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The thing is, Tim knows his parents had loved him.
They said so in every email, every phone call, every hurried goodbye or exhausted hello. Sometimes they’d say it multiple times, soft reassurances when one of them was having a bad day. They went through a phase, too, where they’d say it in new languages each time they called and Tim would have to guess what language it was before they’d hang up. He learned a lot of different ways to say I love you after that.
Je t’aime
Sarang hae
Ya lyublyu tebya
They didn’t always say it with words, either.
Every time his mother came home, the first thing she would do would be to take Tim into her arms and press kisses all across his blushing face. She did it when he was five, she did it when he was six, she did it when he was eight, ten, thirteen. No matter how much he protested or giggled or tried to shove her away, she did it every time she came home until she died.
His dad wasn’t nearly as physical, but his eyes would brighten in delight whenever Tim would open the door. He always brought him some sort of present from wherever they’d gone off to. Sometimes it would just be a knickknack he picked up from the airport, especially if he’d only been gone for a rushed business meeting somewhere boring or common. But sometimes they would be fascinating, like the wooden flute from Peru that Tim still had on his desk. He remembered the hours his dad sat with him, teaching him how to make music out of the instrument even though neither of them knew what they were doing.
His parents loved him every time his mother fretted about leaving him again. She had lists and lists of things to remember, all his allergies and lessons and the activities he was doing outside of classes, and she would go over it a dozen times with him to make sure he had it all memorized. His mother would ask for constant updates, on his grades, on his hobbies, on his friends. He once found a little notebook she took with her on every trip that detailed all his answers in her neat cursive handwriting. He’d been so touched it almost made him cry.
The reporters never saw that notebook. They didn’t hear his mother stumbling over jag älskar dig, they had never seen the little carved duck his father brought him back from Taiwan. Maybe if they had been there when his mother smothered him in kisses and his father pulled him into a rare suffocating hug, they wouldn’t be writing all the things they are writing.
BETTER OFF DEAD? INSIDE REPORT REVEALS RAMPANT NEGLECT OF DRAKE HEIR.
Tim almost throws up when he reads that headline. One of his classmates has taken the effort to print it out and tape it on his locker, which means half the school has seen it before Tim manages to get out of homeroom. The other half is there, watching him with hungry eyes, as he goes to grab his calculus textbook.
He tries not to react. He tries not to flinch under the weight of a hundred underage judges looking for a story to bring home with them. He knows he fails.
The thing is, his parents hadn’t done anything unusual.
Tim knows of a dozen kids in his school at least, who had seen their parents half as much as he saw his. Parents who had been too busy golfing at the country club to come to soccer games and school plays. Parents who didn’t have the excuse of making groundbreaking archeological discoveries halfway across the world when they missed a parent-teacher conference. Every rich kid is left alone more often than not. It was a fact of life. If your mom doesn’t have a committee to oversee and your dad doesn’t have a board meeting to attend, then they are hosting a charity event or planning a merger or buying a new yacht in Belize.
But the tabloids don’t care about that. Those parents are still alive and willing to sue the shit out of anyone who dared question their family life. Those parents have armies of lawyers and plastic smiles that bury any threatening stories under miles of litigation and carefully constructed publicity stunts to prove what a happy family they all are.
Tim’s parents don’t have that luxury. They have wooden coffins, side-by-side in a plot of land across town that Tim hasn’t been down to visit in months. He should go more often. It’s not like he can dial up their tombstones and leave a voicemail reminding them how much he missed them. He needs to show his love in flowers and tears and muddy knees from kneeling in the grass above them.
But he can’t do that now, because he knows how that would look. Instead of JACK AND JANET DRAKE ACCUSED OF POSTHUMOUS ABUSE it would be DRAKE HEIR SEEN WEEPING OVER PARENTS WHO DID NOT CARE FOR HIM or some other shit anonymous emails will send him for days until another story broke.
DRAKE SCANDAL: THE COST OF ELITE UPBRINGING IS PARENTAL PARTICIPATION
The thing is, Tim’s parents hadn’t known they were doing anything wrong.
They didn’t know better. They were on the other side of the world with terrible phone reception and exciting work to be done. They facetimed Tim smiling, and he always smiled back. He never said anything. He never told them.
Alfred gives him a ride home from school. It’s not unusual, but not common. The quiet radio that normally chatters whenever Alfred is in the driver’s seat is silent for the entire ride. Tim can only guess that his normal radio shows are bursting with opinions about the neighbor kid’s upbringing. He’s at once glad Alfred kept it off, and also angry that he feels like Tim can’t handle the truth.
It is his childhood, after all. His memories. His kindergarten teachers and housekeepers and bus drivers and French tutors. His preschool friends and that one chauffer he briefly had, the school administrators from three of the boarding schools of his youth. If all of those people, people he thought he trusted or at least trusted not to do something like this, if all those people suddenly think they have a right to talk about him, why can’t Tim listen?
They had years to say something, and they never did. But his mother’s been in the ground for more than a year, and his father has recently joined her. So the teachers, staff, drivers, friends, parents, neighbors, doctors, they’re all coming out of the woodwork like cockroaches trying to feast on the carcass of his family.
Tim doesn’t go back to school the next day. He almost hacks into Bruce’s email to send a note excusing his absence, but the wave of self-revulsion that follows the thought convinces him not to cross that line. Not again.
DRAKE INDUSTRIES FORMER CEO REVEALED TO HAVE ENGAGED IN RAMPANT CHILD NEGLECT
The thing is, it wasn’t their fault.
It was Tim’s.
It was Tim’s fault that Jennifer quit. She had come highly recommended, and his parents had interviewed her extensively before agreeing to let her take charge of Tim for the summer. At first, it went well. She was older, experienced, and didn’t mind the responsibility of caring for a ten-year-old while his parents were in Australia digging up old burial mounds.
It was Tim’s fault that he was difficult, whiny, nosey. Jennifer had tried to be patient with him, but after one-too-many times catching him trying to sneak out of the house, after one-too-many times realizing he had poked around her things, after one-too-many fights about privacy and respect and staying where he was supposed to, Jennifer couldn’t handle it anymore. She left a message on his mother’s phone, and sent a strongly worded email detailing all of Tim’s transgressions before packing her bags and heading to Central City.
It was Tim’s fault his parents never found out.
At first he had been terrified. Absolutely terrified. Tim had sat on the floor of his closet, rocking back and forth with tears streaming down his cheeks. What would they say when they heard Jennifer’s voicemail? When they read the email? His parents were always so proud of him, they said so all the time, and now Tim was afraid that all that pride and love and trust was going to go away.
But then he remembered that his mother had lost her phone in a river and they’d been using his dad’s phone to check in on him, and then he remembered that he figured out his parent’s email password when he was eight and bored and they hadn’t changed it since then.
It had been easy. His parents were sixteen hours ahead, it was the dead of night, and they had absolutely not checked their emails yet. So Tim crawled out of his closet, opened up his laptop, and got to work. In less than five minutes, all incriminating information was gone.
It was five weeks until his parents came home. Five weeks of heart-pounding phone calls, forged updates from Jennifer, careful lies about why she wasn’t there to let the housekeepers in.
Five weeks of absolute freedom.
All of the sudden Tim could eat anything he wanted for dinner. It wasn’t sneaking out of the house if you didn’t have anyone telling you when to go to bed. Tim found his opportunities to crave his weird urge to follow Batman (Bruce Wayne) and his brightly colored sidekick (newly adopted Jason Todd) across rooftops skyrocketed without a disapproving nanny frowning at him and making sure his windows were locked tight. He stayed up late every night, he bought a camera to take rare shots of the cowl wearing vigilante and he was happy.
Tim never realized how stifling his mother’s lists were before this. He loved her, he did, but he loved his independence more than he had ever known.
Jennifer, most unfortunately, wasn’t there to greet his parents when they got back. Their flight was delayed, and Jennifer had another job that started early that morning.
His parents grumbled a bit about poor planning on her part, but Tim managed to distract them with a slideshow of his (safe, daytime) photographs and they didn’t bring it up again. He heard his mother complain to his father about it once, and his dad assured her they wouldn’t be using Jennifer or that nanny service that brought her to them ever again.
They never found out.
It was surprisingly easy.
It was easy to convince his parents not to send him back to boarding school after another summer alone (he was twelve now!). It was easy to intercept their new messages to a new childcare service, and tell the young man they decided to hire that, unfortunately, they decided to go in a different direction. At this point his hacking skills were strong enough that he could mimic check-in forms, redirect automatic wage payments, and leave a paper trail convincing enough that his parents never figured it out.
At one point, he had to pay an older brother of one of his friends $275 to pretend to be his nanny on the phone. The college-aged theater major had done such a good job that Tim hired him six more times over the course of the year.
It wasn’t their fault. It was his.
MONEY CAN’T BUY EVERYTHING, NOT EVEN LOVING PARENTS
Tim is grateful that nobody comes looking for him. Alfred lets Tim dash out of the car before he manages to turn the engine off, and by the time the elderly man follows him inside Tim is long gone. Not to his room, obviously, because he worries that people (Alfred, Dick, Steph, (Bruce?)) will try to find him there. Not to the Batcave, because it reminds him too much of his failures of a son. How the lies picked up when he joined Batman on his nightly crusade.
Not to the library, because that belonged to Jason. Not to the second living room where Damian and his pets set up shop. Not to the gym, not to the kitchen, not to the study, not anywhere anyone might think to look for him.
Tim sits on a rafter in the rarely used ballroom. Cass’s favorite spot. Cass is in Hong Kong and will probably be touched he chose her place to hide when she finds out.
He should be on the phone with Bruce, he should be sending emails to Drake Industries PR department. It’s his responsibility to clean up this mess, because he’s the one that made it, but he can’t fathom the idea of closing out of Gotham Gazette to do something as responsible as work.
Instead he has his chin on his knees, an arm around his leg and another one holding his phone in front of his face. Bad choice, he knows. The glow of his screen illuminates his face, and his thumb scrolls lazily through the news feeds, the tabloids, even Buzzfeed. It seems everyone is hopping on the bandwagon. He’s still too afraid to go to social media, silenced his twitter notifications and temporarily disabled Instagram, but pretty soon that fear will be replaced with a deep-seated ache of self-resentment and he’ll have no choice but to feed the beast in his chest telling him he deserves it.
10 TIMES WE SHOULD HAVE KNOWN TIM DRAKE WAS BEING ABUSED (WITH PHOTOS!)
It was harder after his mother died. Jack was home now, all the time, and he needed Tim to be home with him too. He started paying more attention to Tim’s life—not just what Tim was telling him, but the actual report cards, teacher’s notes, wanting to see the newest pictures on his camera, wanting to meet his newest friends.
And then Tim, Tim, he let his father misinterpret what he meant when he said his grades were slipping because he was too distracted to focus in school. He had meant the Red Hood, (no longer deceased Jason Todd), he had meant Teen Titans, but his father heard something different.
I’m too distracting dealing with this sick, old man.
So then Jack, his father, stopped asking so much. Asking for Tim’s time, Tim’s grades, Tim’s life. Because he didn’t want to hurt his son anymore. Because it hurt him to see that Tim was hurting.
CHILD ABANDONMNET AND WHAT IT MEANS IN THE CASE OF TIMOTHY DRAKE
Tim sleeps in an unused guest room in the rarely traversed wing of the manor. He wakes up sneezing and covered in a thin layer of dust, but at least he wakes up alone.
Alfred knows he’s there, because Alfred knows everything, and there is a small tray of food waiting for him outside the door. (Toast, oatmeal, a half-congealed smoothie.) Tim flushes the oatmeal down the toilet, dumps the smoothie down the sink, and throws torn up bits of bread out the window for the birds.
Damian told him once that bread wasn’t actually good for ducks, that people were doing them a disservice by bringing bread to ponds. He said it in a snotty way, delivering a lecture more than holding a conversation, but Tim had heard the undercurrent of concern in his voice for the wild animals. It had been sweet, touching even. He hopes Damian doesn’t find out about this.
He doesn’t go back to the ballroom. They’ll have figured out by now that that’s where he was hiding.
He goes to the roof.
Tim had always liked roofs, even before he started running across them as Robin. Wayne Manor has a great roof. There are slanted tiles, rusting railings, a dormer window or two to rest against, and a plethora of chimneys to perch behind. Every generation of Robin has spent time on the roof when they needed to get away. Dick had shown him where he accidentally melted a tile smoking his first cigarette, had pointed to where Jason liked to dangle a leg over the edge just so Bruce knew he was smoking cigarettes.
Tim’s favorite spot was a surprisingly flat bit above the east wing. He could lay out there with his camera and take pictures of the stars on nights when he wanted to something relaxing to do.
But not now.
Now it’s daylight and the sky is grey and there’s a light drizzle of rain in the air. Now Tim lays down with his arms outstretched and accepts the dampness of the tiles beneath him, accepts the sogginess of his clothes, accepts the condensation across his face. It’s cooling, almost punishingly so, and Tim knows he deserves it.
He shouldn’t be up there. He shouldn’t. His immune system has never been that strong, and he’s still in his school clothes from yesterday. But the thing is… The thing is…
Tim can’t take any of it back.
It’s after lunch when his self-imposed exile is broken. Heavy footsteps warn him of a coming presence. He thinks it must somehow inexplicably be Jason who has come after him, even though Jason still hates him for all that he says he doesn’t, because the steps are too heavy to be Dick and too graceful to be anyone unfamiliar with the Wayne roof. Damian would never bother coming for him.
But it’s Bruce.
Bruce who gently lifts Tim’s shoulders until he’s seated. Bruce who sits down beside him. Bruce who puts an arm over his shoulder and tucks him close to his side, despite of the sodden material of Tim’s clothes pressing into Bruce’s nice jacket.
ADOPTION OR RESCUE? NEW EVIDENCE REVEALS STARTLING REASON FOR BRUCE WAYNE TO HAVE TAKEN IN HIS NEIGHBOR’S CHILD
“I know they loved me,” Tim says. He doesn’t remember the last time he spoke.
Bruce doesn’t say anything. He never does. Maybe that’s why Tim didn’t run the moment he realized who it was. He’s in control of the conversation, not like he’d be if Dick had cornered him, and he can say as much or as little as he wants without Bruce pushing him.
“Plenty of parents travel a lot,” Tim says. His throat is sore, and he can’t figure out why.
Bruce doesn’t point out that plenty more parents stay home.
“They didn’t think they were doing anything wrong,” Tim says. Has he been crying? He can’t remember crying.
Bruce’s hand tightens around Tim’s shoulders. He has a fistful of Tim’s shirt wrinkled in his palm, and Tim knows it means Bruce is trying to ground himself in this moment. He’s trying not to get up and dig up his parent’s graves so he could hit them or burn them or bring them back to life and let the Red Hood shoot them.
“They were good people,” Tim is crying now. The tears are small and silent, and if it were anyone other than the Greatest Detective beside him Tim could convince himself they’d blend in with the rain on his face.
Because the thing is…
“They weren’t the ones who doctored the evidence that I was being cared for,” Tim explains in a rush. He has to say it now, this is his one chance, and then it would never be spoken again. He knows that. “They had no idea I wasn’t. I was lying to them, tricking them the whole time, they thought I was being cared for.”
“And you can’t tell anyone,” Bruce says. The first words Tim has heard in almost 24 hours. They should break his heart, but instead they make him feel so much better than he ever thought he could.
The thing is, Tim can’t ever tell anyone the truth.
Not the reporters begging him to make a statement. Not the lawyers drawing up lawsuits to be sent out once Bruce gives the okay. Not the snickering classmates, not their gossiping parents, not his teachers, his friends, no-one can know.
Except Bruce. Because Bruce understands.
“No-one would believe a ten-year-old had the skills to fool even their parents,” Tim says with a sniffle. “And if they did believe me, it would bring up too many questions about why I was doing it, why I wanted to do it, what I’m doing with those skills now.”
He doesn’t have to say it, but Bruce knows. Questions like that were a slippery slope that would bring light to a lot of the unusual skills from different members of the family. It was too much of a risk. Maybe people wouldn’t immediately jump from hyper-independent ten-year-old with super hacking abilities to Red Robin, but what if they did? Tim had uncovered Robin’s identity based on a quadruple somersault and a half-remembered trip to the circus.
It is a risk, one that he doesn’t need to take when the lie was so much easier. Let the world believe that Tim had gone to the Wayne family because he had been neglected. Let them think he took the Wayne name because he was desperate to belong to an actual family instead of a gross facsimile of one. People would pity him and praise Bruce and it explains why Bruce had broken his streak of circus freaks (affectionate) and street rats (less affectionate) to take in the über rich kid from next door. Abuse. That fits Brucie’s pattern.
It sucks for Tim as long as it took for the media storm to die down. But the people who it really hurts? Those people are buried six feet under. And it’s not like Vickie Vale can call up their tombstones to ask them for a statement.
The thing is, it still sucks. It sucks so much.
Tim doesn’t want to abuse the memory of his parents this way. He doesn’t want their legacy to be being a shitty excuse for parents, when they weren’t.
But the thing is…
He’s surprised when Bruce presses a kiss to his wet head. That’s more affection than even Red Hood’s attack at Titan Tower had warranted.
Tim melts into the touch. His mother won’t kiss his face anymore, his dad won’t bring him presents, but Bruce is here.
“Your parents loved you,” Bruce repeats Tim’s earlier words softly. “I love you too.”
Bruce understands. He’s not mad, he doesn’t think Tim is a disgusting ungrateful child. Tim knew he wouldn’t. But it helps.
They sit together on the roof for awhile longer. Tim has nothing more to say, and Bruce ran out of words halfway through his first sentence. But they’re together and Bruce is warm against him, and Tim…
The thing is, he loves his parents. It doesn’t matter what the rest of the world thinks. He loves his parents, and that’s enough for now.