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[Losing the war]
By the end of his life, Tim had known war before anything else. The whole planet had fought a war against itself, and it did not win. Tim lived among the ruins of that lost war alone, and he learned what it meant to truly lose.
“You must have faith,” Babs had told him before she’d passed from a battle none of them had figured out how to overcome.
Faith meant nothing to Tim. He had lost too much for it to matter to him. He dragged himself forward even as he dreamed about falling back into pitch darkness. Giving up on everything that hurt to live through.
Winners might write history, but it’s the losers who make that history possible. Their footprints could be found everywhere if you looked hard enough. If you cared enough to look.
But the thing about losing this kind of war meant that there was no one left to look. The Corruption didn’t win; it took everything, mercilessly. There were, quite literally, no winners. Just the dead and the soon-to-be-dead.
Tim was the last to remember, and then after him, there would be no one.
There would be nothing.
***
[An alternate conversation with Steph]
“How old are you?” Steph asked, eyes bright with curiosity.
“Twenty,” Tim replied after a moment of hesitation. That much information couldn’t hurt, right? He’d just turned twenty when he’d died, and that fact settled like a rock in his stomach.
“And how long have you been twenty?” Steph only maintained her serious expression for about half a second before she was cracking up at herself. “Boom, Twilight reference.”
Tim, who had never seen the movies nor read the books, nodded along. “Right. Very funny.”
“You’re so old,” Steph groaned. “If not for your clothes, I would’ve thought you’d died in the eighteen hundreds.”
Tim just laughed at her grumbling.
***
[Brotherly love]
“I don’t know what I’m doing,” Tim shuddered apart, and Dick let him. “I’m really trying to want to live here, but I don’t know how long I can do this.”
“I know it’s hard,” Dick promised him. “I know this isn’t your original world and it never will be. But it can be your permanent home. We can be your permanent family.”
“Dick,” Tim slumped against his shoulder, comforted in all the worst ways. “You know I love you, right?”
“Gross,” Dick teased, and he pulled Tim into a rough hug he couldn’t really feel. “I love you, too.”
Was it uncharacteristic for Tim to put his feelings into words? In this world that wasn’t his own, where he could make something new of it all, it didn’t have to be. Tim could love people. He could be loved back. He could tell the people that he cared about that he loved them, and it wouldn’t be out of character or loaded with too much baggage. Because here, he could make himself into someone different. Someone stronger.
“In every universe,” Tim said, and he didn’t have to finish the sentence. It spoke for itself, a fundamental truth that couldn’t be denied.
Tim had suffered, absolutely. But he didn’t have to suffer forever.
Please, Tim closed his eyes as Dick’s human hands rubbed soft circles against his ghostly back. Allow me this happiness.
***
[An argument and forgiveness that never was. During Jason’s period as Robin]
Tim felt odd as of late. He watched Jason throw himself into mindless crime-fighting and he thought about how that used to be him. How he used to swing through the crisp air and bleed all he had to give into the dirty streets of Gotham.
A long time ago, he’d had a purpose. He’d been Robin, and then he’d been Red Robin. He’d meant something, and now he just watched. Distanced from it all.
Jason picked up on his change in attitude quicker than he’d expected. He parted from Bruce during patrol and brought it up as he slipped beneath the dull city lights. “What’s going on with you?”
“Nothing,” Tim replied too quickly, and he winced at the judgmental look Jason spared him. “You should focus on the patrol.
“Not until you tell me what’s wrong,” Jason insisted, pulling to an abrupt stop in the middle of an empty street. “You’ve been acting weird lately. You don’t like going out on patrol with me and you don’t like watching me train.”
“Because I’m jealous, Jason, alright?” Tim glanced around, paranoid. “Can we do this anywhere else?”
Jason ignored his question. “Why would you be jealous? You’re experiencing it all with me.”
Tim clenched his jaw. “Not in any way that matters. I’m dead, Jason. And you’re so alive in all the important ways. You get to breathe in this city air and feel everything that I’ll never get to feel again.”
“But you’re still here,” Jason’s brow furrowed, and Tim knew he didn’t understand.
“But you’re alive. You have things to do, things that matter. I don’t have anything. People don’t care about what I do, because I have no impact on anything. I could fade away at any moment and it would mean absolutely nothing.” It had been a long time since Tim had let such sharp words leave his mouth.
“That’s not true. You know it’s not true, because I—”
“Jason, don’t. Don’t say it.” He clasped his hands over his ears as if that could stop it. As if that could prevent anything.
“Because I care,” Jason finished sharply. “I would care if you left.”
“You don’t care about me. You care about having a ghost friend who won’t ever leave your side,” Tim couldn’t believe he was letting himself get this worked up. Jason was a child, one who looked up to him. Yet, the words spilled out regardless. “I’m not a person to you. Not to anyone, but especially you.”
“Especially me?” Jason snapped, furious at the accusation in a way he’d never seen before. “What the hell are you talking about? All I’ve ever done is care about you. Not you as a ghost, not you as someone I pity, but you as Tim.”
Immediately, guilt washed over him. “That’s not what I meant, Jason. I didn’t mean that you don’t try to care.”
“Try?” Jason took a step back, and Gotham murmured something beneath them that Tim couldn’t make out. His face twisted unpleasantly behind his mask. “Do you even know me at all, Tim?”
“You can’t care about me because I’m not human, Jay. You can’t love me.” Tim’s words tripped over each other, ugly in all their bare truth.
Jason straightened at that. “You are human, Tim. You being an asshole right now proves it.”
“The living are human. Whatever I am isn’t human anymore.” He tried not to think about it often. His wavering humanity on the fragile in between.
“The dead are human, too.” Jason looked like he didn’t understand anything he was saying, which was fair. Tim wasn’t sure he was making any sense himself. “Death doesn’t change your species.”
“The dead were human. They were people. Everyone talks about it in the past tense. They were a good person, they were a good friend, they did all these human activities, but now they’re dead so that doesn’t stand anymore. I’m not something that you can care about.” Tim wasn’t sure how else he could explain it. “I watch you fly through the sky and I know I can never reach that level of humanity anymore. I’m a ghost, and that’s all I can ever be.”
Jason’s anger had dropped away to something even uglier. Something tragic. “Not to me.” His hands curled into fists at his sides. “You’re even more than human to me.” He turned and ran before Tim could come up with an answer.
Interlude, I guess.
“I’m sorry,” Tim whispered to Jason, and Jason’s expression crumbled.
“I’m more sorry,” Jason pressed their knees together. A small comfort he couldn’t feel. “I wish I could understand what you’re trying to say. What you’re feeling. I just don’t get it. I don’t get how you can think that you aren’t human and how that would make me care any less.”
“Death changes you,” Tim hoped this conversation wouldn’t be ironic one day. That he’d never have to look at a Jason who death changed. “It makes the logical illogical. It takes a lot from you.”
“Do you care about me, Tim?” Jason asked, dark gaze searching his.
“Of course,” Tim couldn’t believe how much he’d come to care for Jason. For all of these people.
“Then you’re still human. Okay?” Jason’s determination was unwavering. Unnervingly intelligent for someone so young. “That means you’re human.”
“Alright,” Tim didn’t argue. Just stared at where their legs bumped against each other. “You’re a lot smarter than people give you credit for, you know?”
Jason looked away at that. “Thanks, Tim.” He leaned closer to him. “I kind of always thought that I was the stupid Robin.”
“Never,” Tim firmly promised. “I didn’t think that once.”
“Well, that’s because you’re Tim,” Jason smiled quietly at him. “You think too highly of everyone but yourself.”
Tim’s lips twisted upward. “I guess we have that in common.”
Jason laughed at that, and Tim wished he could bottle up that sound. Keep it safe somewhere it could never be touched. “I guess so.”
***
[Dick’s death in Tim’s first world]
Dick knew fear. Of course he did. He was human after all, and he’d been in so many situations where fear was the only appropriate reaction. However, it wasn’t until he lay on his own deathbed that he realized what true fear was.
It was not violent. It was not oppressive. It simply sat in your bones and made you weep for your life.
The Corruption ate at his soul, and Dick found he did not want to go. He did not want to die, and he was so scared that this was it. His vision had gotten blurry over the past few days, and he thought he saw Jason standing in the corner of his room. “Jay,” he rasped out, and he hated the tremble in his voice. “Come back to me.”
But then the blurry figure vanished, and Dick was alone once again. Tears pricked at the corners of his eyes, and he couldn’t move. He could hardly breathe through his ragged lungs.
This couldn’t be it. Dick wasn’t ready for it. He still had so many people to save. He couldn’t save anyone from beyond the veil of life. He couldn’t be anything if he were dead.
On the fifth day of his illness, Dick realized there was no escaping the Corruption. It’d withered away at him, and now his remaining family surrounded him. Faces darkened with grief. It was just Bruce, Damian, and Tim. Dick couldn’t believe it. He couldn’t fathom that this was all that remained of his fragile family.
“Son,” Bruce stroked his hair softly, but Dick hardly felt the touch. “You did good.”
Damian wouldn’t look at him. Why wouldn’t Damian look? “I don’t feel good,” Dick said slowly, each word dragging out from his mouth. He tried to blink away the vision of Jason hovering over Bruce’s shoulder. “Bruce, weren’t we supposed to win?”
Bruce flinched. Barely, but it was there. It was enough to devastate Dick. “I’m sorry.” It was a confession and a burden all at once.
Dick’s heart pounded a pathetically sluggish beat in his chest. “We can still win.” His eyelids were growing heavy, his entire body numb. He reached out his hand and Bruce grasped it. Grip as solid as always, even as it trembled. Dick forced his last words out past his cracked lips. “B, you have to stop this.”
He wasn’t sure if he replied. If Damian was really crying or if Tim was truly staring at him with such haunted eyes. Like a ghost. All he knew was that he did not want to lose his family and he did not want to die.
(Hours later, his body was lowered into a coffin and the Earth mourned its loss)
***
[This was an alternate route that I was playing with. It got too angsty for the story, and I promised a happy ending, so I had to axe it]
This time, they forgot him completely. It was not so much that they couldn’t see him as they weren’t looking for him. Their eyes strayed over him and stayed for a few confused seconds before sliding away. Leaving him behind.
“You were supposed to love me.” The picture crumpled beneath his ghostly grip. Their faces warped, and when he flickered, the picture fluttered to the ground. Slipping through his hands like everything else. “You were supposed to care.”
Tim had fought bloody tooth and nail for an existence that mattered. For some kind of retribution for all he had suffered. Because he had suffered, hadn’t he? Absolutely and unfairly. Even the second chance he’d been given had just been a series of hoops he had to jump through to mark himself worthy of being seen.
They were a happy family with or without him, and he couldn’t accept that. He couldn’t begin to believe it. He had to be needed, had to be loved in some capacity.
He was just—
He wasn’t enough. He fought so hard for no reason, to make himself into someone deserving of happiness. He tore himself up and pretended it was better that way, that those pieces were better than the whole of him.
Everything hurt, from the pressure building in his head to the snake squeezing at his heart. He slid slowly to the floor and picked up the crumpled picture. “I’m trying,” Tim’s voice broke, and it didn’t matter. Nothing he did seemed to matter and he was so tired of trying to change that. “Why can’t that be enough? What is so wrong with me that I don’t get anything?”
Tim sat there for a long time, the picture of the happy Wayne family in hand. Reminding him of everything he would always lose. He sat there so long that it felt like the ground was trying to swallow him, rooting him in place forever.
His skin was a barely there shimmer, and Tim didn’t care. He had fought so hard, for so long, and now all he wanted to do was give up. To rest. He brought his knees to his chest, the movement painfully sluggish. He closed his eyes slowly, each blink of his eyelids like cement sealing his eyes closed. “All I wanted,” he murmured as he began to fade. “Was a fair chance at happiness.”
But life was not fair, and it seemed that death wasn’t either.
***
[Son and father moment. Didn’t fit in the timeline]
“Aren’t you my son?” Bruce asked, and Tim strained to hear the cruelty in his question that wasn’t there.
“I don’t know.” Tim did not get another father. He did not get another chance to lose everything important to him. He flinched back in surprise when Bruce pulled him into a hug, arms dangling uselessly by his sides.
“I know my children,” Bruce whispered into his hair, and Tim fell apart in his arms. Quietly, unnoticed, he crumbled to pieces. “You are one of them.”
“The universe doesn’t seem to think that,” Tim was alive now, but death had a way of lingering. Painting over all the good times with murky fear.
“The universe doesn’t matter in family affairs. I only care what you think, Tim,” Bruce said his name like it sat right on the tongue, and Tim buried his face in his shoulder. Slowly, his hands came up to dig into the back of his shirt.
“I’m scared, Bruce,” Tim clung tight, like they might never part if he held on with enough strength. “I’ve done this before. I’ve had the tentative family that doesn’t stay. I’ve had a version of you that left me behind.”
Tim didn’t know how to live without fear.
Bruce patted his back, and Tim peeled apart at the gentle touch. “I am not that version. I am telling you that I will not leave. Don’t you trust me?”
For once in his life, Tim wanted to stop thinking so hard. He wanted to let go of all of his doubts and just trust that he would be caught if he fell. “I do.”
“Then don’t give up on us,” Bruce had grown wiser as he aged. More open to a life outside of crime-fighting than Tim had thought he would ever allow himself. “Don’t give up on family.”
"I’ll try,” Tim’s limbs slackened with exhaustion, and he slumped against Bruce without fear that he might be dropped. “That’s all I can do, right now.”
“That’s all I ask for,” Bruce held the back of his head with one large hand, and Tim relaxed into the touch.
Family. That had a nice ring to it.
***
[In this version, the voice has all of the dead’s souls. I had to scrap it bc it was making things too complicated]
For the fourth time, Tim found himself floating in empty space. Blind to everything as he tried to get his bearings straight.
Do you see this before you? The voice harrumphed, and Tim actually laughed in disbelief.
He waited a moment for the voice to tell him it was joking, but it never did. “I can’t see anything, dude.”
Do not call me that. The voice sounded irritated. Fine, I shall describe it to you then. You mortals are so helpless.
As if the voice wasn’t the whole reason he couldn’t see. Beating back his temper, he said, “Describe what?”
Your soul. Something warm approached, and Tim straightened to attention. Yours in particular is small. It fits right in the palm of my hand.
Tim felt winded despite being unable to breathe. “What?” He felt at his chest. “You have my soul?”
I have all the souls of your dead planet. They are quite beautiful. The voice sounded closer, and Tim reeled back at the sudden proximity. The heat increased, and Tim squinted despite being unable to see. This is your older brother’s. This is your father’s. His is quite heavy.
“Give them to me,” Tim blurted out, reaching out only for the warmth to withdraw. A surge of desperation flooded through him, and he grasped at the empty air. “Give me their souls.”
And what would you do with them? The voice scoffed, but it sounded almost pityingly. Unlike your soul, these ones no longer have anything to go back to. They are the true dead.
“So why do you have them?” Tim clutched his hands to his chest so he didn’t try to rip through the space around him. “To gloat? To hold onto as trophies?”
To further my understanding of what it means to be human, the voice responded. Almost contemplative. I found you all to be so fascinating. Even the ones drenched in regret hold some light to them. It is fascinating, I must admit.
“They are not experiments to be played with,” Tim was aware that the voice wasn’t implying they were, but his fear melted into anger in the face of this new information. “Those were lives. They are not things for you to find interest in.”
Child, I am not bound by the same rules and morality that you beings are. I brought you to this world because you were a sad, pitiful creature. Not because your humanity spoke to me. The voice’s reply was sharp, but not unforgiving. I do not hold such emotions as the ones you wish I may have.
Tim refused to believe that being emotional was a solely human thing. Still, he bit back the indignance building within him to say, “You’re right, I was holding you up to my standards. I’m sorry.” He ran his tongue along his teeth and then quietly asked, “May I hold Bruce’s soul?”
Hmm, the voice hummed, seemingly pleased with his apology. I suppose there is no harm.
The heat returned and Tim let out a gasp as something grasped at his wrists and brought his hands out, palms facing upward. A hot object landed in his hands, and he was sure that if he were alive, it would’ve burned his skin. As it was, it just felt like holding a hot cup of tea.
It felt round, like an orb, and it barely fit in his cupped hands. “Whoa,” he whispered, fingers gently stroking over the almost glass-like object. “Is this really his soul?”
Yes. I do not lie.
Tim ignored its petulant tone in favor of pressing his ear against the soul. The faint chime of a bell rang within it, and Tim held it close. He could almost make out the faint pattern of a voice, and his fingers shook where they touched the orb. “Could I hold the others?”
The voice paused. You humans hold a nostalgia I will simply never understand. Despite its statement, the voice removed Bruce’s soul and placed another within his hands. This soul is similar to yours. I believe the human went by the name Damian.
Tim wordlessly cradled the soul to his chest. It seemed to buzz quietly against him, and he wondered if a soul could still feel something after its owner died. Without a word, the voice handed him one soul after another, each of which Tim handled with great care. The voice was almost pensive in its silence, and Tim wondered what it thought of him. Maybe it thought he was foolish for this act. Maybe it found him amusing.
“Thank you,” Tim murmured as he handed Dick’s soul back to the voice, feeling more hollow than he had in years. “I’m glad I was able to hold them one last time.”
Unlike what your mouth says, you look quite sorrowful, the voice pointed out. It sounded curious. Could you hear their souls?
“A little,” Tim had strained to hear the faint whispers in their souls, but it was mostly just sounds. Bells and rattling and raspy breath. “It was difficult to make out.”
You yearn for them, the voice commented. Even after I’ve given you this second chance with a different family. I do not understand.
“Maybe you never will,” Tim shrugged, exhausted. “Maybe you’re searching for something in humans that you want but can never have.”
What could I possibly want from humans that I don’t possess? The voice sounded more genuine than he’d expected.
“Devotion based on emotion,” Tim offered. “A connection that you do not seem to understand.”
Huh. The voice sounded fainter. As if it was moving away from him. Perhaps I am…lonely.
“Maybe,” Tim didn’t know what this being was. Whether there were more of its kind or if it could feel as he felt. He found that he didn’t care for the answers. “Most living things can feel lonely.” That much he believed with his whole chest.
You are lucky, human, the voice was growing even more distant. You have people to keep such loneliness at bay.
“You’re right,” Tim thought of the people waiting for him back on Earth. “I have people.”
Having people in and of itself didn’t prevent loneliness. But it was the choices you made to reach out to them and keep them in your lives that did. There were always going to be people who cared.
You just had to find them.