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The lights in Paris glowed neon at night.
Tim sat at a tiny wooden desk in an old safehouse that smelled of stale rain and peeling wallpaper. On his lap was a glowing laptop casting harsh shadows on his thin face. It displayed tracking algorithms alongside a spreadsheet containing all the sightings of Batman or a Batman-adjacent figure throughout history. Tucked in a corner of the desk was a lukewarm mug of what must be coffee possibly blacker than his soul, and a tiny plastic bottle halfway full of yellow pills.
The label on the bottle didn't have his name on it, of course. It had an alias tied to an offshore bank account and a discreet, extraordinarily expensive private clinic in Zurich.
Clozapine.
He stared at the tiny yellow tablets. It was the "nuclear option," the Swiss psychiatrist had told him in a hushed, sterile office three months ago. “Your brain chemistry is in an active state of collapse, Mr. Draper. The grief, the trauma you mentoned–you are without a doubt, experiencing a state of treatment-resistant psychotic depression, indefinitely. Normally, if the standard stabilizers fail, only then do we consider this to even be an option. But the risks—”
Tim hadn't cared about the risks. He had looked the doctor in the eye and said, "I need my mind sharp enough to find a dead man. Fix it, I’ve never been normal anyway."
And that was that.
For a while, it was all fine. As long as he was careful, he could even pretend he was taking nothing more than normal antidepressants or other medication of the sort. But not today.
Tim picked up a pill, his fingers trembling slightly. It was a tremor, a side effect he had to consciously mask whenever he was around anyone else. Kon, and Bart of course, had visited a lot after their return to the land of the living, so they knew he was on something. Kon had seen him downing pills from an unlabeled bottle during a brief pitstop in Metropolis. Bart had once uncharacteristically slowed down for a second, looking at Tim with worried eyes, asking if the "brain mints" were helping. Tim had already perfected the routine in preparation for this–a smile and a lie about vitamins for chronic pain.
He couldn’t tell them they were antipsychotics. He couldn't tell them that without these pills, the silence of the empty safehouse filled with the haunting whispers of a dead boy in a ruined Robin suit, or the tired cadence of his mentor pushing him to be better, faster, stronger, to give it all for the mission.
Tim never could bring himself to tell them the truth of his earlier days as Robin, when Bruce pushed him beyond his limits just to get him to quit.(He had been stronger than that.) He couldn’t tell them there was probably something broken inside of him, and that on most days he used to feel like he felt like throwing himself off a rooftop was an acceptable solution to most of his problems.
But taking the ‘medicine’ meant fighting his own body, fighting himself. And he didn’t have the time to do that everyday.
Tonight, specifically, he had a time-sensitive shipment to one of the national museums that he could only hack into safely during a window of 00:36 and 01:53 when it was scheduled to change containers. If he missed it, the trail to Bruce would go cold for another month, at the least. But the heavy, suffocating blanket of medication’s sedation effect was already clawing at his limbs. His reflexes were lagging. His thoughts were moving through molasses.
Tim looked from the pills to the mug of now almost cold coffee.
He recalled the warning sheet he’d memorized weeks ago. Avoid heavy caffeine intake. He had scoffed at the time. Still did. Caffeine, coffee, was practically a part of his personality at this point.
He knew, theoretically, that coffee could trigger a negative or extreme reaction if mixed too closely with the medication. He’d never actually tested it, he wasn’t exactly keen on doing anything to impair his mental or physical state just for funsies these days(even though he was like 90% sure it wouldn’t kill him). But tonight was more of a ‘desperate times call for desperate measures’ kind of situation. He was in a tight spot–completely exhausted, and more importantly, not un-willing to fuck around and find out if it could help him trace this shipment. He sighed.
Tim dry-swallowed the pill, chugged the coffee, and hoped for the best.
Almost instantly, he knew he shouldn’t have left this to chance. Who was he kidding, the universe and him went way back– they both hated each other with a burning passion.
He stood up to grab some of his notes anyway, and the world violently tilted to the left. Which, nope. That officially shouldn’t be happening.
"Shit–" Tim gasped, his hand flying to his chest. His vision blurred, the neon lights of the city from the window swirling into streaks of green and red that burned his eyes.
His legs gave out. He slumped against the edge of the desk, sending the stupid mug of idiotic, backstabbing coffee clattering to the floor. The dark liquid pooled across the hardwood as Tim slid down, his back hitting the floorboards with a heavy thud. Great. His socks were wet now.
Idiot. You absolute, reckless idiot, Tim cursed, his internal monologue a pretty balanced blend of panicked screaming that almost blocked the sound of the blood rushing in his ears. Almost. He should’ve known better–scratch that, he had known better. He was supposed to be the smart one, goddamnit.
As a wave of blind panic threatened to swallow him whole, Tim forced himself to do what he always did–tell his brain to shut the fuck up and analyze. To Observe™.
He pushed through the terror, dragging his admittedly not very strong focus to the symptoms he could catalogue. The suddenness, the racing heart, the muscles locking up. An enzyme blockade, his mind whispered, the pieces locking into place as he forced himself to think.
The Clozapine stopped the liver from breaking down the caffeine, probably. From there, it was just a matter of time before toxic accumulation led to an acute overdose.
But knowing the science didn't stop the science from happening. God, he hated bio-chemistry.
Tim’s body began to seize, his muscles tightening even more. He was paralyzed on the floor, his breathing shallow and ragged, his mind trapped in a failing body. He was desperate to live—there was still so much left to do, so many clues left to discover and so many leads to chase—but as his vision began to fade into darkness, a heavy acceptance settled over him like a weighted blanket given to a dying pet.
His uncooperative, twitchy fingers knocked against the desk leg when he tried to move, causing the amber pill bottle to roll off the surface. It fell, landing with a soft, plastic clack just inches from his face.
Tim stared at the little plastic cylinder through blurring eyes. This…this wretched thing. This was supposed to be his secret anchor. The thing that, even hidden from everyone, kept him sane enough to wear the cape, to hunt the lawless, the immoral. And now, he was alone in a foreign city, choking on a miserable death-cocktail of his own making.
He looked at the bottle and a (possibly final)thought drifted through his mind.
Is this how I die? Seriously? I thought better of you, universe. At least give me a cool death.
——————————————
Four hours later, Tim groaned as the mother of headaches threatened to stomp all over his will to live.