My Headcanon For Tim Drake Is That He Has Very Odd And Highly Specific Rivalries With Every Single One

My headcanon for Tim Drake is that he has very odd and highly Specific rivalries with every single one of his own personal Rogues gallery.

Anytime Moneyspider crawls out of the coding to play, Red Robin is on it before it’s even a blip on the Batcomputer. He shucks all his current cases off on other family members and unearths this fucking ancient computer, holes up in the basement of the Nest, and locks himself up so tight only world ending shenanigans and Cass can bother him. (Cass always does, primarily because watching Tim’s expressions is like watching tellanovella: unnecessarily dramatic and amusing, and also to poke food at him and knock him out after 72 hours.) For his part, Lonnie sees Tim coming and immediately switches from high maintenance servers to shitty ones. Between the counter-counter-counter-counter-counter-counter-counter-hacking that occurs, Tim and Lonnie also play chess on the oldest server possible, even though Lonnie says it’s a stupid game (he’s the one who jokingly suggested it years ago) and Tim hates it (he learned how to play just to beat Lonnie). This entire process is how they live— it was started when they were both fourteen and Lonnie only had access to shitty tech and Tim found out that shitty tech is the only thing that can access shitty tech and they keep up with it because they hate each other. In the end, Red Robin has way more shit to do than clack away at a damn box for weeks, so he goes: ‘oh no🙉 🙊 you killed the terrible rich, white men I hate’ and he’ll dismantle the rest of Lonnie’s plan and they both call it quits. It’s a little like enrichment to the both of them.

With Lady Shiva, it’s a game of sabotage. She charges into Gotham to kill Tim, Tim does his level best to fuck with her surroundings. This, of course, started with the god damned hotel chocolates. If Tim wins, he gets to mock Shiva’s prone body and be all ‘wow, another life debt, Shiva??? Cass must really get her talent from herself’ and add another heart to his little video game lives when it comes to Shiva. If Shiva wins, she only halfway maims him and is all ‘foolish little bird. you never stood a chance against me. the next time you won’t be so lucky’ and Tim has to scribble out one of his hearts. The game will inevitably end when Tim runs out of lives, but both he and Shiva are usually too busy to play their game too often. Joker gas pellets have been stuffed in her shoes, fear gas mixed in her shampoo, paralytic in her favorite hairpin, and there was one really convoluted plan involving a horde of alley cats, one of Gotham’s public school’s meals, and the only Trader Joe’s in all of Gotham that Tim will call his magnum opus to this very day. And those were only the plans that succeeded.

With Ra’s, it’s all. About. The. Property. Damage. I don’t think even Ra’s knows what game they’re playing when they play it, but anytime the League of Assassins pokes into Gotham or any of Red Robin’s allies, Tim is on him like white on rice. He goes to the furthest distance possible to make a complete nuisance of himself until Ra’s is forced to put all of his attention to Tim and then Tim just stops. It doesn’t happen enough for it to become anything more than a probable pattern to Ra’s, but he finds it amusing enough to let it go. Until the next step of his master plan, that is.

The best part is that once any of Tim’s main Rogues have a clear shot at killing him they’re all like ‘…well…’ because this guy is just too damn funny and annoying and entertaining and terrible to kill. All they really want is to completely humiliate this fool, like absolutely decimate him and never let him live it down. And so the cycle continues.