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Tim might not have liked that Batman gave her his name, but it gave Steph a place to start. If she could figure out who Batman was – like Robin had told her he had in order to get the job – then Batman would have to admit that she was good enough to work in Gotham.
And it wasn’t like she had anything else to do while she was ‘convalescing.’
So Robin’s name was Tim. Timothy Drake, aged sixteen, attended Brentwood Academy. Father Jack Drake, mother Janet Drake deceased, stepmother Dana Winters-Drake (so that was how Robin knew her back when they fought the animal lady!), no brothers or sisters.
Which meant that Nightwing, who called Robin ‘little brother,’ wasn’t actually related to Tim. Which meant that he probably was the first Robin, who maybe was related to Batman, and called Tim his little brother because he was the new Robin.
It took over two months of searching through the newspaper archives at the Gotham City Library – the paper archives, not the computer ones, because for some reason, no matter what she tried, the computers worked against her – but Steph was finally certain that Tim was the third Robin. There’d been another one a few years after Nightwing had…been promoted? Whatever, the second Robin had flown for about two and a half years. Then it had been another two years or so before Tim put on the suit.
So Batman was someone with maybe two sons. And he had to be someone who’d known Tim during the time his father was in the hospital, since from what little Robin had told her, that was when he’d started training to be Robin.
Tim had been staying with Bruce Wayne while his dad was in a coma. Could Bruce Wayne be Batman? At first Steph didn’t think so – it didn’t seem possible – but then she got to thinking. Maybe the playboy billionaire act was…well, an act. No one would think that foppish himbo was actually Batman, right?
And he did have two sons: Dick Grayson, currently a cop in Bludhaven, Nightwing’s territory; and Jason Todd, who was deceased.
He’d died around the same time the second Robin had…disappeared.
That set Steph back. It had never really occurred to her before, but being a costumed crime-fighter was just as dangerous as being a costumed criminal. You could die as either one.
Losing a son… It was one thing to want to make things better for other people’s kids, but why risk it when you had kids of your own?
It made Steph wonder if it was worth it. If fighting crime was worth risking your own life, leaving grieving family behind.
All she had to do was look at the face of her son to realize that maybe it wasn’t. And maybe…maybe she didn’t need to look to Batman for validation.
She could make her own. Little Donovan Brown needed her, and she wasn’t going to risk making him lose her.