Chapter Text
Bruce wakes up not to the sound of his alarm, but to somebody poking his thigh repeatedly with a sharp blade. It’s not forceful enough to actually injure, but it hurts, though not as much as his chest. Why does his chest hurt?
“Is he awake?”
I’m awake, Bruce wants to say, but nothing comes out of his mouth.
“I think he’s still asleep.” That’s a different voice, also masculine, deeper and significantly older than the first. “Stop bothering him, Damian.”
“If Father wanted me to stop bothering him, he can tell me himself.”
Father?
“Alright,” somebody says, and, oh, that’s a third voice, “I’m out of here. Don’t call me again unless he's literally dying.”
“He was,” says the first voice, “literally dying, Jason. It’s only thanks to Tim that he survived.”
“Anyone can jump in front of a bullet,” says the kid who’s called Damian. He sounds disdainful. “I would jump in front of many bullets for Father.”
“This,” Jason says, “is exactly why I don’t answer Bruce’s calls, in case you were wondering.”
“Jason,” the first person says, sounding weary, “you don’t answer Bruce’s calls because you don’t want him to lecture you on what body parts are and are not acceptable to leave in front of a police station.”
“Which body parts are acceptable?”
“None of them,” the first person says at the same time that Damian says, “It depends.”
Depends on what, Bruce wants to ask, but he’s already falling back asleep, and besides, there’s a much more important question on the tip of his tongue.
Whatever happened to him, and whatever caused this apparent amnesia he is experiencing – how many kids did he forget having?
*
The next time he wakes up, he is alone. The room no longer smells like disinfectant and death, so it’s safe to say that he left the hospital, and indeed, when he opens his eyes he finds that he is in his bedroom at the manor. There’s something wrong with it, though. The furniture is all the same, but the walls are bare, and so is the night stand next to his bed. Was the earlier conversation a fever dream? A hallucination? It must have been, because surely, if he really does have a gaggle of children he cannot remember, he would have put up pictures of them.
Bruce reaches for his phone, types in the passcode – and frowns.
Wrong passcode.
Amnesia, he thinks again, and definitely affecting several years, if not decades, of his life. That’s the only explanation for this newfound family, and it would also explain why he changed his phone’s passcode.
But Bruce has always enjoyed puzzles, and he likes to think he’s quite good at them, too. And he doesn’t need to know his passcode in order to check the time and, more importantly, the date.
It's 11:23 am, June 7th. It was June 6th when he went to bed.
The year is the same.
Twelve hours. He has missed twelve hours.
For lack of anything better to do, Bruce tries the passcode again. Still wrong.
His thoughts are interrupted when the door opens, and a dark-haired boy walks in. Blue eyes, pale, doesn’t look older than fourteen, but carries himself like an adult. Damian?
The boy startles when Bruce shifts, clearly surprised to see him awake. His eyes flit uncertainly to the door.
“Good morning,” Bruce says before the kid can bolt.
“Bruce,” the kid says, and Bruce knows that whoever this is, it’s not one of the people who were at his hospital bed last night. “I-“ He sways, suddenly, and as he does, Bruce remembers something else from last night.
“Did you take a bullet for me?” he asks, and gets his answer when Tim straightens, his expression smoothing out until his face reveals nothing.
“The mission required it.”
“Sure,” Bruce says carefully, keeping his tone even, both to soothe and to hide that he has no idea what mission Tim is referring to. “I’m just surprised to see you walking around.”
At this, Tim, if possible, stills even more, doing his best impression of a statue. “I wrote my report as soon as we returned to the Cave yesterday, and it’s a Sunday. I don’t have a meeting at Wayne Enterprises until tomorrow.”
“Sure,” Bruce repeats. It occurs to him that Tim is standing as far away from him as possible, close enough to the door that it wouldn’t take more than a step to leave. Slowly, making sure that Tim can track each movement, he lifts a hand and makes a wavey motion that he’s seen people do on TV. “Come sit with me.”
Tim comes, his suspicion obvious. Following Bruce’s encouraging nod, he sits down on the very edge of the bed. Bruce hides his smile. He remembers being a teenager, remembers a time when every second spent at home and talking to Alfred came close to torture. At least one of his children must be the same.
“All I meant,” he says, “is that you were shot less than a day ago. You should be on bedrest, not sneaking around.” And, since Tim is still eerily silent, still holds himself eerily motionless, he adds, “I’m worried about you, son.”
Tim’s head snaps around comically fast. Several seconds pass as he stares at Bruce, who makes sure to smile back supportively. His smile falls when Tim stands up.
“Nightwing,” he says, and it takes Bruce a moment to realise Tim is talking into an earpiece. “Come back to the manor immediately. We need to check Batman for head trauma.”
*
Bruce lets them run several scans, allows them to draw his blood for a toxin check, correctly answers all questions about his name, the date and the current president, and in between he keeps asking after their wellbeing and whether Damian needs any help with his homework and if Tim is sure he doesn’t want to go back to bed. He also, very subtly, examines his surroundings as though seeing the Batcave for the very first time.
“Amnesia,” Dick declares once they have distracted Bruce (in other words, gave him today’s crossword) and have gathered out of earshot. “It must be.”
“He got all our questions right,” Tim protests. Dick already opens his mouth to object, but then help comes from an unexpected corner.
“Ten minutes ago, that man recommended an “educational, yet spirited” animated movie to me.” The air quotes are audible, even though Damian has not actually moved. “Amnesia does not create new memories. Father would never stoop so low as to watch television.”
“Or at least admit to it,” Dick says. He taps his finger against his lip, which Tim knows Dick stole from a tv show about detectives. It’s not a very good show. As soon as Tim has finished season seventeen, he plans to send a stern letter to the producers detailing all the plotholes.
“Mind control,” Damian suggests, as if they haven’t checked for that like, seven times already.
“Midlife-crisis,” Tim offers.
“An evil doppelganger,” Dick says. Tim has to admit it’s the most plausible theory so far.
“Boys,” Bruce calls out, and all three of them freeze. But his eyes aren’t shooting lasers, and he isn’t throwing knives at them. Instead, he holds up the crossword. “Ten-letter word for dubious, starts with s?”
Tim narrows his eyes at him. “Suspicious.”
“That’s the one,” Bruce says, scribbling it down. “Good job, buddy. Want to come help me with the rest?”
And-
Clearly there is something wrong with Bruce, and clearly somebody should, at some point, take care of this, and clearly that somebody is going to be Tim.
But Tim likes crosswords, and Bruce has never asked for help before.
He ignores the disbelieving looks Damian and Dick are shooting him, and walks over.
*
Dick Grayson, Jason Todd, Tim Drake and Damian Wayne. Those are his sons. Those four boys are Bruce’s sons. He has found adoption papers for two of them, and he thinks he might have kidnapped Tim because he distinctly remembers the Drakes to be his next-door neighbours, and he has found absolutely nothing on where Damian came from, but it doesn’t matter, because overnight, Bruce has turned from not-a-father into a father-of-four, and he could not be happier.
While he has been snooping around the whole day to find out more information on his children, his children have happily embraced his distraction to do some snooping of their own. Bruce doesn’t mind. He wishes Dick didn’t pretend to hug him in order to take some of his hair. If Dick wants a hug, he can just ask for it, and if he wants Bruce’s hair, he can just ask for that, too. Bruce is fairly sure he would give his firstborn (his firstborn!) just about anything right now.
However, besides being a father (a father!), he is also a reasonable man. He knows this can’t go on, and the boys are definitely getting suspicious – at least, three of them are. He hasn’t seen Jason yet, and since his phone is still locked, he has no chance of calling him, either. How often does he normally call Jason? Once a day? Every two days? Maybe Jason will call on his own, and then Bruce can answer. He keeps his phone close, just in case.
That’s a problem for later, though, or at least for whenever Jason calls. For now, he needs to confide to somebody. And since he is an adult, and this is an adult problem, he confides to the one person in the house who is a) also an adult, and b) familiar to Bruce. Even though the last time he checked, that person had also died more than five years ago.
“Coffee, Master Bruce?”
“Tea, if you don’t mind,” Bruce says as he takes a seat. Something is frying on the stove, and the whole kitchen smells heavenly. “Need a hand with that, Alfred?”
Alfred looks, for lack of a better word, alarmed. Bruce has missed him so much he can’t breathe. “I thought we had mutually agreed to each stick to our own jobs after the last meatball incident, sir.”
Ah. Bruce winces at the empty gap that is where surely his memory of any such incident should be. Maybe he hallucinated Alfred dying. Maybe this is a nervous breakdown. It must be.
He takes a sip of the steaming tea Alfred has poured for him, swallows down the pain and says, “That’s actually what I came to talk to you about.”
“Meatballs, Master Bruce?”
“More or less,” Bruce says, and then he figures, screw it, there is no good way to say this, so he might as well just go for it. “I’ve forgotten the existence of my sons and I’m worried it’s turned me into a bad father.”
At the first part of that sentence, Alfred had seemed unperturbed, but at the second part, his eyebrows shoot up. He is exactly like Bruce remembers.
“Am I a bad father?” Bruce asks desperately.
Alfred clears his throat. “If you don’t mind me saying, sir – you’ve certainly never worried about it before.”
That’s not an answer, and Bruce recognises it for the evasion it is. He buries his face in his hands, tea forgotten, and mutters, “How am I supposed to raise four children when I can’t even remember their birthdays?”
“Mine is July 19th,” Tim says, entering the kitchen and plopping down on a seat that’s, though still out of Bruce’s reach, not as far away as it could be. Bruce counts this as progress. “Also, I’ve- what are you doing?”
Wrong password.
Bruce stares dejectedly at his phone. “I thought your birthday might be the code, but it’s not.”
“Give it here.” Once Bruce has placed the phone in Tim’s hand, he quickly types in four numbers and hands it back to him. “Whose birthday is it?” Bruce asks.
Tim snorts. “Nobody’s. It’s the day your parents died.”
“What,” Bruce says.
Tim gives a delicate shrug, faux-casual, but Bruce doesn’t miss how he shifts himself just a little bit more out of reach. “I’m not really supposed to know about it, but my theory is that you use it to remind yourself that pain never stops. Actually,” he quickly says before Bruce can react, “this is great stuff, because it confirms my theory.”
“Your theory,” Bruce repeats flatly.
His son (his son!) nods three times in quick succession. “You know all the basic information, like the date or the president, but you’ve also gained a new knowledge in some areas while lost it in others. Losing information can just be memory loss, but why would you be familiar with a movie that’s only just been released? Why are you drinking tea instead of coffee?” Tim points at his cup almost accusingly. “And your passcode – why would you forget that? All your bloodwork came back clear, so first we thought that maybe you’re a clone, but that doesn’t explain your selective memory. Dick suggested time travel, but earlier you looked like you’ve never even seen the Batcave before – and I think that you haven’t. I think that you’re Bruce Wayne from an alternate universe. A universe where Bruce never became Batman, and definitely one where he never had a Robin. Also, apparently, one where he doesn’t like coffee.” Tim has said all of this in a rush and now takes a deep breath, his eyes gleaming.
Bruce is happy that Tim is so obviously pleased about his theory, but he also has to ask. “Tim,” he says slowly, “you’ve had a long day, and you’re still suffering from a significant injury. Do you think perhaps you’ve just had a nightmare, son?”
Tim does not look contrite. Tim looks like he cannot believe what Bruce just said. “Oh my god,” he says, “Batman is gaslighting me. Alfred?”
“On it, Master Timothy.”
The last thing Bruce feels is a syringe in his neck.
*
The powerpoint has 493 slides and is titled WHY YOU ARE IN A DIFFERENT TIMELINE (AND I’M NOT CRAZY). It has thirty-three slides less than the powerpoint Tim made earlier this afternoon for Dick and Damian, titled WHY BRUCE IS FROM A DIFFERENT TIMELINE (AND I’M NOT CRAZY). He thinks Jason would have appreciated it, maybe, but Jason is not answering anyone’s calls. Again.
Therefore, this all depends on Tim.
Again.
To be fair, Dick had believed him at around slide no. 100, or at least he pretended to in order to get Tim to stop, and Damian, for the first time ever, didn’t even oppose him in the first place. He seems, also for the first time ever, to believe him and Tim to be on the same side – them against this strange man in their house, them for getting the real Bruce back home.
“I don’t know how to get him home,” Tim had said, trying and mostly failing to be reassuring, “but we’ll figure it out.”
That had been an hour ago, before Tim confronted Bruce in the kitchen, before they had to sedate Bruce and tie him to a chair. The real Bruce would be furious with them, with all of them, but especially with Tim.
Other Timeline Bruce is starting to come to, eyelashes fluttering, and Tim nervously flexes his fingers.
“Look,” he says, “I know you’re probably like, super mad, but-“
Bruce does not appear to be listening, his eyes fixed on the screen behind Tim, where the title of the powerpoint presentation can be seen. From behind Bruce, Dick gives him an encouraging thumbs up. Tim wishes Dick would stand by his side, but somebody has to stay close to Bruce in case anything goes wrong.
“So,” Tim says, clearing his throat, “I’ll try to make it quick-“ – Dick snorts – “and if you have any questions, feel free to interrupt. So. Um.”
This is so weird. Tim is normally fairly good at public speaking, but somehow, right now, Bruce’s gaze on him feels heavier than usual. More likely to judge. Maybe because he knows what to expect from Real Bruce, what sort of behaviour is more or less likely to disappoint, but this Bruce is an unknown variable. It’s way easier to get something wrong, to mess up, and then Tim will-
“Hey,” Bruce says, cutting through his thoughts. “Relax, kiddo. It looks like you’ve put a lot of work into this presentation, right?”
Tim frowns. He supposes he has, though it hasn’t been more effort than normal.
“Well, I’m excited to hear it.”
“Um,” Tim says, because maybe Bruce hasn’t understood what’s going on. Maybe this Bruce is stupid. “We tied you to a chair.”
“And very effectively, too. I can’t move my arms at all. Who did the knotwork? Was it you?”
“It was me,” Dick pipes up from behind him. Bruce tries and fails to turn around, but he smiles anyway.
“Well done. Excellent job.”
Dick freezes for a second, before beaming as widely as Tim has ever seen him.
The distraction actually did a good job calming his nerves, and thus he starts his presentation. Throughout it all, Bruce is attentive and even interested, nodding at times as though to underline the point he’s making. He sits through all the 493 slides without complaining once, and when Tim is finished, he says, “Alright, I believe you.”
This makes Tim pause. “Really?”
“You made a convincing argument,” Bruce says and then looks Tim in the eyes, face serious, as he says, “But I feel like I should point out, just to be on the same page, that you didn’t need to go through all this trouble. I would have believed you no matter what.”
That is obviously bullshit, because Bruce had literally questioned him like, two hours ago. “You literally questioned me like, two hours ago,” Tim says. “You told me it was a nightmare.”
“Because you’re a child who got shot yesterday.” Bruce’s voice is calm, patient. “But you’re right, I did question you, and I was wrong. For that, I apologise.”
Tim stares at him, and continues staring until he feels like his heart is beating fast enough that it’s going to jump out of his chest. Blood is rushing in his ears, and he is pretty sure he couldn’t talk right now even if he wanted to, because Bruce has never apologised to him before. Not once.
If he was still unsure whether his theory is correct, then this would be the moment that convinced him.
“I do have one question, actually,” Bruce says, and Tim, still feeling like his world has just fundamentally shifted, nods at him. “Who’s Batman?”
*
Bruce has, apparently, swapped places with himself from an alternate timeline. Not actual places, just their consciousness, since his body has well over a hundred scars he does not remember, as well as a knife wound in his chest that he is still recovering from. Dick told him that once Tim took that bullet for him, Bruce got stabbed.
Well.
What he said, specifically, is, once Red Robin took that bullet for him, Batman got stabbed.
Because in this timeline, Bruce is a superhero.
“Not a superhero,” Dick corrects him wearily, and not for the first time. “A vigilante.”
Bruce is a superhero, and he has a nemesis, like Captain America and Hydra.
“You are not like Captain America”, Dick says. “Captain America has super strength. If anything, Superman is Captain America.”
Bruce has entered a world where men call themselves Superman or dress as giant bats, and they also get their children to fight for them. It’s that point that grates on him the most. He could not care less what an alternate version of him does with his time, and if he wants to become a superhero, why not, Bruce himself once considered joining the cops before he realised that would mean carrying a gun. But.
But.
Red Robin took a bullet for him.
“And Tim,” he asks, keeping his tone quiet even though Tim and Damian had left him and Dick alone for this discussion, “is my…sidekick?”
And then Dick says, “Oh, no.”
He says, “Tim hasn’t been your sidekick in more than a year.”
He says, “We gave that role to Damian.”
Damian. Who recently celebrated his tenth birthday. (Bruce needs to get him a present.)
(Bruce needs to get all of them presents. There are so many birthdays he missed.)
Damian, who, when pestered enough, showed him his math homework. They’ve only just started with decimals in school.
Bruce made a kid who barely knows what decimals are his sidekick.
Weary, because at this point, he can’t be anything but, he asks, “What about you?”
Dick tilts his head, confused, before it dawns on him. He beams. “I’m Nightwing. I was the first Robin, actually, but that’s a long time ago now.” He launches into a story about one of their first adventures together, and Bruce tries to listen, he really does. But all he can think of is, how old was Dick when that happened? Did he know what decimals are?
What on earth possessed him to make not just one, but three kids into mini-superheros and allow them to fight criminals?
Wait.
He doesn’t have three kids. He has four.
He waits until Dick has finished, and gently interrupts him before he can start the next story. “What about Jason?”
He doesn’t think he imagines the way Dick pales. “Jason? What about him?”
“Was he Robin, too?”
Dick scratches his neck, evidently uncomfortable. He doesn’t meet Bruce’s eyes as he says, “Yeah. Jason was Robin, too.”
*
Jason is busy hacking through a guy’s neck with a saw when the call comes. He ignores it, set on finishing this job before he can go home and sleep for a week, but then somebody says, “Red Hood” right into his earpiece, on a comm line that nobody should have. Then again, Tim has never much cared about that.
“I’m kind of in the middle of something,” he says and curses when some blood splatters on his mask. Getting blood stains out of clothes sucks. “Don’t hack my comm again.”
“You’d have an easier time of it if you used a bone cutter,” Tim tells him obnoxiously, confirming that he’s hacked the cameras, too, like the little creep he is. Jason snorts.
“Don’t let the big bat hear you say that.”
There’s a brief silence at the other end of the line. Jason uses it to finish up and putting the severed head in a bag. A jute bag, because he cares about the environment. He’s not an asshole.
“Have you talked to him recently?” Tim finally asks, sounding oddly uncertain.
Jason snorts again. “You know I haven’t.”
“You should. He’s- I think it’s best if you come to the manor. See for yourself.”
Jason shoulders the bag, delivers a kick to the headless body at his feet, and says, “You’re going to have to do better than that, replacement” before dropping his earpiece in a puddle. He is getting angry again, the kind of angry that makes him want to pick up the saw again and cut off a few more body parts. He knows when he’s being manipulated, but you’d think that Tim would at least try. He’s so earnest in everything else, but he can’t even bother to properly lie to Jason? Does he think Jason is an idiot?
No, Tim is smarter than that. This has to be part of a ploy. Reversed psychology or something. Well, Jason is not going to play into it. He’s staying as far away from the manor as possible, and the next time Tim hacks his comm, he’s going to have another thing coming.
Less than twelve hours after the call, there’s a knock at his door. The door of his safehouse. The safehouse that nobody knows about.
Of course.
Jason has his gun out before he can fully think it through. This time, he promises himself, there’s going to be blood to pay, and Tim won’t-
It's not Tim standing outside his door.
It’s Bruce, wearing a hoodie that says Superman and a hopeful expression on his face. Somehow, it’s the stupid hoodie that makes Jason not slam the door immediately.
“Jason,” Bruce says, and it is Bruce talking, not Batman. For a blissful and also crazy weird second, it’s like his dad is back.
Then Bruce asks, “Is that blood on your shirt?” and the spell is gone.
“What if it is?” Jason demands. “Going to arrest me? I have a gun here that says otherwise.”
Bruce blinks. “Do you have a licence for that?” he asks, before chuckling.
Chuckling.
Bruce just chuckled.
“Sorry, I keep forgetting – you’re all superheroes. You probably don’t need a licence. Still, though, are you injured?”
“Am I- what?” Jason asks slowly. His mind is still stuck on the superhero thing.
Bruce shoulders his way in, just shoving past Jason, who is too confused to do anything but let him pass. He makes his way into the bathroom, Jason following, and starts opening cupboards. “Where do you keep your first aid kit?”
“Bottom drawer,” Jason says. What is happening?
Bruce opens the bottom drawer, makes a sort of aha noise upon successfully spotting the first aid kit, and motions for Jason to take off his shirt. Jason complies on instinct.
The next few minutes pass in a rush: Bruce shaking his head at the stab wound and Jason’s poor attempt at bandaging it, Bruce looking wide-eyed at the many scars that mottle Jason’s torso, Bruce disinfecting the wound and rewrapping the bandage, Bruce ruffling Jason’s hair and telling him that he should go to bed and Bruce will be back soon with ice cream.
At this point, Jason is more or less convinced that this is a fever dream.
He goes to bed.
*
Two out of four children are currently injured, and while one is safe in the manor, the other is, well, more or less safe in a rundown house in downtown Gotham. Since Bruce himself is currently also in said rundown house, and is therefore several miles away from the manor and his other injured child, he calls Dick and tells him to stuff Tim and Damian into one of the cars and come here.
“Get ice cream on the way,” he says. “As much as you want, and make sure there’s enough for Jason, too.”
“Wait a minute,” Dick says. “The address you just gave me – is that Jason’s address?”
“I’ll see you soon,” Bruce says and hangs up, but not before adding an, “I love you”. Verbal affirmations of love and cherishment are important.
During the time it takes for Dick to manage his brothers and acquire ice cream, Bruce walks around the house – safehouse – and takes a note of everything that’s missing. There’s a microwave, but no kettle. There is only one towel. There is toothpaste, but only the cheap kind. There is a lot of instant ramen in the cupboards. Bruce frowns at all of this and is still busy writing out a grocery list when the door opens.
He doesn’t miss that nobody rang the bell.
Damian straightens, his hand casually falling to his pocket like he is not putting away a lock pick. Behind him, Tim and Dick are carrying five cones of ice cream between them. Tim has evidently practiced better self-restraint than Dick, who is halfway through eating his own ice cream and, since he needs both hands and can’t wipe his mouth, has chocolate all over his face.
“Did Todd kidnap you?” Damian demands. He glances from Bruce, to Jason’s sleeping form on the bed, to Dick, his gaze turning accusing. “You said Todd kidnapped him.”
“Possibly. I said possibly kidnapped him. If I had been one hundred per cent positive, would I have stopped for ice cream first?”
Damian scoffs and turns to Tim. “Drake. Prove that you’re not completely useless and hand me my cone.”
Even from where he is sitting at Jason’s bedside, Bruce can see Tim’s shoulders tensing, can see him reading himself for a retort. It’s easy enough to guess how this might go on: Tim will retaliate, Damian won’t let the insult stand, at some point somebody is getting an ice cream cone shoved in their face, and all of this would be very healthy sibling fighting if not for the fact that for the three days Bruce has been in this timeline, he has already seen the malicious nature to it.
One way or another, this stops now.
“Damian,” he says, more sharply than he ever has. Both Damian and Tim come to attention. Dick, looking uncomfortable, subtly tries to wipe his mouth on his t-shirt. “Apologise to your brother.”
Damian sneers. “Drake is not my brother. He-“
“Damian.”
“As the blood son, I-“
Bruce crosses his arms and waits. He can be very patient when he needs to be, and right now, he knows that if Damian goes for the waiting game, that’s a game that Bruce is going to win.
A minute passes, maybe more. The silence grows tenser with each second, and so does the unhappy look on Dick’s face. But he’s not going to interfere, and that’s all that matters.
Finally, Damian breaks eye contact. He mumbles something, too quiet to make out, but Bruce distinctly hears a “sorry”, and that’s enough.
“Come here,” he says. In the background, Tim is staring at him like he’s grown a second head, and Bruce is going to deal with that in a moment, but for now, he needs to make sure his lesson sticks.
Damian reluctantly sits down next to him on the bed. It is clear to Bruce that what they need to discuss is not going to work with people listening in. He wants Damian relaxed, not on edge, or at least not more on edge than he already is. Jason is still asleep, but as for the others-
“Take a walk.”
“Excuse me?” Dick says, but Tim, a resigned look on his face, turns and is out the door within seconds of the request. Dick looks from him to Bruce, unsure, before cursing and going after Tim. The door shuts behind them, leaving Bruce and Damian to privacy, or at least to as much privacy as they’re going to get.
“Damian,” he says, “I’m going to tell you something that I haven’t told any of the others. Can you keep a secret?”
Damian nods stiffly. Bruce hadn’t expected anything less.
“Four days ago,” he says into the quiet of the room, “I had no children. This didn’t make me upset. It wasn’t that I actively chose not to have kids, it’s just that the timing never quite worked out. That’s just how it goes, sometimes. I didn’t mind. There are bigger problems in the world than not being a parent. But when I woke up in this universe, and realised that not only am I a father, but that I’m a father of four, I could not have been happier. When I grew up, I always wanted siblings. I was overjoyed by the fact that my children would grow up to have not just me, but each other.”
He pauses, making sure that Damian is looking at him, before continuing. “I’m a father of four, not a father of one. Blood doesn’t matter, paperwork doesn’t matter. I don’t care if we ever drew up official adoption paperwork, or if the other version of me kidnapped his neighbour’s kid-“
“What?”
“-my point is that what matters is what’s in the heart. And I, for one, know that I love all of you equally. Do you understand?”
This silence is even longer than the last. Eventually, though, Damian bows his head. “You love us,” he says. “I will guard this secret with my life.”
“Um,” Bruce says.
“I will also,” Damian says seriously, “live your failed dream for you.”
Failed dream, Bruce mouths to himself.
“I will bond with my – siblings, and when you die, we will light the funeral pyre together.”
“Oh,” Bruce says weakly. “Great. Thank you, chum.”
“You are welcome,” Damian tells him.
The moment is broken when Jason stirs on the bed. He winces as he sits up, his wound presumably pulling at the movement, and Bruce hopes he doesn’t rip any stitches. His frown gets more pronounced when he spots Damian.
“What’s he doing here?”
“Bonding with you,” Damian announces. “We have brought you ice cream. Where is it?”
Long melted by now, Bruce thinks. He stands, clapping Damian on the shoulder and reaching over to pat Jason on the head. Jason looks alarmed. “I’ll find your brothers and get some real food. We can have dessert afterwards. Pizza okay? I won’t tell Alfred if you won’t.” Neither of them reply immediately, which Bruce takes as agreement. He nods at them. “Jason, watch your little brother, make sure he doesn’t run off. Damian, watch your big brother, make sure he doesn’t aggravate his wound. I’m trusting you both with this.”
The last he hears before the door closes behind them is Jason’s “I’m not a babysitter”. He smiles to himself. Kids.
Unfortunately, while two of his kids are now busy with the task of babysitting each other, his other two kids are nowhere to be found. Bruce is in – Crime Alley? He thinks they call it Crime Alley here, and from all he’s heard, it is not a safe neighbourhood for two children to be in, even if one of those children is in his mid-twenties and both of them are superheroes.
He tries calling, but they don’t answer, so it looks like he’s going to have to find them on foot. While he walks through the streets, he scrolls through his text messages, something he is finally able to do now that he knows the passcode. Dick texts him the most, but even that chat is suspiciously short, and the others are even worse. From what Bruce can tell, if his kids text him at all, he rarely replies. One time, Tim texted to ask if it was okay to spend the weekend at the manor, and Bruce left him on read for twelve hours, after which Tim texted again to say that it’s fine and he’s sorry for asking. Bruce left him on read again.
He has just realised that he took a wrong turn and landed in an alley that’s a dead end, when he hears steps behind him. The steps have a menacing quality to them.
“Turn around with your hands up.”
Bruce, for lack of anything better to do, turns around with his hands up. A man is pointing a gun at him, his hands shaking, his eyes bloodshot. “Hand over your purse and your phone.”
“You can have my purse,” Bruce tells him, “but my phone is off-limits.” He knows, realistically, that he can just buy a new phone and reprogram his kids’ numbers. But that would take a while, and also, right now, two of his children are still missing. What if they call because they need his help?
“Purse and phone, now,” the man barks. “Get a move on.”
“Okay,” Bruce says, “alright. Let me just-“ He makes a show of patting down his pockets, frowning, patting them again. “I’m sure I have it here somewhere- maybe it’s in the other pocket-“
“Hands back up,” the man says, approaching him with unsteady steps. “I’ll look for them myself. You move, I blow your brains out.”
“I don’t think so,” Bruce says. The mugger is close enough to reach now, and Bruce is on him immediately, forcing the arm that’s holding the gun up in the air, so that the resounding shot is fired into the sky. He takes the weapon from him, turns the safety back on, and hits the man across the face with it, all in one swift motion and hard enough that the man sags. Bruce checks that he’s breathing before taking out his phone and calling the police. He leaves the gun with the mugger, but only after he’s removed the bullets.
He doesn’t wait for the police to arrive, instead resuming his search. He walks past several abandoned hair salons that are clearly a front for money laundering, ignores a bunch of men playing poker on the street using cut-off fingers instead of chips, and the streets are already looking slightly more cared-for and not as likely to be the background scene for a horror movie, when he hears voices.
“-didn’t mean it,” Dick says. “I told you.”
“He never means it.” That’s Tim’s voice. Bruce fastens his steps. “He never means it, and therefore he's never in the wrong, and as soon as they were alone, he probably told Bruce that I was, was provoking him or something, which is obviously crazy because why would I do that when I know that there’s no point, and-“
“Boys.” They both flinch, turning to face Bruce from where he’s just crossed a corner. They are leaning against a wall, Tim with his arms crossed, Dick radiating guilt with every muscle in his body. “Got room for one more?”
They part, and Bruce joins them at the wall, his upper right arm pressing warmly against Tim’s shoulder, the other pressed against Dick’s. He thinks this conversation might work better with no eye contact.
“I’m sorry,” Tim says. The words sound practiced. “I know he’s younger, I know he was raised by assassins and doesn’t know any better, and I didn’t mean to cause a scene.”
Bruce mentally notes raised by assassins as things to look into more closely in the future, and puts an arm around them both. Dick melts into the touch immediately, but Tim tenses, like he’s unsure what is happening.
“The reason I sent you out of that house,” he says, “is because some things need to be said without witnesses. What I talked about with Damian is between me and him, just like this conversation is between me and you two. But I am going to tell you the same thing I told him: You are siblings, not enemies. I expect you to act as such.”
Dick winces, and Tim extricates himself from Bruce’s grip, just slipping out under it and putting some space between them. “I know,” Tim says. “I’ll do better.”
“Damian will do better,” Bruce gently corrects. “He is going to improve his behaviour, and when he does, I would like you to encourage him. In the meantime, I need you to know that neither did you cause a scene, nor would I be upset with you if you did. You can cause as many scenes as you like. It’s what your teenage years are for.”
Tim opens his mouth and closes it, lost for words, but that’s okay. Rome wasn’t built in a day.
Bruce smiles at his boys. “Pizza?”
On the way back, they walk past an alley that is encircled by several police cars. Even though he’s in civilian clothes right now, Bruce can tell that Dick still wants to take a look, so he says, “Don’t worry about it. Just a mugger. They’re arresting him now.”
“How do you know it’s a mugger?” Tim asks suspiciously.
“I got a little distracted when I was searching for you. But I took care of it.”
Dick grips his shoulder, hard enough to bruise. “What do you mean?”
“What I said.”
“But-“ Dick looks around and lowers his voice. “But you’re a civilian,” he hisses. “Just a civilian.”
“Dick,” Bruce says patiently, “I may be from an alternate timeline with no people running around in masks, but we have crime too. My parents were killed in a robbery when I was eight. That’s forty years ago. Plenty of time to learn how to defend myself.”
“But,” Dick says again, and stops, like he has run out of things to say.
“Not here,” Tim says, pointedly nodding towards the police cars. “We can discuss it when we’re home.”
“I just,” Dick says, and to Bruce’s surprise, Tim, who has never once initiated touch since he’s woken up in this universe, lays a hand on Dick’s shoulder.
“Dick. I get it. But this isn’t the time or the place.”
Dick breathes in shakily. Nods. Breathes again. “Alright,” he says. “Yeah, alright. Let’s get pizza.”
*
Five days after Tim was shot and Bruce woke up all wrong, Tim enters the kitchen to find Bruce already up. This in itself is not that strange; Real Bruce is a late sleeper, but that’s mostly because he spends his nights on patrol. Without that, there is no real reason for him to be up until four in the morning.
What is surprising, however, is that Bruce is a. in a suit and b. making sandwiches. Alfred is nowhere to be seen.
Tim rubs his eyes and blinks, but the picture says the same. Bruce, spotting him, waves at him with a buttery knife. “Morning,” he says. “You mentioned last night that you’d be going back to school today.”
Tim is fairly certain he has said nothing of the sort. If he recalls correctly, what he said yesterday is, I’m well on my way to recovery, so there is no reason why I shouldn’t work tomorrow. Bruce must have interpreted work as school. Not an unreasonable assumption to make, considering the circumstances, but one Tim must correct nevertheless. Except-
“Are you…making me lunch?”
“I’ve made lunch for Damian for the past few days,” Bruce says, going back to spreading peanut butter on toast, “and since you feel better now, I’m making lunch for you, too.”
“And Alfred….”
“Left me to my task. He understands this is something a father needs to do for his boys.” Bruce smiles, finishes the sandwich, and moves on to the next.
There is something stuck in Tim’s throat, something that no amount of convulsive swallowing will remove. His boys. Tim knows, has always known, that before Jason’s death, Dick and Jason had a different relationship with Bruce, a relationship that’s in no way comparable to Bruce’s relationship with Tim. But still, to hear him say it like this – to hear Tim included – makes him feel weird, like his skin is all itchy.
Still, though. Bruce’s mistake is understandable, but still a mistake.
Tim clears his throat, trying to get rid off the lump. “I don’t- I dropped out of high school, actually.”
The hand holding the knife stills, but only for a second. “Oh?” Bruce says, clearly aiming for a neutral tone.
“Last year. You- our- Batman died. Dick took over the vigilante thing, but there was still Wayne Enterprises to consider. Jason is still legally dead, Dick was stressed out enough already in between being Batman and raising Damian, and Damian was too young. I stepped up.”
Bruce has given up all pretence of preparing lunch and instead gives Tim a strange look. “You’ve taken over Wayne Enterprises.”
“Yes, sir,” Tim says, wondering if he’s about to be told what in inadequate choice he is.
“You’ve become CEO at, what, thirteen-“
“Sixteen. I’m almost seventeen now,” Tim adds helpfully.
“-you’ve become CEO of my company, and you dropped out of high school for it?”
Tim nods.
There’s a clash as the knife lands on the counter. Bruce is on him in two steps, and the next thing Tim knows, he’s being pressed very tightly against Bruce’s body. Hugged? Is he being hugged? Is that what this is?
Bruce doesn’t say anything, just holds him close, and after a few seconds, Tim relaxes. His skin has stopped itching, and he thinks he could grow to enjoy this feeling. Dick has hugged him many times, but the closest Jason came to him is when he almost beat him to death, Damian has made his feelings clear, and Bruce – Real Bruce – has sometimes clapped him firmly on the shoulder, but he’s never done this.
Bruce’s next words send an icy shower through him.
“You’re quitting,” he says as he pulls away.
“What?” Tim says. “No, I’m not.”
“Yes, you are. I’m not dead now, am I?”
Tim takes a second to consider this. “True,” he concedes, “but you- Batman wasn’t dead for the last year or so, either. He seemed fine with letting me continue my work. I don’t think he liked his job very much.”
“You’re sixteen,” Bruce says, like that explains everything. “I’m an adult. If I don’t like my job, I can get a different one. That’s how it works.”
“But-“
“Luckily,” he says, “I’m not Batman, and I do actually enjoy what I do. So I’m taking back over as CEO, which I would have done anyway, and you’re officially fired. What’s your school? Gotham Academy?” Bruce waits for Tim’s reluctant nod before getting out his phone.
“What are you doing?” Tim demands, alarmed.
“Getting you back enrolled.”
This is crazy. Does Bruce realise how crazy this is? “Do you realise how crazy this is?” Tim asks, just to be sure.
Bruce is, for some reason, frowning down at his screen. “This school’s website says their extracurricular activities are mostly focused on sports. This is unacceptable.”
“I can do sports,” Tim offers, even though he would really prefer not to. He trains literally every day, and he gets even more exercise at night. He doubts that being on the rowing team would change much.
“Do you want to do sports?” Bruce counters, and Tim has no good reply to that. Luckily, Bruce isn’t waiting for one. Only about a minute after firing Tim, he is on the phone with the headmaster. Tim takes that opportunity to leave, but only after Bruce has just made a reference to yesterday’s PTA meeting. For an insane second there, it sounded like Bruce had joined the PTA, and Tim doesn’t plan to stick around and find out if that’s true.
*
The bare walls of his bedroom are slowly driving Bruce insane. After two weeks in this timeline, he has learned many things about his children and, based on that, reached his own conclusions about his counterpart. He has opinions on that, of course he does, but hasn’t voiced them for now. He reminds himself frequently that he does not know if, or when, he will return to his own universe, that it could be tomorrow or next month, and that the only thing he can do in the meantime is to be the best dad possible and to also not ruin his children’s relationship with their existing dad, no matter what he might think of him.
So he makes them packed lunches, he ruffles their hair and tells them how proud he is, he listens to their stories and asks them to call if they’ll be home late. He does all that, and he keeps his mouth shut.
But the walls.
Where are all the pictures, he wants to ask his counterpart. Where are the photographs that show his kids, growing up or already grown? Where are the pictures they drew, in school or at home, with clumsy fingers or more skilled? Where are the photos that they took themselves? Where are the mismatched vases that they made, the table mats, the pasta necklaces? The essays and tests and report cards, what about them? What did his counterpart do with those?
Every morning he wakes up, not to an alarm, but to his inner clock, finely tuned to wake him six o’clock every day without fail. And every morning the first thing he sees are the empty walls.
Enough.
He corners Damian first, because he already knows that his youngest son takes art classes, and also because he is sure that his other kids would be much more suspicious.
Then again, Damian is frowning at him as soon as he says, “Can I have a moment of your time, buddy?”, so maybe that guess was wrong.
He leads them into the kitchen, where he has asked Alfred to prepare hot chocolate and cookies as both a snack and a bribe. A part of him still cannot quite believe that he can ask Alfred to do things again, that Alfred is really alive and breathing. It makes his eyes sting every time he thinks about it.
Damian ignores the cookies, but he does take a small sip of the hot chocolate, so that’s a win for step one of the plan: make Damian comfortable.
Now comes step two.
“Say, I don’t know all that much about art,” Bruce says. “But a little birdie told me that I have a veritable expert right here in the manor.”
“Dr- Timothy sold me out?” Damian growls. He looks murderous, but he’s also at least attempted to use Tim’s first name, so that’s progress. Even so-
“Tim hasn’t said a word.” And Bruce really should have known better than to use a bird metaphor in a house full of boys who either currently go, or used to go, by some version of the name Robin. “As a matter of fact, I talked to your teacher.”
“Why?”
Bruce falters. “It was parent-teacher conference last night. I thought you knew about that.”
“I did. I was unaware that you also knew.” Damian seems disgruntled by this discovery. His bad mood is hard to take seriously, though, when he has a milk moustache on his upper lip.
Of course he knows, Bruce wants to say, but hesitates. That’s not the point here. He can talk to Damian about just how involved Bruce has become in his school at some later time. “I talked to your art teacher,” he tries again, attempting to get them back on track. “She showed me your last project, and I thought it was really good. She wouldn’t let me take it home with me because it hasn’t been graded yet, so I figured I’d ask you to make me a new one, just for me.”
Damian cocks his head, like a cat. “You wish me to make you a painting with potato printing?”
“Yes?”
“No,” Damian snaps, as fierce as though Bruce has just told him he’s thinking of replacing Damian with a better-mannered lamp. “This ‘potato printing’ is beneath me, and it was demeaning of that teacher to force us to do a task meant for toddlers. I think it is some form of psychological torture designed to break my will,” he confesses to Bruce, glancing around in paranoia. Bruce, for lack of a better reaction, nods along. “I will make you a better picture,” Damian decides. “A real one. Not using vegetables. What’s your favourite animal?”
“I’ve always been partial to anteaters,” Bruce says. “Their noses make me laugh. They’re so long.”
Never has he ever seen Damian look at him with such obvious judgement. “Anteaters,” he repeats in disgust. “Fine. I will draw you anteaters.”
“I can’t wait, buddy,” Bruce tells him, and means it.
He doesn’t have to decide which of his kids to approach next, because they approach him first, specifically: Tim. He knocks on Bruce’s office, well, one of his seventeen offices, after school, and takes a seat at the desk, back ramrod straight. Bruce signs a document, recaps the pen, and takes off his half-moon glasses before giving Tim his full attention.
At first, he thinks his son is here to have another conversation about high school, or to be more precise, another conversation on why high school is unnecessary. Bruce doesn’t particularly mind. He has zero experience with raising teenagers, but he does think this is a healthy stage of their development. And since Tim is apparently sixteen and not, as he’d previously assumed, in his early teens, he’s exactly at that age where kids are most likely to question authority. Of course Tim thinks high school is stupid. Of course Tim wants to drop out. Of course Tim is presumably one provocation away from getting a piercing and threatening to go sleep under a bridge just to provoke Bruce. Bruce’s job is to keep him away from sketchy piercing parlours and to make sure he graduates, and anything else he can bring up when Tim has children of his own.
“What’s up?” he asks once it becomes clear that Tim has no intention of speaking first.
Tim’s eyes flit around the room, focusing on anything but Bruce. “Damian says you asked for a drawing.”
“I did,” Bruce says.
“And Dick mentioned that you said something about the walls in your bedroom?”
“I did.” Bruce hadn’t realised Dick had picked up on that. It had been a throwaway comment, more to himself than to his son.
“He didn’t really get it- he asked if I knew what you meant. And I did. I do. The walls in my parents’ house weren’t bare, we always had lots of expensive art. But my friends’ houses always had plenty of family photos. I mean, we had a family portrait, but that’s only one, and when I was seven my mom put it in the garage because we redecorated and it didn’t fit the colour scheme anymore. So.”
“I see,” Bruce says, even though he doesn’t. All he knows is that Janet and Jack Drake sound like assholes, and now he’s glad that in his own timeline, he didn’t agree to do a business deal with them.
“So,” Tim says, more forcefully, “I wanted to offer- I’m not very good at drawing, but I still have my old camera around somewhere, from when I used to take photos of Batman and Robin. I could take pictures of everybody. So that you’d have something to put up your walls.”
“Oh. Oh.”
“Or not,” Tim says quickly. “It was stupid. Batman always said that anything can be used as evidence, especially personal stuff, and we should keep that in mind.”
“Tim,” Bruce says, and Tim finally looks at him. “I would be honoured. But I have a condition. Tomorrow, or whenever you’re free, we go to a store, and you help me pick out a camera of my own. In turn for your help, you can pick out whatever you want in that shop.”
“But- why do you want a camera? I told you. I can take pictures.”
“And I can’t wait to see them. But you forgot something very important. If you’re the one taking the pictures, who takes pictures of you?” When Tim frowns, about to protest, Bruce says, “It’s not just about filling my walls. It’s about filling my walls with things that remind me of the people I love. You’re a part of that.”
Tim looks like he has trouble processing this, but he doesn’t outright object, and the next day, he goes camera-shopping with Bruce. The day after, Bruce wakes up to two new additions to his wall. First is a beautifully drawn picture of an anteater family. He counts five of them, one significantly larger than the rest.
The other is a selfie, obviously taken with a phone and not with the camera he’s bought Tim, printed out hastily and put up while he was still asleep. It shows his four kids, smiling or scowling or making silly faces. Bruce’s answering smile is so wide that it hurts his cheeks. Take that, Batman, he thinks. 1:0.
*
Somewhere far away, in a very different Gotham, Batman resists the urge to punch a wall. They don’t have magic here. They don’t even have particularly bad crime statistics here. Everybody is more excited about the latest iPhone than about stabbing someone forty-one times with a steak knife just because they took the last soda, which is what happened in Batman’s Gotham two weeks ago.
Simply put, there is no way for Batman to get home on his own.
He is sure that Red Robin is already working on a solution, and he trusts Nightwing to keep everyone in line while he’s gone. But he doesn’t know how long it will take Red Robin. Last time it took him a year.
Batman cannot wait a year. He can’t stay in a universe where his counterpart is signed up for three different yoga classes.
So he goes to the only person who might be able to help.
He goes to Drake Manor next door.