Chapter Text
Tim drags a finger down the center of the image, a perfect snapshot of Robin, laughing joyfully mid-kick to one Harvey's goon’s chests.
The oils on his skin cause a matte streak on the shiny, glossy photo he'd just printed out, right over Robin's face.
He feels something in his chest tighten at the sight, but it's his picture. He can put his clumsy, grubby, child's hands all over it. Just because he wants to.
It may seem out of character, if anyone knew Tim enough to see his in character. But they don't, and so he doesn't have to confront what about this is so different to seeing Robin in person.
Because Tim does see him. Does know him, in that nebulous, twice removed way you can know anybody you've spent long enough observing.
Also in the sense that he goes to Tim's school. That Tim sees him once a year like clock work, at the annual Martha Wayne Charity Foundation gala. That he's Tim's closest next door neighbor.
He doesn't know the difference between the pictures, between the news videos, and the real thing. He doesn't think about it, can't quantify it, doesn't have an answer to a question he's never even asked.
All he knows is that when Robin's gaze catalogs a room, any room, Tim tucks himself away somewhere he can't be noticed.
Or the fact that, despite knowing Robin's real name, Tim rarely ever uses it. Even within the privacy of his own head.
He pins the photo up with the others, at the back of his walk-in closet, biting his inner cheek as he watches the needle pierce a hole into his photo.
Some things, he thinks, are much better left unknown. Even if he doesn't exactly afford himself that blissful ignorance very often. Just because he hasn't asked himself the question, doesn't mean it isn't a very purposeful avoidance.
You can learn the gaps of your own knowledge, and consciously decide not to close them.
The existence of one Jason Peter Todd happens to be such a gap for Tim.
Robin, who takes to fighting criminals with a ferocious, controlled brutality, is knowable. Robin likes cheap smokes and strawberry ice cream. Robin makes dramatic entrances and names gargoyles after characters from classical literature.
Jason Todd is a mouthy tenth grader in Tim's AP lit course. He is a boy who goes to school and, at the end of the day, gets picked up by a butler in a shiny black sedan.
There are no pictures of Jason Todd on the wall.
Maybe it's not fair, Tim thinks as he shuts the closet doors, and pads off to bed just to lay staring up to the ceiling. But then he thinks that it doesn't have to be fair. It just has to be his.
That night, like most nights since he'd watched some obscure anime in a pointless attempt to bond with peers he hasn't seen since he tested out of fifth grade, he raises a single hand out, palm up towards the ceiling he's staring at.
The man in the story had had a daughter who'd died, and every night, he'd reach up to her pinned photo.
Robin isn't dead, Tim isn't a brilliant detective like Narihisago, and he can't pin a picture of Robin to his lofted ceiling, anyways.
He doesn't know why he reaches.
He doesn't want Robin to reach back.
____________________
He steps up onto the city bus in the early morning chill, hands crushing the ends of his hoodie sleeves in his fists. He swipes his pass quickly, and takes his usual seat right up front, where no one else ever desires to sit.
The blue polka dot upholstery is worn in and itchy, and he sits forward stiffly rather than relaxing, so it won't tickle on the nape of his neck.
The academy is loud when he arrives, like Tim has been led to believe every high school is, regardless of whether or not it is privately funded, or stuck with a prestigious name.
The stone steps leading up to the large imposing entry way are cold through the soles of his fancy shoes, and no one looks him in the eyes.
He's not bullied like how some of the scholarship students are, for being different. Tim is different, and lesser than, but his last name is warning enough not to go for what would otherwise be easy pickings.
In turn, he's quiet. Treated more like ghost than boy, most days.
Ives in his fourth period calculus will complain to him about assignments, and Tim will speak when spoken to. But the disconnect is obvious. More than being younger, Tim is fundamentally unlike the other students, in some intangible way they can feel but not verbalize.
He only half pays attention to the bland information overzealous professors lecture about through the day. He keeps his grades as high as possible on his own, of course, but if ever he does slip up, he just hacks and spoofs the records from the public library computers. The ones behind the office-like partitions where no one sees his face.
It all has become routine, despite the unusual circumstance of having skipped four grades in total over the years.
An integral part of this routine includes sitting in the very back row next to the window, in the opposite corner from Jason Todd.
It isn't a large classroom, and their reasons for this positioning couldn't be more different.
For Robin, Tim imagines, Batman's training has instructed him on positioning himself away from doors and windows but so that they are in sight line.
Tim had just taken the furthest seat from Jason that'd still been up for grabs on the first day of that year.
He doesn't let himself look at Robin like this, because the effect it has on his mental health is… not something he looks at closely.
The first day of their shared class, Tim'd had to excuse himself to the bathroom to cry. It was irrational and humiliating.
But some part of him, a large part, had wanted to scream in a fit of awful, ugly rage. This was Robin, an ethereal yet frighteningly solid being made of magic. Pinned down to a fancy desk and chair, holding a pencil, chatting about the poor weather.
In Tim's ever creative mind’s eye, he saw Jason not as a civilian identity, but a stuffed and plaque-d bird. Something wild and free made into a hollow decoration that people would smile upon and pet with uncareful fingers out of curiosity.
His hero was simply a child like himself, and it was an injustice that made him sick to his stomach.
And so, he was only ever allowed to be Robin.
Anyone couldn't just talk with Robin, like Tim couldn't. That was justice. That was fair.
It was knowledge Tim could find safety in, whereas there was no safety at all in Jason Todd.
“Can anybody tell me the literary inspiration for this text?”
Intones Mrs. Hanson, looking across a sea of faces, a mix of disinterest and edge-of-their-seat anticipation. In her hand was the month's assigned reading, a new copy of The Foreshadowing by Marcus Sedgwick.
A few hands raise, Tim's not among them, and he of course doesn't check whether Robin's does, though it's a likelihood.
“Mr. Wayne?”
She calls, confirming Tim's suspicion, and he puts his head down onto his crossed arms. The hoodie he wears over his uniform isn't technically allowed per dress code, but the professors have as healthy a respect for social ladders as do their students.
“There are tons of references to Helen of Troy throughout the storyline, and other facets of Greek mythology taken from the Odyssey.”
His tone holds easy confidence, and genuine excitement for the topic that Tim could never muster.
It sounds like something Robin might say.
It isn't Robin.
“That's exactly right, Jason,” she agrees, her tone firmly unimpressed despite the words of praise. She was an older woman, and if ever there was a day she would ply her protégés with cheerful reinforcement, it was long gone.
“And which parts of the story, exactly, symbolize Helen, Mr. Drake?”
She calls in a much sharper tone, no doubt spotting his miserable slump. The highschoolers titter amongst themselves, relieved it's him getting singled out for ignoring the lesson instead of them.
He begrudgingly sits up straighter in his seat, unwilling to suffer a call to his parents he'd later have to take time erasing from their voicemail.
He has actually read this novel, and knows just enough about the Odyssey to pass. It'll be his first time speaking in this room all year. So, though he feels faintly nauseated, he says;
“She prophesied her brothers’ deaths, and nobody believed her. Everything she saw was always destined to come true whether she got involved or not.”
Her mouth twists like she's eaten something sour, and she doesn't deign to give him a verbal response, simply nodding and moving on with the lecture.
Tim almost never reads their assigned texts, but The Foreshadowing had lit a morbid curiosity within him. In many ways, he could relate to Sasha. Trapped up in a big house, witness to secret machinations he couldn't interfere with without bowling them over.
Unlike Sasha, Tim didn't want to be involved. He willfully ignores the stare burning into the side of his head for the rest of class.
____________________
Nights are for Robin. Moreso even than Batman, who blends deep within its shadows, night makes Robin shine.
The camera's lens draws to him like a magnet, his large personality filling the screen in bright splashes of red, green, and yellow. Robin's teeth bared like a savage dog as he cackles, cloaked in colors of warning.
And Tim can smile back freely, his own giddiness making his hands shake, until he has to prop the camera atop his knees.
He can bump his nose to the glass trying for a better look without zooming, and dream about the logistics of a dark room, just for this, instead of having to print the photos off of the lifeless machine in his parent's vacant office space.
No one can see him, hidden away behind an A/C unit on a rooftop across the street. It's here that Tim doesn't exist, not really, not as anything but buzzing glee.
To those who have spotted him like this, dressed down and in Gotham proper, he's just Alvin Draper. The odd probable runaway with some sort of mental instabilities.
The one who rocks side to side while he fixes up your busted computer for a bit of gossip here and there. The one always muttering to himself about something, like he just can't stand the quiet. A harmless, if off-putting, child.
Robin tries out a new trick Nightwing must've taught him last weekend, when he'd been home visiting the manor.
He somersaults off the concrete lip of a darkened apartment block, curling his knees in, his cape fluttering around him as he spins once, twice, before sticking the landing on his hands the next roof over, jumping up to his feet.
And Tim. Giggles. The shutter clicking in muted bursts of thirty rounds for him to sort through later.
It's normal, except it isn't, because Tim never makes any sound to draw attention to himself. Especially not when Robin has flipped his way much closer while Tim was too busy being star struck to comprehend just where Robin was going.
Robin's head snaps up, alert but never startled, eyes scanning the rooftops in a grid pattern until they lock onto Tim.
Tim, who burns, and burns, and burns.
He's ducked slower to avoid getting hit by stray ricocheting bullets. He flattens down, all the way to his belly, and army crawls across the concrete with his camera held slightly aloft in one hand.
He just needs to make it to the fire escape before Robin can shatter the illusion. Their eyes had met briefly, and the white lenses were a balm to Tim's roiling soul, but even a good imitation of being more couldn't last forever.
It wouldn't hold up to close inspection, and that wasn't something Tim was equipped to see.
One of his old nannies, Mrs. Mac, sometimes liked to tell Tim stories about God. About how he would love and watch over you, but he couldn't come down to earth to be with you.
At first, Tim hadn't understood. How can he love you if he's never there?
But Mrs. Mac just smiled, because she liked when Tim asked his questions, and told him;
“Well, honey, he wants to. But our eyes aren't made to understand something like him. He stays away so that he won't hurt us.”
And she had been right.
There were so many metrics by which Robin would hurt Tim without even trying, and possibly even by trying to help him.
He would hurt Tim with his humanity, by putting his calloused hands on Tim and swiping a mark on him.
A mark he wouldn't be able to wipe off.
A cliff over the side of which Tim Drake was not quite ready to throw himself, and one he told himself he didn't want to go over.
It was one thing to venerate a vigilante. A boy made more of an idea than of tangible stuff in the minds and hands of Gotham's public. Of course, Robin was quite solid to Gotham’s criminal populace, but even then he was regarded as an imp. Doing things no boy his age should be capable of.
To love him in his entirety, to love not Robin but Jason—
A gloved fist closes around the scruff of Tim's hoodie, and hoists.
He scrambles in terror as his feet lift up off the first few rungs of the fire escape and onto empty air, letting go of the roof in his panic to grasp at whatever has caught him, and pray it doesn't let go.
His hand meets a wrist wrapped in Kevlar, and he clings. The moment he raises his eyes and really sees, he goes limp.