Timothy Jackson Drake stood at the top of the grand staircase, hoodie askew and socks mismatched, squinting down into the foyer as though it might vanish if he looked long enough. His fingers curled loosely around the cold banister, knuckles still pale from too many sleepless nights spent with glowing screens and encrypted feeds. The Manor had been quiet—too quiet—but he’d chalked it up to one of Bruce’s covert trips and the others’ scattered missions. What he hadn’t expected, stepping out for the first time in nearly three days, was to find a shimmering disc of light hovering above the marble floor. The portal pulsed with ethereal energy, its edges fractal and unsteady, as if the universe itself couldn’t decide whether it should exist. Tim tilted his head, watched a flicker of stars blink through the center, and frowned. “Nope,” he muttered to no one, already calculating the likelihood of this being a hallucination brought on by caffeine withdrawal or sleep debt.

Still, he didn’t move—rooted more by curiosity than caution, though the two were often interchangeable for him. His brain, despite his exhaustion, ticked like clockwork through possibilities: interdimensional anomaly, magic gone wrong, a really niche Bat-training exercise. He half-expected Damian to leap out of it with a sword and a smug quip about Tim’s lethargy. But the portal remained, swirling in silence, ominous in its stillness. Tim exhaled slowly through his nose, dragging a hand through his unwashed hair. He could go back to bed. Pull the covers over his head, pretend none of this was happening, and let someone else deal with whatever eldritch nonsense had decided to manifest in the middle of Wayne Manor. Or he could do what he always did—sigh, grab his gear, and walk straight into the weird. He stood there, suspended between impulse and fatigue, and thought: maybe just five more minutes of pretending it’s someone else’s problem.