Diabolical | T. Drake ✔

[11] Zombie Bro

The gates to the Batcave parted and in stepped Tim, bringing all his assignments down with him. He knew the vigilantes would be busy doing their thing so he went straight to his lab to work.

About two years had passed since he had gotten surprise adopted Bruce Wayne aka the Batman. And a lot had changed for him since then such as the fact that he had finally gotten quite comfortable around them and stopped thinking that they would hurt him or abandon him.

They were his family and he valued their presence in his life, knowing that they valued him too.

His health had also improved considerably due to the extra attention paid to his food and nutrition by Alfred. Those hollow cheekbones had started to fill out, rendering his face a slightly rounder look that he remembered only from his younger photographs. He was still thinner than an average boy his age but no longer looked like a skeleton that had just crawled out of a coffin.

Richard had insisted upon teaching him acrobatics as he had noticed that Tim was naturally flexible. So with regular exercise, his body had achieved a lean but athletic look and he was no longer complaining about getting exhausted too soon from physical exertion.

He let Richard and Steph keep training sessions for him on the condition that they would not make it too hard for him as he still thought his fragile bones could break if exerted too much. So he often trained with them but he was the only member of the family not actively involved in their vigilante life.

Instead, he was studying at home and was part of the research center at Wayne Laboratories where he worked with a team of pharmacists and toxicologists to come up with antidotes and took part in other experimentation as well. He was supposed to give his high school exams early and for that the legal documentation of his undead status was in progress.

"Sup Bats," he greeted the stoic figure standing by the Batcomputer as he was passing the area to reach his lab.

But he paused, noticing that there had been no sign of acknowledgment from the elder man. Bruce seldom replied whenever he greeted him but he would always look up or give a nod, any nonverbal gesture that could suffice for it.

However, right then he was simply standing there like a statue which seemed odd to Tim. He was not wearing his cowl but staring at the screen as if he had just seen something shocking.

Tim assumed it would be something related to the Red Hood who had been terrorizing the city lately. From all he had gathered on the news, Red Hood had brought Gotham's underworld under his control in merely a few weeks and was giving Black Mask tough competition.

Bruce and Richard had been dealing with the enigmatic entity and so far they had been unable to catch him. So Tim thought Bruce was too engrossed in the case that he hadn't heard him step in.

On the other hand, Bruce had just returned to the Bat Cave after a futile chase as Red Hood had vanished into thin air as usual but he had gotten what he needed to identify the man under the scarlet helmet. The DNA had been extracted from the blood sample and Bruce had inserted the information into the Bat computer, scanning it alongside the entire database for a possible match.

"It can't be..." A shocked exclamation finally broke his silence, "no..."

Tim put his stuff right there and went up to see what was wrong. He knew if Bruce was that worried about something, it had to be a disaster for the rest of them.

"What happened?" He asked, gently placing his hand on his shoulder, "all okay?"

His pale blue eyes were still focused on the screen on which the results of a DNA test were visible. The match had been found and the new entry he had checked under Red Hood had matched with Jason Todd's entry already existing in the database.

That could mean only one thing. Jason hadn't died and was in fact the man behind Red Hood's persona.

"That's some next-level plot twist," he mumbled, "bet no one saw that coming."

Richard had been getting bandaged by Alfred and they too came to see what had made Bruce so worried. The shock that had gripped Bruce extended to the other two as well.

"But that can't be possible," Richard was looking at the screen in disbelief, "our Jason... Red Hood?"

Bruce turned at last and determinedly made his way up to the exit of the cave while Alfred followed.

"Where are you going, Sir?"

"To the cemetery," he replied vaguely.

He could not rest until he had solved the mystery of the dead Robin now walking out in the streets as the city's new terror, Red Hood.

"So he's pretty much alive, you can't deny it," with Alfred and Bruce gone Tim stepped close to the Batcomputer, checking the details of the test.

"I still can't believe it, how could it be?" Richard remarked, rubbing his shoulder that ached from the damage it had sustained on that night's patrol.

"Well, a DNA test can't lie. Until or unless someone cloned Jason, there's no other way for his DNA to match precisely with the Red Hood's sample. He must be the Red Hood himself. And this doesn't look like a cloned sample either because... Never mind."

He left the sentence incomplete as his eyes flickered toward the composition of the DNA. Richard didn't ask him to explain further as he turned to see Steph approaching them

Steph had come out of the shower, changed into her casual clothes and she was asking Richard what she had missed. As expected, it was her turn to get shocked at how Jason could have returned from the dead.

Tim quickly slipped out a USB from his pocket, knowing that Richard and Steph weren't looking at him. Taking advantage of that fact, he copied the data about Red Hood as well as Jason Todd into his USB.

He had struck upon something quite unbelievable and he wanted to be sure that his assumption was right so for that, he needed to study both those samples on his own.

"Where are you going?" Steph's voice stopped him as he was trying to sneak away to his lab without them noticing him.

"Uh to my lab, where else? I figured I'll get some work done while y'all think about the situation regarding our zombie bro," he replied, disappearing into his lab shortly after while all the other work he had brought down with him earlier stayed forgotten in the cave.

Steph shook her head, picking up his files to drop them off in his lab. Tim had an eidetic memory when it came to chemicals and toxins but he forgot the ordinary tasks such as going to sleep, storing his stuff properly, cleaning his room, and brushing his hair, etc. Also, she wanted to check what was so exciting for Tim to abandon everything else as by then she knew him well enough to guess that he was up to something he didn't want Bruce to find out about.

Meanwhile, out in the Wayne Cemetery, Bruce sat behind the wheel of his excavator as he carefully drove it, stopping in front of Jason's grave. Alfred stood by the tombstone carrying a lantern to illuminate the dark of the night.

Carefully, he started excavating the mud from the ground, piling it aside as he went on and on in order to reach the coffin six feet below.

An hour seemed to lapse but Bruce had no intention of stopping. At last, he struck up upon the hard surface of the coffin's lid, so he moved the machine aside and climbed down inside the trench himself.

Alfred was holding the lantern so that he could clearly see down there and Bruce lifted off the lid with slightly shaking hands. In the coffin, Jason's body lay just like it had five years ago, his hands crossed over his chest and his eyes closed.

It was a surprise that it hadn't decayed at all and both Bruce and Alfred realized that it wasn't a real corpse. Bruce lifted the body by the lapels of his suit and a wig of black hair fell down revealing that the body was just a life-size doll, tailored to match Jason's appearance.

A surge of rage and regret coursed through him and he dropped the fake corpse back, his eyes blazing.

"Master Bruce..."

He looked up at Alfred who had a hauntingly sad expression on his face, then breathed in a hoarse voice, "Jason is alive. How I don't know. But he is the Red Hood."

***