Chapter Text
Timothy Drake defines his life by distinctions.
The first and foremost: he and the Bats are brothers-in-arms, not of blood or name. They are not family, he has no family. This is a fact, a truth devoid of emotion, and it’s okay. He has long since stopped wishing for one. Knowing they are not family, and nothing is personal, is how he could rationalize staying in Gotham after pulling Bruce from the timestream.
The second: the once-bright manifestation of his soul is marked by falling birds. It’s an important distinction—falling—because at first glance the soulmarks scribed across Tim’s forearm make them appear as if they’re in flight. It’s only when someone really looks, sits there, and stares, do they notice how the wings are broken and bent with their feathers tangled. He hadn’t noticed the difference until after they paled to a scar-white in a flashfire of pain and rejection.
It took a year and a half and Ra’s Al Ghul’s astute observation to point out that the blue bunting and cardinal were broken from the start, and quite frankly, Tim finds this worse than the loss of a surprisingly important organ.
But Tim leaves soulmarks to the hopeful fools. He doesn't have the time nor energy for backlit daydreams especially because the third and, currently most important, distinction is that he found the body.
Him, Timothy Drake, not the vigilante Red Robin.
But him, the youngest, most vicious, effective, and reluctant CEO in Gotham. And isn’t that a fun thing to explain?
“And you’re on the roof because…” The patrol officer draws, cutting Tim’s thoughts back to the present.
“I have a terrible smoking habit,” Tim answers dully as he glances over the shoulder of the exhausted rookie—fresh from the academy if the green hue of face is anything to go by—to the body propped against the AC unit and the detective hovering over it. Glancing back to the kid, he shrugs. “Never start, kid.”
Perhaps he should fake it a little better, but, hell, this is Gotham, if you haven’t seen your first corpse by the time you’re twenty then you’re unobservant and if you’re that unobservant then it will be your body that’s going to scar a seventeen year old.
On any other day, Tim would have faked it better, but he can’t-he can’t, so he checks his watch and sighs so heavily the dark hair around his face blows aside.
“I have a call in twenty minutes with a prime contractor and the company still owes Wayne Enterprises sixteen jobs on a project, and he will get these jobs or there will be hell to pay,” Tim rants, looking at the officer until the man shifts uncomfortably. He’s not even lying, the call was his priority when he got the notification of a disturbance on the roof nearly an hour ago. Then he saw it—the body and the mark, or more specifically, the lack of a mark—and let’s just say he’s not going to make it to that meeting.
But the officer doesn’t need to know that.
“As I said,” Tim pushes on, playing up his harried irritation for the posterity of the statement. “I came up here for a smoke, saw the body, and called the police. The security tapes will corroborate my statement, and the recordings will be handed over by our security team.” After of course, he deleted the ten minutes of his own investigation of the body, snapping crime scene photos and careful examination. “Now, if you don’t have any more questions, I have a meeting to attend; you know where to find me.”
His tone brokers no room for disagreement. The officer swallows nine and flips closed the outdated little notebook in his hand. And just like that, Tim is free to leave.
“Y-yes, thank you, Mr. Drake-Wayne.”
“Just Drake,” Tim corrects. Another statement devoid of emotion. Despite his emancipation coming through while Bruce was lost and the years that followed, the citizens of Gotham seem to hold a Once a Wayne, Always a Wayne mindset. It was useful on a good day but downright aggravating on a bad day.
Today, it was a simple annoyance, nothing worth a misstep or even a glance over his shoulder as he corrected the man. Tim may not have come into the title of CEO the normal way but with every second he held it, he made it his own. He earned every day, every decision, every dollar saved on the bottom line, every new program to better help Gotham, every sacrifice of sleep lost and stress gained. It was his.
For now.
But future plans are far from his mind as he makes his escape past the police tape and the officer guarding the stairwell entrance to the roof (the only known entrance) and down the stairs.
No one stops Tim as he strides past the walls of glass to his corner office, but their eyes follow him. By the time the police arrived, every employee in WE knew something was awry, rumors flying faster than viruses through the Business Development department. Human Resources will send a company-wide blast through their intranet with an update to staunch the worst of the panic; the draft is, without a doubt, already in Tim’s inbox awaiting his final approval. He moves quickly across the carpeted floor, meeting only his executive assistant’s eyes.
But Tam Fox can read him better than most people he’s fought and bled with, so she doesn’t ask him about the tension around his mouth or the way his thumbnail itches incessantly over a callous on his pointer finger. She doesn’t ask him if he’s okay, instead she fixes one minor problem for him and leaves it at that.
“I’ve pushed the meeting by thirty minutes.”
“Thank you,” he pauses just long enough to say; they both ignore the breathless waiver in his tone. “Review the verbiage from HR and press go.”
Tam—competent, lovely Tam—nods and that is that.
Tim closes the door to his office, locking it so the clear glass smokes over to the private opaque setting, and then, and only then, does his breath hiccup. Air locking in his lungs, his exercise in control stutters and fails. He clenches his fist and leans against the door.
Thirty seconds, he will give himself thirty seconds. To just spiral and panic, to flex his trembling fingers and stroke over his soul mark, over and over, until he can almost feel the scar branded against his shirt and suit sleeve.
Tim is too much of a veteran to be disturbed by death. He has seen too many terrors—lived them—but seeing it in the daylight is different. Each night he goes out in a cape and cowl, he knows what awaits him. The possibility that he might not see the next hazy moon, but this-this is his work, his day job. It’s different.
But beyond that… the crime, the murder is vicious. Barbaric and so inhuman, his own stomach roiled when he clocked the message left behind. The victim’s soulmark was carved from his flesh, a precision cut with unfaltering straight lines. And then that bloody slab of wilting flesh was nailed straight into his heart. By the blood trail on the victim’s shirt, he had still been alive when the nail was pushed in.
There was no other blood or injury Tim found in his quick perusal of the body. The roof of WE was simply the dump site, a message in and of itself, but of what, Tim is going to find out.
His time to spiral is up–twenty nine point three seconds of feeling is all he can spare.
Tim pushes off the door, straightens his sleeves, and strides over to his computer. Work, he has work to do. He copies the original footage and sends it to Oracle, the batserver, and his vigilante-work computer, and then gets to fixing up the video for the police. Scrubbing some of the footage and aligning it to fit his alibi is easy enough that he is already planning the file for this case when a message from Oracle pops up on his screen.
“Footage flagged, prior unsolved case.” Barbara Gordon, the all seeing eye of Gotham, tends to offer more information. The other vigilantes can’t do their jobs if she doesn’t.
So Tim, knowing her schedule, types back: “Did you watch the video in the grocery store checkout line?”
“…no.” Pops up on the message box in the corner of his screen.
Tim snorts. “So much for network security.”
“I have a blackout screen protector,” she argues back, and he can almost hear the indignant huff accompanying her words.
“I’ll remember that for our next training day,” Tim teases because this is easy. He can slip into the banter and distraction even as his fingers fly across the keys, wrapping up the video for police consumption.
“Try it.”
Tim lets himself laugh. “I have other plans.”
For her own sanity and plausible deniability, Babs doesn’t ask. The screen goes quiet for a moment as he wraps up the video and closes out of the software, letting security send it to the police.
“Who was lead?” He asks instead.
“Batman.”
Easy enough, Tim hums happily to himself. Bruce kept case files as meticulously as he did. He probably already had a solid foundation of the facts and old evidence and the start of a psych analysis of the killer. Not to mention, Tim wouldn’t have to talk to—
“Wait,” Babs corrects, and Tim’s stomach drops. He knows where this is headed, there’s only one other option and, quite frankly, he’d rather it be sword-robin than— “Nightwing.”
Fuck. He drops his head into his hands. Why him, why must this happen to him? Of all things he could have found on the roof…
Babs continues, unbeknownst or uncaring to Tim’s inner angst. He peeks through his fingers to read it, and instantly regrets many, many decisions he has made today. “I’ll mark the files and notify him so you can set a meeting to discuss the details.”
Yeah, no.
But Tim doesn’t say that or any of the other colorful words he is thinking, he merely drops a thumbs up and a quick message signing off for his call.
He still had ten minutes, but anything was better than that. Than talking to him.
Leaning back in his chair, he groans to the heavens—or moreso to the cruelty of the Gotham sky for heaven is lost to them—and fumbles around in his desk drawer until he finds it: the pilfered, room temperature but still wonderful can of Zesti.
He’s already had his asplenia-recommended caffeine intake for the day, but if this isn’t a good enough reason to break his rule, nothing is.
—
To no one’s surprise, when the sun goes down, they meet on a rooftop.
It’s a very particular roof, special even. It was on this roof, Tim saw the first robin do his unique flip for the second time in person. The signature move confirmed that Dick Grayson, the new ward of Bruce Wayne was, in fact, Robin, and therefore Tim’s neighbor and Gotham’s favorite playboy, was Batman. If Tim stood a foot over to the right, that would be the very spot where life as he knows it began. He doesn’t do that though, he leans against a wall, tucked out of camera sight and crosses his arms.
And waits.
Dick Grayson, the infamous Nightwing and Batman understudy, is late.
It could be forgiven (anything he does could be) Tim is patient. It's one of the few qualities he shares with the youngest of Bruce’s repertoire of soldiers, the current Robin and Batman’s son, Damian. A quality that skipped over the elder two, Dick and Jason, like a cruel game of leapfrog.
But no matter, it’s only a few more minutes before he sees Nightwing, a nearing speck on the horizon, a slash of bright blue against the dull haze of the polluted sky.
Sheer hurt hits Tim like a kick to the chest. He has the space mere minutes to allow himself to feel it too, feel it and prepare to get through the next conversation like an adult even though he’d rather run and run and run until he finds himself back in desert or some other forgotten piece of earth. No matter what time passed, or the distance he put between them, every time… every damn time he sees him, Tim aches. The scarred seams of an old wound tearing open with claws, there is only pain. Never relief.
But he would never say that. Could never let him know.
So Tim pushes off the wall, braces himself for a fight, and yanks at every shred of a mental block he has to shove down the spiral of emotion, loop them together in lead chains and drop them so far into the depth of his psyche that touching the bottom of the Mariana Trench would be an easier task. His cowl masks the upper part of his face hiding the muscle as it pulses and feathers by his temple the armored fabric edge, biting into his cheek. It serves as a reminder, his mask, that he is not Tim Drake.
He is cold logic. He is the weight of his bo-staff in hand.
He is not the night, but the grey dawn.
He is not a man but a vigilante. An apparition of justice. A figurehead. Another borrowed name, Red Robin.
And for now, the reminder is enough to settle his nerves, ease the ill-fluttering of his stomach, and the pulse thumping away near painfully in his throat.
Nightwing grapples over. Dropping the line midswing, he tumbles artfully through the air in perfect front tuck. He lands on the adjacent roof, and vaults over the alley with a flashy Silavas, a move Red Robin only saw that perfect on Olympic reruns.
The acrobat only shows off moderately; Tim’s not fooled into thinking it’s for him, rather for the sake of Dick’s own amusement.
He rolls into the landing and pops up a meter from Tim, mindful of personal space for once in his life.
Alarms sound in Tim’s brain, but he doesn’t have the time to address it before the older vigilante looks him up and down and takes one more step closer.
“Red,” Nightwing says in greeting. It’s a tentative thing, that word. It holds more tension than any single word should, but nowhere near as much as the older vigilante’s shoulders. Red Robin’s old hero, mentor, and—at one point or another—friend looks like he’s halfway across a tightrope and there’s someone on the other side with a chainsaw. Only in that situation, the ex-circus brat would be more comfortable.
“N,” Tim offers, keeping himself and his tone as neutral as possible. He doesn’t turn off his voice modulator built into the neck of his suit and cowl. It’s between him and clouded stars of his voice waivers.
It’s rare for them to both be in Gotham, but with their respective teams grounded for injuries or on rotation, here they are. Together for the first time in months, and closer than a distracted signal across rooftops as they hunt the latest Arkham escapee or investigate their own cases on designated, well-defined patrol routes.
Silence settles, and Red Robin doesn’t rush to fix it.
Nightwing shifts, moving his weight off the knee that was once shot and shattered by the Bludhaven police—a move Tim has only ever seen him do in the sanctity of his primary safehouse or the Cave, and never as fully-masked Nightwing.
Tim swallows, brushes his fingers over the reinforced kevlar armor on his thigh to keep from clenching his hands, and breaks first. “Oracle said you would prefer to update me in person.”
“It’s my case,” Nightwing says, his tone unreadable. Stilted and wrong.
So utterly wrong. Is this Clayface? A possession or some other being behind the domino. This isn’t the Nightwing he knew. Humorless and tense and so far some the flirty devil-may-care attitude the vigilante is known for not only in Gotham, the ruins of Bludhaven, but across the world and some regions of the galaxy.
Tim just barely refrains from stepping back. Instead he doubles down.
“They dropped a body on my building—” and it was, it was his building, more so than it was ever ‘Brucie’ Wayne’s even if he was a Wayne and his parents built the enterprise, it was Tim’s. His baby, his work. “—I want in.”
“I’m lead.”
“Okay,” Tim drawls, blinking behind the mask. “Want to tell me a third time or can you bring me up to speed so I can help?”
“And if I don’t want your help?”
Fine. What a waste of fucking time. Tim snorts and shoves forward, firing off a petty little salute in Nightwing’s general direction before stalking for the edge of the roof.
“Wait,” he calls, a hiss of sound. “Wait. Don’t—”
Hand on his grapple gun, Tim doesn’t look back, but he catches the slight groan of his words, the regret that hinges in the space between consonants. He doesn’t need to see him to know Nightwing’s shoulders drop and he scrubs his hair and face in an agitated gesture.
Tim turns back slowly, head high.
“Yes,” Nightwing relents like it was oh so difficult. “Yeah, Red. I could use your help. This case, it's…” And despite his tenure, the vigilante who has been fighting for so long can’t even find the words to describe it.
Tim is not some rookie cop to get sick at the scene, but god, it was close. Even hours later, he wants to look at his own marks, as scarred as they are, just to see that they are there—safe.
The very manifestation of someone’s soul, of their love, carved out and nailed to their chest, and it wasn't just a one-time thing.
“I saw the marks,” Tim says instead. It’s enough.
Nightwing nods in slow agreement; the heavy rise and fall of his chest is the only show of emotion he can afford.
“Victims?” Tim asks in shorthand. He still doesn’t look at him, gaze settled and focus blurred to the right of his shoulder—definitely not focused on the barest hint of a brightly colored blue wing peaking through the collar of his suit.
“Men, early to mid-twenties, no connecting features or demographics,” Nightwing rattles off. Tim hums, letting the basic facts settle him and shift his focus into something more substantial. An investigation, he can do an investigation. “Today’s victim makes it officially three murders we know of, so there may be more of a pattern if we look again.”
“The marks,” Tim says, speaking before the thought fully connects.
“They were all carved off,” Nightwing answers slowly. It’s not the barbed insult he would expect from Red Hood or Robin, but it's so far from N’s usual carefree and kind tone that it’s an insult in and of itself.
“No before that.” Tim waves a hand. If he were alone, he’d be pacing, but some wounded, instinctual part of himself won’t allow him to turn his back on Nightwing, not even for a moment. So he stays still where he is and struggles to think. Remembering back to exactly what the carved mark looked like, past the bleeding edges to the— “Scars.”
“All marks scar when you die.”
But there is something off about them, something… Tim needs to test his theory before he can voice it. He wants to be wrong; he won’t be.
Oracle’s voice cuts through his comm, alerting them both of a robbery one block over and a mugging three blocks to the other side because, well, Gotham.
Tim raises his grapple, already mapping the quickest route to the robbery, as Nightwing paces over to the side of the building to take on the mugging. They both know, even if Tim wouldn’t admit it aloud, that N was quicker and therefore should take the one further way.
“I need to look into it,” Tim says, wrapping up their discussion.
Nightwing looks over his shoulder, his expression shifting under the domino in a way only someone bat-trained could read. Hesitant concern, he wants to say something. Address the Thing that wedged the chasm in the relationship, at first glacial and then like a flood. They don’t have time for it, not right now, or in Tim’s mind, ever.
So he picks up the nearest proverbial knife and lets it fly. “Don’t worry, I heard you the first two times: it’s your case. But if it’s taken you nearly three years to solve it, you’re not in a position to deny my help.”
And then he’s gone. Diving off the roof, Tim fires the grapple and flies to the robbery. He doesn’t look back.
No matter how much he wants to. He doesn’t look back.
Nothing good comes from the past.
–
When his distractions run out, Tim returns to his Nest early. The converted theatre just outside of the Bowery was one of the few places in all of Gotham where he could take a breath. A full, lung-aching breath. The only place where, when the security system is locked down and he completes his regular sweep for bat-bugs and oracle-cameras, he can just be.
Rarely does he visit the Cave, opting to file his nightly reports from his own computer system here and keep his equipment in the garage below or in his safehouse apartment downtown a block from Wayne Enterprises. Only when his gadgets malfunction past what he can fix or his bikes or cars need a tune up does head up north to the Manor, and it’s better this way. Easier for him to stay out of the way whenever he finds himself in Gotham away from the Tower in San Francisco.
He stays out of the bat-clan’s way, and they stay out of his.
Rarely does he get any unwanted visitors, so maybe that’s why it feels safe enough to keep his safe here. Locked a false wall, three biometric scanners, another false wall and fake safe off to the side, there is a small shoebox sized bomb proof safe.
Sore from the night, he rests on his knees before it. Hesitating despite the anxiety that followed him through his rushed morning stretches and shower, his hands hover over the keypad. Tim has already wiped the miniscule oil from his fingertips, unwilling to wear down the number faces over time.
He is safe, Tim tells himself. He is safe. It is safe.
So why can’t he open it? Nothing has changed since the last time he held the pictures, receipts, keys, and paraphernalia of his childhood (nothing but time, the scars that map his body, the number of people he considered friends, and those he considered enemies) but nothing inside the box at least.
Tim inhales slowly, holds it for a four count, and exhales.
He sets aside the printed case file— no electronics are allowed past the first false wall, one can never be too cautious in this field— wipes his hands over the soft sleep pants covering his thighs and presses a random number at first, clears it, and enters the code.
A date. An arbitrary date no one else would remember but him. And maybe one other person, but not for the same reason.
No, Dick Grayson would remember it as the night his parents died.
Tim remembers it as the first time he was held. Hugged with kindness and not patted on the head with distracted indifference. From that very moment he was filled with such bright hope; he should have known things would have ended just as that night did, with screams and tears and so much blood.
The safe opens with a quiet snick, distracting him from going further into those kinds of thoughts. Nor does Tim let himself hesitate, he flips the container over and dumps everything out.
The key to his old house, his parents house thunks to the carpeted ground, followed by fluttering paper— embarrassing receipts from every time Dick bought him dinner or a treat after a long night, real tangible things that scream that it happened, that even if for a moment they meant something to each other (even if it was only friends, and something as close to family as Tim has ever come)— followed by pictures.
So many pictures.
Of his heroes, flying across the starless night. Of his home, the Gotham skyline at an angle you can only capture correctly on the edge of a skyscraper. Of his parents, from around the corner as they packed their suitcases for another trip.
Of the first Robin posing with childish glee beside Batman. And the second, crouched against a gargoyle, half-lit by the lighter and cigarette. And even of the fourth, sneakily taken as he leans down to pet an alley cat, just to complete the set.
There’s only one of Tim. It’s not even truly of him, but rather his arm. The only existing picture of his true soulmark, not the mass of scars Bruce keeps in his database, but the fully fledged mark that formed when he hit ‘adulthood’ a month before his eighteenth birthday.
It’s the picture he has seared the edges of, held a lighter to the corner and sobbed as he couldn’t burn it. The one he turns to when his memory hazes over, lying to him that since the day it formed it has only ever been scars. That there was never color.
The picture is proof. His only proof. Of what was. What could have been.
Tim breathes out slowly. Mechanically, he follows the breathing exercises damn near beaten into him. They help keep him centered, focused on fact. So he finds himself reviewing what he knows about soulmarks. However, despite the studies done on manifestation of one’s soul, there are still no clear cut answers on what they mean or how, specifically, scientifically they are formed. There are only common denominators across people, ethnicities and cultures.
Every person around their eighteenth birthday and when their body ages into what is generally considered adulthood, has a mark formed somewhere on their body. The lucky few—in Tim’s opinion—can hide it like the personal thing it is. The unlucky have it in an utterly visible location: high on their neck, on the back of their hand, or hell, forehead.
Soulmates have coordinating marks, a similar but different approach that is never taken by the media in all their ridiculous and horrible(ly entertaining) trash tv. It’s not a love at first sight thing, and some people never find their match.
If only Tim were one of them.
Unfortunately, the moment he saw those damn birds scrawled down his arm, he knew.
When someone met their potential soulmate, the marks shifted depending on reception. The analytical side of Tim hesitates to call them sentient, but he couldn’t find another word for it. Because when faced with acceptance and respect, the peoples’ respective marks begin to shift into a unique and identical design.
But when abused, denied, or rejected the marks fade in color and scar over.
He’s read it's not permanent. He’s read that it is. Tim doesn’t know either way, nor is he ready to truly find out.
Anyway, he backtracks and corrects his course. Facts, he’s reviewing the known facts. When someone’s soulmate dies, the marks turn black, no color nor design, just a harsh unforgiving slash of ink. But if they are the one to die, they fade, not white a scar, but like the pink makings of one.
There’s a slight difference, one barely noticeable unless you have to stare at it all day, that snagged Tim’s attention—the scaring.
In the safety of his home, he leaves his arm uncovered, so when he holds up the picture, he can see the stark contrast. The blue bunting and cardinal, no longer red and blue but white, and a picture like a coloring book. And Tim, Tim forgets the facts, forgets the manila folder by his knee and… looks.
He had seen marks before that night, similar but different. Twin birds in flight.
The birds were the last thing he photographed, the most beautiful thing he ever saw. Tim will forever be grateful that he took a picture before walking into the Cave. That he can hold the image, keep it in the safe with every other image from his childhood, back when hope felt as real as the biting wind off the harbor waters. Before he was replaced like a broken part.
Being replaced as Robin hurt, especially the way he found out without so much as a true conversation beforehand and just walking into the Cave to see Damian in his cape, but-but it wasn't the worst part of that night.
He wasn’t ready to give up the name. Tim doesn’t like change (he knows this, objectively), but he was getting older. It made sense, striking out on your own, leaving the nest like the normal teenagers headed off to college.
He knows intellectually the cold hearted truth is that he did his part, he played his role—the band aid solution until the true fix came along—but that doesn't mean it hurts any less. Knowing something, and feeling it are two different things. Tim doesn’t even fault himself for wishing the many knives that carved up his flesh hit a little deeper, lancing this weakness from him instead. But he only thinks that on the bad days.
And today, despite its… challenges, wasn’t a bad day.
Comparatively, he means.
His hand shakes as he places the picture down atop the pile and picks up the crime scene photos instead. One by one, he lays them in a semicircle and by the time he makes it to the third and latest victim, the commonality is clear.
The scarring isn’t because the mark was cut off—soulmarks have been known to move in cases of amputation—nor of post-mortem withering. They had all known their soulmate and they had all been rejected.
Each victim had a mark like Tim’s.