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Tim often forgot how smoggy the Gotham air was until he was out of it. He breathed deeply and noted the hint of sea salt that lingered in the smell. Not stench or mucky algae build-up. Actual sea spray. Humidity so thick you could cut it with a knife. Fat water drops hanging in the air and slipping into his lungs.
He was standing on the front porch of the house that was going to be their home for the next few days. Beyond the house was the wide expanse of the Atlantic Ocean, grey and rocking with almost animal restlessness. The waves slashed at the pale sky and sea birds danced just overhead of them before spearing into the water. Occasionally, he could hear their garish voices rise from the waves, bouncing off the cliffs and filling the air. He knew there was a beach somewhere down the cliff, a small strip of sand among crags of the rocks. There was a small staircase that wound down the cliff to the beach, but Tim immediately didn’t trust it. More than a few steps were missing. The ones that were there were moldy and soft.
Maybe they could convince Bruce to let them set up a rappel line. That could be fun.
“God, I can’t remember the last time Bruce let us travel for something that wasn’t BatBusiness,” said Dick as he slung his arm over Tim’s shoulders good-naturedly. Tim couldn’t help but smile a little to himself because he had officially been deemed two inches taller than Dick within the last month and he could feel his older brother straining a bit.
Dick pushed him fully inside and the sea salt smell of the water became fainter.
“Me and Bruce have gone for business trips,” said Tim, watching as Jason dropped one of his bags on the couch and then went to go get Cassie’s. She smiled gratefully as she handed it to him and they went to decide which one would be her room. Damian was lurking near Bruce’s side, probably complaining about something or other. “But I wouldn’t really call those vacations. It was more being cooped up in a hotel room and talking about WE or Bat stuff.”
Tim’s memories of those days were mainly interchangeable hotel rooms all in shades of beige or grey with the almost-same stock images on the wall. It was hardly exciting. He doesn’t even think he used a hotel pool once during those trips.
It was starkly different from the Maine coast house that Bruce was borrowing from Oliver.
The house was smaller than Tim had expected with only four rooms and three bathrooms. It wasn’t dilapidated but it had obviously been let go for a while and the plants had grown up into the outer walls. The inner area wasn’t much better and Tim could see a thin layer of dust coating the ancient looking furniture. He’s pretty sure there were multiple spider webs in the corners.
It was actually getting worse the more he looked at it, but he knew if he brought it up he was be teased for being priss for at least a week.
“Was Oliver not able to get any cleaners in?” Tim asked, eyes flicking from a dead hanging plant to a hazy picture frame. He didn’t recognise the people that were captured behind the glass. They weren’t any of the Queens. Why would Oliver have pictures of random people in his house?
“Apparently none would take the job,” Dick said, following Tim’s gaze. “Kinda spooky right?”
“I guess, but it’s probably because they didn’t want to drive out this far,” replied Tim, remembering the one-and-a-half-hour drive they had to make from the nearest small town. Bruce didn’t take many vacations but when he did, he wanted them to be as far away from civilisation as possible. He required accommodations where there was no chance of cameras or microphones or being seen and swarmed in public. The only way to get him to truly relax was to separate him from any threats and surround him with all the people he cared about the most. If he could see them, if he could know through his own eyes that they weren’t in danger, then just maybe he could lose some of the tension in his shoulders.
Apparently, Oliver Queen’s forgotten Maine beach house fit the bill.
He does think that it was strange that this was the house that Bruce chose out of all of the available options from him and his rich friends. Didn’t Bruce have an apartment in London? And Singapore? And that private island or the lake house in Illnois? Why were they in this run down fishing shack?
“Come on,” said Dick, unlatching himself from Tim’s shoulders, grabbing Damian’s backpack, and practically bouncing up the stairs. “I want to claim all the rooms up here so that Jason’s forced to bunk with Bruce.”
Tim smiled and followed him, two stairs at the time. Dick got to the top of the stairs first and used a Bat hand signal to indicate Tim go left while he went right. Tim followed the directions opening the first door he found.
It was a small and relatively clean bathroom with a shower-tub combo on the far wall. The showerhead looked slightly rusty and there was a layer of grime in the tub. The sinks looked ancient and were a mint green colour that Tim had only seen in photos. He severely doubted the cleanliness of them and prayed that the downstairs bathroom was better. What the hell was this place? It didn’t look like anything that would be owned by a billionaire. Behind him, he heard Dick opening and closing a couple of doors.
He left the bathroom with a shrug and Tim moved on to the next door, half looking over his shoulder to shout at Dick.
“The bathroom looks rank. I hope this bedroom is a bit bet–”
He turned around and the words died on his tongue. His brain, usually filled with so many thoughts, came to a screeching halt, because he couldn’t physically comprehend what he was looking at.
Because it was Dick.
Hanging from one of the rafters that tilted across the room’s ceiling.
And not hanging from his arms or from his feet.
It was a rope.
Looped from a rafter and down into a noose that had wrapped itself around Dick’s neck.
Dick’s head was back, exposing his entire throat to the world. Tim had seen that neck at this angle before. Dick throwing his head back in a laugh that shook through his whole body. Dick swinging through the air with a smile towards the sky. Dick stretched across the Manor’s couch, half-asleep but still murmuring a soft conversation to Bruce standing behind him.
Tim had never seen this.
His muscles strained around the rope, the bite of it indenting into his brother’s neck and making it spasm. The skin was growing red as blood and air were cut off from their intended destinations. The anatomy of it seemed to press out against his skin like it was trying to escape from the inside, meat threatening to burst from the skin as the rope pushed in.
The rest of Dick’s body spasmed with his neck. His spine was tense. His arms were struggling with the air, flopping gracelessly around him. His feet gave out little kicks that were just growing weaker.
Slowing.
The thought slammed into Tim’s mind and finally made him react.
“Dick!” He screamed, his desperation turning the name into a howl and racing into the room to grab at his brother’s feet. Panic was making his hands clumsy and Dick’s legs escaped him, making his brother turn in a sickening circle that made Tim want to throw up.
Focus. He demanded to himself.
Help your brother.
Don’t fucking panic.
He knew that people died from hangings by either oxygen deprivation or having their neck snapped. A fall from a short distance was probably going to kill through oxygen deprivation caused by the rope cutting off the airway. A fall from a larger distance increased the chances of the rope snapping the vertebrates in the spine.
Was this a short distance?
Was this a long distance?
He didn’t know what was short and long when it came to the snapping of spinal bones.
Dick seemed to still be alive and kicking which suggested that his neck hadn’t been snapped. But Tim didn’t know how long he had been hanging there. How much oxygen was he deprived of.
He hoisted up Dick’s feet the best he could, struggling with his weight and the awkward angle and praying that it was enough. He hoped that it would make the rope slacken enough. That air could flow in.
That his brother wouldn’t –
No. No.
Do not panic.
“Bruce!” He screamed now, his voice taking on a tone he hadn’t heard in a long time. It was Kon still being gone. It was his father bleeding out on the ground. It was Bruce telling him that Dick had been shot in the head and they didn’t know if he was going to make it. He sounded like an animal with an arrow in its neck, life being stolen right out from under him.
His chest convulsed and it took him a couple seconds to realise that it was a sob.
“Bruce!” he screeched again, begging for him to come to help him, to make this better, to make Dick not be– “Bruce! Help me!”
He heard Bruce the instant he stopped screaming. Footsteps heavy on the stairs, crashing through the house with not a care to the sound of it. The fact that he was making a sound at all said a lot about how he was hurtling through the house. It only took a few beats before Bruce rounded through the doorway, pale and haunted as he took in the scene.
The sobs that shuttered through him were growing stronger as Dick’s twitches were growing weaker. Tim couldn’t really tell the spasming of his body from the throws of Dick’s and he told himself that it was definitely Dick.
Dick was alive.
Dick was alive.
Dick was…
“He-he…” Tim couldn’t form words from his throat. “He was just…”
Bruce didn’t wait for him to finish. He ran in and grabbed Dick by the feet, lifting him higher than Tim ever could. He was steady where Tim was shaking apart, a statue against the storm of panic swirling inside of Tim.
“Find something to cut the rope,” Bruce barked, a clear order that triggered the Robin in Tim. Some part of him settled with the command and the suggestion of a plan.
It meant that Batman could fix it.
Dick could survive this.
It would be–
“What the fuck.”
Dick was…
Dick was standing in the doorway?
Tim froze again.
His brain seemed to rewrite itself again.
His thoughts buckled under the shock of his brand new reality being quickly rewritten by the presence of his brother standing three feet away from him.
Dick was right there.
Living. Breathing. Neck unscathed and pulsing with air that flowed through him like it was the easiest thing in the world.
But how…
“Dick?” he whispered, sure that it was a hallucination because he had just been scrambling at Dick’s feet, trying and failing to lift him back into breathing and…
Dick’s hand caught his, lacing their fingers together and then instantly pulling him close. He slammed into Dick’s chest and his brain melted just a bit more. Dick was breathing. That was him, chest convulsing, lungs filling and emptying of air even if it was shuddering. Dick’s hand was trembling in Tim’s and when Tim looked towards his brother’s face, Dick’s eyes were fixed on the body.
“What is that?”
Tim looked back, even though his body screamed at him not to.
Bruce was still holding the legs, lifting the body up so that his windpipe wasn’t being crushed by the weight of the rest of him. It wouldn’t of mattered, though.
It was dead.
The body hung too limply. The eyes were rolled back in its skull. The neck was strained at an impossible angle with the head flung back and the mouth hanging open. The hand that he had thought was grasping down towards him when he had been holding the legs wasn’t actually. It was just hanging.
Hanging like all the rest of him.
“It’s…” Dick’s voice was shuttery. “What is that?”
He asked the question, though Tim knew he had to recognise his own face even if it was strained up and gruesomely slackened.
“We need something to cut the rope,” Bruce repeated, his voice steady but forced. Tim could only imagine how many emotions he has keeping forced off of his face. What he must have felt in that first moment he saw Dick hanging there with Tim screaming underneath him.
It took Dick a few seconds to react, but with a stuttering breath he pulled a pocket knife out of his pocket and flicked the blade out. He had to climb onto a windowsill and then clamor on top of a dresser top to get to a position where he could reach the rope to cut it.
Tim’s spine tingled as he looked at his brother, alive, looking at his brother, dead. Dick had frozen for a second, staring into his own lifeless face.
“Dick,” Bruce’s voice was sharp and Dick jolted.
“Yes, yes, right,” he muttered, putting the blade against the rope so he could begin to saw.
Tim couldn’t move, he could only watch. The world around him seemed tight and slightly wrong as if he had suddenly slid into a reality where things were just off. Bruce was still holding the body’s legs, lifting it up so it wasn’t hanging, which Tim was inextricably grateful for. He wasn’t sure he could have standed to see Dick’s body thump against the ground when the rope was finally cut.
Bruce grunted at the sudden increase of weight and he adjusted his arms so that the body didn’t awkwardly flop to the side. He held the body while slowly lowering it and for a second it looked like they were hugging, like Bruce was clutching the lifeless body of his son before he laid him to rest.
Dick jumped down from the dresser and broke the illusion as he came to stand beside Bruce.
Then, without his consent, Tim felt his own feet begin to move him forward.
All three of them stood around the body, looking down.
Tim purposefully tried not to focus on Dick’s throat. He didn’t want to see the red, so dark it was nearly purple, or the pale pallor that was settling onto his skin. He didn’t need to have the image of another still chest in his head.
“It looks just like me,” said Dick and Tim was thankful for something else to think about. “Bruce, do you see any differences?”
Bruce hummed, squatting down like Tim had seen one hundred times before on a case. Maybe that’s how he was compartmentalising this. It’s just like a case, a mystery to be solved. Bruce reached out a hand and Tim almost missed the way it minutely paused before resting on the dead Dick’s face. Bruce turned its head about, reviewing the corpse’s eyelashes, its bone structure, the tiny tick in Dick’s nose that came from that time he slipped on the Manor stairs and ate it on a banister. He put his hands into the body’s hair, and ruffled it until he found the thin bullet scar.
It was pinker and fresher than Tim remembered, but he had only seen it a couple of times.
It was almost unnoticeable from the naked eye. Dick had always kept his hair longer, but since the bullet, he seemed to use it like a security blanket. Tim had seen him purposefully brush his hair over the scar, hiding it from view like he could hide that it ever happened. Still, if you looked close enough, you could find it on Dick’s head. There was a small streak of thinning, a little blip in his otherwise shaggy head that suggested there was something underneath.
“Check the left hip,” said Dick, startling Tim. Tim whipped his head towards Dick and saw that, like Bruce, the man had narrowed his eyes and seemed to be treating this as a case.
Lock in.
Lock everything else out.
“The hip?” Bruce questioned even as his hands went towards Dick’s pants. He hesitated again before tugging the waistband down, exposing the grey briefs beneath.
“Got stabbed,” Dick said shortly before huffing in frustration. “No Bruce, you gotta pull those down too.” Without hesitation, he pulled down the briefs, partially exposing the corpse. He pointed towards a spot on the skin, a place that would have been covered by the briefs if they had been in place. “There should be a knife scar here. About one inch wide.”
He stood up and tugged down the waistline on his own pants. Sure enough, there was a straight horizontal line of a knife scar.
“It’s one of the only scars that I’m sure hasn’t been seen in public because I’d have to be naked for someone to see it. Even if I was in a Speedo, it would still be covered.”
“So no hip scar means what?” questioned Tim out loud, gaze going back towards the skin of the corpse and…
“It’s making a copy of what it sees,” Bruce muttered, hand on his chin as he thought through various theories.
Dick himself didn’t seem to be sold on that theory though. He had gone back to the head scar, revealing it again, before looking at the rest of the body. He touched the corpse's clothes, skimming over the fabric. For the first time, Tim realised that he was dressed in an entirely different outfit than Dick was currently wearing. The Dick that was alive was wearing a black tee-shirt and grey sweatpants, comfy clothes for the car ride. The Dick that was dead was wearing dark wash jeans and a faded red Superman t-shirt. It was an outfit Tim had seen dozens of times before, so common that he didn’t even note it as weird.
“Hey Tim, check the ankle. The one I scratched on that pipe two mon–”
There was a crack.
A shattering of sound.
Familiar but rarely heard inside.
A gunshot.
Tim and Dick’s head both shot up, meeting each other’s eyes before going to Bruce. Bruce was completely still, almost like someone had put the man on pause and frozen him and the world around him. His eyes were wide but far away. In a different place.
“What the fuck!” A voice yelled, breaking the silence left by the gunshot.
Jason.
It was Jason.
Jason alive and not Jason dead.
That seemed to kick Bruce into motion.
The man stood, only stumbling a little on his feet before he was moving. Tim and Dick followed behind in a familiar pattern. But Tim wasn’t used to running like this inside of a house or in his civilian clothes.
Bruce followed Jason’s booming voice towards the kitchen and they found him, standing there hands on his head and muttering to himself.
“Jason, what…” Bruce’s voice fell off mid-sentence. Jason turned towards them and Tim got a view of the body beyond him.
At first, he thought it was Cass. Small. Full of wiry muscle instead of bulk. Pale skinned. Dark haired. But the eyes were blue.
No. The eye.
One half of the face was a pulpy, bloody mess, blown to pieces by the gun on the floor. There were bits of flesh and brain blown across the cabinet in a violent spray behind him. It was far more gruesome than the hanged body, but Tim was so much more comfortable with this sight.
Dick had been familiar.
This was a stranger. Just like all the dozens of dead strangers he had seen on patrol before. This one was easier to fit into his head. This felt almost normal.
“Who the hell is this?” Jason questioned, scowling towards the body and the blood sprayed across the kitchen. “Did someone really just break into our house to off himself in the kitchen and make someone else clean up the mess?”
He didn’t seem perturbed as he kicked the guy’s shoe.
“It’s me,” Bruce said so quietly that Tim almost missed it.
Suddenly, all the relief that Tim had forced himself to feel (It wasn’t someone he knew. It wasn’t another piece of their family. It was a stranger. A stranger.) shattered. It was blown to pieces like the brain in the skull.
“What?” questioned Tim and the word tasted like ash on his tongue.
“It’s me,” repeated Bruce more strongly, even though his voice seemed to quiver a bit in his throat. “That’s me when I was about fifteen.”
Tim looked at the corpse again and suddenly he saw it. It was Bruce, but younger. The eyes were the exact right shade of blue. The tilt of the eyebrow was correct. The nose wasn’t the right shape, but Tim knew Bruce had had multiple plastic surgeries. Tim could see the base of the man a younger Bruce would become. The places where muscle would have been packed onto, where the hair would begin to silver and where eventual wrinkles would crease.
There was a small sound behind them and Damian’s nasally voice cut through.
“Father, we heard a gunshot,” he said primly, striding into the kitchen like he owned the place with Cass trailing behind him. Bruce whirled, eyes widening before finding Cass’s gaze.
“Get him out of here and keep him out” he commanded, making Cass’s spine straighten to attention.
She nodded, sweeping Damian away before he could really register what Bruce was asking for or the body on the ground. She complied without question, dragging Damian away despite all his protests. They heard Cass drag him down the hall and all his complaints about not being a child and not needing coddling.
Tim wished it was that simple.
He stared at his father’s back as Damian’s voice got smaller before disappearing altogether. The muscles between Bruce’s shoulders were tense in a way that Tim rarely saw out of cape. It felt more unsettling to see under the thin cotton of his grey t-shirt. It brought the situation closer to home, off the streets and into the house.
When Bruce turned back around, he was all Batman. Eyes narrowed on the scene of the crime. Brain shuffling through possibilities and solutions. Body language silently signalling them to gather round like they were his soldiers.
He had been caught on the other foot just a few minutes ago. Now, he had both feet on the ground and was tensed for a fight.
“Jason,” he said, his voice like a general’s, “what did you see?”
Jason shuffled slightly closer to Bruce, mirroring their father in a way he probably would never acknowledge. He looked so much like Bruce as he analysed the body and quietly assessed the pieces of the forming mystery..
“Not much. I walked into the kitchen, saw the kid put a gun in his mouth, and saw the shot. Then, I yelled and you all came running. It took maybe five seconds all together.”
“Did he say anything?” questioned Tim, crouching near the body so he could look at the gun in the boy’s hand.
“No,” Jason answered over him. “He didn’t even look at me.”
The gun was older and more ornate than the firearms Tim usually saw used during suicides. People usually didn’t take out their best stuff for such a grisly act. This piece was even engraved and Tim could see the top of a small “A” under the boy’s finger.
Something tugged at the back of Tim’s head and he didn’t really know why.
He wanted to question Bruce’s memory. Could Bruce be sure this was him? Would Tim even be able to recognise a younger version of himself if it popped into his life twenty years later? A kid just happening to look a lot like a young Bruce was far more likely.
But that train of thought involved questioning Batman and maybe Tim would have gone there if this was an isolated incident, but he was sure that the body in the bedroom upstairs was Dick.
One copy maybe he could have written off as a weird doppelganger.
A second was a pattern.
Which brought them to two new and more impossible questions: why? And how?
“It has to be magic, right? Or a copycat?” Tim guessed, rocking back on his heels, but remaining low and near the body.
“Maybe collective delusion?” Jason put in and Tim’s stomach turned at the thought that maybe there was a gasleak somewhere and they were all imaging each other’s deaths.
“I think it knows,” Dick’s voice cut through the kitchen air, everyone turned to look at him. He was staring at the body, his face as dark as a stormcloud. There was no characteristic levity to him, no playful competence. He was as dark as Batman as he crossed the kitchen and took the gun out of the corpse’s hand. Bruce tensed as Dick held the gun and they all watched as Dick’s finger traced the elegant “A.P.” on the gun’s silver side. “Fifteen. That’s before you created Batman, right?” he said, still looking down at the gun. “That’s before you decided to commit yourself to Gotham?”
Bruce swallowed and his Adam’s Apple bobbed in his throat. “Yes.”
“You told me that was a hard time for you.” Dick’s eyes were as sharp as a knife, as serious as a gun. “How hard was it?”
“I-I…” Bruce was uncharacteristically fumbling around an answer. “I… was in a dark place. Deciding to become Batman saved me.”
“Right, was it the same dark place I was in? After the head injury, when we didn’t know how extensive the damage was going to be. When I had those balance issues and the memory loss and was starting to develop the verbal tics.”
Bruce’s eyes narrowed and he seemed to catch onto Dick’s line of thinking. A scowl deepened on his face. “You said you were fine.”
“I was, ” Dick stressed the word, anger beginning to slip into his tone. “I was. That’s why I didn’t do it.”
“I’m sorry,” Jason cut in, arms folded across his chest as he broke off the screaming match before it could develop.”What are you talking about?”
Neither Bruce nor Dick answered. They looked away at the exact same time with the exact same body language.
Father and son, even if they were at each other’s throats.
“Suicide,” said Tim answering for them. “They are talking about suicide.”
Silence fell like a heavy, awkward blanket between all of them.
“Well, shit,” said Jason, scratching at the back of his head and looking towards the teenage Bruce. “I guess that’s not too surprising.”
“Whatever this is,” said Dick, forcing the conversation back to business. “It is completing our thoughts. We need to figure out what’s triggering it.”
“No, I think we need to get out of here,” argued Jason. “I know we are Bats and figuring things out is the whole schtick, but let’s just leave. No us, no more little bat bodies. This place can go back to being creepy, we can check into a Ritz-Carlton somewhere, and show back up later with a magic user that can actually handle creepy ghost shit.”
All their eyes went to Bruce, who sighed heavily. “Let’s go. This…” his eyes went back towards his own corpse. “This is obviously magical to some degree. We can call Zatanna and she can figure out whatever is making the house make these.”
So, just like that. They tried to leave.
*
The car wouldn’t start.
“God dammit,” Bruce growled as he smacked the hood. The car remained as still and dead as a stone.
“What does this mean,” said Tim as he stared back towards the house. It was midday, but it was not sunny anymore. The clouds had begun to crowd into the sky and blot out the light. A chill was forming from the lack of light and fog was beginning to rise from the sea. It seemed to be climbing over the cliffs, not quite reaching the surface, but definitely rising.
He didn’t know why, but a shiver ran down his spine at the thought of it travelling across the grass and touching his ankles.