Chapter Text
Tim eats breakfast at 6:52 a.m., standing at the kitchen island in Drake Manor, because sitting down implies you're planning to stay for a while and he isn't. Half a grapefruit, four almonds, black coffee. He has already logged it in his head before he's swallowed the first bite: two hundred and ten calories, give or take, which puts him on pace for a normal day, and normal days don't require any particular attention. It's only the abnormal ones that need managing.
He's aware, in an abstract way, that most fifteen-year-olds do not think about their breakfast in terms of pace. He filed that observation away sometime around age eleven and has not found a use for it since.
Mrs. Ellery, this month's housekeeper, sets a plate of eggs down in front of him without asking. She's new enough that she hasn't learned the shape of the house yet, the way Mrs. Faulk knew to leave him alone and Mr. Diallo before her knew to just put a granola bar in his bag without comment. Tim looks at the eggs for a second too long.
"You look like you could use them," Mrs. Ellery says, not unkindly. She's maybe sixty, has the brisk energy of someone who's raised several children of her own and finds this odd, occasionally puzzling child, but not an unmanageable one.
"I'm actually running late," Tim says, which isn't a lie exactly, since he does have somewhere to be. He takes two bites so the plate doesn't look untouched, wraps the rest in a paper towel to eat later, which he won't, and is out the door before she can ask anything else.
This is not restriction. He wants to be extremely clear with himself about that, walking to the bus stop with the wrapped eggs cooling in his backpack. Restriction is a word for people who have an unhealthy relationship with food, and Tim's relationship with food is simply efficient. He eats what he needs. He just happens to need less than most people assume, and it's easier to let people assume what they're going to assume than to correct them.
By the time he gets to the manor after school, the eggs have gone cold and slightly rubbery in his bag, and he throws them out in a trash can two blocks from Wayne Manor's gates, because throwing them out at the manor means Alfred will notice the shape of the waste, and throwing them out at Drake Manor means Mrs. Ellery will notice the shape of his lie.
"You're early," Bruce says, when Tim comes down into the cave still in his school blazer.
"Case?" Tim asks, ignoring the observation, because it isn't a question that requires an answer. He's early because there was nothing at home worth being late for.
Bruce pulls up a file on the main monitor. A man's face, mid-fifties, expensive haircut, the kind of smile that costs money to maintain. RANDALL VOSS. Executive Director, Gotham Harvest Initiative.
"The Harvest Initiative runs subsidized meal programs in the East End," Bruce says. "Six distribution sites, roughly eleven thousand meals a week at full capacity. For the last fourteen months, they've been running at about sixty percent of that."
"Where's the other forty percent going?"
"That's what we're finding out." Bruce brings up a spreadsheet, transfers routed through three shell accounts, funding that arrives from donors and never quite makes it all the way to the food. "Voss has been diverting grant money and padding invoices. Best estimate is somewhere around four hundred thousand dollars over the last year. Meanwhile the East End sites have been quietly cutting portions and closing early. Officially it's supply chain issues."
Tim looks at the numbers for a long moment. There's something clean about them, something he can hold onto. A dollar amount is a fact. A missing meal is a fact. It's the kind of problem that has an actual, discoverable answer, which is more than he can say for most things.
"And Drake Industries," he says slowly, already knowing.
"Is the Initiative's largest corporate sponsor," Bruce confirms. "Your parents have been in Metropolis and then Star City for the last three weeks finalizing the renewal of that sponsorship. It's a significant contract for them, reputationally as much as financially."
Tim files that away too, next to the eggs and the granola bars and every other small useless fact he's never found a use for. His parents are, at this exact moment, somewhere on the eastern seaboard, negotiating to give a man money to feed hungry people, and the man is stealing it.
"There's a gala," Bruce goes on. "Annual fundraiser, the nineteenth, at the Excalibur. It's meant to be the public face of the renewed sponsorship, press, photographs, the whole apparatus. Your mother called this afternoon. They're not going to make it back in time. She'd like you to represent the family."
"Fine," Tim says.
"It's your birthday."
"I know when my birthday is." He says it lightly, the way he says most things that would sound bad out loud if he let them land with any weight. "It's fine, Bruce. I'll go to the gala, I'll shake the right hands, I'll be back for patrol by ten. It's not a big deal."
Bruce looks at him for a second longer than the conversation strictly requires, the way he does sometimes, like he's running a scan Tim can't quite feel the edges of. Then he nods and moves on to assignments, and Tim lets himself relax, because the moment has passed without anyone asking him a question he'd have had to actually answer.
"You'll work the guest list and the financials with Jason," Bruce says. "He's got contacts in the East End who can tell us what's actually happening on the ground at the distribution sites, and you're better with the paper trail than anyone else I've got right now."
"Jason," Tim repeats.
"Problem?"
"No." There isn't, really. Jason's mostly civil these days, in the specific way that means he insults you constantly but has stopped meaning it as a threat. It's an improvement Tim doesn't examine too closely, in case examining it makes it stop being true.
His parents call at nine, which is later than expected, and Tim takes it standing in the Drake Manor kitchen with the lights off, because the dark makes the phone call feel shorter somehow.
"Timmy, sweetheart," his mother says, and there's the sound of a hotel bar behind her, ice in a glass, someone laughing at something that isn't the phone call. "Did your father tell you about the Star City extension?"
"Bruce did, actually."
A small pause. "Well. Yes. It's a very delicate negotiation, baby, you understand. We can't very well fly home in the middle of it and fly right back out."
"I understand." He does. He's understood variations of this sentence since he was seven.
"You'll be marvelous at the gala. You always are. Wear the navy, not the charcoal, the charcoal makes you look washed out under those lights." A muffled voice on her end, his father's, saying something Tim can't make out. "Your father says happy almost-birthday. We'll do something big when we're home. A proper dinner. All your favorites."
Tim thinks, unbidden, of the last proper dinner. Nine months ago, roughly. Five courses, a private dining room at a restaurant that didn't take walk-ins, his mother in the blue dress and his father telling the waiter three separate times exactly how he wanted the steak, and Tim sitting between them eating slowly, carefully, savoring it in a way that had nothing to do with the taste and everything to do with knowing it would be a while before there was another one. That's what love looks like, he'd decided, somewhere around the second course. Something rare and orchestrated and expensive. Something you have to wait for and be worthy of and not waste.
He doesn't say any of that. He says, "That sounds nice."
"We miss you terribly," Janet says, and the sincerity in her voice is real, he thinks, in the way that a photograph of a fire is real. It has the shape of warmth. "Now, the gala. You'll need to speak briefly if Voss asks you to, just a few lines about the family's commitment, Bruce's people can help you prepare something. And Timmy, do try to eat something before you go this time, you always look a bit peaky in the photographs."
"I will," Tim says, and means it the way he always means it, which is to say he means to try and already suspects he won't, the way a person can mean to go to the gym and still not go.
"Love you, baby. We'll call Sunday."
The line goes dead before Tim can say it back, which is fine, because he wasn't sure he was going to anyway. He stands in the dark kitchen a moment longer, phone still warm against his ear, and does the math on the conversation the way he does math on everything: three minutes and forty seconds, one instruction about a dress color, one instruction about eating, zero questions about how he actually was.
Still, he holds onto the promise the way he holds onto most things his parents give him, carefully, like it might not survive being handled too much. A proper dinner when they're home. All his favorites.
His phone buzzes twenty minutes later, and for a second he lets himself hope it's them calling back. It's Dick.
Papa Wing: you good, baby bird? bruce said the folks are stuck out west a while longer
Tim considers three different answers before he types the fourth. Fine. Working a case with Jason, actually, should be a good one.
Papa Wing: oooh teamwork. tell him if he steals your fries at a stakeout again im telling alfred
Little Wing: That happened once.
Papa Wing: once is enough to go in the permanent record.
A pause, three dots appearing and disappearing twice before the next message lands.
Papa Wing: hey for real though.
Papa Wing: happy almost birthday. wish i could be there for the actual day, got a thing in bludhaven i cant get out of, but ill make it up to you. promise.
Little Wing: It's fine, Dick. You don't have to.
Papa Wing: i know i dont have to. i want to. Another pause. love you, kid. eat something good tonight, okay?
Tim looks at that last line longer than the rest, the plain, ordinary kindness of it, the way Dick tosses out eat something the same easy way he'd say drive safe or text me when you land, no weight behind it, no idea what he's actually asking. Tim types back a thumbs up, because a thumbs up doesn't require him to lie in full sentences, and puts the phone away.
He doesn't tell Jason any of this, obviously, when they meet up two nights later to go through the Harvest Initiative's donor list. They're in one of the smaller monitor rooms off the cave, Jason with his boots up on the console in a way that would get Bruce's eyebrow if Bruce were here, Tim cross-legged in the chair beside him with a laptop and a legal pad.
"You eat lunch today?" Jason asks, not looking up from the tablet he's scrolling.
It's such an odd, sideways question that Tim almost laughs. "What?"
"Lunch. Did you eat it."
"I had a sandwich."
"Uh huh." Jason still isn't looking at him, which somehow makes it worse, like he already knows the answer isn't the point of asking. "How much of it."
"All of it," Tim lies, and it comes out so smoothly he almost believes it himself. The truth is he ate about a third of a turkey sandwich in the school library and gave the rest to a kid two grades below him who looked hungrier than he felt like admitting he was, and it had felt, in the moment, like a good trade. Somebody got fed. It just wasn't him. He doesn't examine why that arrangement of facts feels satisfying instead of sad.
"Great," Jason says, in a tone that suggests he doesn't believe a word of it but has decided not to fight about it tonight. "Because Voss's assistant, guy named Pruett, he's the one actually cutting the checks on the ground level, and he's sloppy. There's a discrepancy in the East End site logs going back to last September. I want you cross-referencing it against the donor database tonight, which means you're gonna be here a while, which means at some point you're gonna eat something real or I'm ordering you a pizza and watching you eat it like I'm your damn mother."
"You're being weird."
"I'm being normal. You're being weird, you just don't got anything to compare it to." He finally looks over, and there's something almost gentle underneath the flippancy, gone as soon as Tim tries to look directly at it. "Cross-reference the list, Replacement. I'll be back in twenty."
Tim works. It's easy to lose himself in it, the donor database is a genuine mess, dozens of small recurring donations laundered in with the corporate ones, and there's a kind of peace in following a number until it either resolves or doesn't. He's three hours in, past midnight, laptop screen the only light in the room, when he notices his hands have started to shake slightly over the keys.
He flexes his fingers. Looks at them like they belong to someone else.
It's nothing, he tells himself, probably just low blood sugar from three hours hunched over a screen without moving, and completely normal besides. He does the math again out of habit: the third of a sandwich at 12:15, and now a few minutes past midnight, which comes out to roughly twelve hours on maybe two hundred calories. Written out like that it sounds bad. It isn't, though, not really, not for one day, not for someone as used to it as he is.
He doesn't get up to find food. He finds another discrepancy in the East End logs instead, dated the week of his birthday last year, and follows that number down into the dark until his hands stop shaking on their own, and counts that as a win.