Archive of Our Own ^beta

Chapter Text

Tim doesn’t like the way hospitals smell. This is only the third time Tim’s been in one, he’s only seven after all, and his doctor (Tim just learned last week, his doctor is called a pediatrician, that means he’s a doctor for kids) has his own practice which smells much better than this place, and is way more fun, it’s got a bunch of toys for him to play with in the waiting room, and there’s animals on the walls. Tim doesn’t remember the first time he was in a hospital, since it was when he was born, and last time he was in a hospital he was too sick to really notice the smell, or how boring it was.

This time though, Tim’s not sick, so he’s had plenty of time to stare at the white and gray walls of the hospital, each wall painted gray on the bottom and white at the top, with a harsh line between the two just a little bit above Tim’s eye level, and to take in the smell of stale air and cleaner and something distinctly hospital that Tim would only be able to describe as the smell of sickness if asked. But no one is asking. No one’s doing much of anything with Tim. When they first got here, Jack had tried to keep Tim entertained while Janet talked to the nurse at the counter, but as soon as Janet had come back, they had started talking together, so now Tim’s sitting off to the side, flipping through an old National Geographic he found on the little table next to the row of chairs they’re sitting on, with nothing to distract him from the smell of the hospital.

Well, there is one thing. Tim’s throat has been bothering him for the last few hours. He tried to mention it to his parents, but hey just told him it was the hospital air irritating his throat, something about it being kept cold with air moving to push germs towards the floor so people don’t get sick, Tim didn’t entirely get it. He’s pretty sure they’re wrong, his throat has been itching since about half an hour into the long car ride from Gotham to the small, peaceful town in rural New York that this hospital is in.

Tim is about to complain about his throat again, it’s getting worse and if it keeps going, he’s pretty sure he’s going to start crying, when a nurse walks in and calls them over. He drifts behind his parents as they walk over to her, and as such misses the first half of their quiet conversation, but he does catch something about ‘it’ doesn’t look good. He doesn’t know what ‘it’ is, though. Despite there being plenty of time on the way over, his parents never actually told him what was going on. He hadn’t even known they were going to a hospital till they pulled up outside. Only the knowledge that there were some of the best doctors in the country back home in Gotham kept him from worrying that something was wrong with him or his parents.

“She probably only has hours to live.” Tim hears the nurse say. “She’s awake now, but we don’t know how long that will last, you’ll want to make your goodbyes quick.”

Oh. So, they’re here to see someone who’s dying. That makes Tim feel better about his parents ignoring him, grief can excuse a lot of bad behaviors after all, and ignoring your kid for a few hours is definitely one of them. Tim immediately feels guilty about his relief. Someone is dying after all.

The nurse leads them down the halls of the hospital. Tim is thoroughly lost by the time they stop in front of a door that seems indistinguishable from the rest. The plaque next to the door says it’s a private room, and a little paper slid into a slot at the bottom of the sign marks it as belonging to an E. Drake.

Jack pauses with his hand on the door to the room, looking through the little window on it with a sad look on his face. Janet puts her hand on his shoulder and gives him a little squeeze. Jack opens the door and walks in, a look of guilt and sadness and remorse on his face that Tim has never seen before. Tim has never seen his dad look so unsure in his life. Jack has always been confidant, and even when he’s in the wrong, he’s always been unrepentant. Now, visiting a dying relative that Tim doesn’t even know the full name of, Jack looks like a dog going up to their owner, knowing they’ve misbehaved.

“Jack?” a voice rasps out, just barely audible to Tim where he stands outside the door.

“Hey, mom,” Jack says quietly. Tim’s eyes widen, he hadn’t realized he had any living grandparents. His parents almost never talk about their parents, and Tim has always assumed that meant they were dead. Something in him hurts at the knowledge that he’s only finding out that wasn’t true right as it’s about to change. Tim could have known one of his grandparents for seven years, now he’s going to be lucky if he gets seven hours.

Janet walks into the room and sits in the uncomfortable looking pleather chair by the door. She sits with the same perfect posture that she always does, but the way that she clenches onto her purse in her lap rather than set it down gives away that it’s just a façade.

“Janet,” The voice speaks again, though this time there’s a note of displeasure in the rasp that wasn’t there with Jack.

“Ellen,” Janet responds coldly.

Tim moves to the doorway and gets his first glimpse of the person in the bed. She’s an older woman, her hair is almost entirely gray, though there is some black mixed in. She has blue eyes, the same kind of pale ice blue that Tim has. The eyes that get him bullied at school for looking creepy, even then though he’s never seen any other blue-eyed kids get the same treatment. The woman looks frail in a way that Tim would expect from someone much older. Ellen Drake can’t be older than her sixties, but she looks like she would break if you shook her hand too hard.

Tim’s silent watching is interrupted by the pain is his throat suddenly shifting, as if something is trying to force it’s way out. Tim would think he was about to throw up, except his stomach feels fine. Instead, what comes out is a small broken sounding whine.

Three sets of eyes snap to him. Janet and Jack both look upset. He’s ruining the moment he knows, not that he has any control over it. The woman, Tim’s grandmother he reminds himself, looks more shocked and curious than anything.

“Hello,” She croaks out, a softness in her voice that Tim recognizes from teachers and nannies. Tim’s always thought of it as the ‘gotta be happy for kids’ voice, though this woman seems genuinely happy to see him in a way teachers often don’t. “What’s your name kiddo?” She asks him.

Tim straightens up, going into polite young Drake heir mode the way he’s expected to when talking to strangers. “My name is Tim Drake Ma’am.”

His grandmother lets out a laugh at that, though it quickly devolves into a cough. “I see Janet’s taught you to be a good little rich boy. Call me Grandma, not ma’am.”

Tim is a little confused by he comment about his mom, and flicks his eyes over towards Janet. She’s clutching her purse so hard now Tim’s pretty sure her sharp nails are going to put holes in it, which she’s going to be mad about later.

“Ok, Grandma,” Tim says cautiously.

Grandma Ellen shifts her focus back to Jack where he’s sitting next to her. “You should have brought your boy to see me, Jack. Or at least told me about him.”

Jack looks chastised. “Yes, mother,” he says after a moment, his voice filled with unspoken protests.

“Now, bring me my grandson, I want to see him properly. Put him up here on the bed with me.”

Jack waves Tim forward, more obedient than Tim had ever seen him. Once Tim is standing next to him, he carefully lifts him onto the bed next to Grandma Ellen.

She looks him over, eyes darting around, but always coming back to his eyes. She reaches a frail hand up and strokes the curve of bone under his eye. “I’ve never seen a boy with banshee eyes before. All my brothers had dark eyes like your father and my father.”

“Banshee?” Tim asks, confused.

“Banshee,” she confirms. “The wailing woman; Omen of death.”

Omen of death sounds bad. Tim pulls away in shock, nearly falling off the bed. Janet catches him though, and pulls him into her arms in a way she hasn’t since he stopped running towards every interesting thing he saw when he was three. Tim leans into her hold, relishing the feeling of her care for him that he so rarely gets.

“Don’t say that kind of thing to my son!” Janet screams, losing the cool composure Tim always associates with her. “Jack, Timothy and I will be outside in the car,” she states curtly, pulling Tim out the door with her.

By the time they get to the car Janet has calmed down a bit. She takes a few calming breaths with her head against the wheel, before looking back to Tim in his car seat. “How about we go get ice cream once your dad is done in there?” she asks.

Tim isn’t really in the mood for ice cream, but he knows his mom is trying to make him feel better after Grandma Ellen got weird inside so he nods anyways. Janet gives him a tight little smile at that and it makes him feel better than the ice cream ever could.

Tim ruins their little moment of connection by whining in pain again. It’s like his throat is on fire as he tries to keep them down. The pain ramps up to unbearable levels and he vaguely processes Janet climbing between the front seats of the car, tearing her tights in the process, before he finally gives into the urge to scream.

It’s loud, Tim’s pretty sure he’s never made this much noise before. Tim’s pretty sure he passes out for a second after his scream. The next thing he knows he’s being gently rocked back and forth in Janet’s arms as she babbles to him in a panicked way Tim hasn’t heard since the time he got hospitalized with a fever of 104°.

“Mom?” Tim asks, though he’s not sure what he’s asking.

“Hey, baby, let’s get you inside. We’ll get one of the doctors to look at you.” Janet says, pushing Tim’s hair out of his eyes.

“No, I’m ok.” Tim says. It’s not even a lie. It’s like the scream released a big pressure that had been building in his throat all day.

“Are you sure? Don’t just tell me what you think I want to hear Timothy.”

“Yeah. Yes. I’m sure.” Tim pushes himself back to sitting straight up. “We’re going to get ice cream, remember?”

“Ice cream can wait Timothy, your health is more important,”

“I’m fine mom. Look, dad’s coming out now.” He points at Jack walking towards them with a dark look on his face.

Jack pulls open the passenger door and sits down heavily, seemingly not even noticing the disheveled appearances of his wife and son in the back seat. “She’s gone,” he says heavily.

He breaks down crying and Tim is shocked. He’s never seen his dad cry from anything other than physical pain that one time a bookshelf fell on his foot. His mom is shocked too if the way Janet’s eyes widen is any indication. She looks back and forth between her husband and son for a moment before ultimately deciding Jack needed her more. With a kiss to Tim’s forehead, she moves to get back into the driver’s seat where she can comfort Jack better.

It takes several minutes, in which Jack cries wordlessly while Janet holds him and rubs his back, but eventually Jack calms down.

“I told Timothy we’d get ice cream, are you up for it?” Janet asks, her voice still more emotional than Tim’s used to.

“Yeah, I could use the distraction,” Jack says.

The ice cream is good, though it’s still weird to see his parents being emotional. It distracts Tim enough that he almost forgets about the weirdness at the hospital. It’s almost midnight, and Tim is lying in his bed in his room in Gotham after another hours long drive back, when he remembers what his grandmother said. Banshee eyes. Tim slips out of his bed quietly and goes to his laptop. It’s cold in his room this time of night, something about the house being old and poorly insulated, so he brings the laptop back to his bed and curls up under the covers with it.

It takes all of five seconds to google Banshees. It takes almost three hours for exhaustion to pull him away from his research.

Chapter Text

Tim almost forgets about Grandma Ellen’s death over the next few years. Sure, if asked about her he’ll remember the strange day where his parents drove him to meet his grandma, she called him a banshee and then died. Sure, if he thinks about it, he’ll remember that he’s pretty sure she was right and he is a banshee. That he’s pretty sure the pain in his throat that day, and the scream in the car where his mother held him so gently were probably a banshee’s wail like all the sites he had looked into over the week after that day had talked about.

The thing is, being a banshee doesn’t exactly come up in daily life. He’s not wailing over every death announced on the news or anything. So, it just kind of fades into the background.

It fades so into the background that Tim honestly just forgets to tell Batman about it when he becomes Robin. Or well, he’s not Robin yet, but he is training to be Robin. Tim’s been training with him almost every day since Bruce accepted him as his next Robin, staying in his house even, and it feels awkward to tell him now. So as Tim stares at the screen where the news just announced his parents’ plane is missing, feeling his throat tingle in a way it hasn’t in over six years, he panics. Alfred is talking to him, trying to comfort him with all the harmless reasons his parents might not have reached their destination, but Tim knows.

Tim can’t handle it anymore and shrugs Alfred’s hand off his shoulder. “If you want me, I’ll be in my room,” he says, already walking up the long flight of stairs to the manor. Once out of the cave with the door closed behind him, Tim rushes to his room. He’s not sure if it’s just because he’s older, or if it’s because he knows what’s happening, but the need to wail is building far faster than when he was seven.

He makes it to his room with just enough time to slam the door closed before he can’t hold it back anymore. He wails. It’s long and loud and filled with a sadness that wasn’t there for the grandmother he never truly knew.

Tim blacks out for a moment. When he comes to a few seconds later, he’s covered in sweat, lying on the carpet of the guest room he’s claim for his time in the manor. Tim sends a silent apology to Alfred for the mess. He’s still shaky, as he moves to pull off his soaked clothes and get in the shower.

Almost as soon as he’s in the shower, with the warm water pressing down on him, he breaks down. His parents are dead or dying, and he’s here in Gotham, unable to do anything about it. He cries for a good ten minutes, occasionally letting out choked cries of desperation. They’re not true banshee wails, but there’s some amount of power in them, not that he really notices.

Tim has just pulled himself together enough to get out and put his pajamas on when Bruce comes to comfort him. Of course, Bruce’s idea of comforting him is to put his hand on Tim’s shoulder while in the full Batsuit and tell him to be strong.

Tim considers, for a moment, telling Bruce he’s a banshee. Maybe then Bruce would understand that it doesn’t matter if he stays strong, Tim has already announced their deaths to the world. But telling Bruce would mean Bruce would think he’d been hiding it from him, would quite possibly mean not being Robin, and Tim can’t lose that, not before he’s even truly began.

Tim lets Bruce leave; tells him he’s going to keep working on the Moneyspider case they’d been working on when the news came in.

Tim eventually heads back into the cave. Tim’s halfway down the stairs when he hears Bruce’s voice. The echoing nature of the cave distorts it too much to understand him, but it’s clearly him. Tim quietly walks the rest of the way down the stairs. When he gets to the bottom, Bruce is nowhere to be seen, but Tim can hear someone flipping through a book in the library section of the cave, so he’s sure Bruce is over there.

Tim makes his way to the Batcomputer to wait for Bruce. He’s calmed down about his parents’ deaths. But when he sees the video frozen on the screen, with his parents tied up in a dark room, something shifts inside him.

Tim had assumed, when he wailed, that his parents were dead. That’s how it had worked with Grandma Ellen. But this, here, proves that if nothing else, someone is trying to make them think his parents are alive. He’s still staring at the screen when Batman comes out of the stacks.

“Tim…” Batman starts.

Tim’s angry. It’s probably not rational, but he’s mad Bruce didn’t tell him about this earlier. “They’re still alive! Why didn’t you tell me? They’re my parents! I’ve a right to know!”

“I didn’t want to worry you needlessly,” Bruce says. Tim scoffs internally, if only Bruce knew Tim had already been mourning them. “There was no point building your hopes if… if there’s nothing I can do.”

Tim gets where Bruce is coming from, but he needs Bruce to understand what’s been going through his head too. “I thought they were dead!”

Bruce actually looks a little sheepish at that. He doesn’t apologize though; he just starts bringing Tim up to speed on the situation. Tim’s a little mad when Bruce says they aren’t heading to Haiti to search for them, but his reasoning is sound, and Bruce is the one with more experience, so Tim lets him call the shots. Every second they aren’t searching for them feels like it’s going to be their last though, like that will be the second their kidnappers decide to kill them.

Tim spends the night tossing and turning in his bed, images of the horrible ways his parents could die haunting his dreams. In one dream their kidnappers shoot them after. Getting the ransom. In another, they break free and die lost in the wilderness of Haiti. One that keeps popping up is poison. They drink some water, or are forced to, and it kills them.

When Tim wakes up, he meditates. He would do it anyways, he’s going to need to be centered as Robin, but today he does it for much longer. It takes almost an hour, but eventually he’s feeling mostly centered, able to ignore the burning pain in his chest that is his fears about his parents.

Tim gets to work on the Moneyspider case as soon as he’s done with breakfast. Bruce is nowhere to be seen, but that’s not entirely unusual, Bruce has been known to sleep in as late as 2 pm, on days he doesn’t have to show up to work.

Tim spends the next several hours searching for where the money could have gone. A sense of dread wells up in him, that he pushes away in favor of continuing to focus on the case. Just as he’s figured out that a thousand people in Cambodia were given a thousand dollars each just after the last Moneyspider attack, when the feeling builds to a crescendo and then disappears completely. Tim may not understand how his powers work, but he’s almost certain in that moment that his parents just died.

Tim takes a moment to clutch to the desk. Tears threaten to leave his eyes, but he won’t let them. Tim manages to get himself under control before Alfred notices, or at least comments. He quickly traces the money back to its source, Gotham Juvenile Correction Hall. He can’t tell exactly who in the building did it from the trace, but a quick look over the residents shows that Lonnie Machin, aka Anarky, is there. He’s the perfect candidate for it, so Tim is sure it’s him. Tim changes into a suit, and goes to confront Lonnie about Moneyspider.

The confrontation with Lonnie goes well, and for a little bit Tim even forgets about his parents. But when he gets to the Batcave to see a bloody bandaged Bruce standing there, telling him he has bad news, it all comes back.

Bruce doesn’t tell him much, on the way to the hospital. Tim doesn’t think Bruce would be so cruel as to drive him all the way to the hospital just to take him to its morgue, but he’s sure his powers were telling him his parents died. Maybe… He doesn’t dare hope, but maybe they were only dead for a moment. Maybe their hearts stopped, and his powers recognized it as their deaths, but Batman was able to resuscitate them?

It’s not until they’re in the hospital, looking at his father lying in one of the beds, in a coma that he understands. His dad made it out. His mom didn’t.

It’s strange, in all Tim’s worries about his parents dying, he had been thinking about them as a unit. Either both were alive, or both were dead. Now, knowing that his dad is alive and his mom isn’t, he feels conflicted. Part of him feels stupid. Stupid for assuming that the wail was for both of them, that his parents couldn’t be separated by something as big as death, even though he knew that they’d been planning on separating anyways.

He also feels an odd sense of happiness. He’d been expecting them both to be dead, and having his dad alive is almost like he came back to life after days of mourning. That happiness in turn makes him feel worse though, when he thinks about his mom’s death.

Thinking about how his mom died, drinking poison like he dreamed, almost certainly suffering the whole way to her death, he’s destroyed. Neither of his parents had been around much for him, he grew up under the care of a nanny until being sent to boarding school as soon as he was old enough, but when they were around Janet had always been the one making most of the effort to connect to him. She wasn’t very good at it, had even admitted that she didn’t know how to be a parent to him, but she had tried. And now she was gone.

Bruce gently guides him out of the hospital when visiting hours end, with a promise that he or Alfred will bring Tim back any time he wants. Tim stares out the window most of the way home. It’s easier for him to ignore his feelings when he thinks about what needs to happen now, so that’s what he does. He knows there’s funeral arrangements and reading Janet’s will and Jack’s medical care and figuring out what happens to Tim while Jack is in a coma, but he’s sure he’s missing something.

When he mentions it to Bruce, Bruce tells him he’ll take care of everything. Tim tries to argue, but Bruce tells him he shouldn’t have to deal with paperwork while he’s mourning. It makes Tim feel worse that he’s avoiding the pain.

The next few days pass by in a blur of pain. Tim breaks down during the reading of Janet’s will, and again that night as it hits him again that’s she’s gone forever. She hadn’t left much instruction about her funeral or burial plans, just a note about the plot that was bought years ago and that she did not want a combined tombstone with Jack, so Bruce picks what he thinks is best and runs it by Tim.

The actual funeral is rather impersonal. Jack is still in a coma, and Janet’s parents died before Tim was born, so Tim’s the only family there. There are a couple of friends of hers from college, who give their speeches and actually seem to have known her well, but the rest of the people there seem to have known her through business first, and as friends second. Their speeches, the ones that give them, are about how good she was in a board room or giving an investment pitch. Tim zones most of them out.

Tim had written a speech himself, but when it’s time for him to give it, his throat closes up and he’s forced to sit back down instead. He’s pretty sure he hears some nasty comments from one of Drake Industries’ board members.

After the funeral, most of the people disperse pretty quickly. Soon it’s just Tim by the grave, with Bruce and Alfred a distance aways to be there for him without suffocating him. Tim stays there for a long time, crying silently, until the sun starts to set and he knows staying longer would keep Batman away from the city that needs him.