Chapter Text
At precisely midnight, after the grandfather clock struck its twelfth bell, the wooden entrance door swung open. With practiced, automatic steps, Tim dropped his drenched boots and coat at the entrance.
The grueling hours of fighting the board of directors meeting, along with playing niceties with a long list of investors who thought they could outplay him, were written on his exhausted face: twelve hours, plus the half-hour commute. He spent almost half his day, if not more, keeping Bruce’s company afloat.
He paused as the single hallway light flickered above him.
“I’m home,” he said out loud, to no one in particular.
No one replied.
Tim stared into the silent, dark hallway for a minute before realizing no one had replied. He closed his eyes. The frustration that had accumulated throughout the day made his eyes prickle with tears. He fought it back. He’d spent the whole day hovering over the phone, waiting for the call, and jolting every time it pinged. As the hours passed, the hope that someone might have remembered the date still clung to him.
He’d just turned seventeen, and no one in his family remembered.
Now it could have been many things: scheduling errors, the sheer chaos of late-night patrols, or even simple date confusion.
But the reality was that they’d forgotten.
The worst part is that Tim could understand why it had happened. In a world where a single split-second decision could mean the difference between life and death, it made sense that his family could have forgotten the date. Milestones, dates, graduations went to the back burner whenever the city was at risk and needed urgent saving.
That didn't make the stinging ache in his heart go away. Jealousy was an ugly, bitter thing in his chest that bubbled up because they didn’t forget Jason’s birthday. Whenever the date was near, Bruce would start moping, his brooding turning inward, while Dick’s joviality drained away, replaced by a quiet, watchful tension. Even Damian’s birthday was celebrated, with Dick taking it upon himself to make every year unforgettable and reminding everyone to send a congratulatory message. Tim never quite knew why he bothered, especially since his younger brother invariably left him on read.
Yet, for all their collective grief over that date, they had managed to overlook the day Tim was actually born.
Tim could understand that Jason’s birthday, or even Damian’s, was more memorable than his—he could rationalize it —but it never quite managed to kill the bitter taste of jealousy. “Why them and not me?” The question sometimes resurfaced. Was it because of his upbringing? Or was it because of the nature of Jason’s tragic death? Was it because Damian never had a normal childhood and he was just now adapting to a normal life?
He didn’t know.
And to be frank, Tim was terrified to find out.
On most days, Tim could swallow those feelings and move on with his life, as if it didn’t matter. He could bury it in cups of coffee and mystery cases that needed looking into. Whenever jealousy hit him hard, he would double down on his work at Wayne Enterprises, spending days holed up in his office until he became the terror of the corporate financial advisors. Yet some days, Tim couldn’t escape them. The thoughts left him paralyzed as the venomous noise whispered in his ear, “They don’t love you.”
It was an irrational thought—a self-destructive reflex, as his therapist once said, born from an unstable childhood and insecurity.
While his integration into Bruce’s household had been… “unusual”, to say the least, Tim had always considered himself a part of his family. Perhaps not the blood or birthright, but family nonetheless.
Yet as he stood alone in the flickering light, he couldn’t help the ugly doubt creeping in.
***
Gotham looked entirely different from a rooftop at midnight.
The city looked like a concrete labyrinth hidden under a perpetual cloud of smog. For anyone else, Gotham at night is a place of locked doors and drawn curtains. For a vigilante, however, it meant showtime.
"Perimeter secured," Oracle’s voice crackled through the comm line. "There's a disturbance down on 4th Avenue."
Thirty feet above Gotham’s cracked concrete, Tim took a sharp breath. 4th Avenue. That was dangerously close to the deli shop Tim liked to visit—a little corner store run by an elderly couple blocks from Crime Alley, serving up simple comfort food made from well-worn family recipes.
“You mean the Narrows?” Bruce asked.
The mix of biting cold and ozone made the back of his throat ache, but Tim paid it no mind as he launched himself from one rooftop to another.
“Yep, down 4th Avenue, B’.”
Through the static line of the comm, Tim listened to Oracle’s direction while the rest of the members bickered. He listened to Damian's latest update on the trick he’d learned, followed by Jason throwing an acidic reply at Bruce that held no real bite, and Bruce’s tired reply that felt more like a father who had finally stopped fighting his own kids.
Then a grappling hook cut through the air, missing his ear by an inch.
Tim didn’t need to turn around to see who it was.
“Watch your step, Replacement,” Jason drawled, dropping onto the gargoyle with a heavy, metallic clatter.
Just as Tim was about to retort—that it had been Jason’s careless toss, not his own footing—Dick landed right beside them. His older brother flashed a quick grin at him and gave him a two-finger salute, though it felt less like a greeting and more like an automatic reflex.
Dick tapped the comm line open, his attention gone elsewhere as if Tim was just a simple afterthought. "Alright, guys. Let's keep moving before the bad guys run away. Oracle, where did ya’ say they were heading again?"
The rest of the crew continued moving effortlessly, like a well-oiled machine. They didn’t ask him how he’d been, or why he had been absent and alone for the last hour. No one paused to check if he was lagging.
For them it seemed like just another Wednesday patrol. And the casual fact that they didn’t care for his absence cut deeper than any knife.
His spiraling thoughts were quickly cut short when a siren wailed from a few blocks away. Without missing a beat, they all shifted their attention to the sound. It was a group of thieves raiding a high-end jewelry shop off the main commercial avenue, shattering glass.
As soon as their feet hit the pavement, thugs flooded the storefront.
The fight was immediate and messy. They were outnumbered: fifteen men from the grittiest part of the Narrow against five vigilantes. And then it happened. Bones were snapped in two, joints were hyperextended with surgical precision. The family operated like a closed circuit, covering each other's blind spots with a fierce, effortless energy.
Tim threw himself into the center, trying his best to match their pace. He pulled his weight despite feeling entirely left out of the loop, taking unnecessary risks to see if anyone would call out a warning, to see if anyone was watching his back.
None of them called him out. To them he was just another gear inside the engine—efficient, reliable, and entirely invisible.
A heavy pipe whistled past his ear, missing his temple by an inch. Tim ducked just in time, feeling it graze against his temple. He caught a glimpse of Bruce watching, but the older man quickly turned away to fight someone else, leaving Tim to his own devices.
They knew he could take care of himself. They trusted him to survive. But in the chaos of the fight, no one stopped to see if he was hurt or needed help. When the last thug hit the concrete with a groan, the street fell into a heavy, echoing silence broken only by their collective breathing.
Dick wiped a smear of grime from his cheek and grinned at Jason as he shouldered his staff. "All right, that's the last of them. Oracle, ping the cops to clean up the mess. We're heading back to the Cave for a debrief.”
Jason grunted, already shooting his grapple hook to the next roof. “Let's move, I'm freezing."
So they left. Tim heard them talk about grabbing late-night snacks, the intel Red Hood had gathered, or even Damian’s latest trick, but no one turned around to check if Tim was still there. They assumed he was there, just as they assumed he was always there—like an ornament.
Tim stood in the center of the damp floor, breathing hard. He wiped the sweat off his face, staring at the space where Dick had stood a second before.
He could still hear the comm in his ear buzzing softly with their chatter and laughter. Slowly, deliberately, Tim reached up. His gloved fingers found the small disc of his earpiece.
He pressed down, releasing the latch, and pulled it free from his ear. With a sudden burst of rage, Tim threw the tiny disc against the pavement. The device hit the ground and shattered into tiny pieces.
The chatter cut off instantly, plunging him into a profound, ringing silence.