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Now
“You’re not doing it right.”
Tim lies on the floor, catching his breath. “Gee, what was your first guess?”
After his fifth attempted and subsequently failed kick to the training dummy, Tim has officially resigned himself to a long and flourishing life on the floor. It’s a simple world down here. Befitting for worms and for Robins who don’t know how to beat a lifeless practice dummy.
Pitiful.
“Come on, kid, you’re making me look bad,” Jason calls from where he lounges on one of the cave’s lab tables, perched beside several test tube racks. Being so close to unknown chemicals would be dangerous for anyone else who wasn’t invulnerable, but Jason has no reason to worry. Obviously.
Tim raises himself up on one elbow, shooting him a glare. “Would you like to try this?”
Jason crosses his arms behind his head and leans back. “Nah, it’s more fun watching. Besides, you’d just be embarrassed at how much better I am at it. I’m courteous like that.”
“Yeah, sure,” Tim mutters. “You just don’t want to look stupid when your leg goes right through it and you fall on your ass.”
“That too.”
Tim forces himself back up and once more takes up a fighting stance in front of the dummy. He strikes, kicking out and twisting in midair the way he’s watched Dick do a hundred times before.
And promptly falls on his ass when the momentum throws him off balance and sends him crashing to the ground. Oh, irony. You malicious bastard.
Jason tuts like a disapproving mother. “How many times do I have to tell you, Timbo? You gotta lead with your heel on the spin.”
Tim blows away a strand of hair that hangs in front of his eyes. “What do you know? You’re dead.”
“Golly, Batman! The kid’s a comedian now.”
“I’ll be here all week.”
“Who are you talking to?” Bruce asks, entering the cave. He’s already suited up for the night, clad in the full bat ensemble—minus one glove.
Tim tries not to look in Jason’s direction as he stands, brushing dust off his uniform. “Nobody. Just...you know. Self-motivation.”
“Mm-hm. You ready to go out?” Bruce is distracted, scanning the cave around them with a crease fixed between his eyebrows. He rifles through the objects on the table Jason’s sitting on, clearly searching for something.
“Uh...that depends. Are you?”
Bruce bends down to look under the Batcomputer, then the chair in front of it that Tim will never admit he sneaks downstairs to spin around in when he can’t sleep at night. “I can’t find my glove.”
Jason snickers, and Tim sends him an accusatory glare when Bruce isn’t looking. Jason raises his hands. “Don’t look at me, I’m not physically capable of taking stuff.” Tim arches an eyebrow, and Jason rolls his eyes. “Fine, fine. He dropped it under the front seat of the car last night.”
“Did you check in the Batmobile?” Tim says.
Bruce snaps his fingers. “No I did not.” He goes and rummages around the front seat for a few minutes before emerging with— poof! —one left glove. He pats Tim on the shoulder. “Sharp eye, pal.”
Tim ignores Jason’s prideful smirk. “It was nothing.”
Then
When Tim was young, it never occurred to him that he wasn’t normal.
How could it? Toddlers have no concept of what humans are supposed to be like. Especially when the majority of that child’s babyhood is spent being cared for by nannies and Care.com’s finest pay-by-the-hour sitters.
It wasn’t until Tim turned four years old that he realized no one else saw the smoky apparitions which trailed behind him like shadows, lurking in dark corners and merging with fog. Being as old as it was, Drake Manor had a surplus of spirits roaming its halls, and Tim saw them all.
His “imaginary friends,” as his mother called them.
For the love of god, Timothy, you’re too old for these games.
His parents never listened to him when he tried to tell them about the people living in their house, some of them horrifically wounded and dripping blood on the carpets that the maids never seemed to notice.
Jack and Janet Drake never did come to understand why little Timothy would so often burst into tears, trembling with his eyes locked on an empty spot across the room.
Of course, some ghosts were friendlier than others.
Cynthia—a kind, middle-aged woman in Victorian clothing—used to tell Tim stories about her dog Casey whenever he couldn’t sleep at night. And there was a little boy around Tim’s age who had tire tracks over his torso and a shard of glass in the back of his head. He liked to hear about Star Trek.
In a way, Tim understood these spirits. He knew what it was like to wander a cold, empty house, feeling invisible—like the people you care about most don’t even notice you’re there. If being a listening ear to those spirits would help them feel even a tiny bit better about their predicament, then Tim was happy to contribute.
Then there were the Bad Ghosts; the vast majority of the spirits Tim witnessed. The ones with bullet holes in their heads and their necks cut open, bitterness and resentment rolling off of them in waves.
Tim could sense it—the fury. The hostility. The rage. It scared him, and as a child he never understood what could have possibly happened to make those people so angry.
They were the ones who went out of their way to torment Tim, as if the fact that he could see them made him a perfect target for their pent-up aggression. They would shriek and growl from the shadows, making young Tim cry and hide under his covers, night after night.
Mom and Dad got mad at him for waking them up every night with his crying, and eventually Dad took to locking Tim’s bedroom door from the outside after bedtime. An effective solution to Tim running to their bedroom every time the terrifying wails became too much for him to bear.
He just wanted it to be quiet. No matter how hard Tim clamped his hands over his ears or how loud he screamed, he could never drown out the voices. It was as if they were being filtered directly into his head; like he was cursed with this ability and had to endure it no matter the pain it caused him.
Two months after the nightly terrors began, Mom took him to a child psychologist.
Every night it’s a tantrum about monsters and people who aren’t there. My husband and I barely sleep these days as it is. We can’t deal with it anymore.
That was the day Tim got diagnosed with an anxiety disorder, and the doctor sent them away with a prescription to level out his “overactive imagination.”
And that was that.
Now
Tim has only been Robin for a few months, but even now he has an inclination that swinging from rooftop to rooftop alongside Gotham’s protector will never get old.
Tonight’s agenda consists of a stakeout—an info-grab on a man by the name of Carl Tucker who was released from jail on a technicality and narrowly avoided a ten-year prison stay, courtesy of his thriving drug-peddling business. Batman and Robin are trying to find evidence to pin him down for good.
Tim is reorganizing the cartridges in his belt while Bruce is at the other end of the rooftop, scoping out the building across the street where Tucker’s apartment is.
Jason sits on the edge of the roof beside Tim, swinging his legs. “After this is over, we should go to the park.”
“What for?” Tim asks quietly. Bruce is far enough away that he won’t hear Tim talking to himself, but taking risks around the bat is a game with no winners.
In the back of his mind, (not for the first time), Tim can’t help wondering what Bruce would think if he knew about Tim’s visions of his dead predecessor. Would he be horrified? Sad? Angry that Tim kept it a secret for so long?
It would be a shock for anyone who isn’t Tim to see the dead Jason Todd, that’s for sure. To view the charred and ripped uniform he died in cutting a stark parallel to his unfazed personality—a pleasant change in demeanor compared to most of the ghosts Tim has made the acquaintance of over the years.
“I carved my name into a swing set a couple years back and I wanna see if it’s still there,” Jason replies.
“Go find it yourself. I’ve got homework.” He should really stock up on band-aids, now that he has a gauge of his supply—or lack thereof. Maybe if he catches Alfred in a good mood tomorrow, he can talk him into getting the Superman ones. Dick’ll get a kick out of that.
Jason throws a skeptical look over his shoulder. “You know I can’t do that. Which is extremely rude, by the way.”
“Hey, I didn’t make the rules for you having to stick by me. God knows my life would be a lot quieter otherwise.” Tim nearly drops his canister of shark repellant when Bruce suddenly speaks up.
“Our target’s going to be heading out in a few minutes,” he says, oblivious to the presence of his second son. “When that happens, we can drop in and find something to incriminate him in court.”
“You ever notice that his voice gets more hoarse every day?” Jason observes, head tilted. “I think the gravelly Batman voice is finally starting to get to…” He trails off, and suddenly his eyes widen at something over Tim’s shoulder. “Shit—Bruce!”
Tim’s head whips and he follows Jason’s line of sight to the building behind them. He catches the glint of a rifle aimed directly for an uncharacteristically unaware Batman, and Tim’s heart stops.
Without thinking, he dives. “B, get down!”
A gunshot goes off from somewhere far away, and sharp pain bursts like a starbolt in Tim’s side.
“Robin!” Tim hears as he hits the ground, the rooftop’s gravel scraping against his temple when his head knocks against it.
When he opens his eyes again Jason’s kneeling in front of him, worry etched into his face through the pieces of the domino that were burned away all those months ago. His hands are raised like he wants to do something to help, but they both know he’s powerless.
The dead are cursed to remain nothing more than silent observers.
Bruce’s hands are on the wound now, applying pressure. “Robin. Robin, you with me?”
Tim nods feebly, adrenaline wearing off. His side burns.
“I just radioed Alfred. I’ll get you back to HQ and he’ll fix you up, all right?”
Tim tries to nod again, but his head feels fuzzy. Blood loss? Hitting his head in the fall? Probably both. Jason’s image is flickering before his eyes now. Tim can see right through his body to the horizon behind him.
Jason’s frown stays in place as he fades away, and Tim fades shortly after.
Then
On his sixth birthday, Tim received his first camera.
It was a gift from his parents, arriving the day after the fact wrapped in green paper and a silver bow. The Drakes were busy on a dig in South Africa and couldn’t make it home until a week later, when all of the celebration had already drained out of Tim’s heart.
Still, Tim was ecstatic about the camera and spent the whole first day turning it over in his hands, pressing all of the buttons and exploring each little compartment. He loved the weight of holding it around his neck, making him feel like a real photographer.
Most of all, he loved the opportunity for proof. Proof that he wasn’t just a child suffering from an overactive imagination. Proof that he wasn’t crazy, seeing things that weren’t there. Proof that the shadowy people he saw everywhere he went were real.
Tim spent the rest of the week taking photos of everything in sight. The dusty rooms of Drake Manor, the shrubbery in the yard, the ghosts who lingered in doorways and in empty halls. Tim photographed them all.
“You know it won’t work, right?” one shroud said to Tim—a crotchety old man with a German name Tim couldn’t pronounce. Now he held a pose in front of the mantle, humoring Tim’s amateur direction.
“What do you mean?” Tim asked, snapping another pic. “Everyone can see pictures.”
“Yes, but only you can see us.”
“So?” Tim shifted for a better angle, tongue poking out from the corner of his mouth.
“Anyone else will simply see an empty fireplace.”
“You don’t know that.” Tim turned the camera upside-down. “Now say cheese.”
By the time Jack and Janet returned from their trip, Tim had an entire Aquaman folder filled with photos he’d taken in the time they’d been gone. He practically vibrated with anticipation as he tugged on his mother’s skirt.
“Mom, Dad, look! I took pictures!”
His mother took the folder and sat on the edge of the sofa while Dad went off to his room, loosening his tie as he walked. Tim settled in beside her, bouncing in place.
The first picture she found was of the scary man who roamed the backyard, one of his arms missing. Tim waited, studying his mother for a reaction—fear, shock, maybe even a scream. But Janet merely smiled as she rifled through the photos. “These are lovely, Timothy. You took these?”
She paused on the one Tim took the day before. He’d gone all the way up to the roof to get a shot of one of the surlier ghosts—the one who made Tim cry most nights with his mutilated body and face that looked like it had been crushed repeatedly under a cinder block.
“Oh my god,” she gasped, and Tim smiled. Finally. She can see it. “Honey, what did I tell you about playing on the roof? That was extremely dangerous. I don’t want you up there anymore, do you understand me?”
Tim frowned. “But Mom, the picture. Can’t you see it?”
“Yes, it’s very nice. But—”
Tim climbed up over her lap, reaching for the photo. “No, look.” He pointed at the ghost in the center of the frame, clear as day. “This guy. He’s the bad one, see?”
Janet’s lips pursed. “Sweetie, we’ve talked about this. These monsters you’re seeing, they aren’t real. It’s in your imagination.”
“They’re not monsters, they’re people!” He picked up another one and held it up, pointing at a figure in the corner. “This one’s Franny, and her husband put bad stuff in her food and buried her under that scary place in the basement.”
Janet leaned away while he waved the picture in front of her face. “I’m not discussing this with you anymore. It’s time to be a big boy and stop it with this nonsense.”
Tears welled in Tim’s eyes. “It’s not nonsense!” he insisted, crumpling the photos in his small fists. “They’re real!”
She sighed, forcing an aura of patience. “Did you take your medicine today?”
Tim’s mood soured and he crossed his arms. “I don’t like it. I don’t wanna take it anymore.”
Janet stood, picking up a struggling Tim and leaving the folder on the sofa. “Come on, honey, let’s get your meds. Your father and I have a party tonight and I don’t have time for your stories right now.”
Frustrated tears fell down Tim’s cheeks, but he didn’t resist.
Now
When Tim wakes up, Jason’s face is the first thing he sees. “The Boy Wonder lives,” he marvels. “I thought we were gonna have to get a new memorial case.”
Tim blinks a few times, clearing away the lingering traces of grogginess. He glances down and discovers bandages wrapped around his bare torso. At his side is Bruce, sitting in a chair and reading a novel that Tim vaguely recognizes from the bookshelf in Jason’s room.
“Son of a bitch is stealing my stuff now,” Jason gripes.
Bruce looks up when Tim moves, and he puts the book down. “You’re awake,” he says with a relieved smile. “How are you feeling?”
“Like I got shot.”
“That about sums it up. Alfred patched you up a few hours ago. The bullet was deep but didn’t hit anything too important, so you should be in the clear.”
Well, that’s one problem he can tick off the list. “You catch the shooter?”
Bruce smiled. “Tracked him down the second Alfred said you would be okay. Tucker got a tip we were onto him and hired someone to take me out. I dropped the perp off with Gordon an hour ago.”
Tim hums, settling back into the pillows. “Cool.”
Then Bruce makes that face, and Tim knows he’s in for a Conversation. The more time he spends with Bruce, the easier it is to spot his tells. Knot between his eyebrows. Tension in his lip.
“How did you know?” he asks, finally.
Tim schools his face into a mask of innocence. “Know what?”
“The shooter,” Bruce says. “You weren’t even looking in his direction before you moved to knock me out of the way.”
“Oh, I…” He briefly glances at Jason, who is of no help at all where he’s blowing a raspberry in Bruce’s ear. “I saw the reflection. In the window of the building across from us.”
Bruce’s expression doesn’t change. “Guess I should count myself lucky you caught that, otherwise it would be me in that bed right now.” He stands then, knee creaking, and reaches over to ruffle Tim’s hair. “But don’t go taking bullets for me anymore, you hear? You kids are making me go gray.”
“Aye aye,” Tim says with a salute. He holds a grin and waits until Bruce has disappeared upstairs, dropping it when he hears the clank of the grandfather clock sliding into place.
Tim digs the heels of his hands into his eyes. “Fuck,” he groans.
“What?” Jason comes over and sits at the foot of the bed, swiping his translucent hand through the blankets.
“He’s going to test me for the meta gene.”
“You got all that from one conversation?” But he doesn’t deny it.
“He’s too good not to know I came up with that excuse on the spot. And he’s got more than enough samples of my blood on hand, so I wouldn’t be surprised if he has the program scanning my DNA already.”
“How d’ya figure?”
Tim sighs, glaring at the ceiling in resignation. “Because it’s what I would do.”
Jason smirks. “World’s greatest detective, indeed.”
Tim waits until morning—the only time Bruce sleeps, as all nocturnal creatures do—and slips out of bed, biting back a wince at the pinch in his side. He pushes away the pain and hobbles out of the med bay to the computer, where he bypasses Bruce’s security in minutes.
“I was right,” he says to Jason standing over him. He scrolls through the reports. “He started the test an hour after handing me off to Alfred.”
“They don’t call him Bitchman for nothing.”
It takes some finessing to hack through the firewalls and access the program itself, but after that it’s only a few more steps until mission accomplished. In two hours, when the computer notifies Bruce that the meta test is finished, it’ll present Tim Drake as a metagene-negative picture of health.
Jason holds up his hand for a high-five. “Nice job, Drake.”
Tim swings his hand to meet Jason’s, only for it to pass right through and nearly send him topping out of the chair. Jason cackles.
Then
As Tim grew, so did his abilities. And not always in a good way.
Two hours into Tim’s first day of third grade, Janet Drake got called to pick her son up early because he was scaring the other children. Tim didn’t understand at the time what was so wrong about telling stories of the old lady who followed their teacher around, blood streaking down the side of her face and her intestines spilling out of her abdomen.
(The teacher’s great aunt had been killed in a hit-and-run. She never said a word to Tim, but as soon as he looked at her, the knowledge of her death simply appeared in his mind as if he’d known it all along.)
“He’s a strange boy, that Timothy Drake.”
It was bad enough Tim’s peers already considered him a weirdo, courtesy of his raging Robin obsession and the fact that he had his multiplication tables memorized before the rest of his classmates could subtract. Throw in the fact that he was bombarded by spirits everywhere he went, and fitting in was a lost cause.
And, as time went on, it became apparent that Tim’s connection to the dead wasn’t limited to merely seeing the shrouds.
It was the summer before sixth grade. Tim surged awake one night, ripped from a dream and instinctively reaching for his head as spots danced in his vision. “Ah,” he hissed, closing his eyes against the onslaught of grating, pounding noise rushing through his head.
It was as though someone had cracked open his skull while he was asleep and filled it with battery acid. The voices of the millions of ghosts wandering around Gotham—usually no more than a dull roar in the distance—had increased in volume tenfold.
Tim could hardly hear his own thoughts over the torturous cacophony, let alone his screams when the souls’ awful shrieks made it feel as though his head was splitting open.
He was just lucky his parents were away in Italy and couldn’t be woken by the ruckus.
“Shut up,” Tim whimpered to he didn’t know whom, gripping the sides of his head. “Shut up, shut up, shut up.”
But it was no use. Tim could always close his eyes whenever the sight of the ghosts became too much for him to bear, but it was impossible to tune out the voices when they were being filtered directly into his head.
If Tim were a radio, each ghost was a different transmission trying to force its way through. The spirits wailed and rasped through every wire, vengeful and eager to torment.
It wasn’t long before Tim shot out of bed and made a break for his desk, yanking open the top drawer and feeling around until his fingers curled around a bottle of pills. He twisted off the cap, head throbbing agonizingly as he dumped three capsules into his palm and downed them dry.
It’s impossible to know how long Tim spent that night curled up on his bed, trying to block out the voices to no avail until the drugs kicked in. He must have passed out at one point because the next morning he awoke, head blessedly empty of ghostly dissonance.
He took two more pills, just in case.
If the housekeeper noticed the frost over the windows in Tim’s bedroom, she said nothing of it. Nor did she mention the oddity of every lightbulb in his room and the hallway having been mysteriously blown out overnight.
But the meds did their job. The ghosts were silent once the sedative took hold, and for the first time in years Tim could actually think without the wails of a hundred dead spirits rattling his senses.
So he kept taking them. He downed a pill every time a whisper of the dead touched his mind or he caught an apparition in the corner of his eye. Tim had been battling this burden for so long he nearly forgot what it was like to be completely at peace, and it only made him crave it more.
And, when a year passed and the usual amount was no longer enough to keep the voices from creeping in, he upped the dosage. Until Tim was popping four, five pills daily without breaking a sweat, just to keep the dead at bay.
Tim’s parents were too busy to notice the self-prescribed increase in dosage, and he could tell they were just relieved that their son was “normal” again.
See? he told himself. Everyone wins.
Now
If he’s being completely honest, Tim doesn’t know why the meds don’t block out Jason.
By all reasoning, they should. It works on the other spirits. But Jason comes and goes as he pleases, undeterred by Tim’s evident benzo addiction which blockades every other spirit that tries to slip through. Tim has no idea why that is, but he’d be lying if he said he wasn’t grateful for it.
As odd as it may be, Tim and Jason have grown close over the months. Just like Dick is a brother to Tim in every way, Jason reminds him of a badass version of a guardian angel. You know. If a guardian angel swore like a sailor and lived a short life filled with unrestrained violence.
On Tim’s third day of recovery from the gunshot, Dick visits from Blüdhaven. For reasons unknown, Jason is quieter when Dick is around. He lurks off to the side more often than not, watching Dick’s every move and only chiming in with the occasional snarky comment solely for Tim’s ears.
It reminds Tim of the way he used to act around his parents: hopeful but wise enough not to expect much, yearning for love just out of reach. Tim can’t imagine what it must be like to be cut off from one’s own brother in a way that allows them to observe but not interact—trapped in a concrete bubble.
Which is precisely why he never asks for further details.
Gotham is unusually bright today, so when Dick comes to the manor his first order of business is to get Tim out of the house because “I can’t remember the last time I saw a Gotham sky that didn’t look like the clouds had been chain-smoking nine times a day for fifty years.”
So they go out.
“How long did Bruce bench you for?” Dick asks, taking a bite of his burger. That’s right— fast food. Alfred would have a stroke if he knew his wards were eating greasy helpings of junk in Grant Park right now.
But that’s the fun thing about having an older brother, Tim supposes. Whatever the adults don’t know is fair game.
Tim takes a sip of his milkshake. “I’ll be allowed back out in a week or so, as far as Bruce told me. Though I’m trying to get him to drop the sentence to a few days.”
Tim doesn’t need to look at Jason to know he’s rolling his eyes. He’s been sticking to himself mostly; sitting beside Tim and watching the other people in the park go about their lives. “Don’t get your hopes up, squirt.”
Dick chuckles. “I wouldn’t get my hopes up. You know how the bat is about safety. Especially after Jason...you know.”
Jason makes a face. “Well, duh. What, did it take him all day to come up with that conclusion?”
“Trust me,” Tim says, ignoring Jason entirely, “I get it. Ever since my mom died, I’ve been keeping up with every detail of my dad’s health just in case something goes wrong while I’m not there.”
(Tim’s spoken to his mom once or twice since her death, but the visits are nothing special. Janet Drake is as she was in life: a distant being.)
“He still hasn’t come out of it yet?” Dick’s eyes are sympathetic, but not pitying. Because he gets it.
“Not yet, but soon. Every day he’s closer to waking up, I can feel it.”
Dick pats him on the shoulder. “Of course he is.” Tim flinches as soon as he makes contact, less out of habit and more of uninhibited drawbacks of being a medium or a metahuman or whatever the hell it is that ails Tim’s mind.
Because whenever Tim touches someone, he can feel their ghosts. It’s even less fun than it sounds.
Every time Dick ruffles Tim’s hair or gives him a hug, Tim can feel the weight of the people he’s lost sitting on his shoulders. He senses the lingering spirits of John and Mary Grayson, of Jason, of friends he’s lost and victims he couldn’t save.
Every touch sends static ringing through Tim’s head, and he lets out a breath when Dick’s hand leaves and the secondhand grief retreats like a rubber band snapping back.
The pins and needles take longer to fade than usual this time, so Tim takes a bottle of pills out of his pocket and slips a couple in his mouth, chasing them down with a gulp of milkshake.
Dick doesn’t comment. He and Bruce are well aware of Tim’s “anxiety disorder” by now, so him popping pills is nothing new. What they don’t know about Tim’s three backup prescriptions under inconspicuous pseudonyms so he can get the relief he needs without turning heads won’t hurt them.
Burning under Jason’s judgmental glare, Tim changes the subject. “But what about you?” he says, pushing the spotlight back onto Dick. “How are the Titans?”
Dick shrugs and munches a fry. “Same old, I guess. They’re all boneheads, but they’re my boneheads. You won’t believe what happened last weekend, though, oh my god.” To Tim’s relief, Dick launches straight into some story about a situation involving Wally, Donna, and a blender.
As the sedative kicks in Tim can feel the constant undertone of whispers in the back of his head receding, and his shoulders slacken. “Junkie,” Jason mutters under his breath. Tim pays him no attention.
While Dick talks, Tim absently curls the petals on one of the daisies growing from a cluster beside the bench. He lets his mind wander with one ear tuned in to Dick’s story, laughing and prodding for more info at all the correct parts.
It’s easy, being with Dick like this. Tim can sit and embrace whatever quiet he can get, letting Dick steer the conversation with chatter as he pleases. Always a good distraction from the ghostly racket within.
“Uh, Timbo?” Jason says after a while. Tim doesn’t look at him directly, but arches one eyebrow in silent question. At the following silence Tim dares a peek and finds Jason staring down at Tim’s hand with an odd, bemused expression. Tim follows his gaze and stiffens.
The daisies, which were lively and flourishing just a minute ago, are now dry and withered down to the roots. The flower Tim touched might as well be straw now. He yanks his hand back.
“Damn,” Jason says, examining the dead flowers. “That’s not creepy at all.”
Dick is unaware of Tim’s brutal plant murder and doesn’t miss a beat. “Anyway, once we got the fire out it still took a solid week to scrub the kale and yogurt from the ceiling.” Tim doesn’t respond, so Dick turns to look at him. “Tim? You okay?”
Tim keeps his arms wrapped tightly around his middle and tries to exude a facade of ease. “Yeah, sorry,” he says. “Just—you know. School and stuff has me stressed out lately. Keep getting distracted.” Always a good excuse. Works like a charm on anyone too observant for their own good.
Dick nods, buying the excuse faster than Flash in a sneaker store. “Believe me, I know. You have no idea how many times our nightlife has fucked me over in the education department. Jason too, I’m sure.”
Jason straightens up at that, offended. “Excuse me? Fuck no it didn’t.”
“One time Jay came to me for help studying before his calculus final. I think he got an eighty-something on it even though he spent the whole night before battling Grundy and then cramming three hours before class.”
“Hey, Dickface,” Jason says, coming to stand in front of Dick and look him dead in the eye. “For your information, it was trig and I got a ninety-two, so fuck you. Tell him it was a ninety-two, Tim. Tell him. Tell the bastard I’m a genius.”
Tim ignores him with a head shake and a smile.
Then
When Robin died, Tim’s entire world shifted.
He realized the truth long before the press did, when two weeks passed and Batman’s partner was still nowhere to be seen. Around this same time Batman started himself on a one-man rampage, pummeling criminals to pulp and risking his life to the very limit, and Tim knew what had happened.
Jason Todd was gone.
And, most of all, Tim knew something needed to be done. If Batman was indeed Bruce Wayne like he’d deduced all those years ago, then he needed someone to knock some sense into him before his grief-fueled reign of terror consumed him, mind and soul.
But what could be done? How was thirteen-year-old Tim Drake supposed to snap the Dark Knight out of this monumental funk?
Then he remembered the Wayne family cemetery that lay between the properties of Wayne and Drake Manor—the place where Jason Todd would have been buried. And Tim knew who had the advice he needed.
So, for the first time in years, Tim went off his meds. Cold turkey. He flushed his prescription down the toilet and resisted temptation even as the voices of the dead filtered in, shrieking and wailing until he wanted to jam a fork into his brain just to make it stop.
It took days for the cold sweats and nausea to stop, and even longer until his fingers stopped trembling like an anemic in a blizzard. The ghosts all around him danced on the edge of the un part of bearable, but Tim forced himself to power through it.
He needed to know. If Tim was going to be his hero’s hero, he needed to know the truth.
Sunday morning, Tim snuck out before sunrise and set out toward the small cemetery between the properties. He sought it like an explorer, or an archaeologist, or really anyone but a kid looking for proof that he wasn’t losing his marbles.
Because Tim knew Bruce Wayne was Batman. He knew it as surely as he knew that Dick Grayson was Nightwing and that lima beans were the devil’s candy. He knew it.
But, as with every unproven theory, there was always that pesky smidge of doubt. That small what if lurking in the corner. The inkling that maybe Tim was wrong. Maybe he was just another crackpot scraping for made-up clues and noncommittal evidence.
If Tim was going to march to wherever Dick Grayson was and slap some sense into him, he needed to be absolutely certain, once and for all, that he was right and it wasn’t just his meds messing with his neural processing. He needed proof.
As expected, there were clusters of spirits milling around when Tim approached the graveyard, but they paid no attention to the new visitor. He went down the rows of graves, searching and searching until he finally stopped in front of a headstone.
The name was just visible in the sun’s weak morning rays: Jason Peter Todd
This stone was smaller than the others. Newer. The ground was freshly-dug, and the flowers in the vase beside the grave were half-wilted. It was eerie, being here. Like Tim was desecrating a memorial he hadn’t been invited to—which was true in every sense.
But he needed this. Bruce needed this. And it was that knowledge that kept Tim’s sneakers planted on the ground. Kept him from turning back and heading home like he knew he should.
In all honesty, Tim had never tried this before. It was hard enough getting the ghosts to shut up on a daily basis. He’d never attempted to summon one at will. Hell, he didn’t even know if it was possible.
Then again, he supposed he had nothing to lose. Tim closed his eyes and focused.
He reached out with his mind, picturing Jason Todd the way he was: black scruffy hair, turquoise eyes, red and green uniform. He pushed away the voices swarming his mind like echoes from a beehive and concentrated on only one, zeroing in on the essence of Robin.
Slowly he felt a tingle like pins and needles creep into his fingertips, spreading static throughout his body. Until, finally, the tingle became all-encompassing and Tim knew it was working.
He opened his eyes, and there over the grave stood the ghost of Jason Todd.
He was misty in profile and wearing a tattered Robin uniform, charred in some places and blood-soaked in others. But it was undeniably him. The grass around the grave and Tim’s feet had withered and died, as if Tim’s power sucked the life out of it.
Tim let out a bewildered laugh, breath fogging in the suddenly cold air. “I did it,” he breathed. “I was right.”
Now
“Would it be cheating if I summoned George Washington to ask how many battles he won in the revolution?” Tim asks.
Jason is sitting across from him on the floor, leaning against Tim’s bed and reading a magazine. It’s mildly irritating for Tim to have to keep turning the pages for him, but he’s used to being Jason’s hands by now.
“Can you actually do that?” Jason wonders.
“Dunno. But if it’ll help me with this homework, I’m willing to try anything.”
Jason just shakes his head, attention fixed on an article about how to dress properly for a dinner party. “You’d think a kid genius would be able to breeze through this kinda stuff.”
“You try doing school during the day, visiting your coma-ridden dad in the afternoon, and patrolling until three a.m. every night. It’s a miracle I’m even conscious right now.”
“Been there, done that,” Jason says. Then he gestures to the magazine. “Page?” Tim reaches over and flips to the next page. “Thanks.”
“Would it be offensive to say ‘kill me now’?”
“Probably.” Then he shakes his head, a chuckle spilling from his lips. “You living people and your complaints. You know, when I was your age…” Jason’s voice dips mid-sentence, fading out into an indistinct whisper. His lips are moving like normal, but the audio is off. Like an untuned radio.
His form flickers, fading out for a moment before reappearing hazily.
Tim sits up, brow wrinkling. “Jay? You okay?”
Jason looks down at his hands, at the way his image fades between white mist and fuzzy solid. “I...don’t know.” Because this has never happened before. Not like this. Jason’s eyes blow wide at the sight of his own misty limbs, contrasting his usually chill demeanor, and it sends Tim’s stomach in knots.
“What do you mean?”
“Something’s happening. I—” Jason’s face contorts in something like pain. “It hurts. I don’t—I don’t know what’s going on.” There’s an edge of panic in his voice now. His lips move, but the rest of his words are lost as though an invisible tornado is sucking the breath from his dead lips.
Tim’s eyes widen. “Holy shit— Jason.” Because for reasons Tim has never encountered before, Jason’s body is glowing . Glowing a ghostly orange while it fluctuates between mist and solidity. It’s like his state of matter is having a tug-of-war with itself.
Jason meets Tim’s eyes, his own wide under his mask. It’s the first time Tim has seen him this afraid. “Tim—” he starts, but it’s no use. Because in the next instant, Jason’s body evaporates entirely.
Gone.
“Jason!” Tim lurches out, but his fingers pass right through the last wisps of the phantom that was Jason Todd. Tim scrambles, looking all around the room as if Jason will reappear like the Cheshire Cat. “Jay? Where’d you go? Jay!”
He waits, heart pounding as he searches for any trace of Jason. Any vestige of his ghost because he can’t just be gone. He can’t—it makes no sense. In Tim’s fourteen years of life, he has never had a ghost suddenly disappear like that.
Their lot in death is to remain, wandering the world lost and forgotten. The idea of Jason being gone forever is unthinkable. Unacceptable.
So Tim waits there in his room, homework forgotten as he channels all of his energy into summoning Jason. He squeezes his eyes shut and concentrates on Jason’s essence until sweat beads on his forehead and his hands shake.
Nothing.
An hour passes. Two. A day. Two, three, four days. There’s nothing. Not a whisper, not a scream, not the slightest tug in Tim’s mind to give him some notion of Jason’s spirit being close by. It’s as though he’s been erased from Tim’s radar completely, and Tim can’t help feeling like he’s lost a limb.
Tim lies awake at night, waiting and waiting and waiting. Jason doesn’t come back.
He goes off his meds, and Jason doesn’t come back.
He journeys down to the memorial case in the cave, and still Jason doesn’t come back.
Tim rests his hand over the glass now, head bowed as he closes his eyes and focuses. Reaches out with his thoughts for anything. “Come on, Jay,” he murmurs. “Where are you?”
He doesn’t know how long he stands there, searching for a soul who simply isn’t there. There’s nothing—not a single trace of Jason Todd’s spirit left to find.
It’s there in front of the memorial that Bruce finds Tim hours later, bent over his knees and sobbing. “Tim?” he says as he approaches, a hint of instinctual panic rising in his voice at the sight of his partner so uncharacteristically distraught.
Tim says nothing, because what can he say? How is he supposed to explain that the ghost of a person he hardly knows yet considers a friend in every way has left him, and he has no idea where he went or why or if he’s even okay, wherever he is?
There’s no way to say it. So he doesn’t.
Bruce drops beside Tim and takes the boy into his arms, holding him tight as Tim sobs into his chest. “What happened?” he asks. “What’s wrong? Are you hurt?”
Tim just shakes his head and cries.
Elsewhere…
A grave sits, cold and untouched since burial. The name Jason Peter Todd can be read in the dim moonlight, turning shadows gray and reflecting on the morning dew. The night is quiet, all but for the chirping of crickets and muffled screams too deep in the ground to be heard by anyone but the worms.
Until a hand shoots up from the dirt, and a new era has begun.