Chapter Text
The bottle of wine is the shit cherry on top of this shit sundae that’s been Tim’s week. He’s not going to tempt fate and call it the worst week of his life, but all of the other worst weeks have lead up to this point, and he’s just 100% done with pretending he’s okay with it.
He hasn’t slept in over forty hours. Since the last time he saw his bed, he’s spent nine hours in the Wayne Enterprises offices, two hours stuck in traffic, one hour showering under the luke warm water of the Batcave’s increasingly temperamental showers, twenty eight hours in the sewers tracking Killer Croc with Bruce and Damian, and scant minutes stuffing energy bars into his face in lieu of actual food.
Oh, and he also turned eighteen.
He yanks his tie over his head and drops it on the kitchen table. The wine is Syrian, nineteenth century. It’s sitting on top of a small leather bound book with a Arabic script embossed on the cover. Tim’s been working on his Arabic, mostly to understand Damian’s insults, but he’s too tired to think straight in English right now, let alone something with an entirely different alphabet.
He’s bone tired, physically and emotionally. He’d been apprehensive about his birthday before it happened, anxious about the grief it might drag back up. He hadn’t even figured out how to bring it up with Bruce when he got the alert about Croc and dived in to help.
However he might have wanted to spend it, waist deep in raw sewage with the demon brat spewing bile in his ear while Bruce alternated between ignoring his sons and remonstrating with Tim for letting Damian get to him wasn't it.
His eyes burn and the wine bottle blurs in front of him.
It’s not fair.
It’s not fair his parents are dead.
It’s not fair Bruce didn’t remember his birthday.
It’s not fair that Ra’s did.
Because that’s who’s clearly set this up.
Tim’s only birthday present is a bottle of presumably-poisoned wine and a book he can’t read, and he’s achingly grateful for both.
He calls himself pathetic, but it doesn’t seem to help stem the impending tears. He shouldn’t care. He doesn’t want to care. Birthdays are for little kids; adults don’t need a pat on the head for stumbling through the world another year. Ageing isn’t an achievement. Even in his line of work.
He scrubs his hand over his eyes. He’s spent the day lying about his birthday to his colleagues, using it as a handy excuse for why he and Bruce skipped work the day before. Tam had provided cookies to the staff on his behalf, and that breaks him all over again, because they were his birthday cookies and he didn’t even get one.
He’s too tired to calm himself down, and too worked up to sleep. He gives himself permission to feel sorry for himself for as long as it takes his tub to fill with hot water. It doesn’t help, though, because he’s immediately conscious of how lucky he is. Look at this bathroom, this clawfoot tub. He’s an ungrateful little shit, isn’t he? His internal monologue picks up his mother’s nasal tones: didn’t his parents always give him money to buy himself a birthday present, a nice one? Why was always he moping about the fact they didn’t call him on the right day? He’s bought himself a new car ‘from Bruce’. He can’t demand more of Bruce than of his parents, not when Bruce is so much busier, with a mission that’s so much more important.
He’s too caught up arguing with himself about his unrealistic expectations to register his own actions, but the bath is full, the taps are off, and he’s sitting on the edge of the tub with Ra’s wine in hand.
Fuck Ra’s. Fuck him for drawing attention to the date, for forcing Tim to think about the fact no one else had. Just to spite him, Tim’s not going to let the wine breath. You know what? He’s going to drink it straight from the bottle. If Ra’s is going to poison him, Tim’s not going to do him the honour of an elegant death.
It’s not the first time the older man has sent him a token to remind Tim he’s being watched. The thoughtfulness of the gifts is always unnerving - a newspaper clipping from the eighties about his parents, new bearings for the Redboard's wheels, a custom set of D20s as a reminder to call Ives, even an umbrella on his desk at WE the day he forgot to bring one - and Tim feels ungrateful every time he tears them apart to check for toxins and bugs and incinerates the remains. Ra’s never brings up the gifts when he calls, which he does, often. Tim hates to admit it, but they’ve developed a rapport since his misadventures with Tam. Ra’s never thought he was mad.
He hasn’t checked these gifts for toxins. He isn’t going to incinerate them.
He wonders what his family will think when they find him. Will they think it was suicide? Will they go after Ra’s?
A small part of his mind, sharp despite the sleep deprivation, recognises where this thought pattern is going. Suicidal ideation. Side effect from missing his meds while fighting Croc. He’s been here before. He tests the mental waters. Should he call Dick? He recoils before he can even finish the thought: Dick forgot his birthday too, and managing his emotions around that is more than Tim can handle right now. Dick is a whole ‘nother riptide in the depression ocean, and he’s dragged back under before the sharp voice can force him to make better choices.
He slips out of his clothes and lowers himself into the scalding water. He takes a slug of wine. It’s viscous, coating his mouth, and so smooth. Notes of dark fruit and vanilla, and under that something caramalised and chocolatey. It’s good. It’s really good.
This isn’t suicide, he tells himself. It’s risky behaviour, sure. Drinking alcohol in a hot bath when you’re exhausted? It’s just plain fucking dumb. But it’s not suicide. If it were, he’d leave a note. He’s imagined the kind of note he might leave. What he’d write to assuage Bruce’s guilt - “it was the only way to save Gotham” - what he’d say to soothe Dick - “you did everything, and don’t for one minute think it wasn’t enough; it’s just that enough means something different to me, now” - what he’d tell the Titans - “let me rest”. Sometimes he goes the other way, and imagines how he might let them have it, let them know how badly they let him down, let them feel the weight of everything Tim’s been carrying on their behalf and have the whole family tear itself apart without him. The ‘that’ll show ‘em’ note, which simply reads “You were right, Jason” or “You win, Damian”. The nuclear option.
God, this wine is really good. The hot water is working its magic on the knots in his shoulders, and despite wallowing in the worst parts of him, he is feeling a little better. Why hasn’t the poison kicked in? He’s two thirds through the bottle.
“Come on, Ra’s,” he addresses the empty room. “What kind of weak ass poison is this?”
There’s no gut cramps or muscle spasms. The only creeping warmth is coming from the hot water, and the drowsiness is natural after so long awake. He isn’t seeing anything, hearing anything.
Sure, his thoughts are getting away from him a bit, and his movements are less coordinated, but Tim’s pretty sure that’s just because he’s drunk.
“Ra’sh? Is thish just… wine? Good wine?”
The bathroom tiles don’t reply.
Tim levers himself out of the bathtub and kicks the plug free so it’ll drain. Carrying the bottle with him, he wanders back into the kitchen. He grabs a glass from the cabinet and pours the rest of the wine unsteadily into it, trying not to let the dregs escape the bottle. Old wine. Good wine. Wine with lumpy bits in the bottom.
So Ra’s just gave him a present. That’s nice. It’s nice to get a present.
“Happy birthday to me,” Tim mumbles, raising the glass in a toast to the empty kitchen. He’s naked and dripping. Maybe this could be a new birthday tradition. Suicidal ideation in the bath, naked toast in the kitchen, then… Oh, the book. Tim got two presents from Ra’s.
He picked the little leather tome up, fingers clumsy, and opens it to a random page.
On the left hand side is Arabic script, but on the right is English. Nice. Even if the English is swimming and doubling under his gaze.
He sits down at the table and picks up the wine in one hand, holding the book in the other, and concentrates.
Passion makes the old medicine new:
Passion lops off the bough of weariness.
Passion is the elixir that renews:
how can there be weariness
when passion is present?
Oh, don’t sigh heavily from fatigue:
seek passion, seek passion, seek passion!
Rumi
Well, he’s weary, that’s for sure, but his life is distinctly lacking in passion. Still, it’s nice.
Something pings a deeply buried memory, Dana looking for readings for her and Jack's wedding. Rumi wrote in Farsi. Same alphabet as Arabic, different language. No wonder it looks even more unfamiliar than he expected.
Jack never cared about Tim's birthday. Sent him a gift, acknowledged the date, but he and Janet didn't see a need to actually celebrate it with him.
Dana did, though.
Tim tries to turn the page one handed, but his uncoordinated finger skims down the edge of the page instead of turning it, slicing a neat line through the centre of his fingerprint. Twenty eight hours against Killer Croc with nothing worse than a couple of bruises, but a book of love poetry has drawn blood.
The words blur, and he struggles to pick out the stanzas. His head starts to feel like it’s stuffed with cotton, and he wonders if he should just go to bed already.
If anyone wonders how Jesus raised the dead,
don’t try to explain the miracle.
Kiss me on the lips.
Like this. Like this.
He’ll go to bed. Just as soon as he works up the energy to stand, he’ll go to bed.
When someone asks what it means
to “die for love,”
point here.
Like this. Like this.
And then his vision fuzzes like static on an old TV screen, and roaring fills his ears, and his last thoughts are Oh, the poison wasn’t in the wine.