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Have you ever wondered what would happen if the ground fell away? If the car swerved, if the ice cracked, if the bomb in the baby carriage exploded. Have you ever stood at the top of a tall building and looked down, and thought: what if there were no window here?
Tim has.
But surely everyone thinks like this. They’re just little stories he tells himself to keep his mind occupied when the day grows dull. When he’s sitting at the traffic light: what if another car comes? When he’s taking a coffee break on the 52 nd floor of the WE building: what if the glass shatters? When he’s stocking up on midnight snacks at the Seven-Eleven: what if propane tanks explode? Nothing wrong with a little supposition, it keeps him on his toes. He’ll swerve, but it’ll be okay. He’ll be hit by that elusive vertigo which will keep him away from the edge. He’ll duck behind the gummy bears and he’ll drive home and he’ll say to Bruce: did you know I almost died?
They’re just stories, just contingencies.
Like Batman like Robin, right?
The glass doesn’t shatter. The drive home is uneventful. And when he wakes with a craving for a snack he drives to the Seven-Eleven, the propane doesn’t explode, and he drives back home munching on wasabi peas.
The spice goes up his nose. He coughs, holds his breath, and blinks away the tears so that he doesn’t crash the car.
The house is dark and silent when Tim enters from the garage. Bruce and Damian and Alfred are asleep, Dick isn’t visiting until next weekend, and Jason isn’t visiting until hell freezes over. The only creature awake is Alfred (the cat), crouched atop the marble bust of Sir Wayne the Greatest and tracking Tim’s movements with unblinking yellow eyes. Tim tosses a pea at the eyes. They disappear. Tim debates trying to relocate the wayward pea, but then decides that if it does end up attracting a mouse then at least Alfred will have better things to do than stalk Tim all night.
Not that he’s being a hypocrite. Nope. Not Tim.
Still, the house is dark and silent. It feels like a little knot of pressure at the base of Tim’s skull, like voices murmuring indistinctly in urgent tones. Nothing alarming, not really, but he should probably check anyway. Just to, you know. Make sure no one’s had a heart attack in their sleep (the nearest AED is in the foyer).
Tim pops another pea in his mouth, then panics because it is going to crunch and it might wake Bruce (who is a notoriously light sleeper) and Tim absolutely does not want to wake Bruce up. So he sucks on it instead, and nearly dies as a result.
Still.
Tim creeps past the guest room with the red curtains and he slinks past Jason’s old room with the layer of dust and he pauses at Damian’s room, just to make sure. Then on past Dick’s room with the dumb-waiter and past his own room with the pine outside and he stops at Bruce’s room and peaks inside.
The bed is empty. Tim stares at it, eyes burning, for a long long time.
“Tim?”
Tim jumps. A hand on his shoulder steadies him, and when he looks up (up) he sees Bruce wearing his black dressing gown and a layer of scruff.
“I went to get wasabi peas,” Tim whispers. He holds up the evidence, heavy in his hand.
“I didn’t know you liked wasabi peas.”
“I don’t.”
“Oh.”
Bruce blinks, and Tim looks away. “Good night,” he whispers, and creeps guiltily back to his own room.
He should have stayed in. Probably wouldn’t have woken Bruce, then.
Tim wakes up at seven and snoozes his alarm until eight and then nearly trips down the stairs in his haste to exit the house at a timely eight-fifteen. Damian scoffs at his disheveled jacket and Tim ignores him in lieu of trying (and failing) to straighten his matted hair in the visor mirror.
“Are you even awake enough to drive?” Damian demands.
“I’ve got it,” Tim insists, and pulls out of the garage.
He forgot his lunch, but that’s okay because he always keeps extra lunch money for situations just like this. He didn’t read the required chapter of Macbeth but he stumbles through the discussion anyway, because he thinks he remembers Jason yelling something about blood and knives and lakes the last time Bruce tried to tell him what to do. And he totally forgot that today was the pacer test in PE, but of course Tim is going to ace it. He’s Robin, after all.
He doesn’t ace it. Charlie Ingram crashes into Tim who crashes into the wall and fractures the wrist that he sprained two weeks ago wrestling with Killer Croc. And he’s definitely been injured worse, but man did that hurt.
Mr. Phelps rides in the ambulance with him to the hospital. Bruce meets them there.
“It’s not, like, fully broken,” Tim remarks as he looks over his X-rays with Bruce. It’s just a fracture, he’s had those before. It’ll heal in no time. “Like a month, right?”
There’s too much noise in the hospital. Too many people, too many machines. Too many fans. It’s hard to hear himself think.
“A month in the cast, then a two months of PT,” says the doctor. “You’ll be right as rain in no time.”
Back in the car, Bruce is silent. Tim turns on the radio, and switches the station. Turns it off. Turns it back on again. “Sorry.”
“It’s okay,” Bruce says.
Tim wonders if Bruce even knows what he was apologizing for.
School Monday through Thursday. WE internship Friday and Saturday, day off on Sunday. Tim isn’t allowed to drive with his cast, so Alfred drives him and Damian to school and Bruce drives him to WE. Tim also isn’t allowed to be Robin with his cast, so Batman patrols alone.
What this means is that Tim is now getting eight hours of sleep a night, is keeping a consistent schedule, and is staying on top of all of his homework. He wakes up at six and is bed by ten and the consistent sleep plus the better grades means that he is feeling better than he has in a long long time.
Lies.
Tim sleeps for four hours one night and twelve the next. He binge-watches Grey’s Anatomy and procrastinates his humanities project and forgets to eat dinner and then forgets about lunch. It’s not all that different from what he normally does when he isn’t in a cast, actually, so Tim isn’t too worried about it. If this is the schedule he keeps when he doesn’t have anything to do (when he isn’t Robin, that is) well then this must be his natural rhythm, right?
Tim hacks Dick’s phone and steals Jason’s number. He takes a picture of his cast and sends it to said previously acquired number. I asked for pink and they gave me red.
He duplicates the message and sends it to Steph as well. Steph replies with a devil emoji and a paintbrush emoji and a question mark. Jason blocks him.
But that’s okay, because now that Tim has Jason’s number he can just hack Jason’s phone and unblock himself. Not that he’ll do that (yet). It’s just in case of emergencies.
What if I did go out with my cast? Tim thinks idly, watching Damian try for the umpteenth time to convince Bruce to take him on patrol. Would I still be efficient as Robin?
Probably not.
Batman leaves and Damian sulks, and after a few minutes Tim goes back upstairs to get started on season nine of Grey’s Anatomy.
“The theory,” he explains to Steph the next day, as they’re both sitting on her bedroom floor, “is that by educating myself about how medicine works my wrist will heal faster.”
“Come back in a month and let me know how that’s going,” Steph replies. She holds up two bottles of acrylic paint. “I have baby pink and purple with glitter.”
“Do you ever wonder what would have happened if you’d stayed Robin?” Tim asks later, as they’re both admiring his newly decorated cast. “Or what you could have done differently, or what you could have done better?”
“Sure,” Steph says. “But then I wouldn’t be Batgirl.”
That’s not the point, Tim thinks. That’s not what I asked.
“Hey,” Steph says, “did you hear? They opened that new arcade on Marlboro, me and some friends from school are going to check it out. You’re free tonight, right?”
Right. Because he can’t be Robin while he’s in a cast.
“I told Bruce I’d help with a case,” Tim says. He holds up his plaster-wrapped wrist. “I can dazzle the bats with my sparkly new cast.”
Dick usually comes by the manor every two weeks or so. Every week, if someone asks. Tim wonders if he resents it. If he would rather spend time by himself in Blüdhaven, with his adult friends instead of his kid not-quite brothers.
It doesn’t seem like it. Dick is always cheerful when he arrives, always greeting Bruce warmly and teasing Damian and pulling Tim into a sideways hug. It’s nice, but more and more often Tim thinks he sees a tiredness to Dick’s frame, a fakeness to his smile. And he wonders if maybe Dick doesn’t want to be here at all.
“Yikes,” Dick says, grimacing in sympathy when Tim shows him his cast. “Three more weeks? How are your one-handed hand-stands?”
“Not great,” Tim admits. “The cast throws me off balance.”
Dick laughs. “Try doing it with a broken leg, that really throws you off. Want to go run obstacles after dinner?”
Tim wants to say yes. He takes a moment though, because he also doesn’t want to be selfish. He takes a moment to run back Dick’s words and to examine his face and posture to see if he really means it. Want to run obstacles after dinner? Dick asked, and Tim thinks....
“Sure,” Tim tries, trying to be discreet about how closely he’s watching for Dick’s reaction. He can always backtrack if he needs to, can always tack on a hasty but I need to check with Bruce first.
Dick grins. “Cool. I’ll tie one hand behind my back so that we’re even.”
Of course, that doesn’t make a difference. Tim ties one of Dick’s arms behind his back and Dick convinces Damian to run the obstacle course with them and still Dick beats them both, laughing on the ground as Tim throws himself down beside him.
“I swear you cheat!” Tim insists.
“I don’t,” Dick smirks. “I hold the record time, too.”
“What was your time?” Damian demands, standing over them both.
Dick lifts his head, grinning at the younger boy. “Ten minutes and thirteen point two seconds.”
Damian spins on his heel and stalks back to the start of the course.
Tim looks away, back up to the ceiling. Between the hanging lights he can just barely make out the stalactites dangling from the roof of the cave. “Do you ever wonder,” he asks Dick, “what would happen if the ceiling of the cave collapsed?”
“I imagine there would be a lot of damage,” Dick says. “If we were down here, we’d probably die.”
“That would suck.”
“I know, right?”
“What if it was just me down here?”
“Then that would double suck,” Dick replies. He rolls over and pushes himself to his feet, reaching down to offer Tim a hand off the mats. Tim takes it. “Do you think the cave is going to collapse?”
Does Tim think the cave is going to collapse? No, not really. But that doesn’t mean it never will. That doesn’t mean that he shouldn’t be prepared.
Tim didn’t used to wake up in the middle of the night. He can’t really remember when it started; all he knows is that he didn’t before, and now he does. He doesn’t really know why, either, not that he gives it much thought. Growing pains, maybe. He always decides he wants a snack.
The real problem is that it’s starting to happen every night instead of every other night. And whenever he wakes there’s this weird buzzing feeling in the back of his head, like an insistent swarm of mosquitoes, and the only way he can make it quiet down is if he checks to make sure that everyone is alive, that everyone is where they are supposed to be.
He checks on Damian. He checks on Bruce. Sometimes he checks on Alfred, and sometimes he manages to convince himself that he’s being silly and that everything is fine and that he just woke up because he’s not tired anymore. He takes his computer down to the living room and curls up to watch horror movies until Alfred rises, and Tim goes to help with breakfast.
It’s a bit tricky chopping strawberries with your wrist in a cast, though, so he sets about making the coffee instead.
“Couldn’t sleep, Master Tim?”
“I wasn’t tired,” Tim says. His mouth betrays him with a yawn.
“And how much sleep, exactly, did you get last night?”
This takes Tim a minute. Because he didn’t actually check the time when he woke up, but he watched three movies so that means he’s been up for at least five hours, which means.... “Three hours? Ish?”
Alfred clucks his tongue. “You are a growing boy, Master Tim, you ought to be getting more than that.”
“It’s fine,” Tim insists. “I’ll get more sleep tonight. Because I’ll actually be tired this time.”
Alfred gives him a doubtful look. Tim looks away.
The next night, Tim wakes with that same strange uneasiness clamoring for his attention. And he can’t convince himself to go back to bed until he’s made sure that Damian and Bruce and Alfred are all where they’re meant to be.
The cast comes off and Tim starts a PT regiment designed by the Batman himself. This way he’ll be back in the field in no time. Batman needs his Robin, after all.
But he still can’t sleep, and Tim thinks that maybe (just maybe) this might be starting to become a problem. Because the more he ignores it the louder the buzzing becomes, until it’s hard to sleep and hard to concentrate and hard to answer when someone asks him a question.
It’s okay, though. He can start going out as Robin again now. Everything will be fine.
The first Tuesday of November is Tim’s first night back on the streets. Of course Damian throws a royal fit, but Tim ignores the kid (except to smirk at him, once, as the Batmobile rolls out of the cave) because he’s got more important things to think about. Namely, the trafficking ring he and Batman will be monitoring tonight.
The stake-out goes well, and Tim rolls into bed at one in the morning, exhausted and happy and ready to get a good night’s rest.
He wakes up two hours later, heart in his throat after a fading dream about something he can’t quite recall. He stands, bare feet cold against the wooden floorboards, and creeps out of his room to check on Bruce and Damian.
They’re both in bed, sound asleep.
He manages two more hours of sleep before he calls it quits, and he spends the rest of the day thinking about what could be wrong. Maybe he’s sick. Maybe he has a brain tumor or a hormone imbalance or maybe this is some weird quirk of puberty that everyone forgot to mention. Or maybe Tim is simply going crazy.
I think I’m losing my mind, he texts Jason, after unblocking himself. I think I might be going crazy.
duh, Jason responds, before blocking him again.
“Do you think you can tell when you’re going crazy?” Tim asks Steph that night as they’re patrolling together. “Do you think I’m going crazy?”
“Everyone has to be a little bit crazy to be Robin,” Steph replies. “It’s practically part of the job description. I think the only certifiably insane person is the big boss-man himself.”
But what if I’m going insane too? Tim doesn’t ask. Like Batman like Robin, right?
The worst of it is, Tim doesn’t know how to stop it.
What if the breaks just stop working? Tim wonders as he drives Damian to school. What if I trip down the stairs? he thinks idly as he makes his way from one class to the next; what if I step onto the street before the light turns red?
But these are just stories Tim tells himself. These are just little contingencies to keep his brain occupied (to drown out that awful, incessant buzzing).
“Are you okay?” Steph asks one night, and Tim imagines it’s not a lie when he says “I’m fine.”
Imagine if you could just think a thing into existence. Imagine if by thinking about something hard enough, by wishing with all your might, you could make it happen. Manifestation, Tim thinks, is the word for it. If you want something bad enough, you can will it into existence.
But what if you don’t want something and it happens anyway? Does that mean that, deep down, you really did want it to happen?
Tim stands at the top of a tall skyscraper, peaking over the edge and down down down as Batman surveys the skyline beside him. People say that vertigo is a thing: they say that when you stand too close to the edge you get sick, like your body is telling you back, stay back! Stay back, stay away, take a minute. Tim has yet to feel this vertigo, and he stands on the edge every night.
“What if I fell,” Tim asks the void, “and my grapple didn’t deploy?”
There’s a beat of silence. “What would you do?” Bruce asks.
“I’d use my backup grapple.”
But what if I didn’t?
Tim knows what would happen. A Tim pancake on the side-walk, that’s what. But what would it feel like? Would it feel like vertigo?
“Robin?”
Tim blinks, and has to rewind a minute. He blinks again and says “Yeah. Let’s go.”
Tim leaps first, grapple spiraling away from him almost lazily before it latches and pulls taut, swinging him in an elegant arc to the next building. It feels like flying, almost, and Tim wonders what the difference is between flying and falling. He wonders if Dick knows the answer.
Batgirl meets them on the roof of the courthouse at midnight. A late sea fog has rolled in, blanketing the streets and dimming the lights. Usually it’s nice; the fog makes everything quieter, makes it easier to think. It’s not nice now. The silence presses around Tim, increasing the pressure and making him feel like something is going to give.
That something might be his sanity. Batgirl launches into a rapid-fire report of all her exploits over the past four hours, and Tim leans over the side of the building.
Is this what vertigo feels like? This pressure, this burning, this morbid curiosity?
Tim’s pretty sure there is supposed to be at least a little bit of fear involved.
And then it’s time to go. And then Batgirl is racing him to the Batmobile, and Tim jumps and his grapple doesn’t deploy and for just a moment he wonders— is this it? Because he’s falling and he knows he should be afraid, but there’s this tiny little part of him that is viciously, terrifyingly glad. Is this what dying feels like? Tim wonders, and then his arm is nearly yanked out of its socket as Batman catches him and they both tumble to the asphalt on the street below.
“What happened?” Bruce demands, and Tim thinks it’s been a while since Bruce came this close to yelling.
Steph lands on the pavement beside them. She’s staring at Tim, eyes wide beneath her mask, and he looks away. “I—” he starts, and finds himself at a loss for words. He silently holds out his grapple for Bruce to inspect.
Bruce snatches it from his hand, turning the gun over. He inspects it carefully, the trigger and the recoil and the lock. He points it to the sky and fires: the line spirals free, arcing out into the pea-soup fog.
Manifest destiny, Tim thinks giddily as Bruce rewinds the grapple. Is this what vertigo feels like?
“Tim,” Bruce says quietly. The name hangs in the air between the three of them, blending with the fog and the buzzing in Tim’s head. “Your grapple is fine. What happened?”
“I don’t know,” Tim says. “It wasn’t working. I’m sorry.”
Bruce extends the grapple wordlessly and Tim takes it. Bruce turns, cape flaring behind him, and Steph falls into step beside Tim as they walk in silence the rest of the way to the Batmobile.
Tim is grounded from Robin for a week while his shoulder recovers. A part of him is annoyed: he’s patrolled with a torn rotator cuff before, he knows how to be careful and how to guard it. Another part of him is relieved: he isn’t sure if can trust himself to be Robin right now.
On his Sunday off, he decides to drive into Blüdhaven to visit Dick. It’s too bad, Tim decides, if Dick doesn’t want to see him. (If he refuses to let Tim in, Tim will just go to the park. It’s a nice enough day for November.) Tim parks on the street and climbs the stairs to Dick’s apartment and knocks on the door.
It takes five long minutes for Dick to answer. He stares at Tim in confusion for a minute (he’s still in his pajamas despite it being nearly noon) and then he steps back, opening the door wider.
“Tim! Hey, come on in. I was just about to make some lunch.”
“Bruce grounded me,” Tim explains, because it’s easier to say I’m grounded than to admit I’m scared. “I missed my grapple.”
Dick pauses. “Yikes,” he says. He shoots Tim a look before continuing to pull ingredients from the fridge. “How did that happen?”
“It was an accident,” Tim says, because it’s easier than I don’t know. He watches as Dick sets out four slices of bread. “What does vertigo feel like?”
“I think you’re asking the wrong guy, Timmy.”
“Is it the same as falling?”
“Mustard?” Dick asks. Tim shakes his head. “I’d imagine it’s a bit scarier than the actual falling part. How far did you fall?”
“Not far,” Tim says. “B caught me before anything could happen.”
“You didn’t use your spare?”
“I didn’t have time.”
Dick licks mayonnaise from his fingers and then pushes a sandwich at Tim. Tim reaches for it and takes a bite.
“I remember when your parents died,” he says, after he’s finished half his sandwich.
Dick chokes and makes a blind grab for his glass of water. Tim watches in slight fascination as he downs half of it before clearing his throat. “Uh, yeah,” Dick says. “You’ve said.”
“Did they have emergency lines like you?”
“Yeah,” Dick says. He sets down the remaining corner of his sandwich. “Yeah, they did. But those weren’t for—emergencies, Tim. Those were part of the act. No one was expecting the lines to snap.”
“Do you think they would have survived if they’d had time to deploy them?”
Dick looks down. After a minute he clears his throat. “Yes,” he says. “I do. Can we talk about something else?”
Tim lets his gaze roam the apartment. It’s messy, but it’s also Dick’s mess which means that there is an inherent organization to it, a method to the madness strewn about the small living space. “What were you watching?” he asks, his eyes zeroing in on the paused TV.
“I was catching up on Downton Abbey,” Dick says. There’s a strain of relief in his voice. “Alfred convinced me to start watching it, and we’ve been discussing it each weekend.” He stands and takes Tim’s plate. “I think there were about twenty minutes left; do you want to join me, and then we can go on a walk or something?”
“Sure,” Tim says. So he settles beside Dick and they watch the last twenty minutes of season three episode five. And then they go on a walk, but all Tim can think about is poor Sybil who everyone thought was just fine. I just want to sleep she’d said, and Tim wonders if she too might have guessed something of her own mortality.
“Tim?”
Tim startles. A hand steadies him from behind but Tim pushes it away, taking one step back and then another. The hall is dark, the manor quiet, and all Tim can hear is the pounding of his heart in his ears.
He stares at Bruce. Bruce stares quizzically back, and Tim feels a flush of shame rising to mix with the panic in his chest. He’s supposed to be in bed right now. But so is Bruce.
“Did you need something?” Bruce asks slowly, quietly.
“Where were you?” Tim blurts out. Because this shouldn’t be happening. He should be checking on Bruce to make sure—to make sure he’s not dead, and Bruce should be there.
“I was just stretching my legs,” Bruce replies. “I get stiff sometimes. Can you not sleep?”
There’s something wrong with me! Tim wants to shout. I think I’m going crazy and I don’t know how to fix it!
“I was just hungry,” Tim whispers, and he turns and bolts back to his room.
Damian won’t shut up about Robin, and Tim thinks he might actually have to strangle the kid one day. It doesn’t help that he has to drive Damian to and from school every day. It doesn’t help that (according to Damian) the position of Robin is open to be filled. And it definitely doesn’t help that Tim has been having a hard time regulating his emotions.
Damian has been ranting for a solid ten minutes when something in Tim snaps.
“Will you just drop it already, you’re not going to be Robin!”
“It is my rightful place,” Damian snaps. “If you were not here Father would not hesitate to make me Robin! I have been training for this my entire life, I am far more experienced than you. The only reason Father continues with this foolishness is because he pities you!”
“Shut up, Damian!” Tim yells. He breaks a little too hard at the intersection, the seat belt digging into his shoulder at the sudden change in momentum. Damian too bounces forward in his seat, and Tim thinks what if— “Being a bio kid doesn’t make you special!”
Damian struggles to right himself, yanking the seat belt away from his collarbone. He’s pale beneath his tanned cheeks, and if Tim were feeling generous he might acknowledge that Damian looks scared.
“It means that I am the heir, Drake, not you! You will never be my father’s blood son no matter how you try to convince yourself otherwise, and you will never be Batman because Batman is mine!”
Tim isn’t feeling generous.
“Bruce doesn’t owe you anything, Damian,” he says harshly. He looks both ways and then pulls past the stop sign, gripping the wheel tightly and pretending that it’s good posture. “And you’re just fooling yourself if you think anything different.”
“You’re a liar and a pretender,” Damian spits.
“Yeah,” Tim says, “well so is everyone else.”
Damian is right, though. Tim pretends all day everyday. But sometimes he can’t tell where the pretending ends and where the lying begins, and it is this that scares him more than anything.
Surely other people feel this way too. Surely this is normal, and everyone is just pretending to be fine.
“Hey Tim!”
Tim jumps, thoroughly startled. He looks up from his computer to see Dick entering the sitting room with his own computer and a plate of cookies. He places these on the coffee table and settles beside Tim on the sofa. “I surprised you,” he observed.
“I didn’t know you were coming today,” Tim admits. He tries to calm his racing heart. Dick usually comes on Saturdays: so why is he here on a Friday evening?
“I thought I’d spend the night,” Dick says. He offers a cookie to Tim, who shakes his head.
“Don’t you usually teach Friday afternoons?”
“They’re doing their bi-annual deep clean of the gym today,” Dick replies, but he isn’t looking at Tim. “And I thought it would be nice to spend a bit more time with you guys.”
Tim would like to think that’s nice. And it is nice, because Tim likes Dick and he likes it when he comes over and he especially likes it when they can spend a whole two days together. But he also wonders if maybe Dick is pretending too, so he stealthily opens a new tab on his computer and logs into Dick’s gym’s Facebook page.
They’re closed for cleaning. So at least Dick isn’t lying about that.
“How’s school?” Dick asks.
“Fine,” Tim says.
Dick shifts. “And how are things with Damian?”
Tim stills. He’s a spoiled brat! is honestly the first thing that comes to mind. This is closely followed by the utter bullshit he tells himself every day: Fine. We’re both fine. Tim sneaks a look at Dick, and he wonders if Dick ever felt this way about Jason. Or even if he thought this way about Tim: maybe he thought, when Tim showed up on his doorstep, that Tim was an entitled brat who thought he knew more than Dick did about Robin.
Tim goes back to his computer, and pretends to look at his screen. Everything’s fine, he imagines himself saying, and he imagines that Dick nods and smiles and lies through his teeth when he says I’m glad (because, of course, Dick will know that he’s lying too). We had a fight yesterday, Tim tries, and Dick’s brows furrow with worry and he says tell me what happened.
Maybe (maybe) Dick will understand.
“We had a fight yesterday,” Tim admits. He doesn’t look up, but he imagines Dick’s face turning down in a frown.
“What about?” Dick asks. His tone is softer, slightly lower. Tim lowers his own voice to match.
“Robin.”
Dick sighs. It takes Tim a minute to convince himself that the sigh is not directed at him. “I wish he weren’t so hell bent on it,” Dick mutters. “What did he say this time?”
There’s a lump in Tim’s throat. It wasn’t there a moment ago and it’s making it awfully hard for him to concentrate. What if it gets bigger? What if it gets so big he can’t breathe? And his face is hot, and he feels jittery like he’s had one too many coffees and now suddenly he wants to be anywhere but right here. He wants to be with anyone but Dick, but at the same time he wants Dick never to leave.
“Just the usual,” Tim mumbles. He glares at his screen, at the picture of the girl doing a back-bend on the Facebook page. “Just—stuff about him being Bruce’s kid. And stuff.”
“You know none of that matters,” Dick says after a moment. Tim scoffs.
“Of course I know it. Damian is the one who’s obsessing over this blood son bullshit!”
Dick is silent for a second too long. What he’s thinking, Tim doesn’t know; he never knows what Dick’s thinking, because sometimes Dick is too much like Bruce. Tim closes the lid of his laptop with a bit too much force.
“Sorry,” he says.
“It’s not your fault.”
But it’s not Damian’s fault either, is it, because the kid is traumatized. So if it’s not Damian’s fault, then whose is it? Because it certainly isn’t Dick’s.
Tim sighs. “Do you ever just have one of those weeks where no matter what you do, you can’t do anything right?” he asks the ceiling. Do you ever just have one of those months?
Dick snorts. “All the time,” he says. He sounds like he’s telling the truth, which is a bit startling. Tim gathers the courage to look over and sees that Dick is smiling a little. “I—”
“Grayson? What are you doing here?”
Tim sinks an inch into the couch and Dick shoots upright, an even wider grin spreading across his face. “Damian!” he greets cheerfully. “I thought I’d come early this weekend, spend the night.”
And just like that the spell breaks. Look at Dick smiling at Damian; look at the way he brightens as soon as the younger boy enters the room. Of course Dick is here to see Damian: he’s always here to see Damian because what reason could he possibly have to see Tim? Dick is nothing if not a performer, and Tim feels silly that he fell for it at all. Because he should know better by now: he does know better.
His face is too hot. He stands, the edges of his computer digging into his hands where he grips it too tight. “I’m going to my room.”
Damian says something and then Dick says something, but Tim’s ears are roaring too loud for him to hear. He quickens his pace down the hall, feet falling heavily despite his training in stealth. The walls feel like they’re closing in around him but if he runs now, it will be worse. He knows it will, because the walls aren’t actually collapsing and his hands aren’t trembling and Tim is absolutely one hundred percent fine.
A hand lands on his arm and Tim lashes out without thinking. “Get off!” he shouts, shoving Dick’s hand away with too much force. Dick steps back, hands in the air.
“Are you okay?” Dick asks, and his voice is soft again, softer than it was when he was talking to Damian; but that means that Dick’s acting now and that none of this is real.
“Stop lying!” Tim snaps, because he’s tired of this. “Stop pretending like you care!”
“What—Tim, I’m not—”
“I’m fine,” Tim interrupts, managing to wrangle his voice into a passing semblance of normal. “I’m just tired.”
He turns away before Dick can reply, and when he finally reaches his room he locks the door and then slides down to the floorboards and buries his head in his shaking hands, taking deep breath after deep breath. Except it’s not working, he’s just stuttering and stopping, and then before he knows it he’s crying, tears rushing silently down his cheeks as he presses his face to his knees.
It takes half an hour for him to get himself back under control. Honestly, he’s just glad he made it back to his room before Dick (or Damian) could see.
Dick’s an asshole, he texts Jason fifteen minutes later, having successfully hacked the man’s phone.
Jason sends him a thumbs up and doesn’t re-block him.
Tim’s hand rests lightly on the steering wheel, keeping the car neatly between the yellow and white painted lines. And he thinks: what if I just—yank.
“Do you have plans tonight?” Tim asks his phone. He stands in his small ensuite bathroom, staring with no small amount of dismay at the dark circles under his eyes. Nothing a bit of concealer won’t fix, but still. It’s unfortunate. “Do you want to watch a movie?”
“Nope, no plans,” Steph says. Her voice rattles around the small bathroom like a penny in a tin can. “You should come over to my place; Mom’s working the night shift, so we’ll have the apartment to ourselves.”
Tim packs a bag and takes the bus into Gotham. He picks up a pizza from the corner store and brings it up to Steph’s apartment, knocking on the door like a civilized person instead of chucking stones at her window like a creeper.
“So what should we watch?” Steph says, taking the pizza and placing it on top of the layer of magazines covering the coffee table. “The Force Awakens? Nanny McPhee? The Lion King?”
“Let’s watch something we haven’t seen before,” Tim says. “Let’s watch a mystery.”
They watch Knives Out. Steph finishes the last slice of pizza by the half-way point and Tim figures out the ending by three-quarters of the way through, and then between one blink and the next the movie’s ended and there’s a blanket over his shoulders, and Steph snoring quietly on the far end of the couch.
Tim blinks drowsily, and checks his watch. It’s two in the morning. He blinks at Steph, then back at his watch, and then he closes his eyes and lets sleep pull him back under.
Steph makes waffles for breakfast, and then they catch the bus together, Steph to school and Tim to WE for his internship. He’s feeling ridiculously chipper: it’s the first time he’s gotten more than six hours of sleep this month, and he feels like anything is possible. Maybe he can even convince Bruce to take him out as Robin tonight. Maybe he’ll text Dick and see if he wants to come over this weekend as well as the next.
And then he gets back home, and the dark walls of the manor curl over him like a cage. Damian steadfastly ignores him at dinner and Alfred (the cat) stalks him down the halls and Tim stays up until midnight and wakes just two hours later, stumbling out of bed and trying to convince himself that it was just a nightmare, that everything is fine.
Maybe it would be, if only he could remember what exactly the nightmare was about.
Life isn’t fair.
This is the conclusion Tim comes to when confronted with the small red F on his humanities paper. Because it’s not like Tim failed on purpose. He knows how to write an essay, he aces essays. The thing is, he can’t concentrate. He doesn’t know why he can’t concentrate, but he thinks it has something to do with the fact that he’s apparently forgotten how to sleep through the night and he hasn’t been out as Robin in two weeks and Bruce hasn’t said anything.
Tim’s wrist is fine and his shoulder is fine but he hasn’t gone out and Bruce hasn’t said a word.
So Tim can’t concentrate enough to write a stupid essay and somehow this means that it’s his problem and he now has a little red F and a note that he has to give Bruce when he gets home.
Maybe it isn’t Tim who’s going crazy. Maybe it’s the rest of the world.
The pressure in Tim’s head is building and buzzing and blocking everything else out, and he tries frantically to distract himself. What if I just run away? he asks himself, head on his desk as he tries to drown out the ticking of the clock. He might go to Tibet, or Ethiopia, or perhaps the Caribbean. What if Crane just walked into school, now, and released a new strain of gas? Surely whatever Tim fears most can’t be any worse than this. Would he even bother with his emergency respirator?
Poor performance at school means no Robin, not that Tim is really Robin anymore anyway. Damian has been right all along: all Tim ever was was the placeholder.
“Looks like you might get your chance,” Tim informs Damian when he pulls up to the elementary school. “Looks like you might be Robin after all.”
“Tt. Of course I will be Robin. Has my father finally seen sense on the matter?”
Tim pulls out of the parking lot, keeping an eye out to make sure he doesn’t run over any wayward toddlers. Once he’s safely on the main road he sits back and tries to zone out so that he doesn’t think about the airbags failing to deploy or the words that are currently falling out of his mouth.
“I failed my assignment,” he tells the double yellow line. “I have to tell Bruce when we get home. So he probably won’t let me be Robin anymore.”
Any other time it might be okay. Tim would be grounded for a little while until he got his grades back up and then he would be back in the air, no muss no fuss. But the thing is, Tim thinks he might be dying. And he’s been trying to fix things, he’s been trying to get better but he’s been trying for weeks and for some reason everything is only getting worse.
“You failed a school assignment?” Damian demands. “You truly are an idiot. How did you ever manage to fool my father—”
“At least Bruce chose me,” Tim interrupts. “At least I actually earned the role.”
Damian twists in his seat to stare, and Tim feels a curl of vicious pleasure at the look of righteous fury on the kid’s face.
“You lied and cheated your way into my father’s home,” Damian spits. “You took advantage of him after Todd’s demise—”
“I took advantage of him? I took advantage of him? So what exactly are you doing by invoking blood privilege or whatever the hell you want to call it? Do you think he actually wants you?”
“Want has nothing to do with it, it is my birthright! I have been training my entire life to stand by his side and you have done nothing deserving of the role—”
“You think killing people makes you deserving of Robin?” Tim demands. “Batman doesn’t kill, and in case you haven’t noticed, neither does Robin. So what about all that red on your ledger, huh? How many people have you actually killed? Because Bruce might forgive one or two, but ten? Twenty? That’s serial killer territory, Damian, Robin isn’t a serial killer. You think your dad wants you? God, even your—”
“Stop—”
“—own mom didn’t want you, you really think Bruce—”
“Drake, stop!”
Tim slams on the brakes and both he and Damian are flung violently forward as a semi blares through the intersection mere inches from the hood of the car. In the ringing silence which follows Tim turns to Damian and finds the kid staring at him, eyes nearly as wide as Tim’s own. When Tim finally looks away he finds that his hands are shaking.
They drive the rest of the way home in silence.
Tim finds Bruce in the kitchen with Alfred. Damian is ignoring Tim, which honestly suits him just fine, and he ignores the kid right back as he hands Bruce his note. “I failed my paper,” Tim says, modulating his tone so that it carries an appropriate amount of chagrin. “I’ll do better next time.”
Bruce’s eyes roam back and forth as he reads the note. At the table, Damian doesn’t even try to hide the fact that he’s eavesdropping. Finally Bruce looks up, his brow furrowing as he examines Tim.
“This says your grades have been slipping in all your classes.”
The pressure increases. “I’m dealing with it, you don’t have to worry.”
Bruce’s eyes dart almost imperceptibly to his son. “Let’s go to my study,” he says, and gestures Tim ahead of him down the hall.
The little brat is probably waiting to feed on Tim’s carcass. Proverbially, that is.
“I’ll do the extra credit,” Tim says as soon as the door falls shut. “It won’t be my best class, but I’ve done the calculations and as long as I get eighty-three percent on the final I won’t fail.”
He can do that. Tim knows he can do that.
“Tim,” Bruce says, “is there something going on?”
“I’m fine. I’m handling it.”
“Your grades are slipping. You haven’t been sleeping.”
“It’s fine!” Tim insists. Bruce doesn’t need to worry about this, Tim can figure it out by himself. “I just need to do a better job.”
“Would it help if you took a break from your internship?”
No. Tim can’t lose his internship, he likes working at WE. He can’t lose Robin and the internship. “No, I can do it. I’m sorry, Bruce. It won’t happen again.”
Bruce stares at him for what feels like an eternity. Then he folds the letter neatly and places it on top of a neat stack of envelopes on his desk. “Try and get your grades up,” he says at last. “We can re-evaluate in two weeks when the quarter ends.”
Tim should be glad about this. All he can manage is to feel a bit dizzy. He turns to go.
“Tim?”
Tim looks back and meets Bruce’s gaze. It is, as always, unreadable. “Yeah?”
“Is there anything I can do to help?”
Tim looks away. Win some lose some, right? “I don’t think I can drive Damian to school anymore,” he tells the doorknob.
Bruce hesitates. “I’ll see if I can work out a schedule with Alfred,” he says at last. Tim jerks his head in a nod and flees the room.
For the first time ever, Jason texts Tim. Dickface is worried about you and he’s making it my problem.
Tim stares at the text message for a solid minute before slowly lifting his phone and taking a picture of Alfred (the cat) who has inexplicably fallen asleep on his lap. I’m dying he captions the image, and hits send.
Tim doesn’t know why he wrote that.
The response comes a second later. It’s a picture of one of Jason’s guns neatly dismantled on a scratched table with a full cleaning kit set up beside it. Then RIP and leave me out of it.
For the first time in what feels like forever, Tim feels his face break into a real smile.
Tim tries sleeping at Steph’s again. She puts on Modern Family and Tim manages to get some of his homework done and the first night goes well enough. He wakes up at three in the morning and hears Steph snoring from her bed and manages to fall back asleep for another five hours.
The next night he wakes at midnight and can’t make himself go back to sleep. He paces the Brown’s small apartment and eventually decides to make himself a bowl of cereal. He pulls up The Haunting of Hill House on his phone and tries to chew quietly so that he doesn’t wake Crystal or Steph.
Apparently he doesn’t chew quietly enough because ten minutes later Steph appears, ghostly in her lilac pajamas. “Tim?” She yawns. “It’s the middle of the night.”
“I was hungry,” Tim whispers, gesturing at his bowl of cereal. Steph yawns again and settles on the kitchen stool beside him. She folds her arms and lays down her head.
“What are you watching?”
“The Haunting of Hill House.”
“Wanna watch it on the TV?”
So Tim goes to fetch their blankets while Steph sets up the TV and they both settle on the couch, Tim at one end and Steph at the other. Maybe it will be better if I just leave, Tim thinks drowsily as Shirley finds a box of kittens. Maybe if I disappear it will be easier to live.
He jolts awake an indeterminate amount of time later. His body is tingling and his brain feels like it’s about to explode and when he shoves himself upright he comes face to face with Steph, her face lit blue by the light of her phone.
“What time is it?” Tim gasps.
“Three twenty,” Steph whispers. “Are you okay?”
No, he’s not, because something is wrong and Tim doesn’t know how to fix it. He doesn’t even know what’s wrong, and maybe that’s half the problem because if he can’t find it he can’t do anything about it. But he thinks it might have something to do with Bruce, or maybe something to do with Damian or Alfred, because the world is ending and something is wrong.
Tim pushes himself to his feet. “I need to go home.”
Steph stands as well. “It’s three in the morning.”
Which means the buses aren’t running. And neither Steph nor Crystal own a car, which means that Tim is trapped here. “It’s only eight miles, I can walk.”
“Don’t be stupid. You’ll get yourself killed.”
For a moment Tim just stares at her. For a moment he considers yelling something along the lines of so what?! He won’t get killed, he’s Robin, he knows how to deal with muggers and the like. But he’s also not Robin, so he takes a deep breath and sinks back onto the sofa and rests his head in his hands.
Because everything is fine. Tim is fine, Bruce and Damian and Alfred are all fine. And when he gets home in the morning he’ll find them all alive and well and exactly where they’re supposed to be.
“The first bus back to Bristol runs in two hours,” Steph whispers. Tim feels the couch dip as she settles beside him. “That’s two more episodes, three if you get the bus at six.”
“It’s fine,” Tim mumbles at last. He sighs. “Sorry. Just a nightmare, I guess.”
“Nightmares suck ass,” Steph agrees. She turns the TV back on and starts the next episode.
Tim wonders if she knows that he’s lying.
Tim can’t concentrate enough to find his own jacket so he decides to take Bruce’s instead. Bruce won’t miss it: Bruce is asleep, and Tim will be back before he is any the wiser.
It’s one in the morning and it’s cold and it’s snowing large flakes which turn to slush the moment they touch the road. Realistically these are not great driving conditions. Black ice, Bruce’s voice warns in Tim’s head, but it’s dull, muffled, blocked out by the screaming pressure threatening to make him go mad. There probably isn’t any black ice anyway. It’s cold but it’s not that cold; the roads haven’t frozen yet, only the water in the air.
Perhaps we’ll have a white Christmas, Tim thinks. He shoves the keys into the ignition. A white Christmas would be nice. As long as the snow doesn’t melt. As long as Tim doesn’t get himself killed on the black ice.
He just needs some fresh air. A snack from the Seven-Eleven, and then maybe he’ll re-watch the third season of Stranger Things because he knows better by now than to think that he’ll be getting any more sleep tonight. He woke with a rushing head and a pounding heart, and at this point all he wants it to do is stop.
Stop. Everything just needs to stop, and Tim doesn’t know how to make it.
What if he keeps driving? What if Tim misses the Seven-Eleven and just goes and goes and goes: would that work? If he puts everything behind him will he finally be able to sleep? That’s what his parents did, after all. They left for Egypt and they left for Peru and then they left the Caribbean. If Tim leaves, will anyone even notice that he’s gone?
But, Tim reflects, he doesn’t really want to leave. He likes Gotham and he likes living at Wayne Manor—
He misses his turn.
Snow falls like a galaxy of stars before his headlights. Tim turns the car around and tries to convince himself that it was an accident.
By the time he gets to the Seven-Eleven Tim knows that something is well and truly wrong with him. The best way he can think to describe it is that it feels like the sky is falling, with all the absurdity that entails. But still: what if the sky really is falling? What if he skids on black ice and crashes into the chest of propane and what if it all explodes?
So what? a small voice whispers.
The car skids to a halt and Tim stumbles out with less grace than a duck out of water, his boots splashing in the layer of sleet covering the pavement. He needs—out, he just—what if this is real, what if Tim is dying and there’s nothing he can do about it? Manifest destiny, only Tim is standing on a razor’s edge and there’s no shining future, only a steep drop to oblivion on either side.
Is this what vertigo feels like?
He needs to calm down. He needs to breathe and he needs to pull himself together so that he can get his snack and get back home and watch Stranger Things. (But what if the manor is empty? What if Bruce and Damian and Alfred are no longer there?)
This isn’t okay.
Tim’s hands are shaking and it’s not okay because they never used to do that. None of this is okay, it’s the exact opposite of okay and Tim just wants it all to stop. He wants everything to go back to the way it was before.... Before. Just, before all this.
He sinks into a crouch beside the propane locker and wraps Bruce’s jacket tightly around himself and pulls out his phone with trembling fingers. He calls Steph. She picks up. “What if,” Tim says, and places himself outside the conversation. It’s just a story, one he has to find an end to. If he doesn’t like the end, then once he has told the story he can tell it again with a different ending. “What if I told you I think I’m dying?”
“Why do you think you’re dying?” Steph asks. That’s okay, that’s an acceptable response. Tim closes his eyes and continues.
“Don’t you ever wish,” he says, “that you could just disappear?”
That’s a normal thought, right? Is that an okay thought?
“Where are you?” Steph asks, and Tim restarts the conversation.
“Did it hurt when Black Mask killed you?” he asks. His hands are shaking so badly he can barely hold the phone. He squeezes his eyes tight and imagines that he’s fine.
“Yeah,” Steph says. Her voice sounds weird. Tim wishes she sounded normal. “It really did. Are you hurt?”
I hurt, Tim thinks, but he doesn’t think she’ll believe him. It’s not like he’s bleeding, after all. No evidence, no crime.
It’s just that his hands won’t stop shaking.
“Tim?”
I’m fine, Tim wants to reassure her. I’m okay, this will pass. But that’s what he’s been telling himself for months and nothing has changed. So maybe what he really wants to say is help me, please, but when he opens his mouth the words won’t come out. He imagines himself saying those words and his chest tightens and his throat constricts and he thinks that maybe it is this that will kill him.
“Tim! Are you there?”
“I’m here,” Tim whispers. He leans forward, pressing his forehead into his knees. “I’m here, I’m here I’m here.”
“Where? Where’s here?”
His pants are wet, ice-cold slush seeping through his pajama bottoms where he sits on the cold pavement. Snow falls on his hair and his jacket and his shaking hands, and the cool metal of the propane storage locker presses against his side. “The Seven-Eleven.” He tries to laugh but it comes out wrong. “I—I was hungry.”
“Is anyone else there?”
“No.”
“Did you drive?”
“Yes.”
This is good. Tim can answer questions like this. Yes or no, easy peasy.
“Can you drive yourself back?”
If Tim gets in the car right now, he thinks his hands might slip for real. He thinks the tires might skid in the slush and send him (and the car) careening at eighty miles an hour into the trees lining the road. And this terrifies him, so much so that his hands are shaking and he can’t think straight, because he also knows that if he doesn’t get in the car he might just stay here. He might drop the phone and close his eyes and just wait for everything to calm down.
Freezing wouldn’t be a terrible way to go. Everything goes numb and you just fall asleep, right?
“Steph,” he gasps, trying and trying to keep these thoughts out of his head. “I think I’m going to die.”
“You’re not gonna die, Tim,” Steph tells him. “You’re going to stay where you are and stay on the phone and we’re gonna figure this out together. Okay?”
It would be easy, Tim thinks, to ignore her. To drop the phone and walk into the woods and just sit down and fall asleep. But he doesn’t, because he’s scared and he’s a coward and he’s the biggest pretender there is. “Okay.”
“I’m going to call the manor. I won’t hang up, I’ll use my mom’s phone. Is that okay?”
What if Tim says no? Will Steph still do it? Will she say she won’t but then do it anyway? “Everyone’s asleep,” he mumbles.
“Not for long they’re not. Tell me what you got everyone for Christmas. But not me, I don’t want mine spoiled.”
So Tim tells her. He rests against the propane storage locker and sinks deeper into Bruce’s big jacket and ignores the way his fingers are starting to feel a bit numb, and he explains how hard it was to pick out a gift for Alfred. “He never tells anyone what he wants. He just says ‘surprise me’ and expects us to know what that means.”
“So what did you get him?”
“Mittens,” Tim says. “His hands get cold when he drives.”
He tells her about the plant he got for Bruce, a spider plant that is supposed to be impossible to kill. He tells her about the movie set he got for Dick (Lord of the Rings, because Dick is a nerd) and the set of books he sent to Jason (also Lord of the Rings, because Jason is also a nerd). He’s in the middle of telling her about the book of rare sheep breeds he picked up for Damian (because he thinks it would be funny if Wayne Manor had a flock of sheep) when a car pulls into the Seven-Eleven, headlights bouncing over Tim as the wheels bounce over the potholes.
A second later Bruce is crouched in front of him, one hand gripping his arm and the other reaching out to cup his face. “Kiddo,” Bruce says, his voice gruff. Tim turns away, heart thudding in his chest as his phone falls from numb fingers. Because he’s here, suddenly, and he doesn’t want to be. Anywhere but here, Tim thinks. Bruce reaches for his dropped phone, lifting it to his own ear. “I’ve got him,” Bruce says, and then he’s gripping both Tim’s arms, pulling him up and not taking no for an answer. “Come on, let’s get you home.”
It’s exactly two in the morning when they arrive back at the manor. Tim knows this because between Bruce getting out of the car and Tim pushing his own door open he takes a minute to check his watch. 02:00 read the digital numbers. Tim shoves himself to his feet and doesn’t bother to shake off Bruce’s hand when it lands behind his shoulder. He’s kind of beyond caring at this point.
What if I died? he wants to ask Bruce. What would you do then?
Bruce takes Tim’s jacket (Bruce’s jacket, but Tim is wearing it) and Tim kicks off his boots and then they both kind of just stand there. If he’s being honest, Tim is kind of waiting for Bruce to yell at him.
Eventually Bruce clears his throat. “Do you want to talk about it now,” he asks quietly, “or do you want to get some sleep first?”
Tim looks abruptly away, reaching up to rub at his burning eyes. That isn’t a fair question. Tim doesn’t want to do either of those things; he wants to curl up on the couch with a snack and his computer and forget any of this happened at all.
But he also really really doesn’t want to do that.
“Sleep,” Tim breathes at last. He isn’t sure Bruce has heard him until large hands are taking him gently by the shoulders and guiding him upstairs and down the hall to his room. Tim would gladly faceplant his pillows in his soaked pajamas but Bruce holds him back, rifling through Tim’s clothes until he’s found a suitable substitute. Tim changes and then crawls into his bed without a word and curls up tight, pulling the blanket over his head and blocking out all other noise and light. He squeezes his eyes tight and wills himself to fall asleep.
And he does. Until something wakes him and he shoots upright, eyes going wildly around his room until they land on Bruce sitting in the chair by the nightstand. Bruce meets his gaze and frowns. “Tim?”
“Sorry,” Tim gasps. Bruce pushes himself up and moves so that he’s standing beside Tim’s bed.
“You’re having a panic attack.”
Tim shakes his head. “I’m not,” he whispers. “It—it was just a nightmare.”
“What about?”
“I don’t know!” Tim wheezes, and then he’s crying because he just wants it to stop! He doesn’t know what’s wrong and he doesn’t know how to fix it and he doesn’t know how Bruce will be able to fix it either.
“Breathe,” Bruce murmurs. His hand finds Tim’s and brings it to his chest; beneath the silk shirt Tim can feel Bruce’s heart beating against his fingers. “Breathe, Tim. With me.”
Tim closes his eyes and breathes. In with Bruce, out with Bruce.
In, and out.
In,
out.
Tim is here, and so is Bruce.
“Has this been happening every night?”
“Yeah,” Tim sighs.
“For how long?”
Tim’s fingers are still splayed on Bruce’s chest. The steady rise and fall steadies Tim: it makes him feel less like he’s falling. “It didn’t used to be this bad,” he mumbles.
“How long has it been bad?” Bruce corrects himself.
“October.”
Months. Tim thought it might get better, but now he wonders if it ever will.
“I wish you’d told me.”
Tim pulls his hand away. Bruce lets him. “It’s not—it wasn’t supposed to be a big deal. But it just—just keeps getting worse, and I don’t know what to do about it.”
It’s so stupid too, because Tim is sixteen years old. He knows how to sleep, it isn’t rocket science, but for some absurd reason his brain has convinced him that it is. And then there’s the pressure, the awful feeling of impending catastrophe, and the way that what if has become so what?
Another wave of tears spill down Tim’s cheeks, and by the time he’s managed to blink them away Bruce has settled on the bed beside him and pulled him against his warm side. Tim doesn’t even try to resist. “I j-just want it to stop,” he cries.
Bruce doesn’t say anything, but his arm tightens nonetheless.
Tim is feeling like crap by the time he makes it down for breakfast three hours later. Alfred and Damian are already gone, so it’s only Bruce at the kitchen table with his tablet and his yogurt and his coffee. Tim grabs the plate of toast and eggs that Alfred left in the heater for him and slouches down in seat, poking at the eggs and not meeting Bruce’s gaze.
...would it be too much to ask that they just pretend last night didn’t happen?
Tim manages to eat half his eggs and half his toast before Bruce clears his throat and sets down his tablet. “How are you feeling?”
“Fine,” Tim says.
“Good,” Bruce says. He’s watching Tim, Tim can feel it, but he still doesn’t look up. “Have you talked to Stephanie this morning?”
“No.”
“You should text her. Or call her. She’s worried about you.”
Tim stabs another mouthful of eggs and can’t quite ignore the rush of guilt. “Sorry.”
“Why don’t you tell her that.”
He’ll have to find his phone. He thinks he saw it on his bedside table this morning, but he could be misremembering. If it’s not there he’ll have to ask Bruce. “Okay.”
Bruce stands, chair scraping against the floorboards, and Tim looks up in surprise as Bruce starts to stack his dishes. “Take your time with your breakfast,” Bruce says. “Then come find me so we can talk about what happened last night. I’ll be in the sitting room.”
So Bruce is putting this in Tim’s hands. Tim finds that he’s simultaneously relieved and pissed about that.
He takes his time finishing his breakfast. He stacks and washes his dishes, and then he washes Bruce’s dishes too, and then he sneaks up to his room to find his phone (it’s on his bedside table). He sinks to the floor with his back against his bed and pulls up his chat with Steph.
let me know when you’re safe
and when you get this
please don’t die
i’m alive, Tim texts. sorry abt last night. i’m gonna talk to b. And then after a brief consideration he adds: wish me luck
The texts flip to read almost immediately. good luck boy wonder. call me later.
Tim reacts with a thumb’s up and pockets his phone before standing and slowly making his way back downstairs.
Bruce is in the sitting room. He looks up when Tim enters. He doesn’t smile, but then he rarely does.
Tim swallows. “Hey.”
“Hey,” Bruce greets. He gestures at the sofa and Tim takes a seat. “Why don’t you tell me what happened last night.”
Tim’s hands twist in his lap and he has to remind himself to breathe. “I just—I think I overreacted,” he says. “I got, um, spooked, by the snow and the ice.”
“Steph told me she thought you were going to kill yourself.”
At those words Tim’s throat tightens up again, and he feels a flutter of that same fear that had seemingly come out of nowhere last night. Because what if she was right? Tim hadn’t wanted to die, he doesn’t want to die, and yet—somehow, inexplicably ... he does. Because somewhere along the way rest and death have become synonymous in Tim’s mind and he can’t seem to untangle them.
“I didn’t want to,” he manages. “I just—I didn’t—I don’t know how to stop.”
“You did the right thing when you called Stephanie.”
Tim looks up. Bruce is watching him closely, his face unreadable, but Tim thinks that maybe (maybe) he looks a little bit paler than usual.
It helps to know that this is hard for Bruce too. Tim looks away, takes a steadying breath, and tries to explain. “I just get these thoughts sometimes. And usually it’s not a big deal, but recently I just can’t stop thinking—like, what if I did d-die? What if I just—stopped, would it really be that bad? And then I think maybe it wouldn’t be, and I just—I can’t—I think, maybe it would be better if I—like, if I didn’t exist.”
It feels like a crime to say it out loud. It feels like this is some terrible secret that Tim was admitting, an awful truth that confirms that there is something dreadfully, irrevocably wrong with him. A twisted part of himself that is rotten and black to the core.
What sort of narcissistic, self-absorbed person thinks they deserved to end their own life? Tim, apparently.
“I’m sorry. I’m trying to fix it, I don’t actually want to—um—”
“Tim,” Bruce interrupts. “It’s not your fault.”
If it’s not Tim’s fault, then whose is it?
“I wish you had told me. I wish it hadn’t gotten to this point, but that’s on me as well. I knew you were struggling, and I should have tried harder to reach out.” He reaches a hand to his face, up and down so quick that if Tim blinked he would have missed it. Bruce meets Tim’s gaze, and Tim is surprised to see a part of himself reflected in Bruce’s eyes. “We have a chance to try again, and I want to work with you going forward. I want us to set up a plan and have strategies to make sure you feel safe going forward, so that you can ask for help if things get bad again.”
“Okay,” Tim whispers. (It feels a little bit like a lie.)
“Okay,” Bruce echoes. He leans forward and lifts his phone from the table, holding it up for Tim to see. “We’re going to make a safety plan. It’s similar to what we have for emergencies in the field: a list of the danger signs, safe places you can go, people you can call.”
Slowly, haltingly, they work through it. It feels entirely strange to Tim, and he thinks it might be due to this that he’s able to contribute without completely shutting down. And he does want to: he wants to forget that last night ever happened, he wants to pretend like it didn’t and more than anything he wants to pretend that it will never happen again. But Bruce won’t let him take that chance, and eventually (painfully) they have a solid, step-by-step plan that Tim can follow if (when) last night happens again.
“I’m pulling you from school for the rest of the week,” Bruce concludes, “and you’ll take a break from your internship until school restarts after the holidays. You can do some work from home, if you would like,” he adds at Tim’s slightly panicked expression. “But I would like your main focus to be on rest and recovery. I’ll speak with your teachers this afternoon.”
There’s not really any room for argument in his tone, so Tim just nods.
“How much do you want to tell the rest of the family?” Bruce asks.
“Um,” Tim says. He’s still feeling a little overwhelmed staring at his new speed dials, but he manages to tear his gaze away to meet Bruce’s. “Uh. Do I ... do I have to?”
“We need to tell them something,” Bruce replies. “Alfred has probably guessed the gist of it by now, and Damian knows that something happened last night. And I think Dick would like to know as well. The more people who know,” he adds softly, “the more people who can help.”
Yeah right. Damian will probably just egg him on.
“I guess we can tell them,” Tim mutters at last. As long as Bruce is there. As long as Tim doesn’t have to do it alone. It feels too much like exposing a weakness; like pulling aside his cape and pointing at his beating heart and saying look at me. I’m bleeding.
It still feels a bit too much like Tim is dying.
Dick arrives the next day, unannounced. Bruce is working through an annual report from WE R&D while Tim works on his extra credit assignment for school when the bell rings through the house, indicating that someone has entered through the front door.
“Bruce?” Dick’s voice ricochets through the manor, small and muted by the time it reaches Tim’s ears. Bruce stands and walks out of the room, leaving Tim staring at his half-written essay and trying not to think about why Dick is here. Because it’s Thursday. And doesn’t Dick have a job? Doesn’t he have his own life in Blüdhaven? Sure Tim had an emergency and things kind of suck right now, but it’s Tim’s life, not Dick’s.
So why, exactly, is Dick here?
The foyer is too far from the sitting room for Tim to even contemplate eavesdropping, so he tries to forget about it. It’s not like him listening would make a difference anyway; of course they’re talking about him. He almost died the night before last: what else would they be talking about?
When Dick finds Tim he does so silently. One minute Tim is staring daggers at his blinking cursor and trying to focus on his stupid essay and then the next Dick’s weight is sinking onto the couch beside him, the older man pulling Tim into a tight embrace before Tim can get a proper look at his face.
Tim doesn’t resist. They sit like that, Dick not saying anything and Tim kind of just existing, for a long long time.
When Dick finally pulls back he won’t meet Tim’s gaze. Tim’s heart jumps to his throat and he quickly looks away too, pretending without success to focus on his school work.
“Sorry,” he says eventually.
Dick releases a sharp breath. “Don’t.”
“Are you mad?”
Dick shifts. “I’m not mad at you,” he says at last. “I’m just really, really glad you’re okay.”
“Oh.”
“You know you can talk to me, right? Anytime, about anything. I want to help.”
Tim doesn’t know that, actually. “You have a job,” he says slowly.
“I do,” Dick acknowledges. “But I...” he trails off, then lets out a little laugh. “Christ, this is hard,” he mutters. “Look. I just need you to know that you’re not alone, okay? Do you remember last year, when we learned Jason was alive?”
“Yeah...” Tim says slowly.
“I was going through a really rough time,” Dick says frankly. “There was—let’s just say there was a lot going on all at once and I didn’t handle it very well. Or, well,” he says, backtracking. “I tried to handle it by myself, and it was too much and I didn’t realize that until it was almost too late.”
Almost too late. Tim looks at Dick, and wonders.
“I’m still working through some things,” Dick says, “but looking back, things are a lot better now. I have a better support network and a stronger relationship with Bruce and Clark and my friends from the Titans since I opened up to them. And you don’t need to tell everyone, you can take your time to figure things out, it’s just—you’re not alone, okay? And if you call me, I’ll pick up.”
“Okay,” Tim whispers.
“Okay,” Dick echoes. He shifts slightly so he’s more settled on the couch and more settled against Tim’s side. “I’m just gonna sit here and hug you for a bit. Feel free to ignore me.”
Something warm rises in Tim’s chest, and he feels his lips curve into a small smile. Because maybe Dick is right: maybe he isn’t lying and maybe he does want to be here (with Tim) after all. Maybe (just maybe) everything will be okay.