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Bruce had been having a good day. Nothing of particular note had happened, but it was past noon and the school hadn’t called about anything Damian had done yet, he and Dick had been casually texting all morning in between Dick’s gymnastics classes about pleasant and safe topics, Cassandra was staying in the Manor at the moment, and Jason had been making excellent progress in controlling the newfound strength and aggression he’d developed following an unfortunate and accidental dive into the Lazarus Pit underneath Gotham last month, and had even been able to return to attending his senior year in person this week. All of his children were safe, speaking to him, and reasonably close by, and Bruce was content.
In retrospect, that should have been his first clue that something was deeply, deeply wrong.
Just as he was finally convincing himself to dive deep into some terribly dreary spreadsheets that Lucius had sent over the previous afternoon, there was a loud thud outside of his study followed by a familiar raspy hiss that sounded suspiciously like ‘if you try to escape again so help me I will gut you like a fish and use your intestines to restrain you’. Which was an alarming enough phrase, but what made it more alarming was that the voice belonged to Jason, who as far as he knew should be sitting in his world history class right now. He furrowed his brow and was halfway to standing when the door was abruptly thrown open and Jason stepped into view.
“Hey, old man,” he drawled, leaning against the door frame with an unusual degree of stiffness. “Got something you need to address. You might want to sit down, though, this one is a doozy.”
Bruce paused, hovering awkwardly between sitting and standing. He wanted to be supportive of whatever Jason felt the need to talk to him about, but if he let cutting class go without comment it might seem like he was condoning that behavior… “and it couldn’t have waited until after school?” he decided on asking, doing his best to make his voice mildly reprimanding while still supportive.
He likely failed, because Jason just snorted derisively while inspecting his fingernails. “Little fucker figured out I was onto him, he was going to make a break for it. Anyway, I’d like to report a kidnapping,” he said, looking Bruce dead in the eyes.
Bruce tensed and straightened fully, ready to spring into action. “Who?”
“My brother.”
No— “But Damian’s supposed to be at school, they should have called me,” he sputtered out, his mind frantically racing as he tried to figure out if it was likely one of the faculty or staff at Gotham Academy might have been bribed into covering up his son going missing off of campus—nobody had called him about Jason cutting class, after all. “Wait, is it Dick? I was just texting with him, he was at work, so I’m not sure how—”
“Dickiebird and the gremlin are both fine,” Jason said, rolling his eyes. “Nah, I was talking about my other brother.”
Bruce blinked slowly, the brief flare of visceral fear fading away into an anxiously-tinged confusion. “Jaylad… you don’t… have another brother?” Unless Jason had recently uncovered another biological child of Sheila or Willis or Catherine, that was, because Bruce certainly didn’t have any children of his own unaccounted for…
“Yeah, that’s exactly what he wanted you to think,” Jason grumbled as he turned and leaned down, and then proceeded to drag an entire teenager into Bruce’s study. A gagged and bound teenager dressed in a Gotham Academy uniform, who was glowering up at Jason with furious eyes. Jason returned the glare with a viscous smirk before turning back to Bruce and gesturing down at his prisoner. “May I present Timothy Jackson Dumbass Drake-Wayne.”
Now, Bruce had always prided himself on his excellent memory, and he had absolutely zero recollections of ever adopting his deceased former neighbors’ child. An entire child was not something he would ever just forget. He grimaced, wondering if this was somehow a false memory Jason was experiencing as a result of getting dipped in the Lazarus pit while also cringing at the number of apologies he was going to have to start making, to Timothy himself as well as his current guardian and their school that Jason appeared to have abducted him from. Because there had been a kidnapping, and Jason had committed it. “Timothy, I am sorry that my son has—”
“Oh, don’t start apologizing to him, he needs to start apologizing to you, and to me, and to Dick and Cass and Alfred and Damian, and Babs and Steph, and once he’s done with the family I imagine all of his little friends will need an apology of their own, and—”
“Jason, please,” Bruce interrupted, stepping out from behind his desk so he could walk over and settle a firm hand on Jason’s shoulder. Ever since his accidental exposure to the Lazarus waters, he’d been experiencing an unprecedented growth spurt, and now nearly matched Bruce’s height, so Bruce’s arm was nearly level as he gently squeezed his son’s shoulder and looked him in the eyes. Jason was putting on a front of anger, but he could recognize the hints of fear and hurt in his eyes. Regardless of the true reasons for his actions, whatever he was experiencing was affecting him greatly, and Bruce’s heart ached for his boy, unsure of how to fix what was wrong. But he also knew he couldn’t just let the fact that Jason had taken some poor civilian boy captive and was claiming that they were somehow brothers go. “Can you explain what you think is happening?” he asked carefully, glancing down at Timothy again.
Timothy was surprisingly no longer glowering, instead staring up at the pair of them with a calculating glint in his eyes. Odd… but then, Bruce had always thought he was a bit of an odd child, an observant little thing always watching Bruce while trying to pretend he wasn’t as he trailed behind his parents at galas.
“Timmers here fucked the timeline,” Jason seethed out. “He changed our history from what it was supposed to be, and in doing so altered the chain of events that led to him joining our family. Essentially, he has stolen your son and my brother, aka kidnapped himself. And the little shit thought he could get by without letting any of us know the truth. But that’s ok, because ever since I swam in the pit again, I’ve had my original memories, so I can make sure we pay his ransom and fix this thing.”
Oh no. This was somehow pit induced, and he’d just mentioned that in front of Timothy, and now Bruce was going to have to come up with a really good cover story to explain what was going on with Jason because this was not covered by the Mono story they’d sold the school—
“So it was the Lazarus Pits, then?” A third voice piped up and joined the conversation. Bruce whipped his head back down to stare at Timothy, who was rolling his shoulders back into a stretch, the restraints and gag in a neat little pile beside him. “I thought that might be it, given that you suddenly look like a skunk had a baby with a tank again, but I wanted to be sure. Thanks, I’ll just be sure to destroy all the pits after I reset everything so this doesn’t happen again—”
“Don’t you fucking dare,” Jason snarled, lunging to tackle Timothy to the ground and try to wrestle him into a restraining hold. “I am going to find whatever spell or artifact or machine you used to do this and shatter it, you are not pulling this shit again!”
“By ‘shit’ do you mean saving your life?” Timothy snapped back while putting up a surprisingly resilient defense against someone trained by Bruce himself. “Honestly, if you’ve gotten your original memories back, why aren’t you thanking me? All I’ve ever tried to do is keep your family safe and together; this way, it never fell apart in the first place!”
Jason managed to pin Timothy to the ground by his shoulders and glared down at him. “Maybe, but now we don’t get to have you! ”
Tim glared back and jabbed a quick knee into Jason’s gut so he could push Jason’s bulk off of him when he winced. “Jason, you’re all doing just fine without me around, I know.” he rolled away and pushed himself up, springing up and taking a step backwards towards the door. “I’ve been watching. And don’t worry about me either, I’m doing just fine with my uncle—”
“Oh, you think Dick never told me about your uncle?” Jason lunged again, but this time, Timothy was expecting it and managed to dodge and jump behind a chair. “I know that man’s an actor!”
“Hey! I may be paying him to pretend to be my relative but that doesn’t mean he’s not a decent guardian! I’ve never even lost an organ on his watch!”
Bruce was getting somewhat annoyed at being ignored by the two boys having a wrestling match in his study. He was also growing steadily more suspicious as the conversation flowed between them with far too much familiarity to match their previous level of acquaintance. Or rather, what he had thought was their previous level of acquaintance. Either Timothy was also somehow affected by whatever was altering Jason’s memory, or—and he didn’t really want to consider it because it would mean he had in fact forgotten an entire child, and such a thing was unforgivable, magical timeline fuckery or not—maybe Jason was somehow telling the truth. Either way, he wanted answers, and he wanted them now. “Boys,” he said, his voice dipping just enough into Batman’s registers to make both teens go rigid and turn to look at him. “What is going on?”
Jason was now red faced and panting slightly, his mask of anger slowly fading as desperation took its place. “I told you—this little idiot went behind our backs and went back in time, breaking just about every single rule for time travel in the process, and now that I figured him out he’s just going to do it again, and you have to stop him and make him come back—”
“I saved his life, B, you can’t fault me for that!” Timothy snapped from across the room, looking at Bruce with an oddly defensive look in his eyes. “And you’re all much better off this way. Trust me,” he huffed.
Bruce narrowed his eyes. His interaction with Jason had already planted the seeds of suspicion, but the degree of familiarity with which Timothy had addressed him, coupled with that look… see, he knew that look. It was Dick after he’d been caught hosting a party for the then-Teen Titans in the Batcave. It was Jason after Bruce had figured out he’d lied about visiting Dick last summer and had instead embarked on some harebrained road trip mission with Roy Harper and Starfire of all people. It was Damian after Bruce had discovered the mutant snake he’d smuggled home from a mission and had been raising in the old garden shed. It was the look his sons got when they were caught doing something wildly dangerous and irresponsible. It was odd to see that look directed at him by a child he saw as a stranger, but he was getting the sense that the lack of familiarity between them did not extend both ways.
“If what you’re both saying is true, I very much doubt that I’d agree,” he said slowly, his eyes sweeping over the young man, taking in every detail of the boy who might be his and he just couldn’t remember. “And even if it’s not, I think it would be good if we ran some tests. On the both of you, actually—”
Timothy didn’t wait for him to finish before turning and dashing towards the door. Jason managed to lunge to block him, so he redirected, changing paths to head straight towards the window. Whether he intended to actually leap out of it into the tall tangle of rose bushes outside the window rather than give Bruce a full explanation, they never learned, because Bruce had already gotten the cover off the secret panel on the back of his desk and pushed the button that locked down the room before he could get the window open.
Once his final route for escape had closed up, Timothy turned back around, falling into a tense but ready defensive stance. “I don’t want to fight you guys, but I’m warning you right now that I will,” he said, clearly trying to bluff up some bravado. “Just because I couldn’t have Bat training this time around doesn’t mean I’m totally helpless. I still went and found Shiva, I can hold my own.”
Bruce blinked. “Lady Shiva?”
“Don’t let him distract you or he’ll wiggle his way out of this,” Jason said, widening his stance to better block the doorway. “He’s good at that; he used to be your Robin.”
…Bruce had possibly not only forgotten adopting a child, but Batman had forgotten a Robin? Well, he hadn’t ‘forgotten’ so much as he’d somehow been made to forget. And if Timothy had been Robin in whatever timeline the two of them had come from, he would have known how dangerous and forbidden it was to mess with time like that. He would have had to have severely violated Bruce’s rules to pull this off, and had possibly endangered the very stability of reality. Bruce was certain that if he could remember being Timothy’s parent, then Timothy would be so very grounded right about now.
Well, Timothy hadn’t balked at the mention of Robin, and he apparently knew about the Lazarus Pits, so it felt reasonable to assume that whether or not the rest of the story was true, he knew their identities at the very least. “Let’s take this to the cave, then,” he said, narrowing his eyes at his son and his… possibly-erased-from-the-timeline-thanks-to-a-scheme-of-his-own-making son. Fuck him, was this really his life? “I can run my tests down there, maybe call in a few specialists.”
“Alternatively, you could just forget this ever happened and not put up a fuss when I file a restraining order against Jason,” Timothy suggested, eyeing the air vent by the ceiling with an unsettling amount of interest.
“You think a restraining order will be enough to protect yourself from the consequences of your own actions? I was a crime lord in another life, short stack, you’re not getting away from me that easily.”
Bruce frowned. “You were what now?”
Jason just waved a hand blithely through the air. “Don’t worry about it, we argued about it plenty in the other timeline. The point is, I’m not letting Timmy get away with this, and if you ever meant any of that shit about loving and needing all of your children, then you shouldn’t either!”
“Of course I meant it,” Bruce said, mildly offended despite himself. He’d always worked hard to make sure his children knew how special and important they were. “If what you’re saying is true—”
“It is!”
Bruce silenced Jason with a significant look before looking over at Timothy. “If it’s true, then Jason is right; I’d never want to lose my child. Even if I don’t know the full story, I can say with certainty that that is not an acceptable outcome.”
Timothy looked back up at his face, his eyes swimming with something resolute and heartbreaking that Bruce ached to understand, but simply didn’t. “I know you wouldn’t, B,” he said, voice raw with sympathy. “That’s why I had to do things this way. After all, you can’t lose something you’ve never had.”
Bruce registered the intent a nanosecond too late, and suddenly Timothy was disappearing into the cloud of smoke that suddenly filled the office thanks to a smoke bomb from his pocket. Bruce quickly stumbled over to his desk with his eyes closed and scrambled to grab an emergency rebreather from his drawer. He got it in place just in time to hear the unmistakable sound of a vent cover clattering onto the ground.
He growled softly in frustration before following the sound of Jason’s coughing across the room to slap an extra rebreather over his face. “He’s taken to the vents,” he informed Jason before moving to lift the lockdown procedures, which he should really update to include sealing the vents. Once that was done, he and Jason burst into the hallway to regroup and breathe a few lungfuls of less smoky air.
“He knows your security systems inside and out, don’t rely on them to tell you where he is,” Jason rasped when Bruce pulled out his phone to check some of the interior cameras. “Now, what I imagine the little shit is planning to do is give us the runaround through the manor before doubling back into the cave so he can get out through the tunnels. What we need to do is split up, and—”
Jason would never finish getting to share his tactics, because there was a sharp cry followed by a loud thud from further down the hall, and Bruce was off like a shot with Jason right on his heels.
When Bruce turned the corner, he skidded to a halt, and barely managed to catch himself when Jason barreled into him from behind. Cass was standing in the middle of the hallway, looking vaguely distressed while Timothy twitched from his position on the ground. When she heard them enter, she looked up, and her face twisted in contrition.
“He came out of the vent, I just reacted. Surprised me.”
“It’s fine,” Bruce said soothingly, stepping over so he could kneel down next to Timothy and rolled him onto his back so he could recover from what was no doubt a painful and debilitating nerve strike. When he saw the unamused look Bruce was giving him, he cringed and squeezed his eyes shut.
“Can’t believe I forgot to account for Cass. Should’ve just risked the dead drop through the elevator shaft,” he muttered, proving once again how familiar he appeared to be with Bruce’s home and family and lending further credence to the idea that he himself might actually belong there.
“Who is he?” Cass asked, looking between Bruce and Jason.
Jason scowled. “Your stupid little brother who tried to martyr his way out of this family via time travel.”
Cass’ eyes grew wide. “Another brother?” She appeared delighted by the revelation.
“Oh come on, I’m never getting away from Cass,” Timothy groaned, his body slumping in defeat.
And that settled it; he really was supposed to be in their family. Which meant Bruce felt perfectly justified in saying, “I think unless you can find some way to disprove Jason, you should consider yourself grounded while I get to the bottom of this, Timothy.”
Timothy huffed and directed an angry glare at the ceiling. “You’re going to regret pressing the issue, but whatever. And also, just call me Tim.”
“Then you’re grounded, Tim.”
"Fake Uncle never tries to ground me," Tim grumbled. "This is what I get for trying to do something nice for my brother!"