Chapter Text
He’s working with Nightwing for the first time in weeks, and he’s not happy about it. Dick should be safe at home with Tim—Chemo just happened. Bruce thought he was dead. Tim almost was dead. Jason isn’t dead anymore, and that’s not—that’s not a good thing. He’s—he’s not Jason anymore. He tried to kill Tim. He laughed when they both saw Bludhaven go up, when they thought Dick was there, was dead.
Whatever came home wearing his face, this isn’t Jason. Which means Bruce has two sons left, and they’ve both nearly died this month. Tim is too injured to be out right now, but Dick—
He doesn’t need to be here. He needs to be home, with his recently-orphaned, recently-nearly-murdered little brother, recuperating. Batgirl will be here any minute to back Batman up, and yeah, he wants his daughter to be safe, too, but Cass didn’t know Jason before, hasn’t had any run-ins with him yet, and didn’t lose anyone she knew or cared about when Chemo hit Bludhaven. She is definitely the least emotionally compromised member of their family or their team right now, the two of them can handle this, and Dick needs to go home.
Dick is refusing to go home. They’re fighting a newbie, some sort of magician targeting a cancer research facility.
They don’t get a lot of magicians in Gotham, and Bruce has no idea what they’re dealing with here. Barbara was probably right, they probably should have called Zatanna, but he—no one outside of the Bats knows yet that the Red Hood is Jason Todd. And he needs to keep it that way, needs to make sure nothing tarnishes Jason’s memory while he searches for a way to fix what’s come back. He can’t—it has to be fixable. It has to be. But he doesn’t see how, not when he tried to kill Tim, and nearly succeeded.
Maybe Bruce isn’t any more fit to be out tonight than Dick is. He doesn’t—now isn’t the time to be thinking about Jason, he isn’t watching, he doesn’t warn him in time, doesn’t even notice anything is wrong until Dick shouts. And he can’t—he can’t lose another son, it isn’t—it isn’t -
Everything goes black.
-
Bruce wakes up to his phone ringing, and fumbles around in the dark to find it. He knocks it off the bedside table and has to feel around on the floor for it—by the time he gets it he’s lost the call, but it starts ringing again almost immediately.
“Bruce?” Dick says as soon as he pushes the talk button. “Bruce, are you there?”
“I’m here.”
“I woke up in my apartment. In Bludhaven.”
They had been—right. The magician. “I’m in bed at home,” Bruce reports. But that’s where he’s supposed to be, aside from the fact he doesn’t remember anything after seeing the magician start some sort of light show. Dick’s apartment doesn’t exist anymore.
“Bruce?”
It’s been too long since he’s said anything. Dick sounds like he’s panicking—of course he is. The last few weeks have been a nightmare. “Get to the manor as soon as you can. We’ll figure it out, Dick.”
He gets dressed and goes downstairs, even though the sun is just starting to rise, and he wouldn’t be up for hours yet on a normal morning. No one else is awake. He gets the coffee started and tries—it’s hard to think, which might be because he’s barely gotten any sleep—it was nearly dawn when they were fighting the magician—or might be for some more concerning reason. Concussion? Under a spell?
“You’re up early,” Alfred says when he comes into the kitchen.
“Call from Dick woke me. What’s the date?”
“The 23rd.”
Yesterday was the 8th.
“I’m going to need a month and year, too.”
Alfred raises his eyebrows, but tells him.
Yeah. That’s not good. “I think I fought a magician with time travel powers last night.”
“Oh dear.”
“Yeah. Where’s Tim?”
“At home, I would assume.”
Right. Tim’s not—Jay’s been dead for a few months. Tim’s not even Robin yet, officially. Still training. Still living with his parents. Not—not Bruce’s son, yet.
“Cassandra?” He asks.
“I’m afraid I don’t know who that is.”
Of course he doesn’t. This—this is bad.
“I need to call Zatanna.”
-
Zatanna seems uncharacteristically irritable when Bruce calls her, and it takes him a minute to remember they weren’t on good terms, at this time. He wasn’t on good terms with any of the Justice League—he’d been reckless and excessively violent and more antisocial than usual. He’d been mourning. His son had been dead, and he’s not—he’s not sure how to feel about the Jason that’s come back to him, but it’s devastating to be back in a world with no Jason in it.
Dick is home by the time Zatanna gets there. The house feels empty—better with Dick back, but still so empty. Tim and Cass should be here.
“It’s not reversible,” Zatanna reports eventually. “Your magician basically hit the rewind button on the entire universe, and you kept the memories because of proximity. The future—hasn’t happened yet. I can’t send you there.”
That’s—they can’t—it doesn’t matter. Bruce needs—he needs to focus. The magician. They have to find and stop the magician.
“So our evil magician reversed time to…cure cancer?” Dick asks.
Right. They’d been wondering why someone was targeting—“We can’t be certain that was the goal. We still need to—”
“Bruce. Bludhaven is—Chemo hasn’t happened. We can stop Chemo from happening. And Jason—”
Jason. They have no idea how long he’s been alive, or how he came—
“I need to call Clark.”
-
“You want me to x-ray the grave to make sure Jason’s still in it.”
“Yes.”
Clark frowns, and uses one of his comforting-victims voices to say, “Bruce, we talked about this. Grief is—”
“This is different. Clark, please.”
Sighing, he lowers his glasses and looks down at the grave.
“He’s there, Bruce. He looks exactly like he did when we buried him. He—”
Clark drops his glasses, going white. He vanishes in a blur, reappearing several seconds later with an armload of shovels. “Dig.”
“Clark?”
“He’s breathing.”
Bruce digs. Clark digs faster. Within a few minutes they can hear thumping and panicked noises from below—did Bruce actually manage to get sent back in time to the exact day his son came to life? How—what is he—
“Jason,” Clark says, because somehow Clark is the one not panicking in this situation, even though Bruce is the one who knew Jason would come back. “Jason, you need to stay calm, all right? Your dad and I are working to get you out. You need to hold still until we get there—I don’t want you to hurt yourself more.”
More? Bruce wonders. And then the dirt is clear and Clark is tearing the lid off the coffin, and Jason—Jason—is flying into his arms, and it only takes a few seconds to realize he still has every injury he died with.
Bruce lets go. “Get him to the hospital. I need to see if Zatanna’s still inside.”
Zatanna is, talking with Alfred, since Dick apparently ran out at the same time Bruce did.
“Jason is alive and Clark is taking him to the hospital and we need to meet them there. No, I haven’t lost my mind, but if I have taking me to the hospital is probably a good idea anyway. Meet me at the car—I’m finding Dick.”
Dick is in his bedroom, just getting off a phone call.
“Bruce,” he says. “Bruce, they’re alive. They’re all alive.”
“So is Jason. We need to go.”
Bruce is just about to start the car when Clark reappears.
“Bruce needs to come with me. The rest of you can catch up.”
They’ve flown halfway to the hospital before Bruce registers that Clark is still Clark—he hasn’t even changed into his suit. They land on the roof, and take the elevator down to the emergency room entrance.
“Is he—”
“He’s been asking for you. But it’s—it’s bad, Bruce. They’re about to bring him into surgery, but I want him to see you first. In case—”
In case he doesn’t make it. But he will. He will; he has to. He was alive last night, and last night was also the future. So he’ll be fine.
He’s in a wheeled hospital bed still in his funeral suit, covered in blood and dirt, and Bruce forgets all about the nightmare the last month of his life has been, and goes to hug his son. It’s less than a minute—not long enough to even try to have a conversation—before the doctors rush him away.
He’s still in the first few minutes of what will be a several hour surgery when the others arrive, and Clark and Zatanna, both still in civilian clothes, move to a far corner of the room to have a whispered conversation. Bruce focuses on assuring Dick and Alfred that Jason will be all right, even though he has absolutely no idea whether or not that’s true. The Jason of the future is certainly not all right. Bruce still has no idea how he came back, or to what extent he is still himself.
The Red Hood’s DNA was a match for Jason, and he seemed to have his memories. But Jason would never have done the things Red Hood did. So Bruce can’t get his hopes up. Not yet.
Clark and Zatanna stay. Clark doesn’t ask any more questions about why Bruce wanted him to look at the grave, so Zee must have filled him in on the time travel situation. As soon as their group is left alone in Jason’s room, without any doctors, Bruce bombards her with questions.
“What brought him back? Is he still himself? Missing anything? Possessed? Does he—”
“Bruce. I don’t know. I’m not going to do any magic while he’s in a medically induced coma.”
“Right. That makes sense.”
“I need to head home, but I’ll swing by his grave first, okay? I don’t think it was magic that brought him back, though. You and Clark were both there when it happened, too, and there’s no magical residue on any of you.”
“All right. Thanks, Zee.”
Clark leaves a few minutes later. It’s another couple hours before Alfred convinces Bruce and Dick to go home, insisting that he be the one to spend the night in Jay’s hospital room—only one guest is allowed overnight.
There’s no talk of Batman and Nightwing tonight—neither of them remembers this time clearly enough that rushing right into crime-fighting is safe. They’ll need to do a lot of research to get caught up first.
The cave is empty when they get back, which is worrying since it’s long past the time Bruce remembers Tim coming to train most nights when he was living with his parents.
“I’m with my parents,” Tim says when Bruce calls to check on him. “You said—you said we could skip training, since they’ll only be here a few days.”
“Right. Of course.”
“Did something happen? Do you need me?”
“No. I’m sorry, Tim. Have fun with your parents. I’ll see you on—” He pauses, realizing suddenly that he has no idea what day of the week it is.
“Thursday,” Tim prompts, sounding concerned.
“Right. I’ll see you on Thursday.”
He wants to see Tim now, see for himself that he’s whole and healthy and safe. Last time he saw his youngest son, Tim was bruised and bandaged and in bed, still reeling from the sudden death of his parents when he was beaten half to death by his undead foster brother.
But Tim’s not his youngest son anymore. Tim will never be his son again, not really, because Bruce can prevent his parents’ deaths this time.
So. He’ll wait until Thursday.
Dick has to go back to Bludhaven—he has work in the morning, now that his job and his city exist again. And the house is so empty. Dick’s been living back at the manor since Chemo, but now he has his own place again, and Tim and Cass aren’t even his kids, and Alfred—
Shit. Cass. He’s a horrible father—how did he forget about his daughter for an entire day? He calls Barbara.
“Is Jason all right?” she asks as soon as she answers the phone, because Dick called to fill her in on the resurrection while they were at the hospital.
“He’s—stable. Alfred is with him now. I need you to find someone for me. It’s urgent.”
“Sure. Name, birthdate, physical description?”
Cassandra didn’t have a name when they met her. They still don’t know her real birthday. “No name or birthdate, but she’d be about sixteen. Asian. Brown eyes, black hair.” How tall was she when they met? How many months from now was that? “About 5’4”, or shorter. Um, distinguishing scars.” What would she have definitely had already by this time? “She has scarring from a bullet wound on her left shoulder. Her right pinky is crooked—it broke and didn’t heal right. She has a burn mark on the back of her right thigh, and a thin, three inch long scar at the back of her neck from a knife.”
“Last known location?”
Gotham, six blocks from the cancer research facility. “I have no idea,” he says.
“All right, I’ll work on it. But Jason’s paperwork—”
“I’ll handle the paperwork. This girl needs to be your top priority right now.”
“All right,” Barbara says again, instead of objecting to being bossed around—she’s probably making allowances because his dead son came back to life this morning. “Who is she?”
“Someone who needs our help. She—” Oh, right. That’s an important detail for tracking her down. “Her parents are Lady Shiva and David Cain.”
“Yikes, that’s not gonna be a happy childhood. I’ll do my best. Let me know when I can visit Jay at the hospital?”
“I will. Thank you, Barbara.”
She hangs up, and he should go to bed. He knows he should. It’s been a very long day. But he can’t imagine sleeping in this empty house, so he gets started on Jay’s paperwork. The hospital is discrete, but it will only be a few days before the news breaks, and he needs to be ready. He just has to keep it a secret for long enough to tell everyone who deserves to hear personally. The Justice League, the Titans, Leslie, Lucius, Tim. Which means the news can’t break until after Thursday.
-
Dick and Bruce catch up on the current criminal element in Gotham and Bludhaven as quickly as they can. Alfred has all but moved into the hospital. Bruce and Dick visit, but it’s not—it’s a miracle, but Jason hasn’t woken up yet, and they don’t know if he’s—if it’s really Jason. The way they left Tim, in the future—Bruce can’t hope. Not yet.
It takes far too long for Thursday night to come. As soon as Tim walks into the cave Bruce is wrapping his arms around him and kissing the top of his head.
“You’re being weird,” Tim says as soon as Bruce lets go. “Have you been out already tonight? Did you get drugged?”
“No. I just—” I’m so happy to see you, so glad you’re uninjured, you’re my son and three days away from you is much too long. “Jason woke up in his coffin. He’s—he’s alive.”
That explains uncharacteristic physical affection, right?
“Oh. Um. Wow. Can I meet him?”
“Not yet.” Not ever; he nearly killed you. “He came back with all the injuries he died with, and he’s still in the hospital.”
“Oh. Okay. I guess I’ll—”
Dick gets in just then, and immediately goes to hug Tim, too.
“Okay, what is with you guys?”
“I can’t be happy to see my little brother?”
Tim flinches back like he’s been slapped. He’s—this is still the earliest days of his training. He’s barely even interacted with Dick, and Bruce is still holding him at a distance. He’s not their family; he’s a child they send home to an empty house every night.
“Your little brother is in the hospital. I’m going home.”
“What about training?” Bruce asks.
“Jason’s alive. You don’t need me anymore.”
Bruce absolutely does. “Stay for training. Please.”
Tim hesitates for much too long. “Fine. But the next person to hug me is getting a tox screen.”
He goes to the far end of the cave to start his warm-up stretches, clearly wanting to put as much distance as possible between them.
“Sorry,” Dick says quietly. “I fucked that up.”
“I did the exact same thing before you got here.”
Neither of them is at their best right now. It’s all just been so much. Dick, especially, with Chemo. He’s just undergone an incredibly traumatic experience. And now the event itself has been erased from history, but Dick still experienced it. Everyone he knows in Bludhaven is alive, but he remembers their deaths, and from Bruce can tell, from the too-brief times they’re spending together, he’s cycling rapidly between depression and euphoria. It’s concerning. Everything is concerning right now. Jason hasn’t woken up yet, and they haven’t been able to find Cassandra.
“We’ll figure this out,” Bruce tells Dick. “We will.”
-
When the news breaks that Jason Todd is alive and comatose in the hospital, Bruce leans more heavily on the Brucie persona than he has in years, drawing on his very real confusion and horror when he heard sounds coming from the grave. (He neglects to mention that he was already halfway through digging up the coffin at the time.) No one questions the story. Well, no one questions that Brucie is telling the true story to the best of his abilities. They have the destroyed grave site, and several witnesses describing Bruce Wayne and an unknown friend coming to the emergency room covered in mud, along with an even more filthy, severely injured Jason still wearing his funeral suit. Bruce pays close attention to speculation on what brought Jason back, hoping that someone will come up with a brilliant explanation he hasn’t considered. No one has, yet.
-
They’ve been back in time for a week when the Joker is killed in his cell in Arkham. The security feed shows a woman materializing in the cell, and the Joker falling to the ground, dead, seconds later. She never touches him.
“So our evil magician rewound time to cure cancer and kill the Joker?” Dick says.
“Apparently.”
“Okay. Anti-cancer. Anti-Joker. That narrows it down to the entire world except for Harley Quinn.”
“I’ll take Harley off the suspect list.”
They have very little to go on, here. Bruce has put out an alert for any breakthroughs in cancer research, but they weren’t at the facility for long enough to find out what was taken, and they’ve never seen their suspect’s face uncovered.
“Zee’s going to check the body and the cell for any clues,” Bruce says. “See if Barbara notices anything interesting on the footage?”
“Yeah, we’ll talk about it tonight. I haven’t—this is the first time I’ll actually see her since coming back, and I’m having, um. Sort of a situation.”
“What kind of situation?”
“I don’t remember if we’ve started dating yet.”
That is a little awkward. They’ve only told Alfred, Clark, and Zatanna about the time travel situation. They might need to consider telling Barbara as well.
“Hopefully she’ll make it obvious when you see her.”
“Maybe. It’s still pretty new, if we are. We wouldn’t have gotten to the point with, like, pet names or lots of touching or anything unambiguous like that.”
“If you’re not dating yet, tonight’s as good a time as any to start.”
“Maybe. I don’t know. This whole thing is just weird.”
“Remember to ask her about Cass?”
“I will.”
-
It’s three days after the Joker dies that Jason wakes up. Alfred is there. He’s made it clear that he feels Bruce and Dick should be spending more time at the hospital. He doesn’t understand. Bruce doesn’t want him to understand, doesn’t want him to know what his miraculously alive grandson has done (will do? Would have done?) to keep Bruce and Dick from being too optimistic now.
Bruce is wary. But he still visits for a few hours every day, and he still rushes to the hospital as soon as he gets the call from Alfred, walking out of a board meeting he can’t remember the reason for.
Jason is sitting up when he gets there, although not under his own power—it seems to be mostly the adjustable bed. He’s even more banged up than Tim was before they came back, and at least Tim was—Jay’s awake, but he’s clearly not fully lucid. He can’t answer any of the doctor’s concussion-test questions—not just wrong answers; he isn’t speaking at all, just staring at her blankly. Bruce doesn’t get any time alone with him before the doctors are trying to take him away for more tests.
Trying being the operative word. The only signs of life he’s shown so far are blinking and turning his head slightly, but as soon as he can’t see Bruce he panics, doing his best to pull away from the nurses despite being injured in about a hundred different ways. “Bruce! Bruce!”
Bruce rushes across the room, shoving the nurses aside. “It’s okay, Jay. I’m here. I’m right here. I need you to calm down, okay? You’re going to hurt yourself more. I promise everything is going to be okay. We don’t have to do the scans right now.”
Jason doesn’t answer. He’s shaking in Bruce’s arms. He’s so small—Bruce forgot how small he was. He came back so big.
“It’s okay, Jay. It’s okay. I’m here, Alfred’s here, and Dick is on his way.”
“Mr. Wayne,” one of the nurses says, sounding apologetic, “we really do need—”
“You’re not going to be putting a panicking child into a scanner—you’ll have to sedate him, anyway. You might as well wait until he’s worn himself out; it won’t take long. I want as much time as I can get with him while he’s awake.”
They maneuver Jason back into the bed and finally, finally leave him alone with Bruce and Alfred.
Jay’s holding on to Bruce’s jacket with the few fingers that aren’t splinted. He’s still shaking, and his eyes look empty and far away. He doesn’t respond to anything either of them says, but every time Bruce moves his grip on the jacket tightens. It’s utterly impossible to reconcile this boy with the one who decapitated eight men and nearly murdered Tim.
How did he come back? What changes between now and then?
By the time Dick gets down from Bludhaven he’s already out again, without saying a word besides Bruce’s name.
It’s four days before he wakes up again, and Dick and Zatanna both make it to the hospital, this time.
It’s difficult to tell exactly how aware Jason is of what’s going on right now, but he seems wary of Zee, flinching away when she tries to touch him.
“There’s nothing obvious,” she says after a few minutes. “I still don’t think magic brought him back. He doesn’t—I suppose if he was also in the blast radius of the spell—but no, that wouldn’t explain how he came back your first time around. There’s nothing missing that I can see, and definitely nothing that doesn’t belong. We’ll know more when he feels better.” She pauses. “He will feel better, won’t he?”
“He will,” Bruce says, and leaves it at that. He and Dick have agreed that no one needs to know about Jason’s murderous rampage until there’s some evidence it’s about to happen again.
Zatanna leaves. Bruce climbs into bed with Jason, pulling him close, and Dick doodles on the cast on his right leg. Alfred starts fiddling with the hospital food Jason hasn’t touched.
“Recovery timeline?” he asks. It’s the first direct question he’s had about the future, and Bruce can’t answer it.
“I don’t know. We didn’t find out he was alive until long after this. I have no idea how he got out of the coffin in our timeline, or what happened to him between then and coming home.”
“He didn’t tell you?”
“We’d just found out he was alive when we got sent back,” Dick lies, “and we didn’t have a chance to really talk yet.”
They had plenty of chances to talk. Jason had elected to blow things up and shoot people instead of talking. And Alfred does not need to know that.
Barbara calls him just as Jason is falling asleep that night.
“I found the girl. She snuck off a cargo plane at the Gotham airport this morning. Hasn’t shown up on a camera since.”
The three minutes it takes for Jason’s breathing to even out and his grip on Bruce’s shirt to loosen are agony. He’s not going to run out on his catatonic son before he falls asleep, but Cass. Cass.
Dick is spending the night at the hospital tonight—he’s not working tomorrow, and they like to have someone there at all times, now that Jay’s waking up. Alfred will be coming home in his own car soon. But Bruce has to get home right now, has to change into the bat suit and go looking for his daughter.
Why is she even in Gotham? She’s months ahead of schedule.
Tim calls when he’s about five minutes from the manor.
“Someone broke into the cave. I got upstairs and locked down all house entrances, but they’re down there now, unsupervised.”
“Okay. You did a good job, Tim. I’m almost home. Just wait for me upstairs.”
He hopes—he hopes—Cassandra is in Gotham early. And there aren’t many people in the world who can let themselves into the cave. She was coming to back them up at the research facility—how close was she when the spell went off?
Tim waits upstairs—he’s barely trained, and it really could be anyone down here. But as soon as Bruce reaches the bottom of the stairs, Cass is there, flinging herself into his arms.
“You remember?” he checks when he sets her down.
She nods.
“It’s just you, me, and Dick, so the others won’t know you. We’ve only told Alfred about the time travel. You’re all right? You’ve been safe? We’ve been looking for you, but Jason woke up in his grave, so there’s been a lot to handle there.”
Cass nods again. “Safe. I—words. Harder now.”
“That might be because of how we came back—I’ll ask Zatanna in the morning. But as I understand it, we didn’t actually come back in time; time itself reversed, but because of our proximity to the spell caster we retained our memories. So your future memories now exist in a brain and body that haven’t really learned to speak yet.”
Cass frowns, and Bruce goes back over what he’s said. That was way too many large words way too quickly for future Cassandra, never mind one whose language processing may have been worsened by the time travel.
“I’ll explain better after I talk to Zee,” he says. “Do you want to meet Tim?”
“Yes.”
He has no idea how to make these introductions. He doesn’t—he could tell Tim the truth, about the time travel. But he doesn’t want a twelve year old boy to know there was ever even a possibility of a world where his parents died and Robin tried to kill him in the same week.
“Tim,” he says. “This is Cassandra. My daughter.” Because whatever story he comes up with here, he can’t pretend she’s not his daughter. Not when he’s already lost the right to call Tim his son.
“Oh. I—I didn’t know you had a daughter.”
“It’s a…recent development.”
Cass takes Tim’s hand and pulls him back toward the cave. “Sib—sib—brother-sister bonding.”
Tim casts a baffled look at Bruce, who shrugs. “If Cass says you’re her brother, I’m not arguing. You kids have fun—I need to meet the Commissioner at the police station in half an hour.”
He doesn’t want to leave, not when Cass just got here, but he doesn’t know how to bond with Tim, right now, and he thinks she’ll make more progress if he’s not around.
When he gets home the cave is empty; he goes upstairs and finds Tim and Cass both asleep in front of the tv. He switches it off and tosses a blanket over them; he’s absolutely not waking them up. He’s been trying for days to figure out how to convince Tim to spend the night. This works.
“I take it we’ll need to set up another bedroom?” Alfred says.
“And forge a whole lot of paperwork. Hard to adopt a kid without a birth certificate—we learned that the first time around.”
“I see. Are there any other major developments you’d care to warn me about?”
Jason might be evil. “Nothing comes to mind.”
“Do please keep me posted. I suppose there’s a specific bedroom you’d like me to put her in?”
-
“I’m sorry,” Tim says in the morning. “I didn’t mean to fall asleep here.”
“It’s fine. In fact, I’d rather you slept here more often—I worry about you, in that house alone.”
“Oh. Um. Okay.”
Dick comes in before they can have a proper conversation about it. Which means it’s Bruce’s turn to go to the hospital and sit with Jason. And it’s not that he doesn’t want to be with Jason, but he spent several hours with him yesterday, and he’s only had a few minutes with Cassandra.
“Cass!” Dick says, hugging her. “Bruce told me you got in last night. And Tim! I’m meeting Babs for brunch; you guys wanna come?”
Cass nods.
“I don’t want to be—um. In the way?”
Integrating Tim into the family is not going well so far, likely because it’s—from his perspective—very sudden, and he’s mostly just confused.
“You won’t be,” Dick says. “Babs thinks you’re great.”
“Timmy?” Cass asks, pleadingly.
He frowns. Cass is one of the few people that can get away with calling him that, but maybe not when he’s only known her for a few hours. “Okay,” he says.
“All right, I’m past due at the hospital. I’ll see you all tonight.”
Dick has wandered off to let Babs know about the kids; Bruce hugs Cass before leaving, and resists the urge to hug Tim, settling for a hand on his shoulder instead.
-
Jason wakes up in the last hour of Bruce’s shift at the hospital, extending it by several more hours. They can’t tell if he even recognizes Dick and Alfred right now, but he definitely knows Bruce, and doesn’t like being separated from him.
It’s fine; Bruce brought one of Jay’s favorite books in case this happened. He’s always liked being read to when he wasn’t feeling well, and it should get them through a few hours, at least. But first he has to speak with the head neurologist.
He talks a lot about brain damage, about concussions and smoke inhalation and oxygen deprivation, about all the unanswered questions that come with Jay’s unprecedented rise from the grave. What it seems to come down to is that there’s no quick fix—or any guaranteed fix at all—for his current catatonic state.
Bruce squeezes Jason’s hand and pretends not to be relieved; he’s in no condition to be murdering anyone right now.
The doctor moves on to experimental treatments, but Bruce brushes him off immediately. Even aside from the murder issue—this is a miracle. Bruce isn’t going to risk it on anything experimental.
There’s only one thing that really matters right now.
“When can he come home?”
-
By the time Jason is asleep and Bruce can go home, leaving Alfred at the hospital, Dick and Cass have already gone out for the night. (Cassandra is out of the loop and doesn’t even have a proper suit yet, but she’s promised to stick close to Bruce or Dick the whole time. She’s spent the last two weeks horribly confused and alone, traveling across the world with no resources to get to a home where she wasn’t even sure anyone would know her, and now she’s a stranger to three of the most important people in her life. If she thinks patrolling will give her a sense of normalcy, she can patrol.)
Bruce spends an hour or so with Tim before joining them. It’s not long before he sent Tim abroad for further training, before; he’s not inclined to let him out of his sight for nearly that long, this time, and they have a familial relationship to build.
“Do you like Cass?” Bruce asks as they work.
He nods. “She’s nice. I just—um. I don’t understand why I’m here? If you have a daughter who’s already trained, and Jason is alive—you don’t need me to be Robin.”
“Do you still want to be Robin?”
“Jason is alive,” he repeats.
“Jason is very badly hurt. Robin’s not on the table for him right now.”
“Oh.”
“I think you’ll make an amazing Robin, Tim. And even if you weren’t Robin, you’re here because I want you to be here. Because you’re a great kid and I like spending time with you.”
“Really?”
“Really.”
“I want to be Robin,” he says, all in a rush, as if Bruce might take it back.
“Good.” Bruce looks reluctantly over at the clock. “I should go help y—help Dick and Cassandra.”
He’d almost said “your siblings”—Tim’s not ready for that.
Tim nods. “I have to go home—I have homework.”
“All right. We’ll talk more tomorrow.”
-
“Tim go home?” Dick asks, when the three of them come home to an empty cave.
“Said he had homework.”
“On a Saturday night?”
Bruce shrugs. That does seem a bit unlikely , now that he’s thinking about it.
“I want him back. Can’t we just accuse his parents of neglect?”
“Not yet. If I take him from his parents without convincing him it’s the best plan first, he’ll just resent me.”
“We couldn’t convince him the first time around. And he already thinks we’re acting weird.”
“I know. Cass, what do you think?”
“Miss them.”
Tim, Barbara, Alfred—Bruce can’t even imagine how difficult it would be to be a stranger to the people you love. Alfred, at least, knows about the time travel, and will try to be considerate of her feelings, but he’s still mostly focused on Jason.
“I’m sorry. It’ll get better. They loved you—they’ll love you again as soon as they know you.”
“I’ll talk to Babs about spending time with you,” Dick offers. “Something about needing female role models or something. She seemed to like you, this morning. Tim, too.”
“Cass is very likeable,” Bruce says. “Tim’s a little insecure, I think, about having you here—he feels unnecessary. But he did say he liked you. I think it will be important for you two to bond—Tim’s not used to me and Dick being very friendly with him at this point, and he doesn’t—doesn’t trust it. I think you’ll have an easier time connecting with him.”
Cass nods. Bruce moves on to the other pressing matter at hand.
“We’re looking at three weeks, at least, before they’ll even consider letting Jay come home from the hospital. Given his current state, I need to plan to spend at least seven to ten hours there each day. Alfred will likely want to spend most of his time there, too, and Dick has work. So Cass, you can stay here if you want, or you can come with us. I would like you to at least meet Jay in the next couple days, though.”
He’s a little nervous about that relationship—Cass really only knows Jason as the man who tried to kill her little brother. But he hasn’t done that yet. (How can they make sure he never does that?)
“Tomorrow,” Cass offers.
“Good. I think we should all spend a good part of the day there, assuming he’s awake. Before Dick has to go back to work on Monday.”