Chapter Text
Tim woke to the feeling of grass brushing his fingertips and sunlight pressing insistently against his closed eyes. For a moment, his brain refused to reconcile any of it. No cold rooftop biting into his spine, no dusty warehouse air, no comm feed humming faintly in the background. Just wind. Birds. The soft rustle of tall grass shifting around him.
Okay. Weird. Not the weirdest way he’s woken up, but definitely cracking the top ten.
What unnerved him more than anything else was the absence of pain. No stiff legs from spending half the night perched above alleyways investigating a new organization, no aches reminding him of last week’s fights, not even the heavy, lingering fatigue that usually clung to him after Gotham wrung out every hour it could.
Waking up without a single bruise felt… wrong.
That wrongness finally pushed him to move.
He opened his eyes with a quiet groan and forced himself upright. His mask was still in place— a small mercy— but his utility belt was conspicuously missing. Not ideal. Neither was the open, endless field surrounding him. It looked like someone had taken the Windows XP wallpaper and cranked the resolution into “too real.” No alleys. No rooftops. No neon glow smeared against the smog. Just green and horizon and a sky that looked aggressively cheerful.
And across from him, something watched.
Tim stiffened.
Years of experience and the general paranoia that came with being a Bat had his mind racing before he could even fully register what he was looking at. White fur, sleek and immaculate. A curved, blade-like horn. Piercing red eyes that don’t so much as flicker when he meets them. And a long tail, edged like a scythe, sways once in the grass.
Tim blinks.
The creature does not.
His stomach drops. "Oh. That’s an Absol. That’s not ominous at all."
Because of course he wakes up in a strange field with a literal harbinger of disaster staring at him like he’s a particularly interesting puzzle it hasn’t quite figured out yet. That’s just his luck.
The Absol doesn’t move, its unblinking stare doing absolutely nothing for Tim’s already well-established trust issues. He’s faced Gotham’s worst, survived Ra’s al Ghul’s unsettling fixation on either recruiting or marrying him, and endured Bruce’s definition of ‘training’— but waking up in a world where Pokémon are real? Yeah, that might just be the thing that finally pushes him into a very specific, very tired breakdown.
He brushed dirt off his gloves and took a slow breath, running through his memory.
Right. Think. What’s the last thing he remembers?
Ah.
Tim stills.
He can remember yesterday— or at least, what should have been yesterday. Patrol. A case he was looking into. Another late night in Gotham. But what happened after that? How did he get here?
Nothing comes up. No memory of how he ended up unconscious in a random field, no hints of a fight, no flashes of an ambush or a portal or anything that would explain this. And that? That was almost more concerning than the Absol.
He closed his eyes, tension settling deep in his shoulders. Wherever he is, it’s not Gotham. Not even remotely close.
"Right," he mutters, scanning the horizon again. "That’s a problem."
The Absol tilts its head slightly, as if it heard him. As if it understood.
Nope. No. His brain immediately threw up a giant red flag and the beginnings of a mental PowerPoint titled Reasons That Is Extremely Concerning.
The Absol’s tail flicks again in a very deliberate movement.
Right. Nope. Not taking that as a coincidence. He might not be a Pokémon expert (that title undeniably belongs to Damian, a secret tryhard who treats competitive battling like real-world warfare), but even he knows Absol isn’t the kind of thing you want showing up unannounced.
Tim dragged a hand down his face. “This is fine,” he muttered. “That’s a lie, but fine.”
He pushed himself to his feet, stretching out muscles that protested far less than they should have. The Absol remained rooted in place, tracking his every movement.
“So,” he ventured, because at this point he had nothing to lose, “do you talk? Or are we doing the silent, mysterious guide thing?” He was pretty sure there were books about that. Probably entire genres, actually.
Predictably, the Pokémon didn’t respond.
It did, however, pad forward. Not aggressively— just close enough to make Tim’s heartbeat kick up again— before settling beside him like this was completely normal.
Tim watches it warily. It watches him back.
"Okay," he says slowly, inching towards an optimism he didn't exactly feel. "If you were going to eat me, you’d have done it already... right?" Please let it be as sentient as he suspected, because he was starting to feel more than a little ridiculous talking to it.
The Absol blinked once, in a way that reminded him uncomfortably of Alfred-the-cat right before a pounce. But if the dark-type really was as feline as it looked, it didn’t seem inclined to attack. Its ears were forward, alert, and its scythe-like tail swept lazily through the grass.
"Really reassuring," Tim mutters, crossing his arms. "So, what now?”
The Absol doesn’t answer— because obviously, that would be too easy.
Great. Love that for him.
Tim sighs, scanning the landscape again. The field offers zero clues; no landmarks, no roads, no buildings, literally nothing resembling civilization. And definitely no Wi-Fi— not that it mattered, considering he didn’t have his phone, his laptop, or even his comms. If this was a test, he was failing spectacularly.
He pressed his fingers to his temples, weighing options. No gear, no comms, no map, no explanation. Step one: find people. Step two: acquire clothing that didn’t scream vigilante lost at a convention. Step three: fabricate an identity that wouldn’t fall apart under basic questioning.
He reached for the adhesive solvent on his suit — at least that survived whatever brought him here — and loosened the domino mask. It came off easily enough. The cape, though? That was more complicated.
It wasn’t exactly subtle. Or compact.
He hesitated, folding it in on itself. On one hand, leaving bulletproof materials behind was stupid. On the other, keeping a cape tied around his waist was… a look.
Not a good one.
He was still wrestling with the decision when something else finally registered. His gloves felt too light, his boots didn’t hug his ankles the way they used to, and the gauntlets were missing tech he’d installed ages ago.
He glanced down at himself— really looked.
Oh. Oh.
The suit wasn’t his most recent one. Not even close.
This was what he’d worn at sixteen.
“Fantastic,” he said out loud, trying very hard not to cry. “They're really leaning into the theme here.”
He touched his jaw, half expecting the angles he’d grown into. Instead, his fingers met a face with softer lines and less definition. A lot younger.
Great. Amazing. Beautiful.
“Fine. Add ‘teenage hormones, round two’ electric bugaloo to the to-do list.”
Absol flicked an ear, still just staring at him. Which wasn't getting creepy. At all.
Tim shoved the urge to roll his eyes aside and tied the bundled cape around his waist — bulky, awkward, a fashion nightmare, but workable. “Fake it ‘til you make it,” he whispered, mostly to himself.
Absol made a low sound that was almost amused.
Tim narrowed his eyes at it. “You laugh now, but at least I still have my spleen.” Small victories. Whatever kept him sane. He drew in a breath, forcing his mind back into familiar structure. Lists. Plans. Order.
Step one: Find civilization. Because while he’s decent at survival, he’d rather not test just how aggressive the local wildlife can be. He’s not sure if the “Pokémon world” follows normal Earth rules, and frankly, he’s not in the mood to find out via an unfortunate encounter with something (else) that could eat him.
Step two: Get a change of clothes. Because as much as he appreciates functionality, spandex is not a casual look. If he’s lucky, he’ll find a place that sells something practical.
Step three: Create an identity. While Timothy Drake is a normal name, he didn’t have a presence here. A back story is necessary, something simple enough to stick to but vague enough that people won’t ask too many questions. Something that makes sense for someone wandering around alone.
Step four…
Tim pauses, lips pressing together. Right. Then what?
His chest tightened faintly at the last one. For the first time in years, no alarms were ringing in his ear. No emergency waiting for him. No family member relying on him to hold it together.
Bruce is back.
The Robin mantle is in good (mostly homicidal) hands.
His dad and Dana are taking care of Drake Industries.
Jason is… better? Probably? Better enough.
Dick has his family together again.
Cass and Stephanie have each other and Barbara.
No one needed him.
Oddly, the thought didn’t hurt. Not exactly. It just felt… strange. Weightless. Like the world had finally stopped leaning on him long enough for him to realize how used to it he’d become.
He released a long breath.
“Huh. I guess this counts as a vacation.”
Absol’s skeptical stare said it disagreed.
Tim huffed a quiet laugh. “Yeah. I don’t buy it either.”
But still.
For the first time in a long time, he doesn’t have to do anything.
So maybe… he wouldn't.
He took a step forward, the grass parting under his boots. Absol rose immediately and matched his pace, gliding beside him.
Tim shot it a sidelong glance.
“So I guess you are sticking around.”
Another tail flick.
“Great. My first companion is a disaster magnet. That’s… probably fine.”
He kept walking, and Absol kept pace.
It felt the shift before anything else.
A premonition— dangerous, but not malignant— rolled through the world like distant thunder. A tremor in the world’s rhythm, a crack in the natural order that should not be, yet was. It wasn’t destruction, not yet. But something unfamiliar pressed against the edges of fate, a presence that did not belong.
And then, all at once, it arrived.
A new thread tangled itself into the weave of the world, ripples spreading outward like a stone dropped into still water. Absol could not yet read the shape of those ripples, only that they were wrong in a way it had never encountered.
So it went to the place where the disturbance rested.
The human was sprawled in the grass, breathing steady, uninjured, but wrong. Not wrong in the way sickness clung to the body, or the way darkness tainted the soul, but like something fractured. A thread pulled from a tapestry and woven into the wrong design.
So Absol watched.
The human stirred, releasing a soft groan. One hand rose sluggishly, adjusting the strange black strip across his eyes. Not a wound. A crafted covering. A mask.
Then his eyes met Absol’s.
Weary, cold and very much alive.
The thread of fate twisted again.
Absol remained perfectly still. It had stood at the threshold of countless calamities, witnessed sorrow, inevitability, and the quiet grief of futures that could not be stopped. It had watched destruction form and fade like storms across the horizon.
But this human?
This was something new.
And, for the first time in a long while, a pulse of emotion flickered through it.
Something dangerously close to excitement.