Chapter Text
There was absolutely no way this sunshine was from Gotham in April.
Not possible.
Which meant, Tim was no longer in Gotham, in April.
One deep breath confirmed it to be Gotham’s particular tangy chemical smog (though even that seemed lighter, was it a trick of the sun or was the air actually different? He needed a lab to check), so he hadn’t moved much geographically, but that still left the problem of the weather.
If Tim had to hazard a guess, he would call this early June, before the serious summer storms and the heat picked up enough to dye the sky interesting colours through the city’s miasma. The question, then, was if he had lost time, or gained it.
At least he was in costume, so he had something in the way of resources. Enough to get him started, though certainly not enough to establish a base of operations if his luck was as bad as usual. Tim wasn’t holding out hope for things to be easy. They rarely were.
Cape and cowl weren’t conducive to wandering the streets during the day, so he was going to have to sneakily swap those out for a jacket. His armoured leggings and boots could pass as normal pants in a pinch, but there was no way he could pretend either the tunic or the undersuit shirt weren’t part of a costume. They were also nearly skintight, and he’d feel weird wearing them casually.
So, a jacket.
He ducked deeper back into the alley he had awoken in and scaled the fire escape to the roof, sticking to the shadows as best he could. A glance around put him a couple blocks over from where he had last thought he was, on the edge of the South City Park. Not a great area to find clothes unless he was willing to raid someone’s picnic.
…
He was gonna have to raid someone’s picnic. At least he would leave a little cash behind so they could get a new one.
After very carefully scoping out the groups in the park (and there were a lot of them, mostly families, so it was probably a Sunday while Tim had been pretty sure it was a Friday night), Tim decided he could take a track jacket from a family that looked comfortably middle class. It might have something to do with the fact that it was a black jacket with red accents. Tim admitted nothing.
Cape folded and tucked away in his harness, which he was wearing as a rather tacky layered belt, and jacket zipped despite the heat, Tim stepped onto the streets of Midtown proper.
He had a lot of investigating to do before nightfall.
--
The good news, was it didn’t take long to figure out exactly when he was.
The newspaper boxes on 87th still had a few copies, and they were kind enough to tell him it was indeed Sunday, June 10.
The bad news was he was twelve years in the past, and with no clear explanation for why .
He had gone back and scoured the alley he had woken up in, discreetly scanning it for any abnormal radiation, but the equipment he had on hand just didn’t have the power to detect anything in trace amounts. And if magic was involved he had nothing that would give him any indication at all.
Dick was Robin. Dick was Robin and tiny , oh god how could Bruce have ever let him out on the streets? And the scaly panties. Tim completely understood the rumours that never went away about the exact nature of Batman and Robin’s relationship. What responsible father-figure let their child fight criminals without pants on? Bruce, apparently.
The time period did explain why the air was cleaner; Gotham hadn’t had to face years of chemical attacks yet.
The walk through the streets was a head-trip. Stores he had only seen in their twilight days, barely managing to keep their doors open, were bustling and full. The tension in people’s shoulders was lighter, not gone- this was still Gotham- but looking out for pickpockets, not mass shootings. Half the places he passed that would one day be safe houses in condemned buildings were still full apartment complexes.
The next question was how was Tim supposed to get home? This was well before time travel was a regular part of anyone’s day-to-day, and it wasn’t like Tim knew much about it. He could work the technology when it was in front of him, but actually building it? He had left sourcing the equipment to Booster Gold, Rip Hunter, and his buddies when rescuing Bruce from the timestream.
It would take years of research to build a time machine.
Gotham had never been a shining bastion, and Tim knew the crime statistics over the last three decades by heart. This period, the first few years of Batman and Robin’s presence on the streets, was the lowest Gotham’s stats had been since the murder of the Waynes. It was just before things started to get crazy in terms of costumed lunatics. Oh, there were a few running around, but even the ones there were hadn’t escalated to big double digit kill counts yet. Yet.
Maybe he could try and get the Flash to run him home.
Except he was pretty sure Barry’s only run-ins with time travel thus far had been very very unpleasant, so he really wasn’t likely to give Tim the time of day if he asked. While it was tempting to try and force him, there was no way that would end well. Frankly, trying without a cosmic treadmill was asking for trouble anyways.
There was paranoia, and suspicion, but there was also a certain spiteful hope to the people he passed. It was something that got the city through No Man’s Land, but Tim hadn’t seen much of since. The faith that the world would be okay even if they had to drag it there, kicking and screaming. Gothamites had traded that brutal belief for survival and the bitter refusal to roll over and die. While it did the job, Tim had missed the streetside optimism as his own had dwindled.
He could try and get the time authorities to give him a ride, but how to contact them?
The fastest way was just to fuck with the timeline and hope they noticed, which. Was not ideal for a number of reasons. But it might be kind of fun, and they would make sure he didn’t break reality for the worse or anything.
That didn’t mean he was going to just go nuts and murder people, but he could let loose a little, right? Just until the Time Masters noticed.
--
There was no way it was this easy to set himself up in Gotham. No way he could just walk into a warehouse and threaten the criminals inside into leaving. Sure he had to punch a few guys, but between some spooky shadows from the rafters and a smoke pellet, he hadn’t had to pull out his staff before they ran, tails between their legs.
Even the criminals were less hardened in this time. It made his chest ache.
With his newly acquired warehouse, Tim had some decisions to make.
He could try and play it sneaky, interfere with events he knew were to come, for the better. Or he could generate his own entirely new events. The latter option would stand out more, but only because it was much riskier. The likelihood of damaging the timeline was higher if he actually added things rather than just tweaked events that were already settled in place. So really his best bet would be the former.
It would probably be less fun.
It also suggested that a warehouse might not be the best place to be operating out of. Still, he could keep an eye on this one and re-appropriate it if his needs veered further towards big spaces and storage. For now he probably needed an apartment or something less explicitly sketchy.
Responsibility came first, so Tim supposed he’d have to be smart about this.
In the interest of pretending to be an actual member of society, Tim was going to need some capital. His skin crawled at the possibility of getting an actual job, so he was either going to do some creative lying, or some “unlicensed resource reallocation.” The lying would most likely victimize whatever Gothamites he had to, and, while statistically they probably had it coming, he could instead deliberately target an asshole. Tim checked the charge on his overpowered tablet (he had around twenty-seven hours), piggybacked onto a particularly obnoxious satellite, and set to work.
Lex Luthor had the cash to burn.
Now, it was towards the end of Dick’s first year as Robin, and there weren’t a ton of events that stood out during the next few months. The one that did… Had been kind of formative for Dick as a vigilante, Tim knew.
Two Face.
A little resigned to leaving the warehouse for later, Tim set up some proximity alarms and traps around the doors and windows, and hit the streets again. There weren’t really many apartment listings online so he’d have to see what he could find on foot. And he’d feel bad signing a lease on a nice place and then just disappearing. So he’d see what he could find in the neighborhoods where no one would say anything if he walked out and never came back.
The Narrows, Crime Alley, Old Gotham, the Bowery. Real party places.
Did Tim have the right to mess with an event that had shaped his older brother as a crime fighter, and started the conflict that set Bruce and Dick apart for years?
At least Tim was confident in his abilities to handle his own security, and hey, maybe he could offer to improve the landlord’s for cheaper rent. Except that offer in Gotham was likely to get him suspicion and firmly told to fuck off. Maybe he’d just do it discreetly anyways.
On the other hand, Tim had the chance here to lessen his big brother’s suffering, even just a little bit, and touching on an event that mattered ought to put him on anyone monitoring the timestream’s radar. It was too tempting to pass up.
Kind of like this little vacancy sign. Sign was a little generous, it was a piece of paper taped to the inside of a window on the ground floor. A rundown apartment block Tim remembered buying after it was condemned and remodeling into a Neon Knights center. Two blocks over from Crime Alley proper, which meant it was unlikely to get many Bat sightings. Bruce was sore about patrolling this area until Jason.
And then again, after Jason.
The specifics of the situation weren’t as airtight as Tim would have liked. He was going to need a much better grasp on the details of the Gotham mob scene if he wanted to know what he could and couldn’t afford to change. At the very least he’d like to avoid or minimize the time Dent spent kicking the shit out of Dick. And hopefully, you know, save the judge’s life. But Tim really wasn’t sure he could get away with both without there being major ripples.
The landlady gave him a suspicious look when he haggled her on the rent and then offered to pay the first two months, but she just snapped a warning about not bringing any business home with him and that he would be charged for any smoke damage. At least she hadn’t cut power to his unit yet, so the lights would work. He’d get a bill at the end of the month. Gas and water were his problem, which would be fun without a legal identity.
Apparently Tim looked like he was in a gang. Maybe it was the jacket?
He wasn’t sure that he could just let those events play out when he knew he could stop them.
Tim had spent most of the past few years refusing to let bad things happen where he could make a difference. Was giving that up selfless, fighting his instincts to preserve the timeline, or selfish, refusing to help those in need, for the hope it would get him home? In fact, did Tim even have the right to go home from here? There was so much good he could do, and all it would cost was his whole life. But.
That was the Mission, right?
Standing alone in an empty apartment; two rooms, a hallway, and a bathroom, Tim kind of wanted to cry. The one room had a stove-top oven on the wall, a sink, some cupboards, the fixtures for a fridge, and about sixty five square feet. The bedroom had a window and a closet. The bathroom had a standing shower, a sink, and a toilet. Over all, not the worst place Tim had ever stayed, but something about the shitty linoleum and stained carpet wrapped tight around his throat.
There was a need, and Tim had honed himself into the kind of person who fulfilled needs when he was still just a kid. From there, others had done a lot of the shaping, to remake him to suit themselves, whether they knew it or not. The only problem was Tim wasn’t entirely certain what exactly the need here was.
Gotham was mostly fine right now. As fine as it ever got.
But Two Face was going to murder a judge and beat Robin. And the gang violence was going to stew and froth and kill people. Destroy families. Batman would fight it, save lives everywhere he could, but people would die. To drugs, guns, chemicals, and supervillains.
One day Robin would die.
They couldn’t save everyone.
But they had to try.
That was the mantra that kept Tim moving in the face of grief, time and again.
He’d try to get home, but he couldn’t turn his back on all these people he had a second chance to save. He couldn’t let them die a second time without even trying.
Tim laid out his belt and harness, unpacking their compartments to do a full inventory. He plugged his tablet into one of the wall outlets. He opened a file for all of the security features he needed to implement and databases he needed to re-hack.
Best to get started, there was a lot to do.