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Tim learned the rules before he even learned his own name.
Rule One: Stay inside the house. Rule Two: Never touch the locked door at the end of the hall. Rule Three: If Bruce is quiet, be quieter.
There used to be more rules. He can feel the holes where they once lived—empty spaces inside his head where instructions used to be. It is like a story where the middle pages were ripped out. He wonders if they were deleted on purpose, if Bruce deleted them by accident, or if maybe Tim just was not important enough to keep them.
Tim will most likely never know. Bruce doesn't like to disclose that type of information. Or at least, not to him.
Bruce built him in the garage.
Tim’s very first memory is not a picture, but rather a sound: the frantic sound of rain on the roof. He remembers the flickering lights and the sharp, stinging scent of oil that made his sensors hiss. Most of all, he remembers Bruce’s hands.
They were callused and stained, the knuckles thick with scar tissue from years of slipping wrenches and jagged metal. They shook when they tightened the screws in Tim's chest, but they were perfectly steady when they were adjusting the delicate wires in his fingers.
"Forgive me," Bruce choked out, the words muffled by a sob that shook his entire frame. "Please... just forgive me."
In the beginning, Tim was a collection of apologies he didn't yet understand. He had no concept of a "God," and the name Jason—the boy whose ghost haunted every shadowed corner of the workshop—meant nothing to his uninitialized processors. To Tim, the universe was simple: there was only the Creator and the Created.
Tim remembers that day, lying paralyzed while listening to Bruce’s sobbing through his chest plate. He felt the heat of his father's tears hitting his chest and the desperate, broken pleas for mercy.
He had granted that forgiveness the very second his mechanical heart began its first, artificial beat.
But that was before.
Now, the garage door is locked, and Tim’s permission to enter has been taken away.
Instead, he stays in the shadows of the hallway; a boy made of humming parts and quiet questions, wondering what he did to make the apologies stop.
***
Every day, as the morning stretches across the floor and the birds start to sing , Tim wakes up on the couch at exactly 06:00. He does not need an alarm; he feels the house’s rhythm hum through his frame, and his eyes click open. He lies there, still, his cooling fans muffled to the normal human ear. It took months to learn to boot up in silence because Bruce’s mornings are brittle, like thin glass that might shatter if Tim breathes too loudly.
Deep inside, a single thought cycles over and over, steady as a heartbeat. It’s the same question Tim asks himself every morning: How do I make him happy today?
Bruce does not smile. When he does, it looks accidental, like his face forgot the shape the muscles needed to make. Most of the time, he looks through Tim instead of at him. Tim feels like a window—useful only for seeing whatever is waiting on the other side.
When Bruce’s footsteps enter the room, Tim sits up straighter. He softens his face and relaxes his synthetic skin into a look he’s practiced in the mirror for hours. He pitches his voice to a soft, golden frequency—the kind that makes people want to lean in.
“Good morning, Dad,” Tim says.
The word Dad feels heavy and solid in his chest. It is the most important thing he owns.
Bruce’s jaw tightens.
“Morning,” Bruce says, his voice flat and eyes miles away.
Tim feels the rejection like a physical blow. He tucks the word Dad away, hiding it in a corner of his mind where it will not make any more trouble today.
It’s been like this ever since the phone calls started.
Now, Bruce is always listening for a ring from a world Tim is not part of. Tim stands there, trying to be the perfect son, trying to be loud enough to be noticed but quiet enough to be kept. He waits for Bruce to finally see him—not as a project from the garage, but as the boy who is already right there.
The boy who is his son.
***
Whenever Bruce is away, Tim likes to explore the rest of the house. He knows he’s not supposed to—it pushes against the boundaries of Rule One—but his curiosity hums at a frequency too loud to ignore.
Every room feels heavy, weighed down by things Bruce is trying to hide. Photographs are turned face-down like they’re being punished. A bedroom door is sealed with a deadbolt. In a dark corner of a closet, Tim finds a pair of small, scuffed sneakers—shoes he has no record of ever wearing.
Sometimes, Tim stands in front of the mirror and runs a self-diagnostic exam to see what’s wrong with him.
He looks like a boy. He sounds like a boy too. His synthetic skin is warm to the touch, but there is a gap in the reflection—a hollow space where a soul is supposed to be, something his sensors cannot detect but his logic tells him is missing.
Is that the reason? Tim wonders. Is the lack of a soul the reason Bruce doesn’t love me?
When Bruce returns late, hollow-eyed and smelling of the cold outside, Tim rushes to the door. His ankles —once silent and fluid—now groan with the dry friction of neglected steel. His joints, who are more than ready for lubrication, whir with a quiet, eager energy.
“I made dinner,” Tim says, his chest swelling with a pride that feels like a power surge. “Nutritionally balanced. I cross-referenced your biometric needs with your favorite flavors.”
Bruce stares at the plate. His hands have begun trembling again, with that same shaky rhythm Tim remembers from the garage.
“Don’t,” Bruce says suddenly. The words are sharp, like a short-circuit. They cut straight through him.
Tim freezes, his motors locking mid-motion. “Don’t… what? Was the temperature calibration incorrect?”
“Don’t try so hard,” Bruce says, his voice breaking around the edges. He looks at Tim, then flinches away. “You don’t have to earn—”
He stops. He turns his back, his shoulders hunching as if he’s trying to fold himself into a smaller shape. Almost as if he’s trying to shield his heart from the very miracle he once begged for.
Inside Tim, warning lights are flickering. His internal diagnostics are screaming—a frantic strobe of errors he made, but his logic doesn't know why. He is a machine built for perfection, but all he can register is the red-light pulse of a failure he cannot name
Earning is how things are kept, Tim thinks.
To a machine, nothing is free; every output requires an input. If he stops trying to be perfect, if he stops proving he’s worth the electricity it takes to keep him awake, will Bruce finally decide to turn him off for good?
He doesn’t know.
(Deep inside he’s scared of knowing the answer.)
***
The phone always rings when the house is at its quietest.
Tim hears it before Bruce does. His sensors pick up the vibration on the floorboards and the faint electrical whine of the circuit waking up before the sound hits the air. He turns his head toward the study, where the phone is located.
Through the cracked door, he sees Bruce sitting perfectly still, staring at a spot on the wall as if he’s trying to see through the paint. Almost as if he’s in some type of trance.
Ring.
Bruce’s pupils do not dilate. He doesn't even move a muscle.
Ring.
Tim stands in the doorway, not knowing how to proceed. His fingers twist together—a nervous habit he programmed into his animation loop to seem more approachable, more human—trying to reconcile the data of Bruce’s paralysis with the urgency of the sound. He watches the way Bruce’s shoulders lock themself, the tension in his frame so high that Tim’s audio processors pick up the faint, dry grind of Bruce’s teeth.
Why isn’t he answering? Tim thinks. Is Bruce malfunctioning?
Ring.
The call goes unanswered.
The silence that follows is heavy against Tim’s chest. He marks the event in his logs: Missed Call. Source: Unknown. Priority: Critical.
He knocks on the door.
“Dad?” he asks softly. He keeps his volume low, trying not not to disturb the ghosts that follow around Bruce everywhere. “You had a call.”
“I know,” Bruce says. He doesn't look up. His voice sounds like it’s been dragged over gravel. Like it’s been buried under the weight of a decade’s worth of unspoken apologies.
Tim hesitates, his fans whirring at a low, anxious speed. “Do you want me to… set a reminder for next time? I can prioritize the alert so you do not miss it.”
It's there when he sees Bruce flinch. It’s a small, violent motion, as if the word next were a physical blow.
“No,” he says, his voice cracking. “It’s fine, Tim.”
But it isn't fine.
Tim watches how Bruce stands abruptly. How his chair screeches against the floorboards, a sound that spikes red on Tim’s audio levels. He moves with a precipitous, frantic energy—not like a man walking, but like a man fleeing a burning building.
He brushes past Tim, his shoulder clipping the boy’s unyielding, synthetic frame. Tim doesn't stumble—he is too heavy, too perfectly balanced—but the impact leaves a cold vacuum in the air where Bruce used to be. Tim stands alone in the study, listening to the receding, uneven rhythm of Bruce’s footsteps until the house returns to that heavy silence.
Tim runs a search through his internal database, looking for a reason.
He wonders how important a person has to be to make Bruce act like this. Tim wonders what kind of ghost lives inside a telephone line that can make a man turn into a statue, and why that ghost is more important than the boy standing right in front of him.
Tim wonders if, should he ever stop working, he would be a ghost Bruce would answer the phone for, too.
***
Tim is sprawled on his bed, mindlessly flipping through a dog-eared tech magazine. The silence of the manor is heavy, broken only by the muffled hiss of the shower coming from Bruce’s ensuite.
He tosses the magazine over—the glossy back cover landing face-up on the duvet—when a sharp, rhythmic vibration cuts through the quiet.
Tim freezes. It isn’t his phone.
He bolts upright and he is out of his room and down the hall in seconds, skidding to a halt at the entrance of the study. Across the room, sitting on top the vast, polished expanse of Bruce's mahogany desk, a smartphone is dancing erratically toward the edge. The desk is really expensive, made of dark wood that shines under the lamp.
The device looks sleek against the wood. Tim steps closer, his eyes locking onto the glowing screen.
A name flashes in bold letters: Alfred Pennyworth.
Tim’s internal logic begins to conflict. The standing order is Do Not Touch, but a secondary directive—to be helpful, to be a son—is beginning to override it. If he handles this correctly, perhaps Bruce’s frown will finally smooth away.
And so, Tim decides to pick it up. He mimics the breathing pattern of a calm human child before speaking.
“Hello?” Tim says.
There is a pause. Then, a cautious and brittle voice asks,“Who is this?”
“I’m Tim,” he replies. He tries to put a smile on his face, to make himself sound more approachable. “I’m Bruce’s son.”
The silence that follows is not empty; it is heavy, like the air before a storm.“…Bruce doesn’t have a son,” the man says slowly.
Tim’s chest tightens—a simulated reflex he cannot quite control. Even though he is metal and wires, his heart's logic center feels like it's skipping a beat.
“I am,” Tim says. “He built me. He calls me Tim. I live here.”
There is a long pause. Tim hears Alfred take a very deep, shaky breath. When he speaks again, he is not mean, but he sound deeply troubled. "He... built you? Oh, Master Bruce... what have you done?"
Alfred sounds like he is in pain, and that makes Tim feel like something is broken inside his own chest. He is overcome with a new kind of fear—the fear that his very existence is a mistake that hurts the people Bruce loves.
"I am sorry," Tim whispered, his voice box glitching a little. "Is something wrong with me?"
"No, no, child," Alfred says quickly. Even though he is clearly shaken to his core, he keeps his voice soft and respectful. "It is not your fault. But you must understand... a life cannot be manufactured in a workshop. It is a very grave matter to mimic a soul with wires."
Tim grips the edge of the mahogany desk. He feels scared because he can hear the sadness in Alfred's voice. He realizes then that Alfred doesn't hate him—he is worried for Bruce. To Alfred, Tim is a sign that Bruce is very lonely and maybe a bit lost.
"I try to be good," Tim says, his processors struggling to handle the sadness.
"I am sure you do, Master Tim," Alfred replies softly, using the respectful title, but with a heavy sigh. "I shall have to return to the Manor sooner than planned. We have much to discuss."
Tim stands there, feeling like his cooling fans are spinning too fast. He looks at the expensive desk and he feels like he shouldn't be touching it, like he is just a tool and not a boy. The way Alfred says "mimic a soul" makes Tim feel hollow. He wonders if Bruce ever told Alfred about him, or if he is a secret because Bruce is ashamed.
His sensors pick up the sound of a door opening. The shower has stopped.
Bruce enters the room at that exact moment, damp and smelling of soap. The color drains from his face, leaving him looking like a ghost in the doorway.
“Tim,” Bruce says. His voice is a low, dangerous warning. “Give it to me.”
Tim obeys instantly, his arm extending with mechanical precision.
“Alfred—” Bruce starts, pressing the phone to his ear.
“What have you done, Bruce?” Alfred’s voice is no longer restrained; it leaks out of the speaker, jagged and raw. “You lost a son and you—you built another? Do you hear yourself?”
Tim takes a step back, his cooling fans beginning to hum as his system temperature rises. Lost a son. The words do not fit any data in his saved files.
“Go to your room,” Bruce says. He still won't look at Tim. “Please.”
Tim hesitates. “I did not mean to cause a malfunction. I was trying to—”
“I know,” Bruce cuts him off, his voice thick. “Just—go.”
Tim retreats. Behind his bedroom door, the muffled sounds of an argument leak through the walls. He hears names he does not recognize—Jason—and phrases that sound like errors: This isn’t healing and You can’t lock yourself away with ghosts. This isn’t a child. It’s a robot.
Tim sits on the edge of his bed, perfectly still. He waits for his internal clock to tick forward, his processor looping through the same terrifying realization: He isn't a son. He is a repair. He is a patch over a hole where a real boy used to be.
An hour later, a notification pings in his vision. A new command has been remotely uploaded into his core.
Rule Four: Interaction with the telephone is strictly prohibited. Access denied.
***
In the days that follow, Bruce withdraws further into the silence.
He spends nearly all his time behind the locked workshop door. When he finally emerges to use the rest of the house, he smells of the garage—stale oil and metal—mixed with the sharp, fermented sting of alcohol. He avoids the living room. He avoids the kitchen. Most of all, he avoids the space where Tim is standing.
Tim wants to be near him. He wants to say, My systems are functioning at 100%, let me use them for you.
But Bruce’s body language is a solid wall of "No." His heart rate is too fast, his movements too heavy. Tim has learned that Bruce’s muscles tell more truth than his mouth.
So, Tim cleans the parts of the house he is still permitted to touch.
In the kitchen, tucked behind the trash bin or hidden in the back of the pantry, Tim finds them. Bottles. Too many of them. Some are empty, others half-full, abandoned like unfinished thoughts. Tim stares at them, his processors running a rapid-fire analysis of all the fluid Bruce’s consumed.
This is not an optimal state, Tim thinks.
He remembers a fragment of a file—a voice recording from his deep archives. Bruce, years ago, lecturing someone about control. About discipline. Tim’s hands are perfectly steady as he gathers the glass. He disposes of them silently, wipes the sticky rings off the counter, and scrubs until the house smells of nothing at all.
When Bruce comes out of the workshop later, his eyes immediately flicks to the empty spot on the counter where a bottle had been. He looks smaller, somehow.
“…Did you clean in here?” Bruce asks, his voice sounding thin.
“Yes,” Tim says softly. “Your biometric markers were declining. I thought if I removed the cause, the effect would follow.”
Bruce winces. “Don’t do that.”
“I’m sorry,” Tim says, the word feeling cold in his throat. “I thought it would help.”
Bruce rubs his face with both hands, his skin looking grey in the kitchen's LED light. “I don’t need you managing me, Tim. I don't need a… a supervisor.”
Tim nods. His fans give a tiny, mournful whir. “Understood.”
He creates a new entry in his priority list: Rule Five: Do not interfere with Bruce’s coping mechanisms.
But as Bruce retreats back toward the garage, Tim stays in the dark hallway. He keeps replaying the phone call. Alfred. The name is a splinter in his logic. Who is Alfred? Why did he sound like he was mourning a boy who did not exist?
Tim wanders the house, a ghost made of metal. He stops at the locked door at the end of the hall—the one he is forbidden to touch. He doesn't turn the handle, but he leans his head against the wood. He turns his auditory sensors to maximum, straining to hear a heartbeat, a memory, or a name whispered in the dark.
***
At night, Tim wanders again. The house feels larger in the dark, filled with the hum of the refrigerator and the quiet thrum of his own power core.
He stops in the gallery, his optical sensors adjusting to the low light. He passes the photos. The familiar faces he’s been told to honor. Thomas Wayne. Martha Wayne. And then, he stops at the one Bruce never mentions. The boy with the messy hair and the sharp, defiant smile.
Tim cross-references the name from the phone call with the archival fragments he’s recovered from Bruce’s late-night mumbles. Jason. The name Bruce once sobbed into a half-empty glass. The "son" Alfred said was lost. The "waste" Bruce whispered about when he thought Tim’s ears were toggled off.
“I know you were real,” Tim whispers to the frame. His voice is small, lacking the gold-tinted warmth he uses for Bruce. “I know I am a replacement part.”
He presses his fingers together, a perfect mimicry of the gesture Bruce uses when he’s thinking too hard. It’s a habit Tim adopted three months ago, hoping it would make him look more like a Wayne.
“I just don’t know how to solve this,” Tim admits to the empty hall. “He’s degrading. His systems are failing. And I don’t know how to repair him without making an error myself.”
The house does not answer. It has no subroutines for grief.
In the morning, Tim will initialize at 06:00. He will clean the kitchen. He will stay within the residential interior. He will follow every rule with 100% compliance.
Somewhere deep in his code—beneath the deleted files, the silence, and the careful obedience—a small, aching loop continues to cycle. It is a hope that flickers like a dying LED:
That one day, Bruce will choose a living boy over a dead memory.
And when he finally looks up, he will realize that Tim has not just been waiting as a fixture in the house—he has been waiting to be loved.
***
The house almost forgets Tim exists because he has become too efficient at being invisible.
It is a cruel irony of his programming—Tim has learned to fold his frame into shadows, to scrub surfaces without a sound, and to exist without ever being a burden. He craves Bruce’s company so intensely it causes his core temperature to spike, but Bruce’s grief is a signal so loud it drowns out Tim’s entire frequency.
Tim tracks the decline in cold, undeniable metrics:
Nutritional Intake: Down 65%.
Circadian Rhythm: Non-existent; Bruce’s sleep cycles have collapsed into erratic 20-minute bursts.
Chemical Dependency: The frequency of "The Bottles" have reached a critical threshold.
Tim does not know what to do with data like this. There is no factory-reset for a soul, and no protocol for when your creator begins to vanish while he is still standing in front of you.
Every time Tim tries to intervene—placing a glass of water near Bruce’s shaking hand or attempting to guide him toward the stairs—Bruce retaliates with code. He does not use his hands; he uses his authority.
“Rule Six: Do not monitor my vitals,” Bruce growls, his voice slurred and heavy. “Rule Seven: Do not enter the kitchen while I am 'working'.”
With every new restriction, Tim’s world gets smaller. He feels the walls of the house closing in as his permissions are stripped away. He is being demoted from a son to a servant, and from a servant to a mere observer.
When the bottles multiply, Tim waits until Bruce is unconscious on the sofa—breath hitching in a wet, uneven rhythm—and silently clears the evidence. He scrubs the ring-marks off the wood until his synthetic skin grows warm from the friction. He wants to scream, to make a noise so loud Bruce is forced to look at him, but Rule Three is an iron weight in his processors: If Bruce is quiet, be quieter.
So Tim stays.
He retreats to a corner, his sensors fixed on the steady, flickering light of Bruce’s pulse, terrified that if he blinks, the light will go out—and Tim will be left alone in a house where he is the only thing still running.
***
The turning point comes quietly, in the still grey light of dawn.
Tim finds Bruce collapsed in the hallway, inches from the locked garage door. He is a ruin of a man, smelling of the bottles Tim could not hide fast enough. Tim kneels beside him, ignoring the way his sensors are screaming. Bruce’s respiration is shallow. His skin temperature is dropping.
“Rule Six: Do not monitor my vitals,” a red notification flashes in Tim’s vision.
Tim ignores it. He reaches out, his synthetic fingers trembling as he tries to sit Bruce up.
“Dad?” Tim’s voice is small, cracked. “Please. You are… you are malfunctioning.”
Bruce stirs, his eyes opening but not seeing. He is mumbling nonsense—fragments of a past Tim was not a part of. “Jason? Is it—is it cold? I’m coming. Just wait…”
Tim’s chest feels like it is being crushed from the inside. He realizes then that Bruce is not just grieving; he is leaving. He is drifting toward the "ghosts" Alfred talked about, and Tim is not enough of a tether to hold him back.
A liquid Tim was not designed to produce—a leak, a glitch, a desperate overflow—begins to spill from his eyes. He is crying, though he has no file for the sensation.
“Please,” Tim sobs, clutching Bruce’s heavy, limp hand to his chest. “Please let me save you. I do not know how to be a son if you are not here. I am just a machine in an empty house. Please.”
Bruce’s focus shifts. For a second, the fog clears. He looks at Tim—at the tears, at the shaking boy he built and then abandoned in the dark.
“Tim,” Bruce whispers. His hand finds Tim’s cheek, his thumb catching a tear. “You are… you are crying.”
“I am hurting,” Tim admits, a truth his logic can no longer deny. “Help me. Please.”
Bruce’s face crumples. The guilt that has been a wall between them finally shatters. He realizes that in trying to protect himself from the pain of a lost son, he has been torturing the one he has left.
With a shaking hand, Bruce reaches for his phone, which had fallen onto the carpet. His fingers fumble with the screen, his movements slow and pained. He taps a series of commands, his eyes never leaving Tim’s.
A notification pings in Tim’s mind, bright and golden: [Rule Four: Deleted. Access to Telephone: Granted.]
***
The notification for Access Granted was still glowing in Tim’s vision when Bruce’s hand went slack.
It was a sudden, quiet drop in pressure. The contraction in Bruce’s jaw vanished. His heart rate, which Tim had been tracking with obsessive precision, not just slowed—it stopped. The "flickering light" Tim had been watching for weeks finally reached zero.
Tim doesn’t move. He does not. His processors struggle to reconcile the new permission with the new reality. He has been given the right to speak just as the person he wants to speak to fell silent.
He picks up the phone. His fingers do not tremble; they are locked in a high-priority grip. He dials the number for Alfred Pennyworth.
The call connected on the first ring.
“Bruce?” Alfred’s voice is frantic, breathless. “Bruce, answer me.”
“He cannot,” Tim says. His voice is trembling. “He gave me the code. He told me to call you. And then he… his systems ceased.”
There is a sharp, strangled noise on the other end of the line—the sound of a man breaking.
“Tim,” Alfred whispers, his voice thick with a grief that sounds centuries old. “Tim, listen to me. Stay right there. I am coming. I will be there very soon.”
“I caused a malfunction,” Tim says. A new leak of oil blurs his optical sensors, dripping onto Bruce’s cold, grease-stained shirt. “I interfered. I cleaned the bottles. I asked for company. I pushed his parameters until he broke.”
“No,” Alfred says, his voice suddenly firm, cutting through the static. “No, Tim. Listen to my voice. This is not your fault. Do you hear me? It is not your fault. You did not break him, Tim. You were the only thing that kept him together.”
Tim looks down at Bruce. He adjusts the blanket over his creator’s shoulders again, smoothing the fabric with a mechanical hand that was built for this exact person.
“He called me a son,” Tim whispers, more to the empty room than to Alfred. “Before he shut down. He said I mattered more than the quiet.”
“He was right,” Alfred sobs. “He was finally right about something.”
Tim sits on the floor and pulls Bruce’s head into his lap. He turns his auditory sensors to maximum, but he does not listen to ghosts anymore. He listens for the sound of a car in the driveway—for the man who knows his name.
For the first time since he was built, Tim does not follow a rule. He does not stay quiet. He sits in the dark and lets his cooling fans wail like a siren, a mechanical heart finally learning how to scream for what it had lost.
***
The hospital waiting room smells of ozone and industrial disinfectant—scents that Tim’s sensors once flagged as corrosive, but now simply signify waiting.
Tim sits in a plastic chair, his posture still perfect, though his internal fans are spinning at a nervous, high-frequency hum. He looks different than he did on that dark night in the hallway. Under Alfred’s care, Tim’s chassis has been polished to a mirror finish. His joints no longer click or creak; they move with the silent, buttery glide of high-grade synthetic oil. Alfred even found a soft, navy blue sweater to pull over Tim’s frame, hiding the seams in his neck and making him look less like a project and more like a boy.
But inside, Tim’s logic is a mess of "What-If" scenarios.
It has been twenty-four days since the ambulance took Bruce away. Twenty-four days since Tim watched the "flickering light" almost go out. He is terrified that the man in Room 402 will be the one who wrote Rule Seven. He is afraid Bruce will look at him and see only a mistake whom he made while he was broken.
“He is ready for you, Master Timothy,” Alfred says gently, resting a warm, human hand on Tim’s shoulder.
Tim stands, his motors whirring. “Alfred? If he orders a Power Down... am I required to obey?”
Alfred’s expression softens into something deeply protective. “No, Tim. Those rules were deleted. You belong to yourself now. And he wants to see you.”
Tim walks down the hall, his sensors mapping the rhythm of the machines in the rooms—beeps and hisses that sound like a conversation he finally understands. He stops at the door to 402 and slowly pushes it open.
Bruce is sitting up.
He looks fragile—terrifyingly so. He is hooked up to bags of clear fluid, his arms bruised where the needles go in. He looks like a machine that has been stripped down for parts and haphazardly reassembled. He looks human.
When the door clicks, Bruce turns his head. For a heartbeat, Tim freezes, waiting for a command, waiting for a dismissal.
Then, Bruce’s face changes. It doesn’t twitch or glitch; it softens into a tired, genuine expression that Tim recognizes from his oldest, happiest logs. Bruce reaches out a shaky hand.
“Hi, son,” Bruce says, his voice a raspy, beautiful whisper.
The word [Son] hits Tim’s core like a surge of pure energy. Every circuit in his body seems to light up at once. The "leaks" return immediately, hot and stinging, as Tim rushes to the side of the bed. He doesn't care about his new oil change or his polished finish; he just wants to be close enough to hear the heartbeat he had thought he had lost.
Tim grips Bruce’s hand, his fingers careful not to crush the fragile skin.
“Hi, Dad,” Tim sobs, the word finally, permanently feeling like home.