Chapter Text
JJ wakes up warm, bundled into a blanket and his head on a lap and familiar fingers petting through his hair. He hums and leans into the touch a little more.
“Morning, Timmy,” Nightwing says, voice painfully soft. “How are you feeling?”
He grumbles in protest at the voice disturbing the comfortable moment, and Nightwing huffs a laugh.
“Gotta wake up if you want breakfast. Alfred said he’s making your favorite to welcome you… home. It’ll be ready in about an hour.” There’s a tiny hitch in the sentence, like Nightwing doesn’t really know how to describe this version of the manor that they’ve landed in.
“I’m awake,” Tim protests, and with a jolt he’s reminded of that moment on this universe’s Nightwing’s couch after their jailbreak, when he’d fallen asleep wishing for – for exactly this. “I’m glad you’re here,” He says after a moment.
Nightwing takes a deep breath.
“I’m glad I’m here, too. And I’m glad you’re here, Timmy, where there’s people who have been here for you when I wasn’t able to.”
“We’re really not going back?” Tim asks.
“No, I think it’s best if we stay.” The hand strokes through his hair again, smoothing it back off his forehead. “Back home… back home, Babs hasn’t woken up, and Jim won’t let us see her even if she does. Bruce is… gone. And Alfred–” Nightwing cuts himself off, looking more furious than Tim has ever seen him before. “Alfred has made it clear where his priorities lie. There’s nothing for us there, Timmy, but you have a life here.”
The fingers keep combing through his hair. Speaking of…
“Can you ask Batman if he can fix my hair?”
“Bruce? Yeah, I can let him know. He’s a little different from ours, isn’t he? But seems like a good man.”
“He’s nice,” JJ agrees. This Batman didn’t need to take him in, but he had done so anyway with open arms. He fed and clothed Tim, helped him with his hair, let him bond with his kids. It was nice.
Eventually, they make it down to breakfast with the others. It’s a bit of an awkward affair, but before long the conversation starts to smooth out. JJ focuses on his food, mostly ignoring the murmur of voices around him. He’s still frustrated by the fact that his memory of the time he’d been missing from the manor is mostly gone, and keeps getting caught up on the idea that there’s something important missing, something that happened that he was supposed to remember. It’s starting to really bother him.
“Tim,” Batman says, and JJ looks up, eyes wide. “Dick… the one from your universe, that is… said that you wanted me to fix your hair?”
“Mhm,” JJ confirms. “I don’t know why it’s green again.”
Batman frowns at that.
“Were you with someone while you were gone?” He asks, “If you dyed it yourself I’d think you’d have color on your hands, but it was done very cleanly.”
“Bruce! We agreed you wouldn’t interrogate him over this!” Nightwing – the one from this universe – hisses. “He already said he doesn’t remember.”
“I can’t help if I don’t know what happened while he was off the grid, the security footage has turned up nothing until the moment he showed up in the streets of Metropolis,” Batman argues, frowning. JJ feels himself grow tense, his fingers tightening around the fork in his hand. That’s Batman’s ‘working a case’ frown. Is there a case? Is JJ the case?
Batman clearly has some suspicions about what he was doing while he was gone, and JJ really doesn’t have a way to disprove it to either Batman or himself without getting his memories back.
“There are a hundred other ways you can help that don’t involve interrogating a scared kid – your kid, Bruce, since you took him in!” Nightwing replies.
“There’s three mutilated bodies with ‘JJ’ branded into their chests, what else am I supposed to do except investigate?” Batman says.
“I didn’t hurt anyone!” JJ protests, standing suddenly enough that the chair screeches along the floor and topples over, his pulse racing. Bodies with ‘J’ carved into them? What? JJ knows he’s violent, he’s crazy, he’s killed the Joker and his goons countless times, but he’d – he’d never gone after anyone who wasn’t hunting little birds. Right? But the terrifying blank space in his memories implies the possibility that maybe he did.
The Nightwings are on their feet in a moment, and JJ feels – hunted. Vulnerable. But they aren’t even coming at him,, just standing there with wide, concerned eyes. His Nightwing does eventually step forward, slow and easy, but he still doesn’t grab at him, just stands next to him and stares down Batman for a long moment.
“We believe you, Timmy. Bruce is just – being Batman. It doesn’t mean you hurt anyone, okay? You don’t need to worry about it. It was our only lead on your whereabouts at the time, but we found you. It’s over. We know you didn’t do it.”
Nightwing eventually reaches out and takes Tim’s hand, and leads him from the dining room. The Nightwing of this universe stands and shoots a glare at Batman as well. He goes to tug Jason along with them, but Jason slaps his hand away and curls his arm around his still half-full plate of food.
“Fuck off, I’ll come once I’m done,” Jason snaps at him, shooing them away with his free hand.
In the silence of the dining room after it clears out, Jason stuffs another bite of food into his mouth, chews it slowly, and then speaks.
“Great job, old man. Didn’t learn your lesson after the first time you accused your kid of a murder they didn’t fucking do, huh?” He says, voice faux-casual.
Bruce twitches, grits his teeth, and takes another bite of his own food to avoid rising to the bait. Jason finishes his food before Bruce does, and offers one last comment on his way out the door.
“You still haven’t apologized for that, you know.”
*******
Bruce is – struggling.
There is enough circumstantial evidence for JJ – Tim – to be a viable suspect, on paper. The killer was short, small-framed, strong and well-trained, inflicted suffering before killing, and left JJ’s initials literally burned into the skin of the victims. But Tim had never – not once – targeted innocents in his crusade against the Joker.
Jason’s comments stick with him.
There had been a lot of factors surrounding Jason’s decision to run away, but he knows that the last straw had been their fights in the aftermath of the Gloria Stanson case and Bruce’s refusal to believe that Jason was entirely innocent in the death of her abuser. He’s still not entirely sure what the truth was in that situation. He’d looked and looked, but he couldn’t find any CCTV footage to prove – or counter – Jason’s claim of the man tripping and falling over the rail before he reached him.
Bruce sighs, settling into the Batcomputer chair and preparing for another long night, only to be disrupted by the chair being swung around.
Dick Grayson – the one from JJ’s original universe – stops the chair once it’s facing him.
“Staying here has been good for him,” Grayson says, voice quiet and serious, “It’s familiar and safe and he trusts you – trusts Batman. But if you use that trust in order to try and lock him up, you’ll regret it.”
Grayson had taken on the entire Justice League in his home universe to find his little brother. Bruce believes that this young man before him possesses both the skill and the willpower to make his life a living hell if he felt that Tim was threatened by Bruce’s actions. Bruce takes a deep breath.
“Tim has exhibited remarkable control over the violent tendencies leftover from the psychological conditioning he underwent. When he first arrived in this universe, J’onn scanned his mind and skimmed through some of his memories. It was an invasive method, I admit, but it gave us insight into Tim’s potential for rehabilitation. He’s a good kid. I… I don’t believe that he was the one that killed those people, but I do think that the deaths are connected to him, somehow. He’s our best lead.”
Grayson watches him closely, looking for the lie.
“Tim is smart. Smarter than me, smarter than you. He figured out our identities when he was nine years old, and then spent the next three years following us through the city undetected nearly every night to take pictures,” Grayson says.
Bruce… did not know that. He’d wondered how Tim had ended up with the alternate universe’s Batman, but it had felt cruel to ask for stories about the boy’s dead Bruce Wayne.
“And he came to you and your Batman and asked to become Robin?” Bruce asks. Grayson smiles, small and sharp, and shakes his head.
“No. Bruce and I were fighting, I’d run off to be with the Titans full time and then moved to Bludhaven. We hadn’t talked in months, and Tim… Tim noticed. He wanted to help us reconcile, said that Gotham needed Robin back, that Batman was a better man when he had Robin by his side, but I wasn’t… I wasn’t ready. Alfred ended up giving Tim the Robin suit when Bruce and I got captured by Scarecrow. It was the first case we’d worked together in half a year, and we were – arguing, constantly. It compromised our position and we both got gassed. We were going to die, but Tim Drake – all of twelve years old, almost completely untrained – snuck in and got us and the hostages out.” Grayson closes his eyes, clearly reminiscing, before opening them again and fixing his gaze back on Bruce. “What I’m trying to say, Bruce, is that you being unable to find him for a week doesn’t mean he was up to something bad, okay? He’s always been sneaky and fiercely independent. But he’s a good kid, like you said. You just… have to trust him. If he remembers anything that will help, he’ll tell you. He wants to be helpful.”
Bruce considers his words for a long, long moment.
“I’m not going to drop the case,” He says, “But I’ll remove him from the suspect list.” And apologize to Jason, while he’s at it. God knows he’s put it off long enough.
*******
Something is tracing the scars on his cheeks, light but sharp. A fingernail.
“I know you’re awake, birdie,” His Mama’s voice says, but she sounds – off. Wrong.
His Mama was never directly involved in his torture. He knows that many of the methods the Joker used were ones that she devised, modified, recommended, but – but she never hurt him directly. She was always gentle with him.
JJ’s lip is bleeding.
“Where’s Mistah J?” Harley demands – because this is Harleen Quinzel in another universe, one who’d never sung lullabies to him, never wiped the vomit from his chin and the blood from his hands.
This Harley had learned about his existence in this universe, somehow, and come to the logical conclusion that he had something to do with the disappearance of the Joker. She'd been doing her own detective work, apparently. And then, she’d dropped two bodies with his initials burned into their chests to catch his attention. JJ couldn't help it -- he was drawn right into the trap, and now she had him.
She’d kept him drugged for the first couple of days she’d had him. He remembers spending a lot of time bound in the trunk of a vehicle. And now he’s drugged again, but it’s… definitely something different. Not a sedative, that’s for sure. He feels loose and relaxed and sweet, flying high high high above this earth he's ended up on.
“Mmmmama,” JJ slurs, leaning into the hand that’s fisted in his hair and giggling. The fingers twitch, a surprised little sound punched out of Harley. “Missed you, Mama.”
"I'm your mama, lil' birdie?" She asks, voice sweet as syrup. "Where's your Papa, then?" The fingers of her other hand come back up to run over the scars that had been carved into his face, and JJ is reminded to smilesmilesmile.
JJ tells her everything. She's furious, at first, slapping him hard across the face, but then, as quickly as her ire spiked, she calms back down. She coos soothingly at him, tells him he was a good boy for being so honest. As a reward for his good behavior, she unties him, paints his face with white and red, and dyes his hair green for him again. Deep inside, JJ knows there's something -- something wrong with that, but the drugs in his system make him cooperative. Pliant. She takes him with her, whispering something about him being the last little piece left of her Mistah J. She tells him that there's something they have to do.
The smell of sizzling flesh is -- jarring. She's holding his hands gently around the metal poker, pressing the brand into the skin of the dead, mutilated man, and JJ jolts back, blinking away the smoke from the charred flesh. Oh, no. No, no, no, this isn't right. He didn't kill the man, but he knows he just -- sat there and watched while she did, giggling, until she pressed the hot poker into his hands. He doesn't kill her when he runs. She screams at him to come back, starts to cry, telling him that he can't leave her behind, can't leave her all alone after killing her love. She tells him that she'll find him. That he can't run forever. He gets struck with a cattle prod by one of her henchmen, but JJ is an expect at those things by now. He pushes through the shock, even though it feels like his brain is melting out of his ears, and runs, and runs, and runs, and --
Tim wakes up screaming, already cradled in his brother's arms. His brother is murmuring quietly, trying to reassure him, he must have heard him, must have been close by, he was always close by now that he found him because of course he'd find him, of course he'd be there, because it's --"Dick," He manages to gasp, and then brain goes fuzzy with static.
At some point he must have fallen back asleep, because the next time he wakes up, it's a much more gentle drift into awareness. The first thing he realizes is that he's not in bed anymore. He's dressed in clean lounge clothes -- sweatpants, a too-big hoodie -- and he's in the entertainment room. Someone is there with him, tucked close against his side. To his other side is the arm of the couch. The TV is on, the low murmur of voices a pleasant hum in his ears. Tim still feels hazy, disconnected, but he's... definitely awake now. He's not sure why they brought him to the entertainment room after he went back to sleep, though. He turns towards whoever is on his left -- Jason, apparently-- to ask.
All that comes out is a hoarse croak.
Jason still jolts like he's been electrocuted, meeting Tim's gaze with huge, startled eyes. Tim tries again, this time managing to ask the question. It only seems to make Jason's eyes get wider and his mouth drops open in shock.
"Bruce!" Jason shouts suddenly, one hand darting out to grab Tim's sleeve, gripping tightly as if JJ is about to make a run for it, "Bruce, Dickheads, get over here!"
JJ blinks at him, baffled.
"Oh my god, they're gonna be so relieved. What the actual fuck, Tim? Don't ever do that again, you -- you scared the shit out of us! You've been completely unresponsive for days now, dude," Jason says, tugging at his sleeve again, and then, after a moment of hesitation, the older boy is dragging Tim into a hug. JJ twitches at first, but -- this is one of the little birds he saved. This might be new ground for them, but Jason isn't going to hurt him. He relaxes slowly, and brings his own arms up to hug Jason back.
Moments later, Batman and Dick Grayson -- both of them -- come running into the room.
"...Hi?" JJ says. He's extremely wrong footed here. If Jason is telling the truth, he's been dissociated for days after -- after what? What could have set that off so badly while he was safe and secure in the manor? He furrows his brow, thinking back hard, and then it finally clicks right as Batman opens his mouth. "Oh! Ohhhh. I saw my Mama," JJ interrupts. "This world's version. She was looking for Papa. She wasn't happy that I killed him, but she forgave me. That's why I was in Metropolis. She took me there. Sorry for scaring you, Dick," JJ says. The explanation doesn't seem to relieve anyone -- they're all staring at him in shock. He hunches in on himself a little, eyes flicking over to Bruce. "I didn't kill them. The people who died. She did that. I did brand one of the bodies, but she was -- she was holding my hands around the poker, and I was drugged, and I ran as soon as I could. It wasn't my fault. It wasn't!"
"Tim," Batman says, voice gentle, "It's okay. I believe you. You're safe now. Try to breathe with me."
JJ sucks in a harsh, stuttered breath. It helps a little, so he repeats it again, cutting off the impending anxiety attack.
"You said his name," Jason says from out of nowhere. "You said 'Dick'."
JJ freezes, feeling like he's been caught doing something he absolutely shouldn't have done. He glances at the faces surrounding him. None of them look angry. None of them look horrified. Instead, they look -- happy. Soft. Relieved. JJ isn't supposed to know the name, though. And -- and his Mama will be coming for him. So he can't know the name yet.
"No I didn't," He argues.
"Yes, you did. I heard you. We all heard you. It's a good thing, dude, it's part of the recovery process," Jason replies.
"Did not," JJ says back, petty and childish. "Can't say the name if I don't know it."
"Well obviously you know it, dumbass, or you wouldn't have said it!" Jason's face screws up, looking visibly frustrated.
"I don't know it, so there's no way I could have said it. You're crazy, you must be imagining things," JJ says matter-of-factly. Jason's face is starting to get a little red, like a little robin.
"Boys," Batman says, "Drop it."
JJ sticks his tongue out at Jason, and then beams at Batman innocently.
"Mama wasn't happy I left. She thinks I'm the last piece of her Joker that's left, so she's not likely to give up on finding me again," JJ says suddenly, remembering the original topic of conversation. No one looks happy about that announcement, all of them switching back into mission mode, which means he's successfully derailed them from the accidental name drop and they can all move on. JJ is so good at this manipualtion thing.