Work Text:
Everyone in this damn family had died at least once, or gotten damn near close to it.
This must be some sick way of balancing the scales.
Jason was sitting in his apartment playing Mario Kart with Damian, who was viciously smashing all the buttons on the console and still badly losing. Dick was hovering, helplessly trying to direct Damian, and wincing. Steph, Duke and Barbara were playing Uno with only the action cards and it seemed to be getting violent.
Tim had gone out to get five tubs of Ben and Jerry’s brownie ice cream.
That same night, some jackass had stumbled out of a bar with a 0.35% blood alcohol level and slumped into his car. He must have been so drunk he didn’t even register where he was going: his lights weren’t on, he wasn’t signalling, and he was driving almost 100 in a 40 zone.
The motor screamed in third gear, a moment of clarity in a drunken haze, and a last ditch attempt to swerve.
The sound of impact-
The car skidded and crumpled into a nearby stop sign, taking with it, a body.
And at home, Jason’s phone rang. A woman spoke with a shaking voice down the line. “Hello?”
Blurs in motion and bleeding colors. Red and blue flashes and paramedics hurrying around. Jason stood in the wreckage, and then at the woman with a set face. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “Your brother was a fighter but he…”
Strong arms crushed into his back and clung around his middle, and a voice whispered two words again and again. Jason was frozen, not breathing. The colors solidified, and he broke out of the grasp, and darted past the paramedics into the ambulance. A blue curtain and blood-stained floor.
Tim lying, eyes open and one arm hanging loosely from the bed. Debris sunken in skin.
Jason rushed forward and cupped his face. “Tim,” he whispered. “Come on Timmy. Tim.” He grabbed his shoulders. “Tim. Tim wake up.” He shook, violently.
Two people rushed into the ambulance and stood by the entrance. Someone was sobbing behind him. Why were they sobbing?
“Tim,” he laughed. “Tim, come on bud. Wake up.” He pinched his cheek, gently. Tears were starting to well up. He couldn’t see anything. “Hey, Tim. You got me! Okay?” Jason rubbed his thumb on his cheek. “You got me good. Time to get up now.”
Duke lay a hand on his shoulder. “Come on, Jason. Let the paramedics get to him.”
“No,” he said, hoarsely. “No, Tim has to come with. He’s gonna get up any moment now.”
“Jason…” Duke whispered.
Dick wrapped his arms around Jason’s shoulders. “Come on, little wing. Let them take him home.”
Jason sobbed.
The funeral was enormous. The whole city came with flowers and silence. The press was firmly kicked out.
Jason was barely responsive. He wandered about the manor in a dream-like state. He cooked for two people at three am, setting down two plates and two cups and two forks and would sit on one chair and look at the vacant one. Both plates would go untouched, into the bin. He made bitter, bitter coffee in the mornings and left it on Tim’s desk every morning.
He’d sit in the bath and stare at the ceiling for hours, until the water had become freezing to the touch.
At the funeral, he dressed to the nines and stood as the eulogy was said with a proud, sad face. He walked up to the center and said his words, the first clear words he’d said in days.
His face was gaunt and his eyes haunted.
Life resumed.
The Bats returned slowly to the streets, a little angrier than before. A little more violent than before.
Jason smashed up every bit of his kit he could find.
He sat in front of Tim’s old Red Robin suit and cried and cried.
“Tim was an extraordinary person.”
Get up and eat and go into the kitchen and make coffee for Tim- when was he getting home? It had been weeks.
Wayne Enterprises tanked in the weeks following. Who could do what he did?
Pick up Damian from school. Worry about the fact he wasn’t speaking.
Steph cried every day in the bathroom on the third floor, when she thought no one was listening.
Jason walked into the kitchen and made coffee. It went cold again. Was that happening quicker?
The sight of the crash was still taped off. Flowers were gathering at the stop sign.
It rained pretty badly, and all the flowers wilted.
“And he was the person who got me to see life again. He said it was rich and full of opportunity and full of love.”
Dick quit his day job. And then his night job. And went. Who knows where?
He resurfaced two weeks later. He’d lost about twenty pounds.
Damian was still silent.
No one saw Barbara leave the watchtower.
Jason bought more coffee. They were almost out.
“But he was wrong. The world is ugly and cruel. And it took him in an ugly and cruel way.”
Graffiti for the Reds was showing up all around the Narrows, Bowery and Crime Alley.
‘Bring back the protectors.’
Jason threw the coffee machine into a wall, and smashed the debris until his fingers were red, red red and the curtain was blue and the siren was loud and the lights were flashing-
He bought a new one and cried.
“Tim gave me hope. I wish it was me.”
No one dared move Tim’s timetable on the fridge. Everyday, someone dutifully filled it out with mundane tasks, and then someone would go do those things and cross it off the list.
Tim was working on a new bike. He’d been tinkering with it for about a month. It sat unfinished in the cave.
Eventually, Duke sat down next to it, pulled up the blueprint, and carried the work on.
His room wasn’t allowed to gather dust. Alfred went in routinely and cleaned it top to bottom, as he usually would.
The whole Manor seemed in a perpetual state, frozen in time, refusing to look forward.
There were still as many plates set out at dinner. Tim’s ugly fridge magnets that he kept receiving from Pru as she murdered her way across the continents were left untouched.
“So. To the bastard who did this. You’re dead. I can’t kill you.”
Jason cried in the room next to Steph’s bathroom.
“But I want you to know that you stole something precious, and you will never be able to return it. I hope you rot wherever you are.”
Coffee.
God.
“Tim.”
Someone had begun to draw mandala patterns at the wreckage site. Big, beautiful swirls and lines in pastels and chalk seemed to grow larger by the day. It ran when it rained, yellows and reds and blues bleeding from the earth. And it healed, redrawn the second the ground was dry, growing and growing in size.
Jason got out of the bath and toweled himself dry.
Damian said his first word. “Tim.”
Steph repeated the same word again and again. “Tim.”
Duke smiled when the bike was done. He looked up, and his eyes creased. “Tim.”
Bruce hung up a picture on the wall of his office. “Tim.”
Cass wove his name in chalk into the increasingly elaborate patterns on the concrete floor. “Tim.”
Coffee. Jason drank it. He cried into his hands. “Tim.”
The sirens screamed and the lights flashed blue and red.