It started as a favor, it always did. Between being a comp-sci student in the making and being the one friend who hadn't dated anyone, it would practically always fall on you to be the stalker of the group. The one making background checks on your friends' crushes, finding little details about their partners, setting up facial recognition on the CCTV in clubs to ping you if they ever went.

That last one might've been a stretch.

But Tim Drake? Well, you'd never seen anything like it. Not one, not two, not three, but five of your friends had come to you in the past week to gush about him and ask what you could do. So you did what you did best. Your original plan was just to find some of his interests for your friends to play on and catch his eye, and obviously check some of his philanthropic endeavors to see if he really was a good guy or if he was just playing it up.

That had been a bad idea. The deeper you dived into Tim Drake, the more things matched up. They matched up too well. Yet, some things didn't match up at all. His posts all seemed fine, the times concurrent with where he'd supposedly been at the time, yet the metadata had all been wiped. From the photos, videos, even the posts themselves. Like he didn't want anyone to see.

So you went deeper. Fraudulent one way transactions to an unknown entity. That was surprising — he was set to be the CEO of Wayne Enterprises, so it made no sense for him to screw it all up. You inputted his name into your crude facial-recognition and set it to go through feeds from the past two weeks. A lot seemed fine, but there were times when he'd come out of places he'd hadn't gone into that day, or when he'd go in and wouldn't come back out.

Over weeks, it piled up on you mentally. When you tried to trace the one way transactions, you were blocked by something too advanced for you to bypass. When you tried to find him on the CCTV's in the weird instances he appeared or disappeared, you... couldn't.

On another note, you'd traced something else, completely on accident this time. You'd been digging into something different, completely unrelated — an amateur hacker's wet dream. Deep web, frayed ends, open connections that led you right to the heart of an underground crime syndicate that had way too much of their data online.

And then the two crossed. In researching Tim Drake, you'd found one way connections from him to the syndicate — E.T.H.E.R.. Like he was siphoning information when it went through, hidden behind a void of code. Like he was solving the case.

For the week after, you tried to pay no mind to the strange vehicles showing up outside your apartment. Or the dark shadow on the opposite rooftop. Or the red laser that would sometimes show up and disappear, like it was meant to scare you.

So, under the weight of sleeplessness and a desire to know more, you'd cut out magazine letters and wrote a ransom note that wasn't really a ransom note. All it said was, 'Who are you really?' And you slipped it into his locker the next day.

If Tim had seen your poorly put-together letter, or if he'd figured out who sent it, he made no sign of it during school. Paranoia had hit you when he glanced your way during class, or leaned over to ask something, but it was quickly dispelled when nothing came of it.

Or so you thought.

When you went home and opened your laptop, the screen was glowing with just an address and a time. The rooftop overlooking Circle K downtown. Nobody had gone up in years — it was always under construction, then a girl fell from the overlook after sneaking up while it was being built. It was seen as bad luck.

And whoever hacked your system wanted you there at midnight. Prime death hour in Gotham.

But how much worse could your luck get when you'd already stumbled upon a crime syndicate?

... Of course, it was Tim Drake waiting for you on the rooftop, looking anything but happy to see you. "Seriously?" he asked, not even giving you a moment to say hi. "What, you tripped up E.T.H.E.R's security and now you're stalking me? Do you even know what you've done?"