Traversing Gotham in darkness was never a good idea, but his caffeine-intoxicated mind told him this was a great idea. He took another sip of his thermos, pushing back the urge to recoil at the strong, bitter taste. He would suffer if it made things balanced. It was equivalent exchange. He would drink coffee only if made his errors fade away. And sneaking out to the occasional open mic, he decided, was the kind of error that could be fixed with copious amounts of coffee.
Shifting the weight of the guitar case on his back, Tim continued his trek through the dark Gotham night. A siren sounded in the far off distance. If he squinted enough at the horizon, he could make out a fit figure making his way across rooftops. From the lack of the billowing cape, he knew it wasn't Bruce - and he was fairly sure he knew who it actually was.
Gently humming the melody of the song he had performed last, he walked past a seemingly empty alleyway. It was only when he passed that he realized his assessment must have been wrong - his instincts were telling him that he was no longer alone.
He returned to the mouth of the shadow-cloaked alleyway.
It was only after he came to a stop that he realized the flaw in his plan: he was currently his civilian self, and Tim Drake didn't have nearly the same kind of arsenal that Robin had at his fingertips.
She'd always underestimated blunt weapons, but the bodies on the ground around her were pretty good advocates for them. She didn't realize she was smiling until she stood from her crouched position over one of the bodies, having finished feeling for a pulse that wasn't there. She quickly dropped it before turning toward Eddie, who was crouched behind some boxes, out of the way.
He climbed out when he saw the fighting was over and kicked the unmoving body of one of the crooks, "Bad guy," he spat like a curse.
Tim - in retrospect, stupidly - took a step forward. The step was all he needed to get a good look at the scene that lay before. For one of the very few times in his life, Tim felt honestly scared for his life. An array of bodies littered the ground. Even without checking their pulses, he knew they had to be dead.
And standing among it all was a girl and a very small boy.
The girl was the likely culprit. Unless the boy was a meta, it was unlikely that he could have hurt them. But the girl, on the other hand, looked very capable of something like that.
He couldn't entirely know the story. It was hard to in situations like this. Maybe the bodies belonged to criminals, and this girl was an unlikely vigilante who thought death was a suitable punishment for other crimes. She wasn't the first one to think that way, and wouldn't be the last.
Megara's eyes snapped up as someone new entered the alley. She subtly adjusted her grip on her cane. She gave Eddie the 'secret signal' by meeting his eyes and shifting her gaze behind her and he obediently stepped behind her and moved several feet back, giving her room just in case.
She looked over the newcomer, his black hair, guitar case, the clearly very well maintained muscle mass he wasn't doing a very good job of hiding. Either, he was harmless and was just some kid who spent a few too many hours at the gym for a normal teen, or he was a new threat.
Tim had a habit of overanalyzing everything. It was why Ian Parker and him had gotten into an unofficial war on Ian's first day at Gotham Academy, why he had figured out Dick's secret so quickly, and why he had been able to convince Batman to take him on as his new Robin. And when he overanalyzed this situation, he started to get the feeling that the people on the ground were killed by this girl wanting to protect the little boy.
And then he saw their clothes.
The clothes looked out of place in Gotham's streets. They looked out of place for most of the world, in fact. Tim took that as a sign that they weren't from this world - or maybe even this reality - and awkwardly cleared his throat.
He took a sip of his coffee.
"Hi," he said. He slipped into another one of his roles again, this time picking Timothy Drake - the well-mannered and well-behaved Drake heir. "You're not from this world, are you?"
Megara blinked. She hadn't been expecting that so quickly.
Eddie, apparently forgetting the rules of the secret signal, dashed past her to get a good look a the boy as he chattered excitedly, the only words he spoke in the language they were all speaking being the first, "No! We're from Freyellott!" and then it was a horrible amalgamation of every language Megara had ever taught him so much as a word in. He switched so frequently and so quickly even she couldn't tell what he was saying.
She stepped toward him and placed a hand on his shoulder, silencing him almost immediately.
They shared a look, her eyes a silent request for a chance to speak, his a granting of that request.
She looked up at the boy, "Where is this?" she asked.
He gave a small smile when he heard the little boy excitedly talk - even when he only understood a small portion of what was being said - and turned back to the girl to answer her question.
"You're in Gotham City," he said. "We're in the state of New York, country of the United States of America, and on a world called Earth."
Gotham. Jason had mentioned the city back when she'd threatened him with a knife. One of the times, anyway. When she'd first discovered he wasn't from her world at all.
Eddie tugged on her coat, "I'm cold," he announced.
She looked down at him and nodded gravely, "We should fix that, shouldn't we." She turned back to the boy, "Do you know of a place where my friend here can warm up?"
He studied her face for a moment, trying to determine what the best possible option was. He would need Bruce's help in a situation like this; he didn't have the resources. But Bruce and him hadn't been working long together, and he knew that he couldn't abruptly show up with these two in the middle of night without some kind of forewarning or explanation.
He resisted the urge to sigh.
"You can come back to my house," he said. No one was home. He had easily snuck out of the mansion; he could just as easily slip back in with two extra people in tow. "The walk isn't long from here - if we start now, we can get there in the next twenty minutes."
Megara held out her hand for Eddie to take. He did, a cheerful skip in his step as he walked alongside Megara while she approached the stranger, her cane clicking on the pavement below her.
"I'm Megara, " she introduced herself once she'd left the shadows, "and this is Eddie." Eddie grinned and waved.
Their identities weren't overly valuable here, where she wasn't a wanted criminal with enough death sentences and bounties on her head to fit only about half of her total crimes.
His gaze briefly wandered to her cane, only to return to her when she introduced herself. Megara. It was an usual name - more unusual than Eddie's - but he knew it had to be because she was from another world.
"My name is Tim Drake," he said. He decided the name Timothy wasn't really needed right now, especially when someone as little as Eddie was going to be calling him by his name.
Giving them a warm smile, he turned and started heading back in the direction of his house - guitar case bouncing off of his back as he took another swig of coffee from his thermos.
Eddie pulled against Megara's hand as she lagged behind, an effect that would be blamed on the limp but was truly a choice. She wanted to keep him in her sights in such a way that his hands couldn't fall out of her field of view. She refused to believe in such a thing as too much paranoia in such a situation as this.
"It's a hobby," he said, with the conciseness and detachment of someone who didn't really see it as a hobby. It had to be, now. Timothy Drake was never meant to be a musician. At most, his musical performances would further some minor plot - if they ever came up at all.
But he pushed down all of the decidedly not-Tim feelings and looked down at Eddie, giving him a warm smile he didn't entirely feel at the moment. "I'm actually a student at an academy here."
"What are you learning?" Eddie asked, "Meggie wanted to learn magic, but she can't because she can't find her bubble."
"Double," Megara corrected him. It was difficult not to flinch when he mentioned that little tidbit. She hadn't realized he'd remembered that conversation. He was half-asleep when she told him, just some of her increasingly few boring life stories to lull him to sleep.
She had to remind herself that he was just a kid who didn't understand why that should be a secret, or even that it should be a secret. She replaced the twinge of betrayal with a relief that this wasn't her world. That it was, instead, Jason's, or some version of Jason's. If he was here, she had a friend.
That was a strange thought. A friend. That was something other people thought, not her.
She looked over the boy in front of her, Maybe I can make another friend. She didn't know how she felt about that thought.
Dogs love their friends and bite their enemies, quite unlike people, who are incapable of pure love and always have to mix love and hate. — Sigmund Freud
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