Chapter Text
The bus drivers on the eight o’clock Bristol Heights-Gotham city centre run had long since stopped commenting on the tiny 12-year-old with the fancy camera who would purchase a return ticket from them every night for months, disappear for a few weeks, then get right back to it. This suited Tim just fine.
For all his efforts to conceal himself, it really wouldn’t take that much questioning to reveal that the only black-haired blue-eyed boy of his stature to live in that area was Timothy Drake, and then people would start to ask questions and his parents would be at home for longer than a few weeks every four or five months and he wouldn’t be able to take photos of Batman and Robin… Not that that was as exciting as it used to be.
When he’d started with Dick as Robin, staying hidden to take photographs had been almost like a game. Jason’s takeover a short while later had been a difficulty spike, the street Robin had learned early on in life that people staring at you was not good, and had an almost metahuman ability to locate the person who was gazing at him, but Tim’s stealth abilities had improved as well, so it was still fun.
Now though… Tim could dance the Macarena on the Batsignal and so long as he wore a blue shirt the Dynamic Duo would have a derogatory thought about the GCPD’s hiring standards then continue to exchange glares and wait for Commissioner Gordon to leave so they could outright argue, like his parents did any time they spent more than two weeks in Gotham. Like they were doing now.
It was a quiet argument, all things considered, both participants aware that being caught screaming at each other atop Gotham National Bank would not do much for their carefully-constructed mythos. Unfortunately, the bank was the tallest building for several blocks, so in order to see them Tim had sacrificed all ability to hear their words.
From his best guess, it was either started over Jason’s recklessness with the muggers he’d taken down earlier, or Batman abandoning Jason in the middle of patrol last night for a minor Justice League incident that turned out to be a drunken Lexcorp employee in charge of an exo-suit that Superman could have taken out with his pinky. Probably Batman had made a comment on the former, Jason had fired back with the latter and things had escalated. It was a depressingly familiar cycle.
Since the dynamic duo had returned from Ethiopia around six months ago, there had been seven of these fights that Tim knew of, and probably countless more that they’d had the sense to conduct behind closed doors, from the number of times they started their patrols not speaking to one another or even operating separately.
Tim hadn’t taken a single good picture of either of them in that time. He was starting to wonder why he bothered bringing his camera.
The argument ended as they always did, with Jason trying an abortive strike on Batman then grappling off before things became actually violent.
Neither participant was in any fit state of mind for crime-fighting, as proven by the fact that Jason didn’t even glance at Tim’s hiding spot, despite swinging right past it. Tim had no doubt that a month ago he’d be desperately trying to explain himself right now, not slowly descending a fire escape to go home with a blank roll of film and a heavy heart.
Somebody was going to have to find a way to help Gotham’s heroes, or they’d end up dead at worst, separated at best. And screaming, plate-throwing divorce levels of separated at that, a permanent ceasing of relations, not like how Batman and Dick were constantly dancing around the point of reconciliation.
It was as he hit the alley floor that the thought popped into his head unbidden. “Why can’t the person who helps them be me?”
It took until ten thirty the following morning for Tim to admit that maybe he needed more of a plan than some vague idea of ‘help’. He’d decided to hack the GCPD’s records to see if he could predict any negative effects of Batman losing a Robin, so as to have a just-in-case plan if events escalated before Tim could step in, and it did not look good.
Both before Dick Grayson had been taken in by Bruce Wayne and in the brief period between Dick being fired and Jason being hired the number of criminals being brought in by the Batman with serious injuries had been approximately double the amount than with a Robin by his side. More disturbing was the fact that their unofficial ‘Bat-watch’ recorded a similar trend with the number of times Batman had left holding himself as if he were wounded. Batman clearly needed to have a Robin by his side in order to not commit suicide by vigilantism.
The first step in providing the help to avoid that would be finding the root cause of the change in their relationship. As far as Tim could see, neither Bruce nor Batman were treating Jason any different, which meant that the problem lay with how Jason reacted to that treatment, which had always been fine before, right? Tim paused.
Actually, it hadn’t always been fine before. There had been several occasions, especially early on, where Jason’s Robin had stormed out on Batman, only returning after talking with Batgirl and patrolling with her for a bit. Wait, that was it. Batgirl. Tim had been an idiot and focused too much on the revelation that Batman needed Jason to be Robin to question what Jason needed to be an effective Robin. In this case, a Batgirl.
Tim knew that Barbara Gordon was doing an excellent job setting herself up as Oracle, information broker to the Bats, but clearly her new role wasn’t cutting it in the helping-Robin-cope-with-Batman department. Now that Tim thought about it, the problems between Jason and Bruce had started escalating back following Barbara’s crippling. The best explanation Tim could make for this was that Jason was unwilling to remind her of her loss by venting about Batman to someone who would understand.
In any case, what Tim had to do was clear. He had to persuade Barbara Gordon to train somebody else to be a new Batgirl, and thus indirectly save Batman and Robin. That didn’t sound too hard.