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Tim is so tired.
Beyond tired, really. Exhausted feels like a more accurate word to encompass everything he is feeling.
Exhausted from hauling himself through life; taking a single step feels like having to climb over a mountain, more often than not. Tim is exhausted from having the same conversations over and over again, conversations that he knows have meaning. ‘It gets better,’ he hears. ‘It gets easier with time. Keep your chin up, keep smiling, keep laughing.’ With every phrase they say that sounds like something out of a motivational poster in a high school’s counseling office, Tim's brain can only respond with shut up. Shut. up. SHUT. UP. SHUT UP.
And yet, the quiet scares Tim too. When it’s quiet, his thoughts can be heard with an alarming clarity. Thoughts that are from the darkest recesses of his ever-moving mind, the deepest wrinkles in the muscle that is his brain. Thoughts like
‘I don’t deserve this’.
‘Why do they keep you around?’
‘You are disappointing everyone. Your life is nothing but a disappointment.’
‘You kept him alive. That’s all you were needed for. Why are you still clinging on to them, leeching off of their love and affection?’
Oh yeah, the functioning suicidal/depressed repressed pile emotions of a father/mentor figure really didn’t help. Not to mention Tim's already existing parental issues; if anything, they only got worse. Especially since, for so long, it was just him and Alfred who could see how bad it really was. He grew up being used to drunken arguments in the car between his biological parents, and then that transferred over to the cave and almost any interaction between Bruce and Dick. Why else do they think that to this day, every family car ride, Tim puts headphones on and pumps the music as loud as it will go? That was - is - often his only escape.
Then it transitioned from the cave to muffled arguments in the dining room after Tim left the table. Those times, if Tim put his headphones on, it was only over one ear. The volume was left low so he could hear if shit was going sideways, if Dick needed back-up, if Tim needed to step in and pull the “hey I’m a child, don’t argue in front of me or I’ll cry!” card. So many years, he switched with Alfred over who was going to check on Bruce's overworked and overtired ass in the Batcave, seeing if he was asleep. If he wasn’t, they’d remind him to please go to bed, he needs to sleep, his back will hate him if he falls asleep sitting up. If he was dozing off, they roused him. Alfred took the gentle route. Tim did too, at first. Then he got tired of that shit and began to lecture Bruce, firmly pulling him up and dragging him to the bed where Ace has been asleep for three hours now. If Bruce was asleep, and it wasn’t four in the morning, Tim would just cover him in a blanket. Quietly take away his near empty glass of whiskey, if it was a really bad night (those started to happen more and more), put it in the sink and tip toed back to the guest room that he was resolutely pretending wasn't his bedroom.
Tim fucking hates the smell of whiskey.
Nearly every time Bruce was home, this routine would happen. As Tim grew, it evolved; as he learned more about the world and vigilante ethics, Bruce would drag Tim into discussions (thinly-veiled arguments) that Tim wanted nothing to do with. He tried to get through to Bruce about what he thought was common sense, what Time thought was general human empathy, and when Tim started crying because he was so angry and tired that Bruce won’t fucking hear his words for what they are, won’t trust his knowledge and life experience, Tim gets ignored and told to stop being so emotional if he wanted to be taken seriously. He is forced to sit with the leftover scent of whiskey in his bedroom as Bruce storms out, the room which Tim told you not to cross the threshold of because dammit, Bruce has been getting scary when inebriated recently and this is Tim's safe space, the safe space that feels less and less safe with Bruce in there - when did that happen? - the boundary that Tim set and Bruce took as a statement of hatred of him, the closest thing he can get to a loving father, I love you, why won’t you let yourself know that, B?
That goddamn smell of goddamn whiskey.
This was Tim's normal. Is Tim's normal. Has been for most of his time as Robin. It was a normal that only Tim, Alfred, and maybe Dick ever saw, ever fully knew. It was only a few months ago when it started getting really bad that everyone else seemed to at last take their goddamn rose colored contacts out.
‘Why is he like this? When did it get this bad? Why haven’t you saved him if he’s been like this all along, why haven’t you tried harder? What can we do now? How do we get through to him?’
Tim doesn't fucking know! He's asked that for the past four years and still hasn't gotten an answer, maybe now that everyone is screaming and clamoring and scared and worried and carrying all of that on their shoulders like he has for the past eternity, maybe now he'll finally know how the fuck to handle his own damn adoptive father! And wow, isn’t that a great sentence? Handling your father. Why haven’t you saved him - As! If! As if Tim hasn't been taking cups of coffee and glasses of expensive alcohol out of his loose grip and from under his sleeping nose, as if he hasn't been keenly listening in on every whispered conversation Bruce and Alfred or Dick have, clenching his fist every time he hears Dick driven to angry tears, as if Tim hasn't been exchanging concerned glances with Alfred about his increasingly more common inebriated states for the majority of Tim's life in the double digit ages!
Tim wants to save him. He wants Bruce to want to be saved. He's been trying to desperately keep him afloat for so fucking long…
Why did it take so long for the rest of them to catch up?
Please. Please let it be enough. Tim wasn’t enough. Maybe everyone else will be.
Maybe Bruce will finally stop smelling like suicidality and a strange mixture of coffee and whiskey.
Maybe Tim will finally think of his adopted dad with a smile, and not a grimace.
Maybe.