#pt5

Dick landed lightly from the zipline, pulling off his mask to run a hand through his sweaty hair. "Okay, did anyone else feel like we just stepped into an alternate universe? Bizarro-Gotham, maybe? Where Red Hood let criminals get arrested with all their bones intact?"

At the main console, Tim didn't look up from the three holographic screens he was cross-referencing. "It's the third time this week," he murmured, his voice a mix of exhaustion and intense curiosity. He pulled up footage from the night's raid. "Look. Hostile with a crowbar, coming at Hood's blind side. Two weeks ago, that man would be eating through a straw for a year. Tonight?" Tim zoomed in. Jason had disarmed the man with a swift, precise twist, shoved him face-first into a wall to daze him, and moved on. The threat neutralized, the brutality… absent.

"It's good, right?" Dick said, leaning against the console, a hopeful smile tugging at his lips. "It's… it's what we wanted. It's control. It's Jason, but without the…" He made a vague, explosive gesture with his hands.

"It's a deviation from an established, years-long pattern," Tim countered, though not unkindly. He was a creature of data, and Jason Todd had been a terrifyingly consistent dataset of rage and violence. "Deviations have causes. Is he on new medication? Did he have a breakthrough with a therapist I don't know about? Did he… I don't know, get a really calming pet?"

Dick chuckled. "Maybe he's just finally mellowing out. People can change, Tim."

"People, yes. Jason?" Tim finally swiveled in his chair to face Dick. "His changes are usually preceded by explosions, both literal and metaphorical. This is… quiet. It’s unsettling because it’s too peaceful."

From the shadows near the training mats, a deeper voice spoke, its tone carefully neutral. "Or it's a prelude."

Bruce Wayne stepped into the light, having already changed out of the Batsuit into simple black trousers and a shirt. His face was its usual granite mask, but his eyes, always the betrayer, were etched with a deep, weary conflict.

"Hey B," Dick said, his smile softening. "You saw it too, right? He's different."

"I saw a change in tactics," Bruce corrected, his gaze fixed on the frozen screen image of Jason zip-tying a thug's hands from the CCTV recording. "The week before last, he was interrogating informants with fear gas and a BB gun. Now he's… apprehending." He said the word like it was foreign. "It's a significant drop in aggression levels."

"And that's a bad thing?" Dick pressed.

"It's an unknown," Bruce stated, his voice low. "With Jason, the extremes are predictable. This… this middle ground isn't." He walked to the computer, his large frame dwarfing the chair Tim sat in. He began pulling up files—security footage, comm logs, injury reports from the past fortnight. "I want a full workup. Any new contacts? Unexplained movements? Financial anomalies?"

"Bruce," Dick said, his voice laced with gentle reproach. "He's your son. He's doing better. Can't we just… be glad?" Dick softly pleaded.

The question hung in the air, and Bruce’s jaw tightened. He wanted to. God, he wanted to grasp that hope with both hands and never let go. He pictured the little boy he’d taken in, the bright, fierce teenager who loved Shakespeare and knew how to make Alfred’s favorite tea just right. It hurt.

But then he pictured the monster in the warehouse, the crowbar, the explosion. He pictured the Pit-maddened revenant who had tried to tear their family apart. Every time he had dared to hope before, it had been shattered, each time leaving a deeper crack in his foundation.

A ruse, whispered the paranoid, broken part of him, the part forged in an alley long ago. It’s always a ruse. He’s lulling you into a false sense of security. There’s a plan here. There’s always a plan.

He couldn’t survive another collapse. He just couldn't anymore.

"He was involved in an incident two weeks ago," Bruce said, bypassing Dick's question entirely. He pulled up a file tagged with Leslie Thompkins's clinic encryption. "An unidentified male juvenile, severe trauma. Hood provided emergency evac. Has anyone followed up on the boy?"

Tim shook his head. "Leslie handled it. The kid was a John Doe, no match in any system. He disappeared from the clinic after a few days. Probably a runaway who got back on his feet and moved on. Standard for Gotham's street kids."

Dick snapped his fingers, the pieces clicking together in his mind. "You think that's it? Maybe helping that kid… I don't know, sparked something?" He turned to Bruce, his expression shifting from confusion to dawning understanding. "I was there, Bruce, when we loaded him into the Batmobile. The kid was barely conscious, but he looked at Jason and made a joke about staying positive." He paused, "And Jason laughed. A real, honest laugh. It was quiet, but it was there. Like it surprised him."

Then, another memory surfaced, and Dick's focus intensified. "And later, at Leslie's, after he'd been stitched up, the kid woke up. He was out of it on painkillers, and the first thing he does is look at Jason and ask, 'Did I kill the mood?'" A faint, wistful smile touched Dick's lips. "Gotta say, kid had guts” He laughs awkwardly at his own joke 

"He kept it up, too. Just a stream of awful puns and one-liners, despite everything. It had all three of us completely baffled. But the thing is... it kept making Jason laugh. Not just once, but every time."

Dick looked back at Bruce, his hands settling at his sides. "This kid was gutted bruce” he starts quietly and seriously “But, he had this... stubborn cheerfulness. Maybe, it just reminded Jason that there's something else besides the anger. That there are people worth protecting, not just punks worth punishing."

The hope in Dick's voice was a quiet, steady thing now, a deliberate counterpoint to Bruce's simmering paranoia. He wasn't celebrating, but he was certain. He saw his little brother, for the first time in years, finding a reason to stay grounded, and he felt a firm conviction that this was the catalyst they'd been missing.

But Bruce’s eyes remained on the file photo of the kid—pale, dark-haired, unconscious. A data point. A variable. It seemed too simple, too sentimental. Jason’s trauma ran deeper than could be salved by a single act of charity.

"Perhaps," Bruce allowed, the word tasting like ash. He closed the file. "Or perhaps it's unrelated. We operate on evidence, not sentiment. I want a full background on every person Leslie treated that week. I want to know if anyone new has entered his territory. I want to know what he's doing when he's not wearing the Hood."

He turned and walked towards the case holding Jason's old Robin uniform, a bright, painful splash of color in the gloom. He didn't look at his sons.

"Until we know the cause," he said, his back to them, "we cannot trust the effect. Hope is a liability until proven otherwise."

A flicker of frustration, of old hurt, sparked in Dick’s chest. ‘Why can’t you ever just see something good? Why does it always have to be a threat first?’ But, the thing is, he understood. He’d seen the same hope crushed before, leaving deeper scars each time. Bruce’s paranoia was a fortress built from the rubble of his own heartbreak. Still, it didn't stop Dick from feeling like he was kicked in the chest and left to deal with it on his own.

He needed Bruce’s methodical approach to be the guiding principle here; the stakes were too high for sentiment. Yet, in the privacy of his own mind, Tim desperately wanted Dick to be right.

His relationship with Jason was a tangled knot of resentment, rivalry, and a respect so deep it bordered on reverence. When Tim had first put on the Robin suit, it had still been warm with Jason’s ghost. He’d devoured every case file, every training log. Jason hadn't just been a Robin; he'd been a force of nature—brilliant, fierce, and utterly uncompromising. He was the Robin who fought Batman as hard as he fought criminals, the one who pushed boundaries and questioned orders. In many ways, Jason had been the Robin Tim had secretly aspired to be: less of a perfect soldier, more of a partner with his own fire.

Then he’d met the Red Hood. That brilliant, fierce boy had been twisted into something brutal and devastating, a living monument to the family’s greatest failure. The icon he was, had become a cautionary tale, the monster under bed, the boogyman kids were told to fear. And yet… the raw power, the terrifying competence, the sheer will it took to carve out a piece of Gotham for himself—a part of Tim still couldn’t help but look at the Red Hood and see the shadow of the Robin he’d once idolized. The potential that had been shattered, now sharpened into a weapon aimed at them all.

The idea of that figure, of Jason, finding a sliver of peace, of finally laying down the burden of his rage and becoming something more than the sum of his pain… it was a hope Tim hadn't realized he’d been clinging to. It was the hope that the boy from the case files wasn't entirely gone. That the Robin he'd looked up to could, against all odds, find his way home. And he made sure to look at Dick in the eyes and let him know he also hoped he was right, because, as much as he respected Batman, he also respected Dick Grayson and admired his will to keep things light when everything was dark.

Dick looked between them, the strategist part of him, the one that Batman raised, acknowledged their points, even as the brother in him, the one that was internally mad at Bruce for failing them before, rebelled. So he took a slow breath, stomping down the urge to fight, but not the conviction. "Fine. Do your investigation. But just…” He took a fortifying breath and looked at The Bat in the eyes “be careful, B. If I'm right, and we go in there with 'a mission' in our minds instead of 'help,' we will lose him. Maybe for good this time." He met Bruce's gaze, his own pleading. "Let me at least keep that little flame alive. Just in case."

He wasn't asking as Nightwing. He was asking as the first son, as the oldest brother, the one who remembered a bright, brilliant boy in a Robin costume, and who would grasp at any chance, no matter how slim, to see that boy finally find his way out of the dark.

Bruce stood before the glass case, the Cave silent around them save for the distant drip of water and the hum of servers. The armor was off, leaving only the man, burdened and bare. He stared at the Robin costume, a relic from a life he’d failed to protect, and saw the ghost of the son he’d buried twice.

He wanted to believe. But after so many funerals, both in the ground and of the spirit, Bruce knew that the most dangerous thing in Gotham wasn't a monster you could punch. It was the fragile, treacherous thing called hope.

He finally turned away from the case, his gaze sweeping over his sons. Dick, leaning against the console, his hope a tangible, aching thing in the cool air; and Tim, sitting in the chair in front of the Bat-Computer, with a carefully neutral, yet hopeful, expression. They were his sons, too, they had endured the same losses, the same fractures. The fortress of his paranoia was meant to protect them all, but in that moment, he could see how the walls were keeping them away. 

They were looking at him, waiting for a verdict.

His voice was low, stripped of Batman's growl but no less heavy with the weight of command "We will investigate. Thoroughly. Every lead, every angle." It was the necessary course, the only one the Bat would allow. But then his eyes softened, just for a moment, the father briefly eclipsing the strategist. "But we will do so... with discretion."

It wasn't permission. It was a fragile, carefully worded truce with the hope he couldn't afford to feel. He gave them a single, slow nod—a silent acknowledgment that he saw their faith and would not, yet, deliberately shatter it. He turned and walked towards the staircase that led up to the manor, leaving them in the Cave's silence. He had given their hope a stay of execution. He could only pray it wouldn't become the weapon that destroyed them all.

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Welp, now we have the batfam side of the story, you really though they wouldn't notice? Also, B has some actual narrative here, he has thoughts and feelings ppl, he is human. Hella traumatized, but human. And got a comment on AO3 about Tim feeling bad about Jason comment on "Its a kid Tim, you really expect me to beat him?"

so, if you are wondering 'bout it. I don't think Tim has ever seen himself as a kid as to relate to this one tug. Also, even if he did, he would be pretty self aware that he is a trained vigilante, and that is quite different from being a civilian kid who took on a bad job out of necessity. So he knows Jason beating this kid is way dif than beating him. Also the fact that iirc. Jason never had the intention of killing Tim, and also he did it to prove 2 points, the security of the TT tower and that being robin wasn't safe, he did both and Tim understands that, kinda why Jason does respect Tim as much as he does, even if he also resents him, even if he knows it isn't rational.