Chapter Text
Chapter 1
One. Two. Three. Four. Five.
Crash.
The thunder rolled out low and long and right on cue. Tim measured his breaths, trying not to succumb to the urge to pant out his anxiety. One more time, he could wait out one more time.
Really, in the interest of collecting accurate data, he should count out at least three more to be sure of the timing, but storms weren’t regular things, and he was scared this one would blow itself out before he worked up the nerve to test his theory.
A flash of lightning lit his bed with its rumpled covers; he had rolled out of it as soon as he heard the storm start. His desk was up against the wall with his homework and textbooks lined up neatly on its surface, perfectly parallel with the dark stained wood. It was better to keep in practice of having his room be neat, orderly, exactly how his parents expected him to keep it. Tim never knew when they would be back for sure, and it wasn’t worth them being disappointed in him for keeping a messy room. They might decide to poke through his things, might find his den.
He wasn’t supposed to have a den. No one knew that the Drakes were wolf-shifters. Jack and Janet Drake were nouveau rich, at least according to Gotham, and as such were only afforded a few peculiarities. High society smiled to themselves about the archeological escapades of the rich young couple and Jack and Janet were free to travel the globe chasing their passion without worrying about their social standing at home. Not like the Wayne family. Bruce Wayne was often referred to as Gotham’s favored son, richer than sin and a charming sort of rake. If Bruce Wayne also happened to be a wolf, that didn’t keep anyone from inviting him to spend his money at their charities and attend their galas. Being a wolf was Bruce Wayne’s little eccentricity.
So long as nobody knew about Batman, Bruce Wayne would be fine.
Tim kept careful count after the lightning, one, two, three, four, before the next welcome rumble of thunder. He sat, quivering in his little nest of a den, waiting. Next time, next time pounded in his blood, a promise of relief to the near-constant ache in his chest. Although he was twelve Tim was still puppy-sized in his wolf form, something that only time was going to fix. At least he had finally grown out of the brownish fuzz that most wolves had as their baby coat. His fur had turned silvery gray, though it would be a few years before he could know for sure whether he would have any distinguishing markings. He had gotten just a little taller than he used to be in this form, limbs stretching toward the long-legged lankiness that he was expecting as he entered adolescence. He was runty in his human form too, but at least then he was bigger than a Beagle.
No one was supposed to know he was a wolf; even his parents barely treated him like the other half of his soul meant anything at all. Maybe for them it didn’t. He knew they didn’t have a den in the house, a cozy place where they gathered things that smelled like pack so they could rest in safety, surrounded by reminders of their loved ones. Or maybe they had a sort of mobile den, one they took with them to places like Cairo and Belize and Singapore. Maybe they just… forgot that Tim needed one too.
Janet had been angry, the time she discovered Tim’s sad little den. She had been looking for a specific wrap to go with her evening dress, and had found it in Tim’s closet, tangled together with his dad’s brown winter scarf, hardly used since his parents usually travelled in warmer climes. Neither article of clothing had smelled much like his parents anyway, they mostly smelled of Tim and the same fabric softener used on the fleecy blanket he had shoved into the closet to lie on.
“Timothy. Are you a human, or are you an animal? Are you a Drake? Because humans don’t make little doggy beds for themselves inside of closets. Drakes do not show weakness.”
There had been more after that, of course. Things that he had to go and look up later because he had only been eight, and hadn’t known about things like social stigma and dehumanization of minorities. At least, not by those terms. He had tried to be good after that, tried to do what his parents wanted and stay as human as possible… but it hurt. The house was so big and so empty and so, so quiet that he would catch himself whining without meaning to. He had woken himself up out of a dead sleep at age nine, transformed into an awkward wolf pup and halfway through a plaintive howl. A week later he had sleepwalked through the entire house and wound up on his back lawn, dew soaking into his pajama bottoms, looking for pack members that weren’t there.
Eventually, he had caved. He didn’t want to tie himself to his bed or barricade himself in his room, and he definitely didn’t want to howl for attention when there was no chance of the people he wanted hearing him noticing. The Drakes were not supposed to be wolves. If anyone heard him howl, despite the big house and sprawling property, the secret would come out. His parents’ lives would be ruined and it would be all his fault.
So, he did enough to keep his problems under control.
He re-built a den, this time populating it with some old pairs of socks from his parents. That had been his mistake last time, taking clothes that they would actually notice were gone. Nobody noticed when socks went missing, they just blamed the dryer. He had two blankets and an old pillow. The pillow in particular looked pretty sad, Tim had taken to biting down on it whenever he got the urge to whine or howl. It didn’t help with the lost-hurt-alone feeling in his chest, but it muffled the noise okay.
Tonight, he was trying something new.
Lightning flashed, the storm was almost directly overhead, and Tim waited, tense.
One.
Two.
Three.
Booom. Tim tipped back his head and howled. It would be enough, it had to be, the sound of the wind and the rain lashing the Bristol estates, the distance of his parent’s house from any neighbors, and finally, the thunder, the sky’s loud complaint about the abrasiveness of electrons would surely drown out his own plaintive call.
The sound of his own voice not being choked back surprised him, high and thin and so intrinsically sorrowful. He had heard shifter-howls before, he lived next door to the Wayne family and Bruce Wayne had adopted two shifters. None of them were shy about their howls, but they didn’t sound like Tim’s. They… harmonized with each other, voices weaving together as if to prove on a spiritual level that the callers were not alone.
He couldn’t even say that it was because he was a pup, with a pup’s high pitched howl. Jason, the youngest member of the Wayne family, was only three years older, and his howl was still reedy with youth too. It just wasn’t so… sad.
Tim cut himself off as the thunder faded away, jaw snapping shut around the noise that wanted to build and grow and sing out his solitude to the skies. He felt… a little better. Maybe. He was satisfying his frustrated instincts by actually calling for his pack… his instincts didn’t know that it was his own fault that they were gone.
Jack and Janet were busy, were doing “important work, Timothy,” and it was selfish of him to expect them to give up their lives just to watch him do nothing of particular interest. Kids went to school and came home and did homework every day, there was nothing groundbreaking about it, nothing that needed an audience. He had a roof over his head, plenty of food, a good school and an emergency credit card his parents didn’t really bother to monitor.
He was much, much better off than most kids, especially in Gotham.
And if his instincts wanted his parents there anyway? Well, he was caving a bit too much to the wolf, that was all. He had to be better than that, had to be logical and keep the secret. So, he did triage. Trick the wolf instincts into being happy with the little things that he could compromise on, and make sure that he didn’t ruin his parents’ lives.
Another flash lit up his room, and Tim tensed with anticipation. He had read about this method in one of his books at school. Well, not this method, specifically, but something similar. A warrior tribe that allowed its members to vocalize grief so that it didn’t paralyze them, but kept their cries contained, controlled, so as to not disrupt their lives. It had seemed like a good idea, one he could adapt to his own needs, and it was helping, at least a little.
One. Two.
Tim’s howl preceded the thunder by a half-second this time, bubbling out of his throat irrepressibly, like a hysterical sob. He let it climb, higher and higher, grasping at the rafters and the shingles of the house on its way up and out, enveloped by the disguising thunder.
Until it wasn’t. Thunder, as he had reminded himself earlier, and forgotten because he was an idiot, was not a regular thing. He could make all of the calculations he wanted but there would always be little curves and jagged edges that nature threw into the mix. This time, it was a rumble of thunder that barely lasted three seconds, and a howl that was too loud in the sudden absence of that rumble, one that carried on for too long outside of that concealment.
Tim choked it down, heart beating frantically in his narrow ribcage, sides heaving with panicked breathing. He cowered in his little den, dropping from his erect sit to press himself against the floor, furry ears flat to his skull as he tried to make himself invisible as well as inaudible.
The storm carried on outside, with moaning wind and lashing rain, and maybe no one had heard his mistake? It was a loud storm, even without the thunder, and he lived far away from—
A questioning howl rose above the storm, a deep baritone that carried well, joined by a higher treble, just beginning to slide down the register as the singer grew up. The Wayne pack. Bruce and Jason at least, Dick Grayson didn’t actually live in the manor anymore, even if he was a frequent visitor. Tim had hoped that the pair would be out, would be swinging across rooftops keeping Gotham safe as Batman and Robin, but of course they wouldn’t be out in this deluge. Batman might have gone out on his own, but there was no way he would drag his Robin out on a night like tonight, when even the crooks were probably holing up to do… whatever it was when crooks holed up. Play poker? Maybe they watched telenovelas and got too invested in the storylines like the nanny he’d had when he was seven.
The howl pried at Tim’s window, probing into his room like a living thing, a call of here we are, where are you that he was dying to answer. Almost without realizing it he raised his head out from where he had buried his muzzle in the blankets, tipping it up on an inhale to answer back—no!
It was too late to stop the howl, so Tim did the only thing he could think of, turning and biting down hard to smother the noise. He missed the pillow. He hit his own front leg. Distressed noises tried to force their way out of his throat, but they were blocked by his own flesh and blood and bone, and it hurt but he didn’t dare let go, knew that if he did the noises wouldn’t be smothered anymore and obviously, obviously he couldn’t trust himself not to answer those howls when they were specifically asking for him.
Pain radiated with the beat of his heart up and down his leg and Tim tried to focus on that, tried to let the rush of his own blood fill his ears and drown out the continuing howl.
After a minute or so, the call stopped, petering away to allow the storm precedence again. When no further calls came, Tim allowed himself to relax. The Waynes probably thought that they had just heard something that wasn’t there in the storm, or maybe an actual animal, a dog or coyote that had gotten lost in the well-manicured woods that abutted the Wayne estate. There was no reason for them to think of Tim, even if they did think there could be a lost pup out there somewhere. Tim was, emphatically, not lost. He was in his own bedroom, in his own house, and once he shifted back, he could be in his own pajamas and sleep in his own bed.
He wasn’t lost.
Gingerly, he unclenched his jaw and released his poor leg. Tim had to stop himself from giving it a few sad and utterly pointless licks in an attempt to soothe the hurt. It wasn’t bad. That fun mental brake had operated as it was supposed to and stopped him from actually breaking his own bone, though he was going to have a bruise deep enough that it would probably hurt almost as bad. He had broken the skin too, but he hadn’t been trying to actively hurt himself, just keep quiet, so there hadn’t been any of the ripping that real wolves did when they were trying to tear something apart.
Thunder rumbled again, further away now, and Tim hadn’t even noticed the lightning that preceded it. Not that he could have trusted himself in any event. This little experiment was obviously a failure. Awkwardly Tim pushed himself up on three paws and hobbled his way out of his den. His left front leg could probably have taken his weight, but there was no point in making it worse on accident. Free of the closet, Tim shifted back to his human self, landing on hands and knees on his carpet, left arm cradled close to his chest.
Exhaustion pulled at him, the stress of his close call dragging at him now that his adrenaline was fading. With a jaw cracking yawn he managed to get himself to his bathroom and pull out the well-stocked first aid kit he kept under the sink. He was lucky that his parents actually approved of the kit, taking it as a sign that Tim was being responsible and planning for emergencies. He doubted they would be so relaxed about it if they knew he kept it stocked in case he ever got hurt while engaging in his Bat-watching hobby. (He tried to tell himself that they would be upset because they were worried that he was putting himself in danger, but… any time he tried to picture them finding out, his brain kept supplying memories of lectures on proper Drake behavior instead of the fantasies he wanted, of hugs, and scolding and don’t scare us like that, son.)
In the light of the bathroom, his arm didn’t look… well. It didn’t look great? It was definitely bleeding, but it was high enough up on his forearm that his school blazer would cover it easily. The skin around the bite marks was puffy and red, threatening him with the bruise he knew would be all kinds of painful and purple come morning. Blood oozed sluggishly where his canines had caught in the skin, the other punctures weren’t as deep, the blood brighter as it seeped through the tears.
It surely couldn’t be too complicated to clean up? Gritting his teeth, Tim grabbed the dark brown bottle of hydrogen peroxide and got to work.
Later, after the hydrogen peroxide and the antibacterial ointment, the gauze and the carefully wrapped bandage (and after belatedly remembering to brush his teeth because ew) Tim flipped off the light and picked his way back to his room to carefully lower himself into bed. There had been no further howls, and Tim had been listening, straining his ears so hard that he half expected them to twitch even in his human form. But there was nothing. The Wayne pack really had dismissed the call as a false alarm.
Anyway, Tim thought as he pushed his face deeper into his pillow, I don’t think they even know I exist.