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March, Dick thinks with a disdainful sniff, sucks. It doesn’t matter that it’s his birth month, not when it has rained every single day since the calendar changed. It patters a constant white noise against the cement, against the windows, and against the worn awning of the abandoned bodega as Nightwing shimmies his way in through a partially boarded window.
Two weeks into the bitter and gloomy month and Dick can’t stand patrolling on foot any longer. The amount of times he’s peeled off his suit to reveal pruny skin can’t be good, and it’s the thought of being permanently wrinkly at the age of almost-twenty-six that drives him to do something about it.
Dick doesn’t have a car. It was totaled months ago after he’d gotten a little too bold on an icy road while chasing some perpetrators. He has not gotten around to getting a replacement because that meant going to the cave, and Dick needed space.
That unfortunate fact brings him to where he is now: wheeling his Wingcycle through the back door of the building. Water sloshes as he steps out into the alley, the streets are flooded to about an inch already, and though the rain has died down to more of a misting, Nightwing knows it’s far from over. The forecast is predicting near constant rainfall for another week.
He needs a vehicle with a roof, and Batman has a decent collection that Dick is certain he can borrow from. Hopefully he won’t even have to ask. It’s bordering on four in the morning, Batman and Robin’s patrol should have ended hours ago. Dick can imagine Alfred already herded the two to bed. He’s not trying to avoid his adoptive father and youngest brother, but since reclaiming his role as Nightwing, Dick is desperate for independence again. He visits the manor constantly as a civilian, but when it comes to capes, Nightwing is keeping his distance.
It seems all the other ex-Robins are too. Hood has been off with the Outlaws for some time now, and Dick isn’t even sure what Tim has been up to.
Probably something cooler than this, He thinks with a sullen pout. Driving a 2000CC motorcycle at ninety-two miles per an hour in the rain doesn’t sound like something the third Robin would do—
No, Dick’s lips thin into a discontent line as the deprecating thought hits, Tim would go faster.
Though Dick had always hoped that the Robins would learn from the mistakes of their predecessors, it seems the next is more eager than the last to jump into the footpath of peril. Not long ago Red Robin did let himself be shoved off the Wayne Tower by Ra’s Al Ghul. On top of that, the last patrol Nightwing had read a report on, the kid had decided to throw himself into the middle of a turf war armed with nothing but his Bo staff to save a civilian man who’d gotten caught up in the gunfire. Batman was unable to check the kid for injuries as Red Robin scampered off as soon as the civilian was safe, but nothing ever came from the incident. The kid didn’t even receive a signature Bat-lecture, as far as Nightwing is aware.
There had also been that time Nightwing had decided to visit Gotham back in February, a cheeky Valentine's night surprise, but had come across Red Robin in a solo brawl with five other masked robbers.
The memory causes Dick’s hand to accidentally rev the throttle, jolting and wobbling his bike into a hydroplane. Forcing himself to relax despite the rush of adrenaline that stabs into his chest, he lets the bike fly across the highway until the back wheel rights itself, then flutters the brakes until he’s cruising at a much safer speed.
Coming across Red Robin with three stab wounds and a gun pressed against his head, egging the robbers to shoot him, wasn’t how Dick had been expecting to spend that patrol. After knocking the gun out of the robber’s hand with a batarang, sending the bullet into one of the other robber’s feet instead of Tim’s head, Nightwing subsequently mopped the alley with all five of them.
“Reverse psychology!” Red Robin gave a sheepish grin when Nightwing whirled on him, the teen’s hands up in a placating manner. “They get confused when you tell them to shoot you. Survival rate goes up thirty eight percent if you tell them to kill you.”
Dick had been taken so off guard by the whole incident that he never thought to question his brother’s excuse, too stunned to do anything but drag Red Robin to Leslie’s. It wasn’t until a week later when curiosity hit Dick. He spent hours researching before concluding that Tim had pulled that thirty-eight percent out of his ass. There wasn’t even any research done on such a scenario, and he didn’t like what that entailed.
In hindsight, Dick should have realized the worst of Tim’s expedition as Red Robin was far from over. If Dick was kinder to himself, he may have reasoned that the whole fiasco with Ra’s Al Ghul and the League truly felt like the end of the nightmare that had followed in Bruce’s absence, but things had been going well. Bruce was alive, Damian had his father back, and Dick could forget the burden that came with the responsibility of the Dark Knight. Too well.
When it comes to the Bats, nothing is ever well.
Dick should have known better.
At least, that’s the thought that runs through Dick’s head as he peels into the cave, pulls off his helmet, and spots a figure hunched over the batcomputer monitors. At that moment, Dick realizes he hasn’t seen Tim’s actual face since his freefall off of Wayne Tower. He’s seen Red Robin a handful of times, but not the boy under the suit.
For the past few months, Tim has been rather elusive. Dick is a bit embarrassed to admit that he didn’t question Tim’s distance after the younger returned to Gotham with a date on Bruce’s next time-jump and a handful of artifacts saturated in Omega Particles.
When Dick quit Robin, he left the Bat to go out on his own. When Jason… Well, after Jason’s time as Robin, he also left the Bat to go out on his own. So when Tim lost the mantle, he figured the baby bird was ready to spread his own wings — and it seemed that way with Tim’s solo destruction of every known League base, outwitting the Demon Head himself, gathering enough evidence to bring a presumed dead man back to life, and bringing Jack Drake’s murderer to justice.
Despite his impressive accomplishments, something is wrong with the kid. If not for the way he sits in complete darkness sans the computer screens, staring blankly at the single source of light, his eyes are sunken in, dark rings making them look bruised, and his cheeks are hollowed out. Tim is emaciated, the fact hits like a punch to the gut. The Red Robin domino hides it well, and Dick is beginning to wonder if Tim specifically designed the mask to cover his cheeks for that exact reason.
What makes matters worse is that Tim doesn’t even seem to notice Dick is there at all. Didn’t startle when the motorcycle thundered its way into the cave, tires screeching to a stop. Tim coughs after a few seconds, ragged deep hacks that wrack through his whole body, then he sucks in a wheezy breath, types two letters on his mission report, before going back to staring at the blinking cursor.
“How many days have you been awake?” Dick hollers as he sheds his rain gear, nearly braining himself on the limestone as he tries to take his motorcycle boots off. “Or better yet, how much caffeine have you consumed in the past twenty-four hours?”
“Huh?” The kid twitches at the motion of Dick stumbling his way out of his nylon pants, blinking several times as his eyes finally fix on his older brother, “Oh, hi Dick. What are you doing here?”
“I could ask you the same thing.” Dick grins teasingly, “Curfew was three hours ago, kiddo.”
At Tim’s lack of response, Dick’s smirk falters and he allows himself to bashfully scratch the back of his head, “It’s been raining for practically three weeks, Wingcycle’s not cutting it, I’m stealing one of the batcars.”
“It’s been raining for three weeks.” Tim repeats, the corners of his lips twitching in an aborted microexpression. Dick wonders if the kid had meant to say it as a question, but with his tone so flat, it’s hard to tell.
“Um, yeah. It— it has.” Dick swallows, shifting from one foot to the other, suddenly unsure of where to guide the conversation. His cheerful facade is dying with no energy to feed it, and part of him wants to cut the small-talk and go straight for the jugular, ask the kid what’s wrong, but emotionally opening up and Bats have never gone hand-in-hand.
Dick isn’t eager to start an argument at quarter-to-four in the morning, but Tim keeps staring at him, or maybe his eyes are just pointed in Dick’s vicinity because the glazed over fog of his blue irises tells Dick that the kid is somewhere else. He’s not even blinking, doesn’t even look like he’s breathing, and it’s eerie. The stillness is enough to make a statue look inadequate.
“Tim…” Dick steels himself for the immediate rebuke, “are you okay?”
It’s quiet for a long time, too long. Quiet enough to hear the rain picking up again, thundering what has to be a good fifty feet above their heads. Quiet enough to hear the bats flapping between the stalactites, chittering and squabbling amongst themselves. Quiet enough for Dick to hear himself shift with unease.
Maybe it isn’t so quiet after all, but Tim’s taciturn is an overpowering silence.
Dick’s concern triples in a matter of exactly eighteen seconds, sending him forward. As he gets closer, he’s able to take in more of Tim’s state and his stomach twists.
The Drakes have always been terribly lean, considered skeletons by many of Gotham’s socialites. Tim had followed in their genetic footsteps, even after his training as Robin. Dick still remembers one of his first Galas, where Mrs. Monrach had leaned between Bruce and his nine-year old self, reeking of red wine and cigarettes, and made a shallow joke about the Drakes having an eating disorder. At the time, the joke went far over Dick’s head and left him deeply confused, but as he got older, the jibes eventually made sense. It’d been the one thing all the elites could prey on when it came to the Drakes, because when actions couldn’t be attacked, then appearances became next. That had been the entire point of the Brucie Wayne persona, because no one would go digging for dirt if they thought they already found it. On the other hand, the Drakes hadn’t been able to squander their reputation in the same manner, nor did they seem too bothered that their family’s sole flaw was being too thin.
However, a skinny body is far from one that is malnourished, and as of now, Tim’s body is taking the latter. The Red Robin suit is folding around spaces that should be tight, and upon closer inspection, Dick sees the haphazard stitching all over the Kevlar. Dick’s heart stutters over the fact that if Red Robin’s suit had been torn open, then there wasn’t anything to stop Tim from also getting torn open. He wonders how awful the patchwork on the kid’s skin is, if it’s noticeable enough on the suit. For how methodical Tim is in all of his work, patching up his own injuries oftentimes resulted in precariously dumping isopropyl alcohol on open wounds, slapping on butterfly bandages, and keeping the worst of things together with shoddy gauze wraps or god-forbid dental floss.
It’s not until Dick’s last five approaching steps that Tim actually starts to track him, head craning up as his brows tick in confusion at Dick’s sudden proximity.
“What?” Tim croaks before ducking his head to rub his eyes. His fingers are trembling but the kid doesn’t seem to notice.
Dick clasps a hand around Tim’s shoulder, trying to ignore how small the kid feels, and squats down to keep visual on Tim’s face.
“Are you hurt?” He asks, failing to hide the worry in his tone. Tim has never been a fan of receiving any sort of concern, often becoming prickly and slinking away like a grumpy cat if he gets a whiff of worry in his direction. So when Tim just shakes his head, alarm bells start blaring in Dick’s mind.
Lips thinning, Tim looks like he’s about to argue as he takes in the sudden tension that Dick is undoubtedly showing, and for a brief moment a spark of hope swells in Dick’s chest that Tim will snap back with snarky refutation.
Instead of a biting remark, the hope turns to ash as Tim mumbles,“I— I’m just… tired.”
“Are you sure? No injuries?” Dick presses, partly trying to get a rise out of the younger. Anything to see Tim wielding his signature snark.
Tim shakes his head, and Dick knows the kid is lying, because Tim is trembling in intervals, full body shudders that aren’t from the cold but from pain. His breathing is measured, but it’s a fraction too deep, he exhales too sharply and swallows hard. Dick might not be the greatest detective in the world, but he was his protégé.
“Okay.” Dick sighs, “Well how about I take you home? You look too tired to drive.”
Tim stares at him, and Dick is getting more concerned by the second over how long it takes for the kid to reply.
“No,” Tim eventually says, “that’s okay. I’ll just have some coffee and I’ll be good.”
He reaches for the mug on the desk, a mug not steaming with dark liquid, but holding a bunch of pens. Tim doesn’t seem to notice the difference and tries to drink it anyways, causing the pens to spill out and clatter all over the floor. It takes a second for the perplexity to reach Tim’s face before he sets the mug back down, not even attempting to clean up the mess.
“I have to write this report; I don’t want to keep you waiting here.” Tim bargains, but makes no move to start typing again. He sits with his arms dangling and slouches so far back in the batchair that the Drakes are surely rolling in their graves over their son’s posture.
“I think whatever you have to write can wait until you get some beauty sleep.” Dick counters, knowing full well that reports were not as mandatory as they used to be.
Sure, they were a helpful goldmine of information to the team, especially for a worry-wart like Bruce, but with cowl footage now in all of their gear, reports had become more of a thing of habit rather than something necessary for a mission. Of course, geniuses like Tim and Bruce acted like reports were more important than breathing.
“But Killer Croc escaped Arkham tonight.”
“Of course,” Dick groans in frustration, dragging a hand over his face. Tim is not going anywhere if the report involves a class one rogue. Where is Bruce when you need him? “Scootch over; let me write it. You’re typing, like, one letter a minute.”
Dick shoves his way into the batchair, the younger grumbling protests but moving over all the same. If the kid is a little stiff and favoring his left side as he moves, Dick doesn’t mention it, but catalogs the information to address once Tim is a little more willing to focus on himself.
Begrudgingly, Tim begins to mumble about his patrol and Dick’s fingers fly across the keyboard. As he talks, Tim loosens up, his weight leaning more and more into Dick’s side as he reports.
Considering all the rain, it was only a matter of time before Killer Croc decided to break out of Arkham and start rampaging the flooded streets. Tim had been keeping a close eye on the asylum and Blackgate, as the rain was causing enough structural damage that a rogue would inevitably try to take advantage of it.
Unfortunately, Arkham kept quiet about the flooding in their lower levels, and Waylon Jones used that to his advantage. The exact trajectory of his escape remains a mystery, but the crocodilian man used the overflowing sewers to propel himself straight into Park Row before Red Robin could do a single thing about it. By the time Tim caught up, he came across the half-reptilian convening with Black Mask. It put a major monkey wrench in what was already going to be a difficult mission, with the entirety of the city now being a playground not only for Croc, but also for whatever Black Mask had planned to use him for.
Tim breaks off at certain points, contemplating what to say next either with the bite of his lip or a hard swallow. He makes an aborted gesture to his right side a few times, as if remembering that he got hit there. It’s easy to deduce that the kid got caught and attacked by Waylon, and possibly by Black Mask’s goons too, but he omits the information.
It takes a good twenty minutes to finish the report, because not only did Tim tail Killer Croc and Black Mask from Park Row, through the Bowery, and all the way to a cemetery on the outskirts of Burnley before getting caught, but he also helped respond to the scene of a head-on collision, brought a hypothermic street cat to an emergency veterinarian hospital, stopped a moped thief, and helped a young lady back to her flat after her boyfriend abandoned her in the rain halfway through their date.
While the other activities are considered mild for a Gotham vigilante, the idea that Tim did all of it while sporting injuries from his run-in with two rogues makes Dick waste no time in submitting the report and shutting off the computer.
“Okay, let’s go.” Dick shoots up from the chair, tripping over the dozen pens still scattered all over the floor. He kicks the offending tripping hazard under the desk before offering his hand to Tim, who begrudgingly allows himself to be yanked to his feet.
He staggers when his legs try to take his own weight, and although Dick moves to support his younger brother, Tim straightens and begins to make his way over to the garage.
The kid holds up an incredible front, his facial features soften into neutrality and his body sets with an air of confidence. As impressive as it is, Dick wishes his brother didn’t always have to feel like he needed to put up a facade.
It’s not lost on Dick that he pulls the same trick with a different mask, he’s had enough therapy to learn that most people in his profession deal with trauma, and more often than not they learn to bury their own emotions to cope. But Tim has always been that way, enough to not even admit when he has a paper cut. It’s something that’s been ingrained since before Tim became Robin, so Dick chalks Tim’s resolution to be a consequence of being raised as a Gotham elite more than it had to do with his nighttime activities.
They make it to the garage in silence, and Dick decides on an inconspicuous older Mercedes model, no doubt modified for missions where an obvious Batmobile would blow any sort of cover. There’s the slightest bit of grumbling from Tim as he plops himself into the passenger seat, painfully similar to the way Batman grouses, but instead of sitting like a statue in some sort of emotion-lacking form of a temper tantrum, Tim just slouches against the window with a huff.
The silence continues well into their commute, but Tim becomes more and more restless as Dick keeps heading south on the Bristol Turnpike.
As he passes yet another bridge that would lead them into Gotham, Tim breaks. “Uh, Dick, you missed the turn for Belfry.”
“Belfry?” Dick hums, barely able to keep up his act of nonchalance at the fact that Tim has been living alone in the heart of Old Gotham. His grip tightens on the steering wheel. “Is that where you’ve been holed up?”
Tim shrinks on himself with another huff, keeping tense but refusing to glance Dick’s way. They pass Craig Bridge, the last road that could lead them to the island without needing to turn around, and Tim seems to get the message. Dick is not dropping Tim off at his home, he’s bringing the kid to his home in Blüdhaven.
Another ten minutes pass before Tim seems to unwind yet curl into himself in the same movement. He whines miserably, “I thought you were bringing me back to my place. This is kidnapping, Dick.”
“I know you’re hurt.” Dick drops his airy act, giving the kid a stern glance before dragging his focus on the dark wet road.
Tim flinches, jaw snapping around a refute that won’t come as Dick barrels over him, “I’m not gonna drop you off just so you can sew yourself back up with dental floss. I’m not as stupid as I pretend to be, baby bird — I was Batman.”
That strikes a nerve.
“And I was Robin!” Tim snarls with the flash of his teeth, “I know you didn’t think I was very cut out for the position, but stitching yourself up is literally a basic requirement for the job. I’d like to think I at least got that right.”
There’s a sharp twist in Dick’s chest, and he goes to reply but he’s not sure what to say, and his brother’s name barely leaves his mouth before the kid goes pale and deep coughs wrack his body. Tim’s hand flies to press against the right side of his belly and he doubles over as the coughing jars what is so blatantly an injury. He whimpers around a hack, shuddering, and Dick hates that he can see the glimmer of a tear sliding down the boy’s cheek.
Dick debates pulling over as the coughing fit stretches over the span of a minute, Tim barely able to get a breath in between his gasps of pain, but it eventually sputters out until Tim slumps hard against the passenger door, taking deep gulps of air. He shakily removes his hand from his side, and they both inspect the thick layer of blood crusted over his palm.
“Shit kid,” Dick breathes, debates pulling over still, but knows that spending more time in the car won’t help anything. “We’re ten more minutes out, think you can hold on?”
It takes a moment for Tim to gather the breath, he sniffles through his congested nose as he grunts and nods.
The rest of the drive is in silence. Dick parks the car a block away from his apartment; there’s nothing closer.
He apologizes to Tim as they trek towards the building, but Tim just scoffs. He tries to keep up his poker face, but the pain eventually slows him down halfway there, and Tim gradually falls to a crawling pace once they actually get into the building. Dick tries multiple times to take some of his younger brother’s weight, offers to carry him, but Tim stubbornly refuses each time.
It’s not until they get to the elevator and find that it’s under maintenance that Tim sags in defeat and allows Dick to carry him the four floors up to his apartment. The kid is terribly light and bony against Dick’s back, thin arms wrapped loosely around his neck as he piggy-backs Tim. Mercifully, Dick decides not to say anything yet. Tim already looks on the verge of losing his nerve over Dick technically kidnapping him.
“Do you need help taking off your suit?” Dick asks as he sets Tim on his couch.
Tim shakes his head, jaw set, “I can do that myself.” He begins to shift, unclasping the bandolier around his chest.
Dick turns to his bathroom, “I’ll get the med kit, then.”
Tim doesn’t reply, not that Dick expects him to. He treks down the hall and fishes out the medkit under his bathroom sink. It’s less of a medkit and more like an EMT bag, stuffed to the brim with supplies that cannot be found over-the-counter.
He makes his way back to the living room and tries not to show his shock as his gaze finds Tim’s upper body, but his steps still stutter and Tim looks up with a scowl. The kid’s still wearing his thermal undershirt, but it’s raised enough to reveal a stab wound. It’s shaped against the top of his right hip bone, as if whoever stabbed him had tried to drag the blade across his belly but got blocked by the bone. It’s still bleeding sluggishly despite the fact that Tim had gotten the wound hours ago, and that means that Tim had to have lost a lot of blood. It’s no wonder the kid can’t seem to process half the things around him.
Dick takes a deep breath as he sits on the coffee table to face his younger brother, slipping on latex gloves.
“It’s not that bad.” Tim mumbles as Dick leans in and prods the kid’s shirt up a bit higher to take a better look at his brother’s injury.
It’s bad; bad enough for Dick to contemplate hauling Tim to the hospital, and that fact makes Dick less exasperated by his brother’s insistent downplaying and instead the man finds himself overtaken by a sense of sadness. “Buddy,” he sighs, rests his fingers parallel to the stab wound, and pulls the severed skin a bit to see how deep it goes, “this is bad.”
The world holds its breath for a moment as Dick reorients himself. Tim is stiff, and Dick can’t tell if it’s out of pain or discomfort, but there is a flash of confusion that contorts the kid’s face for a fraction of a second.
Dick opens his mouth, but nothing comes out. A reassurance and a reprimand battle in his mind, before the man snaps his jaw shut then leans back to rifle through his medical bag.
“I don’t get why you’re making this into a big deal.” Tim huffs around a grimace, crossing his arms and trying to relax despite the way his body tenses as Dick smears lidocaine across his wound and uses a gloved finger to massage the local anesthetic into his flesh.
Too focused on tending to Tim’s stab wound, Dick doesn’t bother to take in the disgruntled pout on his younger brother’s face. “I don’t know why you aren’t making this a big deal Tim — you’ve been stabbed!” Dick lectures as he unwraps a sterile suture kit, “I mean, in the past three months alone I’ve seen you put yourself into extremely dangerous situations and not bother asking anyone to help. Ra’s almost killed you, those thugs almost killed you, and now Black Mask’s goons almost killed you. I’m starting to think you want to die.”
There’s a gap of silence as Dick’s words seem to sink into Tim before he defiantly grumbles, “I’m not.”
While Dick had not actually been concerned by his own accusation, it’s Tim’s weak denial that dislodges a thick wave of fear that knocks a sick sense of dread against his stomach.
Pride, ego, the unwillingness to admit that he needed help, holding a grudge from Dick’s decision to pass Robin to Damien, those had been the reasons Dick assumed Tim was doing this to himself. It had to be the reason.
“Sure,” Dick covers his terror with a sneer, “ you don’t get injured as Robin, but the second you go out on your own suddenly you're black and blue. I get you’re upset about losing Robin, but letting yourself get hurt and not asking for help just to get back at me is an asshole move, Tim.”
“What are you talking about?” Tim jolts back, smacking Dick’s hands away from his injury mid-suture. The forceps fall, it yanks at the wire and blood oozes from the wound, but either the lidocaine is doing its job or Tim is too angry to care, “I got hurt all the time as Robin; it’s just that I can take care of myself.”
Dick snorts and gestures to all of Tim, “And this is taking care of yourself?”
Tim snarls like a wild animal, teeth gnashing, the whites of his eyes stark in the dim light of the apartment, “Shut the fuck up, Dick. I don’t know why you’re choosing now to make me feel guilty for literally nothing!” As Tim yells, he grabs at the forceps dangling from the wire clinging around his wound and begins to knot the sutures himself.
“Tim—“
“Don’t make me feel guilty over how none of you bothered to ever care for me.” He knots a suture so tight that it stretches the holes in his flesh that the wires are weaved through. “I get I’m not like the rest of you, I get that Bruce chose you, and he chose Jason, and he chose Damian, and no one wanted me so I had to be useful, but you don’t have to rub it in my face like that.
After precariously clipping his finished suture, he moves on the the next and jabs the needle in himself too far from the previous stitch, the wound gapes and bleeds more, “You don’t have to remind me that I have to stitch my own wounds, and I have to deal with Ivy’s Pollen alone, and I have to inject my own antidote for Fear Gas before I lose all sense of reality or else I’m fucked. Stop pretending like I had a choice to not do everything for myself, because none of you have ever given a shit about me!”
At this point, Tim is more-so mutilating his abdomen than sewing it back up. His shaky hands stab the needle into himself multiple times on the next suture attempt before he’s able to ease it through and weave another knot. He’s on his sixth stitch, stab wound a complete bleeding mess as if Dick hadn’t flushed it clean with saline, and Tim doesn’t care.
“Stop!” Dick grabs the forceps back after Tim finishes another stitch and ignores the way his voice cracks, “What are you talking about!?”
There’s a lump forming in Dick’s throat, because what Tim said can’t be true. Because if it is true then everything is so, so much worse than Dick could have imagined. It meant that Bruce chose to resent Tim for taking Jason’s place rather than protecting the kid who gave Robin back to Batman. It meant that Dick cared more about distancing himself from Bruce’s anger and Jason’s death rather than making sure Tim was safe. It meant that Jason saw Tim as his replacement, an intruder, more than his own little brother. It meant that Damian wanted Tim out of the picture.
Dick hates the part of him that knows that has been the truth all along. He tries to block out the fact like he’s always done, except it’s harder than ever to ignore. It had always been easier to assume Tim was okay, always able to bounce back up, never hurt for long, that he didn’t need the same amount of attention as all of Bruce’s other sons because he had his own rich family to dote over him. Tim was the kid that bad things didn’t happen to, and Dick had assumed, despite everything, that Timothy Drake was always cared for. That he was okay.
And that assumption is blowing up spectacularly in his face.
Tim needs at least three more sutures, but both of their hands are shaking far too much. Dick takes a deep breath, tries to swallow the lump in his throat, and tosses the suture kit back in the first aid bag with a clatter. Compression bandages will have to do until they both calm down.
His younger brother keeps painfully quiet, a slight frown on his face that reminds Dick of the way Janet Drake used to carry herself in public. Stiff, a pursed lip, not looking anyone in the eye because she was too busy looking over everyone. While Janet looked regal and confident, Tim somehow carries something akin to a thousand yard stare, like if he doesn’t look at anything, then it can’t hurt him.
“Tim,” Dick tries, hesitantly resting his hands on his younger brother’s shoulders.
The contact kickstarts Tim, he’s halfway to the door by the time Dick even realizes Tim isn’t on the couch anymore. He’s staggering for his shoes, grabs one with slick bloody fingers that slip over the rubber sole and the shoe bounces back on the floor.
“Tim!” Dick clasps the kid’s forearm before he can grab his shoes again and spins him back around, “Talk to me, please.”
Tim shakes his arm loose of Dick’s hold, irritation pulling at his brows as he opens his mouth to tell his brother off, but to both of their dismay, Tim can’t seem to push any words out. He clamps his teeth around the beginning of a whine, then takes an aborted step back. In a flash, his face morphs into pure anguish.
“I think—” Tim chokes before he can even say what he wants to say. He has to take several sharp gasps to smother down the sob that’s threatening to take over, and he blinks rapidly to cut back the tears that are so obviously trying to slip out.
“I think I’m trying to die.”
Admitting it is the catalyst that cracks Tim’s resolve. Within seconds he's on the verge of hyperventilating, jerky inhales that shake his whole body as he tries to keep himself from making a sound. Tears escape as he claws at his sides, bunching up his shirt in a heart-wrenching attempt to hug himself.
Why? Is the first thought to flit through Dick’s mind, desperate for a solution for that answer, but he knows why. He just didn’t want to see it. The reality of it all hits him the same way Wally used to collide into him at break-neck speed, chopping out his breath and making his stomach swoop down.
Tim lost Bruce and lost the rest of his family in the process of bringing the man back. Tim lost Robin, his parents, his friends— And maybe some of them came back but the wound of the loss is still there. The wound has been bleeding for months, nearly a year. It’s festering, rotting, because he’s been so alone.
Dick finds himself suddenly on a tightrope, knows that whatever he does next has to be right, that if he does or says the wrong thing then Tim could fracture in a way that can’t be fixed — if it’s not already too late. Tim might finish what he’s been trying to do, and Dick won’t be able to live with himself if he messed this up. The weight of it makes words die in his throat. Despite living his life diving headfirst into danger every chance he could get, Dick hesitates.
He looks at the floor, down to his feet, and wishes someone else was in his place. It’s a selfish thought, and with it Dick realizes he cannot imagine anyone in Tim’s life more capable of handling this situation than himself.
Not an emotionally constipated Bruce. Not a volatile Jason who's been off with the Outlaws for months. Not Stephanie, who allowed Tim to grieve for months over her faked death. And god forbid Damian had to handle talking his sworn rival off the edge. Cass… maybe, but she’s been traveling on missions around the world since before Bruce even disappeared.
It’s not fair to Tim that all he’s got is a family who has proved that they can and will turn their backs on him, even after Tim had given them everything. It’s even less fair to Tim that the only person who can help him in this moment, is the person who chose to replace him.
“I—I’m sorry.” Tim admits in a wavering breath.
When Dick looks up, all the hesitation evaporates. He sees his little brother trying so hard not to cry even after admitting he wants to die, apologizing for it. His sunken eyes are glassy, fogged over and unfocused.
Dick closes the distance between them in a single stride and yanks Tim into a crushing hug. The kid freezes for a moment, long enough for a bolt of anxiety to shoot through Dick, afraid he made the wrong move. The anxiety melts as Tim does, saved from dropping to the floor only by Dick’s steel hold, and the younger lets out a choppy sob.
It’s a small thing, so strangled that Dick knows Tim is still trying not to cry, but the kid can’t hold himself together anymore. His body shudders and heaves, cries growing louder and less strained until Tim is fully sobbing into Dick’s chest. Dick’s shirt becomes wet with tears and snot, but he can’t bring himself to care.
“Please don’t apologize for this.” Dick begs his brother, bringing a hand up to massage his fingers through Tim’s hair. “You have nothing to be sorry for.”
“I—I’m just so tired, I’m sorry,” Tim barrels over Dick anyway, struggling to shake his head from where it’s squished between Dick’s hand and chest. “I’m really sorry.”
Tears trek down Dick’s own cheeks, “It’s okay. It’s gonna be okay, I’m gonna fix this.” He tries to sooth, failing to hold back the quaver in his voice. He doesn’t know who he’s trying to reassure more.
Tim shakes his head again, but he at least stops apologizing. Dick knows it’s only because he’s too out of breath to do anything but cry.
By the time Tim has exhausted himself to the point of hiccups, body still trying to sob but not having the energy to do so anymore, Dick decides to take them back to the couch. It’s an awkward journey, Dick doesn’t want to pull away and Tim doesn’t seem to have the strength to pick up his own legs, so the result is more like dragging Tim across the living room.
Dick settles down onto the cushions and tries to be mindful of his brother’s still open wound. Tim is clinging much like a leech, uncaring of anything except staying latched on; Dick knows Tim would be red in the face if this had been at any other time. Tim was never much of a cuddler, becoming flustered by mere side hugs and flinching from most contact, but with the way Tim is clinging to Dick now, face digging into the man’s neck, Dick’s realizing that Tim’s discomfort with touch may not have been because he didn’t want it.
It hurts to realize how much Dick had misunderstood his little brother, and now witnessing what that misjudgment caused Tim.
Dick runs his hands along Tim’s jutted spine, the minutes tick by until even the rain calms down. It’s so quiet that the eldest is almost certain Tim has fallen asleep, but he can feel the flutter of lashes against his collarbone telling him otherwise, even if Tim has stopped crying.
“You remember when we first met, it was in this apartment?” Dick starts, nudging the kid for attention.
Tim doesn’t respond, though he can feel a small hitch in his breath. Dick thinks of shutting up, letting Tim rest because he’s lost a decent amount of blood, but Dick feels like not saying anything at all would be worse. He needs to fix this, and he wishes he knew how.
“A twelve year old knocking on my door blackmailing me with my biggest secret — one of the world’s biggest secrets.” Dick huffs amusedly, “You blew my mind from day one. Even when I said no, you took matters into your own hands and you fixed us. A twelve year old, fixing Batman and Nightwing like it’s his responsibility. Saving Gotham like it’s his responsibility.”
Tim shrinks into himself like it’s an accusation that he should be ashamed of, and Dick almost stops it there because he’s messing it up—He knows he can’t stop though, not if Tim thinks Dick is being ungrateful.
Not if Tim wants to die.
“You knew how to do the right thing when no one else did, not even Bruce. You helped everyone, and we kept taking everything from you because somewhere along the way we stopped seeing you as a kid.”
“Not a kid.” Tim mumbles through Dick’s shirt. It’s almost funny how quick and begrudgingly Tim is to correct him, but Dick knows better than to find it so at this moment.
“You are a kid though. Everyone keeps pretending you aren’t because it’s convenient for them. Fuck, Tim, you’ve been trying to get people to care about you your whole life by giving them everything you have, because that’s what you’ve been taught to do, isn’t it?” Dick comes to the conclusion as he says it. He might not be the greatest detective in the world, but sometimes he sees things even Bruce can’t.
“You were always alone, your parents left you for months and you thought if you were good enough they’d come back.” Tim fully flinches this time, nails digging into Dick’s back. “You thought everything was your responsibility, that you had to take care of yourself, that you had to take care of us—”
“That’s not true!” Tim yells, lifting his reddened face to give Dick a glare. Tears are tumbling down his flushed cheeks again, gathering in fat globs by his chin.
Dick doesn’t mean to sound so exasperated when he says, “Then what is true, Tim? Because I feel like I’m hitting the nail on the head for once.”
“You said it yourself, I—I know better. I knew who you guys were, I knew how to take care of myself, I knew how to fix things! Was I supposed to just let bad things happen because I’m young? You make it sound like everything I did was wrong.” Tim is pulling away from Dick now, and Dick feels like he’s losing him. Without meaning to, he tightens his hold, terrified of letting Tim go.
“Bruce knows shit too and look where that got him!” Dick barks out with an intensity usually reserved for his arguments with the mentioned man, and Tim goes absolutely rigid. His eyes are huge, staring at Dick like he’s the fucking Joker, and his mouth is gaped open like everything he was thinking of saying just flew out the window.
Terror sloshes in his chest, and Dick takes a deep breath. He makes a conscious effort to ease his hold on Tim, hating the way he feels like he’s letting him go. The kid, it seems, is too stunned to move away. Dick wishes he could kick himself in the face, because to Tim, Bruce hasn’t done anything wrong. Tim made sure of that when he became Robin.
Dick takes a deep breath. “Bruce knows so much, but Jason still got killed. He still drove me away, he still got lost in the timestream, and now he’s losing you too. He still makes mistakes because knowing things doesn’t make you in control. You can’t control everything.”
Tim’s face twists into something vicious, and Dick would be delighted that his younger brother was fighting back instead of reverting back to the lifeless husk he’d been in the cave if the conversation had been about anything else, “What was I supposed to do? Let Batman kill people? Or kill himself? Let him die in the timeline? Let you all drift apart?”
Shit-shit-shit—
“Are you saying I shouldn't have done that? Are you saying I didn’t have control over any of that? Are you saying I should’ve stayed home and never been Robin?” His voice is breaking no matter how callous Tim tries to make himself, breath rushing out of him and eyes moving rapidly as he seems to rapidly connect dots he shouldn’t be able to. “Do you think I never should’ve been part of the family? It makes sense, considering you fired me from the one thing I had!”
“NO!” Dick gasps, chokes, “God, no! I could never regret you, you’re my little brother; I love you so fucking much and I’m so sorry I never show you that I do. I wanted you to be my equal, I wanted you to be my Nightwing but I messed it up. I’m so sorry, baby bird.”
Tim, for all Dick wishes he’d believe him, looks like he doesn’t. It yanks something terrified in his heart, because if Tim doesn’t think Dick loves him after this, then Dick might as well start digging his brother’s grave while he’s at it. They meet each other’s eyes for a second, a swollen tired blue on watery blue, Dick holds it with every fiber of his being, desperate for his little brother to understand him. “What I’m trying to say is that you have made us a priority over yourself, and you’re hurting yourself because of that.” Dick says gently.
Tim crumples a little, “I don’t know what else to do. You’re all I have, if I can’t— if I’m not useful to you, then everything I’ve ever done, everything I am, is gone. I’m nothing without you, and you— you guys barely care now. What happens when I don’t give you anything?”
If that doesn’t break Dick’s heart, he’s not sure what will. It crushes him, to see how unloved Dick made Tim feel. How unloved the family has made Tim feel. “You don’t have to prove your usefulness to me anymore, okay? I love you no matter what, no conditions. It shouldn’t have come to this for me to do better, and I am so sorry it did, but I will do everything I can to make it up to you. I never meant to make you feel this way.”
Tim doesn’t say anything, but he ducks his head and Dick can recognize the flash of guilt in his little brother’s expression. Dick scoffs lightly, because it’s such a Tim thing to do, where his eyebrows twitch and he catches his bottom lip between his teeth to chew at the dead skin.
“Whatcha thinkin’ there, Timmers?” The imitation of Jason Todd wipes the guilty expression right off Tim’s face with an unamused scowl. Dick’s lips tick into a smile, and he suddenly wants nothing more than to have the kid back in his arms.
“I’m manipulating you.” Is not what Dick expects to come out of Tim’s mouth, but it does. Of course, Dick thinks bitterly, of course Tim feels like he’s manipulating this. The only way Tim ever gets what he wants is when he has to manipulate people to do it.
“Oh, are you now?” Dick decides to play off the rush of anger with a lighthearted laugh. He doesn’t manage to smother it all down.
Tim nods like he’s some toddler admitting to sticking their hand in a cookie jar. His eyebrows are knitted and he’s still chewing his bottom lip with wet eyes like he might start sobbing all over again.
Dick tries not to let the hurt show in his voice, “Why do you think that?”
“I told you all this shit and now you think you need to take care of me. I’m being a burden!” The younger shouts, tears brimming in his eyes once again.
Dick can’t help it. He flicks the kid’s forehead and Tim goes cross eyed. “First off, you’re not a burden, okay?”
Tim, the stubborn bastard, doesn’t believe it. With a hum of disagreement he averts his gaze, fiddling absentmindedly with one of the belt loops of Dick’s jeans.
Dick draws in a very steady breath, counts up to eight seconds, and exhales until he has no more air left in his lungs. “You watched Bruce try to kill himself and you took care of him, didn’t you?”
Tim stiffens, “Yes.”
“So why is it different when it’s you that needs help?”
Tim doesn’t have anything to say to that, it seems. His mouth turns to a thin line, eyes dulled, face becoming stone as he meets a wall he did not want to.
Eventually, he comes to a conclusion and shakes his head, “It’s different, I’m different. People need Batman; they don’t need me.”
Sometimes, Dick understands why Jason throttled his younger brother the first time they met. Tim may be smart on a textbook level, but he’s also unbelievably dense when it comes to interpersonal skills. The kid’s a great detective who somehow managed to make a completely wrong profile of himself, but the evidence has been quite damning to not jump to such a conclusion.
Dick knows it’s going to take more than his word for Tim to believe him, for Tim to change his perception of his whole life. Not with the entirety of Tim’s childhood going up against him, not with the way Bruce depended on Tim yet kept the kid at arm’s length, and not with the way the Drakes taught their son that he needed to be convenient.
Knowing Dick himself had allowed things to get this bad, from the point a freshly turned twelve year old Timothy Drake came knocking on his door begging Nightwing to save Batman and he had closed the door on the kid’s face. Dick can only hope that the past won’t completely uproot the seed he’s trying to plant in Tim’s head.
There’s a dark little voice in the back of Dick’s mind hissing that Tim has no reason to believe him, that this is a wound too deep to heal, but if Jason can get blown up by the Joker at the age of fifteen and crawl out of his grave six months later, if Damian can be raised by assassins and still learn to show mercy, then it’s not impossible to prove to Tim that he is loved and deserves to be a priority.
Looking at his baby bird, at the boy who had mended everything he couldn’t, Dick is struck with a desperation he hasn’t felt since he lost his parents and learned what it felt like to yearn for someone who could never come back. Unlike dead parents, Tim is right there in front of him, but Dick still feels like he‘s already lost him.
It’s a flashback of someone falling, the rope snaps, the glass breaks, they hit the ground with a snap, they land in his arms as if it was part of their plan; he doesn’t know what to do. He sees himself standing in a cemetery, with the only thing left of his parents chiseled out on a slab of stone, because he could not catch them. ”I think I want to die” rings in his head as the headstones morph into one. He caught Tim Drake once, but somehow the kid is still plunging down and Dick doesn’t know how to catch him from a fall like this.
It makes him lunge forward and cling. He yanks the kid on top of himself, and Tim lands with a yelp and the flail of his limbs. An elbow knocks against his jaw but Dick ignores it, burying his face into the kid’s hair and squeezing him tight, mindful of the stab wound.
“Of course we need you.” Dick breathes into a nest of black, “You’ve held this family together for so long. Surely you know that.”
Tim stills at that, breath hitching. He doesn’t.
“You saved us.”
Tim’s voice is thick with tears as he cracks, “And yet I’ve never been worth loving.”
It’s an admission that Dick wants so badly to refute, but knows there is no proof for him to say otherwise.
He knows what he needs to say, knows he hasn’t said it enough, and knows that even now, it won’t be enough
“I love you, Tim.” It doesn’t stop him from trying, because that’s all he can do.