Chapter Text
Tim doesn’t remember exactly when it first started happening. It just did. The memories came back, slowly but surely. He doesn’t remember it all. He doesn’t know if he wants it to. He remembers vague scenes. A palace. A woman. One hundred and eight men, jeering, drinking. And… something. Someone missing.
When he was 6 years old, the first year his parents had left him on his own, the earliest vision (memory) came. Except, he didn’t know it was a memory at the time. It was a cold night, and the Drake estate was so empty. Tim was cold and alone. He curled up on his bed under a blanket, and still the bone-chilling cold wouldn’t leave him. He put on extra layers, shimmied into socks. Still, the chill clung to his small body.
Sleep did not come easily that night, but when it did, Tim dreamed. It was still dark in his dream. Still, very clearly, night. The cold did not leave him even in his dreams.
He whimpered. And he couldn’t help it! His parents would have shushed him. His dad would have told him that he had to toughen up. They couldn’t always be around to comfort him after all… so the best thing he could do was to learn how to bear it on his own. That way, he could take it when his parents were gone for longer.
But he was 6, and tired, and cold. He didn’t want to be tough. He just wanted his mom and dad. The bed was a lot softer than it usually was.
Tim shivered. Then, a hand ruffled through his hair, and a weight fell slowly onto his bed. Tim squinted his eyes open, but he chased the feeling of the hand when it stopped carding through his hair. The figure chuckled. A lady.
Though Tim did not will for his voice to speak, his mouth opened. His voice was different. It wasn’t his .
“ Mother? ” He asked softly.
Tim felt a rush of confusion and slight panic (though the hand comforting him lessened it). The woman sitting next to him was not his mother. This was not his bed.
The woman was beautiful, if you could leave it at that. She was refined. Noble . She had black hair that looked a little curly, though it was tied up. And she wore… a bedsheet ? That’s what it looked like to Tim, at least. It didn’t sound like a bad idea to him. The bedsheet must feel an awful lot like a hug. The woman smiled down at him.
“ Hush, Tel… ” Her voice was oddly drowned out as it spoke the last word.
“ Rest. I will be here. ”
And with that reassurance, Tim (or whoever Tim seemed to be watching through the eyes of), fell back asleep. The cold did not bother Tim for the rest of that night.
That weekend, his parents came home. Tim was wearing his white bedsheet like the woman had. He tied it up at the shoulders with hair ties from his mother’s dresser. It felt comforting.
It felt familiar .
His parents chuckled when they saw him. His dad ruffled his hair.
“I see someone’s watched the new Hercules movie.” Hercules ? Who was that? Was that the woman he’d seen in his dream?
After questioning his parents some, he learned that what he had tried to imitate was not, in fact, a bedsheet draped on one’s shoulders. It was called a chiton . A fashion of Ancient Greece.
A feeling flitted by. Not a vision. Not truly.
Instead of the heavy bedsheets, he felt a lighter fabric. Breezier, but comforting nonetheless.
The feeling left almost as soon as it had come.
Most of Tim’s memories were like that. They were passing feelings, rather than concrete visions. He remembered the familiar embrace of loneliness… sorrow. Tim, who had never been whole in the first place, remembered the first time the void grew. There was the familiar ache of loss. And Timothy mourned, though he didn’t know for what (or who ).
He knew he felt rage. It burned inside him. Back then, it was as heated as the fires of a forge (though he’d never been in a forge, and he wasn’t sure why that was the particular description he’d used, though he felt it rang true inside him).
It still burned now, but these days, it burned cold.
When Tim’s parents left for their next dig with a goodbye kiss to his forehead and a pat on the back, the small child decided he would watch this… Hercules .
Within the first 10 minutes of the movie, Tim is quite certain that the pretty lady he’d met was not at all the man depicted in the movie. But perhaps… they were related in some way.
But Tim was distracted by other things as life took its course. The Circus. The Flying Graysons. The fall . Then–Batman. Then, Robin. Heroes …
And of course, there was school to think of. He absolutely could not disgrace his parents or his name by failing primary education. It wasn’t in his blood.
Tim began his research at the tender age of 10 and-a-half. He delved into the world of Greek mythology and religion. The Titanomachy. The Olympians. The Heroes .
During his research, he would stumble upon names that made him remember . Not always visions, but feelings. He felt nothing with a great many of the names, but with some came… fear, devotion, warmth, and loyalty (and sometimes an odd mix of the three).
One name stuck out to him. Athena . Goddess of wisdom and war. Tim didn’t know why, but he felt a flood of elation at reading the name. As he read and reread the name, he heard the hooting of an owl and a woman’s voice. The woman commanded respect as she offered counsel. She was something to him. He just didn’t know what.
When his parents returned yet again to find him looking over online texts about the Olympians and their tales, his mom hummed.
“You know– Greek mythology doesn’t end at the deities, Timothy. I have copies of both The Iliad and The Odyssey if you truly wish to study the lore further.”
His mom was tired from their flight, but hours later, she returned from her private library and handed Tim copies of both. His dad smiled as he watched them, sipping at his coffee as he worked on his papers on the dining room table.
His mom scolded him for working in the family spaces, as she often did. The couple retired to their bedroom, hugging Tim close as they went.
Tim didn’t mind. He was used to it by now, and his parents deserved to rest.
Besides, he now had something that occupied more of his time. As he looked at the two books his mother had left him, Tim felt excitement. He rushed to his room and immediately began poring over the poems and epics. He’d even ended up grabbing his dictionary to make sense of some of the words. As he read the Iliad, he felt nothing overly familiar tugging at him.
That changed when he switched to the Odyssey. Each name stuck out to him. Heavy feelings weighed on his chest, and it felt like an elephant had stomped its way over to sit upon his small frame as he read the story of war, heartbreak, and death. He couldn’t breathe. Why ? He was essentially reading a different aspect of what had been shown in the Iliad, except this one revolved around… Odysseus .
There was a strange feeling that washed over Tim at that realization. He felt both light and heavy. Like he was floating and drowning at the same time. The name inspired awe in him, but it also brought… longing? A sense of foreignness that Tim really didn’t have the capacity to analyze.
And then another name brings a reaction out of him. Penelope of Sparta . Tim blacked out at that. There was another vision. A lady– no . A mother cradled him in her arms. It was the same woman as before. He now knew her to be Penelope.
She hummed a soft tune as she rocked him back and forth. Tim felt his eyes grow heavier and heavier. He expected to wake in his real body now that the dream version of him had fallen asleep.
Instead, he saw more visions. He remembered .
He was a baby, and a man (his father) pressed a kiss to his forehead, and the woman, Penelope, shed silent tears as the man sailed away.
He was 6 and chasing Penelope, who laughed with delight, around the royal chambers with his small wooden sword.
He was 7 and meeting the elder council for the first time, hiding behind his mother’s skirts.
He was 10 and a prince, who had no king and no father.
He was 11 when the talks of succession began.
He was 13 when the council dismissed him as an option.
He was 16 when the one hundred and eight suitors came. Still no father, still young and naive, and such an easy target for the wine-drunk, greedy beasts.
He was 20 when Ithaca’s king returned.
Now, Tim is 11. He is not of Greece nor of Ithaca. Gotham is his home. But he learns that his father was Odysseus, Champion of Athena, his mother was Penelope, the blameless of Sparta… and he was Telemachus, Prince of Ithaca .
It took Tim two weeks to recover from the visions that swam through his head. His eyes watered and his head hurt, but he was whole .
For two years, he felt whole. He knew his past, though his memories were spotty. He accepted his present.
He had both of his parents, though they were not his father or mother… they could never replace who his father and mother were. He had his own heroes (who fought every day not at war, but in constant battle), whom he followed under the cloak of the darkness, because for once, Telemachus (no, Tim ) was free to adventure. To fly.
He was whole because he saw the fire in Robin. He saw the fight in Batman. He saw the good . Tim admired from afar. The boy wonder was a warrior. The kind Tim wished he could have been once, thousands of years ago.
He watched them from afar. Never too close. Tim would take pictures and hide them in a locked chest at the back of his closet. It was easier than trying to imprint the image into his mind when so many other visions and memories (thousands of years old) were fighting for their place inside it. So pictures it was.
It was perfect. Life was good.
And then he was 13. And then his Robin died.
Not the first one, no. Dick Grayson was very much alive, and very much not his Robin. No, Jason Todd died. His Robin died, and Tim was left scrambling again.
Batman stumbled. He cracked. He broke .
Gotham suffered for it.
The man was blinded by grief and rage. Where a warrior would know when the fight was over, the Dark Knight slipped into something less honorable. Something monstrous in nature.
Tim ( Telemachus? ) saw a monster in Bruce Wayne.
He saw Odysseus in the man.