The buzzer sounded off the bricks-papered halls of the apartment complex. I adjusted, shoulder straps of backpack digging into skin. Clammy hands smearing against jeans. The door squeaked open before I was ready.
Starfire stood in the doorway, her turban towel wrapped around her pretty little hand and her pink bathroom robe heating me up. Her green eyes snapped a fraction wider to take in my bedraggled black hair and red leather jacket, which had brighter days ahead of it. "Hello?" Her voice was cautiously friendly, tilting her head like a curious bird. "I don't think we've met."
My throat closed. *Holy crap, she's here.* The urge to dissect the whole history with her—every Teen Titans comic book, every cartoon series—overwhelmed me like a wave through my body. I clenched my fists in my pockets, fingernails digging crescent moons into my palms. "Tim Drake," I said, attempting to be level. "Dick Grayson. Nightwing. I was wondering if you knew where he retired."
Her expression blanked. The warm curiosity gave way to a slash of fear that shone like glass. Her posture shifted infinitesimally, shoulders squaring, chin jerking up. "Nightwing?" The word was strange on her lips, heavy with distrust. "How do you know him? That name? That pseudonym?" Her eyes narrowed, her gaze sweeping my face with laser precision. "He... he no longer talks about that life. To anyone."
I pressed on, desperation creeping into my tone. "Please. It's life or death." The lie was bitter, but necessary. Darkseid's power waited at the edge of my mind, a silent, approving presence. "You were his teammate. His friend." I let desperation shatter my voice, a well-controlled quaver. "You must know something. Anything."
Starfire's gaze wavered for half a beat, her expression furrowing into genuine worry before her face hardened once more. She truly was bewildered. "I... I don't know," she spoke, apologetic words escaping her lips. Her fingers clutched the doorframe. "He vanished. Severed all contacts. For his sanity... and his freedom." Her eyes searched mine, that extraterrestrial intensity piercing. "Why do you want him? Who are you?"
I let the stunned silence hang, slumping in habitual despair on my shoulders. "Nobody," I sighed, looking away before she could see the smile fighting onto my lips. The hallway air was colder now, alive with her confusion and mine with wicked satisfaction. *Perfect.* The performance had been perfection – the shaking voice, the begging plea. She'd bitten.
My sneakers squeaked across the linoleum as I ran for the stairs, my back searing with the weight of her stare. She didn't shriek. Didn't yell after me. Simply remained in her doorway, torn between chasing after a teenager in on Nightwing's top-secret identity, or honoring Dick's vanishing act. Her uncertainty was preferable to any reaction she could have had. *Good.*
Three flights down, the air thick with mildew and bargain-hall cuisine, I stopped finally. Pressing myself against the graffiti-smeared wall, I gave the grin its full rein. Starfire. Up close. Her confusion, her protector reflex stepping forward and locking—it was greater than I had expected. The comics had not prepared me for her, the raw, alien presence that emanated from her, the worlds of worry in her eyes. So much power, helpless in the face of a well-spun lie.
**
The subway rattled my feet as I headed downtown. Through the grimy window, Gotham blurred by into a neon and rain-soaked ribbon of street. Haly's Circus. The words pulsed in my brain, a calling card Dick couldn't resist. He was that weak.
In the recesses of my head, a presence came to life – vast, cold, ancient. Not words, but an impression: satisfaction, approval, crushing certainty of stone on stone. Darkseid. He'd found me the moment I awoke in this twisted reality, a thirteen-year-old stranger buried under comic book knowledge no kid ever should've been privy to. Had all authority. Purpose.
What else could I do? Denial would have been oblivion. So I embraced the Omega. Became his instrument. His eyes.
The train shrieked through a bend. My face flashed in the black glass – wide eyes, too-pale face. Reminded me of the first time He spoke. Not with noise, but by unmaking the screaming terror inside me. Replacing it with glacial conviction.
Scary? More. Like looking into the heart of a star dying. The comic books had it laughably wrong. Darkseid wasn't as much a villain; He was entropy incarnate. Unadulterated. Ruthless. And He picked me.
My child's interest in Apokolips was a twisted joke now. That sweet villain poster on my wall? It mocked me. Devotion wasn't a choice; it was gravity pulling me into His crushing orbit.
I bunched the flesh of my hand into impossible strength. Effortless. Limitless. Each point of pressure, each group of nerves mapped in my brain like blueprints. Krav Maga? Muay Thai? Amateur hour. I'd take down almost any elite blindfolded before they got halfway through their first snarl.
The knowledge flooded like honeyed poison – centuries of fighting ability condensed into a thirteen-year-old frame. And the charm. oh, the charm was the most advanced. Wonder Woman? Diana Prince would be utterly outmatched if I actually opened the floodgates.
A lean of the head, a shattered smile formed to send back her own reflection, a quiver of vulnerability hiding the Omega Sanction bubbling below. She'd see nobility, not destruction. That's the terrifying splendor of His gift: glimpsing humans to the very marrow of their bones. Anticipating the fissures before they even begin.
Subway doors opened at the Bleake Island station. Not Gotham proper. Wrong. Different. Instead of dirty platforms and sputtering fluorescents, I stepped out into steaming twilight. The air reeked with the smell of wet dirt, diesel fumes, and something else... popcorn? Cotton candy? Sickly sweet, artificial.
Where it ran, not the city's expected blight but a vast, neglected park was entombed in creeping woods. Vines carpeted dirt roadways that wound between massive oaks draped in Spanish moss. Haly's Circus was not there among warehouses. It was at the rear boundary of the park, its tired-out big top nothing more than a distant, gaunt outline in the bruised purple skyline.
A lone, creaking neon sign – HALY'S – buzzed furiously, casting long, jumping shadows out across trodden grass.
I walked quietly through the wet undergrowth, boots crunching in the yielding earth. Darkseid's influence heightened my perception: the hysterical chirring of crickets, the distant roar of generators, the acrid sting of cheap kerosene lanterns.
Then, more shrill sounds cut through the twilight: raucous cries, the clang of metal on metal from a cage door slamming, a high-pitched shriek abruptly ended. Ahead, in a circle around a clump of garishly painted trailers careening drunkenly on their axles, the blue and red glare of Gotham PD cruisers defined the scene with gaudy strobes.
Two individuals were shoved roughly into the back of a squad car. One massive, shoulders straining against tawdry fabric of his sequined shirt – Samson. The other, tiny and struggling fiercely, kicking futilely at the air – I couldn't even remember his name. Their faces were masks of stunned fury under the flashing lights.
Just as it happened. The thought wasn't my own. Darkseid's own cold self-assurance flowed through me, a confirmation beyond remembrance. This bleak small sabotage plan – accidents designed to destroy Haly's worth, clearing the way for a predator takeover – was the same desperate action from the comics.
The same element that made it possible for Dick Grayson to have faith in Tim Drake. History repeated, twisted into an economic. My arrival wasn't coincidence; it was necessary, planned necessity. The old Tim Drake's method, now my method, riddled with the same cheap desperation.
The only deviation was that I had been too late for this, which meant that Dick Grayson was left to figure out what was going on entirely by himself.
The squad cars swerved off, rubber vomiting mud, abandoning the circus ground shrouded in night and the stench of kerosene. Shadows remained in the darkening around the big top – performers huddled in whispers, stagehands kicking the dirt.
There was only one outline, standing against a weathered ticket stand, head bent. Tall and broad-shouldered, with all the signs of exhausted tension even in stillness. Dick Grayson. Alone. Perfect.
Darkseid's approval hung heavy behind my eyes, pushing me forward. I melted from the edge of trees, walking broad through the deeper shadows beneath old equipment trailers. My steps were soundless on wet grass. The wet air clung, thick with loss and cheap theater makeup.
I waited ten feet back from him, behind the bulk of the booth, letting the silence wear on until his shoulders stiffened infinitesimally. He knew he was no longer alone.
"Jason Todd is dead," I said bluntly, shattering the night's buzz of quiet with an icicle of fact. No tremble, no hesitation. Just cold, brutal truth. "And you're Nightwing."
Dick Grayson turned around, faster than a human is entitled to. Wide, snapping eyes full of instant awareness closed onto mine. Fatigue was forgotten, replaced by the intensity of a predator. He didn't reach for a gun – he was the gun.
"Who in the devil's name are you?" The voice was low, menacing, free of any camouflage. His gaze raked over me – a boy in a leather jacket, standing too stiff, knowing too much. The air was tense as the smog over Gotham.
I didn't move. I flashed him a small, studied smile, the kind meant to unsettle. "Tim Drake."
I suspended the name for a beat, watching as recognition flicker dimly on his face – a name filed, maybe, in Bruce's exhaustive records. Then I anchored. "We knew one another. A long time ago. When Haly's stills flew high."
My voice softened, with manufactured nostalgia. "You were still flying with your parents. The Flying Graysons." I paused, letting the image form – the glittering costumes, the horrified gasp of the crowd. "My parents brought me. Afterwards. they wanted a picture. With the stars."
I tilted my head to one side, regarding his inquiring glare. "You placed me on your shoulders. Told I fit up there." The fact was plausible, intimate, designed to cut short suspicion and hit home at the emotional core he couldn't quite block off.
Slowly, warily, I eased the pack off my shoulder. The zipper's rasp was unnaturally loud in the strained quiet. Dick's position remained coiled, poised to strike, but his eyes tracked my hands.
I pulled out a slightly creased but hugely old photograph – the type with white, thick margins. Holding it at the corner, I extended toward him, not stepping forward.
The photograph featured a younger Dick Grayson, likely ten or eleven, beaming between his parents. John Grayson had an arm around his son's shoulders, Mary Grayson's smile radiant. And perched painfully on Dick's shoulders, grasping his hair in small fists, was a much younger version of me – likely four or five, grinning with unproblematic, unvarnished happiness.
The circus setting was unmistakable, colorful even in the worn-out photograph. Dick's breath hitched, a rasp of air. His gaze locked on the photograph, the spurt of hot suspicion momentarily drowned out by a raw wave of memory. His hands flapped, nearly reaching out to it, before knotting into fists.
"That... that was the last season," he said, the words weighed down with a years-old sorrow yet unshed. "Before..."
He looked up at me, the haunted vulnerability vanishing as suddenly as it had come, to be replaced by the cold glint of Nightwing. "Fine," he whispered, his voice low and threatening. "You knew me then. Good. That doesn't tell me anything."
He moved forward deliberately, invading my space, his very presence radiating contained anger. "How do you know Nightwing? How do you know Jason Todd? How do you know he's dead?" One by one, they were hammer blows, his eyes boring into mine, searching for deceit, for weakness. "That information is locked down tighter than Arkham. Who sent you?"
I held steady, meeting his rage with a calmness foreign in my thirteen-year-old frame. "No one sent me," I said, my voice deliberately softer, younger. I flashed a moment of irritation over my face, the kind an enterprising kid would feel when adults won't see the straightforward. "I'm just... smart. Too smart, maybe."
I shrugged, a stiff little motion. "It's not magic, Dick. It's recognizing patterns. Footage analysis, public records cross-checked with police blotters, noticing things others don't." I waved my hand vaguely toward the empty circus lot. "Such as this evening. Such as Samson and Goliath carted off. Wasn't random accidents, was it? Somebody wanted Haly's deal."
I saw the flicker of shock, the reluctant concession that my reasoning bore out his own. "Surmising Nightwing? Same concept. The signs are there, if you know where to find them." I stopped, letting the implication sink in – others may look too. "But here standing, explaining? It'll take some time."
I glanced in pointed fashion around the dark, empty lot. "And it's hardly private."
Dick's eyes clashed with mine for a moment, the tension in his shoulders easing infinitesimally, yielding to wary calculation. He studied my face, the gravity I put into it, the unnerving calm beneath the boyish facade. Finally, he nodded in brief, decisive motion, the decision made.
"Alright, kid. You need privacy? Let's go." He turned, gesturing curtly in the direction of the outer fence. "My bike's this way."
He didn't waste any time, taking big, determined steps that forced me to a jog. Darkseid's cold amusement pulsed within me. The hook is set.
The black sports bike roared into life, a predator awakening in blackness. I swung up onto the pillion behind Dick, gripping the cold metal handlebars. The city flashed past, a strip of neon and blackness, Dick slicing Gotham's streets with skilled ease.
We said nothing. The wind buffeted my coat, wringing out scents of rain, fumes, and the eternal, insidious Gotham rot. I kept my eyes forward, radiating a mix of tense awe and intense focus, feeling the strained tension of Dick's posture under the thin leather of his jacket. He was gauging, probing the silence itself.
The bike plunged down, leaving behind the gritty streets we'd left and rising up through twisting roads lined with gray, dripping oaks. Cleaned-out air, chilled. And then the wrought-iron gates materialized out of the fog, looming and recognizable only from distant comic book pages. They swung open silently as we came up on them. Wayne Manor.
It loomed before us, a Gothic monolith against the battered evening sky. More imposing, more weathered than I'd pictured. Ivy was clinging stubbornly to weathered stone turrets, and gargoyles glared down with worn hostility.
The bike wheezed to a halt on the gigantic, rain-slick gravel driveway. As I kicked my leg off, warm, golden light flooded through the oak front door, out onto the steps. Alfred Pennyworth stood in the doorway, perfect in butler's attire, his face a masterpiece of polite curiosity that didn't quite hide the sharp intelligence in his eyes.
He looked at Dick's dirty face, then over at me – the surprise, rumpled teenager. "Master Dick," he greeted, the tone as smooth as vintage brandy. "And… guest?"
My breathing faltered. Alfred. The Batcave's heart, the taciturn strategist, the astringent dry humor capable of fracturing glass. Fanboy adrenaline ran high, a wild geyser ready to erupt – Ask him the time he outmaneuvered Ra's! Debate the Batmobile ejector seat specs!
Darkseid's cold presence fell instantly like a trap, petrifying the urge to rigidity. I pulled my face into a wide-eyed, slightly dazed look of interest, holding my backpack straps tightly.
"H-hi," I stuttered, letting my voice break higher, really scared but professionally faked. "It's… really big."
Alfred's sharp, scalpel-cut eyes locked on mine for that small extra fraction too long to qualify as polite. He looked at the frayed jacket, the scuffed sneakers, the too-passively calm eyes looking out from behind the nervous disguise.
"Yes, young lad," he replied, tone exactly polite, stepping aside to allow entry. "The scale can be... overawing."
His eyes shifted to Dick, an unspoken question hanging in the air heavier than the Manor dust. Dick walked by him, tension still radiating from him like body warmth.
"Alfred, this is Tim Drake," he stated, voice cutting, without warmth. He didn't look back, continuing on into the cavernous, wood-paneled entrance hall. "He knows things. Things he shouldn't. Including Jason."
Dick stopped, glanced over his shoulder just enough to see Alfred's suddenly frozen face. "And he knows me. Whereupon he said he met me at Haly's, ages ago." He waved vaguely towards me, still standing by the door. "After that? Your guess is as good as mine."
Alfred's polite façade didn't crack, but his eyes, when he turned back to me, were shards of glacial ice. He shut the enormous door with showy gentleness, the thunk echoing in the sudden quiet.
"Master Tim," he started, his cultured suavity still intact, but sharpened with a knife's edge. "Forgive an old man his cynicism, but I am very much not having fun with this specific… prank."
He stepped forward one pace, his eyes cutting through me. "The photo? A sentimental trifle, no doubt. But to use child sorrow, however sincere the recollection may be, in order to be admitted here? To intrude into affairs that have costed lives?"
He nodded slowly, a gesture of profound disappointment. "It is in very bad taste, young sir."
I returned his stare, did not blink, as the artwork fell away from my face, to be replaced with an even, unbreakable quiet.
"It's not a joke, Alfred," I went on, lowering my voice into its deeper register, artificially level for a thirteen-year-old. I glanced at Dick, who stood tense beside me, fists clenched, radiating suspicion like heat.
"I merely figured out who Nightwing is."
I hesitated, allowing the charge to dangle. "Out of Haly's, after… after your parents died." I'd chosen my words carefully, concise, without fake sympathy. "Batman showed up. To comfort you. In official terms, it was a 'community outreach gesture'."
I could see Dick flinch almost ad infinitum at the raw memory. "And then Bruce Wayne takes on the circus orphan acrobat. Batman gets a sidekick. A Robin." I waved a vague hand in the direction of Dick's dark silhouette. "Red, yellow, green? The colors of the Flying Graysons? Not by chance. A nod. A brand."
Dick's jaw snapped shut, a muscle jumping in his cheek. He half-stepped forward, his voice low and menacing. "Circumstantial. Unsubstantive."
"The quadruple flip," I answered, flat, unforgiving. "Gotham Gazette archives. 'Only three people living who can do that trick.'" I glared at him. "You were one. And Robin shows up on the scene, doing it like breathing."
I stood there, letting the silence grow, heavy with implication. "Coincidence stops there."
Dick scowled at me, the fight for this instant lost from his posture. He was caught. Not by me, but by the unescapable truth laid out before him on the page.
His gaze flicked to Alfred, hoping for something – denial, perhaps. Alfred's face was expressionless, but a fleeting glimmer of unwilling respect sliced through the chill disapproval. He nodded the barest concession. Granted.
"Okay," Dick breathed the word, his face tense with reluctant comprehension. He rubbed his hands through his hair, tension easing from anger to exhausted resignation. "The Grayson hues. The flip. Okay. It makes sense."
He glared at me once more, the suspicion cutting through to sharpness. "Jason. How?"
"It was simpler," I said, trying to sound matter-of-fact. "Robin vanishes. Nightwing pops up. Then." I left the sequence hanging. "Bruce Wayne adopts another damaged street youth. Jason Todd."
I saw Alfred's arched brow, his unspoken nod of approval. "And now there's another new Robin patrolling Gotham. Younger. Angrier."
I raised one eyebrow, a small and deliberate one. "The hypocrisy was obvious. One life in retirement, the other assumed. Bruce Wayne's charity recipients just so happened to coincidentally overlap with Batman's sidekicks." The sheer temerity of it was meant to be a slap.
Dick winced, his clenched white fists. "He was irresponsible," he growled, the words heavy with ancient guilt. "Brash. But he was good."
"He vanished," I prodded, my silence vocal, relentless. "No body. No record. Just... vanished. Like smoke." I caught sight of Dick's face coming shut, the old scar ripped open.
"And Bruce?" I let the name hang, weighted with implication. "He cracked. Gotham could feel it. Batman started to no longer hold back. Villains started winding up in traction wards, not behind bars. The Batmobile ripped up mangled metal and splintered bone."
I saw Alfred freeze, his eyes tightening. He had lived it himself – the spiral into darkness following Jason's disappearance.
"He hunted. Madly. Vengefully. Like a man possessed." I let the image take root – the Dark Knight unraveled. "That's not Batman. That's something broken."
Dick's breath was stopped. His gaze flashed from Alfred's stern affirmation to me – this too-knowing boy in Wayne Manor's deserted hallway. His gaze narrowed, no longer accusatory, but in horrified, sickening realization.
"You're not just smart," he breathed, the knowledge cold and hard biting. "You're here. In the Manor. Following Jason."
His words trailed off, the suggestion remaining thick in the air. Bruce Wayne accepts traumatized boys. Batman receives new Robins. The cycle was not to be ignored.
His eyes sliced through me, stripping away the kid in the leather jacket and into seeing the uncut potential beneath. "Bruce requires a Robin," Dick said, the words hanging, reluctant. "Someone to pull him back from the edge. Ground him."
He appraised me, not simply balancing the data available to me, but my frame, my stiffness, the disturbing ferocity in my eyes. "And you... you marched right into the pattern."
I didn't blink. Didn't feign humility. Instead, I looked him directly in the eye, the falsehood of wonder lost, replaced by a frightfully level assurance more than thirteen years old.
"I saw the need," I told him, my voice flat and unadorned. "The pattern brought me here. To him. To Gotham."
I paused, letting the fullness of it settle. "I'm ready."
They were not a boast. They were a bald statement of fact, reflected in tension that puckered under my skin, the hum of Darkseid's history through my own veins. Ready to take Jason's place in the depths. Ready to be the anchor. Ready to be Robin.
Dick eyed me for a silent, long moment. The suspicion hadn't gone away, but it was overlaid now with practical, serious calculation.
He scanned the unnerving quiet, the lack of fear, the sharp intelligence that had cut through Batman's secrecy. Then he nodded abruptly, swiftly. "Come with me."
He turned around, his step slow, and took us deeper into the Manor's vast entrance hall, between looming portraits and suits of armor. Alfred, his blank face vigilant, dropped behind me, a silent guard.
We descended. Not via a grandfather clock or a concealed panel in the library, but down a slender, businesslike service stair behind a tapestry of an exceedingly deceased Wayne ancestor.
The air was thick, cold and wet, with the smell of dust and ozone. At the bottom, Dick placed his hand on a smooth patch of rough wall. The muted thrum vibrated, and a great slab slid along with a protesting groan, opening up to a gorge of darkness seared by distant, guttering islands of light. The Batcave.
Entering was like stepping into giants' cathedral – the enormity took my breath away: vaulted ceilings lost in darkness, dripping stalactites sending water running on to the mirror-rock floor below. My sneakers rang off a metal gantry catwalk. To my left the predatory, streamlined form of the Batmobile hunched beneath spotlights, its armor glinting like obsidian.
Behind it, there were racks of suit armor guarding in glass jars – the dynasty of Batman and Robin, a melancholy museum and search. Desks hummed with holographic screens throwing blue light that shifted and the distant rumble of giant generators vibrating through the soles of my shoes.
Each thing – the smell of grease and wet rock, the chill air puckering my skin, the stark, brutal truth of it – hit me with visceral force. Awe, true and deep-seated, took precedence over Darkseid's icy presence for an instant. It's real.
Dick did not hesitate. He was already striding towards the central hub – a skyscraper console dominated by a curving bank of screens, the Batcomputer. His face aglow with light, his profile fixed in grim determination. He stabbed a series of keystrokes to bring up a holographic Gotham map overlay.
A red dot flash insistently near the docks. "He left a track," Dick growled tightly. "Subtle. Encrypted. But traceable." He moved in closer, displaying a block of apartments infamous for unfinished renovation projects. "Two-Face's new hideaway. Bruce trailed him there."
Dick ground his jaw. "He's tracking Dent by himself for three days straight. No comms. No support." The unspoken accusation hung there: He's going off the deep end again.
I watched Dick shed his jacket with easy ease, to show under it the familiar black and blue Nightwing suit. The transformation was instant – the tired tension uncoiling into rigid, lethal calm. He cinched on escrima sticks, checked over his gauntlets, motions quick and efficient.
"Stay here," he commanded, not looking at me. "Alfred will be monitoring comms."
He walked up to the Batmobile, then froze, glancing at the high-performance motorcycle standing in its shadow against the dock's constricted aisles – faster, more nimble. "Don't touch anything," he instructed it brusquely, reaching for his domino mask. Lenses snapped into place, hiding his eyes behind blank white slits.
"Specially that." He jerked his chin in the direction of a glass case against the corner wall, the faint light. Inside, untouched and unhandled since Jason went missing, sat the shiny red, yellow, and green Robin's costume. It seemed impossibly tiny on its stand in glass. "I mean it, Tim. Don't be stupid."
The Nightwing motorcycle sprang to life, a raw growl resounding through the cave. Dick did not linger to be recognized. He raced down the access tunnel, tires screeching on slick rock, vanishing into blackness like a ghost.
The silence that followed was gigantic, punctuated by the soft whisper of drips and the whine of the Batcomputer. Alfred moved wordlessly to the console, his fingers blurring across holographic keyboards, calling up feeds – traffic cams around the docks, thermals, encrypted cop talk. His demeanor was grim, his focus unbroken.