Chapter Text
1. Please, don’t cry
Tim hit the shutter on his camera, only partially first, to bring everything into focus, and then all the way. He held it down to take a burst of shots right as Batman dropped four stories onto a fleeing mobster. The man crumpled.
Robin was crouched on the fire-escape, watching. His smile was wide and gleaming even in the dark. “Holy fuck-knuckles, Batman!”
Batman’s head shot up “–language Robin.”
Robin howled with laughter, leaning a little further over the railing to watch Batman string the mobster to the hanging ladder at the foot of the fire escape.
Tim leant a little further over the railing as well, pushing his camera a bit further over the edge and holding the shutter to activate another burst. He angled the camera up to get Robin as well, who was still grinning from ear-to-ear.
When Tim dared to peek back over the ledge, careful to keep low and his black hood up, Batman was back with Robin on the fire escape, likely giving some kind of lecture considering how Robin was rolling his eyes. The argument only lasted a minute, at which point Robin threw his hands in the air and jumped from the railing, grappling away smoothly. Tim threw out his camera and hit the shutter just in time to catch the movement. He didn’t catch Batman, when he followed. His movements were so fast and smooth that he really did look like a drifting shadow in the night.
Tim breathed a sigh, finally sitting all the way up, which his aching knees appreciated.
That was fantastic. His shots were going to be incredible.
The new Robin was fairly green—he didn’t go out with Batman every night, like the last Robin had in the years before—so Tim didn’t have that many photos of him, and even less of him in action during grappling or fights. Batman had been keeping him mostly on the sidelines, which made sense, really.
Jason was still new at this.
Tim had feared the worst when Robin went missing in the previous Spring. There had been nothing in the news about anything happening to Dick Grayson-Wayne, and Batman had seemed relatively okay despite his lack of a red-and-green chatterbox at his side, but Tim had fully freaked out. The second week with no Robin saw him marching right up to the Wayne’s front door, a store-bought, and definitely stale, box of cannelloni in hand. He knocked before he had really thought through his plan. Thankfully, It had only been Mr Pennyworth at home. Tim had handed over the cannelloni wrapped in a lie that his parents had sent him to give the gift as an apology for not making the last gala. They had been in Nepal, and Tim wasn’t sure they even knew there had been an event at the Wayne’s. Regardless, the lie worked because it got him through the door and into the sitting room where Mr Pennyworth served them both tea.
At that point, despite all of his rehearsing different ways to approach the topic of Dick subtly, Tim had blurted is Mr Wayne’s son okay, I haven’t seen him around lately?
Mr Pennyworth had given Tim a warm smile and told him that Dick was fine, and that he was very much enjoying his first semester at College.
College.
On the West Coast.
Robin was…gone.
Tim wasn’t proud of how much he cried on the mile walk back to his house after Mr Pennyworth broke the news. He had to stop part way, crouched behind a copse of trees to stay out of sight from the Manor’s windows, to try and get his breath back between sobs.
Robin had grown up and left.
Tim should have seen it coming, but he hadn’t, and the shock of it felt like a physical blow. He’s stopped going out at night altogether for a few weeks.
One night, though, when he had been stuck in the too-quiet house for too long, he had gone out into Gotham. He hadn’t really meant to look for Batman, but it was so second nature that Tim found himself tracing the different patrol routes at street level anyway. When he found Batman, he had been sitting atop a squat Brownstone in the East End, a bag of Bat-Burger next to him, with Robin’s classic—and fluorescently coloured—slushy at his side.
He sat for nearly half-an-hour, just watching the city. He never touched the food.
He missed Robin too.
Now, when the days when Tim’s house was unbearably quiet, or when he was on school-break, and his parents were away, and he hadn’t spoken to another person in a week, he pulled out his photo of Batman alone on the roof and just stared at it. Although it was far from his favourite, it was something like a balm. He looked at it so often he had started keeping it in a locked folder on his phone.
Tim went out most nights now, which meant that he was right there—camera ready—when Jason Todd made his debut on the streets of Gotham as the new, and certainly more vocal, Robin.
Ever since Tim heard the news that Bruce Wayne adopted another son, which Tim’s parents had talked about relentlessly, and unkindly, for days after it was discovered by the press, he’d been waiting to see if Jason might appear on the streets. He hadn’t been sure he would. One son as Robin was hardly a pattern, and Dick’s life before Bruce Wayne had definitely been different to Jason’s.
Regardless though, one unsuspecting night, Batman had a colourful shadow at his side again. What solidified the night as possibly the best of Tim’s life, was that, by the Bat’s other shoulder was a tall, athletic new partner. He had a tight blue and black suit, and an achingly familiar laugh.
And so, Robin #2 and Nightwing joined the Dark Knight on his crusade.
They also made him stop regularly for tacos from Nico’s van on third street. And played rooftop tag around him. And laughed hysterically the few times Batman landed slightly wrong and his cape ended up part way over his head.
To say Tim was obsessed, didn’t do his manic glee justice.
Dick returned to the Manor after his first semester and had not gone back to college. Instead he was splitting his time between Gotham and Bludhaven, where he had—according to the internet—started a local gymnastics club that ran as a safe ‘hang-out’ spot for street kids.
This meant that nights when all three of them were out were becoming more and more common, especially as Jason grew in confidence as Robin and Dick was able to make the trip into Gotham from Bludhaven in less than forty-five minutes. He had made it in twenty-five minutes once, when Batman went down and Robin was calling him frantically over the radio. Tim was fairly sure he’d heard Batman scolding him for it—something about underfunded highways and roads too poorly maintained for those kinds of speeds on a bike—but considering he’d been barely lucid, and Nightwing and Robin were practically carrying him to the batmobile at the time, no one had taken much notice.
The scoldings, as a general occurrence, had become far more common. Mainly, because Jason had found out about Dick’s more unfortunate catch-phrases in his early-Robin days and was determined to make some his own. With the addition of far more colourful language.
Tim had learned several new words. Many of which he had to Google, and then quickly scrub his search history after.
All in all, life was great.
So, really, it was only fair that Tim’s foot slipped as he pushed off the rooftop and shimmied down onto the raised window-sill below. Because it wasn’t right that one person be so happy, and have so many good things going on.
He, rather miraculously, did not fall eight stories and to his untimely death.
Tim caught the edge of the window by his fingertips, a strangled yelp clawing out of him. His fingers felt like they might break under the pressure—actually, he might have broken a few, cause that hurt a lot—but he clung on.
He tried only once to pull himself up, at which point he lost his grip on one hand and was left dangling by one hand full of broken fingers over Gotham. Once he got his hand back to the window-sill, he kept it there, resigning himself to just hanging until…he thought of something else. Or he fell properly.
His heart was beating so fast his chest was starting to hurt. Or maybe that was because he wasn’t breathing. No, wait. He was definitely breathing, just too fast, which made it feel like he wasn’t. And he was losing feeling in his fingers, which was annoying at the best of times, and this was, like the worst of times for that to happen.
The window on the floor below wasn’t far from his dangling feet. He might be able to make it if he swung just right. It was his only option, really. His fingers were slipping. It was what Robin would do. He would aim for the ledge below, or the window, or anything that wasn’t the concrete side-walk eight stories down.
Tim wasn’t Robin, though. Something that had never been more apparent until that moment. Still, he swung his feet as his fingers started to slip, using the momentum to push himself further away from the building. On the swing back, he let go.
He screamed so loudly it was a wonder Robin and Batman didn’t hear him across the city. Maybe they did, but they just couldn’t follow the scream because it was cut off sharply when Tim crashed head first through the window on the floor below. It was not at all as cool-looking as it was in the movies. The glass dug into his unprotected sides and hands, slicing across his temple as he fell onto worn carpet.
It hurt. A lot. The movies didn’t mention that part either.
Despite the pain, though, Tim was up and sprinting across the room before he could really take note of what hurt the most.
He was in a rundown looking family-room, with a triple bolted front door on the opposite wall. Tim launched towards it, heart in his throat, and tore the locks open. He could hear movement down the small hall to his left. With frantic hands he wrenched open the last lock and shot through the door, out into the narrow tenement corridor. It was an older building, so no lift, only a set of stairs on either side of the hall. Tim threw himself down the stairs, taking them three at a time, until he hit the ground floor and could flee into the city beyond.
He sprinted five whole blocks, as fast as his cramping legs would let him, before he slowed. When he did stop to take a breath, his legs gave out on him and he fell in a lump on the cold side-walk.
The trek back to Bristol was long and miserable. Two of Tim’s fingers, on his right hand, were definitely broken, and the glass had taken a decent gouge of skin from his left arm.
Trying to keep blood from pooling on the bus seat was almost impossible. They were plastic, and it would wash off, but it was still gross.
His house, when he finally made it home, was dark. His parents were home—they’d flown in from Croatia on Tuesday and were staying for a charity dinner the Madison’s were hosting downtown on Saturday night—but they tended to turn in early when they weren’t out and slept like the dead. It was just as well, because Tim was far from silent as he made the excruciating climb up the tree by his window. When he finally made it into his bedroom, he was sobbing. He kept his jumper bunched up around his neck so he could press his lips against it to muffle the noise.
The fingers on his right hand were turning a terrible shade of purple and blue, but they were still warm—painfully so—and he could manage to twitch them every now and again, so Tim figured the breaks couldn’t be too bad. Besides, he’d broken a finger before, and his dad had just taped it to the others while Tim cried. He said that was all the doctors would do anyway, so there wasn't any point waiting in an ER and wasting the day. He’d left Tim with an ice-pack, the number for pizza delivery, and a jumbo-sized bottle of Tylenol, and headed off to golf for the day. The finger healed up alright, even if it did have a slightly weird bend now, so Tim figured the method was pretty solid. He spent the next hour in his bathroom trying to straighten the fingers and tape them together.
It went…poorly.
By the time Tim collapsed into bed the sun was coming up and he’d vomited from the pain so many times his head was aching just as much as his fingers. He wasn’t sure if he went to sleep, or passed out, but either way he was unconscious in seconds.
He woke abruptly to a banging on his bedroom door.
“Up and at ‘em, sport,” his dad called. “Photographer’s going to be here in fifteen.”
Oh god.
Apparently the Turner’s recently had portraits taken at their family estate in Ipswich and had spoken about nothing else than how well they looked hanging in the entryway for a full hour the last time they hosted. Janet—never to be outdone on social bravado—had booked a photographer to come to the Drake Estate the next day. That day had been nearly three months ago, as the man had been booked non-stop since the Turners, and no one would think of looking for anyone outside of Bristol, so Tim had completely forgotten the day had finally come. No wonder they had flown in so early.
Getting into the formal-wear his mom had left in his closet in a garment bag for the last three months was nothing short of torture. Literal torture, Tim suspected, as he was ready to give up secrets he didn’t even have if it meant he didn’t have to do up any more buttons with his disgustingly swollen fingers.
When he made it downstairs with two minutes to spare, Tim was sweating profusely and fighting back another swell of nausea. He kept his hands tucked into his blazer pockets and thanked every god he’d ever heard about that the photographer completely ignored him. He shook Jack’s hand roughly and Tim nearly vomited on the rug just watching.
It took hours. They moved about the house, searching out every setting that would show them in the best light. Tim followed miserably.
“In the office,” Janet said. “By the Egyptian funerary mask. It’s one of a kind. We need it in the main shots.”
His dad and the photographer wholeheartedly agreed. Tim swallowed some more vomit.
He was rounding one of the armchairs in the office when his dad pushed past, arguing with his mom that he should have a glass of bourbon in hand, and ignoring her complaints. He crashed into Tim as he moved towards the drinks globe. Tim stumbled and the hand he had buried in his pocket smacked into the side of the desk.
“You want one, sport?” Jack grinned, holding up the crystal decanter and a glass. “Make all your friends jealous, and get some hair on your chest.”
Tim didn’t answer. He couldn’t breathe and his entire body was cold. He stayed on his feet out of pure stubbornness, but he wasn’t strong enough to hold back the prickling in his eyes. Tears well despite him, and when he finally managed to take in a breath around the pain, they fell across his cheeks.
Jack slammed the crystal decanter down.
“Jesus,” he muttered. “What’s the matter with you? Kids are so fucking sensative these days.”
He poured himself a generous glass and moved back to the armchairs, ignoring Tim. Janet was already in the other chair. She scowled at Tim’s tears.
“Please,” she snapped, clearly embarrassed. She looked away, as if he had taken all of his clothes off and streaked through the photoshoot. “Don’t cry, Timothy. For god sake, you’re not a child.”
Tim fell into place behind her, standing as both of his parents took their seats.
“Yes, mom,” he murmured with the single breath he’d managed to take. “Sorry.”