Chapter Text
Black. Mars Black—cool undertones, iron oxide heavy, swallowing light instead of reflecting it.
Damian stares at the coffin and thinks absurdly, hysterically, that whoever lacquered it used the wrong finish. Too glossy. Tim would have photographed the glare and complained about the exposure.
The coffin is empty anyway.
Rain freckles the polished wood in tiny silver dots. Gotham’s cemetery turns the world into blurred charcoal: umbrellas, coats, mud. Bruce stands like carved obsidian beside the grave. Helena’s cape snaps in the wind, deep Payne’s Grey against the clouds.
Stephanie is crying openly.
Damian cannot cry at all.
The priest says Timothy Jackson Drake as though the body exists somewhere beneath the earth.
It does not.
There was an explosion. There was rubble. There was Joker’s corpse with a bullet in his skull and half his face burned off. There was blood on concrete. There was no Tim.
No Tim.
Damian’s eyes catch on a camera hanging from Stephanie’s shoulder—Tim’s old one, straps faded almost black.
Lamp Black.
/
“Move.”
The kid grins and raises the camera higher.
“No.”
Damian narrows his eyes beneath the domino mask. “You are following me.”
“I’m documenting.”
“You are twelve.”
“Twelve-year-olds can document.”
The camera flashes.
Damian lunges for it. The boy dodges, nearly slipping on the fire escape before catching himself with a laugh.
The laugh is bright yellow. Cadmium Yellow Medium—warm, impossible to ignore.
“You’ll alert patrols,” Damian snaps.
“You already beat up the patrols.”
“They were criminals.”
“Yeah, exactly.”
The boy lowers the camera just enough for Damian to see his face properly: too sharp to still be childish, too eager not to be. Dark hair curling from rainwater. Expensive jacket. A bruise under one eye like smeared violet paint.
“I know who you are,” the boy says.
Damian stills.
“And Batman,” he adds quickly. “And Huntress.”
“You are either extraordinarily intelligent or profoundly suicidal.”
“Can’t I be both?”
The camera strap is black nylon. The lens catches Gotham’s sodium lights in molten amber streaks.
The boy sticks out a hand. “Tim Drake.”
Damian ignores the hand.
Tim doesn’t seem offended. “You’re my favorite,” he says conversationally.
Damian blinks. “What.”
“Out of all of you.”
“That is deeply concerning.”
“You jump off buildings.”
“And?”
“And you look like you know where you’re going.”
Something unpleasantly warm curls behind Damian’s ribs.
Tim raises the camera again.
Click.
Damian hates that he lets him.
/
The priest says ashes to ashes.
Damian thinks: There were no ashes either.
The grave beside Tim’s belongs to Jack and Janet Drake. Two empty deaths from a mission gone wrong in Qurac years ago. Bruce still visits them every year. Damian had once thought it sentimental.
Now he thinks perhaps Bruce understood this agony long before him.
The wet grass is Hooker’s Green. Cemetery green. Rot green.
Damian digs crescent moons into his palms.
Helena rests one gloved hand on his shoulder. He shrugs it off automatically.
She does not react. She only says quietly, “You should come home for dinner.”
Home. Wayne Manor had stopped being home years ago. Maybe when Damian left the cape behind. Maybe when he traded grappling hooks for stretched canvas and linseed oil. Maybe when Tim put on the uniform Damian abandoned.
“I have work,” Damian says.
“You haven’t slept.”
“I have work.”
Helena watches him with Bruce’s eyes and Selina’s terrible understanding.
Then she lets him go.
/
Oil paint stains Tim’s fingers.
Not from painting. From Damian.
“You touched the canvas,” Damian says flatly.
Tim squints at the smear of ultramarine on his thumb. “Yeah.”
“You absolute philistine.”
“It looked lonely.”
Damian exhales sharply through his nose—the closest thing he allows to laughter.
The studio smells like turpentine and rain. Gotham twilight filters through skylights in bruised indigo.
Tim wanders between canvases with reverence Damian pretends not to notice.
Landscapes only.
Cliffs. Storms. Skylines. Oceans.
No people.
“You never paint faces,” Tim says.
“Faces are dishonest.”
“That’s pretentious.”
“It is accurate.”
Tim pauses before a canvas of the Gotham harbor at dawn. The water is layered in impossible shades: cerulean blue, viridian, threads of titanium white.
“You paint like you’re trying to outrun something,” Tim says softly.
Damian stiffens.
Tim lifts the camera.
Click.
“Do not photograph me.”
“Too late.”
“You are insufferable.”
“You let me come here.”
Another click.
Damian moves before thinking, grabbing Tim’s wrist. Tim startles. The camera nearly slips.
They freeze.
Tim’s pulse hammers beneath Damian’s fingers.
Blue eyes. Too close.
The room suddenly feels painted entirely in alizarin crimson.
Tim looks down at Damian’s hand.
Damian lets go immediately.
Neither of them speak for a very long time.
/
The first portrait fails before dawn.
Damian stares at it from across the studio.
The eyes are wrong.
Too empty.
Tim’s eyes were never empty. Even exhausted, even furious, even, even, even—they always looked alive. Hungry. Burning.
This version looks dead already.
Damian slashes the canvas open with a palette knife.
The rip sounds horribly like fabric tearing in an alleyway.
He starts another immediately.
And another.
And another.
By sunrise the floor is littered with ruined faces.
He cannot remember Tim correctly.
That realization terrifies him more than death ever has.
/
“You can quit, you know.”
Tim lies upside down across Damian’s couch, camera balanced on his chest.
Damian doesn’t look up from sharpening charcoal pencils. “Quit what.”
“All of it.”
“Profound statement.”
“The cape. Gotham. Batman.”
Damian scoffs, says sarcastically, “Father would adore you.”
“I’m serious.”
Tim twists sideways, expression unusually solemn.
“You don’t look happy anymore.”
The words hit sharply.
Damian says nothing.
Tim continues carefully, “You used to jump into fights because you liked proving you could survive them. Now you just…” He gestures vaguely. “Do it because you think you’re supposed to.”
Damian sets the pencil down.
Outside, Gotham glows toxic neon through rain-slick windows: Quinacridone Magenta, electric signage reflected in puddles.
“You know nothing about responsibility.”
Tim sits up slowly.
“No,” he says. “I know a lot about wanting to be someone else.”
Damian finally looks at him.
Tim’s expression is painfully open.
“I think,” Tim says, quieter now, “if you leave, you should leave because you want to live. Not because you’re tired of dying.”
Something inside Damian fractures gently.
He never notices Tim move closer until their knees touch.
Tim’s voice drops to nearly a whisper.
“You’re allowed to be Damian.”
Damian cannot breathe properly for several seconds.
Then Tim grins suddenly, awkward and too bright, like he realized he said too much.
“So, uh. If you become a civilian, can I have your swords?”
“You would die within hours.”
“That’s an o ptimistic estimate from you.”
Damian almost smiles.
Almost.
/
The autopsy report is folded in Bruce’s study drawer.
Cause of death: gunshot wound to the head.
Not the explosion.
A single bullet.
Clean trajectory.
Execution style.
Damian had stared at the page for ten full minutes the first time he read it.
Tim hated guns.
Tim worshipped heroes.
Tim took photographs because he wanted to preserve people, not destroy them.
Yet Damian can see it too clearly:
Tim, bloodied and shaking in some ruined warehouse. Joker laughing. Joker reaching for another detonator. Another knife. Another weapon.
A gunshot.
Silence.
And then—
Nothing.
No body.
No Batkid returning home.
Only absence.
Bruce thinks Tim may still be alive.
Stephanie refuses to discuss alternatives.
Helena searches international crime networks every week.
Damian paints corpse after corpse after corpse trying to resurrect someone from memory.
None of it works.
/
“Hold still.”
“I despise this already.”
Tim snorts from behind the camera. “You’ve complained for twenty straight minutes.”
“Because you are being incompetent.”
“You volunteered.”
Damian immediately regrets it.
Tim peers through the lens, sunlight catching in his hair in streaks of burnt umber. They’re on a rooftop in Bristol, civilian clothes instead of uniforms. Damian had been out sketching gargoyles. Tim somehow found him within an hour.
As always.
Click.
“You smile differently now,” Tim says absentmindedly.
Damian frowns. “I do not smile.”
“You do around me.”
Heat floods Damian’s face instantly.
Tim lowers the camera slowly.
Neither of them move.
Wind rushes between buildings. Laundry snaps overhead in strips of faded Naples Yellow and dull white.
Tim’s voice is very small when he asks, “Do you ever think about—”
His phone rings.
The spell shatters.
Tim groans dramatically, answering it. “Steph, if this is about the encrypted files—”
Damian turns away before Tim can see his expression.
He never learns what Tim meant to ask.
/
The cemetery empties slowly.
Mud clings to Damian’s shoes.
The coffin remains beneath the earth, heavy with nothing.
Damian kneels only after everyone leaves.
Rain drips from his hair onto the gravestone.
TIMOTHY JACKSON DRAKE
Beloved Son. Beloved Brother. Beloved Friend.
No body, nor proof. Just grief.
Damian presses paint-stained fingers against the marble.
For the first time in his life, he wishes he had painted people sooner.
Because landscapes never asked him to remember the exact curve of a smile.
Landscapes never disappeared.
His throat tightens violently.
The tears hit the stone dark as ink.
Mars Black.