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The cell is larger than it needs to be, eight paces long and ten paces wide, even has a window looking out upon a cloudy abyss. Tim uses a bit of stone to mark day one on the bricks. He’ll count the days from the window, hopefully it won’t even get that far.
He sleeps and the light is exactly the same outside. Perhaps he slept too long. He looks for food and sees nothing. Perhaps he slept too little.
His stomach is hollow, he has stubble on his face. Days have passed, the light outside hasn’t. “Kon!” he shouts just out of hope. The cell isn’t even large enough for the sound to echo.
There is no food and yet his hair has grown too much for him to be starving to death. He counts his pulse to two-hundred-million beats. His hair falls down to his hips. His beard does too. He’s tired of counting.
He thinks. He thinks about his family. He thinks about his friends. Wonders if they think he’s dead. Or if they’ve had to decide he’s not worth the search anymore. It would be a reasonable conclusion after a while. He draws Batman’s symbol into the ceiling. Then Robin, then Nightwing, then Superman, Superboy, Impulse, Wonder Girl, Oracle, Flash, Vixen, gradually everyone’s there.
He draws until every wall, ceiling and floor of his cell is covered in drawings. He draws until his fingers are bloody and his hands are shaking and there are symbols layered over words layered over symbols until there’s only an incoherent scramble. He thinks about space. The lonely abyss. It’s still out there, somewhere, hopefully. He hopes space is still out there. That this isn’t the last place in the universe. He looks to the symbols that mean he’s never meant to be alone. The selfish part of him hopes they’re dead. That they haven’t abandoned him like this.
There is no space left to draw. There is no point in counting anymore. There cannot be time without space. There cannot be time without change to measure. He thinks and thinks until the voices start. They’re kind, they’re brutal, they’re a sign of decline, they’re fake and yet more real than anything else in here. He loves them. “How long do you think you’ll spend here?” One asks.
“I mean is that even really a question?” Another asks. “It’s been years, we just don’t know how many. What if every proton in the universe has decayed to nothing out there?”
“Are we not part of the universe”?
“Maybe we’re not anymore. Maybe, it’s just us, Timmy.”
“Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim, Tim.”
“Do you think they grieved you?”
“That there’s an empty coffin out there somewhere?”
“If there’s still an Earth for a coffin.”
“How do we know it’s empty? This could be hell.”
“No torture.”
“Is this not torture?”
“Timmy’s not even religious.”
“Now might be a good time to convert.”
“What difference does it even make?”
“Hope.”
“Hope for what?”
“An after, an end. A change. Hope that there is something different than this.”
“And you believe some god could give us that?”
“No but perhaps I want to lie to myself. Perhaps that’s all hope is.”
“Hope is lying?”
“Hope is pretending that if you hold off doom for long enough, it will turn tail and run.”
“But we are not doomed, we are the opposite of doom.”
“Doom is the cold and unchanging.”
“Yes.”
“We are not cold but we are unchanging. Is this not doom in a new form?”
“If hope is to blind oneself to doom and we are already doomed, is hope to die?”
“Hope is to deny reality.”
“Timmy hasn’t moved in many heartbeats. Has not spoken either. I think he’s found hope.”
“Or apathy.”
“Is there a difference here?”
“No.”
The voices talk and they talk and now they shout, “Holy shit, Tim.” They touch him and they’ve never touched him before. They have Dick’s face and his warm hands and they say, “It’s gonna be okay, buddy.”
Hope is to deny reality, Tim finds hope and falls into the lie.
It catches him.
“Is he okay?”
“I don’t know. Tim, can you tell me what happened?”
“You know.”
“I can tell you’ve been locked in here for a while,” the voice with Dick’s face says. It’s funny, he’s wearing the mask but the voice is Dick’s, not Dick Grayson’s, not Nightwing’s, it’s the voice Dick spares for friends and families. It doesn’t match the mask.
He closes his eyes, tries to will the mask away.
“Can you tell me what you’re doing?” Dick asks. “Does your head hurt?”
“I’m trying to will the mask away,” he tells the vision.
“Oh, yeah,” he opens his eyes as Dick peels the mask off, it tugs at his skin and plucks at his eyebrows, he doesn’t even use a solvent to destroy the glue. He’s less graceful than Dick is in his head. He has hair out of place and pores and he’s real. “Hey, yeah, keep looking at me, that’s good.” His eyes are blue and worried and real. “Have you seen anyone here?”
“The voices.”
“The voices,” Dick echoes. “What do the voices do?”
“They talk about hope and dying. They wonder if the universe has decayed away.”
“The universe is very much still there, promise,” Dick says. “We’re still in it and we’ll be back on Earth soon.”
“When?”
“Whenever you’re ready,” Dick says. “Can you walk?”
He tries to stand on legs but his legs are built into the bones of this place. Sometimes he wonders if he is little more than an abnormal stone in the cell.
Dick catches him. “Okay, I’m going to carry you, okay?”
He nods. He’s going to step into the blinding light behind them and end up back here. “Bye,” he murmurs to this brief realness before it disappears.
The cell is gone. The cell is gone and there’s just vast, white expanses. The last real thing dies and he screams and he howls. There is nothing now. Nothing at all. This is the end and he wants to bless it but at the end of the day he’s an animal whose heart has been stopped short. He fights like one too. It’s meaningless. It’s meaningless and he can’t stop himself until he slams into something. It’s the floor. The floor is real. He runs hands along it and it’s real. It’s real. It’s real. And it’s smooth. No carvings to be found. Were the carvings fake? Is he fake? Is he back with nothing changing at all?
“Dude, did you drop him?”
“He was going to hurt one of us if I didn’t.”
The voices are back.
“Sorry about that, Tim,” the one that sounds like Dick says. “Can I try carrying you again or do you want to walk or we’ll grab a wheelchair or something?”
Tim opens his eyes and the whiteness is a lab. It’s a lab and he can see the sky outside, puffy clouds against blue skies and how many eternities has it been since he saw the colour blue. He’d forgotten it. He knows this is real because right now he knows what it’s like to be an infant seeing a colour for the first time. He bawls.
Dick is next to him again, scooping him into his arms and this is real. This is real. This is real. “Can you tell me what’s wrong?”
“You’re real.”
“Yeah, I’m real and you’re real and Kon’s real. This is all real, Tim, and it’s going to be okay.”
“Kon?” Tim looks up and Kon’s here too.
“Hey buddy,” Kon crouches down next to him and Dick. He’s wearing the ridiculous looking sunglasses and the ear studs and looking at him feels like a homecoming.
He surges from Dick’s arms and clings to a leather jacket with fingers that have known only stone since the universe began. There was a before. There will be an after. Change is real. He is doomed. He has hope.
He sits numbly through tests. They’re wrong. They have to be wrong. By every metric available he is a totally healthy, although asplenic, twenty-year-old. He realises his hair is short, his beard is gone and his hands don’t look like his own. His hands are the only part of his body he’s really looked at since… there was a before. There was a before and he’s back in it. There is no after. He shudders at the thought.
“You said when you found him that he was thin and bearded?” Doctor Midnite asks.
“Yeah, pretty much a hairy skeleton.”
“And that was?”
“About three minutes ago,” Dick says. “Tim, how long did you stay in there?”
“I counted two hundred million heart beats before even that change seemed meaningless.”
“Okay, so about five years,” Dick says. “You have not aged five years.”
“It was longer… so much longer. Eternity stretched out before the voices came.” How does he know this isn’t just the voices coming up with more elaborate schemes? He loves them. Loves them for providing him with change, even fleetingly. He wonders if it will last a lifetime. Wonders if a lifetime will pass when he blinks. He shivers at the illusion of cold. It is so incredible that he might cry.
“As much as I love seeing your man tits, do you want a hoodie or something, Tim, maybe some pants?” Kon asks.
He nods. Clothes can change. They are real. Real things change. He hopes they’ll change.
He’s offered a hoodie and sweats, Dick is gentle as he helps him pull them on. Dick has been gentle this entire time. He thinks that Dick was this way before, sometimes. The unchanging version of Dick, the one who’s voice sometimes haunted the cell, he was always kind, he was always hopeful. He was never real. If this version is real… Tim manages to swipe a Batarang from his belt.
“Tim!” Dick lurches for him as he tears a gash into the cuff of his hoodie. If the fabric is real it will unravel with time. He discards the Batarang. “Okay… you just wanted to tear the hoodie. Want to tell me why?”
“If it changes, it’s real.”
“Okay. Just don’t… okay.” Dick takes the gash mark and tugs lightly, the divide widens, “I think it’s real. I think all of this is real.”
“You would if you were fake.”
“I mean that’s the whole thing with reality. Statistically, if it’s possible to simulate the universe, we’re a simulation. We are someone’s computer program where they set some parameters and we appeared. There’s a very real chance that all we are is binary code. But what we see, hear, feel, experience, that’s all real to us so for the sake of convenience, I’m counting the things that make me and the world around me as real.”
“What if reality paused? What if there was just you and nothing else? Not even time to keep you company? Would you be real then?”
“I don’t know. But I’d be real again afterwards. And those experiences would be real.”
“Even if they didn’t leave a mark.”
“Even if they didn’t leave a mark. You’re real. What you went through is real and I am ready to listen the moment you’re ready to talk about it.”
Tim glances to the Batarang again. “Is that symbol real?”
“The Bat?” Dick asks. “Yeah. Bruce is on his way over.”
“I carved it into the cell. Why didn’t he come?” He’d thought once upon a time that symbol meant rescue. It had meant nothing. Why should he want it now?
“Because he didn’t know where you were, none of us did. I’m sorry.”
“He wasn’t real in the cell.” How many millennia did he spend waiting for him to come before he stopped imagining his arrival, time frozen except for him?
“He’s on his way now,” Dick says again. It’s repetition. It’s unchanging. How different is the hospital bed to the cell, sat, waiting for an ending that will never come.
“If this is real, I want to move room.”
“Okay, we’ll do that,” Dick guides him off the hospital bed and his legs shake but they don’t collapse under him. His limbs somehow work out how to move beneath him when Dick pushes him forwards.
Dick walks him towards a cube, glances and frowns, “We’ll take the stairs.”
What must be the entire world is visible from the window of the stairwell. Tim stares out at the cars beneath them and the buildings and the people. This is change. This is organised chaos. There is a world beneath him. He widens the gash in his hoodie. The world did not fade into nothingness without him. He did not imagine it. It is here and it is doomed and he is doomed and that means he has hope.
“Do you want to just sit here?” Dick asks.
He nods. “It’s real.”
“Yeah, it’s all out there,” Dick says. “Millions of people living their lives.”
Tim suddenly feels the overwhelming urge to do something, choices that seem unreal running through his head. There’s a lake, there’s grass, there’s buildings he could climb, there are cars he could drive. Every memory from the Before is tinged with fuzz but now… now there’s choice.
After a moment of watching the world, active and dynamic and changing and dying, another faded memory greets them at the stairs. Dick has been talking lightly, Tim hasn’t been listening but the noise is better than the silence. But then he’s here and he holds himself as if he’s infallible. He failed. Tim thinks. He asked for him and he never came. No one came for eternities. “You say time acted irregularly in this dimension…”
“Yeah, Terrific’s still tracing the dimensional signature,” Dick says. “But everything healed when we got back here and apparently our bodies didn’t really leave the lab. Might be something analogous to the speed force.”
“Hn,” a cape swishes nearby and Tim is greeted with blank white eyes. “Red Robin, report.”
“You failed.” Tim had carved his symbol into every wall, projected it into the sky as well as he could, stared at it for year after year after century. He hadn’t come.
“Hrn,” Batman stands. “He’s stable?” he asks Dick.
“Physically. Safe for transport at any rate. Are you ready to go back to Gotham, Tim?”
“That is not There?”
“It’s not what we can see out here nor is it the cell,” Dick says. “It’s home.”
“Is home not where time loses meaning?” Home is tappedness, the destruction of hope, the warm doom. Home is the cell.
“Home… home changes with us. Home is safety.”
Tim wonders how being safe differs from being trapped.