Chapter Text
Three was an exciting birthday for Tim.
Although, exciting didn’t necessarily mean good.
The memories of it are hazy, now. Time has reduced it to images, only flashes of what it used to be. Still, for such an old memory, it’s relatively clear. The fact that he can still recall anything is enough to mark it as important.
He asked for one thing that year. He wanted to see Haly’s circus, they were coming back into town in July, for the first time in years. Tim saw the commercials, his father said it was only a few days after his birthday. It was like fate.
He remembers his father brandishing the tickets between thick fingers, his gold wedding ring catching the light just like the sheen of the gloss-covered paper did, they mirrored each other. Gold and shining and brilliant. Tim did not squeal, like he wanted to, but he took the tickets into his much smaller hands, and stared.
He can remember: TV broadcasts, red and white striped tents, bodies twisting, spotlights, elephants and peanuts, and unicycles, flying, flying, flying. He wanted to go so badly, and he was going to.
His mother was smiling that day when they went to the circus; a surprisingly gentle thing. And though Tim was young at the time, and therefore his memory was short and unreliable, he could not remember her smiling very often.
She was smiling that day. She went so far as to ruffle his hair. Her hands were cold, and her nails were long and sharp, but her palms were soft with lotion. She smelled like perfume. Probably wearing something with a European name on it, that came in a small bottle for a steep price. Maison Francis, or Frederic Malle, something that she thought fit a woman of her standard.
It is only years in the future that he realizes that this might’ve been the first time his mother ever smiled directly at him.
In pictures from that time, she only seemed to regard Tim with indifference. Her eyes would glaze over and past him. If she was looking at Jack, or something in her hands, or off-screen, then she smiled.
But, if it was Tim, there was nothing.
There’s a good reason Tim doesn’t look back at family scrapbooks. Even years later, and through a photo, Tim can feel the cold apathy of Janet Drake seep into his bones like ice.
Janet never really seemed to want a child.
In the very first picture of them together, taken at the hospital by a nurse, Janet looks like she cares about him as much as she cares about a speck of dust. She actually might care about dust more.
In the first picture ever taken of Tim (the first proof of his existence, before they even sign the birth certificate,) Janet, tired, red, and sweaty from labor, just stares down at her son and frowns.
In the second picture, the very second picture of Tim ever taken in this world, Tim still has no name, his mother is no longer frowning.
It's worse: her grip loosens a little, like she's debating letting him tumble to the floor, her expression is pulled flat, and she has tipped her head back and away from her son. Exposing the sweaty column of her neck, veins still bulging from the exertion of childbirth to the photographer. She looks to the ceiling like she wants, desperately, to be anywhere but there. Like she would give anything to be free of the moment.
The notes on the back of that picture state that Tim is an oddly silent baby. He was actually so quiet when he arrived that at first they thought he might have come out dead. They scrambled to check if he was one of those unlucky ones that’s born with a noose around his neck before the hardships of life could knot it itself. But he was alive. It was actually an easy birth, a very healthy one, even, it just took him longer than it should have to start crying.
At least, this was according to the recallings of his drunk father, years after the fact, who only heard about the birth from a nurse because he was too busy with a meeting to attend it himself. According to Jack, the whole affair was oddly quiet. It was loud, as all births are, of course, but as a relative thing it was quiet. Like the library of births. Like everyone was scared to make a sound.
It makes sense. Janet always hated making a scene.
She smiled a lot while she was pregnant. But then pregnancy was over, and she held Tim in her arms, and her glow vanished like a snuffed candle. She was back to being cold.
Tim has always been good at being where he shouldn’t be. His life is best played out as a series of incidents. Wrong time, wrong place. From the moment he was in that hospital bed he'd been in the wrong place.
For example- His third birthday, Haly's circus, the Flying Graysons. He was there when Batman led a hysterical nine-year-old Dick Grayson away from the scene of brutality his parent’s performance of the night had been reduced to.
His third birthday was, decidedly, a disaster.
The circus didn't go as planned. The wire holding up the Grayson's snapped, and they fell.
Down. Hands still together, halfway through a swing, it was a straight shot to the floor. There was no net to catch them.
An outpouring of screams were not well contained by the walls of the tent- but surprise turned to horror, and then everyone was still, the band playing music derailed into a flurry of discordant sounds before stopping altogether, lips parted from a tuba, hands dropped drumsticks so they clattered to the floor, somewhere off stage the performers were making confused noises- heads peeked out to see.
Once more, the noise of the crowd grew louder to fill the suddenly quiet space: screaming, screaming, screaming.
At first, Tim could not seem to move from his seat, and he could not look away. His mother covered her own eyes, and left Tim ro watch as those two bodies crunched into death, bones breaking, then they slowly rolled over on the ground with the residual momentum. There was a nothingness behind their expressions, but their hands were still clasped together. A morbid show of love.
A frenzied half an hour later, Tim got lost in the crowd. His parent’s grips slipped from his own, and then he spirited himself away from the noise and the terror (on small, wobbly legs), and the trampling feet of people who didn’t see him- not their fault, his head was about level with their thighs. He could hear demands being made. Most words he recognized, and some he did not. He had a large vocabulary for his age, but his parents never told him what refunds were. People sounded angry.
His heart could not comprehend the horror, and he simply wished for somewhere quiet to sit, away from it, until his parents could bring him home.
Then he heard Dick.
"I... I should-" a choked off noise, guttural, "I have to tell someone. I need to tell someone."
Then he heard Batman:
There's no announcement of Batman's presence until there's his voice. Steady. Comforting in the way only Batman can be: dark, foreboding and yet, somehow, kind. His shadow is an omen of doom for any criminal, but for the victims and the civilians who are wrapped up inside of it, (pushed behind the stern, protective line of his back so they can use Batman like a shield, or ushered into the warmth of his cape and the embrace of heavy fabric,) it is a sign that they will be safe another day. How Batman takes darkness and makes it comforting is something no one else will ever be able to do.
"Not yet, dear boy," a gruff voice says.
“Who-” A bewildered Dick.
"It's okay. I'm the Batman, and I want to help."
Those words weren’t Tim’s to hear, but he heard them anyways. Took them like they were his own. Like he was pocketing a candy bar at a convenience store in a sweaty, guilty palm. He took those words and held them fast to his own chest.
It was not his night to remember, but he still has not forgotten it.
Maybe the words were different, maybe the tickets were silver, maybe the air smelled like peanuts, not popcorn, maybe it was cold outside, not hot with summer air. There are conversations, and jumps in time that Tim can not recall. He does not know what other acts, if any, went on before the Graysons.
Perhaps the memory is now more of a construct that he’d built up- romanticized with time. The real memories gradually replaced with his own understanding of what they should be. Perhaps Dick's smile was smaller, less pointed towards Tim, the glimmer in the air was less magical, and it was less awful when it was gone.
But, unmistakably, the memory persists. It could be a ship of Theseus- each part now replaced by his own imaginings. But, however Tim remembers it, that's what stays. Ambiguous as it is, it's a critical memory, a piece of himself now.
Even if everything a bit confused. Golden tickets shining in the light coming from the tent, a smiling attendant allowing them backstage, Dick's smile, his parent's blurry faces, all of them taking a photo, right before disaster. Dick was at his side for a moment and it was like standing next to the sun, a ball of bright energy, then Dick hugged him and it was so, so warm. The flash of a camera, and then they proceeded to the tent, front row seats, bouncing up and down in seats that stuck to his skin, the smell of popcorn and candy.
A snapped wire, Dick's trembling voice, a gloved hand landing on a shaking shoulder, the whisper of movement right in front of Tim, a dark cape sweeping the floor and kicking up dust. So close that Tim could reach if he came out from his hiding place behind the thick curtains, but he doesn't dare announce his presence, or act like he belongs.
That night is his first sight of something truly, truly unattainable.
Something he shouldn't have seen.
He has always been good at being in the wrong place, wrong time. Tim has never been where he should be.
Janet reminded him of this fact in the car ride home that night. She berated him for running off, and he said he was sorry, but didn't really listen to her at all.
He just stared out the window at the passing Gotham. A Gotten he doesn't have to remember because he sees it every day. Dark bricks, yellow street lamps, gothic windows with thick, old glass, tinged with age, buildings topped with spires that go on forever into the night sky, reaching for something that they can't quite get to.
As it always does in Gotham: it began to rain.
He was supposed to be in a booster seat but wasn't. His parents didn't like having it in their car and Tim wanted to sit in the regular seat like they did.
Jack grew angry as Tim ignored them, but even he had not meant for it to happen so harshly. Perhaps he thought it would just be a jolt, and pressed on the breaks.
But the tire tried to stop on unforgiving wet pavement, the car turned in the road, momentum almost tipping them over, and Tim hurtled into the back of his mother's seat.
-
Tim had a broken arm.
His parents had no injuries. They sued (though whether it was the car manufacturer or their mechanic, Tim isn't sure. But they claim that there are faulty brakes, and Drake's, and by extension, Drake lawyers, never lose.)
They don't themselves again after this night. They rarely did before, but Tim's birthday show was a special occasion, it was supposed to just be Tim and his parents.
And it.
Well.
It went poorly enough that it would never happen again
They hand off the instructions of Tim's care to a nanny. They just print off the doctor's notes- how to keep the cast dry in the tub, when the checkups are at the doctors- and then fly off to Peru.
They use the money in the settlement to pay for their trip. Not because they had to dip into those particular funds, but because they wanted to. Like it proved something.
The cast is off by the time they return.