#if Steph became Robin III and Tim therefore had no motivation to join the batfamily

[weekend-conspiracy-theorist]

A needlessly self-indulgent Tim and Steph role swap AU. Sort of.

"There's definitely something hinky going on here," Barbara told Jason. She was down in the cave for the night rather than across town in her Clocktower; Alfred had requested her presence for dinner earlier that night. He'd requested Jason's, too, and having Barb around to sweeten the pot had almost tempted him. There had been genuine regret in his voice when he declined.

Her red hair wasn't bright under the lights near the Batcomputer, not exactly, but it was vibrant, and the screens flashed over her glasses in an intimidating show of blankness. What the rest of them needed kevlar and voice modulators to achieve, Oracle needed only sheer presence. Jason fucking loved her.

"Told you," he grunted. His helmet was tucked under his arm, domino already tossed aside for the night. He stepped up next to her, dropping a hand to squeeze her shoulder briefly, and he could feel the smug satisfaction rolling off of her as she deliberately didn't glance over towards Bruce, who was hunched over grappling gun repairs at the main table and trying very hard to pretend he wasn't jealous of their easy comaradarie.

Up on the screen in front of them were two pictures--the young, pale face of the private-investigator-in-training who'd been bugging the shit out of the Red Hood for the last few nights, hounding him about help on a case, and the neutrally attractive, mid-fifties PI who was supposedly responsible for the kid. Newspaper clippings, police files, birth certificates, and a copy of both the PI's investigator's license and the intern's training contract surrounded the pictures.

"The kid's barely old enough to be out of high school," Jason said, darkly. "I dunno what the fuck this guy is thinking letting him run around unsupervised."

Unsupervised, and with a fucking attitude. The kid clearly didn't have a very high opinion of the Red Hood, despite his uncompromising assertions that whatever he was working on was going to require his assistance, and still, somehow, he couldn't seem to catch the hint that Jason wasn't interested.

(Actually, that wasn't quite true. Jason knew the kid had caught the hint. He just didn't seem inclined to let the hint stop him, and he was both annoyingly sneaky and frighteningly good at guessing where Jason was going to pop up each night. It was fucking annoying.)

Barbara hummed neutrally, rather pointedly not saying anything about the number of teenagers they'd had running solo around the Gotham underworld over the years, and brushed a strand of hair behind her ear. "That's just the tip of the iceberg," she informed him, and she sounded much more interested now than she had when Jason had initially asked her to dig up information on the PI firm.

She flicked quickly through several police reports, her green eyes sharp as she studied them. "First of all, the kid seems to be pretty much the only one doing any real leg work for Red Bird Investigators. Draper's the one who handles digital communications with the police, and he's handled the press whenever their cases get enough attention to require it, but every time Red Bird shows up in an actual police report, it always seems to be Drake that they've run into."

Barbara paused rather than compete with the roar of a motorcycle as Batgirl came racing into the cave after her patrol, and she dropped a hand to the wheel of her chair so she could turn slightly, fixing a critical eye on her protegé.

Stephanie was rolling her eyes even as she pushed back the cowl. "Not a scratch on me," she yelled, hand cupped around her mouth, and flatly ignored the disapproving look that Bruce shot her. She'd been even more of an independent operator than either of the Robins that had proceeded her, and Jason knew it rankled for Bruce that she submitted so much more willingly to Barb's authority than his own.

"Just some nasty bruises then," Barbara said sardonically, voice pitched only a little louder than normal. The cave was quiet enough that that was all it took; Stephanie definitely heard her, but all she did was grin. It involved a lot of teeth.

Jason liked Stephanie, a lot. It was easier with her than it was with Dick or Bruce or even Barb, without any baggage between them from his previous life--despite the fact that there was plenty of baggage from this one. Luckily, Stephanie seemed to have decided against holding a grudge over his murder attempt at about the same moment as she'd fought through broken ribs and a dislocated shoulder to bash his face in with one of the steel chairs in the Titans' dining room.

They'd both laid there panting for a moment, Jason's vision swimming with the nastiest concussion he'd ever received, and called something of a truce. It was the last time he'd made the mistake of thinking Stephanie Brown was any less of a threat just because she'd lost a grip on her bo staff.

Jason shot her a lazy, two-fingered wave, and Stephanie fluttered her fingers back as she headed for the lockers. She was wasting no time, halfway to the door and already shedding her armor to reveal a sweat-soaked white tank top and a Green Arrow sports bra.

Bruce looked even more sour than he had a minute ago. Stephanie's reflection in the locker room door, just before she yanked it open, was bright with mischief.

Jason shook his head, trying not to look as amused as he felt, and turned back to the screen. "Okay, so Draper's... what? Riding his intern's coattails? Seems like a risky gamble to put a private investigation firm in the hands of a twelve year old."

"Drake's twenty," Barbara informed him.

"No fucking way," Jason said, flatly. Twelve was a joke, obviously, but--

"His identity, I can confirm," Barbara said, a delicate stress on the first word, and Jason's attention sharpened. So did Bruce's, over in Jason's periphery. Jason could tell by the sudden tension in his shoulders, even if his hands didn't falter as they fiddled with the retraction mechanism of the grappling gun.

"Mind your own business, old man," Jason shot over his shoulder, and Bruce just grunted.

Barbara turned fully back to the Batcomputer, and her long fingers flew across the keyboard as she pulled up a bunch of seemingly unimportant bits of paperwork. "Whoever put Draper's identity together did a good job. They covered their bases--school records, hospital records, employment records, even a social media presence, and all of it pretty convincingly done."

"Unless you're Oracle," Jason said.

Barb's lips twitched. "Unless you're me," she agreed. "Draper's identity would pass muster for most every legal entity that went poking around, but there's some small evidence of it all being faked."

"Is Red Bird some kind of front?" Jason asked, frowning. His eyes flicked over all of the records Barbara had pulled up, more for the sake of having something to do as his mind churned than out of the expectation of spotting something in just a few seconds that Barbara hadn't already seen. "Money laundering, maybe a blackmail operation?"

"I'm not sure yet," Barbara admitted. "Their hourly rates as a firm are shockingly low; it's pulling a lot of attention from your end of the city, attracting the kinds of clients who can't usually afford to hire a private investigator, and they seem to be doing good work. Tracking down missing kids, recovering stolen items, turning evidence over to the cops-- notably only to reputable ones-- when they turn up anything especially nasty or organized." She rolled her eyes. "Not to mention catching plenty of cheating husbands. But that can pretty much all be attributed to Drake; whatever else his boss may be caught up in, I'm confident he's not aware of it.

"I haven't done a deep dive yet. Right now," Barb said, as Batgirl reemerged from the locker room in a pair of sweats, chugging a bottle of water as she took the stairs two at a time up to the platform where Jason and Barbara were talking, "all I can tell you with certainty is that Alvin Draper isn't who he says he is."

Stephanie choked on her water, the bottle crashing to the floor as she spluttered and pounded on her own chest. "Did you just say Alvin Draper?" she managed to grind out, those dark blue eyes of hers wide with surprise, and Jason snapped around to look at her.

So did Barbara and Bruce.

"You know him?" Jason asked sharply.

Stephanie was staring up at the screen, her eyes darting over the information Barbara had pulled up, and then she made a strangled noise. For a second, Jason thought she was choking again--

Except then she was laughing so hard that she had to drop to a crouch, one hand on the railing to keep herself from tipping over completely when her foot slipped in the puddle of water still leaking from her bottle.

"Oh my god," she wheezed. "This is--Oh my god. I can't believe him--"

"Stephanie, if you wouldn't mind sharing the joke, please," Barbara said, a warning note in her voice, and Stephanie hiccuped, wiping tears off of her face.

"Yeah," she managed after a moment, pulling herself to her feet and breaking off in another choked off laugh. "Yeah, you could say I'm a little familiar with--yeah." She snickered, swiping at her cheeks again. "Uh, so, Tim Drake's the annoying creep who's been bothering you the last couple of nights, huh?" she asked Jason. Her voice sounded like Christmas, Hanukkah, and her birthday had all come at once.

"You know Drake, too?" Barbara asked. Her expression was flinty. "You never mentioned anything about working with any PIs."

Stephanie subsumed another giggling fit, talking more to herself than to them. "I should've fucking--oh my god, I should've known it was him as soon as Jason said he was a bit of a stalker." She took a deep breath, managing to get her voice more or less back to normal, and gestured dismissively at Babs. "I've mentioned him, just not by name. A lot falls under the category of 'trusted contacts.'" She wiped her eyes again, calming down even further. "Red Bird isn't some kind of criminal front," she promised. "And Alvin Draper is just-- well, okay, Tim is--"

She seemed suddenly cagey, her chin turning as if to glance over her shoulder at Bruce before she aborted the motion. "Okay," she said, and it was that casual, placating tone of voice that all of the Robins had perfected at one time or another. The "Really, Batsy, it's not that big of a deal" voice. Jason had never actually heard her use it before--by the time he'd reentered the scene, Stephanie wasn't the least bit shy about flaunting her disregard for Bruce's opinions.

"Okay, if I hadn't been caught so off guard I totally would not have handled this conversation this way," Stephanie told Barbara. "If I'm going to be honest, I did not intend to ever have this conversation. Tim would have given me away at my theoretical future wedding without a single one of you having any idea how we even knew each other. He'd probably have done it wearing a stupid wig and calling himself Maurice."

Barbara raised an eyebrow. Bruce was no longer pretending to be focused on anything else, a frown line etched firmly across his forehead.

Jason had no idea where this was going.

"Absolutely no chance you can just take my word for it and drop your suspicions about Red Bird?" Stephanie asked hopefully.

"Not in the fucking slightest," Jason told her.

Stephanie pressed her palms together and leaned her fingers against her lips for a moment, thinking, and then she dropped them, still far too casual to actually be casual. "I should set the stage for a second, because none of what I'm about to say is going to make sense if I just dive into it," she admitted, hands on her hips. "Jason, you know what what everyone-- what Bruce, specifically-- says about my reputation as Robin, right?"

"Ferocious," Jason said immediately. "Clever. Scrappy. Compassionate."

A smile twitched at the corners of Stephanie's eyes, but she told him, dryly, "Actually, the word I was thinking of was 'insubordinate.'"

Barbara rubbed at the bridge of her nose with her thumb and forefinger, suddenly looking exhausted. Bruce, in the background, looked vaguely like he wanted to argue, but didn't actually have much of an argument to make.

"I mean, I've always been the master of back talk to the B-man," Stephanie said, and her expression-- her tone-- was somewhere between pride and guilt. "And I frequently ignored any and all instructions to keep my nose out of certain cases, unless I was given really, really thorough and convincing reasons why I should leave them alone. So yeah, my time as Robin was characterized by a lot of flaunting the rules."

She took a breath. "But the thing is that even with all of that," she said delicately, "Bruce does not actually know even a third of what I got up to as Robin."

Bruce finally spoke up. "I know more than you think I do," he said, with just a hint of amusement in his tone. "You found a lot of counsel in Barbara, thinking it was behind my back. She handled plenty of mishaps for you, but she certainly didn't keep as many of your secrets as you might have hoped. I didn't mind, since you were confiding in someone."

"Sorry, kid," Barb said.

"Yeah," Stephanie said impatiently, "I know Babs was ratting on me. I knew it then, too. Which is why I leaned on the fact that you all saw me as just a little bit silly when it came to boys, and I fed Oracle a number of thrillingly believable lies about sneaking around on patrol to make out with Boyfriend, without ever mentioning that Boyfriend was also a detective savant with a corkboard conspiracy map of the city and a freakazoid obsession with stalking mobsters and crime lords with his insanely expensive long distance night vision camera."

Jason blinked.

Bruce said, "What."

Stephanie shrugged. "I mean, we did also do a lot of making out, it was just usually on top of a rooftop across the street from some dudes whose noses I was about to break. Which, before you say anything about endangering civilians, I did all the muscle work; I never let Boyfriend anywhere near the fighting, even though he's been taking a bunch of martial arts lessons since middle school.

"And," she added sharply, cutting off Bruce's response, "before you say anything about endangering myself, I'd like you to remember that it's only been two weeks since the Ex-Robins Union collectively negotiated for amnesty regarding cases that occured during our days in the pixie boots, and if you break the terms of the contract in under a month then the Extreme Penalty Subclause is activated and Dick, Jay, and I get to decide on our response. Suggestions have included an official Titans Gotham team and the Outlaws getting open season on the Joker."

Stephanie and Jason high-fived as Bruce's mouth slowly shut.

"I told you that signing that contract without reading it was a bad idea," Barbara sighed. "Dick was being way too nonchalant about the whole thing."

Stephanie turned back to Jason and Barbara and waved a hand at the Batcomputer. "This is relevant because Tim Drake is Boyfriend, if this room full of detectives hadn't already made that leap," she told them. "Alvin Draper's one of his favorite aliases. He did not tell me about this because he knows how much fun I am going to make of him, but I know how that batshit little brain of his works, and that guy--" She jerked her chin at the alleged picture of Alvin Draper-- "is definitely an actor Boyfriend hired to pretend to be his boss. Hacking the New Jersey PI database and issuing himself a license is easy enough, but convincing anyone he's actually old enough to be in possession of it is literally impossible with that baby face of his." Stephanie mimed squinching his cheeks together.

"Which, for the record, fucking classic Boyfriend move, right here," she added, grinning. "He once hired a fake uncle to be his legal guardian when his parents died and he was too young for the judge to consider emancipating him."

Jason had no idea what was going on in Bruce or Barb's brains because they both appeared to be blue screening a bit, but all he could think was that it was official: Stephanie was hands down Jason's favorite Bat.

"You hid a whole ass vigilante from Batman for like six years," he said wonderingly.

Stephanie snorted. "Not a vigilante," she corrected dryly. "Boyfriend has no interest in dressing up in tights or kicking people's teeth in; he just likes detective work and hates cops. He mostly just does a lot of sitting on rooftops taking surveillance photos." She obviously couldn't resist adding, smugly, "But yeah, more or less. Cass couldn't even kiss Superboy without Bruce knowing about it, meanwhile I practically had Boyfriend hidden under my cape on every solo stakeout for a year straight, and no one ever noticed." She tapped a finger on the side of her nose, raising her eyebrows. "No small part of why I've refused to ever live in the Manor or the Clocktower."

"This is the first and only time I will ever acknowledge that the people who call you the greatest Robin have even a single leg to stand on," Jason told her.

She gave him a nod, lips twitching.

"That's probably why Boyfriend's being such a little bitch about working with you, by the way." Stephanie leaned back against the railing and crossed her arms over her chest. Her scars stood out, stark, over the bulge of her biceps. "You used to be his favorite Robin, but then you came back from the dead and tried to kill his ex. He took it pretty personal." She made scare quotes, rolling her eyes and pitching her voice up an octave mockingly. "'It's my responsibility to hold a grudge since you have no intentions of doing it yourself, Stephanie.'"

She shook her head, her tone suddenly serious as she added, "I couldn't begin to guess his motivations in trying to drag you of all people into one of his cases, but it's gotta be something important. I'd hear him out next time he approaches you."

"You trust him? Trust his judgement?" Jason knew she did, she'd pretty much just admitted that Drake was aware of her identity, but it still seemed prudent to ask.

"As implicitly as I trust Cass," Stephanie told him immediately.

High praise, Jason knew, but he could tell it wasn't all she had to say on the matter.

Stephanie was very still for a moment, her gaze flicking to meet Bruce's in the reflection of the metallic plating at the edge of the Batcomputer, and then she met Jason's once more. Her voice was quiet but steady as she told him, "You weren't here for it, but I know you know the gist of what happened during War Games, and that I've always been vague about how I got away from Black Mask. Nobody ever pushed because they thought it was just the trauma fogging my memory, and yeah, that's part of it, but keeping Boyfriend safe from the fallout was the other part. I didn't somehow manage to break myself out after Mask left me for dead; Tim tracked me down. He got me to Leslie."

Barbara sucked in a breath, sharp, through her nose. A muscle ticked in Stephanie's jaw. And Jason had never before seen that expression on Bruce's face when the subject of conversation had nothing to do with an explosion in Ethiopia.

Jason whistled, low and slow.

"So, yeah," Stephanie managed, a little stiff. "I trust him. He's an obsessive, scheming little weirdo as I'm sure you noticed, Jay, but it's all part of the charm. He's a brilliant detective, and he cares so much about everything. We've always make a good team; he's good at seeing the whole picture, I'm good at seeing the people in it." She grinned, wicked. "Plus, he taught me how to skateboard."

Barbara snorted at that, then immediately looked annoyed at herself, but Stephanie was already fist-pumping.

"I'm not gonna lie, despite my years long efforts to keep all of this a secret, I'm excited to finally talk about Boyfriend as something other than the abstract concept of my best friend who none of you except Cass were completely certain existed," she said cheerfully.

"Cassandra knew about this?" Bruce asked.

Jason was pretty certain that the threat of invoking the ERU contract was the only reason the Bat was managing to stay so calm. Collective bargaining worked, people.

"I have never successfully kept a secret from Cass in my life," Stephanie said, ruefully. "I'm fucked when she takes over Batman."

"And everyday of interacting with you pushes Bruce closer to that retirement," Barbara told her dryly. "I'm still processing this, Stephanie, so I'm not going to get on your case tonight, but you know that your union will not protect you from me. We will be having a conversation about what other secrets you've been keeping."

"Considering that your vigilante career began and ended entirely outside of--well, anyone's supervision, not sure you have a leg here, Barb," Jason pointed out.

"There's a reason I'm your protegé now," Stephanie said cheerfully, as her voice cracked on a yawn. "Anyway, I need to scoot. I can text you Tim's number if you want it, Jay."

"Yeah," Jason sighed. "Sure. I guess I'm probably never getting rid of him if even your annoying personality hasn't managed to drive him off sometime in the last six years."

Stephanie flipped him off, rolling her eyes, but she was laughing under breath as she leaned down to pick up her water bottle. "Oh," she said, far too casual once more, as she found some papertowels to use to dry up the puddle. "There is one more thing I should probably tell you guys about Tim."

"He's a vampire," Jason guessed, just as casual. He kept her in his periphery, sensing immediately that this was something that the Ex-Robins Union contract was not going to cover.

"Nope." She bundled up the dripping paper towels and walked over to toss them in the trash. The movement took her closer to the stairs up to the Manor.

Neither Bruce nor Babs had apparently gotten any better at recognizing the signs of a shifty Robin than they had been before the revelations of the last ten minutes, so it's up to Jason to abruptly dart between her and the stairs, cutting off her escape route.

"What do we need to know about Tim, Replacement?" he asked, pleasantly, as he loomed over her. Batgirl was a bad ass, undoubtedly, but Jason had three inches and at least fifty pounds of muscle on her. Plus, he was still in his body armor.

"Ah," Stephanie said, clapping her hands together, and Bruce finally seemed to clue in to the fact that he was really not going to like the next words that came out of her mouth.

"What did you do?" he asked flatly.

"I did not do anything," Stephanie fired back immediately. "It was Dick, actually, and the thing he did was a quadruple somersault that only three people in the world can do, or whatever. Notably," she said, thumb and forefinger pinched together as she took a step forward, away from Jason and away from the stairs, "Dick Grayson, of the Flying Graysons, can do that somersault. And, my, what did a nine-year-old Timothy Jackson Drake see on the news one morning, except Robin the Boy Wonder doing that exact same somersault."

"You're fucking kidding," Barbara said.

"Yeah," Steph said. "Tim knows the secret identities of literally every single vigilante in Gotham, even the ones not connected to us. It's a hobby of his."

And then she pivoted, the space she'd gained from that step forward giving her enough room to dive under Jason's arm and come up sprinting as she took the stairs three at a time.

now continued

#tim drake #stephanie brown #I wrote this #I think that was my tag? whatever #this is pretty much just wildly self-indulgent musings about what it might look like #if Steph became Robin III and Tim therefore had no motivation to join the batfamily #and I thought this would be the funniest way to explain it #also ft. the truly hilarious concept of an ex-robins union #also war games definitely didn't go down exactly as it did in the comics but I'm i no mood to hash out details #I would be down to write more in this universe but also I have no interest in writing casefic so I will probably never touch it again #I just had this scene in my head and needed to get it out