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To be orphaned in that hollowed-out canyon of time—after the softness of thirteen but before the legal armor of eighteen—was a specific brand of tragedy. It was a box Tim Drake could check on a FAFSA application if he needed it, a bureaucratic shorthand for a life cleaved in two.
By twenty-one, the jagged edges of those years had been sanded down by the sheer passage of days. He wasn't thirteen or sixteen anymore; he was a man who had learned to walk through the fire because the world offered no shade. He pushed through the static of loss, preserving the grief of his parents alongside the heavy, aching privilege of loving those still living. He had made it out of the wreckage, standing tall enough that people mistook survival for a choice.
They called him resilient. That word felt like a lie.
He hadn't chosen to endure; he had simply run out of alternatives. There was no dignity in the dirt, no future in the shadows. What else was he meant to do? Sink into the mattress until the dust reclaimed him? Let the salt of his own tears drown out the world? His responsibilities didn’t stop simply because his parents’ pulses did. The clock kept ticking, and Tim, ever the soldier, marched to its beat.
He understood the geography of grief. He knew it lived in the marrow of his bones, a quiet tenant sharing space with the loud, vibrant neighbors of his soul. Love. Hate. Fear. Joy. Vigilance. They all crowded into the same small room, but grief was the one Tim knew how to silence.
He could bury it beneath the noise of a heart that still beat. He could shove it down, tucking it behind the sharp flares of hate and the soaring peaks of joy, hiding it so effectively that he could almost convince himself it was gone. He convinced himself he would only call for it when he was ready.
The tragedy of his design, however, was that Tim was never ready. He never "needed" the pain. So it stayed, packed like gunpowder into the tightest corners of his chest, waiting for a spark.
He knew the structural integrity would fail. He knew that one day, the ghosts would grow tired of the dark and claw their way out, sinking their nails into his lungs and shredding his breath until the air turned to ash. He just didn't realize that "one day" was a Tuesday in Smallville.
The grocery store was a symphony of the mundane, a cacophony of the ordinary that felt increasingly like a battlefield. In the distance, the rhythmic, electronic chirp-chirp-chirp of a scanner kept time like a malfunctioning metronome. A baby’s frantic cry cut through the aisles, sharp and jagged, a siren of pure, unfiltered need.
Overhead, the air conditioning groaned, a mechanical beast waking up to spill a draft of artificial winter down the back of his neck. It turned his fingertips to ice, the blood retreating to his core as if sensing a threat. The oversized sweater he’d borrowed from Kon—soft, smelling of laundry detergent and the sun—offered no warmth against the chill rising from within.
Tim stood paralyzed. He was a statue of flesh and bone in front of the frozen section, that small, universal aisle where every supermarket tucked away its "International" flavors. His eyes were locked on a single package. It was a simple thing: black-and-white plastic, dusted with a fine layer of frost that glittered under the fluorescent hum. Korean characters marched down the front in a language he could recognize but never speak.
Soybean paste stew.
His mother had loved it. She had craved it with a quiet, fierce devotion, a piece of a home she had left behind but never quite forgotten. Yet, she had never once let the language pass from her lips to his ears. She had kept that part of herself in a box, much like Tim did with his pain. Looking at the bag, he felt the first spark hit the gunpowder.
“Kon, what’s the date?” Tim’s voice was a ghost of itself, thin and reed-like. He couldn't look away from the bag. The pressure in his chest was no longer a dull ache; it was a physical weight, a cosmic alignment of memory and mercury.
Kon hummed, a low, grounding sound that vibrated in the air between them. He pulled his phone from his pocket, the screen a bright, digital intrusion into Tim’s collapsing world. “April twenty-seventh,” Kon said, his brow furrowing as he scanned a crumpled list of Martha’s requests. “I feel like I’m forgetting something... the sour cream? No, we got that...”
The world narrowed. April twenty-seventh. The date didn't just exist; it exploded. It was the day two people had promised a "forever" that ended in a graveyard. It was an anniversary for a marriage that had been buried in the dirt.
The beeping of the groceries became the frantic, erratic pulse of a heart monitor in a room he never wanted to revisit. The baby’s cry became a eulogy. The air conditioning didn't just chill his skin—it froze the oxygen in his throat, turning the very act of breathing into an assault. Spikes of panic rose like a tide, cold and unrelenting, licking at his chin.
He hadn't been watching the calendar. He had come to Smallville for the silence, for the break that Kon had demanded and even Bruce—in a rare moment of parental clarity—had sanctioned. They thought he needed rest. But there was no rest for the guilty, and forgetting this date felt like the ultimate betrayal. If they were alive, his mother would have looked at him with that quiet, disappointed grace; his father would have made a joke that didn't land. They would be upset that their only son had let their most sacred day slip into the cracks of a mundane Tuesday.
“I need to go,” Tim said. His body was a statue of marble and regret. He was still staring at the frozen stew, the black-and-white bag now the only thing in focus.
Kon looked up, the harsh overhead lights reflecting in his eyes, making him look alien for a split second. “Go? Go where? We’re almost done, Tim. Just the milk and the bread.”
“I need to leave,” Tim repeated, the words tasting like copper and salt. He dropped the shopping basket. The plastic hit the linoleum with a hollow clatter that echoed like a gunshot. He turned his back on the life he was trying to lead, on the normalcy he had tried to borrow.
“Tim? Hey, wait!” Kon’s voice was a tether, a golden rope trying to pull him back to the shore, but Tim was already drifting into the heart of the storm.
He burst through the automatic doors, the sensors wheezing as they slid open. The spring air hit him, but it offered no sanctuary. It was thick with the scent of blooming life, heavy with the golden, suffocating dust of pollen. It was the kind of air his father would have feared. Jack Drake would have forced a spoonful of bitter, cherry-flavored allergy medication down Tim’s throat, even though Tim wasn't allergic. A Drake did not sneeze at a garden gala; a Drake was always composed.
The grief wasn't just clawing now; it was a riot. It gripped his heart and squeezed his lungs, a suffocating embrace that left him gasping against a wooden pillar of the storefront. He leaned his forehead against the rough grain, trying to find a single point of reality to hold onto.
But as the air failed him, the sadness morphed. It didn't melt into tears; it hardened. It sharpened into a jagged, white-hot fury that burned hotter than any joy he’d ever felt.
He was angry. He was so incredibly, violently mad.
He was mad at the soybean paste stew for being there. He was mad at the store for its sterile lights, its crying children, and its mindless, repetitive noises. He was mad at Kon for bringing him here, and at Martha for needing the ingredients that led him to that specific aisle.
He was mad at the world for calling him resilient. He was mad at every well-meaning souls who told him his parents were in a "better place," as if a better place existed than being alive to see their son. He wanted to scream at the poets who claimed that grief was just "love persevering."
No. This wasn't love. This was a haunting.
He was mad at the shadows that took them. He was mad at the parents who had left him for months on end while they chased artifacts and the sun. He was mad at his mother for the language she kept to herself, a secret she took to the grave. He was mad at his father for the medicine that tasted like iron and the control that felt like a cage. He was mad at them for the ultimate abandonment: for dying and leaving him to carry their ghosts in a grocery store in fucking Kansas.
How is his grief love persevering if he was so angry?
A hand settled on his shoulder—warm, solid, and terrifyingly real. It was a tactile reminder that he wasn't alone, and at the touch, the dam finally broke. Hot, stinging tears tracked through the pollen on his face, leaving mud in their wake. Tim felt as though he were vibrating out of his own skin, his atoms ready to scatter into the Smallville wind. He could see Kon’s lips moving, a frantic blur of comfort, but the sound was drowned out by the echoes of the dead.
“I’ll teach you one day, Timmy. We have all the time in the world.”
“Take the medicine, son. If you do, I’ll let you bring your camera. You can take all the pictures you want.”
A cold breeze swept across his skin, sharper than the Kansas wind. Tim blinked, and the voices of the dead flickered like a dying candle. For a terrifying second, he wondered if that was the last time he would ever hear the specific, nasal cadence of his father’s voice or the melodic lilt of his mother’s promises.
“Tim? You with me?” Kon was right there, his thumb brushing a tear away, his hand snapping rhythmically in front of Tim’s face.
The mechanical motion of Tim’s head—a jerky, shallow nod—felt like a gear stripping in an engine. He was present, yet he was miles away, standing in the wreckage of a memory he hadn't invited in. The fluorescent hum of the store still buzzed in the back of his teeth, a lingering ghost of the panic that had just tried to swallow him whole.
“What happened? Tim, talk to me. What’s wrong?”
The concern in Kon’s voice was a physical weight. It was too warm, too thick, too full of a love that Tim felt he was currently betraying by the sheer act of his own silence. Tim swallowed hard, his throat feeling as though it were lined with shards of that black-and-white plastic packaging from the freezer aisle.
“I don’t want to talk about it,” he managed. The words were brittle, a thin barrier between his sanity and the screaming vacuum in his chest.
“Okay,” Kon said, his voice dropping into that soft, Clark-Kent-adjacent tone that usually acted as a balm. “We don’t have to talk about it right now. We can just breathe. Let’s just find a rhythm, okay?”
But the rhythm was broken. The metronome had snapped. Tim shook his head, the movement violent and desperate. “I don’t want to talk about it at all. Ever.”
How could he? Telling anyone, let alone the person who held his heart in his hands, that he was currently harboring a tectonic, world-ending fury at two people who were long since buried was an admission of a rot he didn't want Kon to see. It was one thing to be the tragic orphan; it was quite another to be the son who wanted to scream at the headstones.
He felt the guilt rising like a tide. How could he be angry at them? They hadn’t chosen the ending of their story. They hadn’t sat down and decided to leave him behind in a world that demanded he be a soldier before he was a man. They hadn't chosen the violence that stopped their hearts.
And yet, the anger remained. It was a living thing, a parasite that had grown fat in the dark of his subconscious. It was wrong. He was wrong. He knew he was wrong. He was a bad son, a jagged person, a fracture in the perfect image of the "resilient" hero.
“Tim, look, we’re gonna have to talk about it eventually,” Kon said, his brow furrowed in a way that signaled he wasn't going to let this slide into the shadows. “You just ran out of a grocery store like the building was on fire. You’re shaking. Something hit you back there, and I need to know what.”
“Conner, leave me alone,” Tim snapped, stepping back. The gravel of the Smallville road crunched under his boots, a harsh, grounding sound that did nothing to settle the reeling in his mind. The world was spinning—too much light, too much pollen, too much history.
“What is going on?” Kon asked, closing the distance again, his hand outstretched as if he were approaching a wounded animal.
Tim looked at that hand and felt a surge of pure, unadulterated resentment. How could he possibly formulate the sentence? I am angry at my mother, who has been dead for eight years, and my father, who has been dead for five. It sounded insane. It sounded like the beginning of a villain monologue.
He was so angry. The heat of it was radiating off his skin, a fever of the soul. He needed to be anywhere else. He needed the rooftop wind of Gotham, the kind that smelled of rain and exhaust. He needed to feel the familiar weight of his bo staff in his palms, the satisfying thud of wood against bone, the distraction of a riddle or a lead. He needed the cold, clinical distance of research, the blue light of a computer screen, the safety of a mission where the stakes were simple and the enemies were living.
He needed to be anywhere but this quiet town with its wooden pillars and its flowers and its supermarket that dared to sell a meal his mother loved but never taught him to name.
“I need to leave,” he said, his voice rising, his boots already hitting the dirt road with intent. He didn't look. He didn't check the perimeter. Vigilance—that tenant that usually lived in the front of his brain—had been evicted by the rage.
He stepped out, his eyes fixed on the horizon, only for a sudden, violent yank to pull him backward. The air rushed past him as a massive truck roared by, a blur of steel and speed that he hadn't even perceived. The vacuum of its passage tugged at his hair, a reminder of how easily the world could snuff out a life.
Kon caught him. Kon always caught him. He held Tim close, one hand pressing Tim’s head against his shoulder, the other wrapped firmly around his midsection. It was a cage of safety, a fortress of Kryptonian strength that Tim usually melted into. But right now, it felt like a trap.
“Let’s get you out of here,” Kon mumbled into his hair, his voice vibrating through Tim’s skull. Tim felt him glance around, checking for witnesses, before the ground vanished.
The ascent was silent. Tim closed his eyes, leaning into the flight, letting the hot, stinging tears finally spill over and soak into Kon’s shirt. He felt the cold air of high altitude, the way the pressure changed in his ears, and for a moment, he let himself be a passenger in his own life.
They landed in a field, miles away from the store, miles away from the eyes of Martha Kent or the ghosts of the supermarket. The ground was solid, and Tim hated the feel of it. He hated the stability. The anger hadn't subsided with the flight; it had fermented. It had grown into something jagged and sharp.
He yanked himself back from Kon’s arms the moment his feet touched the grass. He turned around, facing the vast, empty expanse of the Kansas plains. The spring air blew past him, mocking him with its freshness.
“Did I do something?” Kon asked. The tone was quiet, small, and laden with the kind of hurt that only someone who loves you deeply can project.
The guilt hit Tim like a physical blow. He was being a dick. He was being a cold, unreachable prick to the man who had just saved his life from a truck and his sanity from a grocery store. And the worst part was that Kon didn't even know why he was being punished.
But how could he voice it? How could he tell the love of his life that his heart was a warehouse of hidden spite? How does one explain the physics of a grief that, when it finally breaks through the floorboards, drags every dark emotion it touched on the way down?
“No,” Tim said, his voice cracking. “I’m just…”
He stared out at the field. The barbed wire of his own making seemed to tighten around his throat. His eyes wouldn't stop watering, the salt blurring the green of the grass into a smear of color. He was a Drake. Drakes didn't do this. They didn't break down in fields. They stayed composed. They took their medicine.
He did the only thing he could think of—the thing he had learned from watching his parents when their own carefully curated lives became too heavy to carry behind closed doors.
He screamed.
It wasn't a hero's shout; it was a raw, guttural sound that tore at his throat. He screamed into the wide, indifferent sky, hoping the sound would carry all the way to the cemetery in Gotham. He shouted until his lungs were empty, until his head throbbed, and then he sucked in a ragged breath and did it again.
“I am so pissed!” he screamed, his voice breaking. He wanted them to hear. He wanted them to feel the vibration of his fury in the soil. He wanted them to know how much it hurt to be the one left behind to pick up the pieces of a life they just walked away from.
“Tim! What are you doing?” Kon stepped in front of him, eyes wide and glowing with concern. He was covering his ears, his shoulders hunched.
Tim didn't answer. He couldn't. He turned the opposite direction, the words spilling out of him now like a dam that had finally burst under the pressure of a decade.
“I hate soybean paste stew!” he screamed at the horizon. “I hated that medication! I hated the way it tasted like copper and lies!”
Kon raised an eyebrow, the confusion on his face shifting into something more profound— understanding. He didn't try to stop him. He didn't try to logic him out of it. He simply stepped up next to Tim, his feet planted in the dirt, and shrugged.
“I hate the texture of polos!” Kon screamed, his voice a thunderclap that echoed across the plains.
Tim paused, looking over at him through the blur of his tears.
“I can yell too,” Kon said with a small, sad smile that didn't reach his eyes. “I hate Lex Luthor! I hate the way he smells like expensive soap!”
Tim felt a microscopic shift in the air. He turned back to the empty field. “I hate grocery stores!”
“I hate the color orange!” Kon shouted.
“I hate being resilient! I hate that everyone thinks I’m okay just because I’m still standing!” Tim’s voice was a jagged blade now.
“I hate being a clone! I hate the labs and the tubes and the feeling that I’m just a copy of someone else’s mistake!”
“I hate that they died!” Tim screamed, his voice reaching a pitch that hurt his chest.
“I hate that I died!” Kon shouted back.
The silence that followed was heavy. Tim caught his breath, his chest heaving, the adrenaline beginning to ebb away and leave a cold, hollow ache in its wake.
“I hate that I forgive them for leaving me alone all the time,” Tim said, his voice dropping to a whisper that felt louder than the screaming. The tears were a constant stream now, warm against the cooling air. “I hate that I’m mad at them for dying.”
He felt his knees go weak. The anger was leaving him, and without it, there was nothing left to hold him upright. He was just a boy in a field, missing people who were never coming back.
Kon caught him before he could hit the dirt. He lowered them both, kneeling in the tall grass, pulling Tim into a tight, grounding embrace.
“I miss my mom,” Tim choked out, his fist hitting Kon’s shoulder in a weak, rhythmic pulse of grief. “I miss my dad. I miss the versions of them that didn't even exist, and I miss the versions that did.”
“Oh, baby,” Kon murmured, his hand running up and down Tim’s back in a steady, soothing motion.
“I’m so mad at them. I miss them so much it feels like I’m being hollowed out. I missed them even when they were alive, when they were on the other side of the world, but now… now they aren’t coming back. Why can't they just come back?”
He sobbed then—real, ugly, chest-wracking sobs that he had spent years perfecting the art of avoiding. It wasn't fair to dump this on Kon, to break down in the middle of a trip that was supposed to be a vacation. But Kon just held him. He held him so gently, as if Tim were something precious and fragile, kissing the top of his head and whispering the only things that mattered in the silence of the Kansas afternoon.
The sun began its slow, bruised descent toward the horizon, bleeding shades of violet and burnt ochre across the Kansas sky. Tim didn't see the beauty of the prairie; he only felt the damp heat of his own breath trapped against the rough weave of Kon’s hoodie. The world had shrunk down to a radius of a few inches—the circle of Kon’s arms and the rhythmic, steady thrum of a heart that wasn't human. It was a terrifyingly constant sound, a reminder of the life that persisted while others flickered out.
The silence of the field was heavy, broken only by the distant, lonely whistle of a hawk and the ragged, hitching sound of Tim’s breath as it slowly leveled out. The violent energy of the screaming had left him hollow, a cavernous space where the anger used to be. Now, it was just the cold—the kind of cold that starts in the marrow and radiates outward until the skin feels like thin glass, ready to shatter at the slightest vibration.
“I’m sorry,” Tim whispered into the fabric, his voice a wrecked shadow of itself. He felt as though he had just shed a skin he had been wearing for a decade, and the air against his raw nerves was too much to bear. “I’m sorry I’m a mess. I’m sorry I’m being a dick. I just… I didn’t know it was still in there. I thought I’d buried it deep enough that it would just turn to stone.”
Kon didn't pull away. He didn't offer a platitude or a joke to break the tension. Instead, he tightened his grip, his chin resting atop Tim’s dark hair. The strength in those arms was absolute—the kind of strength that could shift tectonic plates—but right now, it was being used with a delicacy that made Tim’s heart ache.
“You don’t ever have to apologize for being human, Tim,” Kon murmured. The vibration of his voice was a low hum in Tim’s ear, a physical grounding wire. “And you’re allowed to be mad. If I were you, I’d be pissed off at the universe, too.”
Tim pulled back just enough to look at the grass between his knees. He traced the edge of a stray wildflower with a trembling finger, his mind drifting back to the grocery store. The soybean paste stew. The date. The anniversary of a promise that had been broken by cold Gotham nights.
“My mother used to make this Korean dish when she was homesick,” Tim said, the words coming out slow, like he was pulling them through deep water. “But she never called it ‘soybean paste stew’ in front of me. She’d whisper the name in Korean when she thought I wasn't listening. Like it was a secret she wasn't ready to share with the boy who was becoming more ‘Drake’ and less like her every day. I think… I think I’m mad that she took the language with her. I’m mad that I can’t even order her favorite food without feeling like a stranger in my own culture.”
He felt a fresh wave of heat behind his eyes, but he was too tired to cry anymore. It wasn't just about the food, or the medication, or the missed dates. It was about the theft. Death had stolen his chance to finally know them as people, rather than as icons on a pedestal or signatures on a check. He was twenty-one now, old enough to understand their flaws, old enough to challenge them, old enough to forgive them—but he was stuck in a permanent state of being their son, frozen in the amber of their final, messy moments.
“And my dad,” Tim continued, a ghost of a bitter laugh escaping him. “He wasn't a bad man. He just didn't know how to handle a kid like me. He wanted me to be polished. He wanted me to be perfect so the world wouldn't see the cracks. He spent so much time trying to fix my exterior that he never bothered to look at what was happening inside. And now he’s gone, and I’m still trying to be perfect for a man who isn't even here to see the effort.”
Kon reached out, his hand cupping Tim’s cheek, his thumb catching the salt-stain on his skin. “You’re not doing it for him anymore, Tim. You’re doing it because it’s the only map you have. But maps can change.”
Tim leaned into the touch, closing his eyes. The anger was gone, replaced by a profound, soul-deep exhaustion that felt heavier than the rage ever had. He felt as though he could sleep for a century and still wake up with this hollow ache. The field was quiet, the wind dying down as the first stars began to pierce through the twilight, cold and distant.
“How do I stop being mad at them?” Tim asked, his voice barely a breath. “How do I stop feeling like I’m constantly failing people who aren’t even here to grade me?”
Kon moved to sit beside him, shoulder to shoulder, their legs stretched out into the tall grass. He looked out at the horizon, where the light was a thin, glowing sliver of what it used to be. “I don’t think you stop being mad all at once. I think you just let the anger sit there. You let it be a part of the love, like a scar on a tree. It doesn't go away, but the tree keeps growing around it. And as for them watching? Tim, if they can see you now, they aren't looking at your ‘resilience.’ They’re looking at the boy who finally stopped pretending he was fine.”
Tim let his head fall onto Kon’s shoulder. The silence felt different now—less like a vacuum and more like a heavy blanket. He thought about the soybean paste stew again. Maybe one day he would go back to that store. Maybe he would buy the bag and try to cook it, and it would probably taste wrong because his mother wasn't there to whisper the secret ingredients. It would be a meal shared with a ghost, a reminder of everything he had lost and everything he would never get back.
“I’m really tired, Kon,” Tim said, the mundane reality of his exhaustion finally overrunning his defenses.
Kon sighed, a soft sound of shared burden. “I know, Tim. I know.” He didn't offer a bright smile or a promise that everything would be perfect tomorrow. He knew Tim too well for that. He just stayed there, a warm presence in a world that had become very cold very quickly.
Tim stood up, his legs feeling like lead. He looked at the vast, empty expanse of the Kansas plains. The lights of the Kent farmhouse glowed in the distance—a small, fragile amber light in an ocean of darkness. It was a beautiful sight, but it felt millions of miles away.
He reached out and took Kon’s hand. His grip was tight, almost desperate. The anger had left a hole, and he was realizing that he might be filling it with a different kind of sadness—the quiet, permanent realization that some things are simply broken forever. There was no "fixing" his parents' death. There was only the long, slow walk back to a house that wasn't his, carrying a grief that would never truly leave him.
“Let’s go back,” Tim said, his voice small.
“You okay to walk?” Kon asked, searching Tim’s face for a sign of the boy who had run out of the store.
Tim looked back at the field one last time. He could almost see them—Jack and Janet—standing there in the tall grass, looking at him with the same distant, clouded expressions they always had. They weren't smiling. They weren't waving. They were just memories, fading into the purple dusk.
“No,” Tim admitted, the honesty stinging worse than the tears. “But I’ll keep moving anyway. That’s what I do, right?”
Kon didn't answer. He just squeezed Tim’s hand and began the walk back toward the light. Tim followed, his footsteps heavy in the dirt, knowing that tonight he would eat dinner and smile at Martha, and tomorrow he would wake up and be "resilient" all over again. The cycle wouldn't break, and the grief wouldn't vanish; it would just settle into his bones, a permanent part of the anatomy of Tim Drake.
As the farmhouse door opened, spilling a warm, yellow light onto the porch, Tim felt a sudden, sharp pang of longing for a bitter spoonful of allergy medicine and a mother who kept secrets. It was a hollow, haunting feeling—the realization that he was loved deeply by the man beside him, but that there were parts of his heart that would always belong to the ghosts in the field, and they were never coming home to claim them.