Archive of Our Own

Tim’s memory has always been a point of contention in his household, largely because it’s quite remarkable. 

In the Drake household, however, and specifically with regards to Jack and Janet Drake, remarkable doesn’t necessarily mean positively remarkable so much as it means something that our child chooses to vex us with when we are exhausted and simply trying to enjoy a few glasses of wine. 

It’s not as if Tim can help it; he doesn’t choose to remember. He just does . Things just file themselves into his brain like bills being sorted at a bank, and that’s how Tim makes sense of the world– it’s how he always made sense of the world. Names, dates, times, how many spoons of sugar Janet takes ( one and a half, always), how many times Jack shakes his pants out before he wears them ( three, without fail), how many clementines Tim likes to eat after lunch ( one, but two if they’re sweet). 

He remembers the two plane tickets from Archie Goodwin International Airport to Suvarnabhumi International Airport, dated for July 10th, nine days before Tim’s birthday. He remembers the path on the flight tracker, perpetually open on Tim’s phone, because they don’t always let him know when they land. They’re busy-busy, Janet says, busy busy busy, Timothy, we can’t always be texting you. You’ll just have to trust we’ll be back safe .

I won’t go down in some lousy crash, Jack says, insulted. 

And he doesn’t. 

Tim’s memory is very good.

That means he remembers the exact moment he’d heard the gunshots.

And, he remembers the exact moment he’d discovered their bodies.

The first thing Tim does is fold down to the ground, because all the bones in his legs seem to dissolve away into dust. His knees land hard against the hardwood panels, and then his palms, and his chest does something he’s only felt a few times before— it buckles, like it’s made of sugar lace. Tim knows what sugar lace is because he’d seen it on his mother’s birthday cake, once, and it had snapped fragile and easy underneath the knife.

His chest feels like sugar lace— all of him feels like sugar lace, under a knife.

For a moment, he thinks he’ll throw up, but he— he can’t, not on their nice rug, not on their nice floors. Always maintain decorum in a crisis, and this is a crisis, and his mother will never say those words to him again, so he has to— 

He has to—

It’s not that he can’t process that they’re dead. 

It’s a fact of life. Tim’s parents are dead. Jack and Janet Drake are dead. 

(Google: What do you do when someone— two someones— your parents—)

One moment, Jack is laying facedown, and the next, he’s on his back, even though Tim doesn’t quite remember turning his father over. He can see Jack’s face, now, peaceful in death. The perpetual pinch between his brows flattened into smoothness, into nothing. 

And Janet. His mother’s necklace is missing. She’s already on her back, starfished over the wood floor as if she’s swimming on her back. He’s only seen her swim once. 

There’s hardly any blood. Tim thinks his parents would appreciate that, since blood is so hard to clean. He would know, because he’d had a terrible nosebleed, once, and Janet had shrilly proclaimed that blood on the rug would be a disaster, a nightmare to clean, and she’d herded Tim away from the vulnerable fabrics and sat him and his bleeding nose right down onto the kitchen tile. There he’d stayed, until the bleeding tapered off, until he was deemed living-room-friendly once more.

They would be glad, he thinks, and the world whirls around him, lost to a blur of reds and oranges and browns. They would be glad to know that they died on the wood and not the rug. 

When the world comes into clarity around him, he realizes he’s lying beside his mother. 

She’s still dead. He knows, because there’s the quiet and the not-breathing and the not-moving and, right, the bullet hole, a matching set with the one in his father. 

The time is— it’s starting to creep into the brightness of morning, which is odd, because it had been night, it had just been— It had just been 3:41 in the morning, when he’d heard two shots in quick succession. It had just been night, but it isn’t anymore. He isn’t sure how it happened.

He’s cold. Shivering, just as cold as his mother’s marble fingers when he presses his own against hers. Janet’s never been particularly warm, not in Tim’s memories of her, but sometimes, when he’d catch her at the right angle in the sun, or see the line of her face as she looked away from him, there could be something soft, something a little gentler. 

None of that, not anymore. Tim tries gently to suffuse her with his living-warmth, but she’s too cold, he’s too cold. He’s so cold his teeth keep chattering in his ears. He drapes a blanket over his mother, first, and then his father, with fingers that hardly respond to him anymore. 

“I’m sorry,” he says in his head, but it comes clattering out of his mouth, somehow, like marbles clinking together. The cold’s crept all the way up along his arms like ivy at this point, suffocating his blood like weeds choking a river. “I should’ve…” 

There’s nobody left to forgive him. Just him, just him. He’s alone in here, in this enormous house full of Things, important Things that Jack and Janet had dedicated their life to procuring. 

Tim’s an orphan in a house full of Things, and his parents left them all behind.

Before patrol that evening, Bruce asks him if he’s okay.

Tim thinks about how he doesn’t remember if he went to school today. He thinks about how there’s nobody left for him. He thinks about how he’s going to walk in through the front door of his house after patrol, because sneaking in is for people who have parents who will be mad if they sneak in, and not for people who don’t have parents, like Tim, who is now an orphan, because his parents are dead in their living room. Is it still their living room? Something, something, how cruel for them to have died in the living room, of all places. Maybe they would find that funny.

Through brittle laughter that sears the inside of his throat away like acid, Tim says, “I’m okay, I’m okay. I’m okay.” Three times the charm. Bruce only looks half-convinced, so Tim pries open his stiff, cold fingers into little finger g— 

Little finger g— 

He makes a funny little gesture. Bruce sighs, and his furrowed brow tilts into something unamused, but unamused means he won’t pry (which is good, because Tim’s about as tightly boarded up as rotting wood, right about now). 

He manages to act like a person for as long as Bruce is with him, or at least person-adjacent. Bruce tells him something in a This-Is-Important sort of voice, and Tim tries to pay attention, he does, but he feels like his brain is pushing up against his skull, he feels like the bone is starting to crack and splinter under the pressure. Bruce says something like “The sally is food berry stories, so stay awake,” and Tim has no fucking idea what to make of that, and he doesn’t ask. He’s sure that he’ll start screaming if he opens his mouth, so he keeps his lips pressed together and nods.

(He wonders if his parents had time to scream.)

Bruce splits up with him somewhere in the Bowery. He thinks. He isn’t sure. It feels like it could be the Bowery. Everything’s a little blurry, a little hazy; the buildings all curve and bend above him, merging into one, long, dark shadow in which Tim can hardly discern where one stops and another begins. Death’s imprinted into the back of his eyelids, so he tries not to close his eyes for as long as he can, until they start to water. 

He’s still so cold, even though it’s June, and the air is muggy and warm and smothering, and Tim shouldn’t be this cold. He has to press his teeth together to keep them from clacking together, and he keeps whistling these pitiful little sounds out between his teeth. At some point, he buckles against a roof railing with no memory of how he’d gotten there, punching out breaths so hard he’s surprised the momentum doesn’t pitch him clear off the edge of the roof.

There’s a gaping expanse in his chest, something with a gravitational pull that feels like it could swallow the world. He gulps in air, but the thing in his chest sucks it right out of his lungs immediately, leaving him heaving for breath as he crawls underneath a plumbing vent pipe. He holds onto it for dear life, because he isn’t sure that whatever’s inside of him won’t swallow him, too—

The howling inside of him gradually whistles back down into a hum. In the distorted metal mirror of the vent pipe, Tim realizes he’s bone-white. 

“The sally is food berry stories, so stay awake.” 

Tim decodes this only after a bullet whistle-screams a good few inches past his shoulder. He’d been roaming around aimlessly, and he isn’t sure when he’d crossed lines ( how had he gotten off the roof?) but Hood makes it glaringly clear. He always seems to have a sixth sense for sniffing out anyone he considers interlopers, as it were.

“Pretender,” Hood says, like one would say “Vermin.” 

Tim stares at the bullet hole seared into the brick wall. He stares, and stares, and stares until everything starts to twist and ripple like a mirage, and suddenly, all he can see is the back of his father’s head.

Obviously, Hood hadn’t been trying to kill Tim, because Tim’s a sitting duck of a target in his current state, and if Hood had wanted to, Tim would have been dead. Just as dead as both of his parents, and wouldn’t that have been oddly poetic?

“Didn’t he warn you,” Hood says, voice coarse and cruel-edged, “that this is my territory? That I don’t take kindly to trespassing birds?” 

“The sally is food berry stories, so stay awake.” 

“The Alley is Hood’s territory, so stay away.” 

Oh. 

Hood’s arms are loose by his side, and he’s only a few feet away from Tim— Tim hadn’t even registered him approaching. Tim’s not even sure if Hood’s real, actually. He doesn’t know how long he’s been out here. He isn’t used to not remembering things, but he can’t remember what he’s doing here or how he even got here. He presses both hands to his chest to hold himself together lest he shambles apart right in front of Hood, who won’t bother picking up the pieces.

Tim’s parents are at home, and they’re cold, and alone, and dead. He can’t get shot by Hood out here. 

If this had been a normal day, Tim might have sought Hood out. He’s had this burgeoning suspicion that Hood and Jason Todd, the second Robin, are connected somehow; however, the reasoning behind that link is, like most other things, locked away behind an utterly undecipherable stone wall. Where he is right now, Tim’s lucky if he can even remember how the hell he ended up in Hood’s territory. He remembers having had encounters with the crime lord before, but he doesn’t— he doesn’t remember how they’d gone. He can’t remember. 

“Sorry,” he says, knee-jerk-reflexive. He turns around and walks right into the brick wall.

“What the fuck,” Hood says behind him, but his words are blurry and smudged soft around the edges so they sort of smear together. “Are your eyes just decoration or something?” 

Tim’s entire face throbs, but it doesn’t hurt. Tim’s not entirely sure why, but he doesn’t question it, because he’s too busy filling his palm with blood as he keeps it cupped underneath his nose. He— The wall hadn’t been so close. Had it? His legs tremble as he manages to walk himself out of the Alley, and he can feel the weight of Hood’s silent, too-bewildered-to-be-annoyed stare between his shoulders. He doesn’t have the capacity to think, though, save for one consuming thought; despite the fact that no one is waiting for him at home, he desperately needs to be there. 

When Tim gets home, he sneaks in through the window. Force of habit.

(Bruce will probably be mad that Tim ducked out of patrol without telling him. Or had Tim told him? Maybe he had, but— he can’t— he doesn’t— )

Lying between his mother and father, Tim presses his blood-slick palms over his face. He has no idea what fucking happened today. He went to school— maybe? He patrolled— maybe? Or maybe that was yesterday. Hood had got him, but Tim isn’t sure when that happened; his nose is bleeding… Maybe they fought? That feels like it could make sense. 

He slips his fingers between Janet’s once the blood has dried, so that it crumbles off his skin instead of getting all over her. She’d hate that. She’s in a white nightgown, after all, and Tim’s not stupid enough to make things even worse than they already are.

By now, they’d have been in Bangkok.

Tim’s not entirely oblivious to the fact that his parents had, perhaps, not been the best parents that they could’ve been. To even be the best parents they could’ve been, they’d have to have been at home for more than one month out of the year. Even still, Jack would sometimes reach out absently to ruffle Tim’s hair as he passed him on the staircase, exhaustion having lowered his usual barriers. Janet would allow him a sip of her wine, especially if she was feeling particularly triumphant in the wake of a successful dig. They weren’t the best, but he didn’t need the best, he didn’t even want the best.

Tim lifts Jack’s hand up against his hair and presses, but it’s too cold to feel real.

Inside the house, time feels as if it rolls to a grinding halt. The clock’s hands tick away, but all Tim knows is 3:44, 3:44, 3:44. The palette of the sky shifts outside the window, suggesting that the world beyond him is still functioning, but not him. Not him. 

He’s been sitting with his parents all night. All morning? All day. He’s still in his Robin colors when night rolls around again, so he trudges out just like that. The costume feels secure— familiar, and behind the domino his expression is safe from prying eyes— namely, Bruce’s prying eyes. 

He practices smiling. The first, a smile that feels like all teeth, won’t pass. He looks feral in the mirror. The second approaches human, but it’s too much a grimace, twisted corners of his mouth that he can’t seem to tilt back upright again. 

My parents are dead, he thinks when he looks at the mirror, and he’s exhausted. My parents are dead, and I have to smile like a human being. 

The last smile— thin-lipped and tight, is passable. He can make it through scrutiny with this, at least. He thinks he can make it through scrutiny. He doesn’t know how long he’ll be able to do this; all he can think is that if someone comes to take his parents away, Tim will never see them again, and then he’ll be alone, he’ll be alone. He knows what’s right, but right feels like good-bye and do you have any other family? and he’ll be able to access his trust fund when he’s eighteen and we’ll make sure to take good care of you, Timothy. 

It feels like how could his parents have left him. 

“It’s come to my attention,” Bruce says in his I-am-very-disappointed voice, “that you didn’t attend school today, Tim.” 

Tim smiles at him, brittle. He’s aware that this, perhaps, isn’t an appropriate moment to be smiling, but he’s locked into the expression now; if he tries to do anything else with his face, he’s afraid the mask will crack right down the center and expose the absolute nothing underneath. He isn’t able to put together a cogent argument as to why he hadn’t attended school, either; frankly, for much of today, he’d somewhat forgotten that the concept of school even existed, let alone the fact that he ought to have been attending.

Bruce’s mouth flattens into a tight, impenetrable line. He, unlike Tim, is not smiling. “Tim, they called me because they weren’t able to reach your parents, and you put me down as the next available contact. I told them I would check in on you. Where are your parents?” 

“Definitely alive,” is the first thing Tim thinks to say, because he’s a fucking idiot. The thing in his chest howls something fierce, and Tim thinks it might have sucked his lungs right down because it’s so hard to breathe, all of a sudden, it’s so hard to breathe. He manages to punch one sharp breath out between his smiling teeth so hard that it nearly dislodges something. “Just hard to reach. Digs, you know. That’s how it goes.” 

Bruce grunts. It’s Disapproving Grunt #3, which means he’s thinking, “I’m not going to take action right now, but this is on my radar, and I’m going to be looking somewhat closely.” Tim would’ve preferred Disapproving Grunt #1, which is more like “this is irritating, but not necessarily worth looking into yet.” 

“You shouldn’t be skipping school,” Bruce says after a beat, leaning back against his chair and folding his arms over his chest. “Do you want to tell me why you did it?” 

“Well,” Tim says, and chokes. “Well, I…” 

What is the societally appropriate way of saying “my parents fucking died and I spent the better part of my day sat between their dead bodies, trying and failing to emulate the ephemeral moments of affection they’d offer me on the rare occasions that they weren’t frustrated by or at least largely inconvenienced by my existence”?

Bruce examines him for a moment, and some of the sharpness in his expression softens away into something a little more concerned.  

“Maybe you should take a couple of days off from Robin,” he says, low and cautious, and Tim feels the edges of his smile fracture. “You seem… Tired. Do you want to stay here while your parents are away? I’m sure Alfred would—” 

“You’re right. I would like to go home and rest,” Tim says through his teeth. Some sort of sharp-toothed creature that won’t stop screaming is fist-fighting his brain and it’s winning , and if Tim stands here much longer, he’s going to collapse into a pile of nothing. Bruce looks surprised; he had been expecting an argument, that much is clear, but Tim doesn’t have any more words left in him. He doesn’t even remember how to speak, now that he thinks about it, so he turns himself around and gets the hell out of there before he splinters apart.

He means to go home— he does, he means to go home —but he finds himself decidedly not at home. When he comes to awareness, he’s folded up like a wonky paper crane and clutching a fire hydrant like it’s the only thing tethering him to any semblance of reality.

He doesn’t know where the fuck he is. Nothing looks familiar. His world currently consists of exactly two things: the segment of sidewalk he’s currently occupying, and the fire hydrant beside it. He doesn’t remember coming out here; his cape is pooled around him in sewer water, and the air, stale with cigarette smoke and gasoline, only becomes prominent now. He more gasps than breathes, and then chokes immediately as he tries to wobble to his feet.

“Are you itching to be taught a lesson or something, kid?” 

Tim turns, his arms full of his wet cape. Hood. 

Oh. He must be in the Alley again.

“What the fuck are you doing here? Why the fuck are you harassing a fire hydrant?” Hood asks him, and the warble of his modulated voice is again more incredulous than angry. That’s good. Incredulity means he won’t strangle Tim— at least, not now, perhaps. 

“I don’t know,” Tim says, even though he ought to have dissembled. Honesty is usually the best policy, but not necessarily when it comes to Hood. “Took a wrong turn at the last stop sign.” Fuck, Tim, shut up, he thinks helplessly, his teeth clacking together as he huddles his cape close to himself. “I don’t know,” he repeats, and then starts walking. He— He has to get home. He doesn’t know where he’s going, but he’s worried that if he stands still, he’ll grow roots, and the earth will swallow him down into a grave of cement. 

“Pretender,” Hood hisses out between his teeth, furious, “where the fuck do you think you’re going?”

Tim’s standing on the metal platform of a fire escape. Hood’s on the stairs only a few paces away, and he—  he’s still there. Hood’s still there, for some reason. Hood is here and Tim isn’t dead, which means miracles can happen, but not for his parents.

(Also— when did he climb these stairs?)

“Home,” Tim tells him patiently, and keeps climbing up toward the roof. Hood makes a sharp sound of frustration and follows warily; he keeps staring at Tim like he thinks Tim is possessed, and that’s fair, Tim does feel a little possessed. It feels like something else inside of him has taken the wheel, something dead-voiced and demon-eyed, and Tim is locked in the trunk while it careens down the freeway at full speed. 

“You are just the fucking same as he is,” Hood seethes. Tim’s pressed against the short railing of the roof, now, and Hood is hanging back a few feet. There isn’t any wind, nothing to bring Tim back, nothing that feels like anything except for the warm, heavy air. It’s like everything is the same, because that’s how things go; a hole doesn’t open in the sky just because Tim’s parents die. It’s still the same June air, the same, humid summer. “You just fucking come and go, like my threat doesn’t mean jack shit. You want me to kill you, kid? You want me to leave another dead Robin for Batman to find, since he can’t seem to wrap his head around keeping you the hell out of my territory? Because I will, I’ll fucking do it.” His chest is heaving, words guttural with fury, and he might as well not have a helmet at all with how visceral his rage is— hairpin trigger, and if Tim makes the wrong move, his fuse might just go off and blow them both to hell. 

Hood steadily lifts his gun. Aims. Black swallows Tim’s vision entirely as his soggy cape tumbles out of his now-limp arms. 

Well it— 

It kind of makes sense, in like a poetic way. 

( Had they screamed? Should he scream?)

“Fucking entitled little shit,” Hood says, all bark, all bite. “Let me guess. Trust fund kid, mommy and daddy never told you no, so you’re incapable of following directions—”

Tim’s lungs compress, collapse entirely into nothing. He grasps at his chest to try to keep his insides— inside, but his feet, unsteady, go out underneath him, slide along the slick tatters of cape, and the railing is suddenly in front of him, and—

And then he’s falling.

When Tim’s awareness decides to join him again, he cottons onto Hood saying things that feel like they should be words but just sound like a series of sharp, spiky sounds. 

“—the fuck is wrong with you, what were you fucking thinking —”

Tim lethargically rolls his eyes upward: he’s tucked up against a dumpster. How…

“Oi.” Sharp snapping in his peripheral, and Tim angles his head slightly to lock onto the jarring sound. He scrapes in a breath that feels like it tears at his throat on the way down and tries to sit up, but his limbs, his limbs are boneless. “I’m talking to you. Robin. What the fuck were you thinking, taking a dive off the roof like that? Fuck’s sake, you trying to make my job easier or something?” 

Tim, at the crawling pace of a death march, coils himself up into fetal position and presses his cheek into the asphalt, trying to breathe, trying to make any of this make sense. Everything he’s ever used to ground himself is a meaningless blur— he doesn’t know the time, he doesn’t know the date, Janet will never take her one and a half spoons of sugar again, Jack will never shake his pants out three times again, and Tim, Tim is all that’s left— 

Oh my god, my parents are dead, he thinks, my parents are dead, my parents are dead, my parents are dead. He shoves his fingertips hard into the asphalt, into the gravel, trying to combat the numbness, trying to make something hurt, but he can’t, he can’t, he still can’t feel anything—

“Oi. Kid.” Hood says, and though the modulator twists the edges of his words into something cruel, Tim’s now become aware of the fact that Hood had caught him as he’d fallen. He doesn’t recall what exactly happened, but he isn’t a heap of broken bones on the ground, so that has to count for something.

(Or maybe all of his bones are broken, and Tim doesn’t even know.)

He angles his head slightly toward Hood, and can’t make heads nor tails of the blank slate staring, indeterminable, back at him. 

“Where the hell’s your other glove,” Hood says. He’s crouched a few feet away from Tim, but his gun is out of sight, now. 

Tim sluggishly moves his hand out in front of him. Bare. His hand goes blurry in front of him, totally out-of-focus, and there’s no glove. He doesn’t know where the glove went, or when he lost it. He doesn’t know anything. Time. Date. How much sugar his dad takes. How many times his mom shakes out her pants.

Wait—

It’s all blurring together. He feels the thing inside of him expand, wreaking havoc like a hurricane, shrieking like a banshee, he— 

“I don’t know,” he says, and over the wailing in his lungs, he croaks, “I don’t know, Hood, I don’t know, I don’t know. I don’t want to fight again.” 

“What do you—” Hood rests back on his haunches, and Tim can almost hear him grind his teeth together. “Again. What the fuck do you mean, again?” 

“I,” Tim starts, pulling himself upright painstakingly. “I had— a bloody nose. The other—” When was that? Yesterday? Two days ago? No, because Bruce had talked to him about missing school, and that had been today… That had been today, right?

He— He doesn’t know. 

“Yeah,” Hood says incredulously, “because you walked into a fucking brick wall, dumbass.” 

“I w—” Tim stops. He presses his knuckles against his mouth so he doesn’t scream, and uses the dumpster to try to get back to his feet. “I walked into a brick wall,” he echoes. He doesn’t remember that— any of that. “I need to go home.” 

Hood’s fingers twitch at his sides, like he’s only just managing to keep from exploding. Tim can’t blame him; he hasn’t been making sense, even to himself, but it’s hard to make sense when nothing makes sense. 

“I need to go home,” Tim says. He’s been gone so long. His parents will be— dead.

“Only fucking smart choice you’ve made all night,” Hood snarls out through his teeth, still fuming. “I’m not going to warn you again— stay the hell away from here.” 

“Okay,” Tim says, too tired to argue, too tired to remember the context of the warning. Hood himself keeps flickering in and out of Tim’s blurry vision, like a glitch, and it’s exhausting trying to keep him in sights. When Tim doesn’t move ( he doesn’t know which way to go) , Hood’s fingers curl into tight fists that squeak his gloves loudly. 

“One time,” Hood tells him. “I’m going to do this one time, because this is fucking pathetic, and it’s pissing me off just to watch you. Follow me.” 

He turns on his heel, and he’s all Tim has, so Tim follows. He doesn’t know where Batman is.

He could be dead, too—

No. Tim would know. Tim would know. 

He thinks he can feel wetness behind the mask as he trails behind Hood, soggy cape gripped in hand, one glove down.

“You know where I live?” Tim finds it in himself to ask, and Hood snorts. It’s a mirthless, derisive sound. 

“I know everything about you,” he says harshly. 

Tim thinks he should probably be more worried about Hood knowing his identity, but he just— doesn’t. It doesn’t feel like it matters, any of it, as long as Tim can keep his mask on, as long as nobody will look into his eyes and see the wasteland of his insides reflected in them. He just hopes Hood doesn’t come in, because— Jack and Janet would hate that. They’re in their nightclothes. And also dead. 

“You don’t know everything,” Tim says, and his voice comes out choked.

Hood dumps Tim off his motorcycle the second they’re in front of his house and immediately speeds off after aiming what Tim assumes is a vindictive look in the direction of Wayne Manor (and there’s something there, if Tim could just… grasp it). Tim is grateful he leaves promptly, in any case, because that means Hood doesn’t see him crawl the last few feet into his house.

Walking is so hard. It’s so tiring, which Tim belatedly realizes is because he hasn’t been eating much, maybe. The piece of clementine he eats fills his mouth like dust, but Tim’s pretty sure he’ll also die if he keeps this whole not-eating thing up, so he forces himself to choke it down fully.

“Did you know I’m Robin,” he says to no one, sprawled horizontal in between his parents. “You never had a chance to find out. I think you would’ve— handled it poorly,” he says, and the words kind of wheeze out of him. Grief is— an unpredictable creature, Tim realizes. He can go through the motions uninterrupted, and out of nowhere, profound despair like nothing Tim’s ever known eats him alive, devouring pieces of him until there’s nothing left but bones. Like now, when he comes to the slow realization that he’s just been saying words that make no sense, in an order that doesn’t mean anything, to an audience that cannot hear him.

“I’m sorry,” he says, and he manages coherency, finally. “I’m so sorry I couldn’t save you.”

He wraps himself up in the cape, close to his mother. If he closes his eyes, he can almost remember being little again, in that sweet, brief period of time where his parents had found his antics more winsome than irritating. He can remember Janet sliding over slightly to let him squirm in between her and a sleepy, grumbling Jack, where he’d felt safer than he had in his own bed. In between them, now, in the safety of the darkness behind his eyes, Tim curls himself up between his parents and loses time, loses time, loses time.

Tim doesn’t go to school the next day, which he realizes belatedly is for the best, because it’s a Saturday. It’s a beautiful, sunny, summer Saturday, and light beams in through the windows, catches on the buttons of Janet’s nightgown.

He thinks he slept, but he’s still so tired. So tired that he can’t seem to move his arms, or really anything else. He doesn’t try to. The cape is stiff, by now, from the gutter water, and Tim’s missing one of his gloves (he isn’t sure how that happened, but it feels lonely to have just one missing glove. He takes the other glove off, so his arms can be bare together). When he lifts his head, his hair’s flat along one side, where it’d been pushed up against the carpet. 

He manages upright-ness for only a moment before the ground does its best impression of a teacup ride at an amusement park, eager to meet him, and Tim finds himself right back where he’d started, eye level with Jack’s folded-back collar. 

They’re still dead.

Tim has to crawl again to make it to the kitchen. This time, he manages a little bit of juice, a clementine. It’s sweet, so he takes two. With sticky fingers, he draws the unused plane tickets on the countertop toward himself— the last imprint of life Jack and Janet had left. He traces their names with his fingertips, and his lungs shake the way spiders shake when their webs are disturbed. 

His cape makes a sharp sound as it drags across the floor.

“Please don’t leave me here,” Tim says aloud, and it’s too late to mean anything, too late to make a difference. “I know I haven’t always been the b— been the best,” he says.

They look different, now— Tim knows the stages of death; as Batman’s partner, he’s well-versed, of course, but it’s different to see the stages in his parents. The way they’ve bloated up— still recognizable, but. But…

But unrecognizable as well, somehow.

“ I know I haven’t been the best,” Tim says, and the words stick behind his teeth like the way leaves cling to trees at the turn of the season, begging not to be torn asunder by the wind, longing for forever. “ But you didn’t have to leave me.” 

And it’s silly— well, something about it is silly, because all they’ve been doing since Tim was old enough to talk has been leaving him. They’ve left him for days, months, weeks, almost a year, once, and even still, he’d known they would come back, they’d always come back. Flushed with triumph from a successful expedition or cloudy-faced with disappointment after a failure, they’d come back, and there would be faces that brought some modicum of life back into the empty house.

“ You didn’t have to leave me,” Tim says, and it’s almost dreamy, as if he isn’t the one speaking. He presses his head into his knees, wraps his bare arms tight around his legs, and says, “ please don’t leave me here alone.” 

Tim’s starting to think his subconscious has something against Hood, because for some reason, he’s in the Alley again— against Hood’s explicit orders.

He’s not supposed to be out here at all, actually; Bruce had sent him a message saying as much and telling Tim to rest up instead of coming out for patrol, and Tim had summarily sent him several eye-rolls, because it had felt like that was what Bruce had been expecting— protest, even though Tim isn’t even sure he’d had full control of himself when he’d sent the message. Half the time, he’s driving, and half the time, he’s lying on the road, abandoned by his own body, or he’s leaning halfway out of the window, or he’s been hit by the car and left for dead by his own subconscious. 

Today is one of those lying-in-the-road sorts of days, because by the time he comes back to himself again, he finds himself seated beside a familiar fire hydrant.

And this time, he has company— Not Hood, who Tim’s gotten used to seeing. These guys are sitting right beside him, like they’ve been there with him the whole time, but Tim wouldn’t know. He looks down at his hand, and there’s a tiny plastic bag full of unfamiliar white pills in his palm, and the guy on his right claps his back so sharply that Tim jerks forward. When Tim looks at him, the guy’s features blur together until he’s unrecognizable, until there’s nothing Tim can pick out to focus on. 

“Come on, Birdie, it’ll make all that bad shit go away,” the guy says, and Tim isn’t sure what he’d said to them to prompt this, to prompt any of this. All he knows is that there’s something unfamiliar in his hand, and his heart is beating this sluggish, thready beat in his ears, and bad shit doesn’t even begin to cover what’s happening, but is he really— is he really— 

“I’m sure the big Bat won’t mind if Robin has some fun,” the guy on his left says, and there’s a bright, eager gleam in his eyes, and it— it pulls at Tim, it pulls on a little thread that says no, this is bad, this doesn’t feel right— 

“ I fucking mind.” 

The gunshot in the air scatters the two guys like birds after a sonic boom. Tim doesn’t hear what Hood says, but he doesn’t need to hear words to hear anger, and Hood isn’t just angry, he’s burning with a rage so incandescent that Tim can feel the heat of the blaze from where he’s sitting.

“What the fuck,” Hood says, and Tim just sits there dumbly with his palm open as Hood snatches the pills away, “ are you fucking thinking?” 

(Tim’s thinking that he hasn’t had a coherent thought in hours.)

“Do you even fucking know how bad these’ll mess you up?” Hood continues, and he’s stomping back and forth in front of Tim with footfalls so heavy they practically shake the street. “Fucking— fuck. Do you even know what these are?” 

“He said it’ll take all the bad shit away,” Tim says through a numb mouth, through a tongue that feels about ten sizes too big, because that’s all he can remember. He hopes Hood doesn’t ask him anything else, because that’s the only thing he’s managed to retain. 

Hood stops. 

“ Is that what you want?”  he says, low and furious. “You want these little pills to take all the bad shit away, pretender? Is that what you— fucking— want?” With each beat, Hood slams his boot down onto the tiny bag, all but disintegrating the pills into dust. “ Fuck. Thought you were a Robin , we’re supposed to be smarter than th —” 

He stops, and looks down. Tim’s just staring at him, mouth slightly agape, because even though he can’t comprehend exactly what’s happening, he— 

Hood doesn’t seem to realize exactly what he’s just given away. Instead, he says, “Where the fuck are your shoes,” in the strangest tone.

“My,” Tim says, and looks down. He looks down, and socked feet greet him. Wet, socked feet, because he’s sitting with his feet in the gutter.

Hysteria crawls up his throat, takes hold of his tongue, and pulls. 

“I don’t know,” he sort of warbles. 

Still in that strange, blank tone that Tim doesn’t have the wherewithal to decipher, Hood says, “Did you take any of those pills.”

And— Tim doesn’t know. He doesn’t know what he’s been doing, because he’s half out of his mind with grief, his parents are dead, and he doesn’t remember, he doesn’t know what he’s been doing because he keeps dissociating . His body doesn’t feel like his body, his thoughts don’t feel like his thoughts, his words don’t feel like his words, and he’s all alone and he’s afraid and there’s nobody around him but Hood, who hates him.

"Robin," Hood says.

“I don’t know,” he says, and his voice seizes. He looks up at Hood. “Do you keep helping me because you’re Robin?” 

Hood startles slightly, staring at him for a long moment, and then glances down the empty street before sighing heavily and taking a seat on the other side of the fire hydrant. He reaches up to unlatch his helmet, and it hisses slightly as he pulls it up and over his head; his hair sort of spikes up as he does, and Tim’s greeted with the surly face of Jason Todd, the second Robin. Underneath the helmet, Jason’s wearing a domino, but Tim can still feel his discomfort despite not being able to see his eyes. 

“ Was,” Jason corrects gruffly. “I was Robin.” He gestures at Tim’s face. “Take the mask off. I need to check your pupils.” 

Jason Todd hasn’t given Tim many reasons to trust him. Even still, Tim finds himself lifting a lethargic hand to peel the domino aside slightly. Jason’s mouth twists.

“No dilation,” he says, “But you have the beginnings of a fucking awful rash. How long have you been wearing the mask?” Jason gives Tim a cursory look from head to socked toes and scoffs out a sharp, angry sound. “Half your fucking costume is missing, shit. What the fuck are you even doing out here without shoes? Does he know?” 

“No,” Tim says quietly, and smooths his mask back over his eyes. “I’m supposed to be resting, but I haven’t been— able to sleep.” That much is true, at least (as far as Tim knows). He doesn’t know why he keeps coming out here, instead of going to Bruce.

(Or maybe he does know: it feels cruel to take himself and all of his grief to the man who’d seen his parents get gunned down as a child.) 

“So you— what? Have some nightmares, and then come out here to the fucking epicenter of nightmare fuel?” Jason says, hissing the words out between his teeth. He looks like he’s trying to hold onto his anger, but bafflement appears to be winning out instead. “That’s the worst fucking idea I’ve ever heard.” 

“It made me feel better when I was younger,” Tim says, and now he thinks he might be choking up, but he still tries. “To come out here and see— you, and Batman, and take pictures. When my— When I was alone, it made me feel like I had—” He stops. 

There’s a restless silence for a few minutes, during which Jason seems to be having some sort of internal back-and-forth. For his part, Tim just picks at the paint on the fire hydrant and wonders if Jason Todd still has enough Robin inside of him to not disintegrate the pieces of himself Tim had just entrusted him with.

“You can’t fucking walk around like this,” Jason says finally with a scowl, and directs a frustrated glare at Tim’s feet. “In fact, I’m surprised you haven’t given yourself tetanus already, for fuck’s sake. Do you see how much broken glass there is around here?” 

Tim shrugs listlessly. In all honesty, he may have stepped on glass already. He wouldn’t know either way.

Jason ends up taking Tim back to one of his safehouses on his motorcycle, and Tim tries, to the best of his ability, to retain at least some semblance of awareness— even if it’s just one thing he’s aware of at a time, like his fingers loosely locked together around Jason’s waist, or the way the breeze lashes wildly against his cheek, or the smell of Jason’s leather jacket.

All of Jason’s shoes are predictably too big. Jason gives him three pairs of socks and they try again, and at least this time, the boots actually stay on Tim’s feet. Tim kind of loses pieces during the in-between, but in what he does retain, there’s something almost… Almost…

Almost . It feels like almost.

Jason gives him ointment. Tim just stares at the small tube in his hand, and Jason gestures irritably to Tim’s face.

“For the rash,” he says, still churlish, still annoyed, but the presence of a real threat hasn’t been established in the entire time Tim’s been here. Tim curls his fingers tightly around the tube and nods, because he’s afraid that if he tries to speak, he won’t make any sense again. For all he knows, this isn’t real, and he’s already—

“Am I drugged?” He manages after a moment, and he sees the lines of Jason’s back tense something severe.

“What? Why?” Jason asks, turning partially so Tim can see the stark outline of his sharp profile. “Do you feel drugged?” 

Tim shrugs in a play for nonchalance, but he’s holding onto the tube for dear life. “You’re being nice, and usually you want to kill me, so… it doesn’t feel real.”

Jason just stares at Tim. Without his helmet, without his domino, Jason just— looks like a guy. A tall, perpetually-scowling tank of a guy, but there’s still something childlike in his face— something familiar, like a sort of brightness, or a spark, that makes sense. Something that still feels like Robin, if Tim catches him in the light correctly. 

“To my knowledge, no,” Jason says flatly. “You’re not drugged. And I’m not being—“ He grits his teeth, and verbally reprioritizes. “—I don’t want to kill you. Fuck.” 

Tim doesn’t think his face changes much, but he thinks he manages to convey skepticism regardless. Jason huffs out a long, put-upon sigh and thumps heavily down onto his couch.

“It’s fucking complicated, alright?” Jason rasps through his teeth, head in his hands. “I thought he’d fucking learned his lesson, but here you are, fucking— shoeless, with a bag full of who fucking knows what, like, what the fuck? Is nobody keeping an eye on you?” 

Tim’s parents had been about as attentive to him in life as they are in death. Even still, that singular barb snags on a nerve and pulls, nearly unraveling Tim entirely. He grips the tube so tightly he’s surprised it doesn’t burst, and manages to croak out, “Bruce is trying. He told me not to patrol today.” 

“Oh, right. Because Robins always listen when they’re told to stay put,” Jason says harshly, and the bite of his words would’ve come off as sarcastic if it didn’t feel so strikingly like grief. “He should fucking know better.” 

Silence again, and it— it isn’t awkward, not really, not like what Tim would’ve expected. Jason’s puttering around, snatching things out of the fridge and tossing them haphazardly on the counter, and Tim loses himself a little to the sounds of activity. Maybe he’s desperately holding onto them so that he can remember how it feels when he goes back to his quiet, quiet, quiet house. Jason’s adroit in the way he moves around, graceful despite his stature, and Tim wonders where he’d gone for so long to hone those skills; he’d known Jason to be slippery enough as Robin, of course, but the striking fluidity is something entirely different when Jason’s no longer a fleeting slip of a boy. 

“ I am going to eat,” Jason says tightly. “Are you?” Despite asking, he’s already set two bowls down onto the table.

Tim’s only eaten clementines since his parents died, because his little system had kept him vaguely grounded when everything else had gone out the window. He doesn’t know how to eat anything else, but if he doesn’t try, Jason’s going to be suspicious. 

“Okay,” he says, throat parched so dry that a match-strike would’ve lit his insides up like a prairie fire. He mostly just picks at whatever Jason had made, but Jason doesn’t force him to eat more, just watches him from across the table with sharp, narrowed eyes and a clenched jaw.

“Your parents travel,” Jason says, apropos of nothing. “Don’t they?” 

The corners of Tim’s mouth tremble. “Mhm,” is what he manages. He swallows what he thinks is a piece of carrot down wrong and nearly chokes, and alarm bells ring warningly in the back of his head. He needs to keep his composure, somehow, he needs to. 

“And you’re home alone?” Jason asks, deceptively calm, even though the narrow-eyed, keen sharpness of his expression reveals much more than he’s letting on. 

Unbidden, the image of his parents’ bodies brands itself into his brain. “I’m home alone,” he echoes, and there’s a sort of creak in his chest warning him that his foundations are about to crumble away, and he’s going to fall and fall and fall. “I’m home— alone.” 

Jason lets his spoon drop with a clatter into his empty bowl and sighs. “Listen, shortstack,” he says. Without the modulator, Jason isn’t nearly as intimidating— he certainly isn’t soft, either, but the edge of his words comes off more like gruff ire than vengeful hostility. Tim knows what he prefers, in any case. “You can’t keep fucking roaming around here like this. Now, it’s none of my fuckin’ business what’s up with you— you got issues, fine. We all got issues. Nobody well-adjusted ever puts on that fucking cape. But it ain’t safe for you to be roaming around here in the dark like this, when you clearly—” He waves at Tim. “Have something going on. So either get your shit sorted out, or stay home. And for fuck’s sake, stop roaming around gloveless or— shoeless, or whatever. ” 

“I’m trying,” Tim says, and it comes out like a plea. Too much like a plea, because Jason’s brow furrows sharply. “I don’t—” He watches his spoon slide down into the half-full bowl and notices just then that his hands are trembling— faintly, but still trembling. He presses them into his lap. “I’m trying to deal with it.” 

“Deal with it better, kid, ” Jason says darkly, but it’s not cold, not as cold as Tim would’ve expected, at least. “Because if you’re not careful, you’re going to get fucking killed out here.” 

Bruce texts Tim a link to an article about how important sleep is for growing kids.

Tim sends him another obligatory eye-roll and reads it lying facedown on the rug, where he’s been for what he thinks might have been the last eight hours. Jason had dropped him off the night before, and Tim had lost pretty much every second between standing in front of the imposing front door of his quiet house (no longer a home), and now. It’s somehow morning again. His knees ache. His head is throbbing. His mouth feels like it’s full of steel wool and thorns. 

The thing is— he is tired. He’s tired in a way he didn’t even know he could be tired, and all he wants to do is drift down, down, down, but no matter how long he closes his eyes, no matter how exhausted he is, he doesn’t feel any better when he returns to consciousness. He doesn’t feel any less tired. 

He pulls himself up onto his arms and presses his fingers into his gritty eyes— in his fist, he finds that he’s still holding onto the tube of ointment that Jason had given him. He’d ended up somewhat crushing the hell out of it, but he’s still holding it , and he presses it close to his cheek as he curls back into himself.

Tim had always thought he’d had some sort of general instinct to survive, but if the last week has taught him anything, it’s that he might actually be more susceptible to the whole ashes to ashes, dust to dust thing than he’d perhaps initially expected. There’s hardly any will left, hardly anything left inside of him, hardly anything left inside at all.

He’s still wearing Robin like a shield, but it’s starting to chip away; the cracks are starting to show, long, gouged-out fractures that can’t be filled, like the way he isn’t wearing shoes again, the way he’s bare-armed, the way his cape is stiff and crunchy in his wake. The way that he looks into the mirror and can’t make heads nor tails of the face looking back, just that it’s this pale, human-shaped, fleshy thing, like bread that had baked wrong until all the definition blurred away and left behind an indiscernible mass.  

There’s dirt under his fingernails, soil and gravel, and he has this growing, gnawing fear that he’d been digging somewhere, but he doesn’t know where, when, why. 

Maybe he’d been digging graves.

He has to do something about his parents. 

He can’t just leave them here, on the floor, but if he moves them— if he takes them away, then they’ll be gone forever, for good. Tim had wondered, more than once, if they would leave him during their trips— he had this thought, more than once, that they’d decide they were actually quite content far away, sipping margaritas on a quaint little island rich with history and artifacts for them to find, miles out of reach of a too-inquisitive child with too many thoughts in his head and too many words on his tongue. They’d always come back, though— reluctantly, sometimes, and maybe not even for Tim so much as for their own sakes, but they’d come back.

And as darkness begins to eclipse the sky, long-fingered hands stretching wide and bleeding the blue ink-black, Tim thinks about revenge for the first time.

Logically, he knows it’s a futile mission— he has nothing to go off but the time. 3:44, and three minutes before that, when they’d actually been shot, 3:41. Tim’s always been persistent, though, persistent and meticulous to a fault, and he could, he could try to piece the events together, he could try to make sense of the night. Maybe he could do that instead of wasting away. 

Maybe he will, after this, after he just— closes his eyes for a little bit. He’s just so tired. Even the thing inside of him that had once howled like a summer storm, that had once felt strong enough to swallow Tim up from the inside, feels like it’s atrophied away into something frail and hungry and quiet, much quieter.

He lies down on his side again, between Jack and Janet. His cape crackles— reminiscent of fire, for a moment, and Tim is so cold— his hands are so cold, his feet are so cold through three pairs of socks ( why is he wearing three pairs of socks?), Jack’s face is so cold, Janet’s hand is so cold, and Tim’s cold, too, because his teeth are chattering, and he hasn’t stopped trembling, and he doesn’t even care if his cape actually does catch fire in this moment. He certainly isn’t warm enough to breathe life back into his parents. 

He’s so tired. 

So, so, so— 

When the world has been very quiet for a very long time, things that aren’t quiet have a habit of seeming even louder.

Case in point: when Tim becomes aware of a loud thump, it feels like a gunshot going off right beside his head. And— words. There are words too, and each one feels like a bullet, harsh and sharp. They pop under Tim’s skull like firecrackers, and all he can feasibly manage in lieu of saying “please stop talking” is a pathetic, fractured little sound.

Maybe the home intruder came back to finish the job, and here Tim is, the easiest target in the world. 

Tim wakes up twice; the first time is when he comes back to consciousness, or at least semi-consciousness, and the second is when he actually wakes up. The words actually sound like words, now, instead of shrapnel.

“Jesus fucking Christ. Jesus fucking Christ. What the fuck. What the fuck.” Jason sounds stricken, like he’s actually going to be sick; his voice is muffled, as if he’s speaking through his hand. One of his arms, like a band of steel, is wrapped around Tim’s midsection, and Tim’s sock snags on something shiny— Jack’s wristwatch, gleaming on his pale wrist. 

He reaches out for it.

“Dad,” he slurs, half out of it. His head is spinning, the world is spinning, and in this wild, spinning world, Jack looks like he’s moving. “I’m stuck on your watch.”

Jack just has to reach down and unhook Tim’s sock. He just has to reach down. He just has to move. It’s the easiest fucking thing in the world to do, and Jack just has to move a little bit, just a little bit, he just has to move a little bit—

The thread unravels more; Tim’s legs decide they’ve had enough and spill out into a puddle underneath him. He realizes belatedly that he’s making these sounds that he didn’t even know he was capable of making, inhuman and ugly, and Jason just won’t fucking let go of him and let him go back to his parents. Jason’s really trying to take him away, he’s going to take Tim away, and Tim isn’t nearly strong enough now to fight him, to pull him off.

“ Dad,” he says, wails.

“Oh my god,” he hears Jason say, and if Tim didn’t know any better, he’d think Jason’s voice just cracked. 

“Don’t take me away,” Tim thinks he says, and it’s wounded. In the commotion, the blanket’s slid off of Janet, leaving her half-exposed to the cold. His tongue’s swelled to unmanageable proportions, blocking off his airway completely, and he can’t seem to suck air down to his lungs. 

“Fuck. Fuck,” Jason swears, and his free hand presses up against Tim’s heart. “Tim. Listen, Tim, please listen before you pass out.” 

And Tim—

Tim does. He listens. And just as the black encroaching over his vision starts to converge toward one tiny pinprick of light, he realizes— 

He can hear something. Namely, Jason’s heartbeat.

It isn’t steady, but it’s something, it’s something Tim can breathe to, it’s something Tim can actually make sense of. He’s exhausted every other facet of himself into nothing, so this is all he has left, this is all he can do. He forces himself to slow down, to just— process this, one moment, one beat at a time, one, just one. 

“I’m so fucking sorry, Tim,” Jason says above him, and Tim’s fairly certain that Jason is currently the only thing between Tim and the fucking floor trying to swallow him whole. “I’m so fucking sorry, I’m sorry. But I can’t let you stay here. I know you want to.” 

“ You don’t understand.” Tim tells him, or he thinks he says that, but he doesn’t actually have a fucking clue what he’s saying. By the time the words make the journey between his brain and his mouth, they’re basically mush. “You can’t let them take my parents away, Jason, please.” 

Jason takes a long, measured breath. “I’m not going to do anything to your parents, Tim. I’m just going to take you to—” He pauses, and then Tim hears him go, “motherfucker,” under his breath. He knows Jason’s made the same realization Tim had made days ago. 

“I can’t go there,” Tim says. “Jason, they’re dead. I’m alone. I’m a—” His voice cracks, and actually, he realizes he might be screaming by now. He’s writhing around wildly by now, fish flopping on dry land, and he can barely even see through what he’s positive are tears. Long time coming, he supposes, since he hasn’t had even a single one to spare for the last few days ( too busy dissociating to cry, too busy losing time, too busy wasting and withering away.) 

“I just want to stay with them,” Tim says, and water fills his throat. He might be drowning ( no, that’s stupid, but it doesn’t feel stupid, it feels real, it feels like dying). 

Jason makes a funny sound, then, and his arm goes slightly lax— as if he’s just then realizing something.

“Tim,” he says, and his voice feels like a hushed blur. “When did your parents die?” 

“3:44 in the morning ,” Tim burbles. “3:41 when the gunshots went off. 3:44 when I found them.” 

“No, I mean—” Jason stops, and there’s a sort of horror bleeding into his voice, now. “—What. Day was that?” 

Tim finally stops flailing, because he realizes he has exactly no energy left. “What day did I walk into the wall?” he asks numbly, through a sort of buzzing under his skin. His blood pounds drumbeats in his ears, so loud that he’s surprised he can hear at all, let alone speak in any sort of comprehensible manner. 

Jason actually does let go of him, then, as if he’s in shock himself. “What?” 

“What day did I—” Tim stutters to a halt, and then sits down hard. He can see the lace of Janet’s nightgown peering out from underneath the blanket, which Tim is just now realizing isn’t a blanket at all. He’d draped a curtain over her, and he hadn’t even realized. He’d ripped the curtains right off the rod and he hadn’t even realized. He doesn’t even remember having done it.

"Tim—"

“That’s not a blanket,” Tim says, and then he really does start to cry, these unwieldy, wailing cries, high-pitched with hysteria. “No wonder they were so cold. I didn’t even give them blankets.” 

He just needs to—

He just. 

“ I didn’t give them blankets,” he repeats, and darkness rises like a wave to wash over him completely. 

More time passes.

It’s not as if Tim remembers much of it, anyway. To remember, he has to be awake and actually processing, and he isn’t actually convinced he’s even really awake at all. Maybe this is limbo, and Tim’s going to be suspended in this place forever, like the way Jason’s costume had been suspended in the case after he’d died. 

It’s easier to close his eyes, so he does.

The next time he comes awake, the world’s a little bigger. It’s not just a tiny circle of light— it’s more, this time, there are things that Tim can actually see, like— 

“Master Tim, can you hear me?” 

Oh. Oh no. Tim’s stomach lurches. His gears screech to a grinding, screaming halt as he immediately tries to pinwheel up onto his feet, arms flying akimbo; it doesn’t work, because he still doesn’t have enough energy to be moving freely, or even fucking moving at all if he’s being honest. The world lurches again (or maybe Tim’s the one lurching, he has no idea). 

“I’ve got him, I’ve got him.” Jason. He sounds wrecked. Tim can kind of relate to that, at least, because he’s pretty sure he’s been in pieces for what feels like a month, by now. “Fuck’s sake, Tim, just— sit.” The words are paired with something around his shoulder that feels like a clamp, but is really just the strength of Jason’s grip pushing him right back down. “I didn’t think I’d fucking find him like— this, Alfie,” Jason’s saying, quietly, “It wasn’t supposed to— I thought he was dead. I thought he was— You have to do something.” 

Tim sits. What choice does he have? 

“Alfred,” he says, even though his vision still hasn’t actually focused, yet. He’d know Alfred’s voice anywhere, after all. “Please let me go back. I can fix this.” 

“Dear boy,” Alfred says, in that very gentle voice he reserves for victims, “I’m so very sorry, but there’s nothing to be fixed.” 

There’s a long, stretching silence after that, during which Tim doesn’t say anything at all or really even think about anything at all. For a few moments, his mind is just full of— nothing. Nothing. His mouth moves— no words actually come out, though, and Tim doesn’t try very hard.

“I knew they’d leave eventually,” Tim says finally, and the thing that’s been living in his chest since he first heard the gunshots is back, striking matches up against Tim’s lungs and scorching him from inside out. The fire licks up along his bones, and Tim swears he can feel holes start to open up all over his skin, black-edged and tender. Let it just fucking take him. Anything, so he doesn’t have to be here, so he doesn’t have to feel this, this grief, please, not anymore. “Each time they left me alone, it was longer and longer. I thought one day, they just— but not like this.” 

He blinks, and when he does, the film over his vision clears slightly. Tears. Go figure.

“They didn’t even have a chance,” he says. “It was so fast.” 

Alfred’s hands close around both of Tim’s— and they’re warm. 

“I know,” Alfred says, so kind that Tim almost wishes he’d be impersonal. Then, he thinks, there wouldn’t be anything sentimental about it— he could pretend that this is just another case, that they were someone else’s parents— that it wasn’t about him, Tim, once Jack and Janet’s son, now an orphan, now a victim. “But they didn’t leave you alone, Master Tim. They didn’t leave you alone.” 

“Someone has to fucking tell Dick,” Jason says, and Tim can’t imagine breaking this to either Dick or Bruce. Not for his own sake, because at this point, Tim’s already neck-deep in it with no chance of surviving unscathed. He hadn’t even wanted Jason to know. (His predecessors— all orphans themselves, technically speaking). “ Fuck.” 

“Certainly you don’t expect Master Timothy to do that,” Alfred says mildly. He hasn’t removed his hands, but Tim doesn’t want him to, so he doesn’t raise any sort of protest. He’s suddenly aware that he’s positively grimy— he’s been roaming the streets, cocooned up in the safety of Robin, for days. “He’s been through a great loss, after all.” 

“I know. I know, fuck,” Jason says. He’s shoulder to shoulder with Tim on the—

Tim blinks. Where is he, actually? 

For the first time since he found himself back in the land of the living, so to speak, Tim takes a moment to glance around. He’s in the Cave, but Bruce is nowhere to be seen, and he’s seated on a cot. There’s a needle inserted into the back of hand— an IV drip? And he’s still shoeless, which— fuck, he really can’t remember where he’d put the shoes Jason had given him. 

Jason seems to cotton onto Tim’s thoughts (or maybe Tim is actually speaking out loud— he isn’t actually sure of anything, at this point), because he says, “don’t fucking worry about it. I’ve got plenty more where they came from.” All sharp angles and defensiveness, even though his expression is drawn and haggard. He looks— stressed. 

“Yeah, I can’t imagine why,” Jason hisses, practically apoplectic. 

Oh. Tim’s definitely speaking out loud.

“ Four fucking days,” Jason says, and Tim blinks at him with bemusement. The number doesn’t mean anything to h— 

No. That isn’t true.

“Master Jason,” Alfred says warningly, and Jason pulls back despite the recalcitrance in his expression. 

Tim presses his lips together, aware, all of a sudden, that he actually hasn’t stopped crying yet. “Sorry,” he says reflexively, hoarsely, and Jason just stares at him like he kind of wants to kill him. Or maybe that’s just kind of what Tim expects from Jason, and all of his expressions blur into one. “I just wanted to— I just want to,” he says, and the fault lines running underneath his voice split it clear apart. “I didn’t want to leave them there, like that,” he says, low and sluggish. 

His cheeks itch; when he frees one hand to feel, Alfred’s brow pinches. 

“Master Jason informed me that you’ve been wearing your mask for quite some time,” Alfred says. “It seems you’ve developed a bit of a rash. I don’t suppose you had been planning to use this?” He holds up something, and Tim stares at it— the tube of ointment Jason had given him, squished up and imprinted with the shape of Tim’s fingers. “You were holding it when Master Jason brought you back home.” 

Back home. Tim’s eyes sting. 

“Can I—” Tim croaks, and reaches out for it. Alfred obliges, and Tim gratefully tucks it back into his hand; the familiarity soothes some sort of needling anxiety in the pit of his stomach, and he presses it up against his cheek the way he had earlier, when he’d been lying on the floor. 

“Alfred,” he says partially into his palm, tears trailing down his cheeks unbidden, now. “I— I think I’m an orphan.” 

“Only technically speaking, dear boy,” Alfred says, the ever-calm oasis that Tim’s been crawling through the desert to try to find. “I consider myself a foremost authority on Master Bruce, however, and I cannot imagine that your status will remain as such for much longer. You have a family here, after all.” 

“But my parents,” Tim croaks. He smears the tears away with the heel of his palm, and hiccups. “I— I couldn’t save them, Alfred. I c— I didn’t know, I didn’t— you have to believe me,” he says, and grasps at Alfred’s hand with his own desperately. “I woke up, and— they’d already been—” 

Alfred squeezes Tim’s hand. “I never doubted you for a moment, Master Timothy.” 

Tim blinks, and tilts his head back slightly to stare into the ceiling lights as if that'll keep him from a total breakdown. 

“Where’s Bruce?” he asks after a moment, not daring to look back down for fear of what their expressions are going to tell him. “I lied to him, I. I didn’t want to— Because of what happened—” 

“Master Timothy,” Alfred says after a moment of hesitation, and there’s something a little firmer in his voice now. “It has been many years since Master Bruce’s parents met their untimely ends. It was a tremendous tragedy, but it is not your responsibility to shoulder both his emotions and your own . I assure you, Master Bruce can handle himself.” 

Jason scoffs loudly, and Alfred directs a steely-eyed look at him that quickly quells him. 

“To answer your question, however, he is working with Commissioner Gordon to…” Alfred pauses. “...Determine what exactly happened that night. You were— not in much state to answer any questions. We expected that you would require more rest.” 

“All I’ve been doing is sleeping,” Tim rasps, and— and he knows that, so why is he still so tired?

“The grieving process is a difficult and oftentimes exhausting one, Master Tim,” Alfred says cautiously, and gestures to the patch on Tim’s hand. “You were severely dehydrated, and Master Bruce suspected you likely hadn’t eaten or slept much, either.” His eyes crinkle at the corners with something melancholy, as if he’s hurt for Tim, and Tim hates that he put that expression there, hates that this reality is the one he has to live with, now. 

“I shouldn’t be—” Tim says, and then takes a shaky breath. “It’s happened to— everyone. B… You, Jason. Dick. I shouldn’t—” 

“I’m going to stop you right fucking there,” Jason says, and his expression twists up into something fierce for just one moment before the drawbridge rises and shuts the brief burst of emotion away. “Just focus on making it through this, Tim, fuck. I should’ve—” He scrubs his hands over his face, and sighs. “I said— things I shouldn’t have,” he says. “I didn’t know. I’m sorry.”

Tim makes some sort of sound low in his throat. “It’s okay,” he says, or really kind of gurgles. He doesn’t want to think about what Jason said, mostly because he still hasn’t— it still hasn’t— 

Jason opens his mouth immediately in protest, but he’s promptly interrupted.

“Tim.”

Up until this moment, Tim had dreaded seeing Bruce— he’d dreaded the thought of breaking the news to Bruce, out of fear of digging up the skeletons he assumed Bruce had laid to rest. But when Bruce reaches up to push the cowl back, and Tim sees his stricken face, he realizes he— he can’t think of anyone he needs more, right at this moment. 

“B,” he says, all but shambling apart immediately, and Bruce crosses the floor in two clear strides and has him. Bruce has him. Bruce is there, and he has him, and he’s holding Tim, and Tim can’t think about anything else— he can’t think about anything more than this moment. 

“I know,” Bruce says, even though Tim doesn’t even know. Tim’s positive he’s just blubbering out nothing, total nonsense, and— “I’m so sorry, Tim, I had no idea you’d been— going back to.” Bruce stutters to a stop, and his grip tightens against the back of Tim’s head. “I know. I know.” 

Jason’s clearly trying to stealth his way out of there, but Alfred isn’t letting him— Tim doesn’t know how to say it, but he wishes Jason would stay. Maybe he’ll be able to vocalize it later, but he doesn’t actually think Jason is nearly as cruel as he would like them to believe. He just doesn’t have the words, he doesn’t have anything now, except for his tube of ointment in one hand and a handful of Bruce’s cape in the other.

“Things are going to be— difficult, Tim,” Bruce tells him, and he’s talking to him the way Batman talks to traumatized children— the way he talks to grieving children, and Tim supposes he is technically both of those, even if— he can’t seem to wrap his mind around it, now. “But they won’t be difficult forever. You won’t have to go through this alone, not even for a moment. We—” He exhales, and Tim’s so close that he can hear something that feels almost like a tremble in Bruce’s voice, so minute that Tim almost misses it. “We’re going to be here for you.”

Tim isn’t— used to this, to vulnerability from Bruce. He figures if there’s any time Bruce would reveal those rare moments of vulnerability, though, it made sense that it would be now, in this specific scenario. He figures there’s always room for exceptions.

Bruce pulls back, lowering his forehead so it rests against Tim’s. He smells like— the cold, like night air, and Tim finds himself gasping in greedy lungfuls of air as if he suddenly can’t get enough of it. “Jason mentioned that you’ve— been out and about in the Alley.” His breath hitches only slightly at the mention of Jason’s name, and the man in question makes a sharp, unhappy sound somewhere off to the side. It’s obvious that Jason had made the no-doubt difficult decision to give up his identity somewhere in the middle of all of this commotion, and Bruce is looking at him with this unusual, longing expression that might have made Tim smile if he’d been in literally any other timeline but this one. 

As it is, all he feels is guilt, sharp and needling. 

“I’m not mad, Tim,” Bruce tells him, his hands clasped around Tim’s shoulders— grounding him. “I’m just glad that Jason was there. Seems like you were a little bit out of it, huh?” 

Tim blinks, and turns his hands over to reveal dirt-encrusted nails to Bruce. “I can’t remember— patches,” Tim says, words waterlogged. “Swathes of memory, just— gone. I have d— dirt under my nails. I don’t know why.” A tear slides down along the plane of his face and splatters down against his knuckles.

Bruce clasps Tim’s face between his palms, and his skin is warm, warm the way Alfred had been, warm the way Jason had been. All of these warm people, so why is Tim still so cold? 

“Memory is a really tricky thing, Tim,” Bruce says, and his thumb smooths back stiff, clumped up locks of Tim’s hair. “Sometimes it’s hard to remember things when you’re going through something difficult, something that shakes you up. And this— ” Bruce’s shoulders lower into a sympathetic slump. “I’m not surprised you can’t remember. It might come back, but— it might not.” 

He lowers his hands to clasp them around Tim’s, just the way Alfred had. “But just so you know, I think I can at least explain why you have dirt under your nails. It seems like you may have been— digging around your front door to find a backup key, I think, to try to get back into your house.” 

Tim swallows. Janet and Jack had kept a key underneath one of the decorative stones lining the walkway leading up to their front door, in the event that Tim ever got locked out of the house and lost his key while they were traveling.

“I don’t remember,” he says. As it turns out, he’d done a few other odd things during the blackouts— torn the curtains down, for one, broken a few dishes (out of clumsiness or grief, Tim isn’t sure), and left that one missing glove draped over the mailbox.

Bruce sweeps circles over Tim’s bruised knuckles (he isn’t sure of how they ended up bruised, either) . “I know,” he says. “I know, Tim. Give yourself some time.” 

“It’s just,” Tim says, and lifts tired eyes to Bruce’s face. “They— They were hardly around. I’ve been— alone, for so long. Hardly anything’s going to change, now that they’re—” He can feel his face twist up, and it aches, not because of the rash, or the tears— it aches deeper than that. “ So why do I feel like this?” 

Bruce looks a bit like he’s been shot himself.

“They were still your parents, Tim.” He says hesitantly, and adds a gentle, “Maybe that counts more for you than you thought it did.” 

Tim thinks of the way Janet took her sugar— one and a half spoons, always ( and how she would let him share sips, when he was little). He thinks about how many times Jack would shake out his pants— three times, without fail ( and how he’d lift Tim up and toss him into the pile of warm laundry, when Tim was still small enough to fly), and how they’d steal segments of his clementines when they were sweet, which is why he’d have to take two at all—

(They hadn’t been the best, but Tim had never asked for the best. All he had asked was for them to come back.)

“I can’t believe they’re gone,” Tim says hazily, and the sorrow that consumes his burn-riddled bones nearly sweeps his voice away entirely. “I can’t believe they’re not coming back. They always come back. Even if they— Even if they weren’t the best parents, they—” He stops, because his heart leaps, swells up, and closes his throat. 

“I know. I know, Tim,” Bruce says, and folds Tim and his exhausted limbs close. “It’s going to be okay. You won’t be alone. You have us— all of us. Me, Alfred, Dick—” Bruce casts a sidelong glance at Jason, who shifts his gaze from Bruce to Tim but doesn’t protest. He’s holding his helmet close to his chest, like he’s trying to protect himself, and Tim doesn’t know how to interpret the look on his face, but… he thinks, maybe, that Jason won’t leave, and he’s relieved. “— And of course, Jason, too. You aren’t alone.” 

And—

If it had been anyone else, Tim isn’t sure he would’ve believed them.

But as he listens to Bruce’s heartbeat— steady. Countable. Something he can make sense of — he thinks maybe—

Maybe—

—He might have a chance of surviving this.