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kittymaine · 1 year

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Two Weeks Notice Ch. 1

// Summary: Tim Drake disappears without warning, and the bats blame the Red Hood. Jason doesn't know who took Tim or where he went, but he knows that finding out before the bats will be the sweetest revenge. What he finds only begs more questions, each one more uncomfortable than the last.

A parallel story to Early Retirement. //

Jason Todd learned that Tim Drake-Wayne was missing when the rest of the world learned about it. It was a normal cold November day when the only real item of note was Tim’s face splashed across the front page of every major newspaper in Gotham.

Despite reports to the contrary, Jason was not heartless. He might not be showing up to Christmas Dinner at Wayne Manor, but he cared about the kids who did. So, he did the only thing he could do. He read the articles printed in the papers, he read the Wayne Enterprises official statement, he even skimmed through a few of the less trashy tabloids to see what the fringe media was talking about. Through all that reading, nothing jumped out as troubling. Nobody was speculating that Tim had been kidnapped or that he was hurt or missing. Everyone was just saying that he had suddenly retired. Tim was barely eighteen and had been a CEO since he was sixteen and Robin since he was thirteen. As far as Jason was concerned, good for him.

So, Jason brushed it off. If it wasn’t exactly what it looked like (Tim finally getting out from under the weight of a whole ass company being dropped on him), then it was probably for some totally batshit plan Bruce cooked up. It would have twenty steps, fifteen of them would be completely useless, and would probably take months for any results to come through. Either way, it was none of Jason’s business.

Jason Todd was the Red Hood, the anti-hero of Gotham city who skirted the line between hero and villain on a daily basis. That was how the public saw him. Through his work with the Outlaws, he had improved his image with the hero community. He would get calls to back up heroes in other cities sometimes, thought it wasn’t uncommon for other heroes to give him the side eye even though he was on their side. But, he was still persona non grata for the Bats. If something colossal went down, he would show up and help to throw some punches, but that was it. He wasn’t on their comm channels, he didn’t show up for Sunday Brunch, and he sure as hell didn’t get tagged in on any of their operations. For the most part, he didn’t fuck with them, and they didn’t fuck with him. It was a pretty shitty setup, but it worked. At this point, Jason just wanted to leave it alone.

So, after checking into it as much as he was able to, he went about his life without a thought to what was going on with Tim Drake-Wayne.

That changed just three days after Tim went missing.

Jason had been following a tip about a human trafficking ring that operated around Hyde Park, at the south end of the Narrows. They targeted preteen girls mostly, but had also grabbed a few young women in the past few weeks. He had been sitting on a nearby roof with a pair of binoculars and a half-eaten meatball sub when the sound of a cape snapping shut sounded behind him.

Jason didn’t turn, and he didn’t flinch. He didn’t even take the binoculars away from his eyes.

“What the fuck do you want, old man?” Jason grumbled, training his binoculars on a portly man walking suspiciously slowly around the duck pond in the center of the park.

Jason’s answer was the prick of a dart hitting him in the neck, right above his armor. He had it out in a second, whirling on Bruce with a feral growl, even as he felt whatever he had been stuck with quickly sap his strength.

“You piece of shit!” Jason tried to snarl, although it came out as more of a slur.

He collapsed to his knees, his eyesight becoming unfocused and blurry. He could just make out Nightwing and Robin land on the roof behind Batman’s ominous black silhouette before his vision faded out, and he surrendered to unconsciousness.

~ ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ ~

When Jason swam back to consciousness, he was cuffed to a metal table in an unfortunately familiar interrogation room. The table was stainless steel with a single bolt in it that his handcuffs were attached to. He was sitting in a stainless steel chair with a matching chair pushed in across the table from him. A single bright light hung above the table, reminiscent of an old crime noir movie.

Bruce loomed in the corner, the tightness of his mouth testifying to how shitty his mood was.

“What the fuck is your problem?” Jason sneered, his speech slightly slurred. He had drooled on the table and tried ineffectually to wipe the drool off his face with the sleeve of his leather jacket.

“Where is Tim?” Bruce rumbled. His voice sounded like the quiet grinding of stones in a mill, the danger of being crushed hidden between the words.

“How the fuck should I know?” Jason spat.

The punch that landed on his jaw was lightning quick, but he had been expecting it. He let his head roll with it, even as he felt a muscle in his neck jump and scream with the strain.

“I KNOW YOU HAVE HIM. WHERE IS HE!” Bruce screamed about two inches from Jason’s face.

Jason scrunched his nose at the volume and the spittle landing all over him, but kept himself loose and carefully regulated his breathing.

“I told you. I. Don’t. Know,” Jason enunciated very clearly.

“You tried to kill him twice already. You are the most likely culprit,” Bruce growled, literally baring his teeth at Jason like a dog.

“That was fucking years ago!” Jason shouted before physically reining in his temper. “I haven’t seen or heard from Tim in months. Look me in the eye and tell me I’m lying,” he said. Bruce could do exactly that, since Jason was missing his domino. Based on how painful the skin around his eyes were, it felt like it had been ripped off without any time taken to dissolve the glue.

Bruce stared at him for a long, pregnant moment. Or, maybe it was better to say that the white lenses in Batman’s cowl stared at him. There was no Bruce there, not that Jason had seen any hint of the man he once considered his father in years. He sometimes fantasized that Bruce was gone, as dead as he himself had once been, replaced completely with Batman. A demon from the darkest shadows of Gotham that walked around wearing his father’s skin to smile for the cameras before returning to the darkness.

After a long moment, Batman pulled back and looked up into the corner of the room, just above and behind Jason. Jason knew that a camera was installed there, with an innocuous red light to indicate it was recording. It was a red herring, though. The red light could be flashed by whoever was sitting behind the one way glass to communicate messages to Batman. Whatever message Batman received, he backed off a little bit and stood on the far side of the table.

“If you don’t have Tim, then you know who does,” he said, back to his quiet, dangerous rumble as if he had never lost control in the first place.

“I haven’t heard anything,” Jason said with a roll of his eyes. “Nobody’s talking about a missing bird. The only things I’ve heard are what’s in the papers.”

Another long pause. Jason kept staring at the impassive face of the cowl and, while he couldn’t see Bruce’s eyes, he was sure they were watching the flashing of the light just behind his head.

“You will investigate among your contacts and report back,” Bruce bit out, like the words tasted vile in his mouth, before retreating through the only door.

“Like hell I will,” Jason grumbled.

The door swung shut with a final sounding clank. Jason heard the sound of a lock automatically engaging. He sighed heavily and let his head thunk down on the table in front of him.

How was this his life? It should be illegal for one person to have to take so many hard knocks, even a bad person like him. His own dad (ex-dad?) had hauled him in to interrogate him over his sort of brother’s disappearance. He had even roughed him up a bit. He couldn’t even pretend this was a special kind of hatred, either. Jason imagined the only reason he got the interrogation room treatment was because he was one of their few rogues who knew their identities. It was likely a lot of people had gotten similar treatments in the past few days, just in shady back alleys and basements instead of the Batcave itself.

Jason didn’t know how long he sat there waiting for someone to remember he couldn’t actually leave while handcuffed, locked in, and on the Batcave’s threat list. It felt like a long time of just letting his bruised cheek rest against the cold metal table and thinking about how everything was bullshit and pondering what destructive thing he was going to do to bury the more insidious feelings squirming in his gut. Maybe he would blow up a car? Blowing up cars was always strangely satisfying.

While he was considering whose car he should blow up for maximum chaos and enjoyment (Roman’s? Harvey’s? Oh, the mayor’s???) the door finally opened again and Nightwing stepped inside.

What Jason could see below the domino was stony. Jason didn’t know Dick super well before his death, and they certainly hadn’t bonded after he came back. He didn’t know how Dick felt about him hanging out with his ex-girlfriend and one of his ex-best friends, but he imagined it didn’t exactly make him feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Not that Jason gave a shit. Imagining Dick’s constipated face every time Starfire gave him a hug was always a high point for him.

Nightwing stared at him for a stupidly long time, probably waiting for Jason to say something snarky so that he could chastise him and make him the bad guy somehow. Well, he could go fuck himself. Jason knew for a fact he was way more stubborn than golden boy Dick Grayson. He could sit in this cell all night saying fuck all if he needed to. Eventually, Dick sighed and crossed the small space to unlock Jason’s handcuffs.

“This wasn’t personal,” Nightwing said under his breath as he stepped away.

Jason got to his feet slowly and rubbed the circulation back into his hands. Whoever had put the cuffs on him had put them on way too tight. On top of that, whatever knockout juice they got him with hadn’t totally worn off, so he would have to take it easy for a bit.

“Don’t worry about it. It’s not like you could have texted. Super reasonable,” Jason snorted, holding onto the table as he took a few cautious steps toward the door. It felt like the room was spinning, and his legs felt like jello, so he didn’t make it far.

“He’s just worried. This isn’t like Tim at all. We’re worried about him,” Dick said, not moving out of the doorway.

“Look, if you think that I don’t expect B to act like a psycho asshole 100% of the time, then you are under some serious misunderstandings about my opinion of him,” Jason sighed. He stopped at the end of the table, when it became pretty obvious that Dick wasn’t going to move. Jason was nowhere near steady enough to make him.

Dick’s mouth turned down into a faint frown at that. His first expression since entering the room. “I know you’re not B’s biggest fan, but I would really appreciate it if you could ask your contacts if they’ve heard anything that might be related to Tim’s disappearance,” Dick said in what sounded like his best little professional voice.

Jason did roll his eyes at that. “Right, because I am just overflowing with goodwill after this little performance.”

“Jason!” Dick bit off whatever he was going to say a second after shouting his name. His mouth and nose were wrinkled with anger, so at least they were back on steadier footing. The whole good cop routine was starting to give Jason the creeps.

After Dick visibly mastered himself, he spoke again, “It would really go a long way to building some trust between you and Bruce if you could help us with this.”

For some reason, it was this last line that really lit the fire of anger in Jason’s chest. Not the screaming from Bruce or the suspicion, but this carefully worded advice from Dick.

It felt like the drugs in his system burned up in a single moment of incandescent rage. Before he knew it, Jason was in Dick’s face.

“There’s that misunderstanding again,” he sneered. “What the fuck makes you think I want Batman to trust me? What makes you think I trust him not to put a knife in my back the second it’s convenient for him? He could eat shit and die tomorrow and trust me, these eyes would be dry as the desert, asshole.” Jason shoved Dick out of the way hard. He knew the door jamb was digging into Dick’s back, but all he did was stand there and stare Jason down like all he wanted in the world was to lay him with a good punch. “I hope the kid really did ditch all you fucks,” Jason whispered viciously, putting his mouth just a scant inch from Dick’s ear. “It would be the smartest thing he ever did.” He felt Dick shaking where he held him still across his chest, and he wasn’t naive enough to think it was anything other than barely leashed rage.

Jason stepped away from Dick and strode down the hallway away from him. His heart was thumping hard in his chest and his hands were shaking with adrenaline. A rushing noise in his ears muffled the chattering sounds of bats and running water as he exited the short hallway into the main Batcave. He hadn’t been inside the cave since before his death, but he couldn’t be fucked to take a single backward glance, he was so mad. He walked down to the vehicle bay, his long legs eating up the distance in no time, jumped on the first motorcycle he saw and revved the engine hard. The rumble between his legs felt like escape. He let the throttle open up and tore out of the cave with a screech of tires.

He drove mindlessly for a long time. It was late (or early depending on your perspective) so he took the highway loop around the outside of the city and drove recklessly fast. He let the thrill of the speed and the near misses with other cars sweat out the stink and hurt and fear from his body. Only once the trembling in his limbs cooked down to hunger and exhaustion did he pull off the interstate.

It was the early hours of the morning when Jason crashed the cycle into the most glorious fireball against a nearby empty warehouse. It wasn’t the mayor’s car, but it was Dick’s Ducati, which was pretty close. He hoped he liked that bike, that he had plans for it. That last little bit of revenge completed, Jason wandered into the nearest 24 hour diner, ordered almost the entire breakfast menu and then went into the bathroom and crushed no less than six trackers that he found all through his clothes. He ended up just leaving his boots in the bathroom. It was too easy to hide trackers in the soles that couldn’t be found with a simple pat down test.

As he munched through toast and pancakes, he finally let himself turn over his encounter with Bats and Dick.

Tim wasn’t just retiring from Wayne Enterprises, he had also disappeared. It had the bats scrambling. They must have had no leads if they were going to such lengths as to drag him into the cave, a place that they had vehemently kept him out of even when he was bleeding and broken after co-op missions. It was probably going worse than he imagined if they were willing to lower themselves to asking him for help. He thought that Dick was going to have an aneurysm during that little bit of making nice in the interrogation room.

The thing was that Batman and his little brood were actually good detectives. It was pretty unusual for them to be this lost when it came to an investigation. If Tim really was kidnapped against his will, he was smart enough to find some way to leave a clue for his mentor, and Bruce was definitely smart enough to pick up on it.

Jason paused to take a swig of his coffee and stare out the window at the early morning wageworkers walking the pavement with their heads down against the early morning chill.

Unless the bats were approaching things from the wrong end.

Jason had mostly been going for the easiest dig when he said that last thing to Dick, but what if that was closer to the truth than he thought? Bruce and the rest of the bats were probably arrogant enough to not even consider that Tim had left under his own power. But, the police response to the media sure sounded like they weren’t very suspicious. Tim had just turned eighteen last summer, so it was now legal for him to disappear. Even emancipated, disappearing while underage was likely to set off a pretty serious investigation. But, a wealthy eighteen-year-old disappearing? That wasn’t illegal, just concerning.

Was that why the bats couldn’t find him? Because they refused to consider Tim a suspect in his own disappearance?

Jason snorted around a piece of bacon. It all just fit together too well. And, god, what a hit that would be if he was right.

“Oh my god,” Jason said, putting down the huge glass of orange juice he had just started to pick up. The old lady sitting in the booth behind him gave him a derisive look.

If they wanted Jason to investigate Tim’s disappearance, he would. But, not to bring the poor little bird home. No, he was going to prove that Tim bounced out hard and dunk the bat's collective egos into the toilet bowl. And, he would flush too.

~ ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ ~

Jason starts with the money.

Unlike a normal eighteen-year-old on the run, Tim was a fucking billionaire a couple of times over. There was no way he just grabbed a backpack and a ticket on a greyhound bus. No, Jason's bet was that if Tim had decided to disappear, even if it was a spur of the moment thing, he had used his exorbitant wealth to help things along.

Financial forensics were not exactly Jason's strong suit, but he knew enough to hide his own trail of illicit cash and purchases. A few books checked out from his local library helped him the rest of the way.

Jason wasn't an incredible hacker either, but luckily Bruce had helped the Gotham City Police Department gain access to Tim's civilian hard drive. The GCPD were many things, but digitally secure they were not. It was nothing for Jason to sneak into their network using the login he had pinched from a detective over a year ago and start cruising through what they had and use that to open any other doors he needed.

The picture came together pretty quickly. Just a few days of digging and Jason had a pretty good picture of what happened.

Tim had an absolutely obscene number of alias' and shell companies set up. What half of them were for, Jason had no idea. It seemed like he just randomly cycled money through them for no particular reason he could tell.

But, if you knew what you were looking for, you might notice that one of those shell companies had bought a farm in the middle of rural Pennsylvania just a month ago. Then, just two weeks after purchasing said farm, the deed was transferred to one 'John Timothy Drako'.

The alias was so weak that Jason actually squawked out a laugh at the sight of it. It was almost like Tim wanted to be caught or something.

It seemed obvious to Jason that this little farm must be where Tim had disappeared too, but just the paper trail wouldn't be enough for Bruce. No, if he was going to convince him that his little bird had flown the coop on purpose, he would need proof positive.

The farm was only a few hours away, so Jason decided it would be worth it to check it out himself. He wouldn't get close. Jason didn't want to spook Tim, for reasons that he wasn't willing to think about too much. He would just confirm that Tim was on the farm and then fuck out of there without Tim any the wiser.

In order to do so, Jason had found another farm sitting on a ridge almost a mile from the one Tim had bought. It looked like it had been abandoned for decades, the windows broken out and the door hanging by only one hinge. It had a big barn that looked like it was one stiff wind away from falling down. Regardless of its run down condition, the barn was perfect. Jason scaled the creaking ladder up into the loft and from there hauled himself up onto the roof. The rusted corrugated tin was warm from the sun, even in the November chill.

Jason laid flat on the roof and pulled a huge telephoto lens and camera from his duffle. He aimed it across the valley at Tim's farm.

He didn't even have to wait. There he was, just wandering around the property, trailing his fingers along fence posts and looking up at twisted old fruit trees. He looked happy and calm, an expression that Jason had never seen on his face as he stumbled over tree roots on his way back to the old farmhouse. He was in a red and black flannel shirt and ripped up old jeans over soft brown boots. Tim fit right in to the scenery, so long as you didn't look too close.

Because, if you did look close, you would see that he looked like death warmed over. His hair was long and unwashed, his skin was sickly pale, his face was gaunt with his cheeks and eyes sunken into his already bony face. His hands where they protruded from the worn ends of his shirt sleeves shook faintly. The way his clothes hung on him, Jason suspected that there wasn't a single ounce of fat on his body.

Jason took his pictures, but he remained on the roof of the barn for a long time after Tim retreated back into his little farm house.

His mind was scrambling with questions, but the biggest one was definitely 'What the fuck happened?'

Jason hadn't ever seen Tim out of costume personally that he could remember. So, admittedly, he wasn't an expert on what Tim normally looked like. There were pictures in the newspaper, but he knew better than anyone how expert all the bats were at using makeup and padding and other tools of disguise to hide what was really going on with them. When Jason had met up with Tim during patrols or to work on cases, he seemed fine. But, then, all but the skin of his jaw was covered while they worked and his costume could have been padded out to hide weight loss.

Even if Tim had fooled Jason, who admittedly wouldn't have been looking at him very closely, the Bats had to be aware of something, right? The kid looked like he was ready to pass out any second. How was Bruce okay with him living on his own and working a full time job on top of vigilante work if this was the toll it took on him?

Jason was missing something big. Or, was he? An insidious voice whispered in his ear that maybe the Bruce of his childhood never would have allowed something like that. But, he had changed a lot since Jason had come back to Gotham. Mostly for the worse.

Jason had always assumed the coldness and the vitriol and the judgment were reserved only for him, but what was he basing that on? Did he think that Bruce could only treat people he had a bad relationship with that way? How did he even know that Tim and Bruce had a good relationship in the first place?

There were so many questions, and the connotations of all of them were absolutely tragic to consider. Jason had thought that Bruce was a bad father to him for a long time, but the idea that he was also a bad father to all of his other kids sunk into Jason's stomach like a ten ton rock.

Before Jason could even begin to come to terms with what he had just realized, his phone buzzed in his pocket. This was weird because he had only brought his real phone along on his op, the one he gave to friends only.

He had a text message from an unknown number.

Meeting in cave tonight @ 10 PM. Not optional.

"Fuck my life," Jason muttered as he shoved his phone back into his pocket and packed his expensive camera back into its duffle bag. "This is going to suck."

~ ♥ ♦ ♣ ♠ ~

Jason shows up at the cave at quarter to ten. He comes in through a back entrance hidden in the woods behind the manor that he'd known about since he was a kid.

Even though he was early, he wasn’t the only one there. Three women and one boy were sitting at a large round table in the middle of the main cavern that he didn’t remember being there before. He recognized the boy as Damian Wayne only because his picture has been in the paper from time to time beside Bruce and Dick. Cassandra and Steph he only recognized by reputation. He'd maybe seen one photo of Cassandra in the press and had never run across Black Bat during patrols, which he'd attributed to their territories being too far apart. Steph he only knew from his own research into the bats operating in Gotham. She was the only one visibly struggling with her emotions, her eyes red and shining, her bottom lip wobbling intermittently as she stared intently at her hands where they rested on the tabletop.

The last person at the table had to be Barbara Gordon, someone he hadn't seen or heard from since before he died. She was still beautiful just like he remembered, but she was also older and more mature, whatever girl like warm she had before long gone. She looked like a serious young woman tired beyond her years as she sat in a modern looking wheelchair pushed up close to the table. Barbara was also the only one who acknowledged him as he sat down in a free space and put a manila folder down in front of him. They shared a brief glance, her face completely unreadable, before she nodded and looked away.

It was a long fifteen minutes of waiting in silence. Steph sniffled while Barbara and Cassandra, sitting on either side of her, reached out to reassure her. Jason and Damian were completely still. Dick came in wearing his full Nightwing gear five minutes before the meeting was set to start. He was the only person fully kitted out. Damian appeared to be in pajamas, the girls were all in civvies, and Jason was in his normal body armor but sans mask or helmet. Dick stared at Jason for a long time, frozen just a few feet from the table. Jason didn't know what his deal was, but he stared back until Dick finally shook it off and took a seat beside Babs.

Batwoman and Batwing showed up shortly after Dick, also in full costume. They both stuttered a little bit when they saw him, but Jason could not give less of a fuck about either of them. They took the remaining two seats on either side of him very stiffly.

Bruce came striding into the main cavern at exactly ten o'clock in full Batman suit and gear. He looked stiff and tired to Jason's trained eye. The way he moved in the armor made it look like it weighed five hundred pounds, but Jason and Dick may have been the only ones who knew him well enough to pick up on it. Bruce covered his own discomfort exceptionally well against people who didn't know what to look for.

Batman stood at the head of the table, at the exact other end from Jason.

"What have you found?" he growled out. It sounded painful, the way his voice ground out from between tense lips.

Nobody spoke for a long moment, but then Steph's wavering voice broke the tense silence.

"I've been all over his apartment and talked to all of his friends. Nobody knows anything," she said, just barely choking out the last sentence before she had to cover her face with her hands as a sob finally broke through.

Cassandra put a comforting hand on her back, and Barbara took hold of the hand not pressed to her face.

"Searched all over Gotham. All Tim's favorite spots. No Tim," Cassandra said in a soft, halting voice.

"I contacted my mother," Damian spoke next. He was as still as a statue, unnaturally still for a kid his age. His bright green eyes stared at nothing, looking directly ahead. "She says that there is no whisper of him among the League."

"Batwing, Batwoman and I have been coordinating to shake down all the big players in Gotham to see if they had anything to do with it," Dick spoke up next, his defeated tone conveying what everyone already knew. "Nobody seems to know anything."

There was a long pause. Not a head turned toward him, though Jason could still feel everyone's attention focus on him. He supposed he made it a little obvious with the folder. He was the only one who brought anything, after all.

Jason used a single finger to flick the folder across the table toward Bruce. Batman stopped it from hitting him in his armored stomach with a gauntlet slap.

"Tim is fine. He left on his own, just like I told you," Jason said, folding his arms across his chest.

The table erupted in noise, multiple people trying to talk at once. Dick and Steph were the loudest, but most people had their mouths open. Jason didn't care. He only had eyes for Bruce, and Bruce only had eyes for the folder trapped under his hand.

While Dick shouted angry questions at him and Steph cussed at Bruce while Cassandra held her back, Jason watched Bruce pick up the folder and flip it open. It was a heavily redacted file, a decision that Jason made just a few seconds before he printed everything out. It wasn't as convincing, with addresses and names all blacked out and the photos of Tim zoomed in so far as to crop out any identifying information. But, the idea of just handing Bruce Tim's location made Jason sick to his stomach.

He watched Bruce's mouth tighten, his fingers tighten on the paper until it bent and warped under his thick fingertips. He watched the muscles in his jaw tighten until Jason sincerely thought he was going to crack a tooth.

"Stop!" Barbara shouted, cutting through all the arguing and shouting that swirled around the table. It pulled Jason out of his focus, snapping him back to the present.

Dick and Damian were both on their feet, and Batwing was leaning back from the table like he would like nothing more than to get up and leave. Batwoman looked like it was any other Tuesday, but Steph was glaring at Bruce like she was about two seconds away from jumping across the table to attack him.

Babs had the hand not clutched in Steph's shirt over her forehead, her eyes closed tightly behind her glasses.

"Jason is right," she said, like she had to force each word out between her teeth. "I found Tim too. He left of his own accord and appears to be perfectly fine."

Silence descended again, but it was short-lived this time.

"Explain," Bruce ground out, tossing the folder onto the table like it disgusted him.

"There's nothing to explain," Barbara said, frustration clear in her tone. "The police were completely right. Tim engineered his own disappearance."

"If you expect me to believe that my own son-" Bruce started, his voice deadly soft in the beginning but steadily building before being brutally cut off by Barbara.

"I saw the cave footage," she shouted, looking furious herself. "So, don't act like what I'm saying is so unbelievable," she hissed.

The kids all froze at that (Dick, Damian, Steph and Cassandra), but Jason leaned forward with a frown. He could feel Batwoman and Batwing tuning in as well.

"What the fuck does that mean?" Jason asked with a wrinkle of his nose.

"Bruce," Batwoman sighed, her voice somehow quiet and hard at the same time.

Bruce stared down at the file sitting on the table in front of him. He didn't move and didn't speak, he just stared while Dick carefully edged toward him.

"Bruce, is there reason to believe that Tim would have left on his own? Something you didn't feel the need to share with us?" Luke Fox asked, sounding as exasperated as Jason felt disgusted.

Did Bruce know that Tim had probably left on his own and decided to act like he was kidnapped just to save face? Or was he really in denial? Jason honestly wasn't sure which one would be worse.

"There was no reason to believe that Tim would have left under his own power," Bruce ground out.

"That is not true!" Stephanie shouted, her face flushed red and shining with tears. "He left a note," Stephanie added with a wobble, another tear escaping to run down her cheek.

"What note?" Dick asked faintly. Now that Jason looked at him, he almost looked like he was going to pass out.

"There was a single sticky note on his computer monitor in his apartment," Barbara explained tiredly. "It said only, 'don't look for me'."

"Jesus Christ," Luke snapped, standing up so fast he nearly knocked over his chair. "And you didn't think that was useful information to share with us?"

"It was obviously fake," Bruce snarled.

"The handwriting was an exact match," Barbara tossed back.

"It is incredibly easy to imitate someone's handwriting," Bruce shot right back.

"That may be the case, but it also may be the case that the note was genuine," Batwoman replied as easily as if she were ordering a sandwich at Subway. "But you hid that clue from us because you wanted to make sure our investigations only went in certain directions."

"I was removing misleading information from your view in order to eliminate distractions," Bruce replied through clenched teeth.

"It begs the question," Batwoman continued quietly, completely ignoring him. "Were you aware of Timothy's role in his own disappearance all along and only bringing us in to keep up appearances?"

"This is ridiculous! This meeting is over," Bruce barked, but was immediately shouted down.

"Let her speak," Barbara snapped, Luke nodding along with her.

"It also begs the question of why Timothy felt the need to disappear in the first place. He's surrounded by adults and other vigilantes. There are plenty of people who know who he is and what his struggles may be. So, why was it preferable to disappear than to turn to one of us for help?" Batwoman continued quietly.

"Are you implying that I abused my son?" Bruce asked in a dangerously quiet voice. His hands were visibly trembling where they pressed against the top of the table.

"I am simply asking questions," Batwoman sighed. "I don't pretend to know the answers."

"I want you all out," Bruce said quietly. He sucked in a breath, and it trembled on the exhalation. Jason wasn't sure if he had ever seen him emote so visibly in the last few years. "If I see a single one of you still here in ten minutes, I'll throw you out myself."

With that parting note, Bruce spun on his heel, his cape billowing out dramatically behind him, and stalked back to the door he had initially appeared from. Not ten seconds after he had disappeared, loud crashing sounds could be heard from the other side of the door.

"Well, this was a huge waste of time," Luke said, shrugging his wide shoulders and curling his lip like he smelled something nasty. "I'm sorry, Steph," he said, turning a sympathetic expression on the still quietly sniffling Stephanie. "I hope he comes home soon."

"Thanks, Luke," she said despondently.

With another pitying look at the rest of them, Batwing turned around and headed toward the vehicle bay.

"I'm also sorry that things turned out this way," Batwoman said as she gracefully slid to her feet. "I'm always available if any of you need anything," she said, making eye contact with everyone but Jason before following Batwing out to the vehicle bay.

The rest of them sat at the table for a while, listening to the sounds of equipment smashing in the other room until it finally subsided. Jason considered making an exit that was much louder and angrier than Kate and Luke's, or maybe just turning around and leaving without saying anything. Something kept him stuck to that chair.

Kate's question swirled around in his head. What did they do to Tim to finally drive him off? Jason hadn't even managed that when he nearly killed the kid in his own base.

"Come on, Steph. Let's head back," Barbara finally said, squeezing her hand one last time before releasing it and rolling away from the table.

"Who's taking the kid?" Jason asked before his brain really registered what he was saying.

Dick, Steph and Cass looked at Jason like he had suddenly started speaking Martian, but Barbara was giving him a level look, so he focused on her.

"Listen, I don't like what you're implying," Dick said once he finally got a handle on his words again. "No matter how upset Bruce is, he would never lay a hand on Damian!"

"I am a highly trained assassin," Damian chipped in, scowling straight ahead into the darkness of the cave and not attempting to look anywhere near anyone. "I hardly need a common thug like you questioning my father."

"Jason's right," Babs said, a challenge in her voice. Dick sputtered and Damian shrunk in on himself, but she didn't back down. "Damian, you can stay at the Clock Tower with us tonight. Let B cool off for a while, okay?" she said.

"Babs," Dick hissed. Damian stood up from his seat and walked over to the group of women without making eye contact with anyone.

"Dick," Barbara snapped back. "There are more ways to hurt a kid than by hitting them," she said flatly.

Dick reeled back like she had slapped him. But, Babs only looked tired. "Come on, guys. Let's go."

The four of them got up to leave, which seemed like as good a time as any for him to head out too. He sure as fuck didn't want to be left alone in the cave with Dick and Bruce after that shit show of a meeting. So, Jason got up and walked to the vehicle bay with them.

There was a plain white van sitting among the Batmobile and tricked out bikes that the two girls and Damian made their way toward. Babs hung back and waved them on when they hesitated to leave her behind.

Jason hesitated, not especially wanting to chat with Barbara. He had never had any particular beef with her, either before or after his death. In fact, she was probably one of the few people who might have been able to identify with him, since the Joker ruined her life so close to when he had taken Jason's. Even so, it was hard to reconcile this self-possessed woman with the vivacious girl he had been dazzled by when he was a teenager.

"That was some good detective work back there," she said when Jason finally stopped a few feet from her.

"Yeah, well," Jason shrugged awkwardly. He glanced back at the manila folder still sitting on the table behind him. "When you look into it without bias, it was pretty straightforward."

"Did you see him?" Babs asked, her eyes suddenly focused and hungry in a way they hadn't been since he got there. It was impossible to mistake what she was asking.

Jason nodded.

"Was he really okay?" she asked. There was a wobble in her voice, the first betrayal of grief he had seen in her.

"Yeah," Jason said, talking around a frog in his own throat. "Like, he looked like a skeleton shambling around the countryside. But, he, uh, also looked happy and relaxed? I don't know. It's hard to say from just looking at him through a scope, but I think he's okay."

"Okay," Barbara said, taking a deep breath and closing her eyes, struggling with some emotion that Jason couldn't identify. "Okay, thank you for telling me."

"Sure. No problem," Jason said, awkwardly shuffling his weight from one foot to the next. "Hey, can I ask you something?"

"I think it would only be fair," Barbara said, but she looked wary.

"What the fuck happened? To drive the kid away, I mean?" Jason asked, not really expecting an answer, but needing to ask.

Barbara closed her eyes again, but this time he could plainly see the expression of hurt on her face. "I don't think I have the energy to talk about it right now. Rain check?" she asked, the ghost of a smile on her face.

Jason frowned. It felt like a cop out. He never saw Babs, how the fuck was he going to cash in that rain check?

But, he also sort of wanted to get out of the cave so bad that he was probably willing to let just about anything go.

"Yeah, sure. Rain check," he agreed, before turning and walking away toward the little known path he had taken into the cave.

"Don't be a stranger, Boy Wonder," Babs called after him.

Damn if that didn't stick in his chest like an arrow. But, he didn't let his gait miss a beat and waved over his shoulder without stopping.

He walked, and he walked until he got to the tiny biometric scanner that let him through the blast door and into the wild, unmaintained cave beyond Bruce’s defenses. The path was rockier as he made his way farther from the Wayne Estate and closer to the surface. Once he was finally outside, the moon was full and bright overhead.

He just wanted to get back to his bed and his life and forget about bats and missing birds. He wanted to sleep and read and eat until the rock in his stomach eventually dissolved. Most of all, he wished he could just forget about his fucked up excuse for a family forever.

#jason todd #red hood #barbara gordon #oracle #dick grayson #nightwing #tranquilizers #wrongful imprisonment #canon level child abuse #gaslighting #fanfiction #kitty writes

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