Chapter Text
His subconscious has too many teeth.
Tim’s fault of course. The doppelgänger sitting across from him is a mental projection, and his mind clearly isn’t up to the task of creating a reflection that is accurate, rather than uncanny. Teeth that are too-many and too-sharp, flashing as the mirror asks, softly: “Why did you do it?”
Tim flinches. Then clenches his fists. “Because it’s what I’m for.”
His subconscious hums, a sound of acknowledgement followed by an inquiring head tilt.
“Why?” it asks. “Why is that your role?”
Fuck you. It’s his fucking subconscious. It knows the answer already.
But Tim swallows down the bile, unclenches his fingers and teeth. Because he understands what this is. A confrontation of the ego or the id, a mandated moment of self-reflection. He has to justify his actions to himself, to the perpetrator and the victim. This is penance or punishment; staying silent would defeat the point.
“Because I made it my role,” he says, meeting his own eyes. “Because it was the only way I could stay.”
***
He is a boy, knocking on doors.
Begging to be listened to. Begging to be let in.
He is a blanket dragged along a polished floor, pooling at bare feet as hesitant knuckles rap rap rap on sturdy wood in a night-darkened hallway.
He is a camera banging against a chest as desperate hands thud thud thud against peeling paint in a flickering apartment corridor, as fingers hold fast and clunk clunk clunk an ornate door knocker against gilded panels. Please listen, please let me in, please please please.
He is a boy, knocking. He is a slideshow of memories flashing out of order, photographs floating to the surface of a chemical bath. Let me in, let me in! Timothy Drake, in technicolor. Immortalized in the repeated image of a boy and a door.
***
“My parents loved me,” Tim says, and means it. “And trust me, I know what it sounds like when I say that. Like coping. Like denial.”
He’d heard it all the time at Brentwood. ‘Daddy missed my birthday, but he bought me a new Jaguar, so I know he cares’. ‘Mummy slaps me when I’m bad, but it’s how she was raised, how she shows her love’. Tim knows how actual coping and denial sound.
“That’s not what this is,” he says evenly. “My parents loved me. I know that.”
“Why do the words sound like a wound?” his subconscious asks. Tone light, almost lilting. “Was it a bladed thing, this love?”
Tim doesn’t want to talk about this. He’s burning beneath his own face’s unyielding gaze. It’s just me. It’s just yourself. His own eyes peeling him apart, unmasking. It’s just me. He takes a breath. Counts the freckles on his subconscious’s face. 1, 2, 5, 13, 17, just beneath the right ear, spilling onto the neck. Have I always had that many?
He’s stalling.
“My parents loved me,” Tim makes himself repeat. “They also loved their collection of Herculaneum scroll fragments.”
“Mm.” His subconscious hums thoughtfully. “Loved the things like a child, or loved the child like a thing?”
Tim chokes on half a laugh. “Both. Neither. But it was the same, somehow. How they felt about their artifacts and me. Evidence of their own prestige.”
“I can hear the edge of the blade, the shape of the weapon. But I still don’t know the truth of it. Explain it more?”
Tim stamps down a flare of irritation. You already know! But that’s not the point. This is self-reflection. This is self-confrontation. This is punishment.
“Their collection, their artifacts, were evidence of how good my parents were at their jobs,” he bites out, “that could be showed off and put away at their leisure. And I was a healthy child; no worrisome defects, no behavioural issues. All those articles and think pieces about affluenza, about how the children of the rich were destined to be despots and delinquents. And then there was me, remarkably well adjusted and handsome to boot. I photographed well and stayed where they left me, as far as they knew. I proved their genes and parenting were superior to their peers. They loved me.”
“Mm.” His subconscious tilts its head further. More freckles revealed down its neck, looking more red than brown in the strange, foggy orange light. “Will you tell me about the cut of the blade?”
“They loved me. And…and they left anyways.” Tim swallows. Swallows again. “They loved me, and it wasn’t enough to make them look at me. I wanted more. I shouldn’t have, but I wanted more. But that was wrong, that was greedy. They loved me, and I knew it, and that should have been enough for me. It should have…I…”
He stutters, falters. It’s just him, it’s just his subconscious, but Tim hates being self-pitying. And no one likes someone who complains about the hand they dealt themselves. He put himself in this position. His own fault, his own hands–
Hands, hands. A hand on his head. Then moving beneath his chin, lifting his head up. His eyes meet his eyes, ice-chip blue. Steady and pinning.
“You can tell me,” his subconscious says softly. “Speak the wound, and I will taste the blood with you.”
“My parents loved me, and I knew it,” Tim says, words tumbling from his mouth like a casualty-heavy rockfall. “And I didn’t know how good I had it, to have a home with people I knew loved me. It wasn’t always good and it hurt almost all the time, but…but because of that, I know the difference. I know the difference between a home with people who hurt you but love you, and a home with people who hurt you and, and don’t.”
He squeezes his eyes shut. “My parents died. And I know the difference between what I had with them and what I have now.”
***
He is a boy, knocking.
He is a boy, loved.
And so, he is a boy let in. Blanket picked up from the polished floor as sturdy wood swings open, a bit of window-light brightening the night-dark hall. Loved, his parents open the bedroom door and let him worm his way between them.
A few times, at least. When he is young. And when they are home to do so.
When he is older, they help him outgrow his nighttime neediness by keeping the bedroom door shut. Which is fair and understandable. Older, there are other doors to knock on.
The office door. The basement door. The places where his parents work. When they are home to do so.
He is a boy, knocking, and he is a boy, loved, and they are busy. His parents rarely allow him entry if it is just him, with his needs and his wants and his himness. But the door opens if he wants to photograph their artifacts for a school project. If he wants to hear about their latest trip so that he can boast about it to classmates. If there is something he can give them.
It is rare for the office door, the basement door, to open if it is just him.
But it happens.
Sometimes, because they love him, his parents open the door even when it is just him, with nothing to give. When it is just a boy knocking because he wants to see his parents. It is rare, and they are usually visibly annoyed, but they bear it, this trial of parenthood. And sometimes his dad ruffles his hair instead of shooing him with annoyance after two minutes. And sometimes his mother bears his presence with an approving up and down instead of a serpent-fanged glare.
It’s not the love they make Christmas movies about, obviously. But it is love, because they let him in, sometimes, just because it’s him, with nothing to offer, nothing for them to gain.
When they are home to do so.
And then, there are the doors beyond his house.
An apartment door. A manor door. thud-thud-thud clunk-clunk-clunk
Begging to be let in. Begging to be heard.
He is a boy who knows the rule of knocking. You’re only let in if you have something to offer. Unless the people on the other side love you. Then maybe, they’ll let you in when you have nothing but yourself, sometimes. But the people in the apartment, in the manor, have loved and loss, and that’s not what he’s for. Love is not even in his mind, not on the table.
He begs them to open the door. Because they need him.
Knock-knock-knock-you-need-me-you-need-me-let-me-in-because-you-need-me
***
“I’m not saying this to throw some kind of pity party,” Tim says sharply. “I’m just trying to paint the full picture. From the beginning, I always knew I wasn’t there to be Bruce’s son. For one, I had parents when I first became Robin. But more importantly, I wasn’t there to be another thing for him to love and lose. It was always–,”
“Wait,” says his subconscious. Its hands are back in its lap, but it has shifted closer, so that their crossed legs are almost touching. “You are speaking of your current home, which you believe contains hurt without love.”
“That’s an oversimplification–,”
“And your parents are dead. So whose love are you certain of, presently?”
A completely unnecessary dagger thrust, that knocks the wind from Tim’s lungs. He gapes a few seconds, breathless, then turns away with angry tears blurring his vision.
“What are you even talking about,” he hisses. “I’m trying to answer why I did it, why this is my role. I don’t care if this is some kind of punishment, I am not engaging with a metaphysical therapy session–,”
“You chose to begin your answer by speaking of love,” his subconscious interrupts, voice soft but insistent, “and so love must be what defines you, your choices, your role. I’m sorry it hurts to speak of. But unspoken stories die in darkness. Don’t let the truth of what drives you disappear. Speak it, little drake.”
Why is my subconscious talking to me like I’m four. Why is my subconscious petting my hair. The hand heavy but gentle, moving down the back of his head again and again. Tim doesn’t really want to unpack what this means, mentally speaking. Something something having to comfort myself too often in childhood something something self-soothing behaviours, probably. The worst part is that it’s working, disarming him, patting down the anger like errant hairs.
“Tell me about them,” his own voice says, words curling up into the air like smoke. The hand on his head is warm. “The people who love you.”
Tim scowls. Stares down at his knees.
“…Cass,” he says tightly. “Steph.”
He stops. Other names bloom and wither on his tongue. The silence, the list ending at two, is deafening. Louder the longer it stretches.
His subconscious breaks it. “Tell me about them. Cass and Steph. Who they are. Why you named them.”
Tim shudders through his next breath. Doesn’t look up from his knees. “Cass…is my sister. And I…I know she loves me, because she wanted me to join her when she turned evil. A chemical had completely rewritten and unmade who she was, and still, there was us. To her, there was still us. It twisted her to hate Bruce, but she still– for me she still–,”
Struggling, still staring at his knees. He’s not wearing his costume, what he was wearing before he was here, before he came to this world of endless streetlight-coloured fog. Instead he’s wearing his favourite sweatpants, with the bleach stains on the knees that Alfred would kill him for if he saw them. One of the names that sat on his tongue and died there.
“Cass loves me.” His words are quiet, like a secret. “I know she loves me because she wanted me just to have me. She wanted me because she thought I was hurting like she was and that we should hurt together and hurt the world together. But it wasn’t about what I could give her. It was about what we could be.”
“And still, it’s a wound on you. I can hear it, the way it bleeds.”
“Well, yeah.” Tim laughs bitterly. “She was brainwashed. I can’t ever tell her any of this, because the idea that any part of her was still there, in control of her actions is– it’s not a fun road to go down. Trying to figure out how much of you was you when you’re brainwashed.”
His subconscious gives another hum of acknowledgement. Is that a thing Tim does? Hum? He can’t remember being a hummer. He grunts more than anything – a bad habit picked up from an uncommunicative mentor.
“Is it the same with your Steph? Another wound?”
“No.” Tim lets his eyes close. Leans forward a little into the fingers moving through his hair, the slight scratch of too-long nails. “Steph is…Steph is my…she’s just my person. I don’t know. Our relationship is weird.”
The possibility of applying any sort of label to his relationship with Stephanie had honestly gone out the window when Tim had been her birthing partner when (1) it wasn’t his baby, (2) Steph hadn’t known his name or what he actually looked like, and (3) they hadn’t dated yet. Whatever the fuck they had defied description from the start.
Steph had once said, tipsy, that she thought her and him were a ‘find-each-other-in-every-universe’ type thing. Could have been twins in a past life. Which had been a weird thing to say since they’d been dating at the time. But Tim understood what she meant. Wavelengths and resonance. I-just-met-you-but-I’ve-always-known-you. Sometimes they came close to hating each other. But hate wasn’t the opposite of love, of knowing someone was yours and you were theirs.
“I know Steph loves me because…fuck.” He laughs, a little bitterly. “Because when she was engaging in psychological warfare by proxy, fucking with me on Bruce’s behalf, I just, I was furious with her, and I thought I’d never trust her again, but I knew I still loved her. And I just knew she still loved me too, even though our relationship was literally at that exact moment exploding catastrophically into unrecoverable pieces. I don’t know.”
Tim rubs a hand over his face. “Cass is easier. There’s no proof to what I’m saying about Steph. I shouldn’t assume to know how she feels–,”
“I don’t think you would have said it if you weren’t sure.” Another thoughtful hum. Tim grunts back.
“But I see Steph is a wound as well, in the end,” it continues. “You have defined the love of your sister and your person by moments in which they hurt you. Does every person who loves you do it with a blade dug into your skin?”
Every person who loves you. Tim doesn’t flinch. He holds perfectly still as he cards through names he might have said a year ago. Names he can’t seem to say now.
“Tell me about them? The ones you want to say, but won’t.”
“I already said the ones I want to say,” Tim snaps. But the hand has moved from his hair to his cheek, warm, and Tim leans into it. Leans into the warmth, into the bite of pointed nails against his skin. Hating himself. Hating both of him selves. Leans harder into the palm and the points. Punishment and self-comfort. The same thing, in the end.
“I…I don’t know if I’m being unfair,” Tim finally says, in a voice that’s thicker with unshed tears that he would like. “To…to the names I’m not saying.”
“Why?”
“I’ve…I’ve been distant from a lot of people. My friends. I shouldn’t…I shouldn’t assume how they feel about me.” He swallows. “But I don’t know in which direction. I don’t know if I shouldn’t assume that they still…that they feel the same about me as they did a year ago. That we still…love each other. But I also don’t know if I shouldn’t assume that they’ve stopped loving me. And it’s not on them, because I’ve been distant.”
Kon and Bart, separated by death. Ives, separated by Robin, constantly moving schools, and time.
“Mm. Maybes then. Uncertainties that scab. Do you want to talk about them more? To try and remember, and think, and learn in your own memories what is true of them? It is hard to leave things unknown. To never have the chance to smooth over the scar that unknowing leaves.”
The sudden escape of tears surprises Tim. They roll down his face, sizzling against the hand on his cheek. He sits up abruptly, wiping his face.
“No. I don’t, I don’t want to talk about them. Kon and Bart and Ives. I just…just leave it. Leave it, please.”
“Names. I will remember them for you,” says his subconscious softly. “Your friends, Kon and Bart and Ives. Your maybes.” It tilts its head. “Are there others?”
Cassie. And– Tim exhales, low and slow. “Yes, but talking about them, that’s part of answering the question. You know, the main question you had before you randomly went off topic? Asking why it had to be me, and why that’s my role?”
His subconscious smiles faintly. “It is you who began your explanation with love, little drake.”
“That’s because–,”
“And you were right to. It matters, I can hear it. All of what you said. Small wounds accumulate, kill in time. Bleeding on the inside fills the body, bloats it to death. Scales lost here and there, until a full chunk of hide is exposed, vulnerable. What bled you, bloated you, stripped your armour? This is what you let me understand, when you explain all of it. You say you have not started answering the question yet, but you have.”
“No,” Tim says quickly, hoarsely. “No. You’ve got it wrong. I know exactly what you’re thinking– no. Cass and Steph and my friends, the hurt and the uncertainty, not having more names to say, that didn’t factor into my decision, okay? You’re wrong.”
Hi subconscious regards him carefully, heavily. But the pity at least, seems to be gone from its expression.
“I see,” it says. “Tell me your answer then, and I will listen.”
***
He is a boy, knocking on doors.
He is a boy, standing outside of a cave.
His predecessors were boys who never had to knock. Who were let in on nothing but love. But he is not that boy. He is let into the cave only because he has something to offer. Only because he can be something unloved.
Only because being unloved is what he is offering.
***
“My role has always been to make sure that Batman can keep protecting Gotham, and the world,” Tim explains, composure back in place, distance between himself and his subconscious. “To watch his back, and to keep him from falling off the edge, metaphorically speaking. What brought him to the edge was the loss of his son, so that’s what I couldn’t be. A son, or a loss. He only let me be Robin because I had parents. I had a house. I could be Robin without being an emotional vulnerability. I could watch Bruce’s back and make sure he was more careful in the field, but in the capacity of a colleague. Sure, he’d be upset if I died, but it wouldn’t destroy him like losing a child would.”
It’s his turn to smile faintly. “And it worked. There was a situation where everyone thought I was dead, and Batman held it together completely. He was honestly more irritated than sad.”
The day Dick beat the Joker to death, avenging Jason Todd under the guise of avenging Tim. Bruce had shown none of that same anger. Steph had told Tim later, first numbly and then with mounting outrage, about Batman’s stoic reaction to Tim’s apparent death. He told me ‘Revenge is for weaklings. You have to be strong and deal with this Stephanie’. Stone cold. Like it was nothing. It had allowed her to push through her own grief in the moment, but had shaken her deeply afterwards.
The worst was when I asked what happened to you, she’d said, expression a twisted mix of pain, fury, and bewilderment, and he looked down at the bones and your costume in the water and said, ‘I think it’s clear enough’. Like, what the fuck. What the fuck?!
“But it was proof that I was performing my role correctly,” Tim continues, proud despite the pangs in his chest. “And that worked…for awhile. But I mean, despite evidence to say otherwise, Batman isn’t an unfeeling robot. He did get…fond of me, eventually. Started to care for me.”
It was partly why Tim had invented a fake uncle. Bruce may have been willing, suddenly, to have another son. But Tim hadn’t been ready to be that liability. Not when that was the opposite of what he was supposed to be.
“I tried really, really hard not to become his son.” Voice quieting to a near whisper. “But…the situation was also different. It wasn’t Bruce and Alfred and an absent Dick. It was Bruce, and Alfred, and Cass, and Barbara, and Jason was back in whatever fucked up capacity, and Bruce was more involved with the League, with other heroes. He had…he had a lot of support, if something were to happen to me. I could…I could trust that they could hold him together. So I…I let my role change.”
“You mean,” his subconscious says carefully, “You let yourself be loved?”
“Yeah.” His chest is tight. Throat thick. His next breath is shaky, and trips over a humourless laugh. “Yes.”
Tim knew, or had once believed, that he had been loved way, way before the official adoption. That Dick and Alfred had loved him pretty early on, and Barbara quick to follow. Bruce was harder, because he had only accepted Tim as Robin on the promise, hope, that he could be emotionally detached.
But the thing was, Bruce had a problem when it came to children. Tim had heard it from Dick, from Alfred, from Barbara. Bruce had loved Dick from their first conversation. He’d loved Jason the moment he’d spotted him by the batmobile. It wasn’t in his nature to warm up to his wards slowly. Historically speaking, it was more or less at first sight. He couldn't really choose not to,
Tim will never know when Batman’s pragmatism had been defeated by Bruce’s nature. But he knows he’d been moved over to the son category, emotionally speaking, long, long before his official adoption. And he hadn’t fought it, really. He’d let himself become part of the family, didn’t fight the fact that he belonged.
A joke, in retrospect. And the ache of it renders him quiet, as he struggles to reassemble his composure.
But his subconscious doesn’t let him breathe.
“What happened,” it asks, “to make you doubt that love?”
“You know what-,” Tim sucks in a breath. Pulls up a brittle smile. “Batman disappeared and Dick took Robin from me. That’s what happened.”
And that says it all really. But his subconscious’s brow furrows.
“Explain?” it prompts.
“Oh for fuck’s–,” Tim wishes there was something in this stupid orange fog that he could throw at his own mind. “You don’t let up do you? Fine. Robin was all I had. Bruce was missing, presumed dead, and I told Dick that Robin was all I had left. I did everything family therapy tells you to do. I was emotionally honest, I didn’t speak in metaphors, I flat out told him that Robin was all I had left. And still. He took it.”
Tim chokes, on tears and laughter. Presses his hands to his face. “How do you hear your brother, your four-times-orphaned brother, your-lost-three-best-friends-in-one-year brother, tell you that you’re taking away the last thing he has left, and still take it? Take it, and give it to a kid who hates him? A kid who was literally in that moment insulting me and calling me worthless?”
He lowers his hands. “Dick could take Robin from me because when it came down to it, I was a colleague, and it didn’t matter if Robin was all I had, Damian was his brother, and needed it more. Dick called me his equal. His closest ally. Not his brother. Because Damian’s his brother.”
His subconscious’s expression is sad, but questioning. “But…you were speaking of your Bruce, before. If he was not there–,”
“I’m not done,” Tim snaps. Then he smiles, sardonic and sharp. “It was a package deal. I was Bruce’s, and I was also Dick’s and Alfred’s and Barbara’s. A family. I thought Dick was my brother. Fuck, I though he was the first one in the family to accept me, before Bruce ever had! But then Dick gave Damian Robin, and Alfred sewed Damian’s new Robin costume, and I’m sure Barbara knew what Dick was planning–,”
He sucks in air. Turns away from his own face. Closes his eyes. “I’d accuse myself of being overdramatic. Of blowing a single fight out of proportion. But then…none of them believed me when I said Bruce was alive. Not Alfred. Not Barbara. Not Dick. Not Cassie, my friend, my teammate. No one. None of them listened. And with that on top of Robin– it wasn’t that I felt they’d stopped loving me, it was that I was suddenly certain that none of them ever did.”
“Grievous,” his subconscious breathes. “Doubt is so often a death blow. It hollows, it cores. When you can no longer believe what you once knew to be true.”
Tim presses his palm heels into his closed eyelids. He tries to take a few deep, steadying breaths, but chokes instead. His subconscious closes the distance, and he is being hugged now, a hand on his back, rubbing soothing circles.
“Don’t drown in it,” his own voice says, soft and sibilant. “Don’t let the unsaid fill you until your embers are dead and smothered. Speak, speak child.”
“Dick said he still needed me, and Damian said ‘for what?’” Tim chokes out. “And he was right. Dick didn’t need me. Dick had been a solo vigilante in his own city and knew how to watch his own back. It was Bruce that was fucking bad at it. It was Bruce that needed me. My role was to Bruce. To always bring him back, to support him. And I did it. I found the evidence, I went with the Justice League to get him, I pulled him out of his own head when he was possessed, and I saved him. We saved him because of me. I got him back. That’s my role, it always has been, and no one can take that, no matter what name I have. I was never there to be loved. I was there because I was needed by Bruce.”
And he’s proud of that. He’s so goddamned proud of that. He will always be proud of that, no matter what it cost him. He did what he was always meant to do.
“My role, always,” Tim repeats, steadier, “is to save Bruce.”
“How did the choice you made today save him?”
“Because he was about to choose. And Bruce couldn’t make that choice, it would have destroyed him. I couldn’t let him do that.”
“And you chose yourself.” Chin hooked over his mirror’s shoulder, Tim hears the frown, rather than sees it. “But Bruce was not there, when you had those revelations about your family. Do you really believe his love was false?”
“If I was wrong about them, how could I not be wrong about him?” Tim whispers. “Especially with how our relationship started. I was a colleague. Needed but not wanted. Thinking it had grown into something more…maybe that was the mistake.”
His subconscious makes a sound that’s not quite a hum. Bassier. It doesn’t sound right, another thing that’s off, like the teeth and the red freckles and the nails. There’s something to unpack in that too. That the appearance of his subconscious has shades of monstrosity. The cuckoo in the nest. The changeling thrown into the fire. Tim Drake, the child-shaped thing pretending to be wanted.
“You are in so much pain right now, little drake,” the voice in his ear says lowly, a growl devoid of aggression. “Do you think it is colouring your memories, your thoughts? Do you really think those you have named will not be harmed by the choice you made?”
“I know they’ll be hurt,” he snaps. And he’s crying now, just crying. His mouth twists bitterly, angry at himself, every version, but unable to stop the tears. “But I was the best choice. They’re family, and I’m not. They care for me, and they won’t be happy about this. But they’ll get over it. Faster than they would if anyone else had been chosen.”
“But your role to Bruce? You cannot fulfill it, any longer.”
“I-I know. But that’s how it is with duty. You fulfill your role until…until your time is over. If I hadn’t made the choice for him, I would have failed him. If I picked anyone else, it would have destroyed him. I had to. And it had to be me. I was meant to be the one he could afford to lose. I told you.”
He closes his eyes again. “This is what I’m for.”
***
He is a boy, knocking on doors.
He is a boy, standing outside of a cave.
He is a boy, let in because he was needed, because he had something to offer.
You need me, you need me, let me in because you need me.
He is a boy who knows the rule of knocking. You’re only let in if you’re needed, or loved.
An open door shuts. A curt voice says, We did, but we don’t anymore.
He is memories and photographs, apartments and offices and basements, he is a swirling chemical bath, the point where the colours bleed, where hurt and love become one. Thank you for letting me in, once. Timothy Drake, in fading black and white.
He is a boy in front of a door, letting his hand drop to his side.
He doesn’t knock again.
***
Tim is tired.
He leans heavily against his mirror, head on its shoulder. Its hand is back in his hair, moving in a soothing motion that feels like pity. But Tim can’t summon the energy to be indignant about it.
“Do you have anything to say,” his subconscious says quietly, “about the others you saved with your choice? You spoke of them, Damian and Jason, but they were not in any of your lists of names.”
“Fuck you, I answered your question, so therapy is done,” Tim mutters. But he sinks more heavily against the warm-nearing-hot body. “They’re just…more ‘brothers’. But they’re honest about how they feel about me. They both hate me. They’ve both tried to kill me.”
He doesn’t say more, even though there’s more to be said. Namely that if Jason really wanted Tim dead, he’d be dead. Each time, Jason had stopped just short of actually killing him. Whereas Tim’s fairly certain the only reason he survived Damian is that the kid couldn’t get down from the dinosaur he’d pushed Tim off of to finish the job before Bruce arrived.
And even then, the dinosaur was over a year ago. And Damian has saved his life, since. Multiple times. Jason as well. They’d worked together more than a little. There was trust on patrols and jobs together. And there were times where Tim could almost be fooled into thinking Jason didn’t still want him gone, Damian didn’t still want him dead.
But alone in a room with them, Tim still keeps his back to a wall.
He’s too tired now, to give Damian or Jason the benefit of the doubt. He’s too tired. He’s so tired. They hate him. That’s simple, that’s easy. It might as well be true.
“That’s all,” he whispers. “I don’t have anything more to say.”
His subconscious hums in acknowledgement, and Tim grunts back, and lets his eyes slip shut.
“Thank you for speaking with me, little drake.” Low and lilting. Soft and sibilant. “What would you like to do now?”
Tim almost snorts at that. Like I have options? He’s pretty sure that if the self-reflection-punishment is over, that means…he’s done. It's time to go.
But he answers honestly.
“To sleep,” he says. “I’m…I just want to sleep. I’m so tired. I’ve been tired for so long.”
“Then I will guard your rest.” A pause, followed by a now familiar hum. “But one last question.”
Tim groans. His own voice laughs.
“An easy one, little drake. And then you may sleep. You used dual names when speaking of the one you are sworn to. Bruce, Batman. A name for battle and a name for home, I assume. What is your nest name, Red Robin?”
“Timothy Drake-Wayne,” he mumbles. Stupid. His subconscious should know his name. Is this the last step of self-acceptance or something? Naming himself? Something feels off, not quite right, but his eyes are already closed, and aren’t inclined to reopen.
“Drake,” it breathes. “Fate, then. It is clear that you were always meant to give yourself to me. Rest well, child, and know that I cherish everyone who makes themselves mine. You will never be unwanted again.”
But Tim is already asleep.
***
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***
When John got a message from Batman’s gal-in-the-chair ordering him to the Batcave immediately under threat of dismemberment by batarang, he knew he was going to have a bad night.
Unfortunately, that message was accompanied by a wire transfer to the tune of six figures, with promise of more to come. Which shut off his common sense and had him scurrying to the London Zeta tube like a good little lackey.
He should have ignored the message, no matter how much fucking money it came with. Because a situation that caused Batman to allow Constantine to Zeta directly into the Batcave was probably more dire than was worth the trouble.
But Constantine had responded, like an idiot. And gone to the Batcave, like an idiot. And now, less than an hour later, he's in the most dangerous place in the world.
Standing next to an apex predator trying to get to their child.
“It’s not him,” Constantine says in a nervous whisper. “It’s an illusion, a projection. The entity’s just using Red Robin’s shape to fuck with you.”
Silhouetted in the open doorway of the abandoned building, the entity smiles with Tim Drake-Wayne’s unmasked face. Red scales spread across the right cheek, spilling onto the neck. Horns of ruby and gold spiral out from its head. A long scaled tail coils around its feet. There are too many teeth in its smile.
Batman does not respond to Constantine’s comment. His jaw tenses, works beneath the skin.
“Hello, Dark Knight,” says the entity, smiling still. “I know this is your city. I wish to coexist peacefully. I hope we can come to an agreement.”
Batman does not flinch when Tim’s voice comes out of the projection’s mouth. But the murderous aura around him doubles.
“Agreement, yeah,” Constantine says with a miserable laugh. “That’s uh, that’s why we’re here. To strike a deal. I mean, he’s striking the deal. I’m just facilitating.”
The entity tilts its head. "Deal?"
No going back now. Constantine grimaces as Batman steps forward. The League's going to kill me for allowing this.
“Allow my colleague to leave here, unharmed, with my son’s soul,” Bruce says, unwavering, “and you can have mine.”