Archive of Our Own ^beta

Tim had never been much good at sleeping. And he really meant never- for as long as he could remember his bed had always been a place of mild discomfort and extreme boredom. He’d never understood how people could drop off in cars or at school, it just didn’t seem possible. He spent hours trying to fall asleep every night, staring at the patterns on the ceiling as he bounced his leg up and down on the mattress. If he was still, he could hear the clocks tick, if he wasn’t (and he usually wasn’t) he could feel his heart pound. 

His mind was just too busy to sleep. He tried turning it off, he really did, he would try the breathing techniques Mom did when she was really angry at someone on the phone, he would imagine all his thoughts drifting away in cardboard boxes tied to red balloons. 

And then a couple minutes later he would be thinking about camera lenses or Ancient Egyptian architecture and feel like crying. 

Nothing. He branded the word across his mind in bold, white letters whenever he slipped up and held his breath until he forgot to in punishment. Mom and Dad always told him to just fall asleep, like it was as easy as walking. He learned early on that pushing bedtime, letting this swirling ball of hurt have even a second of voice resulted in nothing but being told he was ungrateful and whiny, being locked in his room and forgotten about. 

Tim learned to dread the blinking green numbers of his alarm clock, rarely falling asleep before they marked two am. 

When he was six, Tim asked the school librarian if he could check out two books instead of one so he could read late into the night by the yellow glow of a flashlight hidden under his covers. Not that his parents would’ve noticed the light, but Tim liked feeling sneaky and didn’t like thinking about how little they cared. He read until he couldn’t keep his eyes open anymore, and then he would fall asleep- deep and with much nicer dreams than most other nights. 

Nightmares, nightmares had been bad. After the first few times, he learned to simply curl up outside his parents’ bedroom door with the hall light on, waking them proven to be dangerous. But Tim felt like the almost-dreams were ten times worse, the waking nightmares, an awful and confusing state between dreams and reality that made him want to cry. 

Drakes didn’t cry though, so Tim tried not to. 

But Mom and Dad started being gone more and more, and Tim started being alone more and more. He looked up sleeping tips on his newest discovery: the internet. He tried at least four different ways of breathing but at night they all got muddled. He tried guided meditation, and that helped some, helped him feel calmer and less frustrated in the empty-boring-long-dark. In the empty mansion, he played music late into the night, which kept him sane if not rested. He would migrate from bed to couch to Mom and Dad’s to bathroom floor to- everywhere really. 

The nanny started coming every other day when Tim was eight, but he still followed this routine to the letter, following his parent’s instructions to be good. He did that for a while, until he realized no one would know. No one would know if he stopped hiding the flashlight or his tablet under the covers. No one would know if he made hot chocolate and watched cartoons on the big screen in the main room instead of pacing the top floor in the silent dark. No one would know. 

So Tim stopped paying so much attention to the division between night and day, and just kind of kept moving. He would sleep when he was tired enough not to dream and work when he wasn’t, puttering away on the recesses of the internet, picking up skills that didn’t elude him even half as much as sleep. 

Tim accepted the fuzzy feeling in his head and purple smears under his eyes as permanent fixtures in his life and moved forward. 

And when the time came for him to get a little more hands on with his investigation of Batman and Robin? Tim was no stranger to late nights and secrets. Racing across rooftops with a camera was a very efficient way to brute force his way through the never ending buzz of his brain, Tim realized. A very efficient way to get tired enough to sleep. 

***

Gotham Academy’s junior high department started an hour earlier than elementary did. It didn’t really hit Tim that that might be a problem until he’d nearly tripped down the stairs on day three, sleep deprivation bitter in his mouth and vision clouded with the sounds of his too-quick heartbeat. 

That’s when Tim started buying coffee. 

Suddenly the world was in sharper focus. He could do everything he knew he could before. 

His elementary school grades had been mediocre, a source of constant tension between him and his parents. It was one of the few things they ever talked about with him, failure the only time they ever gave him their attention, and so part of him didn’t mind the disappointment devolving into sharp, underhanded jabs devolving into shouting until he was sent to his room, blood boiling, pumping, singing. He minded the aftermath though, the anger dissolving into a deep sort of devastation little Tim couldn’t understand beyond the tears muffled in his pillow. 

Of course, they didn’t sit with him on the nights when he got too frustrated to continue, the numbers and letters echoing in his mind like deranged parrots until rage boiled over and he abandoned it all. He’d ripped up his homework exactly once, but he knew better now. They would leave him to stew on those nights, stew in his own self-hatred over the simplicity of the task. It seemed like they knew that leaving him alone would hurt him worse than any punishment, any words. 

Tim liked it when they yelled better. 

Tim seemed to remember days before that, days when he was younger, four and five, where they didn’t hate him so much. He was sure it was his performance in school that made them pull away, made them stop caring about his nightmares, made them hire a nanny and leave. It had to be that, why else would they go? 

But he was getting off topic. The point was, the coffee helped. It helped him pump out the grades his benchmark scores and parent-mandated IQ test had hinted at since he was a child, made skipping a grade like his parents had always wanted less of a dashed dream and more of a tentative olive branch that stood to bridge the loveless gap between them. 

Tim didn’t keep track of how much he drank, or when and how that number started increasing when he gained a tolerance. He started drinking it before bed and would conk out almost immediately, something he knew was weird but chose to ignore, chose to ignore how his mind was quieter with caffeine in his veins. Ignored how he slept both better and worse this way, but liked himself much better on the nights he laid awake in bed. 

By the time he was fourteen, it had stopped working so well. No matter how much he’d bounced around on patrol (because he was fucking Robin now!), his quiet mind was no match for his artificially fast heart. 

***

Alfred and Bruce were worried, which was a new odd sort of thing that made Tim’s stomach flutter whenever he thought about it. But it also made him feel trapped. 

Tim stayed with them for six months while his father was in the coma, where they enforced his first bedtime in over half a decade. Tim wanted to scream every time they poked their heads into his room with an innocent reminder that it was time to sleep- it wasn’t time to sleep until Tim was tired, that’s how it had worked for years - but Tim complied without complaint because he didn’t yet know what happened to rule breakers in the Wayne household.

(And he could handle silence from his mother, he could handle silence from his father, but he was sure that silence from Bruce would break him.) 

Tim and Bruce met frequently in the dark halls of the manor, matching eye bags giving them away.

“Can’t sleep,” Tim would say. 

Bruce would grunt and Tim had thought he was getting better at reading him, but he swore those grunts had moved from acknowledgement to admonishment to true concern over the past few months, which couldn’t be right, could it? 

After a while, Bruce became convinced it was the coffee. Asked him to cut back, asked questions that were too close to the bundled ball of hurt in his chest until Tim gave in just to keep it out of the spotlight.

***

Tim didn’t even care that his reaction meant he was as addicted as fuck. Didn’t even care that Alfred’s restrictions were making his grades suffer, backpack full of abandoned assignments even as he powered through cases at an alarming rate. All he cared about was the fact that everything was both sharper and duller, without the caffeine, and about how loud his brain was at night. 

The first week he crashed, the second he slept lightly and the third he went insane. 

His dad woke up and Tim couldn’t decide if it was the best or worst thing that had ever happened to him. 

***

Tam was convinced he’d get caffeine poisoning. As the one who stocked his office, he was sure she knew more about the amount of coffee he was drinking than he did, and she didn’t even know about the energy drinks. It was the one thing in his life he didn’t control meticulously, the one thing he didn’t track and mark down. No, his caffeine intake was for God to know and him to decide, based on how much work he had to do and how much of it involved spreadsheets or speaking without immediately losing his train of thought. 

And it wasn’t healthy, he knew that. He knew that because he would give anything to be that twelve year-old little boy finishing a math worksheet in a record breaking twenty minutes, a single cup of coffee marking a brown ring on the corner. 

To achieve that sort of clarity he needed so much more now, and no matter what he did, a consistent sleep schedule loomed out of reach. Age brought guilt, supposed to’s he hadn’t had as a kid. 

God, what Tim wouldn’t give for two minutes of silence, free of racing thoughts or pounding hearts. 

***

“It’s like, two am, Timmy,” Dick chided, resigned and aghast as Tim pulled the thermos from his belt, settling next to his brother on the edge of the building. 

“Helps me think,” Tim said with a shrug, uncapping the thermos and taking a swig. 

Dick frowned and sighed and returned his gaze to the city skyline. This high up it was almost peaceful - you could almost forget the war that ran through Gotham’s underbelly like blood in the nile. 

Tim drank to peace. 

***

Tim sighed, not bothering to turn around as his living room window slid open. None of his security alarms had gone off and it wasn’t even the window attached to his fire escape, so if it wasn’t a family member come to bother him on his night off then whatever criminal it was honestly deserved the drop they were about to get on him.

But a moment later Tim recognized the sound of those feet, so he sighed and leaned back on his barstool, pushing away his cereal, which suddenly had the texture of wet cardboard. “I wasn’t aware this was a Bloody Mary situation.” He turned to face his oldest brother, gesturing to the Captain Crunch box on the counter. “This is my third bowl.” 

Dick was in full Nightwing regalia and in the middle of taking off his domino, which he abandoned on the counter when he saw the cereal. “Oh fantastic,” he breathed, lunging for the cupboard with bowls. “I raised you so well.” 

I raised myself,  Tim barely stopped himself from saying. “I thought you were in Blud this weekend,” he said instead, watching Dick enthusiastically pour his cereal, pushing aside three dirty coffee mugs to find space. 

“Can’t a man spontaneously decide to come visit his baby brother while dressed as a bird-themed vigilante?” 

Tim scoffed. Of course he could, that was basically all Dick did these days, but usually the baby brother in question was Damian, and usually it was on a rooftop and not inside Tim’s apartment, but Tim didn’t have the energy to argue so he grabbed his bowl of half-eaten cardboard cereal and slid past Dick, putting it on top of the pile of dirty dishes in the sink. 

Tim watched Dick open three different drawers looking for a spoon before taking pity and opening the right one on his way to the couch. 

His laptop was open on the coffee table, and okay , maybe it hadn’t been so much a night off as it was a night in. He closed it reluctantly, unsure why Dick was here and not keen on setting off one of his self-care lectures. 

But Dick was well distracted with shoveling Captain Crunch into his face, so Tim pulled out his phone and collapsed onto the couch, deciding to Instagram-stalk his suspect in the meantime. 

Dick would say what he had to say eventually. Or he wouldn’t, and Tim would get a call tomorrow morning about whatever Dick had forgotten to say. Either way worked. Moral of the story: there was no rush to figure out his most spontaneous brother’s inner machinations when he would reveal them himself sooner or later. 

Tim began to scroll through every ‘Joy Graham’ on Instagram and reached over for his coffee mug, only to find it empty. He groaned and set it down with a clunk. He tried to force himself to get up for all of five seconds before giving up, his mind even more exhausted than his bones. Then he remembered his home had recently been invaded and raised his head. “Dick, can you start the coffee machine?” 

Dick gasped. He slurped up one last bite of cereal and set his bowl down on the counter, which set off all sorts of alarm bells but Tim refused to show fear, refused to look up even as Dick rounded the couch to stand in front of him. “The coffee machine is the other way, Dick,” he said, tapping on the right Joy. 

“See no, that’s what I came to talk to you about.”

Well that merited more attention than Joy’s at home baking business (more than likely offering poisoning on the side). Tim dropped his phone on his chest and looked up at his brother with the most intimidating gaze he had. “What?”

“Scoot over,” Dick said instead of explaining , pushing Tim’s legs aside and forcing him to sit up. Tim squawked and flailed and generally made a whole production of the thing, but Dick won, only to twist into some sacrilegious shape and face Tim, arm resting on the back of the couch. 

Fuck, he had his serious face on. Not even his ‘you’re in trouble’ serious face, but his ‘I need to be open and honest with you right now’ serious face, which was worse.

So Tim sat up straight and tossed his phone onto the coffee table, folding his arms. He matched Dick’s expression with a preemptive glare, ignoring the way his heart was pounding because Dick had a way of driving points like nails into his heart whether he wanted them there or not, and all this felt like he was preparing to raise a hammer. Jesus Christ, he’d put down his cereal for this, Tim had the right to be a little scared! 

But Tim’s coffee intake was his choice and his alone, Dick could well and truly suck it if he was here to talk about sleep or coffee habits because Tim couldn’t help it and whenever people tried to help him with it they only made things worse. 

Dick took a deep breath and looked him in the eyes. “Okay so. You know how I have ADHD?” 

Okay, right out of left field, that one. Tim blinked and took a second to recalculate, unsure how this encounter was going to continue. Suddenly there was a very big rush to figure out what Dick was thinking before he said it himself. “Yeah…?” Tim said, curiosity taking over his instinctual cry of ‘it’s a trap!’ 

Damn, maybe it was time to watch that movie again. 

But Dick was talking again, twining his fingers together in a nervous habit. He was looking just as off kilter as Tim felt, like he’d suddenly realized he didn’t know what to say next. “So… listen Tim, I just… hear me out for a minute, okay? You remember when I took Adderall for a while in college?” 

“Uh, sure? Are you thinking of going back on or something? Do you need help?” Tim guessed, trying to beat Dick to the punch even though none of his theories seemed even remotely right. 

“No, I- just listen, Tim. You know how I don’t drink coffee because it makes me sleepy?” 

“Yeah…?” 

“When I started taking meds the doctor told me that that’s because of ADHD. Cause like. Adderall and caffeine are both stimulants, right? It- it makes sense that what makes other people hyper calms us down. Helps us focus or sleep.“

Tim’s head was spinning as he tried to understand what Dick was getting at until- “ Wait, us?” he repeated, leaning away from his older brother. “Dick, what? Stop- just, stop.” 

“Come on, babybird. You know what I’m getting at.” Dick looked pained and open and sympathetic and all the things that made Tim’s insides squirm, because he didn’t know what to do with them. People kept telling him that it was because of Jack and Janet, but they said it the same way Dick was saying things now, so it had a hard time sticking. 

The hammer hovered in the silence, as Dick’s eyes begged him to see reason. 

“A diagnosis helped me so much, Tim. Ask anyone. I just. I want the best for you. I see you struggling, kiddo."  

Dick didn’t need to point out the dishes piled high in the sink, the evidence scattered across the living room couch that he hadn’t left it in days, the Depression™ outfit of two day-old pajama pants and a stained t-shirt, and coffee mug after coffee mug staining circles into the counter and the table and the armchair by the tv. He didn’t need to point them out but Tim suddenly saw them clear as day, clear as a detective and goddamnit who was he to think he could hide how consistently he existed in pieces from one of the only emotionally competent Bat-trained detectives in the world, huh? 

Tim felt frozen and too hot all at once, like a computer monitor hiding an overloaded server. No, none of this was- none of it could be true. He wasn’t like Dick, who was practically the ADHD poster child. He wasn’t hyperactive, he wasn’t- didn’t need help. 

But at the same time, the back of his mind was slotting puzzle pieces together, and it was all becoming a little too clear for comfort, Dick’s godforsaken nail iron-cold inside his chest.

“That’s not- I don’t. Dick,” Tim finally landed on. “I’m just, I’m just the way I am. I don’t need an excuse.” 

“It’s not an excuse, Tim. You know that.” 

Tim held his gaze until the honesty in his eyes was too much to bear and looked away, staring at his empty coffee mug instead, ignoring the facts about stimulants scrolling across the back of his brain. 

“Just think about it, okay?” Dick asked, backing off, like he knew that pushing any more tonight would shatter Tim like glass. He put a sudden hand to his ear. “On my way, Oracle. ETA fifteen.” He turned back to Tim. “Break in at the docks. Gotta go. I love you.” 

Dick kissed him roughly on the head and disappeared out the window, pressing his domino back over his eyes as he went. 

Tim blinked after him, his mind finally rebooting. “ Fuck.” He fell back into the couch and threw his arm over his eyes. “Fuuuuuuuuck.”

***

Okay, so maybe Tim had done a little research since then. It wasn’t like he believed Dick. He was just checking. Pursuing all available avenues of investigation, like a good detective should. And it wasn’t like it was that hard either; Bruce had a massive database on neurodivergency hidden in the Batcomputer that he probably stress-gathered when Dick was diagnosed, although a small portion of it seemed older than that. 

Well, two hours wasted down that rabbit-hole and Tim could make a solid guess that it had been for Barry, which explained so much about Bart but also definitely meant that Tim didn’t have it because he was nothing like those two and did you know that ADHD is actually hereditary and there was no way in hell either of his parents had it so there, case closed. 

“Whatcha doing, Timbo?” Jason asked, waltzing into the cave like his blood-smeared death regalia wasn’t hanging in a glass case about twenty feet away from him. Okay, so maybe the stress was getting to him. That was kinda harsh. 

Tim practically tripped over himself closing all his tabs and whipped around. “Nothing!” 

Jason sent him a weird look. “Okay…”

“What are you even doing here?” Tim shot back, hoping to derail him. 

“Picking up the new Fear antidote, jackass. What about you?” Jason asked, just as ruthlessly. 

“Working a case,” Tim said, which was technically true. “Just finished actually. The antidote’s by the batarangs.”

Jason silently grabbed the doses and hopped back on his bike, flicking up the kickstand and starting the engine. “You can go back to watching porn now. Bye Timmy!” 

Tim whipped back around as Jason peeled out of the cave. “I’m not- ugh! Jason!” 

***

Tim dumped a bunch of spoiled peaches in the garbage and ignored the voice in his head that said it was because he struggled with object permanence. Tim blinked at the screen of his laptop that was telling him it was somehow four am already and pretended his brain wasn’t calling it time blindness. 

Tim stared at the ceiling and wondered what Bruce would say if he told him it wasn’t the coffee, but something inside him so deeply broken it made his prison of a body feel like home. 

***

“Tim.” 

Tim grunted an acknowledgement, never tearing his eyes away from the screen. 

“You’ll hurt your eyes glaring away at that thing in the dark,” Bruce admonished, looming closer. 

“You have no room to talk, B…” Tim answered haltingly between keystrokes. 

Bruce’s hand fell on his shoulder and Tim jumped. Hard. 

Bruce murmured a couple apologies and Tim saw his hand hovering just into time to relax, to let it be replaced on his shoulder. He reached up without thinking, one hand continuing to type, the other clasping B’s for a moment. 

“What are you working on?” Bruce asked, stiffly in that way that meant he was trying but wasn’t sure how. Tim almost wished he’d just get to the point. 

“Riveter Case. I found the paper trail between the shipping company and the docks, but the manifests are all weird. A ship like that can only carry fifteen tons, but they have over twenty containers logged. Unless they were leaving empty…” Tim’s eye twitched and he sighed, slumping back in his seat, letting his hands rest on his laptop, still. 

“Eyewitness reports or cameras?” B asked, crouching down to see the document better. His voice was fueled again, latching on to what he knew. 

“Cams haven’t gotten me much, none of the vantage points are any good. I’ll have to plan a stakeout.” 

Bruce nodded thoughtfully. He stood back up, but his hand didn’t leave, which Tim was grateful for. 

“Tim…” 

Tim hummed. 

Bruce opened his mouth and struggled for a moment before deciding. “Can we talk?” 

Tim sighed, rubbing his face and shutting his laptop. “Go ahead, B.” He swiveled the chair to face him. He was too tired to stand, settling for looking up at Bruce even though it made him feel small.

Bruce’s hand dropped from his shoulder to his arm as he crouched, the other joining it on Tim’s other side. Tim thought it was funny, a leftover (or perhaps still used, considering Damian) habit from the Robins, getting down on their level, making them feel important, valued.

Understood. 

Tim studied his- B’s face, the way he was keeping his expressions closely guarded, locked under the minuscule scowl he wore everywhere he was Batman. But he wasn’t supposed to be Batman here at the manor, he was supposed to just be Bruce. 

Tim’s heart pounded suddenly, an act of betrayal as his nerves flared. “Everything okay, B?” 

Bruce’s face twitched. “Nobody’s in danger,” he prefaced, knowing where Tim’s mind had leapt. He gave a quiet sigh. “Tim, has Dick talked to you recently?” 

Tim scowled and turned his chair back around. “It was stupid. I already looked into it.”  

Bruce hummed, a small noise that meant disagreement, and caught the back of his chair, turning him back around. “And I think it merits a little more investigation. Tim, would you be interested in following his advice?” 

Tim bluescreened. “I- what?” 

“Tim, honey.” 

Tim’s chest swelled at the name, the emotion infused into each syllable. 

Batman cleared his throat, clearly just as surprised by the display of emotion as Tim. “I think it would be incredibly beneficial for everyone if you got an ADHD screening.” 

“But- I- Bruce, that’s not-” Tim grunted, frustrated. 

“I’m sorry I didn’t notice sooner,” Bruce said, genuine apology in his eyes. Not pity or disappointment like Tim had feared. Not disgust or anger like Jack and Janet would have felt. Just the promise to pay more attention next time. Bruce cared and was poised to listen, and wanted Tim for Tim, and that broke down all his reservations as sudden tears pooled in his eyes. 

“What if I’m not?” he asked. “What if I’m not and I’m just this stupid all on my own?” 

“Tim, you are not stupid,” Bruce said softly, thumbing away a tear on Tim’s cheek, any hint of Batman gone from his voice. “You are one of the smartest people I know, and you have handled so many devastating things with admirable grace, and most of them were ‘all on your own’. When I see you struggling I don’t see a failure, I see a hero.” 

Tim pressed into B’s hand and shut his eyes. “But what if I’m not?”  

Bruce stood up and grabbed the nearest chair, sitting down. A folder appeared from a drawer and Bruce handed it over silently. Glaring a bit at him for the dramatics, Tim opened it. 

A self-evaluation worksheet. Lists and lists of symptoms and open spaces to mark their severity. Tim looked up at Bruce, already itching to collect quantifiable data. 

Damn, Dick was good. 

Bruce scooted his chair closer. “There’s only one way to find out.”

Tim nodded without thinking, words stuck in his throat. “Yeah,” he finally managed, turning back to his desk to find a pen. 

***

A week later Tim was sitting in a doctors office, placidly scraping his stack of papers on his thigh as he waited. 

It didn’t matter, he tried to tell himself. It didn’t matter what happened. 

But he was filled with a crushing sort of hope that maybe, just maybe, there was a reason he was like this, and that there was a better way out than drowning himself in music and caffeine. An explanation for the waking nightmare his life had been thus far. 

There was a knock and the doctor was back, and she was sitting and telling him about the results, about her consultation with another doctor, about how- “Tim, we are positive as can be that you have ADHD.” 

Tim shut his eyes, lungs freezing. 

There is an odd sort of comfort in being told that you’re broken. 

Relief, palpable and sweet, crashed into his body. His face remained passive- stony and cold. 

He opened his eyes, and gave her one quick nod. 

She smiled at him. “Let’s discuss treatment.” 

***

Bruce asked him to stay at the manor while he started the meds, and Tim tried to pretend it wasn’t so he could keep both his paranoid eyes on him. Tim had made the mistake of mentioning the doctor’s hesitance to put him on meds due to the fact that Tim was scraping the upper ranges of being underweight, which he fucking hated because he already forgot to eat half the time and other times food tasted like nothing but bad feelings. So now Bruce was worried and Alfred had taken it as a personal offense and Tim was also supposed to cut back on the coffee to see the real effects of the medicine, so he stayed in the manor and tried to find some sort of consistent sleep schedule. 

That first week, Tim was off-put by the meds. They didn’t seem to do much at all. Alfred and Tam were helping him slowly cut back on the coffee, and by his first med check three weeks later it had really started to affect him. With all of Bruce’s mother henning, Tim’s weight had stayed fairly stable, so the doctor agreed to up his dosage to fifteen. 

Bruce called her three days later when he was done watching Tim walk around like a zombie- eyes empty. 

“I know it’s counterintuitive, but that means the dose is too low. I’ll up him to twenty.” 

Twenty worked. Mostly. 

Tim hardly slept, and at about five O’clock every day he felt as though his face was melting off his skull as the crash came. He could focus better, but not enough. His mind was still too loud. 

She gave him medication to help him sleep and upped him to twenty-five. 

Four days into that dosage, Tim sat in front of his computer in blissful silence. When he realized- when he realized just how quiet it was- the brief jitteriness of the meds kicking in gone, his mind still- his fingers froze on the keyboard. 

There was… there was really nothing up there. 

It wasn’t branded across his brain like a punishment or a prayer, it was just… there. 

Tim knew there wasn’t really nothing- it was just that there was only one thing. One thing at a time. 

Tim’s head drooped. 

Three hours later he woke up drooling all over his keyboard, a row of keys indented onto his cheek and a row of fs spilling across his document. 

For the first time ever, Tim felt at peace.