Chapter Text
The room changed around ten-thirty.
Tim noticed it gradually, then all at once, the accumulation of small signals resolving into a pattern. Guests leaving in a particular way: coats retrieved, goodbyes made, the specific energy of people who had other places to be versus the specific energy of people who were exactly where they intended to be for the rest of the evening. The ones leaving were the larger group. The ones staying were maybe fifteen people, settled into the room's furniture with the comfortable ease of a regular arrangement.
And underneath that comfort was something else: expectation.
Tim stood near the drinks table and tried to work out what the correct move was.
He'd been to many events in his life and he understood the social grammar of most of them, but this particular late-evening configuration didn't have a category he recognized. The people remaining clearly knew each other, knew this room, knew the specific shape of a Szarr gala after the main event concluded. He didn't. He was waiting to talk to Cazador about the contract - the man was currently deep in conversation with a silver-haired guest and showing no signs of concluding - and he didn't have a natural reason to circulate among people he hadn't met.
And for the first time that evening, Tim had the uncomfortable sense that maybe he wasn't actually supposed to still be here.
He looked across the room.
Astarion was near the far windows, and beside him, Richard. Who looked like Dick. Who Tim was not thinking about as Dick because he was being professional.
Richard was a common name, he'd told himself in the corner forty minutes ago. It was genuinely common. There was no meaningful data in the coincidence of the name.
He had not quite managed to believe that. It was becoming a bit of a problem.
He watched them from across the room - the low conversation, the ease between them that had the texture of something long-established - and thought about what a welfare investigation actually looked like when the subjects were adults in a private residence and the abuser was a wealthy man with deep Gotham connections, and what resources he had access to, and what he was going to do with the photographs he'd already taken with his phone angled toward the floor. Discreet. Professional.
He was compiling documentation. That was all.
Not because Richard looked like Dick. Because something was wrong in this house. Those were separate things. He was keeping them separate.
He saw it happening with Astarion first.
One of the remaining guests had moved closer to him - fifties, heavy-set, with the ease of someone who had done this before in this specific room with this specific person. He was standing too close and Tim watched the quality of the interaction from across the room.
Astarion was not stopping it.
That was the thing Tim couldn't square for a moment. He wasn't moving away, wasn't doing the hundred small things a person did to communicate disinterest or discomfort to someone who should back off. He was standing there with a quality Tim recognized, now that he was looking for it - the careful neutrality of earlier, but deepened, the specific stillness of someone who had gone somewhere else internally while their body remained present and available.
He wasn't freezing or panicking. It was worse, somehow. His face remained perfectly pleasant, perfectly engaged, and yet he was enduring, not welcoming.
Tim looked at Cazador.
He was still in conversation with the silver-haired man. Tim watched - watched him glance over, do a brief survey, the same assessing look he'd given Tim earlier. He saw Astarion and the guest. He registered it.
And then he turned back to his conversation.
Something cold slid down Tim’s spine. Because suddenly the entire room reorganized itself in his head - the lingering guests, the late-night atmosphere. This wasn’t a wealthy recluse tolerating inappropriate behavior in his house. This was infrastructure.
Tim felt adrenaline start to wake up under his skin.
Okay, he thought. Okay.
He processed what he'd just watched, which was a man who'd looked at his ward being handled by a guest and decide it was fine. Not even just fine, but expected.
Then he looked for Richard.
He found him after a moment - across the room, different guest, different configuration, but the same shape of thing beginning to develop.
And God.
It was worse watching him.
Because once Tim noticed the expression, he couldn’t stop seeing it. He felt his chest tighten with sudden, visceral force because he knew that expression.
He knew it from undercover agents after operations that had gone too long. From victims giving statements in Gotham precinct interview rooms. From Bruce, exactly once, after a case he still didn't know the full details of.
The look of someone mentally stepping out of their own body while remaining perfectly socially functional.
It was the face people made when they’d learned dissociation was useful. And Richard- Christ, both of them, really.
They wore it like muscle memory.
Richard smiled at something the guest said. It was a good smile. Easy. Believable.
It made Tim feel vaguely sick. He had never hated a perfect smile more in his life.
Tim watched Cazador not look at this either.
He's allowing it. He's arranging this.
He got out his phone and checked the time, and while he was doing that he got two more photographs he could look at later on a larger screen and assess properly. Documentation. Professional. He put the phone away.
His hands felt very steady.
That usually meant he was angrier than he realized yet.
The heavy-set guest was pulling Astarion toward the corridor and Astarion was going with the compliance of someone for whom going was the only outcome. Tim watched this and thought about the flinch he'd clocked earlier and about two adults who couldn't seem to say no to anything in this house and thought about an old-money patriarch who was watching all of it with the satisfaction of someone whose evening was proceeding exactly as planned.
The bastard had looked pleased.
He thought about how old the estate was.
How many rich men in Gotham had hidden terrible things behind philanthropy and antique furniture and old family names.
He put that down because he wasn't ready to pick it up yet.
He cornered Cazador when the silver-haired guest finally moved on, and the contract discussion was exactly what he'd expected - detailed, specific, Cazador demonstrating a thorough understanding of Wayne Enterprises' recent strategic positioning that suggested he'd done significant research before this evening. He was sharp. The warmth was still there but thinner at this hour, the calibration more focused, the social performance dialed back in favor of something more direct.
And somehow that made him more unsettling, not less.
They talked for twenty minutes. Tim asked the right questions, gave the right non-committal positive signals, got a sense of what was actually being proposed and what the leverage points were. He could work with this. The contract was real and possibly worthwhile and that was a separate problem from everything else in this room.
He hated how competent Cazador was. It would have been easier if he’d been openly slimy. Instead he was charming, measured, reasonable.
Tim kept finding himself tracking the hallway anyway.
When they were wrapping up, Tim looked around in what he hoped read as casual.
"I was hoping to say goodnight to Astarion before I left," he said. "He was good company tonight, I wanted to thank him."
Cazador smiled. It was warm, pleasant. Tim suddenly understood warmth could feel predatory.
"He's occupied at the moment," he said. "Some of the guests prefer his company for the later portion of the evening." The warmth was entirely intact, entirely pleasant, the tone of someone explaining that the restaurant was fully booked in a way that suggested you might want to come back another time. "You're welcome to wait, of course. He shouldn't be more than an hour."
He thought about Astarion’s face, about Richard’s stillness, about the way both of them reacted to touch they clearly did not want.
He held Cazador’s gaze exactly one second too long, and in that second, something ugly and furious tried to rise up in him.
An hour.
As though Astarion was a service that was temporarily unavailable.
“I won’t keep him,” Tim said easily. “Please thank him for me.”
“Of course.”
The smile never slipped.
Not once.
He thanked Cazador for the evening, made his goodbyes, and walked out of the Szarr estate into the cold March air.
In the car, he sat for a moment before he told the driver to go. He looked at the estate through the window - the pale stone, the lit windows, the gate closing behind him.
Beautiful house.
Horrible place.
He took out his phone.
He opened a new file and titled it Szarr - welfare/trafficking preliminary and started typing, because once he started typing he didn't have to think about the other thing yet, the one that was sitting in the corner of his mind saying his name repeatedly in a voice he was not ready to deal with in the back of a car at eleven-thirty at night.
That man wasn't Dick. Couldn't be. Because if he was, Tim wouldn't be able to live with himself.
He typed harder.
The contract documentation was first, then the observations from the latter half of the evening, then the photographs annotated with times and descriptions. He typed with the focus of someone doing careful work because the careful work was what was available right now and the other thing could wait until he had a screen bigger than his phone and the lights on and Bernard sitting next to him.
Because Bernard would say the reasonable thing. Bernard would ground him back into reality. Because Tim knew what grief could do to people.
The car moved through the city.
He typed.
He didn't think about the name. Didn't think about the almost-familiar laugh. Didn't think about the flinch. Didn't think about the way Richard had looked at Astarion with the exhausted ease of someone who'd survived beside the same person for a very long time.
He typed for a long time.