Fic: Brothers Together - Chapter 2
Title: Brothers Together
Chapter: 2/?
Series: Teen Titans Go!/DCU Batverse crossover
Timeline: TTG - mid-series, after the defeat of Trigon; DCU - just after the Identity Crisis incident.
Characters: Tim Drake, TTG Robin (alt. Dick Grayson), other TTG Titans
Genre: Action/Adventure, Drama, Family
Summery: Still coping from the death of his father, Tim Drake finds himself in a world reminiecent of his world's past, but somehow not the same. Robin, who long ago attempted to forget his old name, finds himself face-to-face with a stranger who may or may not play a key factor in his own future. Maybe they can help each other.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. DC owns it all. They may have been abusing their deathstick privalges recently, but they still own it.
A/N - For those unfamiliar with my fan fictions, my fight scenes tend to generally suck. This has something to do with the muse who controls them running off after fake demons whenever she cares to.
Chapter 2: A Tale of Two Robins
In the most basic possible sense, Tim Drake was having a pretty crappy day.
Though, given the general standard of you average superhero-level crappy day, the day itself really hadn’t been all that bad. It just seemed worse than it would have otherwise because it was the latest in a cycle of bad days that had been spiraling around him for the past three weeks.
Not that anything could have compared with the day that had been the start of those three weeks. That was the day that had become the ultimate worst day of his entire young life.
That was the day that his father, Jack Drake, had been murdered.
Murdered by a cheap thug hired in a desperate attempt to cover up the homicidal tendencies of the crazy ex-wife of a superhero that Tim had only really been acquainted with through Bruce’s JLA contacts. She was in Arkham now, and the assassin has been shot by the very man he had gone to kill, but that meant nothing to the Boy Wonder. Punishment and retribution wouldn’t bring his father back.
Tim had spent the first week after the incident in bed, with the covers pulled up over his head, hiding from the world. The first day, Nightwing had called his family line every thirty minutes from 6 am to 9 in the evening, when he went on patrol. Oracle had taken over for him, doing the same from 10 to 4 the next day. Tim had ignored them all, lost in the memories, shutting himself away from everything, until Alfred - bless the dear old man’s paternal soul - had gotten in with a spare key and coaxed some warm food into his body.
Even with the entire bat-clan checking in on him and Alfred’s home cooking available whenever he could keep it down, it had been the very worst week of Tim’s entire life.
Despite Bruce’s objections, he had gone to Titan’s Tower that weekend, just as he had been planning to long before his father’s death. It was familiar, it was normal, and his friends - Wonder Girl and Kid Flash and the rest - didn’t know what had happened, and he wanted it that way. After a week of remembering, all he wanted to do was forget, to lock the feelings away inside of him and deny any power that they had once held.
But he couldn’t even have that, as a rogue villain…a leftover of the incident that had killed his father - had sparked the rage and sorrow back to life, resulting in another break down on his part.
If nothing else, his friends had been there to pick up the pieces.
When he’d gotten back, to his surprise, Bruce did not even seem to think about uttering the word “I told you so.” Instead, he insisted that he take it easy for the next few weeks - no school, no patrols, minimum training, just rest. He’d chosen to spend it away from Gotham - away from the memories that Gotham would bring - and somehow wound up back in his room at the Tower. In the middle of the week, he’d taken up Conner’s offer for dinner at the Kent’s in Smallville, but other than that, he remained in San Francisco with Vic and Gar.
And it had helped.
He’d felt better - much better - the following weekend, participating in training, getting to know Mia, their latest addition; and even taking on Doctor Light when the giant flashbulb had reared his ugly head. He’d returned to Gotham, but stayed off the beat, left at home with his thoughts. They’d grown dark again, and he had been thankful to return to the Tower for another weekend with the Titans.
And then today had happened.
It had started out as just the usual sort of alert - the super-villain of the week, in this case the bumbling time traveler Chronos, had been attempting to bust an old metahuman buddy of his out of the newly-renovated Alcatraz prison. True to their contract with the City of San Francisco, the Titans had retaliated. A battle ensued, fending off attacks from the various gizmos the not-quite-genius had somehow picked up, trading the occasional had-to-hand blows…Chronos had tried to get away, hastily imputing coordinates into the machine on his arm. Tim had lunged at him, and…
And the last thing he remembered was a frightened cry in Wonder Girl’s voice: “Robin!”
Then, nothing.
Tim now found himself being pressed from all sides, the very breath that he held pushing outward against his lungs. Groping through the darkness, he held onto Chronos with both hands, despite the villain’s struggles. He knew better than to let go. Letting go would get him lost, trapped in this non-world between times, possibly forever.
He fumbled through the shadow, his right hand losing its grip only to find a new one on something hard, something that suddenly broke and came loose, and then he was falling, falling…
His sight and senses returned seconds before his feet hit the ground, just enough time for his training to kick in the instant the earth was solidly beneath him.
He pushed away from Chronos, arching his back into a graceful handspring. The villain stumbled, green cape rustling around him, gripping his gauntlet as though it had bitten him. “You…You little brat…”
Tim rolled his eyes - this guy must be really minor-league if that was the best he could do with his insults - and stuffed the little whatever-it-was into a spare pouch on his utility belt without giving it a second look.
Chronos hissed again. “Give me that!”
He took one step and wobbled awkwardly, giving the Boy Wonder the opening he needed. Tim lunged, delivering a hard right to the man’s check, following it up with a sharp knee to the gut. “Give it up. We’re bringing you in.”
“’We’?” Chronos snickered at some kind of private joke, though it turned into more of a cough. “You’re fooling yourself, boy. There is no one else.”
Tim frowned, confused, and glanced over his shoulder to observe the situation. It was dark, which it hadn’t been before, and the roof was more old-fashioned - there was a water tank at the very edge, and a stairwell with a pile of debris stacked up next to it just on his right. But most importantly, his teammates were nowhere to be found.
His guard dropped for a split second, giving Chronos exactly what he needed. The air was thrown from Tim’s lungs when his opponent kicked him in the stomach, and again when he crashed into the wall of the stair house. He dropped to the ground, gasping and hacking as he tried to force the air back into his lungs.
There was a low chuckle as Chronos stepped forward, the kind of little laugh that the bad guys always used when they thought they’d gotten the upper hand on Batman’s teenage sidekick.
Tim hated that laugh.
“Gotcha, little birdie,” the assassin snickered. “We’ll see how well you fly once I clip your…”
“Azarath Metrion Zinthos!”
A black shadow, alive and animated in the shape of a bird, shot from one side and collided with Chronos. It swept him away and dropped him in a heap on the other side of the roof, his back pressed against the stone guardrail.
Tim coughed, gaining back a bit of his breath, and took a moment to sigh with relief. The attack was familiar, even if the call had not been. “Raven…”
A second later, a familiar, fem-feral battle roar echoed through the air as a gold-and-purple blur shot after the time traveling villain. Starfire seized Chronos by the collar of his flashy green cape, hoisting him up twenty feet into the air. “I do not know what you are doing here, but I will not allow you to cause harm!”
Tim shook himself, staggering to his feet as he tried. There was something…different…about the alien princess. The way that she moved, the way that she spoke, the way that she…felt…was similar, but it wasn’t the Starfire that he knew. “Kory? What…?”
“Damn you...” Chronos grunted, struggling to reach into one of the many silver pockets on his excessively over-laden belt. “Every last one of your brats is a pain.”
Tim realized what was going to happen seconds before the handful of blinding powder was thrown into Starfire’s wide green eyes. The golden-skinned girl shrieked and jerked back instinctively, dropping her captive as she fell.
Tim was on the move a second later, now running purely on adrenaline. The Starfire he knew was almost a foot taller than he was and 25 pounds heavier, but this was just about the right size for his attempted ‘catch’ to turn into a somewhat effective ‘breaking her fall’ maneuver. If nothing else, he managed to keep her head from hitting the hard concrete, even if it did mean that his body took the blow instead.
With Starfire weighing him down, Tim wasn’t quite able to get a grip on the situation before Chronos gained his second wind, returning to his feet with a hefty jump. But the bad guy had barely managed to get on his feet before Raven - materializing from her soul-self once more - appeared seemingly from nothing and delivered quite a solid kick to the side of his head.
Starfire groaned and sat up off of Tim, rubbing at her blinded eyes. “Robin...?”
Tim gulped, rubbing his neck. Up close, it was even more obvious that this was not the Starfire that he knew. She was too quiet, too young, too...small.
“Robin?” she repeated, reaching out and grabbing hold of his costume, as though assuring herself that he was still there. “Robin, what...?”
“Starfire!”
Both heads turned, and Tim moved to push Starfire into a duck as a large green condor swooped just over their heads and claws at Chronos’s gaudy silver goggles. The time-traveler reared back with a scream, gripping a handful of blood-stained red hair. “Damn you all!”
The eagle covered back in an elegant arch, swooping low over Tim and Starfire as they uncurled from their previous position. It dropped to the ground just behind the owner of the original warning voice, reforming into a human state. Beast Boy straightened, his green eyes slowly widening. “Dude...no way.”
Tim lifted his eyes and came face-to-masked-face with another Robin.
They stared at each other for a full thirty seconds before all the pieces clicked together in Tim’s head. He knew this Robin, he had grown up knowing him, studying everything that he could about him, eventually even training with him and around him. When he was a child, he had pictures of this Robin, newspaper clippings, strung up all over his room. Even though it had been years since this particular Robin had been seen, he knew him in a heartbeat - there was no other answer.
Tim swallowed against a dry throat, and when he breathed out, the whispered name passed through his parched lips before he’d even willed it to.
If nothing else, he at least managed to limit it to a single, breathless word:
“Dick...”
( - ) ( - ) ( - )
Robin jerked backwards as the name reached his ears, floating on the wind like a withered old leaf.
He hadn’t heard that name for years.
Confusion piled on top of confusion in his mind, trying to sort through all the information he had been given in the last five minutes. Cyborg’s blurry reports of ‘another Robin’ on the roof had been troubling enough, and though the boy’s appearance to keep Starfire from harm was essentially a good thing, it also created a light pang of jealousy that Robin would have rather pretended didn’t exist. It was beaten down quickly by the realization that the boy was not, as Cyborg had guessed, some twisted version of Robin himself.
This new Robin was smaller than he was and built thinner, making him a tiny bit taller and probably a little bit lighter than Beast Boy. His movements held less power and precision, but almost seemed to be calculated so that every motion added up to the full equation. Despite this, with his build and proportions, he might as well have been some kid in a Halloween costume.
Except that your average school kid would not have been able to jump in the way he had.
Raven’s voice suddenly brought Robin out of his thoughts: “Watch out!”
On instinct, he launched himself to one side as Beast Boy shifted into a kangaroo to jump away from the small explosive charge Chronos had thrown between them. The pudgy, sloppy-looking man in bright green and silver has gone red in the face with rage, gunning for a fight as he stormed through the smoke and debris he had created himself.
Robin rolled up onto one knee, drawing his staff and extending it out to its full length. Raven landed beside him with a sigh. “Looks like he’s still got some fight in him.”
“I’m headin’ over there, Rob,” Cyborg’s voice reported from the communicator. “Think you can handle him until I get there?”
“We’ll try to save you some action,” Robin reported with a smirk, then turned off his communicator and glanced to his teammates for a few hurried instructions. “Raven, you take care of Starfire. Beast Boy, you’re with me. Titans, go!”
The blinding, painful red was just starting to clear out of Starfire’s eyes when she realized that she was being guided away from the battle by Robin - but it was a much smaller, skinnier Robin than the one she was used to. She blinked, her eyes watering with pain, and tried to focus on him. “Ro…bin?”
“Stay here,” he instructed in an unfamiliar voice, pushing a small bottle of water, indicative of emergency rations, into her hand. “Use this. Wash your eyes out and stay low.”
A cold chill, familiar though still mind-numbing, radiated from just behind them as Raven’s voice broke through again. “Get away from her.”
The guiding touch on her shoulder was gone suddenly as the boy backed off. “Just trying to help.”
“It’s not needed.”
“I can see that, now.”
With that, the boy turned on the spot and rushed their opponent, drawing a thin metal rod from the depths of his cape. The weapon telescoped out to it a full six-foot bo staff, which he brought down hard against the older man’s temple.
Chronos grunted, stumbling forward a few steps as his attacker slid past. “You little…”
“Chronos!”
The man twisted, coming eye-to-eye with Robin. The leader of the Titans narrowed his eyes behind the lenses of his mask.
“I don’t know where you came from,” he said seriously, taking a few more steps to the side. “But in this time, you’re wanted in three states. So we’re bringing you in.”
The other boy, his mirror-image, scowled at him from the opposite side, breathing hard. “Please, Dick, not now…”
Robin went stiff again, his grip tightening to an almost uncomfortable level.
Chronos looked back and forth between them, apparently as baffled by the appearance of the two identically-costumed boys as anyone else in the area. He grunted, glancing down at the complicated silver gauntlet on his right wrist. Something about it made him furious, and he suddenly lunged at Robin. “You! Give me back that temporal core!”
Robin didn’t know what he was talking about, but he was ready for the attack. He caught Chronos’s hands with his staff, rolling into a fierce grappling match with the larger villain.
The other one moved, about to engage as well, but was cut off by the large green snake that reared up and wrapped around him in a vice-like grip.
“Hold it, pal!” Beast Boy ordered, tightening his coils. “How do we know you’re on our side? I bet you’re working with this creep!”
“Let…me…go!” the groaned, squirming in all directions, but the snake just tightened its hold.
Raven straightened from her place beside her injured teammate, keeping her purple eyes trained on the battle. She lifted her hand, pushing the dark energy of her mind to wrap around the heavy wooden crates piled beside her. “Azarath Metrion Zinthos!”
The debris lifted into the air and shot at Chronos. Robin saw it coming and jumped back in time to allow the attack to crash into his opponent. Chronos turned just in time to duck the attack, the pile of debris landing in a heap behind him.
Robin straightened into a defensive stance, throwing a shuriken-like dart to distract Chronos and glancing in Raven’s direction. “How’s Starefire?”
“She’s nearly recovered,” the dark girl reported, keeping a cautious eye on the battle and a concerned hand on her golden-skinned friend’s shoulder. She watched as the Beast Boy-snake struggled with their strange new arrival. “What about the kid?”
“Keep an eye on him,” Robin instructed, carefully circling their opponent. “I don’t trust him.”
Chronos toke advantage of the distraction to knock Robin’s projectile attacks out of the way and throw one of his own - in the form of a putrid smoke-bomb, right in Robin’s face. The Boy Wonder reeled back, one arm raised defensively, and was suddenly knocked to the ground when Chronos tackled him through the smoke. Robin wound up on his back, his elbowing being pressed into the ground by his own weapon.
“You little brat…!”
“Robin, get low!”
The surprise of Cyborg’s voice made him slip into instinct mode, and Robin dropped his arms backward instantly. In the moment that Chronos was off-balance, a blue beam of hypersonic sound struck him in the chest, throwing him off Robin and onto the ground in one motion.
Cyborg smirked as he clicked his weapon back into place. “Booyah. Just in time for the fun.”
Chronos growled as he pulled himself to his feet for the third time, now facing Robin, Cyborg, Robin and the fully-recovered and angry Starfire. Recognizing that the odds were against him, Chronos turned once more to the machine on his wrist, grumbling in annoyance as he did. He punched in a few small codes, then hit a button with the flat of his hand.
The kid seemed to realize what he was doing before any of the others did - he paused his struggling with Beast Boy just long enough shout, “No!”
Robin moved forward, but it was too late. With a small pop and a flash of red light, the man was gone, and the only thing Robin hit was thin air.
Starfire hovered forward, perplexed and annoyed. “He is…gone?”
“No…” Robin swore under his breath, even more annoyed than his teammate. “Did he time jump?”
Cyborg glanced over the edge of the roof. “He jumped, but there’s no time. Look, down there!”
They looked, just in time to see Chronos’s gaudy green and silver cape disappear around the corner of the building across the street. Robin hiss again. “He’s getting away. We need to go after him!”
Cyborg frowned at their leader uncertainly. “What about the kid?”
“OW!”
All four of them jerked back around at Beast Boy’s shout, finding the green-skin teen back in his usual form, and gripping his right thigh with boy hands. “He bit me! The little brat bit me!”
Robin twisted again just in time to see the end of a cape - his cape, as far as he was concerned - disappear over the end of the roof as the strange young boy leapt onto the fire escape. For a minute, Robin stopped, uncertain of the situation, debating with himself…
“Well, Rob?” Cyborg broke in, sounding as confused as Robin felt. “What do we do?”
…
TBC…
Chapter: 2/?
Series: Teen Titans Go!/DCU Batverse crossover
Timeline: TTG - mid-series, after the defeat of Trigon; DCU - just after the Identity Crisis incident.
Characters: Tim Drake, TTG Robin (alt. Dick Grayson), other TTG Titans
Genre: Action/Adventure, Drama, Family
Summery: Still coping from the death of his father, Tim Drake finds himself in a world reminiecent of his world's past, but somehow not the same. Robin, who long ago attempted to forget his old name, finds himself face-to-face with a stranger who may or may not play a key factor in his own future. Maybe they can help each other.
Disclaimer: I own nothing. DC owns it all. They may have been abusing their deathstick privalges recently, but they still own it.
A/N - For those unfamiliar with my fan fictions, my fight scenes tend to generally suck. This has something to do with the muse who controls them running off after fake demons whenever she cares to.
Chapter 2: A Tale of Two Robins
In the most basic possible sense, Tim Drake was having a pretty crappy day.
Though, given the general standard of you average superhero-level crappy day, the day itself really hadn’t been all that bad. It just seemed worse than it would have otherwise because it was the latest in a cycle of bad days that had been spiraling around him for the past three weeks.
Not that anything could have compared with the day that had been the start of those three weeks. That was the day that had become the ultimate worst day of his entire young life.
That was the day that his father, Jack Drake, had been murdered.
Murdered by a cheap thug hired in a desperate attempt to cover up the homicidal tendencies of the crazy ex-wife of a superhero that Tim had only really been acquainted with through Bruce’s JLA contacts. She was in Arkham now, and the assassin has been shot by the very man he had gone to kill, but that meant nothing to the Boy Wonder. Punishment and retribution wouldn’t bring his father back.
Tim had spent the first week after the incident in bed, with the covers pulled up over his head, hiding from the world. The first day, Nightwing had called his family line every thirty minutes from 6 am to 9 in the evening, when he went on patrol. Oracle had taken over for him, doing the same from 10 to 4 the next day. Tim had ignored them all, lost in the memories, shutting himself away from everything, until Alfred - bless the dear old man’s paternal soul - had gotten in with a spare key and coaxed some warm food into his body.
Even with the entire bat-clan checking in on him and Alfred’s home cooking available whenever he could keep it down, it had been the very worst week of Tim’s entire life.
Despite Bruce’s objections, he had gone to Titan’s Tower that weekend, just as he had been planning to long before his father’s death. It was familiar, it was normal, and his friends - Wonder Girl and Kid Flash and the rest - didn’t know what had happened, and he wanted it that way. After a week of remembering, all he wanted to do was forget, to lock the feelings away inside of him and deny any power that they had once held.
But he couldn’t even have that, as a rogue villain…a leftover of the incident that had killed his father - had sparked the rage and sorrow back to life, resulting in another break down on his part.
If nothing else, his friends had been there to pick up the pieces.
When he’d gotten back, to his surprise, Bruce did not even seem to think about uttering the word “I told you so.” Instead, he insisted that he take it easy for the next few weeks - no school, no patrols, minimum training, just rest. He’d chosen to spend it away from Gotham - away from the memories that Gotham would bring - and somehow wound up back in his room at the Tower. In the middle of the week, he’d taken up Conner’s offer for dinner at the Kent’s in Smallville, but other than that, he remained in San Francisco with Vic and Gar.
And it had helped.
He’d felt better - much better - the following weekend, participating in training, getting to know Mia, their latest addition; and even taking on Doctor Light when the giant flashbulb had reared his ugly head. He’d returned to Gotham, but stayed off the beat, left at home with his thoughts. They’d grown dark again, and he had been thankful to return to the Tower for another weekend with the Titans.
And then today had happened.
It had started out as just the usual sort of alert - the super-villain of the week, in this case the bumbling time traveler Chronos, had been attempting to bust an old metahuman buddy of his out of the newly-renovated Alcatraz prison. True to their contract with the City of San Francisco, the Titans had retaliated. A battle ensued, fending off attacks from the various gizmos the not-quite-genius had somehow picked up, trading the occasional had-to-hand blows…Chronos had tried to get away, hastily imputing coordinates into the machine on his arm. Tim had lunged at him, and…
And the last thing he remembered was a frightened cry in Wonder Girl’s voice: “Robin!”
Then, nothing.
Tim now found himself being pressed from all sides, the very breath that he held pushing outward against his lungs. Groping through the darkness, he held onto Chronos with both hands, despite the villain’s struggles. He knew better than to let go. Letting go would get him lost, trapped in this non-world between times, possibly forever.
He fumbled through the shadow, his right hand losing its grip only to find a new one on something hard, something that suddenly broke and came loose, and then he was falling, falling…
His sight and senses returned seconds before his feet hit the ground, just enough time for his training to kick in the instant the earth was solidly beneath him.
He pushed away from Chronos, arching his back into a graceful handspring. The villain stumbled, green cape rustling around him, gripping his gauntlet as though it had bitten him. “You…You little brat…”
Tim rolled his eyes - this guy must be really minor-league if that was the best he could do with his insults - and stuffed the little whatever-it-was into a spare pouch on his utility belt without giving it a second look.
Chronos hissed again. “Give me that!”
He took one step and wobbled awkwardly, giving the Boy Wonder the opening he needed. Tim lunged, delivering a hard right to the man’s check, following it up with a sharp knee to the gut. “Give it up. We’re bringing you in.”
“’We’?” Chronos snickered at some kind of private joke, though it turned into more of a cough. “You’re fooling yourself, boy. There is no one else.”
Tim frowned, confused, and glanced over his shoulder to observe the situation. It was dark, which it hadn’t been before, and the roof was more old-fashioned - there was a water tank at the very edge, and a stairwell with a pile of debris stacked up next to it just on his right. But most importantly, his teammates were nowhere to be found.
His guard dropped for a split second, giving Chronos exactly what he needed. The air was thrown from Tim’s lungs when his opponent kicked him in the stomach, and again when he crashed into the wall of the stair house. He dropped to the ground, gasping and hacking as he tried to force the air back into his lungs.
There was a low chuckle as Chronos stepped forward, the kind of little laugh that the bad guys always used when they thought they’d gotten the upper hand on Batman’s teenage sidekick.
Tim hated that laugh.
“Gotcha, little birdie,” the assassin snickered. “We’ll see how well you fly once I clip your…”
“Azarath Metrion Zinthos!”
A black shadow, alive and animated in the shape of a bird, shot from one side and collided with Chronos. It swept him away and dropped him in a heap on the other side of the roof, his back pressed against the stone guardrail.
Tim coughed, gaining back a bit of his breath, and took a moment to sigh with relief. The attack was familiar, even if the call had not been. “Raven…”
A second later, a familiar, fem-feral battle roar echoed through the air as a gold-and-purple blur shot after the time traveling villain. Starfire seized Chronos by the collar of his flashy green cape, hoisting him up twenty feet into the air. “I do not know what you are doing here, but I will not allow you to cause harm!”
Tim shook himself, staggering to his feet as he tried. There was something…different…about the alien princess. The way that she moved, the way that she spoke, the way that she…felt…was similar, but it wasn’t the Starfire that he knew. “Kory? What…?”
“Damn you...” Chronos grunted, struggling to reach into one of the many silver pockets on his excessively over-laden belt. “Every last one of your brats is a pain.”
Tim realized what was going to happen seconds before the handful of blinding powder was thrown into Starfire’s wide green eyes. The golden-skinned girl shrieked and jerked back instinctively, dropping her captive as she fell.
Tim was on the move a second later, now running purely on adrenaline. The Starfire he knew was almost a foot taller than he was and 25 pounds heavier, but this was just about the right size for his attempted ‘catch’ to turn into a somewhat effective ‘breaking her fall’ maneuver. If nothing else, he managed to keep her head from hitting the hard concrete, even if it did mean that his body took the blow instead.
With Starfire weighing him down, Tim wasn’t quite able to get a grip on the situation before Chronos gained his second wind, returning to his feet with a hefty jump. But the bad guy had barely managed to get on his feet before Raven - materializing from her soul-self once more - appeared seemingly from nothing and delivered quite a solid kick to the side of his head.
Starfire groaned and sat up off of Tim, rubbing at her blinded eyes. “Robin...?”
Tim gulped, rubbing his neck. Up close, it was even more obvious that this was not the Starfire that he knew. She was too quiet, too young, too...small.
“Robin?” she repeated, reaching out and grabbing hold of his costume, as though assuring herself that he was still there. “Robin, what...?”
“Starfire!”
Both heads turned, and Tim moved to push Starfire into a duck as a large green condor swooped just over their heads and claws at Chronos’s gaudy silver goggles. The time-traveler reared back with a scream, gripping a handful of blood-stained red hair. “Damn you all!”
The eagle covered back in an elegant arch, swooping low over Tim and Starfire as they uncurled from their previous position. It dropped to the ground just behind the owner of the original warning voice, reforming into a human state. Beast Boy straightened, his green eyes slowly widening. “Dude...no way.”
Tim lifted his eyes and came face-to-masked-face with another Robin.
They stared at each other for a full thirty seconds before all the pieces clicked together in Tim’s head. He knew this Robin, he had grown up knowing him, studying everything that he could about him, eventually even training with him and around him. When he was a child, he had pictures of this Robin, newspaper clippings, strung up all over his room. Even though it had been years since this particular Robin had been seen, he knew him in a heartbeat - there was no other answer.
Tim swallowed against a dry throat, and when he breathed out, the whispered name passed through his parched lips before he’d even willed it to.
If nothing else, he at least managed to limit it to a single, breathless word:
“Dick...”
( - ) ( - ) ( - )
Robin jerked backwards as the name reached his ears, floating on the wind like a withered old leaf.
He hadn’t heard that name for years.
Confusion piled on top of confusion in his mind, trying to sort through all the information he had been given in the last five minutes. Cyborg’s blurry reports of ‘another Robin’ on the roof had been troubling enough, and though the boy’s appearance to keep Starfire from harm was essentially a good thing, it also created a light pang of jealousy that Robin would have rather pretended didn’t exist. It was beaten down quickly by the realization that the boy was not, as Cyborg had guessed, some twisted version of Robin himself.
This new Robin was smaller than he was and built thinner, making him a tiny bit taller and probably a little bit lighter than Beast Boy. His movements held less power and precision, but almost seemed to be calculated so that every motion added up to the full equation. Despite this, with his build and proportions, he might as well have been some kid in a Halloween costume.
Except that your average school kid would not have been able to jump in the way he had.
Raven’s voice suddenly brought Robin out of his thoughts: “Watch out!”
On instinct, he launched himself to one side as Beast Boy shifted into a kangaroo to jump away from the small explosive charge Chronos had thrown between them. The pudgy, sloppy-looking man in bright green and silver has gone red in the face with rage, gunning for a fight as he stormed through the smoke and debris he had created himself.
Robin rolled up onto one knee, drawing his staff and extending it out to its full length. Raven landed beside him with a sigh. “Looks like he’s still got some fight in him.”
“I’m headin’ over there, Rob,” Cyborg’s voice reported from the communicator. “Think you can handle him until I get there?”
“We’ll try to save you some action,” Robin reported with a smirk, then turned off his communicator and glanced to his teammates for a few hurried instructions. “Raven, you take care of Starfire. Beast Boy, you’re with me. Titans, go!”
The blinding, painful red was just starting to clear out of Starfire’s eyes when she realized that she was being guided away from the battle by Robin - but it was a much smaller, skinnier Robin than the one she was used to. She blinked, her eyes watering with pain, and tried to focus on him. “Ro…bin?”
“Stay here,” he instructed in an unfamiliar voice, pushing a small bottle of water, indicative of emergency rations, into her hand. “Use this. Wash your eyes out and stay low.”
A cold chill, familiar though still mind-numbing, radiated from just behind them as Raven’s voice broke through again. “Get away from her.”
The guiding touch on her shoulder was gone suddenly as the boy backed off. “Just trying to help.”
“It’s not needed.”
“I can see that, now.”
With that, the boy turned on the spot and rushed their opponent, drawing a thin metal rod from the depths of his cape. The weapon telescoped out to it a full six-foot bo staff, which he brought down hard against the older man’s temple.
Chronos grunted, stumbling forward a few steps as his attacker slid past. “You little…”
“Chronos!”
The man twisted, coming eye-to-eye with Robin. The leader of the Titans narrowed his eyes behind the lenses of his mask.
“I don’t know where you came from,” he said seriously, taking a few more steps to the side. “But in this time, you’re wanted in three states. So we’re bringing you in.”
The other boy, his mirror-image, scowled at him from the opposite side, breathing hard. “Please, Dick, not now…”
Robin went stiff again, his grip tightening to an almost uncomfortable level.
Chronos looked back and forth between them, apparently as baffled by the appearance of the two identically-costumed boys as anyone else in the area. He grunted, glancing down at the complicated silver gauntlet on his right wrist. Something about it made him furious, and he suddenly lunged at Robin. “You! Give me back that temporal core!”
Robin didn’t know what he was talking about, but he was ready for the attack. He caught Chronos’s hands with his staff, rolling into a fierce grappling match with the larger villain.
The other one moved, about to engage as well, but was cut off by the large green snake that reared up and wrapped around him in a vice-like grip.
“Hold it, pal!” Beast Boy ordered, tightening his coils. “How do we know you’re on our side? I bet you’re working with this creep!”
“Let…me…go!” the groaned, squirming in all directions, but the snake just tightened its hold.
Raven straightened from her place beside her injured teammate, keeping her purple eyes trained on the battle. She lifted her hand, pushing the dark energy of her mind to wrap around the heavy wooden crates piled beside her. “Azarath Metrion Zinthos!”
The debris lifted into the air and shot at Chronos. Robin saw it coming and jumped back in time to allow the attack to crash into his opponent. Chronos turned just in time to duck the attack, the pile of debris landing in a heap behind him.
Robin straightened into a defensive stance, throwing a shuriken-like dart to distract Chronos and glancing in Raven’s direction. “How’s Starefire?”
“She’s nearly recovered,” the dark girl reported, keeping a cautious eye on the battle and a concerned hand on her golden-skinned friend’s shoulder. She watched as the Beast Boy-snake struggled with their strange new arrival. “What about the kid?”
“Keep an eye on him,” Robin instructed, carefully circling their opponent. “I don’t trust him.”
Chronos toke advantage of the distraction to knock Robin’s projectile attacks out of the way and throw one of his own - in the form of a putrid smoke-bomb, right in Robin’s face. The Boy Wonder reeled back, one arm raised defensively, and was suddenly knocked to the ground when Chronos tackled him through the smoke. Robin wound up on his back, his elbowing being pressed into the ground by his own weapon.
“You little brat…!”
“Robin, get low!”
The surprise of Cyborg’s voice made him slip into instinct mode, and Robin dropped his arms backward instantly. In the moment that Chronos was off-balance, a blue beam of hypersonic sound struck him in the chest, throwing him off Robin and onto the ground in one motion.
Cyborg smirked as he clicked his weapon back into place. “Booyah. Just in time for the fun.”
Chronos growled as he pulled himself to his feet for the third time, now facing Robin, Cyborg, Robin and the fully-recovered and angry Starfire. Recognizing that the odds were against him, Chronos turned once more to the machine on his wrist, grumbling in annoyance as he did. He punched in a few small codes, then hit a button with the flat of his hand.
The kid seemed to realize what he was doing before any of the others did - he paused his struggling with Beast Boy just long enough shout, “No!”
Robin moved forward, but it was too late. With a small pop and a flash of red light, the man was gone, and the only thing Robin hit was thin air.
Starfire hovered forward, perplexed and annoyed. “He is…gone?”
“No…” Robin swore under his breath, even more annoyed than his teammate. “Did he time jump?”
Cyborg glanced over the edge of the roof. “He jumped, but there’s no time. Look, down there!”
They looked, just in time to see Chronos’s gaudy green and silver cape disappear around the corner of the building across the street. Robin hiss again. “He’s getting away. We need to go after him!”
Cyborg frowned at their leader uncertainly. “What about the kid?”
“OW!”
All four of them jerked back around at Beast Boy’s shout, finding the green-skin teen back in his usual form, and gripping his right thigh with boy hands. “He bit me! The little brat bit me!”
Robin twisted again just in time to see the end of a cape - his cape, as far as he was concerned - disappear over the end of the roof as the strange young boy leapt onto the fire escape. For a minute, Robin stopped, uncertain of the situation, debating with himself…
“Well, Rob?” Cyborg broke in, sounding as confused as Robin felt. “What do we do?”
…
TBC…