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“Welcome to Drake’s Thaumatorium, how can I -”
Tim was jolted out of his distracted drawl as he felt the hair on his arms stand up. His eyes snapped to the front door as a brick wall of a man clearly in possession of strong identity charms finished closing the door behind him. The identity charms were sketchy, sure, but when dealing with magic it was better to be safe than sorry when worried about potential retaliation for a spell, so those are pretty common - especially in Gotham.
No, what had Tim’s guard up now was the taste of death on the back of his tongue, coming from the man.
The pair stared at each other for a long moment, the man who just entered shifting his weight slightly. Eyeing the red half-cloak and dark uniform, paired with the neon green eyes staring out from a magicked void, Tim thought he knew who this is.
“Red Hood,” he said warily.
“You Drake?” Hood asked, stepping forward.
“Depends,” Tim said, bracing his arms against the counter, his fingers resting lightly on the enchanted bo staff he kept hidden next to the register. “What are you needing from Drake?”
“Heard rumor he might be a necromancer,” Hood said, eerie eyes staring unblinkingly at him. “That true?”
“No necromancers work at the Thaumatorium, I’m afraid,” Tim said honestly, smiling his best customer service smile with flat eyes. “You’ll be hard-pressed to find one anywhere else either, of course. Necromancy is illegal.”
“Of course,” Hood said, in an agreeable tone that implied he didn’t quite believe Tim. He broke his stare to look around the shop. Wandering over to the nearby display, he picked up a small obsidian sphere. “What kind of services do you provide here? Or is it just tools for magic?”
“We offer a range of services at the Thaumatorium,” Tim said, using his fakest customer service voice as he launched into the spiel about the shop. “Our offered divination sessions are by appointment only and range from tarot to scrying to bone reading. You name it, we probably do it. We offer enchanting as well, sourced through a freelance enchanter who works with the store - they are able to give quotes on cost and expected timeline through a consultation appointment. Cleansings and hex-care are walk-in or by appointment, depending on the type and depth of the service required. Spell consultations are walk-in, as our staff are fully equipped to answer customer questions about anything we sell in the shop.”
“Consultations and cleansings, huh?” Hood said, rolling the obsidian sphere in his hand once more before placing it back on the display. He turned to face Tim fully again, shifting his weight to one foot as he crossed his arms. “You guys able to do anything related to soul cleansings?”
Tim’s passive mask slipped for a second as his eyebrows twitched into a frown almost imperceptibly. There were very few things that could cause souls to need cleansing, and almost none of them were good. Usually it was conjurors summoning something they couldn’t handle and needing their resulting bond voided - something Tim usually would call in an expert for rather than tackling himself. It was tedious dealing with demons and he’d just rather not.
Sometimes though, it was people messing with magics they really shouldn’t - often unintentionally, but sometimes for bad reasons. Still, it was easy enough magic to do, and almost anyone with a talent for energies, the right tools, and proper know-how could do it.
“It depends on what is needed,” Tim smiled, still doing his best impression of a corporate drone. “I can perform a general scan of the state of your soul, though any deals with demons would have to be addressed by an outside professional I can refer you to.”
“Honestly don’t know if it’s a deal or not,” Hood said after a moment, which. Was certainly some kind of alarming to hear. His body language shifted to something a little more uncertain, then he continued. “Look, if you do energy readings as a walk-in, that would already tell me more than I know now about the situation. I’d like some answers, and I hear this place has some of the best.”
Tim considered him before nodding, removing his hand from the bo staff and stepping back from the counter as he dropped his ‘cog in the machine’ act for something slightly more genuine. Pulling aside the curtain to the backroom behind him for a moment, he called out for the only other staff member currently present, given how late it was in the evening.
“Tam! I have a walk-in, you’re in charge of the front for a bit!” Hearing her confirmation, he stepped around the counter as he turned back to Hood whose body language read as a little surprised now, before he relaxed just a bit when he realized Tim was actually going to help him.
He gestured for Hood to follow him as he walked them down a short hallway with several private rooms meant for readings, cleansings, and consultations. Stepping into one of the rooms, Tim shut the door after Hood and motioned for him to lay back on chair in the middle of the room styled a little like a dentist’s chair - able to be reclined as needed and raised and lowered for adjusted access to the client.
Hood paused for a moment, surveying the whole room carefully, and eyeing Tim himself with a long look. Tim waited patiently, Hood’s wary reputation far preceding him. He wasn’t going to force the man to do anything - if he wanted Tim’s help, he’d do what he could for Hood, but if not he wasn’t about to stop the man from leaving.
Finally, the man awkwardly lowered himself into the chair, sitting stiffly with his muscles tense. His eyes didn’t leave Tim at all.
On his own part, Tim stepped to the side and pulled out a thin copper rod from a drawer in the room. It had been enchanted by their freelance enchanter, and he waved it over his body to magically cleanse himself of any residues before approaching.
“I’m going to lean you back,” Tim narrated, pressing a button on the side of the chair. “Try to stay relaxed - you shouldn’t feel anything. This is just so that I can get a full-body scan in place to figure out what might be going on with you. I will inform you of any actions I suggest taking, as well as inform you of what they might cost. Our pricing here is very fair, and we do our best to keep costs low if that might be of concern. However, regardless, I will not proceed with anything you do not explicitly agree to. Do I have permission to start the scan?”
Hood grunted in response, before rolling his shoulders slightly and nodding stiffly. He stayed stiff as a board, eyes locked on Tim and his hands as they were raised to begin his scan.
It was a pretty standard piece of magic - projecting a transparent human silhouette in the air above Hood, visible only to Tim as he examined it for various magical influences acting upon him.
There were a cluster of spells circling Hood’s head - the identity charms no doubt, and Tim ignored them for the moment. There was also an interesting lattice of spellwork across the chestpiece of the dark uniform Hood was wearing, and the subtle shimmer of a charm within the material of his boots. The weapons at his sides were all but glowing with magic, and Tim mentally reevaluated how much money Hood had access to, because that amount of magic was not cheap and rumor would have said if Hood was enough of a magical prodigy to do all the spellwork himself.
Digging a little deeper into the spell, Tim saw the sparks and lines of Hood’s own magic become more prominent, and he couldn’t help but blink in surprise at the complexity of the man’s internal magic. In an instant though, it was immediately clear where the issue was located. Shifting, he moved to look more closely at the pulsating ball of energy buried deep within Hood’s chest.
“Well?” the man asked tensely, and Tim blinked, seeing the slight golden glow of his eyes change the shadows of Hood’s face as he looked down at him.
“Right,” he said, having gotten drawn into his own magic. “There’s no cursed artifacts or anything, and your own magic seems to be doing well. But there’s a ball of energy that’s pretty tightly wound that I think is the thing you’re wanting to know about. I’ll have to tease it to the surface to get a better look - it shouldn’t have an effect on your or the effects of the magic itself to do so. Would you like me to continue with the scan?”
Hood’s jaw clenched for a long moment, before he sighed and rolled his shoulders a little.
“Yeah, sure,” he huffed, clearly uncomfortable. Tim waited a moment more, to give him a chance to change his mind, before refocusing on the magic.
He made sure not to touch the magic itself, merely touching the projection in the air to indirectly interact with it. He pulled at it lightly, carefully wiggling the ball of energy through the projections chest until it was at the surface.
The ball of energy was a dull neon green, pulsating in a way that made Tim’s skin crawl, and his teeth ached at the sticky way it clung to even Hood’s projected form. He frowned. What the hell had the crime lord gotten involved in? He’d never seen a scan have something like this before.
Deciding to take a risk, he cautiously reached out a finger to touch the projection just to get a better sense of what it was - a weird demon deal, a piece of soured magic, a curse, who even knew.
The sheer sense of death and wrong from earlier struck Tim like a frying pan to the face, and he recoiled in an instant. Instinctually, he threw up the strongest shield he knew, a pearlescent shimmer filling the air between himself and Hood, and the crime lord jolted upright as the projection dissipated.
“The hell are you doing?” he growled, a hand going down to his weapons. “What happened?”
“I should have recognized that feeling the moment you walked in here,” Tim hissed, mentally hitting himself over not realizing instantly what he’d been dealing with. “Session’s over, no charge. Get out of my store.”
“Excuse me?” Hood seemed torn between incredulous surprise and offended rage.
“Get out,” Tim repeated, snagging his arm and hauling the man out of the chair with a strength he knew surprised the other man, given how hidden it was in his form. Shoving them both through the door back to the main part of the store, he continued. “I don’t mess with the Demon’s Head any more than I have to. Congrats, you don’t have a bond on your soul, but you might as well have. I hope you got what you were looking for.”
“Wh- you can’t just kick me out!” Hood protested, dragging his weight against Tim’s hold. But this was Tim’s domain, and there was more to him than met the eye too, and his protests did nothing.
Tam looked up from the register counter with wide eyes at the commotion, but Tim paid her no mind as he bodily pushed Red Hood out the front door, the man stumbling a little at the sudden absence of Tim’s hold on him.
“You tell Ra’s al Ghul the next time you see him to keep his twisted, necrotic fingers out of Gotham and out of my store, or I’ll do worse than what I did the last time we met,” Tim snarled quietly, stepping back into his store and pressing a sigil on the door that sent up a shimmering barrier the man wouldn’t be able to cross. “And tell him that his necromancy is still clumsy at best and he’s clearly lost his touch in his old age.”
With that, Tim slammed the door between them and stalked back into the depths of his store, leaving behind Red Hood, standing on the sidewalk staring at him with a baffled cant to his posture.
Tim had seethed all week at the trace of Ra’s left in his shop, and he’d done a deep cleaning of the space - both literally and magically - three whole times before he was able to settle down again.
Tam had tried to get him to explain, but Tim had fended off her questions at every turn, unwilling to divulge more information or to bring her further into the mess that was the al Ghul family. Sighing, he locked up the shop for the day and began walking down the street in the direction of his Nest.
He didn’t know what Ra’s was doing with Hood, or how the crime lord had gotten involved in that whole mess, but he wasn’t going to change his mind about letting him in his shop. Tim had tangled with the League before and had no desire to do so again.
Reaching the Nest, he unlocked his door and stepped through his wards, feeling his shoulders unwind a bit at the provided safety and familiarity of his home. He shrugged out of his coat and dropped his work bag by the door, making his way to the kitchen to grab a quick and easy late dinner.
“I thought you said you weren’t a necromancer, Drake.”
Tim spun around in an instant, hand flying up to pin the intruder to the wall with magic, even as the familiar pearlescent sheen of his favorite shield went up around him. The intruder cursed, struggling against his hold, and Tim abruptly recognized him.
“Hood, thought I told you to leave me alone,” he said sharply, tightening the grip his magic had on the man slightly, in his annoyance. Hood’s magic rose up to meet Tim, but there were a rare few who could go up against Tim’s magic directly, and the spell held true.
“Geez, loosen up!” Hood complained, before settling a little as he realized the hold wouldn’t give. “Besides, if we’re fuckin’ arguing semantics, you told me to stay out of your shop. Last I checked, this fancy as shit place wasn’t the shop.”
“If we’re arguing semantics, then I never lied,” Tim said, narrowing his eyes. “I’m not a necromancer, and nor is anyone who works for me. I wouldn’t touch that stuff with a ten foot pole, much less do it myself.”
“But you recognized Ra’s and his work through necromancy?” Hood asked, a little cautious.
“I can recognize when something is necromancy without doing it myself,” Tim snapped. “The same way I can tell you’re some kind of conjuror because of the shape of your magic and your red cloak - though nobody from the Guild would dare alter their uniform like that, so you were likely never a Conjuror, even if you probably wanted to be one day if you’re wearing a getup that alludes to them now.”
There was a moment of silence as both of them sized each other up. Eventually Hood sighed.
“Can you let me down? This is getting uncomfortable. I’m just here for answers - honest.”
Tim considered him for a moment longer, before rolling his eyes and releasing his grip on the magic keeping the crime lord pinned to the wall, even though he left his shield up. He was a little surprised to realize he actually believed the man. Hood landed back on the ground with a grunt, then rolled his shoulders a little and turned to face him.
“Alright. So. If you’re not a necromancer, what do you have to do with Ra’s? There aren’t many who know him or his magical signature enough to want to kick me out that immediately,” Hood said. “And, on that note, what the fuck did that bastard do to me anyway? You never said.”
Tim sighed, deciding that if the man really wasn’t out to get him then he deserved a bit more of an explanation. It wasn’t the first time someone innocent - or, at least relatively so, given Hood’s reputation - had gotten dragged into Ra’s’ schemes somehow.
Even though the shiver of death was still in the air making him want to shower, Hood clearly was telling the truth about just looking for answers. Even his body language was different than the other day at the shop, and Tim felt a lot more comfortable with him in his space. He dropped his shield and moved to sit at his kitchen table, motioning for the crime lord to take the chair across from him.
“The story of why I know Ra’s is irrelevant right now, so I’ll sum it up to he’s interested in my magic and move on to your other questions,” he said once the other had joined him at the table. “To start with your last question: he did necromancy on you to bind you to this plane.”
“Wait, what ?” Hood leaned back, body language screaming disgust. “That fucker is the reason I came back to life and had to break my way out of my coffin?”
“You what?” Tim blinked, before shaking the confusion off in favor of looking at the information anew. “Well, not exactly. It’s possible - rare, but possible - that you came back on your own before he placed the binding on you to keep you here. If you have any skill in conjuring like I suspect, well, there’s a chance you summoned yourself here. I’d have to do some tests to be sure, but that’s a possibility. Especially because you don’t feel like death to me, you just feel… like you’re touched by it? Wearing it as cologne? Washing your clothes in it? I don’t know how else to describe it - it’s present with you, but not part of you.”
“Great,” Hood deadpanned. “Love hearing I’m walking around with Eau de Mort all over me and pulling an Uno Reverse on mortality. What would that mean ? And why can you tell?”
“It means that you are bound to this plane, for better or worse,” Tim sighed, trying to find the words to explain better. “If you get cut, you heal, right? You touch something painful or dangerous or deadly, and it sucks but not much else?”
“Yeah…” Hood sounded wary.
“Well, that’s that. You are bound here . Something else can try to take you away, but it won’t work. You are here, for better or worse - and it can be worse, trust me even if you haven’t experienced that yet. You’ll be unable to move on until he releases you or his magic wears off. You could die and you would just resurrect again no matter what state you were in. A demon could attempt to drag you to their realm and you’d be ripped apart before leaving this plane. You could stand at the doors to Hell itself and jump in, and you’d likely vaporize your body but still remain here as a shade. You get the gist.”
“Wha-”
“And,” Tim cut off the other man’s response, narrowing his eyes, “I can tell because that’s what I do . I’m a pneumancer - a soul mage, in layman’s terms.”
“...Right. And that differs from necromancy how?”
Tim reared back, offended at the comparison despite himself. He frowned heavily.
“With that attitude, you might as well call a priest a demon because they’re both from the same church,” he huffed. “What exactly do you think necromancy is ? I want to know where the mistake is so I can nip that misunderstanding in the bud.”
“I don’t know,” Hood shifted uncomfortably. “Bringing people back from the dead? That whole ‘army of the undead’ thing is a pretty popular trope, as is summoning spirits to talk to. Stealing people’s life force, binding souls to their will or to objects… less common, but some also say that dealing with creatures of the afterlife like demons counts too.”
“Well, that’s a whole mesh of abilities there,” Tim muttered, before shaking his head. “Demons only really deal with conjurors and sorcerors - while they can make deals with others, they don’t like the taste of our magic as much. For the rest - anything with souls, binding, summoning spirits, life force, etc - that’s pneumancy. Necromancy is illegal because it involves desecrating the dead - bringing them back without souls as puppets, using body parts for spell components, messing with the blood of the dead, etc. Pneumancy is souls, necromancy is death - and while they are related, they are two different things.”
“How the fuck did the two get lumped together if they’re so different then?”
“How else?” Tim huffed, glancing at Hood in wry amusement. “The Monarchy and the Church, obviously. Go back far enough, that’s usually the answer.”
“Ha, fair,” Hood snorted a laugh of his own, before sobering slightly. “Okay, so. I’ve been necromancied. How do we fix that?”
“With some help,” Tim said. He paused, looking at Hood consideringly. “I’m not up to date on all the gossip in Gotham right now. Depending on several factors, you may or may not like who we’re getting it from.”
“Batman,” Tim said, flicking off the Batsignal as one of the wards he’d set up went off. “Glad you could make it.”
“Really?” Hood asked, sounding exasperated. “This is who you meant? I can’t believe you’re calling my dad on me.”
Tim paused, before turning around to stare at the black-clad man previously behind him. The Batman stared back at him, looking just as off-footed at the encounter as Tim now was himself. Beside him stood Nightwing, and the tell-tale flicker of movement across the street tucked up on top of a nearby skyrise showed Robin - the fourth one - had joined the party as well.
“...Ah,” Tim said, ignoring the way Hood was looking at the vigilantes suspiciously at their awkward behavior. “That explains a lot. Nice to see you again, Batman. Nightwing.”
“Drake.” Silence followed Batman’s greeting, and even Nightwing looked a little uncertain about how to move forward. Hood shared none of his hesitation though.
“You guys know each other?” he demanded. Tim shrugged.
“It was before your time,” he explained. “After the second Robin, Batman was… struggling, shall we say. I was forced to use my skills multiple times in the aftermath, and ended up confronting him about his behavior. I micromanaged him for a few months until he got his head on straight again, then left him to Oracle and Nightwing after that. We haven’t spoken since.”
“Micromanaged?”
“You know,” Tim said, glancing at Hood. “Forcing him to sleep. To go home when he got injured and stay home to recover. To actually leave his room to go eat. To not beat criminals to the point of needing someone with my skills to keep them here. To not need to use my skills on him . That sort of thing.”
“He was that…” Hood said quietly, sounding a little off, before cutting off that thought and continuing down another avenue. “But to do that, you would have to know who he is under the mask.”
“Yeah?” Tim wasn’t sure where the confusion was, given that Hood and Batman worked together - hell, Hood had confirmed earlier that he was one of Batman’s sons, even if Tim wasn’t sure which. He assumed that meant Hood knew. “I’ve known who him, Nightwing, each of the Robins, and Oracle are since I was a kid. I mean, they didn’t know I knew until I confronted Batman after the second Robin, but still.”
Hood stared at him for a long moment, before spinning around to stare at Batman instead. The man looked a little uncomfortable, before nodding shortly. Hood stared at him in apparent disbelief for a moment more, before throwing his hands up in irritation.
“Nobody tells me shit here,” he complained, annoyance clear even with the voice modulation spell, before turning back to Tim. “Yeah, the second Robin? I’m him.”
“Hood,” Nightwing protested half-heartedly.
“What? He knows everything else apparently,” Hood - Robin?? - said, his body language suggesting he had rolled his eyes. “Obviously you guys trust him enough to both not wipe his memory and let him roam free. And to let him into the house around your civilian selves. And to give me his shop’s name when I asked for recommendations about where to get magic stuff.”
“That’s why you came to the Thaumatorium?” Tim asked distantly, before the last few moments caught up to him fully. “Wait, you’re Ja - er, Robin ? But. You died ? Oh , but that’s why, with Ra’s… and it’s why you feel like death. And with your comments about the coffin thing, all of it combined explains the aversion I had to you at first. This explains so much - I hadn’t expected you to be such a strong conjurer, usually you hear about people with that sort of talent and nobody really talks about that with Hood more than usual. But, people did talk about that with the second Robin .”
“You couldn’t sense it? What happened to him?” Nightwing interjected, looking a little confused and unintentionally cutting off Hood before he could react to the aversion comment. Hood looked doubly offended about that. “I thought a necromancer would be able to.”
Tim froze, and turned towards the hero slowly. He didn’t think he’d ever been so offended. One of his childhood heroes, the first Robin, Dick Grayson just called him a necromancer . And believed it.
“Oh, you’ve done it now,” Hood - Jason! - laughed under his breath.
“You did not just say that to me.” Tim narrowed his eyes at Nightwing, who now looked like he’d realized he’d stepped on a verbal landmine and was trying to figure out how to step off without triggering it. “Of all people. I didn’t take you for a classist, but I suppose we can all be wrong. Though with being raised by Batman, I suppose I get it - he was like that too when we met.”
“Wha- I’m not classist!” Nightwing spluttered. “You’ve been in my apartment! You’ve seen how I live!”
“Which says something, given the amount of resources you have access to,” Tim said, moving on to explaining further before Nightwing could let out more than a squawk of protest. “For the last time, pneumancy was lumped together with necromancy during the Middle Ages as a way to criminalize spirit magic among the poor, and was maintained as a form of oppression to the lower classes. At the time, forms of spirit magic were on the rise within the Royal Sorcerors and Vatican Conjurers. Having ‘the poors’ performing the same things for a fraction of the cost and without oversight from those in power was a threat, so they made it illegal without association, leading to it being fully illegal now. Classic class warfare.”
“Huh,” Hood said, helmet tilted thoughtfully. “You didn’t go that in-detail about it earlier, that’s really interesting.”
“I told you I wasn’t a necromancer before,” Tim said, turning his ire onto Batman now with a glare. “I told you to do your research. Are you why Hood was convinced I was lying about being a necromancer when he first showed up?”
“Hn.”
Batman shifted his weight. Tim’s eyes narrowed further.
“I do not want to have to start micromanaging you again,” he almost threatened. “If you are busy enough you can’t do research right, then you are too busy. Do not make me do this with you again, I’m too busy myself and that shit was exhausting.”
“All the sources I found said they were one and the same,” Batman grumbled. “I thought you were lying to try and get out of being associated with something illegal.”
“If I lie to you, you won’t know about it,” Tim hissed more disgruntled than annoyed now, hackles going down unwillingly due to the decent enough excuse the vigilante had. He guessed. “And I know that because I’ve done it before. For the future, find better sources. The RS and VC had their fingers in nearly all the official propaganda pies since like, 1309 ACE. At least in Europe. Look back to the Archival Records of Galliano Altomare, or from Žemyna Daukšienė, for an example. Their journals should give a much better idea of what pneumancy and necromancy actually are. Or just read anything published outside of Europe, really. Other parts of the world were a lot more open to pneumancy.”
Batman nodded in a way that Tim knew was embarrassed, and Tim hoped it would be enough to actually get the man to deep-dive further this time. He was usually so obsessive about everything Tim had expected him to find more information than he had the first time around. Regardless, he was glad to have that settled now.
“Alright, are we doing this or what?” Tim finally asked, breaking the silence. “I do have a business to run, you know.”
“You never actually told us what ‘this’ is,” Nightwing pointed out. Tim sighed.
“So, you sent Hood to me for a soul cleansing, right?” Tim asked, waiting for them to nod. “Right - turns out that won’t do anything for him, because it’s Ra’s and his necromancy tying him here. I can do the working to sever that, but I don’t have the magic myself to counter it alone, if Ra’s used the Pits to help like I assume he did. So, I’ll need a boost, and we’ll need to give Hood magic to draw on to keep himself summoned here while his soul resettles after removing the necromancy. There’s a reason it's called impossible for Conjurers to summon themselves back from the dead - it’s a massive drain and it is actually borderline impossible .”
“You intend for us to be batteries for the two of you,” Batman said, glancing between the two of them with narrowed eyes.
“It takes a ton of energy,” Tim shrugged, glancing towards Jas- Hood. “It’s a miracle he managed it the first time, I’d rather not risk him having to try that again.”
“Yeah, let’s not kill me again accidentally,” Hood snorted, ignoring the sharp look the other two vigilantes gave him. “Been there, done that, rather not do it twice.”
“So, what do we need?” Nightwing asked, looking between the two of them. “Some rare ingredient? Some complicated ritual?”
Tim shook his head.
“Haven’t you been listening? Soul magic is common-folk magic,” he said, giving the slightest roll of his eyes. “It could hardly be that if it required anything expensive or difficult in a way that made it inaccessible. No, it just needs energy, and well, someone like me.”
“That would be the hard part,” Hood snorted under his breath. “You’re a feral little maniac - we barely know each other and I can already tell.”
Tim slugged him in the arm without looking, and followed it up upon contact with a zap of magic. Hood yelped.
“You little shit! This is exactly what I mean!” Hood snarled, reaching a hand inside his cloak to no doubt grab something to retaliate.
“I have a list of the basic ingredients we need,” Tim said, tossing a short ward over just in time to block Hood’s spell. A muttered string of expletives met the attempt, and Tim had to work hard to smother a smug smirk and remain serious. “Get them. I’ll get the circle set up, and we can get started sooner rather than later.”
Reaching into his pocket, Tim withdrew said list and stuck it to Nightwing’s chest as he walked by, making his way back to Hood’s motorcycle. Hood stared at him silently for a moment, body language a little confused, until Tim put the helmet he’d worn over back on. Then gave a small, almost unconscious shrug and walked over too, settling at the front of the bike.
Batman and Nightwing tried to ask a few more questions, but Tim just glanced pointedly at the list until they got the hint and began looking it over. Eventually, he heard them muttering to each other, splitting up the task of finding the components between the two of them - no doubt with some help from Alfred and Oracle on the few they might not have on hand already. As soon as they did, he tapped Hood’s shoulder, and raised his voice so all three of them could hear.
“I’ll go ahead and get started on the circle in the Cave,” he said, closing the visor on the helmet. “I’ll meet you guys there, and we can get this show on the road.”
Taking the cue for what it was, Hood revved the engine on the bike, and began weaving his way through traffic. There was a long silence, aside from the sound of the engine and the blaring of car horns here and there as they cut corners. After a bit though, a crackle of static in the helmet’s speakers forewarned Hood’s quiet words.
“Hey, Drake,” he said, almost hesitantly, zipping through an intersection just before it turned red. “Thanks. For this, I mean. If it works… just - I’ll be glad to have a better normal again.”
“I’ll be glad to give you a better normal again, if I can,” Tim said back, after a pause in his surprise. “But seriously, you don’t need to thank me. This is literally what I do . Even before the Thaumatorium and I turned it into more of a business.”
“Yeah, well, you’re going to a lot of extra effort for this that you didn’t have to,” Hood scoffed back, voice sobering again shortly after. “It sounds like that isn’t exactly new, for this disaster of a family either. So. Thanks for that too.”
Tim fell silent at that, a little flustered. He wasn’t quite sure what to do with that information. It had been a few years since his stint helping Batman - and by extension, the others - and he honestly hadn’t expected to ever have it addressed again. It was a time in their lives he was pretty sure none of them wanted to revisit. Hood’s family, due to the grief and anger soaked into those months, and Tim himself due to his frankly embarrassing desperation to do something .
He was still too new to his abilities to have done much with them to help (not that he hadn’t tried - there were a few too many close calls before he was forced to call it quits for good), and he just did what he could.
“I couldn’t help the way I wanted to before,” he finally said, having settled on what words to say in response finally. “I can now. So, I will.”
“If the other two can actually get the things you asked for,” Hood huffed a moment later, breaking the tension and making Tim snort out a laugh. “Never tell them I said this, but they’re both incredibly competent, they just sometimes are also idiots.”
“Oh, I’m well aware,” Tim laughed, then tightening his grip on Hood abruptly as they slid around a tight corner. “Just a reminder that if you kill me before we get there, you’ll be stuck with Ra’s and his necromatic residue - and if you try to summon me back, I’m going to ignore you.”
“You worry too much, Drake, live a little!” Hood said, but Tim noticed he did slow down a bit despite his words. Smiling a private smile within the helmet, Tim settled a little more securely on the motorcycle.
“Nah, I think that’ll be your job, now.”