Chapter Text
Tim pushes back from his desk and spins his chair halfway around, stopping it with his foot. It’s 3:06 AM and the report on his monitor has moved about one line every five minutes. It isn’t even hard work, his brain just won’t think.
He closes the window without bothering to save it. Usually he works better the later it gets, but apparently it isn’t his day. Or his week.
He’s been benched for the last two days. Or- wait. Three? He glances at the clock again to be sure. Three. He knows he made a mistake, but he’s gotten the message loud and clear: Damian is more important than you.
The fact everyone loves the kid so much more doesn’t even bother him really. It’s that they all truly believe Tim meant to get him hurt. It was an accident. Tim swore he saw something leaking from one of the alley’s garbage bins, but when he went to get a closer look to make sure it wasn’t an explosive or accelerant, he left Damian wide open and the kid took a knife to the ribs. It wasn’t that deep, but it was the principle that mattered. Tim is supposed to watch his left.
“What the hell was that?” Dick yelled, glaring at him with an anger Tim hadn’t even known he was capable of. “You could have gotten him killed!”
“I thought I saw something coming out of the garbage, look!” Tim walked over to the garbage to show the oily spill, but there was nothing there.
“You left Robin open to what, investigate a raccoon?” Dick snapped from the ground where he was kneeling over a bleeding Damian.
“No!” Tim argued, patting around the concrete to find the wet spot. “No I’m positive I saw-“ The concrete was entirely dry. “I thought-“
Bruce cut him off with a firm grip on his elbow, pulling him up to a stand. “We’ll talk about this later.”
“I won’t do it again. I promise. I’ll make up for it- if Robin needs to rest tomorrow, I can cover you on both sides.”
“You’ll be taking a few days from patrol,” Bruce said, pulling out a flashlight and shining it in Tim’s eyes.
Since that night he’s tried to explain himself over and over—not to get himself out of being benched—just in the hopes that somebody would actually believe that he didn’t want to hurt the kid. But nobody seems to care.
His phone vibrates and he picks it up immediately, breath catching in hope. Some clothing store he opted in to texts from for 10% off is having an underwear sale. Great. He sighs and opens his messages with Dick—just in case he missed the notification. Read 14 hours ago.
A little chunk of fabric breaks off the edge of his mousepad where he’s been mindlessly rubbing, and he rolls it into a dark ball between his finger and thumb.
The night after the patrol gone wrong, he was in the gym, practicing his vertical jumps, when he looked up and caught Damian’s eyes in the mirror’s reflection. He was standing there in the dark of the hall, watching him with both arms at his sides.
“Bruce said you’re not allowed to kill me!” Tim yelled as he chucked a training block at the door. The door creaked open to the long, black hallway.
Tim grabbed his staff and crossed the mats. “What’s your problem, kid?” he shouted. But when he opened the door, the hallway was empty and the lights were on. The stupid kid was just toying with him. Trying to get in his head.
The worst part was that Damian apparently hadn’t even been home at that time, according to both Bruce and Damian himself. But Tim knows what he saw. And if Damian was making up elaborate lies to sneak around the manor, that was not good news for him at all. Probably hoping to strike while he could label it revenge.
He blows the mousepad debris off his finger and they land on the monitor screen. The computer goes completely dark.
Tim blinks and when he opens his eyes it’s back on. Weird.
Opening his settings, he checks the downtime report, but the computer apparently didn’t catch it. He’ll have to fix that later. And by later he means whenever he’s “back to normal” since according to Bruce:
”You seem off.”
He said it last night, giving Tim a classic ‘I want to say something but my brain is incapable of making a sentence longer than five words’ look. When Tim said he was fine, Bruce gave a dissenting nod and told him he needs to get more sleep.
Like sleep is going to fix his problems.
His eyes end up on the orange bottle of sleeping pills he keeps on his desk, extra bright in the dark. Just like they’d been last night. He’s already taken one tonight, nothing. He took two the other night, nothing. He wonders—just out of curiosity—what it would be like if he took the whole bottle. If it would hurt. If it would be enough.
Slowly, he reaches out and grabs the bottle, then twists it around to read the label in the monitor’s light. Quantity: 30.
He wouldn’t even need to leave a note. That’s the benefit of living with a bunch of detectives, he supposes, they’d figure it out.
The little pills rattle, falling from one plastic end to the other as he flips the bottle up, then down, then up again.
He clicks on the internet logo and starts to type “What does it feel like if-”
Outside the door, something creaks.
His heart stops.
He shakes his head and loosens back into the chair. It’s just Alfred surely. Bruce and Damian are still on patrol and he’s hooked up to get alerts when the cave is accessed.
Tim flicks the fidget spinner on his desk and stares at it, watching it whirl. He lets his eyes unfocus, getting lost in the spin.
“Ahem.”
Tim shoots up, chair clattering backward as he dives a hand into his pocket for a knife. How the fuck did that kid get in here witho-
It’s not Damian.
There, crossed legged on his floor, sits Jason Todd.