? I—uh—" Deep breaths, deep breaths. "Y-yeah, I'm good. Uh, what were you saying? I, uh, kind of spaced out."

"You…are a member of the JLA, right?" she repeated tentatively.

"More—more of an honorary member…" Tim nodded, swallowing. "H-how—how did you know?" he asked, already dreading her answer.

"Well, a lot of things, really," she admitted, and she began to tick off fingers. "I mean, for starters, your story always felt a little off to me."

"Here's a question: why does he call non-magical people 'Muggles?'"

Purdie frowned. "…is this a trick question?"

Cordelia looked over at Aruna, who was scanning over Cordelia's notes. "Aruna, what do you call non-magical people?"

"Jyesh," Aruna said.

"And why don't you call them 'Muggles?'"

Aruna didn't seem to care that she had already answered this question dozens of times to students over the years. "Growing up, that word was never used in my household."

Cordelia nodded. "Right. Because, in Hindi, that's the word for Muggles."

Purdie's eyes widened. "Wait, Cori, do Americans have a different word for Muggles?"

She grinned like he had just solved her puzzle. "Yes, they do. They call them 'No-Majes.'"

"And yet," he continued, "I've never once heard Tim call Muggles that, even though he's lived in America his whole life."

"No-Maj?" Ron repeated, as though the word felt foreign on his tongue.

Hermione nodded. "Remember how Dean visited that one school in America, Ilvermorny, I think, and he was confused at the word?"

"No," Harry and Ron both said in unison.

Hermione sighed. "Of course you don't. The point is, anyone who's grown up in a wizarding household in America with American parents would use that word." She looked at Tim. "But you never did. That could be for one of maybe three reasons: either your parents were British, you grew up in Britain, or you never actually grew up in a wizarding household to begin with. Call me crazy, but the latter is the only one that makes sense."

"That's crazy," said Purdie, shaking his head. "He literally performs magic in front of all of us on the daily. He was homeschooled, remember?"

Cordelia nodded. "It sounds insane, right? But think about the other options. Tim's parents couldn't have been British, or else Malfoy would've recognized their surnames when the two met in Herbology."

"And he can't have been lying about his blood status," Purdie murmured, "because then he couldn't have been homeschooled. And why would he lie about being homeschooled other than to cover up the fact that he didn't get any sort of magical education at all?"

"Exactly. And I know for a fact that he didn't grow up in Britain. The Waynes are basically American celebrities, Tim included. He's lived his whole life in America, far as I can tell."

Purdie frowned. "But that would mean that he isn't magical, which we know for a fact that he is."

"Not what she said," Aruna interjected. "She said that he didn't grow up in a wizarding household."

His eyes slowly widened. "He's magical…but he's not a wizard…?"

"Those aren't the same thing?" Harry asked.

Hermione shook her head. "As I was saying before, the Justice League of America is mainly a collection of individuals that possess magical abilities that are not our type of magic."

"So, he has a different magic than us," Ron summed up.

"No."

Harry blinked a couple of times. "I'm missing something, aren't I?"

"Despite all that, Tim isn't magical at all," Hermione explained.

Tim nodded. His utter terror at his whole cover story being ripped to shreds was slowly turning into a genuine interest in Hermione's deductive reasoning.

Purdie and Cordelia both looked at Aruna, who kicked her legs up on the table.

"I'm sorry, what?" said Purdie.

"He's not magical," she repeated stoically.

Cordelia and Purdie looked at each other. Aruna's instincts had always been spot-on, but this was just impossible.

"At our second D.A. meeting, I walked up with Tim while you two were finishing up your Ancient Runes homework."

They both nodded, waiting for her to continue.

"When we were heading up, Tim met up with Harry and started to talk to him. I heard their entire conversation."

"And…?" Purdie asked. He hadn't heard Aruna talk this much since Tim had gone missing early in October.

"Tim told Harry, 'You're wizards. Magic is your greatest weapon.'"

He took a moment to process that. "'You're wizards.' Not 'we're wizards.'"

"And not only that," Cordelia added. "'Magic is your greatest weapon.'"

"Either he knows something stronger than magic," said Purdie slowly, "or else he doesn't have any."

"That's impossible," Harry said immediately. "He's been using magic all semester, we've seen it."

"W-well, yes…" Hermione stammered, her face turning a little red, "…but I thought that there might be some other way to use magic, like how the Justice League of America does seemingly magical things despite having been proven to not be wizards." She turned to Tim sheepishly. "I was…hoping that you could fill us in on that…"

At this point, Tim had realized that abandoning his fake persona that he had been carefully crafting since the beginning of the summer would be much easier than trying to respond to their deductions by retconning his original backstory. Yes, he was deliberately exposing a major weakness of his to outsiders, and, yes, he knew that these three would not be satisfied to sit by and watch him do his job, but…

But Tim was very, very emotionally spent right now. He didn't want to keep secrets. He just wanted to be Tim Drake-Wayne.

"Sure, why not?" he sighed and loosened his tie.

Hermione suddenly looked rather flustered. "Um, Tim, I don't know if—"

"Chill," he chuckled as he unbuttoned the top of his shirt and pulled out his annulus. "This thing is why I'm able to do magic. It's made of an immensely magical stone. A couple of Justice Leaguers enchanted it so that I could go on this mission."

"And even though I don't know how he could just become magical all of a sudden," Cordelia admitted, "it still is the most logical theory. Maybe he got a magical tattoo, I know those exist, or maybe he has a potion which attunes him to magic. I dunno. But I know that he's been lying to us about his past." She scratched her frizzy head of hair. "Still don't know why he's doing it."

Purdie nodded. Why would someone go to a school to learn magic if they didn't have the real ability to do magic? And there were plenty of other magic schools, ones that wouldn't require him to be so far from home. No, if he wasn't here to learn magic, he was here for something in Hogwarts.

"He's probably undercover," stated Purdie. "There's something in Hogwarts that he can't get access to anywhere else."

"Harry," said Aruna.

Harry…yes, yes, that made sense. Why else would he have insisted on keeping up an inter-House friendship knowing that that sort of thing was unusual? And if there was one person in high demand right now, it was Harry.

"But what for?"

Tim rolled his eyes at Harry's apparent confusion. "Oh, come on, you're the only person who's ever bested Voldemort, and he even kidnapped you this summer. Of course the League is interested in you."

"Fair," Ron agreed.

"What do they—what do you want from me?" asked Harry.

"Well, the hope was that I could generally gather information about everything under the guise of being a student," Tim explained. "You were more of a starting point to kick off my investigation."

"And how's that going?" said Ron.

"Apart from the fact that I've blown my cover to you three, it's going pretty well," Tim admitted. "I now understand the fundamental rules of your magic system and what it's capable of, I've allied the League with an anti-Voldemort rebellion led by a man considered the most powerful wizard alive."

Not that that's true. Billy's literally connected to the Rock of Eternity, you can't really beat that.

"I've learned that said wizard is one of the good guys, and that he has an extremely level head. It's good for the JLA to know that you wizards are potentially capable of handling this threat without our intervention. And, now that I've met—"

"So you're not going to help us?" Harry blurted out, leaning forward on his cushion.

Well, that's probably what the League would want…But I guess I'm too emotionally attached to all of you to abandon you like this…

"I can't speak for the League," Tim started, "but I'm in this for the long haul. Count me in." This news was received very well by his three companions. Hermione clapped her hands excitedly, Harry let out a relieved sigh, and Ron nodded at Tim like he was proud of him for making this decision.

"So," Ron said, "what's the plan to defeat You-Know-Who?"

"When I come up with one, you'll be the first to know." Tim laughed this off with the others as a joke to hide the fact that he didn't even have a semblance of a plan in mind. He knew a great deal about Dumbledore and Harry through newspaper articles and direct conversation, but Voldemort was still a total unknown to Tim. All he knew was that Voldemort was the biggest threat in modern wizarding history. If he wasn't, Dumbledore would have taken him down sooner like he did with the radical Gellert Grindelwald.

"He's a fake wizard who successfully infiltrated Hogwarts, and most of what we think we know about him is probably a lie," said Purdie, "but he's done nothing but good since he's gotten here." If there was one area in which Purdie felt most confident, it was his judge of character. He didn't care that people argued with him when he openly defended the likes of Draco Malfoy or Professor Snape—he knew that the way people acted around other people was always an act of some sorts, and that their true character revealed itself in other ways.

"So," Cordelia finally asked, "what's the verdict on Tim?"

"When I come to one, you'll be the first to know," Purdie laughed. But none seemed to actually be needed. Purdie could tell just by looking at Cordelia and Aruna that, despite all of their deductions and theories, the three of them were in agreement about one thing—Tim Drake-Wayne was a good person. But the three of them were also in agreement that pretending they knew nothing and letting Tim do his thing could only last so long. Cordelia in particular hated not knowing the full story, and it was clear that Purdie felt similarly, and Aruna was along for the ride, as usual. That didn't mean they were going to stop investigating him. Hell, he was probably the most interesting thing to have happened to this school since Professor Moody. No way was the trio of Ravenclaws going to pass up this kind of experience.

In regards to the word that Aruna uses to refer to nonmagical people, "jyesh," it's a term I made up. Harry Potter has been translated into Hindi, but I wanted a word that Hindi-speaking wixen would use to describe nonmagical people, not just 'Muggle' translated into Hindi pronunciation.

I know literally nothing about Hindi as a language, but I tried to make it a believable word. The original spelling I was going for was ज्येष, and I based it off of the Hindi goddess Jyestha, who's a goddess of misfortune and the younger sister of Lakshmi, a goddess of fortune and power. I thought that it would be a very wizarding-world thing to do to name your nonmagical counterparts off of a goddess of misfortune, like being nonmagical was a kind of deficiency. Not the kindest of names, I know, but I wanted the etymology to be realistic because I'm obsessive about what I add to the Harry Potter fandom and making it as realistic to the story as possible. The form is both singular and plural because I don't know how to properly decline Hindi.
And, as always, feel free to use the term "jyesh" in any of your creative works as long as you give credit to me. Anyways, just a peek into all the weird research I do for this story.