Chapter Text
For a long time, Tim doesn’t know his parents are dead. Maybe that makes him a bad son, for not knowing. When he reads about death, or when he watches people die in movies, their loved ones always know. There’s a gasp of pained revelation, an instinctual loss.
Tim doesn’t feel that. He wouldn’t have noticed at all, except for that he likes to keep track of the things going on in the places where his parents visit. Sometimes, it means he can ask leading questions, on their mostly-weekly phone calls, and Janet will spiral off into some tangent about these people and their lack of work ethic, and she’ll talk for minutes on end before realizing she’s still on the phone, getting bored, and then ending the call. So he keeps an alert system on his phone, for news, so they have some topics in common to talk about. It’s only luck he sees the article before anyone else does.
They’d been off in Bolivia, studying something to do with the recently discovered ruins there—some new artifact had interacted strangely with the instruments of the archaeologists, and Jack suspected some ancient form of sorcery might be at work. To avoid tampering with the energy levels, they’d gone dark. No phones allowed, not that the radio silence was any different from their usual behavior when it came to their son.
Which meant their secretary had no reason to be alarmed by a lack of contact.
There was only Tim, staring at his phone two days after the fact, reading Archaeological Dig Explodes in Freak Accident, barely breathing. No matter how many times he read the article, it stayed the same. An unexplained reaction. A cave in. Ten people dead, unnamed.
He switches to his computer, needing a bigger screen. Nobody has checked into the hotel they were supposed to be staying at that night. He scrolls through their itinerary, digging through websites like he can tear their guts out and find an explanation. Their dinner reservations yesterday lapsed. When translated, the little note next to their names reads no show in blinking letters.
His hands are shaking. This isn’t happening. His parents can’t be dead.
His father, maybe. But not his mom. Janet Drake has been an immutable presence in his life since his birth, distant and unfailing. Unshakeable. She would never do anything as unprofessional as dying.
Still, there’s the evidence.
Something has to be done. He can see the headlines already, the relatives swooping in—his father’s brother in California, with the smarmy grin and the slippery palms, always asking for money, or his Aunt Myrtle in New York with the six kids and the taxidermy collection. They’ll want access to the company, to his trust fund, they’ll want to take him out of Gotham, and the thought of it is enough to make his heart stutter.
He clenches his hands into fists and presses them into his head, bent over the kitchen counter like a mad man. Think!
What would Janet Drake do?
Not admit weakness, that’s for sure. The first step in getting slammed with a lawsuit is to imply culpability for something going wrong, she’d told him once. If you let them see a crack, they’ll dig their hands in till they see bone.
So what does he do? He can’t just pretend it hasn’t happened, he has to do something—
Except…
He could, couldn’t he? Pretend it hasn’t happened, he means.
It’s bordering on insane. Screw bordering, it’s skipping right over the line and waltzing right across it into straight up crazy.
But nobody else knows, he realizes. They were out of the country. Their phones were off. Nobody expects them in Gotham for anything but the major galas, and they can get out of those by calling in sick. The only person who even knew where they were besides Tim is probably their secretary—
He fumbles for the computer again, signing into his father’s email with the ease of years of practice.
Dear Helen, he writes, then stops. Takes a deep breath. Continues. Although we are grateful for your years of service, we regret to inform you that we feel you may no longer be suited to your current position. Due to some changing priorities, we have decided to look for somebody who better suits the interests of the company moving forwards. We apologize for the abruptness of this email, and hope the attached severance package will help to alleviate the inconvenience we know this will pose to you.
Best regards,
Jack and Janet Drake,
Drake Industries.
It is perhaps too polite for an email from his father, but Tim tries to be as kind as he can be while still sounding believable. Guilt twisting in his stomach, he adds another zero to the already generous number. Helen was nice. She’d brought him a smoothie once, when his parents forgot about his class trip and she’d had to pick him up.
He clicks across tabs. Finds the hotel his parents are supposed to be at tonight, cancels their reservation at a spa. Marks them as checked into their rooms this afternoon in the system.
He hacks into their accounts and finds their return tickets. Gotham. He hadn’t known they planned on coming home so soon. He swallows, then changes the destination to France.
By the time the sun is peeking up over the treeline outside, he’s planned out trips across large swathes of Europe and Southeast Asia, every expected point on their itineraries accounted for. There’s a program set up to check them into hotels, to archaeological conferences, in real time. Airports that will mark them as present in their databases when the time comes, but not register their seats as full on anything available to crew members who could notice their absence. He’s careful with the money trail. Everything he knows from tracking his parents previous trips is applied. He knows what routes they like to take in certain places, which rental car services they trust.
All their mail and messages are now directed towards Caroline Hill, who does not exist. The influx of paperwork already flying into the fake email address he set up is staggering, but manageable. Helen probably has information he needs, he’ll have to fake Caroline emailing to get it, which is inconvenient. Idiotic, probably, for him not to have asked her to transfer their files to someone in the email he sent earlier. A later problem. He has access to their accounts. He knows the major business partners.
The absurd thing is that it’ll hardly even be different, new work to do aside. They were never home anyway. Tim has spent years living in this cold, empty house by himself. There’s not a single thing that is going to change about his day to day life, except that instead of spending his days waiting for the jingle of keys at the door, he’ll be waiting for nothing at all.
Alone. Just like he always has been.
Tim might actually be able to swing this. It scares him.
Stretching his fingers out in front of him, the joints aching, he pulls the blinds down to block out the steadily rising light and collapses into bed.
When he dreams, he dreams of archaeologists.
Waking up to a world without Jack and Janet Drake in it a week after the fact is startlingly similar to waking up any other morning, except for the giant, aching hole that gapes in the center of his universe. Tim rolls out of bed, the sun already low in the sky when he raises the blinds to peek out the window. His eyes are persistently dry. Rubbing at them does little to rid him of his exhaustion. He’s slept more than ten hours, and he’s still tired. Figures.
There’s a peculiar pressure on his throat, on his chest, muddling his thoughts. He goes to raise the blinds again, then stares at the sun. It’s late. He thinks he already did this, but there’s no one there to see, so the lapse in memory is probably okay.
There’s not going to be anybody, he thinks suddenly. Nobody is coming. Nobody is going to be here to see him do stupid things ever again. He chokes on air and stumbles into the side of his bed, sitting down heavily.
Tim hasn’t cried. That probably means he’s a bad person.
It’s late. Tomorrow is trash day. Getting dressed with some difficulty, he starts downstairs.
He’s beginning the long process of rolling the garbage bins out to the curb when something bright dashes out from behind them, scampering off into the corner where the house slants into the wide glass walls of the sunroom.
The cat is small and fat, white with patches of grey like a splotchy, very lost cow. It meows up at him indignantly.
“Sorry,” Tim says.
The cat does not seem impressed, and its yowling increases in volume.
Sighing, Tim drops the handle of the garbage bin and sinks into a crouch. He sticks his hand out, blinking hard to clear the fuzziness out of his vision.
“Sorry,” he repeats. “I didn’t mean to scare you.”
There aren’t a lot of houses around here, the nature of Bristol’s residents meaning each property is set far apart. His closest neighbors are the Waynes, but even they are a distant shadow on the top of the hill, way past the sloping hills and the crumbling, moss-grown wall bordering their two properties. Tim used to walk along the stones there, balancing with both arms out and the sleeves of one of his mother’s discarded dress shirts tied around his neck so it flowed out like a cape behind him. Why yes, Batman, he’d whisper, too afraid of discovery to speak any louder even at a distance, even when he knew nobody was home. I would like very much to be Robin. Don’t worry, I’m sure Dick and I can share the role. I’m very good at time management.
The memory of it is embarrassing. He’s watched Robin for a while now, and his job is nothing like leaping over stumps and fighting trees with stripped down branches. Back in those days, he’d thought that if he could just meet the Waynes somehow, they’d love him at once and sweep him away from all of his loneliness. You poor, darling boy, they’d cry, agonized over his abandonment. Back then, he’d still believed that Batman would come to rescue him.
Now he knows better. Tim Drake is all alone in the world, and if anybody is going to rescue him, it’s going to have to be himself.
He’s stopped going out to watch them, since the accident. It seems strangely unthinkable, to watch and dream of a different family when the one he had is gone, dead before he ever had the chance to really know them. Children complain so much, Jack had laughed once to someone at a gala. His grin and commiserating expression hadn’t fooled Tim, but they did the job well enough for the other gala attendees. Tim had made the mistake of asking if he could go home soon, since it was a school night and he had a project due. When I was his age, I would have killed for the chance to make connections at an event like this. I’m sure once he’s older, we’ll have more in common. The man—and why can’t Tim remember his name—had agreed. Wait until he grows up, becomes a real person of his own, he’d said, like Tim wasn’t right there. Kids these days don’t want anything to do with their parents.
Tim, angry, had privately agreed, already dreading the zero he’d get in class, and his subsequent punishment for it. Now his throat feels tight at the thought of how ungrateful he’d been. He’d fail English a hundred times if it meant getting to sit next to his dad again.
They aren’t ever going to see him get older. There’s no second chance coming to prove himself, to show them he’s more than a stupid kid who doesn’t know how good he has it.
He wonders what that man is doing now, whoever he might be. Clearly they weren’t good enough friends for him to notice the Drakes are gone. But that’s being too harsh. Nobody else has, after all.
It’s not really their fault. Like he said, everybody lives so far away. It’s understandable that people like Tim would slip through the cracks.
It’s because the Drake estate is so remote that Tim knows this cat doesn’t belong to anybody. Alone, like him.
It’s stopped yowling now, but its face is pure distrust.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” he promises, lowering his hand when the cat shows no interest in coming forwards. “You don’t have to be scared.”
The cat, being a cat, makes no reply, only sits back on its fluffy little haunches, unmoving.
Tim stands back up slowly to finish dragging the trash to the mouth of the driveway, wheels rolling noisily on the gravel. The walk is long and boring, but at least he’s out of the house, even if the bright sunlight, filtered through a heavy layer of ever present Gotham fog, makes him squint his eyes in distaste. He goes back for the recycling. The cat is still there, watching him. When he starts walking back up the hill, it hops up to follow him, trotting out in front of him with authority. They make a two-person parade up past the high gates, and it leads him back to the house too, leaping up onto the front steps once they arrive.
“Thank you very much for your assistance, Mr. Cat,” Tim says, because sue him, he was raised polite.
He doesn’t let the cat in, because there are no pets allowed in the house. His mom is allergic. Was allergic. He pretends it’s because a visitor might know of her allergy and question the cat’s presence, a domino effect bringing the whole conspiracy crashing down around his ears, and not a pathetic attempt at normalcy. His mom doesn’t want cats in the house. Didn’t want cats in the house. She wouldn’t like them now, scratching up all her carefully selected furniture.
There’s tuna in the pantry though, so he gets some to scoop out on a little saucer. Fair wages, for the cat’s help making the walk out to the curb a little more bearable.
The cat is gone when he comes out, food in hand. His throat swells.
He can’t believe he’s been abandoned by a cat.
It’s a wretched feeling, considering it’s not even his fucking cat. He sits down on the step, the tuna abandoned next to him, and puts his face in his hands.
God. He starts to cry, and that’s even more pathetic. Ugly, wracking sobs shake through him, miserably loud in the otherwise empty estate. It’s too much, all of a sudden, and he dashes his hand on the stone steps beneath him in a surge of helplessness, then cradles his stinging hand in his arms, hunched over and still blubbering like a baby. Tears are soaking through his jeans. Really? This is what breaks him? His parents, the threat of discovery, all of that he could get through with a brave face, but he crumbles because of a stupid, no good cat—
Something bumps against his elbow, soft and wet. Sniffling, he raises his head.
The cat presses its little wet nose into his side, rubbing its head against him. Beside them, the saucer is empty except for a few smushed out specks of tuna.
“Meow,” says the cat, like cats do.
“Hi,” he whispers, swiping a hand over his eyes so he can see it clearly.
It tilts its head as if to say, What on earth are you doing, bunched up making wailing sounds, you great hairless fool? Don’t you know you have two hands for petting me?
The corner of his mouth twitches, an almost smile. He reaches out to touch its fur, and it shies away. Trying again, he lets it sniff the knuckles of his hand. It bumps its forehead against them, bony and soft.
“Hey,” he says, scratching dutifully behind its ears. “You came back.”
It looks pointedly at his other hand, still curled in his lap. The back of it is scraped up and red.
“My hand hurts,” he says, because apparently he has full on conversations with cats now. “I can’t pet you with that one.”
It makes a little huffing sound.
“Okay, fine,” he says, and smoothes back its fur with both his hands. It’s only the back of it that’s smarting, anyway. “You make a pretty good argument.”
It climbs into his lap, snuggling into him with its face turned out towards the driveway. The sun is setting over the hills, Gotham River sparkling in the distance. Gotham is pretty at sunset, all the pollution distorting the light into vibrant red and purple hues.
He breathes in, still a little shaky.
This time, when he goes in, he lets the cat come with him.