Chapter Text
Tim was seven when he decided he wanted to be a big brother. He didn’t know why he wanted it, not in the way words were supposed to work. He’d seen how his classmates drew their families in school and he liked the portraits the best with many kids. There was one portrait that was a hugomungus banner that had been up in the art room ever since Dick Grayson had been adopted by Mr. Wayne where Dick had drawn the Entire Circus as his family and the teacher had put it up and never taken it down even though Dick wasn’t an elementary schooler anymore. It had so many people in it. (No wonder Dick was so good at hugs.) Tim liked the idea of a big family, but what he wanted was a baby sibling. A brother or a sister—he didn’t care what—all babies made him happy. He held babies wherever he could find them and he loved making them laugh and giggle and he could hug them! He liked that they were squishable like marshmallows. That was the best thing about babies. You could hug them like Dick Grayson had hugged him, that night at the circus. Dick had said Tim was so cute he could just gobble him up, so he must have agreed that babies were like marshmallows. (Tim hadn’t been a baby then but he knew he was small for his age.) He loved Dick Grayson for that hug, and sometimes when he was falling asleep in his big empty house he dreamed up ways of getting Dick to give him a second hug.
A sibling would be even better, because then he could have someone to hug all the time. He began writing out the SIBLING AQWIRMENT PROTOTCALL in his super secret notebook one day, and as the months ticked by he worked and worked and worked on it.
Apparently children with siblings were better adjusted. Something about fighting for resources? Did it matter if some of his facts were from wildlife journals? Surely humans still counted, they were part of the animal kingdom. Tim needed all the information about sibling relationships he could find, and scientists had done a lot of documentation for lions, hyenas, various primates among others. Hyenas were just too fascinating to ignore, really, and he got distracted for a while. When he returned to SAP Tim decided he didn’t care if they were unusual resources, actually, because they were useful. So there. If it was facts about siblings, it went into the SAP. (His parents were BIG on the initials-as-names game. He liked that his had spelled SAP. He liked to say it to himself and pop the p.)
Dad sent Tim a camera for his eighth birthday. Tim liked the camera. He took pictures of frogs and tree bark and everything he could find around the property. He got bored of that eventually and decided to venture out into the city. During the day he took pictures of people, during twilight he took pictures of the city, and at night he took pictures of everything he could. He figured out (slowly) that he liked night photography. It was an accident the first time he took a picture of Batman and Robin. He didn’t even notice he’d done it until he developed the pictures later. It wasn’t a very good picture of the crime fighters. He’d been aiming to get a picture of the building they’d been fighting in front of. He was pretty sure he’d found a clue to some huge city-wide puzzle and he wasn’t certain if it was a Riddler thing or not, but instead of simply getting a good picture of the gargoyle from below, he’d gotten a decent picture of the gargoyle and a wonky shot of Robin kicking a man in the solar plexus. (Tim liked those words and said them a couple of times to himself.)
It was over breakfast a few days later that Tim realized he could follow Batman and Robin around and maybe even get good pictures of them. Tim liked that thought. He liked that a lot. It took time to figure out their pattern and he wasn’t perfect with it, but he did figure places they liked to rest, and those were some of his best shots for a while. Tim was determined he would learn how to take action shots, even if it took a bajillion years.
It was an accident when he found out that Dick Grayson was Robin. It wasn’t even because of a picture he took! He wanted to cry, actually, when he learned the truth. Tim ran back to his room to hold the photo of himself with Dick at the circus close until the feeling passed. He also cut out picture and article from the newspaper that had run the story of Robin’s quadruple flip, only a little bit aggrieved that he’d missed this fight.
Later, Tim pasted it into his Super Secret Scrapbook (named For The Record to make it sound Official, because even his parents had silly Initials for Things and he could forgive the FTR for not being a SAP because For The Record sounded very grown up). Once he got over the shock, Tim was ready to feel like Dick-as-Robin was the best news. Because it was. Actually, it was AMAZING news. Dick was the BEST hugger ever and Robin needed to be able to give great hugs. That was probably the only way to save the city. (Criminals probably were criminals because they didn’t get enough hugs. If Tim wasn’t only Tim he might try to offer his hugs to criminals because Robin was only one person and could only offer so many hugs. But Tim was Tim so he did not think his hugs would stop crime.) One of the best parts was that after Tim discovered that Dick was Robin, Tim decided his sibling was going to be named Robin. Because, duh.
A few months after he learned the truth about Batman and Robin—Tim now got super excited every time he remembered that Batman and Robin were his neighbors—Tim decided that he was ready to make his presentation. He knew from his parents' lessons that a good presentation should have things for people to look at. He could have made a packet, but he didn’t have a printer and he wasn’t willing to break the rules and go into either of his parents’ offices. He did have a laptop, though, so he could make a PowerPoint, easy peasy. He’d used it for school before so he was confident he could do this. His parents would be very impressed at Tim’s ability. Even if they didn’t agree with his research, they might at least tell him that he’d done a good job. They might even hug him. The warmth in his chest that idea caused was enough for Tim to put his whole heart and brain into each slide.
He was very careful and particular about his PowerPoint. It was a short proposal, full of graphs and statistics and all things his dad would like and it had lots of information about how useful two kids would be for his mom. He had so much more information than what he’d carefully constructed in the ten slides he allowed himself (the whole SAP binder) but he knew his parents were busy people and he could not expect much of their time. The PowerPoint was named ‘Why it would be beneficial for Drake Industries to have a secondary heir’ Tim even put in a slide that outlined what his role would be in helping with a sibling. (First and foremost, Tim would make certain a second child knew how to behave. He could do that much, after all.)
When the PowerPoint was finished, Tim made sure to tell them he had a proposal for their review, the next time they were home, and they agreed to hear his spiel one night. Tim dressed in his best business suite—the one that matched with his dad's—and slicked his hair the way mom liked it for galas. It was strange to have their full attention through those ten slides. It was strange that they laughed and told him he was clever and were not at all angry about it. It was strange that they gave him a little bit of the wine they’d been drinking to celebrate ‘Tim’s first proposal’ and sent him off to bed. (Was the whole night a dream?) He didn’t understand how he pleased them, but he did somehow. It almost didn’t matter that nothing more was said about a sibling. Tim had made his parents happy somehow and he didn’t think that had ever happened before. He couldn’t help but hope this would mean they’d stay home longer. It was an old hope, all grated at the edges and wrinkled, but not one he ever managed to burn away.
To distract himself, Tim tried to consider what it would be like to have a sibling. He wasn’t too sure how or when they would appear. Like would his parents adopt the way Bruce Wayne had? Should Tim have found a kid to adopt? He didn’t know where to look. He’d seen plenty of homeless kids when he was running after Batman and Robin but he didn’t think his parents would want a Crime Alley kid and he didn’t want to convince someone to come live here if they would be treated like they might steal the artifacts that his parents brought home. (He had heard mom sniff once at dad “Don’t park here, Jack, that kid wants to steal our tires.” And Tim had looked over to see a teen girl glaring at their car from where she was sitting across the road. She hadn’t looked like a tire thief, but she had looked homeless.) Maybe if he found the right kid it wouldn’t matter? Tim could go out and see if any street kids wanted to be his sibling. Surveys were an important part of research and it was stupid he hadn’t thought to do one before his presentation. The idea still made him uneasy and he was trying to get up the nerve to ask his parents if they had decided on whether or not to get him a sibling when he woke up one morning to a text that said they’d unexpectedly gotten early permits to some location in Peru and were already gone.
It was fine. (His heart was not a little more fretted, his hope was not a little more twisted.) Maybe they had forgotten to tell him that they had to go somewhere else to get him a sibling. (Maybe they hadn’t decided if he was good enough to have one? Did he have to do something to prove himself?)
Months passed without word from his parents and eventually Tim let the dream of a sibling fade a little. He couldn’t really do much more on that front (he had already designed three different variations of a nursery for efficiency and cuteness, just in case a stork, or even a spaceship, did come and deliver babies.)
Tim continued to go out at night and follow Batman and Robin. He was getting good at action shots. Tim managed to get a few decent pictures of Robin and Batman flying across the city on their grapple lines, and a fight with some goons that had tried to torch some tenement buildings, and he got a really impressive picture of Robin launching off of Batman’s back to shoot his grapple off at a taller building. One night, Tim got into position before Batman and was ready to spot him when he landed, even though he was nearly encased in shadow. It was obvious Robin could not have seen him. Robin was taunting a burglar they’d chased across the rooftops, and whatever he said had made Batman smile. Tim had seen Bruce smile before in pictures and at galas but he’d never seen such a soft smile on Bruce’s face and had never considered The Batman could look like that at Robin. Tim felt warm and cold by halves after he’d taken that picture, knowing that it was going to be one of his best of the night, maybe of the year. He wanted to crawl nearer to them, and didn't dare. He never got close enough to be spotted by Robin or Batman, even on the nights he really, really wanted a hug. Especially whenever Robin laughed. Tim got a picture of that too. The burglar moved and Tim realized it was Catwoman. (Tim saw Batman and Catwoman kiss one time and he was never ever going to see that again if he could help it.) Tim went home, to his empty house, and slept in the nest under his bed, where it was easier to feel less alone when he was boxed in. It was almost a hug. A distant cousin to one, most definitely.