Chapter Text
Tim knows what he is.
When he looks into a mirror he sees a boy, halfway to ten, small with knobby knees, pale skin, dark curls, and big eyes that can never seem to stop staring at the world.
He knows what he looks like, mostly. That isn’t the problem, he sees himself constantly- a smart kid from the friendly, if disinterested, eyes of his teacher. Weird and quiet from the eyes of his classmates. A pale imitation of regret in the eyes of his mother. He lives life seeing things from twenty different directions, like he's some sort of insect- he’s like a fly, eyes protruding and incapable of being controlled, constantly cursed to view the world in a crisp, 360 degree perspective.
That's the crux of his problem, he knows. He can’t stop seeing. Tim knows what he is, he’s a child with a mother who doesn’t like to look directly at him and a father that can't seem to drag his eyes away. He’s lived for almost ten years. He likes to read about a family of bears and physics. His favorite color is purple, and his favorite food is fruit tart. He's good at math. But… Tim has also been thirty and homeless, seventeen and living with hands that wont stop touching, forty nine and drinking himself to death, thirty seven and beating his wife into the ground, twenty eight and fucking strangers in the dark because there were no other options.
Tim has been alive for nearly ten years and spent all ten of them living in other people's heads. He’s never experienced silence in any meaningful way because no one will ever stop fucking thinking.
He doesn’t like dogs because sometimes they bite him and sometimes he throws rocks at them until they stop moving for good. Tim does his best to remember his face, spends too much time staring into mirrors, but sometimes he still finds himself surprised by his reflection. Wasn’t he blonde, or maybe a redhead? Didn’t he have a beard, or green eyes? He walks around and memorizes multiplication tables and keeps the black hole that sits just behind his eyes a secret.
When his mother catches him throwing up in the pale light of early morning, annoyed at being woken up before her flight, he is just sick. He is so sorry. He only learns about the dead little girl in an alleyway behind the park because he sees it in the paper. He touches his neck and it isn’t a crumpled piece of paper. He is almost ten years old, not six. He is a boy, not a girl. He isn’t dead, not yet.
Tim is nine and has secrets spilling out into his bloodstream, locked tightly behind his clenched teeth.
He is nine and his body is a lock box full of things other people won’t say out loud.
He is nine and he knows what he is.
---
Tim has known who Batman is since they first locked eyes.
He had been all of four years old and at his first gala, cheeks pinched over coos of how well behaved he was. Dressed in a crisp suit, not flinching about the long nails digging into his shoulder, a smile on his face, he knew what he was meant to do, knew what they wanted him to say. It was so clear to him, the whispers and the screams alike.
He smiled and let his body move in accordance to their wishes and left himself behind. Or he did, until Bruce Wayne stopped in front of them.
He breathed in a startled little gasp and tasted the smog of city nights- the cold, the stars, the blood and dirt under fingernails. He heard an analytical voice noting his reactions, cataloging everything and everyone. There was a soft violence shaped like a man in front of him and he knew its name.
He felt the first letter form on his lips before his father stepped forward, jovial and plastic.
“Bruce! How lovely to see you!”
The conversation flowed after that in the way that all chatter was conducted here- purposefully, a battle of subtle barbs and politeness. For a man nicknamed Brucie, Bruce ( Batman!!! ) held his own well- obnoxious and idiotic, sure, but he never gave anything away. He took and took and Tim watched Janet’s smile grow sharper and sharper, her mind a blade aching for the soft tang of blood and tissue.
Her fingernails dug further and further into his clavicle, and he allowed himself to sink into the mind of Ms. Codsworth, who had gone through a recent divorce. She was planning to kill him off soon.
Good for her.
---
He knows who Batman is now, and so of course he knows Robin, knows him too closely for only having met him once. He watched his parents die from fifty different directions, after all.
He had felt their pain, their desperation, their love as they crashed into the ground. He had felt the galaxies of their thoughts go dark. The pain, then the silence.
He knows the scream that bubbled in Dick’s throat- the one that has never gone away. He knows it because he has the same one.
He’s almost ten now, and his range has only grown. He knows death in so many of its faces. He knows it from both sides of the gun. He knows desperation, deceit, devotion. He knows hunger, knows joy, knows bloodshed- knows them better than he knows himself.
In many ways Tim is not an individual any more, if he ever had been. In many ways Tim is a collective, the culmination of the people of Gotham and their experiences, motives, thoughts .
Tim is almost ten years old, but he’s never really been one person. He’s everyone. Or maybe he’s never really been anyone at all.
---
Tim begins to solve cases. It’s so easy, just to listen in. To connect dots, find patterns, to have confessions sung to him from across the city. It’s so easy. It doesn’t help him sleep at night.
He still dreams of the blood on the pavement, the screams echoing in his ears, a mantra of ‘why didn’t you stop them, you should’ve known, why did you leave me there, why wasn’t I important enough to save, whywhy whywhywhy ?’
He sends them to Commissioner Gordon, finding it easy enough to slip in past his firewalls. The security for the GCPD seems lax.
Still, there are only so many people you can save, only so many bodies you can keep from becoming corpses. Still, he does far too little.
---
Robin leaves. Another Robin comes. Robin leaves again. Robin dies. Tim does nothing to stop it.
He feels achingly guilty. After all, if anyone had known what was going to happen it would've been him. But he didn’t know. He didn’t know and now Jason is dead.
Tim is twelve and he has blood on his hands. Jason’s blends in just fine.
---
Bruce needs a Robin.
This is made clear in the graphs and PowerPoint Tim makes. He picks out the most soothing color combinations, cross referencing color theory and psychology to figure out how to make graphs of near deaths caused by Batman into something palatable, easy on the eyes and professional but still getting his point across.
It’s only when he finds himself knee deep in peer reviewed studies about the effect of the color red does he realize he may be distracting himself.
He forces himself to focus after that, settling on a soft blue (N ightwing colors something in him distantly notes).
When he finishes he flicks through the twenty three slides and deems himself ready to present. It will work. It has to.
---
Something in him knows it won’t work before he even steps out of the door but he breathes deep and does it anyways. He has to try.
A shameful, childish part of him considers for the briefest of moments just… becoming something that can hold Bruce's weight until a better Robin comes along. He knows he can’t. He knows that Robin is something bright and alive in a way Tim isn’t, in a way he hasn’t been for a long, long time, if he ever was like that at all.
Part of him mourns the possibility, the ‘if things were different’. The ‘if he was different’. Maybe in another timeline he could’ve been something great, but he is not that version of himself. He is just this- pale skin and knobby knees. A body that cannot contain what it is meant to hold. Something twisted and wrong at its foundation.
He knows that his mission is destined to fail, but he must do it anyway. The city is desperate, which means so is he.
The bus ride is a quiet affair- all but the truly desperate stick to themselves and pray that the Bat won’t cast its dead gaze upon them. Batman is a symbol, and that symbol has never been truly kind but it has always promised safety to those that needed it. It’s a tainted thing now- cold and cruel. Tim can’t let it go beyond what can be saved.
He says it like a mantra. He cannot let this continue. He cannot let the glue holding the balance together weaken any more.
He says it when he faces Dick’s door. He says it as the scent of despair, of anger and grief and longing teases at his nose.
He knows this won’t work, that it is cruel to ask, but he must do it anyways.
He knows it won’t work, but still he knocks.
The people of the city are frightened.
But so is Dick. He can see it in his eyes as he opens the door. Dick is afraid too. Dick is part of Gotham, for all that he’s done his best to separate himself from it.
A part of Tim, the part he locks away, weeps at what he is doing.
“Hello Dick,” he says, smiling in the way he always does- like he’s not really there. Or maybe he is. He is and he knows the darkness at the center of you. He reads the thought as it crosses Dick’s mind and can’t disagree with it. It is the truth. He knows Dick. And that is why he wavers.
“I’m sorry,” he says because he is. He’s sorry that Bruce has twisted him into knots. He’s sorry about the bruises. He’s sorry about what he’s going to ask him next.
Dick is staring at him. He’s tired, almost too tired to be afraid. Too tired to wonder how Tim tracked him down. He’s so, so tired.
Tim… Tim hesitates.
The question is cruel. The PowerPoint he prepared is cruel. Dick is so young, and Bruce is an adult. It should not be on a grieving child to fix a grieving man.
And so it won’t be.
And something inside Tim shifts, twists, settles into a new path. He stands there, looking at the eyebags bruised into Dick’s skin and finds the only things he can say are apologies.
“I… I’m sorry. And I hope you find the rest you need. I wish you nothing but the best and… he never should’ve hit you. He loves you, yes, but love isn’t… love shouldn’t hurt you like that. And I'm sorry it did. And I’m sorry it does. You deserve better, and I hope you find it.”
He pauses again. Watches as Dick’s mind dissolves into words too fast and contradictory to be anything but static.
“For what it’s worth… it shouldn’t be your job to fix the people you love. You’re still a kid. I’m sorry it’s been your job for far too long already.”
At that the static subsides into almost silence. Tim smiles, as sweetly as he knows how.
The thing is he knows Bruce. He knows Bruce too deeply to ever blame him. He knows what haunts him and what he pretends doesn’t haunt him but does anyways. Hauntings never ask for your consent, and trust him, he knows.
But… but he knows Dick too. Dick, barely nineteen. Dick, still a teenager. Dick, who just lost his brother. He knows Dick deserves more than trying to fit into a shed skin, deserves better than to be an emotional crutch.
He waves, turns to leave.
“How did you know?” and Dick… Dick is devastated and angry and scared and so he turns back.
“I know many things. I can’t help it. I’m sorry.” and he is. He wishes he could turn off this knowing, reach into the core of himself and flip a switch, but he can’t.
There’s a mother down the hall who wants to smother her infant into silence, to smother herself so she can keep her child safe. There’s a son who smiles through being called a daughter even as it cuts into him. There’s a man who has a gun and is so hungry he can’t see straight.
A symphony of fear and desire and regret follow him no matter where he goes. He has learned to allow it to sing through him, lest he lose his mind.
He blinks himself back to his body as best he can.
Dick is closer now, staring at him.
There is something searching in his eyes and Tim can hear the questions he wants to ask before Dick even knows them himself. He knows that he can’t answer any of them.
He steps back. Smiles again. Ignores the way Dick has started reaching out and allows himself to disappear into the night.
Dick gives chase, but Tim slinks onto the bus and loses him.
He lets himself mourn what could’ve been if he stayed- the comfort and rush of finally telling someone, anyone what he truly was. Of letting himself be truly seen. Of not being so alone. He allows a single wave of misery, and then he lets the dream go.
He’s got work to do.