Chapter Text
In a peculiar twist of fate, Bruce is there the first time Tim ever gets really hurt.
He doesn’t know Tim, then. Tim doesn’t really know him either.
Tim is only five years old, and it’s the Martha Wayne Christmas Gala.
Another of his firsts. His mother was the one to decide that he was getting to be a very grown-up boy now – tolerable enough company for public. It’s one of the best compliments she’s ever given him.
So far, he thinks he’s doing a pretty great job at living up to it, even if his parents haven’t outright said so - everyone’s been cooing over him, and his cheeks have been pinched probably, like, a thousand times (his tutors haven’t gotten that high in math yet, so he’s not completely sure how many times that is, but he saw the word in one of Jack’s books the other week and Mrs. Louise told him it was really big, so he’s satisfied with his estimation). And every time someone has told him what a handsome young man he is (maybe a whole TWO thousand times), his parents have looked very pleased with themselves, which he figures is pretty much the same as being pleased with him.
But… as excited as he was to go in the beginning, it turns out galas are. Well. A lot of fun for grown ups. Which is a polite way to say boring.
(Mr. Harris has started teaching him etiquette this month. He’s learned a lot about how to be honest politely.)
(Secretly, he suspects this is really just a way to lie. He can’t actually imagine even grown ups think standing around and drinking gross juice and talking about work is fun no matter how much they smile while doing it.)
Getting his cheeks pinched by old ladies was novel the first few times. Now, his cheeks just kind of feel funny, and there’s been nothing else to do but stand at his parents’ sides and be quiet while they talk.
And talk.
And talk.
The little suit they’ve put him in is itchy. And hot.
His mother’s hand tightens dangerously around his when he starts fidgeting with his tie. “Behave,” she hisses without looking at him, her lips rigidly maintaining their polite, attentive smile.
Tim lets go of his collar. By now, he’s tired and hungry and bored enough that, before he can even stop to think about it, he lets out a sigh of exasperation.
His mother’s hand tightens to the point of pain.
He’s saved by the sound of applause.
He and his parents, along with everyone else in the spacious gala hall, turn towards the podium. Tim stands on his tippy toes to try and see past all the much taller adults around him, his mother’s grip easing in her distraction, leaving his hand with a fading ache.
“I hope everyone’s having a lovely evening!” Bruce Wayne’s voice booms out, jolly and strong, met by more clapping. “If you haven’t already, I highly recommend sampling the gingerbread and white chocolate mousse at the dessert table - I’ll be leaving this party about ten pounds heavier than I came in, and it would be terribly embarrassing if I’m the only one.” Light laughter across the crowd. Tim catches a glimpse of a strong jaw and a smile over someone’s shoulder. “Now, please grab yourself a fresh cup of eggnog, and join us in the garden for the Christmas tree lighting in twenty minutes! Staff will bring your coats around to the Eastern entrance.”
A final wave of applause, chatter picking back up as the crowd stirs and starts to move at a happy amble.
His mother seems to have already forgotten his moment of attitude. Her attention is completely focused on Mrs. Fielderman as they walk out together, and he’s determined to keep it that way, trotting to keep up with her long stride so he doesn’t accidentally tug on her hand by being slow. She takes her coat from one of the waiting attendants without even glancing at them - Mrs. Fielderman must be one of those important people his parents talk about, even if she just looks like a little old lady with lipstick on her teeth and wrinkled lips that lend credence to his old nanny’s claims that Tim’s face would stick like that someday if he wasn’t careful.
A man with a staff badge stops them before they make it out the door. “Yours, young sir?” he says, smiling as he bends down to pass Tim his puffy red jacket from right beside where his mother’s had been hanging.
His mother stiffens for some reason. Wanting to impress her with his manners, he flashes the man a big, gap-toothed grin and his most earnest “Thank you so much, mister!”
His mother titters a slightly too-sharp laugh as he puts it on. “Why, I’m surprised he even took it,” she says to Mrs. Fielderman, loud enough for the attendant and anyone else nearby to hear. “We’ve been going through a phase with him. Hates wearing his jacket, it’s a battle every time he goes out to play to make sure he doesn’t catch cold.”
Tim’s not sure what she’s talking about. He always puts on his jacket when his nanny tells him to, even if he doesn’t think it’s that cold.
But arguing with a grown-up is rude. So he doesn’t do that.
The cold December air hits his cheeks as soon as they step through the doors, but he’s too distracted looking around himself, slack-jawed and wide-eyed with awe, to care.
The garden is a winter wonderland.
The hedges have been lavishly decorated with tinsel and twinkling lights, the paths lined with cheerfully glowing little snowflakes so guests can see where they’re walking. Even the ancient oaks standing sentry over the stone walkways have been draped in Christmas finery right up to their highest peaks.
Tim tries to slow down to look at a rather lumpy snow penguin placed incongruously off the walkway, but his mother tugs him along by the hand without stopping. “Hurry along, now, Timothy,” she says, voice threaded with annoyance. “We don’t want to miss the Christmas tree lighting, now do we?”
He does not want to miss the tree lighting. He hurries.
He’s worried that the tree will be the same as the podium inside, that he won’t be able to see a thing past all the grownups with their tall legs and big heads.
But this time, his mother slithers her way to the front of the crowd, rejoining his father, who’d separated to go talk to some business associates “without the wives hanging around” earlier in the evening. “A little silly to do it outside this year, don’t you think?” she murmurs to him as she takes his arm, letting go of Tim’s hand to adjust her shawl. “Really, he’s being terribly indulgent with that little show-off’s whims.”
The tree isn’t much to look at yet, just a hulking shadow in the center of the courtyard lit only by the dull glimmer of the garden’s other lights reflecting off the ornaments. Tim eyes it warily, suspicious of the black spaces between the branches where anything might be lurking.
It’s big. WAY bigger than the one he saw his parents had set up in their own foyer for the Christmas party they hosted last week. He was not allowed to go near the tree nor attend the party - his father said it was past his bedtime. Tim hadn’t previously been aware that he had a bedtime.
“Pardon me, our son needs to be by the front,” his mother says, flashing her teeth at another couple who’d been trying to edge in front of them. She puts her hands on his shoulders and slides him in front of her like a shield.
Her palms are warm through his jacket. He leans back into her touch while it lasts, away from the yawning black maw of the tree, before she pulls her hands away and releases him.
Up closer, the tree is made slightly less ominous by the people next to it. Mr. Wayne stands off to its side, gesturing broadly with a glass of champagne as he tells a story to a small gaggle of gala attendees.
And next to him is Dick Grayson.
He hasn’t been stuffed into an uncomfortable, too-hot and itchy suit. He’s in a bright, gaudy Christmas sweater, reindeer frolicking around the hem and little tinkling bells and tufts of tinsel stitched into the pattern. He laughs, and it sounds just like the bells.
“Honestly,” his father says, using the same trick his mother uses to make it look like she’s smiling instead of talking, swirling the dregs of his champagne in his glass. “No sense of decorum. I pity the poor thing, really, Brucie certainly isn’t preparing him for the real world.”
Tim stands on his tiptoes to try and get a good look, pretending he can’t hear his parents being mean.
It makes him so strangely warm in his chest to see Dick looking so happy, cheerful and laughing again.
He doesn’t seem quite the same as Tim remembers him, nearly two years ago. The Dick in his memory had a glow to him - this Dick feels a little more subdued, a little more of earth than something completely ethereal in his joy.
But after the scream Tim heard him let out that terrible night at the circus, he hadn’t known how the older boy would ever laugh again.
Tim still has nightmares about that scream, even though his parents have both told him he should have forgotten about it by now. He soaks in the sound of Dick’s giggles, and hopes he’ll have dreams about tonight instead.
The stream of people from inside slows to a trickle, the crowd coalescing anew in the gardens, until finally, finally Mr. Wayne decides they’re ready for the tree.
Or, more accurately, Dick decides they are.
He leans up, tugging on Mr. Wayne’s sleeve impatiently and earning himself a look that Tim can only describe as exasperatedly fond.
He didn’t know those two words could go together like that.
Mr. Wayne’s expression keeps its warmth even after Dick turns around and struts with his chin up towards the tree, leaving Mr. Wayne to follow him.
“Ladies and gentlemen, thank you again so much for attending.” He gives a short speech that Tim grows bored of quickly, thanking them for their generous donations to the Martha Wayne Children’s Foundation - a new project he’s been championing to support Gotham’s social services, which Tim knows only because he heard his father complaining about it as he filled out his checkbook before they left the house.
“And now, my ward Dick, who many of you may know is a national champion in children’s gymnastics, will do us the honor of lighting our tree!”
Mr. Wayne claps the loudest of the entire crowd as Dick gets up on a platform on the other side of the tree.
There must be a trampoline or something on the platform, because Dick flips up into the air like gravity is just a suggestion. The star in his hand clicks into a small stand at the top, and the entire tree lights up in a dazzling display of light.
The crowd claps, and Tim cheers.
“How horribly tacky,” his father mutters, as Dick gives a final bow from the platform, his sweater jingling and twinkling. But whatever his father might think, Mr. Wayne is looking at Dick with so much pride.
Tim doesn’t know if he’s more entranced by the two of them or the tree itself.
After a couple minutes of polite oohing and aahing, the other grownups seem to lose interest in the tree, to Tim’s total bewilderment. Even Dick and Mr. Wayne wander off among the crowd again now that Dick’s little show is over. Absolutely nothing that anyone is talking about seems to him as interesting as the tree and the magical garden around them.
It’s a little cold even with his jacket. He hops up and down, puffing out his cheeks as his parents go back to networking, apparently their favorite hobby. His nice dress shoes slip a bit on the cold stone walkway, and he stumbles, accidentally yanking at his mother’s hand.
“Timothy,” his mother says, sharpness tempered by a careful smile as she turns away from the younger couple she’s talking with now. “Why don’t you go play with the other children, dear heart?”
Tim hasn’t seen a single child here younger than Dick Grayson himself since they arrived. But his mother’s tone is the one she uses when her suggestion isn’t really a suggestion, and he knows telling her this will probably not be received graciously.
She lets go of his hand with a little nudge, and then turns back to her networking.
Free and unseen, he wanders along the edge of the crowd to the frost-covered grass where he feels less at risk of being trampled by high heels and dress shoes.
Dick and Mr. Wayne are long gone. Unlike the tree in his parents’ foyer, there’s no one to stop Tim from coming right up to the base of the tree to stare up into its twinkling branches in awe.
It doesn’t take long for his attention to turn to the platform Dick had jumped from.
He looks around.
No one’s paying attention. Surely no one will notice if he investigates a little bit closer.
He has to stretch his little legs to step up onto the ladder. But from there, it’s as easy as climbing the jungle gym at the playground his last nanny used to take him to before Poison Ivy turned it into a real jungle.
He clambers up to the platform, set about halfway up the massive tree.
There isn’t a trampoline.
How did Dick jump like that?
He cranes his neck to look up at the top of the tree, wobbling on the backs of his heels as he eyeballs the distance from the platform to the star. It looks somehow even bigger from up close. He takes a step back towards the ladder to try and see better.
“Whoa, hey, there’s a kid!”
The voice filters across the courtyard to him from near the entrance. He turns his head and meets Dick Grayson’s wide blue eyes, fixed on him from the Manor steps.
“Timothy!”
His mother’s voice snaps through the winter air like cracking ice.
He whips around to look at her, his stomach plummeting at the exact same moment his foot does.
Right off the edge of the platform.
There’s no stretched moment in time, no agonizing second where he tries to stay upright. He just drops.
The ground meets him like a fist. Everything in him rattles - he feels like the water at the moment when he cannonballs into his parents’ pool.
Something in his arm makes a terrible crack.
Once, his mother had tried to show him a piece of pottery from one of their digs. It had been heavier than he’d expected, slipping from his fingers before he could catch it. It had reverberated the same way when it broke.
At least in that moment of breathless terror, he was still able to take a breath, unlike now, when his lungs seem to have checked out for the night.
His mother catches up fast for a woman in heels and a gown. Tim’s still staring up at the smoggy sky, gasping like a fish out of water when her face appears over his. Her mouth is a hard line, blonde hair frizzed by her bolt across the courtyard. Her eyes rake over his face, his body, his legs.
They land on his arm. Her expression turns even colder. “Come here,” she murmurs, slipping one arm under his shoulders and the other under his knees as she hastily gathers him up into her lap. She jostles his arm in the process, and white-sharp pain forms a circuit through the limb to join with the band of suffering where her arm lies across his bruised shoulder blades. Even knowing what a terrible scene he’s making, he can’t restrain the little, strangled moan of agony he lets out.
“Shh,” she hisses.
She grabs his wrist, shoving his arm between his body and hers so the unsettling lump in the middle of it is hidden, and he gags on another cry. His vision is suddenly very blurry and wet.
More footsteps are pounding across the grass towards them. His mother bends her head close to him to quickly hiss in his ear, “Do not cry.”
Tim doesn’t know if he even can cry. His lungs still feel like someone has them clenched in a fist. He grabs at the front of her dress with his good hand and squeezes with all his might.
“Holy -” a boy’s voice catches up to them. “Is he okay!?”
“He’s fine.” His mother’s icy voice melts and twists as she raises it, sounding breathless and shaky. “He just frightened himself, that’s all.”
Tim summons the strength to turn his head slightly to look. The blurred forms of Dick Grayson and Bruce Wayne are both kneeling in front of them, wearing similar expressions of concern.
“That was quite the fall, buddy,” Bruce says. “Does anything hurt?”
Yes. Yes, very much yes. The pain radiates up and down his entire right side where he hit the ground first, made worse by the way his mother keeps rubbing his other arm in a way that would be soothing if it didn’t hurt so much.
His lip wobbles. His mother tightens her grip.
“He’s fine,” she says again, and he can hear the brittle smile in her voice. “I checked when I got to him, he’s not hurt. Are you, Timothy?”
Tim knows a command, even when it’s hidden in a question. He shakes his head, tears spilling down his cheeks in icy trails.
“He just frightened himself, you see,” she repeats, as he turns and buries his face in her shoulder, the satin fabric of her dress quickly dampening with silent tears.
His father has joined their little huddle somewhere in this mess. “We’re terribly sorry about that little fuss, Mr. Wayne,” he says. “We’re still working on teaching Timothy not to wander off. It’s only his first gala, you see - we thought he was ready for it, but clearly not.”
His disappointed tone jabs Tim right in the ache of his ribs.
“There’s no need to apologize,” Mr. Wayne brushes him off easily, words that don’t compute in the slightest. “I just want to make sure he’s okay.”
He doesn’t sound at all annoyed. He just sounds soft and warm and gentle.
That’s what does it.
Tim’s face screws up. Entirely overwhelmed and unable to stop it, he starts to sob.
There’s much cooing and fussing around him. His mother gathers him close in a hug that feels like a cage as she stands, knitting needles worth of pain stabbing at his arm as she moves.
Dick’s voice floats up to him - something about their butler taking a look at Tim. He hears his parents decline, hears the concerned questions from other guests as they hurry out of the gardens.
A car door opens. His mother gets in with Tim, who lets out a hiccuping sob as his bone rattles and burns inside his flesh.
“Stop it,” his mother hisses as his father slams the door behind them. “This is the consequence of your actions. You are in no position to be whining about it like this.”
The car rocks as his father gets into the front seat. “What the hell, Janet,” he snarls. “You were supposed to be watching him.”
“You have just as many eyes as I do,” his mother whips right back. “Don’t lecture me Jack, this is far more humiliating for me than it is for you. Do you honestly think anyone blames the father when a child misbehaves?”
She pushes Tim away from her chest, balancing him in her lap. They’re both in the back seat. She never sits in the back seat with him.
He sniffles as she picks up his arm, handling it with more care than she did before. “Mom, it really hurts,” he mumbles.
Her eyes flick up sharply to meet his. Her gaze is cold.
His father lets out a slow breath, his fingers tightening and relaxing around the steering wheel. “What’s the damage?” he asks gruffly.
She purses her lips. The lump in his arm is swollen and bright, throbbing red, an ugly contrast to her manicured white nails. “His arm is broken,” she says thinly.
“You’re sure?”
Her grip tightens on his arm hard enough to make him whimper. “Did we not just establish that I have two eyes, the same as you?” She seems to realize how tightly she’s holding him, and her grip relaxes, though she doesn’t release him. “Yes, Jack, it’s broken.”
His father hisses a word that Tim’s pretty sure he’s not allowed to say himself. “Well, no one else saw, right?” He looks at them in the rearview mirror, taking the turn towards their house at a speed that sends Tim sliding painfully across his mother’s lap. “Do we - does he have your - ”
He trails off strangely.
And, just as strangely, his mother doesn’t respond.
“Well?” he demands.
When Tim looks up at his mother, she’s scrutinizing his arm like she’s looking for unforgivable discrepancies in his very pores.
“I don’t know,” she says, her voice lacking its earlier heat, turning oddly quiet and subdued.
His father lets out a wordless snarl of frustration, slamming on the brakes as they pull into the driveway of their house. “It’s your freak blood in his veins, Janet,” he growls. “Whatever needs to be done, it’s your responsibility, you understand that?”
Tim’s never heard this kind of anger in his father’s voice. He cringes back into his mother’s arms on instinct.
And, to his surprise, she accepts him, her arms tightening around him in a way that feels almost protective. “Of course, Jack,” she says, her tone as cool and sharp as an icicle. “I wouldn’t dream of inconveniencing you with the son you begged me for.”
His father’s face is as red as a Christmas light. But his mother’s word is apparently final - all he does is grunt, slamming the car door.
Tim tucks his face against his mother’s shoulder as she carries him upstairs. The sound of clinking glass by the bar in the foyer fades away behind them, disappearing entirely as she shuts his bedroom door behind them.
She sets him down on his bed, detaching his white-knuckled hand from her dress with nothing more than a crinkle of her nose. Then she kneels down, taking his swollen wrist in her hands. She turns it over silently, her fingers prodding at it lightly through his jacket sleeve.
The pain has faded somewhat, the white-hot edge cooling down to a dull, throbbing tightness, like there’s too much inside his skin.
“This must have hurt quite badly,” she says quietly, after a long couple of minutes in which he doesn’t dare to speak. When he nods, sniffling, she tuts. “I don’t know what you were thinking, wandering off like that,” she says. “Let alone making such a scene. Honestly, Timothy, sometimes I just don’t understand what goes through your head.”
“I’m sorry, Mother,” he mumbles. “I didn’t mean to.”
Her lips purse. “Intentions don’t matter, Timothy. Only our actions.”
She stretches out his arm, pushing back the sleeve on his jacket to expose the horrible place in the center where his arm is the wrong shape. “Do you know why your arm looks so awful right now?” she asks.
He doesn’t like to look at it. It makes his stomach do something twisty at the bad-wrongness of it. “I think – because it’s broken,” he hiccups.
Her expression doesn’t change. He has no idea if he said the right thing. “It was broken,” she says, to his confusion. “It’s not anymore.”
He frowns, blinking back tears. He doesn’t know a lot about healing, but he knows one of the girls in his kindergarten class broke her arm falling off the monkey bars, and she had to wear a bright blue cast for ages even though Tommy Price wrote a bad word on it and the teacher got mad at him and scribbled over it with sharpie. “But… it is?” he tries, bewildered, looking between his lumpy arm and his mother.
She grabs his other hand, on his good arm.
She drags it over, and despite his flinching and trying to pull away, presses the palm of his hand against the lump.
The urge to snatch his hand back away from the bad-wrong-no of its shape is animal-strong. The lump feels both hard and squishy at the same time beneath his fingers, and on instinct he shrieks, squeezing his eyes shut as every muscle in his body braces for pain.
It doesn’t come.
Slowly, he opens his eyes. His mother is watching him dispassionately, waiting for him to come to the conclusion she’s guiding him to.
“Oh,” he says. He uncertainly tries to move his fingers, and they twitch, barely responsive. His eyes fill with fresh tears as a new fear floods him. “Is it going to be like this forever?”
She doesn’t soften. “It would be your own fault if it was,” she says. Then she lets out a breath through her nose.
It almost looks like she’s bracing for pain too.
“Timothy,” she begins. “There’s something you need to know about us.”
And for the first time in his young life, she tells him a secret.
Later that night, he lies in bed, watching ashy Gotham snowflakes flutter past. His arm, still twisted and wrong, lies across his chest, sending dull splintering pangs of something between pain and discontent through his nerves every few seconds, the way the little birds in the nest he found in the hedges that spring had cheeped for their parents’ attention. His mother has promised it can be fixed, but said she thought it was only right that he deal with it for the night.
“That is how it is for other little boys and girls,” she’d told him. “Imagine, being in that type of pain, and imagine it lasting. Hour after hour, night after night, day after day.
Imagine what you would do to another person if you thought they held the key that meant you’d never have to feel like that again.”
He can’t. He can’t even imagine what it would be like to still feel the same pain he’d felt when it happened.
His parents are arguing. He can hear them in their bedroom, just down the hall, the words an indistinct rumble of anger in two overlapping tones.
For the first time, it occurs to him that his parents might not like each other very much.
Is it because of their strange blood, he wonders? Is that why his father always seems so annoyed with his mother?
Is that why he always seems so annoyed by Tim?
Because they’re both part of the same secret, and he feels left out?
Tim can empathize with that. He feels left out of things a lot too.
He rolls over onto his side, hugging his arm to himself. His father’s voice raises, almost loud enough for him to make out the individual words, before dropping so low he can barely hear it.
A tiny, forlorn part of him even feels left out of this.
He thinks he might prefer to be in the loudness of their room than the silence of his own.
His arm aches.
***
In the morning, he crawls out of bed a little after dawn. He didn’t sleep much, and he scrubs at his gritty eyes with his fist as he makes his way tentatively out into the quiet house. His mother promised she would make his arm better in the morning.
Still, in spite of himself, he’s a little surprised to find her sitting in the kitchen. Her hair is pinned back in a messy bun and she sips her coffee, a newspaper spread in front of her.
He almost never sees his mother like this. No matter how hard he tries to get up early when his parents are home, by the time he wakes up they’re usually about to go out for the day.
The sight of it now feels borderline surreal.
“Don’t just stand there with your mouth agape, Timothy,” she says, flipping the page of her newspaper without looking up. “It’s quite unbecoming.”
He shuts his jaw with a snap, shuffling into the kitchen. “Good morning, Mom.” He feels oddly shy. He’s not quite sure what to do now. Usually his nanny would have already been preparing breakfast for him; being alone in the kitchen with his mother is brand new territory.
In his uncertainty, he hovers, careful to keep his mouth closed.
After another few moments, his mother heaves a sigh, fixing her gaze on him. “Yes, Timothy?”
He shuffles his feet, stopping immediately as he decides that’s probably unbecoming too. “Where’s Dad?” he asks, playing it safe.
Her lips tighten, and she takes a sip of her coffee. But her annoyance doesn’t reach her voice, which stays neat and level. “Your father had some business to attend to in Bludhaven. He’ll be back this evening.”
“Oh,” Tim says. He curls his toes against the chilly tile. “Are you going to, um,” he falters, then continues softly, “Can you still fix my arm?”
She grimaces. Her eyes flick down to it and then away, and Tim is struck by the sudden intuition that she doesn’t like looking at it either.
She closes the newspaper, running her fingers neatly along the crease so it lays perfectly flat, and sets her coffee down precisely on its coaster.
Only then does she shift her chair to face him properly. “Come here.”
He obeys, hesitantly offering up his arm when she reaches for it. His fingers twitch, little sparks running up his arm at the movement.
“Had we not had an audience last night, this would have been simpler,” she sighs. “You must move quickly when you’re hurt, Timothy. It’s much easier to fix things when the wound is fresh than if you neglect it. The longer you wait, the more difficult you make things for yourself.”
Tim feels a flash of unfairness. He wasn’t the one who chose to wait.
Then he reminds himself that he was the one who chose to climb the platform and fall off, and his mother is perfectly justified in being annoyed with him, and the feeling abates.
His mother sighs again heavily, looking him in the eyes. She turns his small arm over in her hands, placing a palm at his wrist and her other hand just below his elbow. “Unfortunately, this will not be pleasant.”
His tummy twists in fear. “Why?” he demands anxiously.
She doesn’t answer him.
Her hands press, twist.
It’s as bad as it was when he fell - worse, even.
There’s no distance between him and this pain. The snap of bone rings in his ears for the second time in his short life, but his mother doesn’t stop.
She wiggles the loose joint in his arm with steady hands, uncaring of his shrieks, bone grinding on bone until she’s satisfied with the placement and black spots are threatening to swallow his vision.
“There,” she says, letting go. “Now, was that so hard?”
He responds by throwing up all over her white slippers.
Thirty minutes later, he sits on the tile floor, shivering slightly as the sweat evaporates off his skin, flexing his fingers open and closed again like his life depends on it.
The pain is almost completely gone now. There’s nothing but the slightest of aches when he turns it, an echo soft enough he might be imagining it.
His mother comes back downstairs with wet hair and a clean robe, no slippers in sight.
She sighs when she sees the puddle of bile still drying on the tile, the roll of paper towels she’d placed next to him untouched.
But she doesn’t scold him.
She kneels down in front of him, waiting until he raises his eyes to meet hers.
“You’re very new to this,” she says quietly, once he does. “Which is why I’m not upset with you for your little… display today, or last night. Honestly, I hadn’t intended to begin teaching you these skills until you were older, but you never did have a very good sense of timing.” She huffs, then gentles again. “Do you know why babies cry, Timothy?”
He squeezes his hand into a fist tight enough to make his fingers hurt, then straightens them again. They’re shaking a little. “Um,” he says, trying to think. This feels like it should be a very easy question, but he can’t decide how she wants him to answer. “I’dunno,” he hiccups in a tiny voice.
“Because they’re needy,” she answers firmly. “They cry when they’re hungry, and sad, and in pain, because they need people to help them. They’re little leeches like that - completely unable to survive on their own. And everyone else just has to endure it until they’re big and clever enough to stop being so needy all the time.”
She reaches out, catching his chin between her thumb and forefinger when his attention drifts towards the hypnotically straight line of his arm again. “Are you a baby, Timothy?”
He tries to shake his head. Her grip doesn’t let him. “No,” croaks.
“Are you a leech, Timothy?”
“No,” he says again, with a bit more surety this time.
He’s answered correctly. She smiles at him, her manicured nails tracing the baby fat on his jaw as she releases him. “That’s right, sweetheart,” she coos. “You’re a Drake, Timothy. You don’t need anyone to help you, not like other people do.” Her smile fades into something more serious. “You need to unlearn that useless instinct to make a fuss when something hurts. Last night we talked about what someone with ill-intent could do if they ever found out our secret, but understand this, Timothy.” Her gaze is piercing where it pins him in place. “No one wants to waste their efforts. Imagine how someone who truly wanted to help would feel if they worried over you, only to find out you were fine the whole time and just complaining over nothing?”
Tim swallows. His throat feels sore. “Um,” he says softly. “Mad, I think.”
She smiles again. “That’s right,” she says gently. “It wouldn’t feel very nice at all.”
In a rare gesture of affection, she runs her fingers through his hair, her nails scritching against his scalp in a way that should be pleasant.
He can’t even properly enjoy it. His skin feels raw to the touch.
Still, he leans into her hand.
“You’ll get better at this,” she says, with almost tender conviction. “I know you will. You just need to practice, just like with any other skill.”
Tim decides, right then and there, that he’s gotten all the practice he’ll ever need. Anything after this will be a cakewalk.
His mother will never need to worry about him crying again.
***
It turns out that his mother, not privy to his plans to never shed a tear again, has come up with her own.
Tim never sees any of his old nannies again. Any sadness that he might have felt about that loss is overshadowed by the fact that he suddenly sees much more of his mother than he ever has before.
He has no idea exactly what negotiations or arguments take place behind the scenes, but it’s clear some sort of decision has been made.
Gone now are the days when Jack and Janet moved in lockstep, glued to each others’ hips every time they stepped out in public.
Now, while his father continues to go on frequent trips out to dig sites and business opportunities, his mother seems to have restricted her range to Gotham - and, once or twice a year, perhaps Metropolis for the truly unmissable social events of the season.
The majority of her days are spent at home with Tim.
At first, Tim can hardly believe his luck. He’d been just about sure that after his little mishap at the Wayne Gala, there was a decent chance they were going to jet off and he was never going to see either of them again. They’d left for almost a whole month right after one of his tutors told them he had difficulty focusing on tasks he finds uninteresting, after all, and in spite of his mother’s exasperated claim that not everything is about you, Timothy - Goodness, your ego is almost as big as your father’s - he’s still pretty sure that couldn’t have been a coincidence.
So waking up to find his mother in the kitchen, every day, seems like it must be a dream come true.
The dream begins to sour by the end of the first week.
The majority of his tutors disappear at the same time his nannies do. Much like the nannies, his mother takes over their role in his life.
Tim rather liked learning things with his tutors.
“Ms. Anderson used to give me a sticker every time I got a question right,” he mumbles into his elbow where he’s using it as a pillow, scowling down at his math worksheet.
“Ms. Anderson had a degree in early childhood development,” his mother says with a roll of her eyes. “That means babies, Timothy. Are you a baby?”
And there are new lessons on his mother’s itinerary.
He likes these ones even less than stickerless math.
“You just need to step on it,” his mother encourages him. “Don’t even think about it, just let your weight drop forward. It’ll be quick.”
He can feel the tip of the thumbtack digging into his foot. “It’s gonna hurt,” he whines.
His mother rolls her eyes. “Yes, Timothy, that would be the point of this exercise.” Under her breath, she mutters, “Sometimes I really think your tutors oversold your capabilities.” Then, impatiently, “You’re doing yourself no favors dragging this out. You could already be healed by now if you’d done it as soon as we started. Get it over with, and we can be done for the afternoon.”
Maybe, he thinks, and takes a deep breath. As he puts his foot down, he slides it forward, tipping the tack over so his foot lands on the side of it instead of the tip. The plastic edge still digs into him uncomfortably, but it’s pretty easy to bite his tongue and keep the blank face his mother wants to see.
She scrutinizes his expression, and a flicker of surprise crosses her face. “Hey, that was good!” she says, and then her eyes narrow. She grabs his leg and lifts it up to look.
The tack falls off easily, leaving just a small dent in the skin.
She repositions him, mouth tight and disappointed. “Don’t get smart with me, you little brat. We’re doing this for a reason.”
She leans back and waits.
He takes a deep breath, realizing there’s no way around it, and steps down.
“Now, was that so hard?” his mother asks, as he pulls a quarter inch of metal out of the ball of his foot. “Unfortunately, you did make quite the face. We’ll have to work on that. Let’s try one more time.”
They end up trying seven more times that afternoon before she’s satisfied with his lack of reaction.
After his mother leaves for tea with the Hillenburgs, he takes down his Flying Graysons poster and hangs it up again with scotch tape from the kitchen, the tiny holes flattened carefully beneath it.
That night, his mother lets him watch his favorite cartoons in the living room while she works in her office.
And at bedtime, she gives him a sticker. “Well done today,” she tells him quietly. “I knew you’d get it eventually.”
She kisses him on the forehead and tucks him into bed, and leaves him alone with his new favorite sticker in his entire collection.
It’s a little round blue and gold oval, slightly wrinkled and not very sticky, and it looks a lot like the ones on the bananas in the big bowl out in the kitchen.
It still makes him glow inside.
Happy moments like that get rarer the more time his mother spends with him.
He knows she wants him to progress faster. And he tries. He tries harder than he ever tried at any of his math or science or history.
But the lessons get harder, and his mother’s patience thinner.
Not long after they start practicing with thumbtacks, he learns that there are many small bones in his hands during their science lessons.
He learns what it feels like to break every single one of them, snapped with pliers and crushed with hammers.
His mother is there to hold them in the aftermath, coaching him through holding back his tears and keeping his lower lip from wobbling.
Then she teaches him how to set them without any bumps or crookedness, pressing them into place with the shaking fingers of his other hand.
When he does it wrong, it’s as simple as rebreaking them and starting again.
He thinks often of the sticker. It disappears off his desk when he’s about six, worn soft and white from the number of times he’s sat there and stroked it with his thumb, in one of his mother’s cleaning fits. She goes off on these sometimes when she’s in a bad mood - the housekeeper now only comes on Sundays, when she attends brunches with her business friends and he has his one day of the week off from lessons to do as he pleases, so long as he stays on top of his assigned normal-school coursework.
No matter how much he tries to be as clean as he can be, the house never quite seems to be in a state that makes her happy.
She gets especially agitated when his father leaves on real business trips - not just overnight stays in Bludhaven or Metropolis. His sticker is an unfortunate victim of a tomb discovery in Egypt.
He can’t really be upset about it. The sticker’s clearer in his memory by that point than in reality.
When he is seven, while his father is on a trip to Tanzania, his mother takes him out in the garden and shoots him in the thigh with his father’s colt.
He cries out as he drops to the ground. As a consequence, he has to be the one to dig the bullet out of his own leg, sitting in the bathtub with a pair of tweezers and a kitchen steak knife while his mother types on her phone and waits for him to be done.
He drops the bullet proudly in the trash can with a clink. Then he throws up on top of it.
When he is eight, his mother has him jump off the roof.
He’s meant to break his legs. He breaks his back instead.
“I told you to roll when you hit the ground,” she hisses as she presses his vertebrae back into place. “No one is going to believe you’re fine if you can’t even wiggle your toes, let alone stand up.”
“How about I just stay on the ground floor when people are around,” he splutters, a string of bile dripping from his lips to the grass below.
“If you can’t do it right, you may as well just aim for your head next time,” she whips back in an icy voice. “You’ll cause us both less problems that way.”
She leaves him there, lying on his belly in the grass, hidden from the driveway by the bushes as he curls his toes and feels the bee-sting tingling of his nerves as they reconnect. He can tell there are at least a couple fractures in his legs, and he can time his pulse by the throbbing of his left knee.
He thinks he feels the way a very small bug must feel squished beneath a shoe.
Later, after he’s healed enough to drag himself to his feet and limp inside to grab a bag of crackers (healing takes a lot of energy out of a person, it turns out), he collapses into his bed and scrolls through the phone his father got him for Christmas to distract himself.
And, speak of the devil, as soon as he opens Instagram, there’s his dad, standing surrounded by jungle with his arm wrapped around the shoulders of a young, pretty woman in overalls, a piece of pottery held between them.
His dad looks happy. Happy like he isn’t when he’s home with Tim and his mother.
When his mom sees these pictures, does she feel like she’s been left out the same way Tim does?
For the very first time, it occurs to him that his father might be kind of bad at being his mother’s husband in the same way that he’s kind of bad at being Tim’s dad.
The thought sparks an odd, uncomfortable feeling of solidarity with his mother that rankles just as much as it soothes.
He exits out of Instagram and pulls up Candy Crush instead, playing until his brain is numb and his feet have stopped sending random twinges of pain through him every few minutes.
When he thinks his legs can take it, he gets up and goes downstairs, desperately hungry.
He thinks his mother feels a little bit bad about what she said to him outside, because she orders them Chinese food that night, which she never does, and they eat it in the living room while watching a documentary on ancient Egypt that his mother must not like very much, because she spends the entire run time pointing out the things it gets wrong.
And she never makes him jump off the roof again.
When he is nine years old, he proves himself perfect.
His mother watches, the two of them standing before each other out under the dogwood tree in the garden, her in a house dress and him in nothing but a pair of old boxers he’ll trash after this, as he pushes a knife into his stomach. She didn’t give him specific orders about what organ she wanted him to take out - he suspects the actual difference in pain between one abdominal organ and the next is not terribly notable. So he just carves through flesh a little off the center at the base of his ribcage, pressing fingers into the wound and widening it as he goes.
It’s a very slippery task. He wills his fingers into steadiness as he digs through himself, keeping his face a blank mask. He can feel himself sweating. He focuses on the sensation of a droplet trickling down the back of his neck rather than the sensations inside himself.
His hand closes around something squishy and distinct from the surrounding tissue. He explores it a moment longer, making sure it’s not a loop of his intestines, and pulls it out quickly.
If his memories of their anatomy section of his science lessons is correct, he’s pretty sure it’s his spleen.
He stands there, dripping and feeling oddly unbalanced, as his mother studies his face like a hawk.
There’s a little bird singing in the tree above them. He thinks only of its song, worrying his thumb across the smooth satin flesh of his spleen.
Her face breaks out into a smile.
“Well done, Timothy.” She reaches out and strokes his hair, leans forward to press a kiss to his forehead. “I knew you’d be able to do it.”
The swell of warmth that fills his stomach almost eclipses the burning pain where his guts are slowly knitting themselves back together.
He buries his spleen beneath the dogwood tree. Then he goes inside and has lunch with his mother.
It’s a very good day.
***
His mother flies off the following week to meet his father in Mexico.
The day after she leaves, he sits in the middle of the living room and screams until his voice hurts, and then screams some more until it stops working entirely.
Vocal chords itch when they heal.
There’s something gleeful in that discovery, he feels as he lies on his back on the Persian rug, his head swimming. Nobody but him knows that about his body.
His mother doesn’t come back the next week. Or the one after that.
In fact, he’s gone from having his days carefully structured around his mother’s schedule to having so much freedom he thinks he could drown in it.
He starts school at Gotham Academy the following month. He likes it well enough - his parents have gotten him placed two years ahead of where he should be, even though he finds out through the school’s handbook that you’re only supposed to be able to skip one year, and his classmates clearly don’t really know what to make of him - most of them just ignore him.
And that’s okay with him. He doesn’t really know what to make of them either.
His parents hire a new housekeeper, Mrs. Mac. She only comes by twice a week, but after the first couple weeks she starts bringing him homemade meals and leaving them in the fridge for him to eat later, and he appreciates that more than he can say.
She says he’s too skinny, that growing boys need to eat more. She’s probably a trustworthy source on this, having raised three of her own.
He can’t help it. It turns out normal hunger is just so much softer than the sharp hunger pangs that come from healing, so much easier to brush aside and forget about, and he’s not doing much healing these days, beyond the odd scraped knee or papercut - or, once, a rather nasty burn when he tries to get a bowl down from the cupboard over the stove while heating up some canned soup and accidentally slips climbing down from his step stool, knocking his elbow into the lit burner as he falls.
They never practiced much with burns, he muses as he scrapes the melted fabric of his pajama shirt out of his arm into the kitchen sink.
He suspects she found the smell too unpleasant. He decides he’s on the same page.
Sometimes he still tests himself. Just to check that all her hard work is still sticking, digging a fork into his hand as he stares into a mirror, watching for the faintest flicker of pain.
Sometimes, he imagines he sees something. Imagines himself calling his mother to tell her he’s forgetting how to keep their secret, that he needs her to come home and teach him again.
He imagines how sad she’d be to leave her adventures. How disappointed in him she’d be.
He pulls the bloodied tines of the fork out of his palm without wincing.
His parents make it back to Gotham in time for Christmas.
“Timothy,” his mother greets him at the door with a smile and an actual, honest-to-god hug. She looks happy, real happy, the kind of happy that goes further than just that moment.
He wonders if he’s ever seen her happy before.
“Staying out of trouble, my boy?” his father asks as he carries their luggage inside, as his mother strokes his bangs back out of his eyes like she wants to get a better look at him and Timothy stands perfectly still for fear she’ll stop and feels like a Christmas tree bulb lit from the inside out.
And he looks like he’s been happy, too.
It’s one of the better Christmases he’s ever and will ever have with his parents. They don’t fight, hardly even bicker, and while they go out for the bare minimum they need to keep their social life in Gotham alive and well, they’re back every evening to spend time with just them. The Drakes, all together properly again.
“It’s just so nice to be away from the hustle and bustle of it all,” his mother sighs, old Christmas music playing from his father’s record player and her cheeks dotted pink from his bourbon. Jack didn’t even get annoyed at her request that he pour her a glass.
She says it in the warm, fond way of someone who’s absolutely delighted to have enough of something to be sick of it.
He wonders what that must be like, to have so many people around you grow tired of them.
On Christmas proper, they give him a camera.
“Since you decided to join the Yearbook Club. You can use it for your photos,” his mother says, teeth and eyes bright as she settles back against Jack’s side on the couch across from him.
“No Drake should be caught dead using those old school cameras,” Jack adds, tipping his glass proudly towards the device cradled in Tim’s hands. “That baby’s top of the line, Timothy, you be careful with it. Don’t go letting any of your little friends borrow it.”
“Thank you so much,” Tim says in both genuine gratitude and bewilderment. “But, um. I’m not in the Yearbook Club?”
His parents both blink at him, his mother’s glass frozen at her lips. “Ah,” she says, clearing her throat as she lowers it, recovering swiftly. “Well, now you have plenty of reason to join. You’ll need all the extracurriculars you can get if you want to get into a good college.”
He’s embarrassed her, he can tell. He regrets saying anything.
“Thank you,” he repeats himself, as earnestly as he can. “It’s totally awesome, really.”
But the moment’s lost. His mother doesn’t smile at him with that same real happiness for the rest of their visit, which only lasts another two days. They’re gone again by New Years.
He tells himself it’s unconnected.
In early January, when the cold is still biting and the roads still slick with ice, he sneaks out of his home for the very first time.
‘Sneaks’ is a strong word. He puts on his coat and goes out the front door, locking it behind him.
Still, it’s a thrilling thing, doing something he knows he shouldn’t do.
And he’s sick of being in that house. Every time he comes downstairs, he thinks he might see his mother sitting at the kitchen table.
It’s a strange thing, realizing a part of your life is over and you don’t know what’s supposed to come next.
The first photo he ever captures of Batman and Robin is complete and utter luck.
He’s standing huddled against the wall of the old bank, breathing warm air over his numb fingers and looking through the photos he’s taken, disappointedly realizing that the cat he’d tried to take a picture of in the alley moved at just the wrong moment, their golden eyes a smudge.
He looks up. He couldn’t say why. And then he lifts his camera and shoots.
It’s far from his best work. Batman and Robin are both out of focus, midair between the two office buildings on the opposite side of the street, a little off-center in his rush to catch them at all. All that’s really visible is a patch of night a little darker than the rest, and a red and green and gold glint right behind it in the sky.
It’s perfect, really. Dick flew on the first two most important nights of Tim’s life, and he flies on this one too - a realization Tim will come to a couple months later when he watches from a rooftop as Robin does a flip that makes Tim clap a hand over his mouth before he can let out a shout.
It’s at this point that his hobby - something he pursues on lonely nights when the house is too big and empty and he needs to feel the heartbeat of the city around him - turns into something more than just a hobby.
He starts to follow the Waynes, even outside of their nighttime adventures. They’re a private lot - the tabloids and the fluff-piece articles tell Tim some things, like what designers Bruce is wearing this season and that apparently Dick Grayson was spotted on one of Bruce’s yachts with some redheaded fashion model - but nothing important.
He finds himself, more and more, wanting to know the important things.
How does Bruce Wayne take his coffee in the mornings? What kind of music does Dick like?
Did Bruce train Dick to be Robin all by himself?
On the rough nights, when Tim catches snippets of them arguing on the rooftops - is that why Dick is so mad at him?
And then, about six months after he starts his nighttime hobby, Robin disappears.
The newspapers report that Dick was in some sort of nasty car accident. Photos are captured of him coming out of a clinic downtown on crutches, his leg in a big green cast. Tim doesn’t know if that’s the truth or just a cover, but Dick looks so unhappy in the photos. He doesn’t smile or laugh, even in the shot right before he gets in the back of a car when he looks right into the camera, having clearly seen the reporters.
Tim dreams about that cast. He dreams of pain, lancing up his bones, hour after hour and day after day and week after week and wonders if Dick can ever be the same again.
Dick’s cast comes off. He gets a job in Bludhaven, teaching at a local gymnastics studio. Tim has the puff piece article about it carefully tucked into his binder of Wayne Family information he’s collected.
Robin doesn’t come back out.
Sometimes, Batman still looks to his side like he’s expecting to see someone there.
Tim tries to be happy for Dick. He really does. If anyone deserves some peace and a normal life, it’s surely him.
Still - when a new vigilante appears on the streets of Bludhaven, one clad in blue and black who soars like gravity is a choice, he thinks he could just about take flight as well.
He knows he was fooling himself if he ever even tried to believe the last of the Graysons belonged anywhere but the skies.
There’s still grief, a pang of understanding that another era has slipped between his fingers before he even knew it was gone. Batman is alone again, and in some strange way it feels like Tim is too.
And then, six months later, a new Robin appears.
***
He’s quite sure that his mother didn’t intend for him to put his abilities to use chasing bats. But he can’t say they don’t come in handy.
He is nine years old, and his leg is very, very broken.
“Shoot,” he hisses, wheezing on the alley ground, the clang of the dumpster he just bounced off of ringing in his ears.
“Shit,” he hears echoed from three stories up, followed by the whir of a grapple.
Tim struggles hastily to sit up. There’s a nasty lump under his jeans radiating cold, sickening pain. He gags at the sudden movement as his head spins, twisting to the side to avoid throwing up on himself, and - oh, yep, those ribs are broken too.
“Kid!?” Robin’s voice is sharp with panic, boots hitting the asphalt with an ungraceful-sounding stumble.
Okay. Shoot. Tim doesn’t have time for this.
He grabs his leg, feeling his back spasm as his entire body tries to go rigid, and breathes through it. Please please please please, he thinks to himself as loudly as he can, trying to drown out the white-hot fire that shoots through him when he tries to apply pressure.
But he doesn’t let go. And, finally, he’s rewarded with a violent snap.
It doesn’t feel particularly healing. He has no real idea if his bone is actually in the right place without taking any time to feel it out, and he has no idea if the sticky wetness on his jeans is blood or mystery alley slime.
No time to worry about that right now. The lump in his leg is no longer glaringly obvious; it’ll have to do.
He gets to his feet, staggering out from behind the dumpster and nearly crashing straight into Robin’s chest. Robin backpedals so fast his cape snaps and flutters around his legs.
“Hi!” Tim wheezes out on reflex. His vision blurs as he accidentally puts some weight on his leg - which is very annoying, seeing as this is the closest view he’s ever gotten of the new Robin, and he’d quite like to take it in while it lasts. “I’m fine! Everything’s fine! Sorry for scaring you!”
Robin’s white lenses are very wide.
He looks at Tim. He looks up at the fire escape Tim just fell off of. “The fuck do you mean you’re fine?” he sputters. “No the fuck you’re not! You just fell two stories! I watched you!”
Tim cringes. It hurts. “Don’t worry about it,” he says. “I just. Do that sometimes.”
He’d kind of like to go back up and throw himself off again, actually.
Robin stares at him in disbelief. Then, suddenly, he’s moving towards him. Quickly.
Tim flinches, hard. His leg nearly gives out on him as his weight shifts, and he’s forced to grab onto the dumpster to keep from dropping to the ground.
The older boy stops in his tracks immediately. His expression is shifting from shocked to scrutinizing, which Tim likes even less.
He raises his hands like Tim is a spooked dog he’s trying to coax. “Hey, little dude, it’s okay,” he says, dropping into the gentle-but-confident, reassuring voice Tim has heard him use on frightened victims.
It’s a lot more impactful five feet away. If Tim were a dog, he’d be very coaxed.
“You’re right. You’re probably fine. But sometimes adrenaline can make it hard to tell how you’re really feeling, yeah? So why don’t we get you to a doctor, just to make really sure you’re fine, huh?” He can sense Robin studying him through the mask, trying to get a read on what the hell Tim is doing in Crime Alley at two in the morning. “You know Leslie’s clinic? Next to that old pizza place a couple blocks south that’s totally a front?” he asks carefully. “She’ll check you out - no questions asked.”
Tim takes an unsteady step backwards. His leg feels like there’s a livewire embedded in it, but it holds his weight.
“That’s okay!” he squeaks. “It really wasn’t that bad of a fall. I just got lucky, I guess.”
Jason looks unimpressed. “You pinged off the dumpster like a pigeon hitting the Liberty Bell.”
The bone in his leg is twinging insistently, nagging like it’s a splinter instead of a part of him, and he knows the bone isn’t lined up the way it should be as it tries to knit together. He grinds his heel down, attempting to subtly twist it back into place… and then abandons that effort when it drags a small hiss past his lips.
Geez, his mother would have words if she could see the way he apparently falls apart any time a Robin is around him.
Robin - Jason - definitely doesn’t miss it. His lips purse unhappily, the weight of his gaze feeling sharper.
Tim’s pretty sure the only reason he doesn’t press is because he thinks Tim might bolt.
Robin glances back up at the rusty fire escape instead. “What were you even doing up there, anyway?” he demands.
Tim doesn’t know if Jason has spotted the camera bag hanging from around his neck yet, half-hidden under his baggy hoodie. The answer is probably yes.
He’s trying very hard not to think about the bag. Specifically, he’s trying very hard not to think about the camera-bag-shaped bruise stamped into his ribs, and what that bruise likely means for the contents of said bag, because frankly there’s a limit to how much a person should be expected to process at once and meeting Robin is already too much.
“I’m - birdwatching,” he says. When Jason stares at him even harder, he gestures helplessly towards the rooftop. “I like, um. Pigeons.”
Jason slowly tilts his head back to look at the gargoyles looming above them. “Pigeons,” he says flatly. Then, he sighs, sounding much more tired than the fourteen year old Tim knows him to be. “Look, pipsqueak, do you have an adult somewhere who’s into… pigeons too? Or at least who knows you’re out here by yourself?”
Tim edges back another step, tentatively taking his hand off the dumpster, relieved when he doesn’t wobble. “Do you have actual vigilante business you’re supposed to be doing?” he shoots back, and then immediately answers his own question before Jason can answer. “Yes, you do. Poison Ivy is on the loose, you’re supposed to be helping Batman catch her.”
And once this is all over, Tim will be very mad about the fact that he missed his action shot because Jason decided to veer off course to come chase after him instead of making that jump from the roof, highlighted by the moon with the glow of the harbor visible in the background, alongside Batman.
Jason does not suddenly remember his real responsibilities and run off to let Tim crawl home and lick his wounds. He does narrow his lenses like he knows exactly what Tim is trying to do.
He crosses his arms. “Keeping twerps like you from getting eaten by a venus fly trap is my business,” he says firmly. “Look, it’s okay if you don’t want me to call your grown-ups,” he continues, gentling his tone. “But you at least gotta have someone with you who can keep an eye on you and get you some help if it turns out you need it. Is there someone I can take you to for the night? A friend? A nice aunt or something?” He shifts his footing uncomfortably. “I know you probably don’t want to go to a shelter, and I feel you, those places suck, but, seriously - if there’s ever a good night to go to one, it’s when you might have internal bleeding, trust me - ”
“I don’t need to go to a shelter,” Tim finally blurts out, feeling unreasonably guilty over the pinched look on Jason’s face under the mask. “My, um. I have parents.” He bites his lip, very aware of who he’s talking to.
Jason’s expression is grim. “Parents who you’re going to tell that you fell off a fire escape?”
Tim opens his mouth. Closes it again.
Jason’s jaw tightens even more.
The small black comm in his ear crackles, the faintest buzz audible in the quiet alley.
He can’t hear the words spoken from this distance, but he can see Jason’s nose scrunch in frustration. He reaches up to slap the comm like an obnoxious bug. “I know, B - I had to stop to deal with something.”
Tim doesn’t like that - being something that Jason needs to deal with. He takes another step backwards.
Jason’s head tilts as he listens to the voice in his ear, lenses narrowed as he tracks Tim’s movement like a hawk. His eyes suddenly widen, head turning in the direction Batman was headed before they split. “Seriously? Both of them? What the hell is Scarecrow even doing out of Arkham?”
Tim goes still again, torn between taking advantage of Jason’s distraction to make a run for it and his instinct to be nosy and get an up-close glimpse of Batbusiness.
Jason mutters a curse. “Okay,” he says. “Yeah. ETA ten minutes.”
He taps the comm off, looking at Tim and sighing frustratedly. He points at him menacingly. “Go straight home,” he says, all trace of his earlier teasing gone. “Don’t stop for any fucking pigeons, okay? Wake up your parents when you get there and tell them - tell ‘em you stepped out to take the trash out and got jumped, if you won’t tell them the truth. I don’t care. Just tell them something so they know to keep an eye out in case something is wrong.”
Tim nods so eagerly it makes the fading whiplash in his neck twinge in discomfort. He can’t believe his luck.
But Jason doesn’t move.
“Promise me,” he demands.
He keeps his gaze fixed on Tim’s face, waiting until he finally whispers, “I promise.”
“Okay,” Jason says, still sounding terribly unhappy as he shifts his weight away from him. “Okay. Straight home, I’m serious, kid.”
He waits to see one more firm nod, and then he’s gone, the whir of a grapple echoing through the alley.
Tim watches the yellow flash of his cape disappear over the edge of the roof. He waits five seconds, ten, fifteen.
At thirty, he allows himself to slump against the side of the dumpster and slide down to the ground, palms wrapped around his leg.
It’s a solid mass between his hands. An unsettlingly lumpy mass, but a solid one - which is a problem.
He digs his fingers into the uneven surface, biting his lip hard as they press into fragile muscle and tendon that’s still working on knitting back together.
No dice. The bone doesn’t shift.
He hauls himself to his feet, testing it, bleakly hoping maybe it’s fine enough and he can just get used to his new lumpy bone.
It is not fine. The misaligned bone takes his weight, if shakily, but there’s a nasty, bad-wrong ache that grows by the second.
He leans off of it quickly. His body is trembling, he notes distantly and with mild annoyance - the shock and adrenaline rush must be catching up to him.
He turns his gaze up towards the fire escape he’s already fallen off of, eyeing it critically.
No, he thinks grimly. Too uncontrolled. Best case, he’ll find himself dealing with two broken legs. Worst, Robin is going to remember him forever as the dumb neighbor kid who fell off a fire escape twice in one night and smashed his skull open on a dumpster.
“Okay,” he mumbles to himself, shoulders slumping. “Okay. I got this.”
He shuffles away from the wall, angling his leg out away from the dumpster and bracing an arm against the grimy metal.
He takes three deep breaths, and imagines Robin giving him a sticker.
Then he spins on his good heel, and allows the force to slam his lumpy shin directly into the sharp corner of the dumpster.
It’s every time he’s ever banged his shin against the art deco coffee table in the living room, magnified by a hundred and made malicious.
There’s no one here to witness him. He lets himself whine like an abandoned dog as he reaches down to grope at his leg.
There’s a nasty bruise bubbling under the skin, hot and sore and already puffy to the touch. But the bone doesn’t move.
He didn’t hit it hard enough to actually break it.
“God damn it,” he hisses, blinking back tears as he falls back on his father’s favorite curse.
He doesn’t let himself count down this time. He cracks his leg against the dumpster - once, twice, a shout slipping past his teeth as he does.
The break finally comes with a sickening crunch.
He crumples to the ground, chest rattling with the effort of holding back sobs. He doesn’t waste any time. He grabs the leg tight and presses, the bone grinding and scraping and white-hot beneath his hands and then –
Like snapping a piece of a jigsaw puzzle into place.
It’s not like the pain stops. But the simmering, itching wrongness in the core of his shin dissipates in moments, all the parts sliding more or less into alignment.
His cheeks are wet. He swipes at them angrily, forehead pressed against his good knee, the humiliatingly wet sounds of his sniffles echoing against the alley walls as he gently rolls his broken leg back and forth in front of him.
He hates mending bone. It itches in a way nothing can scratch, like pins and needles below all the fat and muscle.
He knows objectively that his cells reproduce at more or less the same rate whether his bone is in place or not. It still feels like it takes forever this time, without Robin staring him down while he tries to pretend it isn’t happening.
The pain ebbs. Little prickles and sparks run through his limb as one piece or another connects back into place.
It takes, all told, about twenty minutes for Tim to be able to convince himself to rise on shaky and still-sore legs and stumble out of the alley, which is about nineteen minutes too long for his taste.
He’s lucky. Being downed in Crime Alley for that long is a very good way to end up healing from a broken leg and a stab wound.
He makes himself stand on the bus back to Bristol, white-knuckle gripping one of the poles, even though there’s almost no one else on the bus. If he sits down right now, he’s pretty sure he’ll pass out and sleep right through his stop. The only thing keeping him awake is the cramping in his stomach.
By the time he stumbles in through his front door, he’s shaky, starving, and wants nothing more than to curl up in a little ball and sleep for the next week.
But first.
Safely hidden from any watching eyes, he leans back against the door as he unzips his grimy hoodie, pulling out the camera bag tucked inside against his chest.
He already knows what he’ll find.
He tilts the cracked plastic shell of his camera in his hands, listening to the tinkle of broken glass rattling inside.
His body must have really put its all into focusing on his leg at the expense of everything else. He could swear his chest hurts almost as badly as the moment he fell.
***
In the morning, he uses his emergency credit card to order himself a new camera. He goes up a level; the new model costs several thousand more than the one his parents got him, and he picks out a couple new lenses, just for fun.
For the next week, he waits breathlessly for them to notice the expensive purchase, keeping an eye on the time difference between home and their current expedition to Myanmar as he tries to guess when they’ll call to berate him for his carelessness with both their gift and their money.
The call never comes. Not even a sternly-worded email. At the end of the month, the credit card is paid off in full.
Tim takes his new camera out on the town the same night it arrives, and tells himself this is for the best.
***
Robin dies.
Tim isn’t a little kid anymore. He understands that people - most people - die rather easily, sooner or later.
But Robin isn’t most people.
Robin was supposed to be magic. Like Tim.
He watches Batman’s fists turn bloody, beating down people who do not get up again when they get hurt. Every crack of bone makes Tim flinch, every shout of pain and fear puts his heart in his throat.
He tries to imagine, not for the first time, what it must be like for the pain to linger. To be hauled off to the hospital in handcuffs and know that the broken bones are going to stay broken for - days? Weeks?
… Months, sometimes, according to Google.
Something needs to change, Tim thinks, calling an ambulance from his hiding place behind a gargoyle as Batman’s cape disappears over a rooftop.
Something needs to change, he thinks, slipping out to check the pulse of one of Penguin’s goons with shaking hands.
I need to change this.
He buys a bus ticket to Bludhaven.