Chapter Text
Tim didn’t rise from his throne, as the doors to the huge hall slammed open and masked figures flooded the room. Green trappings and banners dripped from the walls like candle wax, and, upon each one was emblazoned a golden hourglass. At his side, Pru didn’t jump – she’d been too many years in this business – but he saw the way her hands tightened on the guns at her waist. Neither of them knew what to expect from this, though they’d debated it for months in their council chambers.
‘Get your ninja the fuck out of Crime Alley,’ Jason seethed, guns in his hands, despite their lack of aggression. Some habits, it seemed, were harder to break than others. ‘I don’t care if they’re in Gotham, or in Bristol or in the fucking Manor, but they don’t go in my territory!’
‘Nice to see you too,’ Tim answered mildly. ‘Do you want something to drink or something to eat, after your long journey here?’ Even after all these years, Tim couldn’t deny the guilty thrill he got out of needling Jason. The man had done too much to him, had said too much to him, for it to be undeserved.
‘I’m not here to play your games, Drake,’ Jason bristled. ‘I’m here to tell you that the next time I see one of your ninjas in my area, I shoot them, no matter what they’re doing and what they might say.’ Tim knew he wasn’t bluffing – Jason was still stuck in his old ways, unable to move past the history that the League had.
‘Please,’ replied Tim, cold eyes fixed on Jason until the man shrunk slightly, ‘The moment you try and hurt a single one of my people is the moment that Interpol find out the locations of all of the Red Hood’s current, past and prospective safehouses.’ He paused, cocking his head. ‘What would you do then,’ he asked, slightly curious. ‘Would you run to Bruce, or to Dick and Babs, begging them to help you, or would you let yourself get arrested to prove a point?’
Jason paced, a tick that Tim knew he used to calm himself down, before he took a breath and turned back to Tim. ‘Fine, then.’ He sniffed. ‘Still living up to your mantle,’ he commented, eying the golden throne that Tim sat upon, the steep dais which led up to it. ‘I can’t believe … of all the people, Drake, I didn’t think that it was you who would join the League of Assassins.’
‘League of Balance,’ Tim corrected icily. He’d done too much, changed too much, for it just to be linked back to Ra’s. The former Demon’s Head might have started this organisation, but he sure as hell didn’t bring it to the place where Tim had. The League of Assassins was an autocratic mercenary cult – the League of Balance was a worldwide network of vigilantes and bodyguards, who saved people. ‘And you don’t get to speak about it – at least I’m not so stubborn and set in the past that I can’t understand that people change.’
‘Potato, Potahtoh,’ Jason sniped. ‘No matter what you’re telling yourself and us, you’re still that messed up little fucker who fled to that bastard when you felt slightly threatened.’ He crossed his arms. ‘Just because you realised that you were doing fucked up things for fucked up reasons doesn’t make you a good person.’
Tim straightened his shoulders. ‘I have told you before – all of you – that I knew what I was doing from the moment that I entered the League of Assassins. I knew that it could be so much more than it was under Ra’s, and I was prepared to see it through. The only difference between you and me is that I did exactly what I wanted to and you’re just an internationally wanted criminal with a list of crimes as long as your ego and no success.’
‘Crime Alley is working out-,’ Jason snapped, and Tim clicked a hologram on, displaying a screen of pale blue statistics in the middle of the room.
‘My people wouldn’t have been in your Alley, Hood, if you weren’t controlling yourself. You’re not a one-man army, and my men have been stepping in to help the people that you can’t. You’re not everywhere all at once – I am. We are saving people, and you don’t get to dispute that just because you’ve inherited Bruce’s control issues.’
Jason stood, speechless, for a second, and Tim watched as the words he’d sharpened on his grief hit every chink in the man’s armour, watched as he punctured his bluster and left Jason lost. Wouldn’t Mother be proud of me now, he thought to himself, all the power in the world at my fingertips, and the ability to hurt anyone I chose with only my words.
‘Fuck you,’ Jason hissed. ‘Before,’ – he didn’t need to say which before, they all knew – ‘I think I liked you, but now … now I know that you’re more like Ra’s than you were ever like Bruce. That’s probably why none of us can stand to look at you.’ He stormed out of the hall, Tim’s men and women filing out of the hall behind him.
‘I’m going to shoot that motherfucker,’ Pru snarled once Jason had left. Her hands twitched towards her guns, as if she would follow him and gun him down in a hallway. ‘After all that we’ve done, he doesn’t get to just come in here and preach when he spends most of his time high on Lazarus juice.’ She looked towards Tim; at the way his eyes hadn’t left the door where Jason had exited. ‘Just give me the word, boss, and he’s got a bullet in him.’
Tim sighed, rubbing his temple with his hands. ‘The only that would accomplish is a horde of heroes coming for my head. I … he’s not worth it.’ He paused, before admitting, ‘Sometimes, I want you to. Sometimes, I want to do it myself. But … the Justice League would come for our heads.’ He brushed back the strands of long hair which framed his face, tying them into a loose knot behind his head as he shed the ceremonial robes he brought out every time the Bats visited.
‘You don’t fight it,’ Pru commented as they walked towards a hidden door together. ‘You’ve never tried to fight it that much – everything they say about you.’
‘That I’m a monster and the demon reborn and a murderer?’ Tim laughed hoarsely. ‘Believe me, I’ve heard the whispers, but … what would be the point of it? All of them – the Bats, the Justice League, the world – are too caught up in what Ra’s did to see what I might have done.’
Pru stopped him with a hand to his arms. ‘I never really asked you why, but … when you’re with them, you act like him. Ra’s. You keep on pretending that you’re him, that our League is just a dictatorship under another name. You don’t show them this,’ she said, gesturing at the modern hallways they walked down, the electric lights and tiles so different from the gothic architecture and torches of the other hall.
‘I … it’s easier,’ Tim admitted. ‘It’s easier if they pretend that I’m different, because then they don’t try and become family again, and I don’t have to … ,’ he trailed off.
‘You don’t have to lose them again,’ commented Asbat, as he stepped out of a doorway. Tim nodded, gratefully, at the other person, aside from Pru, that he thought knew him best. Asbat nodded as they paused, the final gesture of respect Tim hadn’t managed to stop him doing. The man had been raised in Ra’s network, and, while he had embraced their new ideas, he hadn’t yet gotten past all of the traditions he was raised with.
‘How long has it been since a Bat visited?’ Tim asked him, taking a breath. ‘It doesn’t feel like that long, but … from the way Jas- Hood talked, it was longer to them.’
‘Three months and eighteen days,’ Asbat said. ‘Though that was Cassandra as her routine checkup.’
‘The only decent fucking person out of them,’ Pru hissed under her breath, though Tim didn’t pay attention.
‘Outside of Cass?’ he asked.
Asbat bit his lip, not meeting Tim’s eyes. ‘Eleven months and three days,’ he said. ‘Talia’s son visited her grave.’ Tim nodded, vaguely remembering that. Damian had knelt there, so quiet in that empty graveyard, that Tim had felt he needed to talk to him. The younger boy, though … Tim wondered if Damian and Cass were the only ones who understood.
He was not Ra’s al Ghul. He had no intention of taking over the world. And he had changed so much and yet not at all from that boy who was Robin.
It had been ten years since Tim, aged eighteen, had joined the League of Assassins with the sole aim of tearing it down to its foundations.
It had been two years since he had created the League of Balance, gutting Ra’s al Ghul on his own throne.
Tim pushed open the door to his chambers, checking that the figure, who had been sleeping in the bed next to his own when he left, was still there.
They were.
It had been five years since Ra’s had decided that he needed a second heir for security’s sake. Five years since Tim’s son was born.