Chapter Text
Up close, he looks younger than Stephanie had expected. Like the rest of Gotham, she’s seen the videos. The kid moves with the kind of body control that most adults only dream of possessing. She’d thought Robin must be well into his teens to move like that. Had figured that his small stature had just been that, a teenager below average in height.
Looking at him now, Stephanie knows that is not the case. Despite the faint scars from what looks like knife wounds, his face is round, his button-nose slightly upturned, and his cheeks soft and dimpled. His body is disturbingly shredded for a kid, but he’s definitely, absolutely, one hundred percent a kid.
A kid wrapped in a uniform that looks sturdy until you remember what happened to the last three Robins who wore it.
Stephanie’s own uniform feels heavy and slick, the oppressive, swampy heat of Gotham’s summer suffusing through the room. There’s no AC in the building, and the ceiling fan rattles too much to run it at anything other than the lowest setting. She listens to Robin’s steady breathing under the fan’s rattle, watches the pulse of the vein in his neck.
“Stephanie…” Tim says from beside her. “I know I said we needed to get the kid out of there but-”
“I know,” Stephanie snaps.
“He’ll come looking for Robin,” Tim says.
“I know,” Stephanie repeats.
“I’m just trying to look out for you.” Tim’s voice is gentle, nothing more than a whisper on the breeze.
A chill runs down Stephanie’s back, despite the oppressive heat of the room, goosebumps rolling over her sweat-soaked skin.
She turns to look for the source of the voice, like she always does.
As usual, no one is there.
Stephanie was eleven when the first Robin died.
It was one of those days that everyone remembered. Even years later, Stephanie can picture the scene, the way her Mom had startled at the news on the television, wine glass slipping from her fingertips and shattering in a sea of red liquid against peeling laminate floors. She remembers the crime scene picture, carefully edited so that it was suitable for the nightly news, the awkward angle of the bare legs, the bright yellow cape spattered in red, the face carefully obscured. She doesn’t read about the extent of the injuries until years later, but even at age eleven, Stephanie could tell he wasn’t getting up.
They’d found the body of the suspected murderer in a back alley almost a month later, discarded like the rest of the trash in the streets. The police had made a statement to the public, noting that DNA from the body had been linked to DNA found on the scene of Robin’s murder. They’d finished the briefing saying that no physical evidence had been located and the police were not actively pursuing any leads.
Before the incident, most of Gotham hadn’t believed in the masked duo. Batman and Robin were something out of a fairy tale. Mom used them to scare Stephanie into obedience, even if Dad used to curse them both under his breath.
After though…
Batman wasn’t a myth anymore.
But he was still a boogie man.
“Fucking did it, Blondie!” Jason crows. “Jesus Christ, you know this is why you’re my favorite, right?”
“I’m your favorite because I’m the only one who talks to you.”
“Timbers talks to me sometimes.”
“You and Tim yell at each other sometimes,” Stephanie retorts. She only ever hears Tim’s side of the arguments and even that is mostly weird snatches, like a radio playing in a different room. Still there’s a special kind of annoyance in Tim’s voice that only Jason can elicit. “There’s a big difference.”
She can feel the air shift as Jason settles against the wall. The fan overhead continues it lazy spin, but she thinks she can feel the way the air displaces at his movement. The way the drywall groans as it accepts his weight. Jason’s always been a more physical presence than Tim, his volatile emotions cascading into the world around him.
Stephanie likes him.
Had from the first moment she saw him swing through Gotham, a small and chattering presence at Batman’s heel. She even likes his explosive temper. She appreciates someone with that kind of authenticity to his emotions, especially the bad ones. It makes it easier to trust the good.
“How the fuck did they let Bats grab another kid?” Jason says as he circles Robin, leaning close to examine the changes to the uniform, scowling at the katanas on his back. “Is he endorsing this kind of—”
And then his voice is gone, cut out abruptly mid-rant. Stephanie blinks at him. His mouth is still moving, but the sound is like someone’s hit a mute button, his form suddenly glitching. She has to shout his name to get him to notice and when he finally does she reads fuck clearly on his lips.
Then he reaches for the swords on Robin’s back before flickering completely out of view.
A second later, the katanas fling themselves out of their holders and embed themselves in the walls. She hears Tim’s voice say, “We’re not poltergeists, Jay!”
Except, Stephanie is almost ninety percent sure that Jason might be a poltergeist. Or at very least, he’s on the verge of becoming one. She tries not to worry about it. After all, he’d made a very neat point. Robin’s clearly dangerous and she should have disarmed him well before now.
Joker murdered Robin Two on a chilly April morning.
Batman killed Joker by Wednesday of the following week, his body dumped unceremoniously in front of the GCPD. Batman didn’t even bother cutting the security cameras to the precinct, just tipped the body onto the steps in a heap, the clown’s mouth still twisted in an enduring smile. There was an odd precision to the wound pattern, and while the press speculated about the broken bones and their apparent contradiction with the autopsy’s manner of death--asphyxiation due to smoke inhalation--no one has a reason as to why.
Years later, Jason had smiled at Stephanie, his injuries blooming through his skin and she’d suddenly known the exact reason for the precision of the beating.
Joker murdered Robin Two on a chilly April morning and Batman tracked him down, inflicted every inch of the same torment on the clown’s body and then left him for the police to find.
“Got what was coming to him,” Dad muttered when he’d heard the news. “Who does that kind of shit to a kid?”
Stephanie, all of fourteen and uncomfortably aware of her father’s own unsavory plots, nodded into her bowl of cereal.
The city that had collectively turned away after the first Robin’s murderer turned up dead seemed more than willing to do the same for the second, even despite the video. You were allowed to kill the man who killed your son. And while the Joker’s corpse suggested… something a little too close to vindictive pleasure, Batman was still a force for justice in Gotham.
Except it didn’t stop with Joker.
Dick Grayson looks like a completely normal sixteen-year-old. He’s only an inch or so taller than Stephanie, with friendly blue eyes and neatly parted dark hair. He is prone to acrobatic feats when bored, walking into rooms on his hands or doing a backflip to get Stephanie’s attention. When she’d first started seeing him, it had taken ages for her to make the connection.
Because his form never wavers. He looks as solid and steady as anyone else in her life.
Understandably, she’d panicked the first time he’d walked into the room on the ceiling.
But if Tim is to be trusted, Dick Grayson always knew how to defy gravity and it would only track that he figured out that particular ghost trick far more easily than either of his counterparts.
He raises an eyebrow and jerks his thumb in Robin’s direction, question plain in his face.
“Already got the lecture from Tim,” Stephanie grumbles. “Jay’s on my side at least.”
Dick rolls his eyes and sits down next to her, kicking his legs out. She tracks him out of her periphery, knows that if she leans into his shoulder, she’ll manage a full ten minutes before the cold makes her have to pull away.
After a second she turns to the side and flicks his ear. Even the small piece of contact sends a shiver through her. Dick turns with a sheepish grin. For all his unwavering solidity, she’s never been able to hear him like she can Tim or even Jason before the inevitable deterioration of his spectral presence. Dick makes due though. He has expressive eyebrows, a malleable face and a complete lack of shame. Like Stephanie, he’s got a few words of sign language in his vocabulary, but also like Stephanie, he’s not patient enough to sit down and make a study of it.
He pushes himself to his feet and jerks a thumb at the unconscious Robin and then bounces a fist against the side of his head and points to Stephanie, his eyebrows raised in a question.
She blinks and then says, “Fuck, of course I didn’t knock him out! He’s like ten! That’s how you get brain damage! I found him like that.”
Dick’s eyebrows creep up farther.
“I swear!” Stephanie shouts, scrambling to her feet. “He was off on his own, no Bats in sight. I think he tripped a gas canister. Scarecrow’s maybe?”
She’s really not loving the thought of a fear-gassed Robin proficient in katanas figuring out he’s been kidnapped. It’s a recipe for disaster even before you throw in a couple of ghosts. And with her own history with fear toxin, she’s not exactly up for round two. Dick seems to have a similar trepidation because he taps on the edges of the swords embedded into the wall.
Poltergeist activity or not, Jason definitely did her a solid by disarming the kid. She’ll have to thank him the next time he manages to manifest.
Shit, she doesn’t have a plan and she really, really should have a plan for a potentially-homicidal, fear-gassed baby vigilante. She hadn’t thought much past her desire to get him off the street.
Dick must read the panic in her face because he flaps his hand and mouths, talk to him.
“Like you could have been talked into quitting when you were his age,” Stephanie snaps back.
Dick winces like he’s been hit, his face crumpling. Like it had been smashed with a baseball bat. Or a crowbar. Or maybe when it had just cracked against the pavement. He stands up staring at her from the other side of Robin’s prone body. He doesn’t flicker, but for an instant, she sees him like he must have been when he died, standing in a bloodied uniform, his leg bent at an unnatural angle, his hair matted in blood. He walks resolutely in her direction, the broken leg dragging as he steps straight through Robin’s body and then straight through hers as if he’s proving a point.
When Dick hits her, her body explodes into ice. She falls to her knees, her breath coming in short gasps. She looks behind her, but Dick’s a dramatic son of a bitch and he’s vanished.
Leaving Stephanie alone with this new, tiny Robin who shoots upright, screaming.
She’d met Tim Drake her first month on patrol. He’d been on a fire escape clutching a camera far too expensive for the neighborhood, eyes scanning the streets for Batman when he caught Stephanie climbing out of her bedroom window. She hadn’t even managed to tuck her conspicuous blond hair into her robes. They made eye contact for long enough that it was impossible to pretend they hadn’t.
Tim slowly raised the camera, snapped a picture and then bolted.
Stephanie, not knowing what else to do, took off after him.
The chase lasted about ten minutes. Stephanie was faster, but it seemed like Tim had done this route more often then she had. Eventually, her endurance won out and she’d tackled him to a rooftop. They fell awkwardly, Tim clearly more interested in protecting the camera than mitigating damage from the collision. He stifled a cry of pain as he hit the ground and if not for the picture, Stephanie would have been sympathetic.
"What the hell are you doing out here?!” she shouted.
“Watching.” Tim curled his hand more tightly around his camera. “Waiting for Batman.”
“Batman?” Stephanie echoed, pushing herself off of him. “Batman’s a psychopath!”
“Says the girl in the purple costume!” Tim countered, scrambling backward. “What are you doing out here? Supervillian in training!”
“Supervillian? No! I’m collecting evidence. My dad.” She broke eye contact, suddenly awkward. “Look my dad’s a piece of shit, but he’s still my dad. And if keeps doing the kind of shit he’s doing, Batman’s going to kill him.”
Tim winced. “Batman—“
“Is a serial killer,” Stephanie interrupted.
“—only kills guilty people.”
“Crazy thought, maybe he shouldn’t kill anyone. I get that two Robins died and that’s terrible but there’s been a bit of, well, overkill.”
Tim snorted.
Stephanie plucked the camera out of his hands, deleted the most recent photo and then handed it back to him. Tim frowned at the view screen for a second and then shrugged like deciding it was a fair reaction. “You know, he never killed anyone when there was a Robin around.”
“Lot of pressure to put on a kid.” Stephanie settled next to him, weirdly comfortable with their little détente. “Seems a whole lot easier to just figure out how to not kill criminals. And then maybe the criminals stop arming themselves to the fucking teeth and Gotham goes back to the shiny happy place of our childhood.”
Tim let out a soft puff of laughter and shook his head.
“Gotham’s always been like this,” Stephanie continued. “If it wasn’t, we’d have never let a grown man with a fursona stand in for the police department.”
“Maybe Gotham needs Robin.” Tim played with the strap of his camera, the earlier mirth fading from his features. “It was better when he was around.”
“Yeah, better for just about everyone except Robin. I don’t think there are any more volunteers for that position.”
After a long second, Tim suggested, “You could do it.”
For a second, Stephanie considered it. Changing out the purple robes for red, yellow and green. Learning from Batman, being the moral weight that kept him from killing. But then the thoughts stuttered to a halt and she remembered the stories. The two boys bleeding for a city until they had nothing left.
“No,” Stephanie said. “That sounds a little like suicide.” She stood up, making sure her mask was covering her face. “This has been weird, camera kid. Don’t take any more pictures of me.”
“It’s Tim,” he said, extending a hand.
Stephanie didn’t shake it, but she did smile from behind her mask. God help her, she was almost charmed by the scrawny lunatic. “I’m Spoiler.”
Later, she’ll think back on this conversation. The question that had betrayed a dangerous idea. The connections that tumbled through Tim’s precise brain. She’ll connect that with the homemade costume. With the way that the third Robin’s moves tilted a lot more towards surveillance and sabotage rather than fights in the street. The way he was only rarely seen next to Batman.
The way the blood had splashed against the pavement when his skull had cracked open on impact.
Stephanie was seventeen years old when the third Robin died and she screamed into the night like she’d seen a ghost.
In a mostly-empty apartment building in the middle of a mostly-abandoned street in Lower Gotham a boy in a Robin costume wakes up screaming.
Stephanie Brown pulls up her robes, and steps back into the shadows because it suddenly occurs to her that she might be fucked if the kid manages to report back to Batman.
“Boo,” she says.