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HI i took forever to get to this sorry!! work has been crazy lately but im finally getting a break!! anyway this is from a wip lovingly named "crash out emotional devastation reverse robin tuesday" in my google docs <33
Ra’s envisioned something different: a return that cakes Gotham in blood, dramatic motions building up to Tim choosing what legacy to inherit, the whole nine yards.
But Tim doesn’t work that way. He comes back under the cover of night and he starts setting up dominoes. Gotham is a city of circumstances. Crime Alley is built from a history of death, a history of the simultaneous stability and fragility of wealth. Shifting the balance of power can be done dramatically, the way Bruce does it—almost akin to flipping the board in a chess game. A complete restructuring, a new predator for the ecosystem to adapt to.
But that can be crude, ostentatious, too much of a presence in too large a space. It gets eyes on you, but attention is always a double edged sword. If you come into the environment as a predator, you can’t balance dealing with every type of prey without some falling through. There’s a reason there needs to be a million fucking Bats in this city—there needs to be more coverage than just one man.
But this city’s circumstances aren’t so much a chess match as they are a game of pool. Precision is in the angles of things, in the adjustments to the untraceable vicissitudes of Gotham. This city is not always built by will. If Tim’s learned one thing from his mother, it’s that half of power here is a willingness to gamble, to take a chance on randomness.
So Tim slips in, avoiding Stephanie’s cameras, and he makes his way to Crime Alley. It’s nostalgic, almost. He remembers when Janet would turn precise and sharp, picking apart anything in her path with a violence. Tim would escape out the window and take the bus into Crime Alley. He would buy the working girls meat buns from the Taiwanese couple Falcone laundered money through, and he would wander through the crowded, underfunded libraries, and he would slip through the crowds unnoticed and alone. And then he would come back to the Manor and sit next to Janet as she smoked through a pack of cigarettes. He would always buy some when he was out, because when he gave it to her, her lips would twitch and she would tuck a strand of hair behind his ear, the only touches he would feel in weeks.
Good business sense, Janet would say. Always have something to give and something to keep.