Chapter Text
Tim had started the search for his actual biological father not long after Jack had gotten the test results that had ripped what felt like deep, dark chasms in the relationships between every member of the Drake household. Neither of the adult Drakes had told the truth to Tim, though he could feel the shudders and see the change in the landscape that the truth had wrought. Instead, Janet Drake had only crouched down in front of Tim to inform him of her and Jack’s unexpected but necessary departure for a six month dig—even though they were supposed to be home the whole summer—while Jack Drake had watched her with eyes that burned.
But Tim’s eleven (okay, technically he's still ten but it's June and his birthday's in July, which means he is eleven if you round up) and too smart for his own good (if what Ms. Wilson, his teacher last school year, had said was true). He’s also very, very good at listening unobtrusively to the conversations of adults when they’re too emotional to maintain proper volume control, as well as excellent at finding and reading things he was never meant to, quicker than any adult around him ever expected him to.
So Tim knows that in reality, the dig is just a facade, a smokescreen, a misdirection. In truth, Jack Drake had found out something Janet Drake had been lying about for a long, long time. To some extent, she’d even been lying about it to herself. The results of the test Jack had taken Tim to get had ended up sitting out on the kitchen table for a full half hour while he’d confronted Janet about their contents. This had been more than enough time for curious, slippery children like Timothy Drake to slink downstairs, see the fact that there’s no possibility of biological paternity between himself and the person he’d always been told was his father, and slip back upstairs with no adults in the house the wiser to his incursion in that apex moment of their interpersonal drama.
When his parents (well, his parent and his “parent”) are finally gone again, leaving Tim with no idea what he’s supposed to do with the very knowledge that they themselves are handling rather poorly, Tim supposes he might as well try to figure out who his actual father is. Maybe he’ll want Tim, maybe not. Either way, it was the knowledge that Jack Drake isn’t his father that tore this hole in Tim’s sense of identity, and Tim doesn’t know what can properly fill it except, perhaps, knowledge bearing a similar shape in the inverse.
He looks for clues for his real father’s identity in what he can find of his mom’s old financial records, and her personal letters and papers, but there’s nothing that helpful there—at least, nothing that he can find without spending more than the two weeks reading even more of them than he already has. He gives it up on day fifteen, when he finally understands what it truly means to be bored to tears.
He’s not old enough to order genetic tests for himself, either—at least not from anywhere reputable—but Gotham isn’t known as a city plagued by crime for nothing. The mob that backs the service he goes to makes a pretense of having a legit storefront, but Tim’s a Gothamite through and through—it doesn’t fool him. He knows before he even tries to go there that they’ll do what he’s asking, so long as he forks over the right amount of money.
It’s a good thing his parent and “parent” are rich, and therefore had been giving him a sizable allowance for a few years. Tim had been saving up for a really good telephoto lens for his camera for a while. Good lenses are expensive—so he has the money to throw around.
Tim had been figuring he’d find out what the rate for individual tests are, then decide what people are the most likely candidates and therefore the best options to spend his somewhat limited pile of cash on later. Instead, he’s pleasantly surprised to discover that the mob’s been compiling a database of the DNA of a whole bunch of the men with relevance to Gotham’s rich upper crust. They offer a paternity testing package deal—test any one set of DNA against their dataset, all for one low, low price of $6,000. Or, test against selected segments of their full database, for a pro rata price reduction.
It’s better than he was figuring, but even then Tim only has enough money saved to get tested against half of them. Now, he doesn’t want to start presuming too much, but this is probably the most convenient luck he’s had in all of this. Because if he gets negatives on every guy in this database he gets tested against, that will at least eliminate a significant portion of the people in the same social circles as his mother since before he was born. He knows she came from a rich family on the West Coast originally, and that she met Jack towards the end of his time in college in Boston. In fact, Jack loves retelling the story of how they first met, so much so that Tim knows it by heart.
Jack had clumsily bumped into her as she was leaving the campus cafe, making her latte splash all down the front of her brand-new Oscar de la Renta white-with-red-flower-print dress. He’d bought her a new latte and, luckily for him, dry cleaning had gotten the latte stain out, so he’d only had to cover the cleaning bill, rather than suffer the pain of dropping hundreds on replacing her designer dress. He’d managed to strike up a conversation while he was getting her a new latte and they’d kept in contact due to their shared academical focus on archeology. When she’d graduated a few years later, she’d taken a job in Gotham, and the rest was—as they say—history.
Or it had been history, for Tim, until this whole stupid paternity test debacle.
When the bubblegum-chewing lady at the intake desk has finished listening to Tim’s explanation of why he wants to test himself against the paternity package deal, half set, she stares at him a long moment, then says: “Tell ya what. I’ll put ya in for the full set. And you can pay the kid price.”
Tim frowns at her in puzzlement. He’s not sure what the mob is going to get out of giving a kid a discount, or why they’d have a kid discount in the first place. Do a lot of children come here? He's certainly never heard his school peers talking about getting genetic tests done.
She rolls her eyes. “Don’t need to look so suspicious. It’s like a kid’s meal. Lower price, cause you’re a kid’n all that. It’s called customer service. Don’t expect a toy, though.”
Tim shrugs to himself, and agrees to the deal.
When he comes back for the results and it turns out the impossible is the reality—that his father is the actual Bruce Wayne, Prince of Gotham—Bubblegum Lady asks him for the $1,500 she wouldn’t take from him before.
As hush money, of course. Unless Tim wants this to be front page news by tomorrow. Bubblegum Lady assures him that none of the adults around him would like it if this happened. Not that she has to tell him that—Jack and Janet Drake had already been impressing upon him that for notable persons of high society, reporters are a useful, but very dangerous, double edged sword. Jack’s already upset that Tim’s not his kid. There’s no way he won’t be more upset by the entirety of Gotham knowing about it.
“Non-disclosure wasn’t part of the original service agreement, kiddo,” she says, holding out one hand flat and palm-up, just as matter-of-fact as she’d been when she’d given him a discount and said “It’s called customer service.”
As much as he’s reeling from finding out the results, it’s reassuring to be extorted, so Tim forks the remains of his savings without protest. She’d been way too nice for someone that was supposed to be a mobster the first time he’d come in here. Now, Tim may be out his other $1,500, but at least it makes sense, and because it makes sense, it feels right.
He doesn’t have anything else in his life that’s been making any sense, lately, that’s for sure.
So, golden silence assured, Tim goes home, shoves the Bruce-Wayne-positive test result in one corner of his closet behind the skateboard propped against the wall, and tries to figure out how he’s going to incorporate all these earth-shaking blows into his internal paradigm.
Jack—his mind imagines saying to the man, like he’s sometimes seen step-kids say to their not-bio-parents on TV sitcoms. But something about that seems wrong in a sticky, gooey sort of way that adheres to the inside of his chest as a lump and aches, so he just as quickly abandons it. Dad—he goes back to try instead, but that’s an outright lie, and somehow not sticky-wrong but hollow-wrong instead, so he has to abandon that label in his mind, too.
Tears prick hot at the corners of his eyes, so he tries taking refuge in the coldness of logic. Not-his-dad—his mind proposes—or maybe—should-have-been-his-dad?
The last is the best alternative to “his dad” as a way to think of Jack Drake that he’s come up with so far.
He swallows, wondering why he’s still crouched in front of his open closet, and sees the skateboard again, and re-remembers that board was the last thing his should-have-been-his-dad had gotten him as a gift before the awful truth had been discovered, and his mom and should-have-been-his-dad had jetted off to some remote location of the world again instead of staying in Gotham for three more months. Should-have-been-his-dad had said they’d make a little outing of going to the skate park soon, just the two of them, father and son, but—Tim supposes it’ll never happen now.
He’s a lie of a kid to Jack Drake. In reality, the son of someone that maybe Jack Drake would feel it impossible to stack himself up against, because, well—Bruce Wayne. Kind of self explanatory, even for people who haven’t figured out that the Prince of Gotham is also Batman.
Tim has to wonder why should-have-been-his-dad is still willing to stay around his mom. Why is he still talking to her and going on trips with her when he hasn’t said a word to Tim since that first test had come back? After all, isn’t she the one who gave the guy a lie-kid in the first place?
But then it occurs to Tim that it’s probably less bad to tell a lie than to be a lie. So maybe should-have-been-his-dad knows that he can find it in his heart to forgive her, eventually, even if Tim himself is very much unforgivable by nature.
While finding out the full truth for himself does make him feel a tiny little bit better, there’s nothing much for Tim to do with it besides pretend to the hired help that everything is just fine. Fortunately, it’s not all that hard. The overnight nanny and the house cleaner don’t seem to think much of how he lays around in bed for several weeks after that, though they do tut about the mess of food wrappers and dirtied dishes that fetch up around him. Between the two of them, however, they manage to keep cleaning it away before it can reach an alarming mass, let alone any sort of critical mass.
The nanny eventually asks whether he’s feeling alright, and since lying to people apparently isn’t the worst relationship breaker possible (if his mom is any indication), Tim tells her he’s been feeling under the weather. No fever, but definitely suffering from a kind of achy and tired that has few other explanations besides a mild little cold.
If she finds it suspicious or concerning that there haven’t been any piles of wadded up tissues among the detritus she keeps having to clean up before she leaves every morning, she doesn’t call him out on it.
Though it takes a while, he eventually thinks about resuming his trips out to take pictures of Batman and Robin II, seeing as it was one of the few solo activities he’d liked to get up to before the truth came out. (His life seems separated into two distinct eras now: before the truth and after the truth.)
Except, imagining it, he can only think that he’d be too distracted by the thought of Bruce Wayne, his real true biological father, being right there in front of him, for it to be a good idea. Even if the man is mostly covered up by the cowl and doing his intimidating Batman voice the whole time, the knowing is an unavoidable, burning thing.
He also tries to imagine what it would be like to see Robin going around with Tim’s actual father like he always does, laughing and quipping easily as the duo takes down bad guys. He’d be oblivious to the ugly jealousy that Tim would probably start to feel at seeing one of Bruce’s chosen sons bask in his attention, while Tim sat alone, mostly hoping not to get noticed. And that wouldn’t be fair to him, right? Because it’s not like it’s his fault. It’s Tim’s fault, mostly. Maybe his mom’s, a little.
And that’s when Tim realizes that in the era of after the truth, that hobby might never hold any joy for him again, not to mention that he’s spent all the money he was going to put towards getting that good zoom lens. He can’t capture much better than distant blurs without it, not unless he’s lucky enough for the Dynamic Duo to happen to take a break on a roof near one of his Bat-watching stake out spots. Plus, going out to watch them will only make him a worse person now, by making him feel awful things like loneliness and jealousy instead of admiration and pride.
So he does nothing but sit idle at home for a while, nights included. The damning results from the mob’s morally suspect paternity checking service sit crumpled in his closet behind the skateboard.
Then, something else occurs to him as he’s watching some rerun of The Maury Show. It’s a paternity test episode that funnily enough doesn’t make him feel anything when he used to at least feel surprise or vindication or annoyance after all the personal stories were explained and Maury finally got down to announcing who was the father regardless of what anyone actually wanted. Instead the only semblance of an emotion he gets is a weird little aborted chuckle at the one woman that runs off stage when her baby’s daddy isn’t the one that she was hoping for out of the several equally lousy men there. At least her kid won’t be living a lie for nearly eleven years, Tim thinks. Maybe if she tried that disappointment on for size she wouldn’t be crying in the back room that daddy turned out to be backwards-ball-cap-Craig instead of military-cargo-pants-John or gym-shorts-Greg.
Anyway. While it would make him a terrible person to go upending everyone’s lives by telling his parents he found out what Jack isn’t, and then running off to try to butt in on the Waynes’ lives instead, if Bruce Wayne doesn’t know about this, he at least should be told. That’s the point of all these paternity shows, after all, that people want to—even deserve to—know the truth, even when that truth is awful. Tim himself would hate not having all the facts—that’s why he spent his $3,000 on DNA tests instead of a camera lens. So maybe there’s a way to tell Mr. Wayne without any sort of implication he has to take Tim on as a son?
Then, at least, Tim doesn’t have to wonder whether he knows or not. And hey, if Bruce Wayne one-hundo-p knows because Tim made sure of it, and yet acts no differently around Tim at the next gala they cross paths at, then that really solves the question of whether Tim should let it start to mean anything to himself.
He doesn’t need a second father that doesn’t want him, after all. He’s not going to go chasing after a man that cringes internally at the sight of him, and cause problems for Batman and Robin. They have important work for Gotham to do that they need to be able to focus on.
Tim just has to figure out how to present the information to Mr. Wayne in a way that makes it seem like neither the two perfectly good parents Tim already lives with, nor Tim himself, are in the know. After all, Bruce Wayne is Batman and Batman is a guy who knows how to deal in life-or-death secrets for the good of like, everybody. So as long as it looks like Tim’s doing just fine with his two whole parents, and by all appearances is blissfully ignorant and happy about it, then Mr. Wayne will have no trouble squirreling away this secret like he does so many others, if that’s what he wants to do. If he doesn’t want to bother with knowing Tim. Or with starting some kind of weird custody battle with the Drakes. Or with uncorking the PR nightmare that is sure to follow if even the most basic outline of this situation becomes public.
Yeah, Tim wouldn’t want to deal with this whole Tim-shaped problem, either. But again, if Tim was Bruce Wayne, he wouldn’t like it if he ever found out about all the people who kept this hidden for any longer than they had to. They both deserve to have the truth.
The ball’s in Tim’s court. It’s all up to him to make it happen.