Work Text:
E Rank: 1999
Against his father’s wishes, Tim Drake spends his fifteenth birthday in No Man’s Land.
The facts are this: At 7:03 PM, some time in late June, an earthquake struck Spillkin Hill in Bristol Township, just fifteen or so miles north of Gotham’s city center.
It came in on the Richter scale at 7.6.
The death toll is somewhere around one million of Gotham’s eight.
Tim knows that he’s one of the lucky ones.
No one close to him died in the quake. Even before his father moved them out to Keystone, he wouldn’t have been caught in the worst of it. Bruce, Alfred, and Harold were all safely in the Batcave. Dick had been in Bludhaven. Stephanie had been at the mall, apparently. He isn’t sure where the other vigilantes were when it hit, but they’d shown up since to help out.
Timothy can’t do anything to help.
There’s a never-ending list of things Robin can do to help.
He can help pull people from the wreckage. Stop looters from breaking into the surviving stores and remind people to behave. Distribute food and water at one of the many shelters that have sprung up. Deliver essential medical aid.
Between helping with the rescue efforts as Batman and signing off on relief grants as Wayne, Bruce is running himself ragged. Tim knows he’s even preparing to fly to DC to petition for federal aid within the week. It’s amazing to think that Bruce Wayne could do more to help Gotham than Batman.
Tim doesn’t remember exactly when he looks up and realizes that the date has turned over, but it doesn’t feel any different.
Gotham is still wrecked. Gothamites are still dying. Food and water is still scarce. Aid is running low.
A simple birthday wish isn’t going to cut it. There's no instant, magical fix-it to a life-changing disaster like this.
It would be selfish of him to make a fuss over not getting a cake or presents when so many others have lost their homes, their livelihoods, their loved ones.
Besides, fifteen isn’t even one of the important milestones.
-:-
D Rank: 2016
Tim's plans to do his eighteenth birthday right are derailed by some real classic cape nonsense.
It’s not like he meant to be zapped into a featureless cube with a display-case door when he made the sacrificial play to redirect all those drones onto himself. Stewing in an extra-dimensional stasis prison cell was also not part of the plan.
According to the kinetic watch embedded in his wrist gauntlet's HUD, he's been stuck here for... a couple of weeks now. And that’s assuming time passes the same way in his prison as it does in his reality. The injuries he’d picked up before he got zapped have been healing normally, but he hasn’t gotten hungry, thirsty, or had the need to relieve himself either.
Tim doesn't think he's been alone, truly alone, like this in a long time. Even when he was a kid staying in boarding school over winter break or flying solo as Robin and Red Robin, there was at least the regular hustle and bustle of a lived-in city. Here, there's just a faint, untraceable hum of whatever is powering the containment cells and his own breathing.
He’d told his mysterious captor that his friends would come for him.
Tim knows Batman wouldn’t have just accepted Tim’s death. Bruce was the one that taught him to question everything. Surely they’d notice the lack of body? Or seen the parallels to Bruce’s own disappearance?
Of course, he’s also Red Robin, so about a week in, he’d tried to break out anyway. He’d gotten maybe four corridors down, burning through a flare and a few smoke canisters before he’d been zapped back into his cell.
It stings that he was captured again so quickly, but Tim tells himself it was a net gain.
He’s tried to broadcast a message. This captor has no interest in harming him beyond taking him "off the field", whatever that means. They wield a strange staff that has some kind of teleportation or warping powers.
He'd told them that his friends would come for him, at the start.
He hopes it's not a lie.
-:-
C Rank: 2003
In itself, his sixteenth birthday was great.
(It’s what followed that really sucked.)
The first sixty percent or so? Tim could genuinely say he’d had a blast.
Jack and Dana (mostly Dana, honestly) had put so much work into really making it special. From inviting Ives and Steph over for the party when it was clear he had forgotten his own damn birthday, to the custom pizza with his favorite toppings and the movies he’d wanted to watch, the handmade gifts, and the thought put into his other presents… A massive step up from his last birthday, for sure.
If the mystery of the box had been an elaborate start to a scavenger hunt, or a demonstration of some neat new Bat-Tech from WayneTech R&D, maybe it wouldn’t have stung so much. Instead, he’d walked right into a trap.
In hindsight, maybe Bruce had done him a kindness.
Was that all it took for him to fall for something?
A fantastical premise with a transparent appeal to his ego, a (fabricated!) recording of a shock death to get him to ignore basic critical thinking, and just enough time to twist himself into knots over the mere potential of not noticing the people he trusted were changing for the worst.
He’d thought he’d been so clever.
At the start, constructing the strawman of Stupid Robin to convince himself that scrapping by with the bare minimum was good enough.
In the middle, when he’d been plotting out everyone’s ten-year descents into villainy like they were background villains in a W&W campaign, chasing the same rabbits down the same holes over and over again instead of actually, accurately, verifying the situation.
At the end, when he’d revealed to Batman how immature he had truly been. Throwing his cape in Batman’s face? Getting upset that he’d wasted his time on groundless paranoia? Storming off like a child because he didn’t like what he’d been told?
Get real, Tim.
Talking with Stephanie had put things back into perspective.
You didn’t become a vigilante because you ran away from the unknown.
Lesson learned, Bruce.
Question everything.
-:-
B Rank: 1991
Tim hasn’t told Bruce or Alfred it’s his fourteenth birthday.
It’s not like he meant to keep it a secret or anything. They’d never asked, and it just didn’t feel like something they had to know! It wasn’t like they’d done anything for Bruce’s birthday in February, or Dick’s in March. And if Alfred has a birthday, he sure hasn’t shared it with the rest of the team. Tim’s not even sure Bruce knows about it.
Mom is dead. Has been dead for just under seven months. He had to count to know how many days it had been since her funeral now (two hundred and eight, including today). He’d had to spend a little time looking out the window about that.
Truthfully, besides being in some admittedly cool work clothes, Tim wasn't planning anything super fancy for his birthday. He treated himself to a chocolate fudge soft-serve, slurping it down while perched on one of Wayne Tower’s ledges. He had visited his dad in hospital before patrol.
Dad is… recovering. He’s still in in-patient care, too weak to stay awake for more than a couple of hours at a time. Tim rarely catches him awake, between the planned physical therapy sessions Jack has and Tim spending most of his time over at Wayne Manor for training.
Tim doesn’t like to think too much about that either.
He listens idly to the police band. Bruce is off somewhere cold and European hunting down some new cape, so Robin’s flying solo tonight.
He’s been Robin for maybe a month now, officially. This is the mantle that Dick Grayson outgrew and the mantle that Jason Todd never got to grow into. It’s equal parts exhilarating and terrifying. He hopes he can do them proud.
Movement catches Robin's eye.
A man running for his life in the streets below. He leaves the empty soft-serve cup on the ledge. He launches himself off the Tower, hooking the parapet of a nearby building. makes a note to himself to pick up it later.
It’s not like anyone cares if Robin has a birthday, but still.
-:-
A Rank: 2007
Tim’s seventeenth birthday is pretty neat, actually.
Sure, it’s ironic how what Bruce told him was too fantastical to be believable proved itself possible almost immediately after he debunked it. (Tim is refraining from saying he told Bruce so, because the paranoia spiral actually helped a ton in understanding the twisted reasoning the Titans of Tomorrow employed.)
Sure, his dad is dead.
Sure, he’s lost Steph.
Sure, he’s lost Kon.
Sure, Blüdhaven was destroyed, and Dana is probably gone with it.
Sure, Jason Todd, of all people, is miraculously alive once again, taking his daddy issues out on innocent teen heroes, before abruptly disappearing off the face of the earth again.
But the point of this cruise is to regroup.
To retrace Bruce’s steps in becoming Batman, to pay their respects to those that came before and reshape the foundations for what will come.
To remember to appreciate what they still have, what they managed to save, despite everything that’s been lost.
Bruce seems determined to be invigorated by all the travelling, reconnecting with old mentors, recalling things he’s forgotten and passing them on anew. Tim almost thinks he’s serious about them being family.
Dick isn’t in good shape.
Hasn’t been for a while, if Tim’s being honest with himself. He’s doing his best to be cheery and supportive, but Tim can tell the most recent Crisis hit Dick hard. That it helps being away from Gotham, from what was once Blüdhaven.
A birthday party will be a good excuse to put everything away for a few hours and just.
Live in the moment.
As they gather around a frosted sheet cake on the deck of a cruise ship somewhere out in the Mediterranean, strangers clapping and cheering for Tim-
He’s still being a little bit selfish, Tim supposes, closing his eyes to make his birthday wish. He wants to be responsible for bringing happiness to people. To believe that him being around someone can help them move past awful tragedy.
He knows it’s coming, so he lets Dick shove his face into the cake.
He can give Dick this.
-:-
S Rank: 1990
For Tim’s thirteenth birthday, Jack and Janet Drake come back from work with tickets for three to a Hero Watching tour of New York City.
They present the plan to Tim over a sit-down dinner in a modest Italian restaurant, eagerly explaining it to their wide-eyed son.
We’ll drive up to New York City after work tomorrow, Janet says. It’ll be a Friday, so we’ll spend the night at the Fitz-Carlton, then meet up with a licensed tour guide at the entrance to Central Park on Saturday. We'll go on a private tour of various locations frequented by the local superheroes. After lunch at Planet Krypton, we'll visit the shore of Titans Tower for a commemorative photo, before being let go. To make full use of the rest of the weekend, we'll also visit some actual cultural landmarks like the American Museum of Natural History, the Statue of Liberty, and the Lincoln Center for Performing Arts
For some real education, Jack adds jokingly.
Tim hugs them both extra-hard at bedtime, practically vibrating out of his skin.
It gets cut short that Saturday afternoon by a work emergency.
Tim doesn’t actually get to meet any of the Titans, but the Green Lantern that served them gets a great photo of the three of them with their Man of Beef burgers and Supershake milk-staches before Jack had to dash off. (According to the waiter, a licensing conflict with Batburger means nothing with the Bat is allowed on the menu.)
It was still pretty fun, Tim thinks as he and Janet take a cab back to their hotel, nodding off in the back seat. They stay in the hotel room while Jack deals with the mess, Tim and Janet laying down newspaper and busting out the child’s dinosaur excavation kit he’d also gotten.
In a month’s time, Tim will bargain his way into accompanying his parents to New York City again. Left to his own devices while they attend a medical conference, Tim will take a bike to Titans Tower, determined to beg Dick Grayson to return to his childhood mantle of Robin.