Tim entered his penthouse, tired after a long night out on patrol. He wanted to get out of his Red Robin suit and fall asleep on his sheets.
He was not expecting to find anyone in his home.
He got defensive when he noticed the red-haired girl sitting on his coffee table. All of his papers had been stacked to the side. She was staring at an unconscious black-haired boy on his couch. There was blood on the floor. The lights coming through the window gave the blood green flecks.
He pushed his panic button, barely making any noise. The girl seemed to have heard him because her attention snapped to him. Tim opened his comms so his family could hear and see what was going on.
The girl had teal eyes that glowed. Something about her seemed familiar, but Tim couldn’t quite put his finger on what it was.
Before he could ask any questions, the girl spoke.
“According to our parents' medical files, they needed a donor to have kids. We have the same father. That makes you our older brother.”
Tim didn’t know what to say to that. Her breathing was starting to pick up and become erratic. The bags under her eyes looked bigger than Tim’s, and he had only slept four hours in the past two days.
“How did you get in here—”
“You’re the only relative we have that won’t hurt us!”
Well, first thing first, “Is he injured?”
Jazz took her younger brother off the table and ran. She had gotten there in time before her parents had done any real damage. They had still been able to make an incision on Danny’s chest.
When she saw her bleeding baby brother, she didn’t think. Using the element of surprise, she attacked Maddie and Jack with the anti-creep stick. She got in her car and drove in a random direction. After a few hours of driving, she stopped and tried to staunch Danny’s bleeding. His advanced healing stopped him from bleeding to death, thank the Ancients.
Jazz was glad she had made a plan in case something like this happened.
She took out the first aid kit in her trunk and used butterfly bandages to close up the incision. She never learned how to sew a person up. Usually, Danny did it to himself. He still hadn’t woken up.
She knew the bandages wouldn’t be enough, but they would have to do. Jazz took out the fake license plates she had hidden in the car and changed them. There was no reason to make finding them easier for her paren—for Jack and Maddie.
Jazz counted the money she had in the car and took stock of her supplies. She had the disposable cellphones with Tucker and Sam’s number programmed. A few thousand dollars in cash, thank you, Sam, and fake IDs Tucker had made for them.
The most important thing, though, was the information on one Timothy Drake-Wayne.
While making plans in case the worst happened, Tucker found out that Maddie and Jack Fenton used a donor to have both Jazz and Danny. He had hacked the agency that the Fentons used. They had used Jack Drake’s sperm to help conceive them.
Jack had been an old friend of the Fentons who had agreed to help. After donating, he had signed away all parental rights. Maddie had carried Jazz and Danny. Over the years, the Fentons had lost touch with Jack.
Jack had a son, though, who was older than Jazz and Danny.
Timothy Drake-Wayne was the biological child of millionaires Janet and Jack Drake and the adopted son of Bruce Wayne. He was rich enough to buy the Ancients and, apparently, had enough goodwill to provide protection and medical attention.
It helped that he was Red Robin.
Tim sucked in his breath when he saw the incision on the middle of the younger teenager’s chest. It looked like someone had started vivisecting him. He had been wrong earlier. It wasn’t the light distorting the boy’s blood to seem green; there was green mixed in with the red. What’s more, it was Lazarus green. Was he a meta-human?
“What are your names,” he asked. He at least needed to know that.
The girl hesitated for a second before answering.
“My name is Jazz, that’s Danny.”
“Don’t worry, Red Robin. I’m using facial recognition and tracking any mention of siblings named Jazz or Danny. I’m also looking through your dad’s medical files. If he donated like she mentioned, there must be records on it.” Thank God for Oracle.
“How’d you find me? And why aren’t you surprised that I’m Red Robin?”
“It’s not that hard to figure out your identity. Or the rest of Gotham’s heroes. There’s only one guy who is rich enough to be Batman and fits the psychological profile to want to fight crime in Gotham City. Once you figure out Bruce Wayne is Batman, it’s easy to find the identity of the other crime-fighters in Gotham.”
Huh, so that’s what it feels like to have your secret identity exposed. He’d have to apologize to Dick and Bruce.
“What happened to him? Why are you running from your family?”
Jazz hesitated and bit her lips. She was still determining if she should trust him.
“I can’t help if I don’t have the whole story,” he told her gently. He was a hero. Whether it turned out that they were his siblings or not, they had come to him for help.
Jazz sighed and dropped her face into her hands. She didn’t know where to start. Tim took out his first aid kit while he waited. He was about to put thread through a needle when Jazz stopped him.
“That thread won’t work. His blood will eat through it. Here,” she took out some glowing green string from her first aid kit, “this will help.”
Tim didn’t question it, but he did file that bit of information away for later. He knew Bruce was doing the same thing. He wondered if they were already here, listening in from the outside, not to spook or give away their location to Jazz.
Tim started sewing up the wound. He discreetly took some of Danny’s blood to test later.
“Just so you know, there will be anomalies in his blood, so don’t freak out when you see that. It’ll still be good enough for DNA testing. Also, if you can burn the evidence when you’re done, that’d be great.”
Tim had thought he had been discreet.
“Damn, Replacement, you’re losing your touch,” Jason said over the comms. Tim didn’t answer, but he did grit his teeth. He should’ve known Jazz would be observant.
“We’re running from our parents. Danny was in a lab accident a year ago. It—it changed him. My parents are ectobiologists. They study ghosts and ectoplasm.”
Tim was listening intently while sewing up the younger boy. He didn’t react to the word ‘ghost.’ He’d seen weirder things. Tim heard typing through the comms.
“A few years ago, my parents built a portal to the Ghost Zone. It’s a dimension where ghosts and other ectoentities exist. It didn’t work the first time they tried to turn it on.” She took a deep breath. “My parents are very lax when it comes to lab safety. They let us enter with little to no protection. Danny had gone to the basement, that’s where the portal and lab is, with his friends.”
Tim continued sewing the boy up, but he could guess where this was going.
“His friends had dared him to go into the portal. I wasn’t there, so I couldn’t stop him. My parents, heh, they’re brilliant but scatterbrained. They built the ‘on’ button inside the portal. From what Danny tells me, he tripped and pressed the on button. A portal to another dimension turned on top of him. It killed him and revived him at the same time. When he came out, his DNA had been mutated. He had powers that only ghosts had and some that were unique to him.”
Tim took a deep breath. He had thankfully finished with the stitches.
Bruce entered through the window silently and in the shadows. Jazz turned to look at him. Wow, she had to be a meta-human, too.
She ignored the bat and looked at Danny, carding her hands through his hair.
“Opening the portal had consequences. Ghosts suddenly overran Amity Park. Danny used his powers to become Amity’s hero. He kept both humans and ghosts safe. Our parents are also ghost hunters. They think all ghosts are evil and would hunt them without prejudice to destroy or study them. Their papers were used to justify making the Anti-Ecto Acts. Laws that allow the capture, experimentation, and genocide of being that uses or produces ectoplasm.”
“I don’t know how they found out about Danny, but I’ll ask him when he wakes up. He’s only woken up for a few minutes at a time. He used his powers to sneak us up here. Sorry about that, by the way. I don’t know what they used on him to make him sleep this long. Usually, he only sleeps two or three hours a night, but now, he’s been sleeping for almost two days.”
“I looked into the Anti-Ecto Act Laws. Guys, bad doesn’t even begin to describe it,” Oracle said.
“Hn,” Bruce said while looking at the information Oracle was sending him to the computer in his glove.
Tim stared at Jazz. He knew now why she looked a bit familiar. She had Jack Drake’s nose and chin. Danny had his mouth and eye shape. Looking at his two (possible) siblings, Tim knew he would do anything to help them.
It seemed he would add more to the brother and sister department.
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