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“GUIL: No, no, no... You got it all wrong. You can’t act death. The fact of it is nothing to do with seeing it happen—it’s not gasps and blood and falling about—that isn't what makes it death. It’s just a man failing to reappear, that's all —now you see him, now you don’t, that’s the only thing that’s real: here one minute and gone the next and never coming back—an exit, unobtrusive and unannounced, a disappearance gathering weight as it goes on, until, finally, it is heavy with death.”
i.
When Tim thinks of dying, he is always standing up.
He wonders if it’s a consequence of his upbringing. Nature versus nurture, or something of the sort. He can never imagine death as something that will meet him at his bed in old age, can’t entirely find any sort of comfort in the notion of death as something that would embrace him, carry him gently into the other room, the one beyond this; his parents were never the type to soften what death was or offer pretty platitudes or empty metaphors, not when his grandparents died, not when his pet goldfish died. They’re dead, his parents would say, and though the word meant nothing to Tim as a toddler, he’s grown to accept it as a very solid equivalent to they will never be here again.
He’s six. It’s late at night, and the living room is dark, television on with the lights dimmed, dousing the room in static-blue and shadow. He isn’t supposed to be awake — his nanny had put him to bed hours ago, but he’d heard the jingle of keys and hushed voices, then footsteps downstairs, and the murmuring of the television, and he’s come down to investigate, socked feet pattering the hardwood floors. Whenever his parents arrive this late, they always head straight to bed, so he’s — curious, perhaps is the better word.
Tim has walking quietly down to an art; put all your weight onto the pad of one foot going forward, then reel it all back before the floor creaks. He peeks around the corner, and sees it’s just his mother, sitting alone in the bigger couch in front of the TV; his father’s shoes are neatly placed near the entranceway, he notices, but he’s nowhere to be seen.
She doesn’t notice him as he lingers behind the couch she’s sitting on, and he’s half-waiting for her to sense his presence, he’d once thought maybe all parents were supposed to, but that’s little kid stuff, it’s dumb. We can’t understand you if you don’t use your words, Timothy.
And so he says into the quiet, “What are you watching?”, and his mother answers, “Oh heavens, Timothy, you scared me.”
Tim shifts his weight from one leg to the other. “I’m sorry.”
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” she continues, as though Tim hadn’t said anything. “And this,” she gestures vaguely at the television, “it’s just the news, just grown-up stuff.”
Tim takes a small step forward, squinting at the screen, digging his fingers into the back of the couch. He’s nervous, for some reason. Jittery. His mother’s face looks as though it’s been cut from shadow, all features painted in the sickly blue of the television light. “There’s a picture of a girl my age there,” Tim says, meaning the screen. “Why?”
“They’re doing a report on her,” his mother replies, glancing at him over her shoulder. “That’s all. You really should be in bed, Timothy.”
But Tim wants to know about the girl. He isn’t sure what to ask — what did she do or what happened to her — so he asks both. His mother fidgets.
(He wonders if all mothers know that they will eventually have to speak of death. That they will have to tell their children about all the terrible things that can happen in this world, and that some, if not all of those terrible things will happen to all of them. Everyone will be hurt and everyone will die, everyone will lose something or everything, everyone will spend their whole lives trying to make it mean something and most of the time it will not, everyone will try their very best to get everything they have ever wanted, and sometimes they will come very close. Will they remember the words they use? Will they remember how they say it matters almost as much as what they say?
Adults talk about death but they never teach the kids what to do with the dead things they carry. Tim learns this eventually. Then he learns it again, and again, and again, and one day someone, maybe Stephanie or Damian or even Alfred will ask, Why do you hold on to all that? And Tim will realize he had never considered it a possibility to ever set anything down. Everything he’s ever let go of has claw marks on it.)
“She died,” his mother says, after a silence full of buzzing light. “They’re talking about her because she’s dead.”
Tim tilts his head. “What is dead?”
His mother is silent for a very long time, or maybe Tim is just young, and he’s yet to realize time is a finite resource. He spends his entire childhood drowning in it, feeling like he will be young and trapped forever. He’ll spend his teenage years tripping over his own two feet as time passes him by, but he will never quite stop feeling as small as he did when he was this age, and the world will never stop feeling a little too big.
“That means,” his mother says eventually. Her voice catches, and she has to clear her throat.“Dead means that she can never go home again.”
Tim gnaws at his lip. Neither of them say anything else, though they both clearly want to. Tim wants to ask but can she never go home again because she is dead or is she dead because she can't go home, and do people on the news always talk about you after you're gone? Can’t she go home even if her parents love her very much? Where do I put my hands now, Mama.
He knows his mother doesn’t really like it when he calls her that — he’d overheard her say so to the housekeeper once, something like, I just feel it too much, I can’t be all that fits inside that word, as small as it is — and so he tries not to. Mother, he could say instead. But his mother has already turned back to the television to watch the news report on the dead girl, and Tim is looking at the dead girl’s face and the dimple in her smile, and he feels very, very sad that this girl can never go home again.
He couldn’t imagine it. He wants to always be able to come home.
(His mother wants to grab her son by the shoulders and press him against her chest until skin and blood and bone are hers again, and she wants to scream don’t die don’t die don’t die because kids like her son will always stumble after new things they learn about, he’s always been such an inquisitive child, too inquisitive for his own good. He’s not a bad kid, his teachers say, he’s just curious, and they always make it sound like it’s a bad thing.
It would never be, she thinks, if this weren’t Gotham. If this were somewhere safe. But Gotham will always have curious children running into the shadows and losing themselves in them, and she has never been able to fully look her son in the eye and shake off the idea that he is going to die young. Maybe all mothers are afraid of that, but just try really hard to pretend they’re not, to pretend they don’t believe in it. But she remembers holding him as a baby in her arms, remembers how fragile he had been, how she’d held his tiny wrist in between two of her fingers to feel his pulse, and she’d thought, One wrong move and I’ll break it. She’s never been able to stop thinking about having thought that. She’s never been able to convince herself she isn’t an awful mother. It leaves her red at the bone.
From the moment you have a child, you belong to them, before anything else. If something happens to them, it will always be your fault; that’s your responsibility as a parent, and anyone who feels responsibility isn’t free.)
“Go to sleep, Timothy,” his mother says, but Tim is already moving. He knows when he’s overstayed, hears it in the strained note of his mother’s voice.
“Goodnight,” he says, and she hums in response. Goodnight, mama.
His footsteps don’t make any creaks, and the good-night that slips past his lips is barely a sound. He climbs upstairs thinking about the color red, and dead things, all the things that can never go home again. He hadn’t really asked it — even if her parents really, really love her, she still can’t go home again, just because she’s dead? — but now he feels he doesn’t have to. He saw the look on his mother’s face. He saw how his dad cried when his grandfather died, even though Tim was very little.
Sometimes love isn’t enough. It can’t bring people back from the dead. That’s a terrible thing to learn when you’re seven years old, or really at any age.
There’s a light underneath his parent’s bedroom door, and the shower is running. It fills him with a little warm something in his chance — both of his parents are home, and he’s going to sleep tonight with both of them near, and he’s home. He’s so unused to the sight of his parent’s door closed but occupied that he keeps his eyes right on it, and walks backwards into his room.
He sits on the bed. It’s dark. He scratches his arm once, then twice, and keeps scratching it. In the dim light, he can’t see the scratches grow a deep red, almost bleeding, almost an open wound. In the morning, he’ll look at himself in the mirror and see that it follows the artery that leads to his heart, like a fuse. It’ll feel like it’s burning.
He lays down to sleep, and his dreams are red and raging. An explosion, somewhere far away from here; metal clanging, scorching heat. Bang, bang, bang.
When Tim thinks of dying, his face is always covered, so no one may see his eyes. He’s wearing clothes that belong to a ghost, mouth filled with blood, metal and rust like he’s rotting on the inside. When he thinks of dying he’s never surprised, merely disappointed. There were supposed to be no more dead Robins; that’s a promise Tim made, once, if not out loud or to anyone but himself. If he dies as Robin, he breaks it. Tim doesn’t break promises.
He has thought of becoming something else. Once or twice, blinking bruised and exhausted eyes down at his uniform, spending his lunch break at school locked up in a restroom stall and re-doing butterfly stitches on his ribs. He could be something other than what he is. He could pass on the mantle, or lay it down to rest. As it should be, a tiny voice in his head always says, whenever he stumbles upon the thought. Robin should have died with him. Tim’s parading around in a dead boy’s uniform wearing a dead boy’s mask, being called a dead boy’s name.
Tim isn’t stupid. He knows Bruce wanted to bury Robin alongside Jason. He has felt it in as many bruises and ear-ringing shouts, all the blood that poured out when Tim kept poking at the wound, kept showing up, kept refusing to not be listened to. He’d pushed and dug, pushed and dug until the flesh grew tough. Batman needs Robin, Tim had said one final time, and Bruce’s jaw had tightened, loosened. He had said nothing, only gestured towards the training mats in the Cave. He’d spent months saying nothing, flipping Tim over his shoulder, and Tim had never been happier about the blood in his mouth.
The thing about Tim is that he’s selfish. That always makes him a little crueler than he’d like himself to be, but he’s under no illusions that cruelty is something he’s not capable of. He knows what he is.
Robin is a hero. Tim becomes Robin. The hardest part, he thinks, is that he barely feels like a hero at all, and he’s not sure what he’s doing wrong. Day after day something in his chest will crack and itch, but he will not scratch it. He’ll be afraid of what’ll come spilling out if he does. He’ll wonder if it’s a speck of rot. One day they’ll be going over the rooftops, he and Dick, and Dick will crack a joke Tim doesn’t understand, and it’ll hit him that it’s likely something Jason would have understood immediately. Tim will glance over his shoulder and say, half-jokingly, It sort of feels like I’m chasing a ghost, and Dick will look at him like he’s already dead, like he has just realized Jason is dead all over again, and Tim won’t speak again for the rest of the night.
He wonders what it would be like to be missed like Jason is. He doesn’t think he’s ever been missed before.
You can love someone so much, he thinks, when he watches Dick or Bruce move through the days as though there isn’t an empty space at the dinner table, or Alfred’s lingering gaze at the closed library door, which — as he had one off-handedly mentioned, used to always remain open just a crack, since Jason was always either coming in or out of it. You can love someone so much and still they’ll always die, and you won’t ever again be able to say their name and have it mean only their name.
Jason, he would whisper between cupped hands during his very first patrols with the Robin cowl, as if it were a prayer, or maybe a promise. Jason, Jason, he’d say over and over again, until it was sound only.
Whenever Tim thinks of dying, he dies as Robin. Perhaps Robin is always dying, perhaps it is a fixed point in time, perhaps Robin is trapped within his own narrative, all-Robins-die-young, perhaps he was dead at the outset, the moment he put on the cowl.
Or perhaps Jason was just right.
you cannot follow the dead
but you can follow a legend until it stains you
on the lips, jaw, teeth
until you are its primary evidence
ii.
They stumble into each other during patrol sometimes. Sparse and unintentional at first, though Tim’s paranoid mind took him right back to the Titan’s Tower the first few times, had him dizzy and clammy-handed trying to scramble down an alley wall before he could brain himself on the corner of a fire escape. He got benched for that one, forty-eight hours, which was incredibly unfair. Apparently he can’t be having panic attacks on the clock, or whatever it was Dick phrased it as, when Bruce inevitably failed to verbalize why he was benching Tim, even though the worried eyebrows were clear.
Unfair. Tim has had much worse panic attacks than that one, of course, but he couldn’t say that, so he took his forty-eight hour break and tried not to complain, lest he got benched for even longer. Tim has lived a whole life before he became Robin, and yet he can’t go back, he thinks, he can’t ever go back to how it was before.
It’s not common, but also not unusual for him to run into Red Hood while out on patrol. After those first two times where Tim thought he was being stalked, they’d established a tentative sort of truce when they stumbled upon each other, which mostly consisted of them staunchly ignoring the other’s presence and going about their day. If Robin happened to be too close to Crime Alley, Hood might growl like a rabid dog, but that’s most of what he would do, which was surprisingly non-violent.
I don’t really get it, he’d commented through the comms once, mostly talking to himself. I mean, I’m glad he’s not attacking us, but I wouldn’t have expected…
Hood doesn’t hold back, is the thing. Tim has seen the aftermath of his drug busts, the warehouses of trafficking rinks dyed blood-red, the odd assassination here or there, which Hood seems to take upon himself at random, only for the worst of the worst. Body by body, he makes it clear he’s not one of the Bats. Bruce’s shoulders grow heavier and heavier, as though the weight bears down on him instead.
Dick had answered him, when the silence dragged on too long. Jason, he’d said, roughly, would never hurt a child.
But he hurt me, Tim remembers thinking. He always thinks so many things he would never say out loud, because he knows they’d draw blood immediately, knows they’d tear down to the bone, knows words are something you can never take back, no matter how sorry you are.
No names over comms, Nightwing, he’d replied instead.
Right, Dick replied, like it was punched out of him.
Tim remembers the blood. The heat of it. The smell — people don’t often mention the smell of things, he recalls always finding it a bit peculiar; it’s so common in police statements to see the witness mention how dark it was, or how quiet it was, or how cold, but there is never a mention of if the place smelled damp or dusty or clean, even though smell is usually what precedes all other senses.
So he remembers the smell. The gurgling, involuntarily, the fleeting thought, Oh, that was my throat, my throat has been cut, and he remembers placing his hand atop it, the warmth, and thinking, Huh.
The worst thing about Tim is that he’s just curious.
He takes a deep breath, stifling the reflex to cough out the humid, fog-filled air. The night tastes like a silver coin, metallic and rusty, half-moon hidden behind some wispy clouds in the dark sky. He half-tilts his head, knowing it’s a nasty habit of his from when he notices something he doesn’t understand. Like an owl, Dick says.
“Hood,” he says, quite suddenly and with no inflection, and isn’t surprised at the lack of movement or noise his greeting elicits, because they were both trained by the same man.
“You don’t have to sound that excited,” Jason deadpans from behind him, and Tim only half glances over his shoulder before going back to where he’d been studying the movement of the alleyway below, gravel from the building’s roof digging into his elbow as he leans over the railing. Should get that checked, Tim thinks. Might need more armor there.
“I’ll lay down a path of roses next time,” Tim mutters, knowing Jason hears him full well.
“I’d be much more pleased if next time there weren’t any birdies alone and away from the cage at this hour of night,” Jason drawls, his voice slightly distorted by his helmet. “No matter how well-trained they might be.”
Tim turns, though training says he should stay still and keep an eye on his target. Instinct, though, tells him to not keep his back to Jason, and so he tries to shift as if he’s doing it unintentionally, so he has a full view of Red Hood’s signature helmet, his stomper boots and scarred hands. There’s something on his suit that looks like blood, but he doesn’t seem injured.
“No such thing as lucky coincidence,” Tim observes, after he’s done taking stock of the situation, and also noting that Jason had stood stock still as he did so. “What do you want from me, Hood?”
“And why would you assume I want something from you, specifically?” Jason asks, but he’s very unconvincing about it. It’s a tad surprising, honestly, considering just how much pretending and lying goes into being a vigilante in a place like Gotham. Jason, Tim has learned, is a very, very bad liar. Even with the helmet on, he can tell there’s something on his mind. Heart on his sleeve, is something Alfred had once used to describe Jason in his younger years, and up until very recently, Tim had thought that part of him must’ve died all those years ago, just like Robin.
“Considering you’ve yet to either attack me and that this time you haven’t pretended to ignore I’m a tad too close to Crime Alley,” Tim says, crossing his arms over his chest, “I’d call it an educated guess.”
It’s unnerving to talk to a helmet that can’t express any emotions, but he imagines Jason lifting a brow. “So you do admit you shouldn’t be in Crime Alley.”
“And you admit you let me be here anyways. What do you want? I have things to do.”
To Tim’s absolute bewilderment, Jason walks closer to the ledge of the building and just — sits down, back against the railing, elbows braced on his knees. Maybe he is injured, Tim thinks. Or some sort of pollen, even though Ivy’s been quiet these past couple months. Tim shifts slightly, unsure of what to do with himself in a way that’s very unbecoming of a Drake. “Hood,” he says, like it’s a question.
For a moment, it seems like Jason is going to do something absolutely idiotic like take off his helmet. For the record, Tim thinks the helmet is stupid, because while it does a better job of covering up Jason’s identity than a regular cowl, it must be stuffy in there, and makes it hard to have conversations. He hazards a guess that Jason never considered he’d be having conversations at all while wearing the suit. Tim knows, logically, that there’s still a cowl under the helmet, but he knows Jason might be even more paranoid than Batman about his own identity.
(I don’t know why, he’d told Babs once, on some slow snowy night where he was actually kind of pleased to stay inside running comms with her, instead of freezing his ass off in the slippery streets of the Bowery. Legally, he’s dead. Even if people saw him, they wouldn’t immediately jump to, yeah, the dead guy must’ve come back to life.
Babs was quiet. Tim could hear her breathing over the comms, and he wondered if he’d been too candid. He has never treated death with the same careful hands most people tend to have, and sometimes he goes too far.
Jason, Babs had replied, eventually, was very loved. More than he knew. When you love someone like that, logic sort of goes out the window. You’re so glad the person’s back, you won’t even ask why or how. We have a million things we want before tragedy strikes, but only one after the terrible thing happens. We just want… we just want them to come back.
Jason Todd was very loved. The words bounced around Tim’s head the rest of the night. He was so loved it bled into the very foundations of the house, into every corner and creaky step and hallway, into each cup of tea Alfred would brew to no one, into each of Bruce’s weary smiles, into every inch of Dick’s stupid bleeding heart, into the cowl itself. Tim has loved Robin as much as a child could love anything. He still feels it every time he puts on the suit.
He can never quite shake the feeling that love is haunting him.)
Jason — he sighs. Closes his hands into fists and then opens then, like he’s trying to make the blood circulate better, or maybe just grounding himself. “I needed a second,” Jason says, “and you were on my fucking roof.”
Tim blinks. “I’m sorry,” he says, slowly. “Do you own this building?”
“Did you just call me a landlord?” Jason asks, as if Tim’s the one being weird in this scenario. “Fuck you.”
“Fuck you,” Tim responds as a reflex.
Jason huffs out something that almost sounds like laughter. Tim tries not to think about how he would’ve once killed to have made Jason Todd laugh, and mostly fails.
Slowly, very slowly, Tim shifts so that he’s facing the same direction as Jason; back to the railing, arms still tightly crossed over his chest. He doesn’t sit down, just looks. At the slump of Jason’s shoulder, the dried blood on the front of his suit. The slightly mechanical hissing of his breathing isn’t labored and doesn’t sound pained, but it’s evenness sounds almost purposeful, as if he’s counting his breaths. He’s shaking his leg, like he’s anxious about something.
Because it’s protocol and because he doesn’t know what else he should do, Tim asks, “Are you injured?”
Jason makes a non-committal noise. “Is that what they’re teaching at the Bat School of Wayward Robins?” he asks sardonically. “You should only take a breather if you’ve got a knife lodged in your gut?”
Tim’s first instinct is to say, of course not, but that would be hypocritical of him, and really, of Bruce as well. Instead, he says, “Do you have a knife lodged in your gut?”
“I wish I did,” Jason says, “so I could stab you with it.”
He’s joking, Tim reasons, when Jason makes no move to get up or even looks in his direction at all. His heart still jackrabbits in his chest a handful of times before Tim manages enough breaths to steady himself.
“Okay,” Tim says, and hopes his voice only sounds strange to his own ear. “So you’re just… taking a break?”
“Not surprised you’re not familiar with the concept, Robin,” Jason drawls. “But I just popped a man’s eyes right out of their sockets, and they made a little pop-splat sound when I dug my fingers into them, so.” He swallows, before wiping a hand down the front of his suit, almost unconsciously. “Just… a minute.”
Tim had never considered the physics of eyeballs before, but maybe he should have. He makes a face at the thought; he’s seen some pretty gruesome things in his time as Robin, included but not limited to his own spleen ripped out of his body and put in a jar, so he has a pretty strong stomach for it, but well. Robin’s not really in the business of torturing and maiming. He got a lecture once for curb-stomping someone’s ribs, something about punctured lungs and life-long consequences, and had to summon every single ounce of self-control to not say something he would regret.
No one’s ever claimed Bruce isn’t a fucking hypocrite.
Still, call it morbid curiosity on his part. “You haven’t ever done that before?” he asks, and when Jason looks at him — well, the helmet looks at him strangely —, Tim makes a squishing motion with his index finger and thumb. “Eyeballs? I guess you don’t see much eye horror in the business, people usually go for the fingers. Fallange for fallange.”
“In the business, he says,” Jason says dryly, but his leg has stopped shaking. “Does B know his favorite little Robin is a budding admirer of the arts of torture?”
Tim can’t help but snort. “I’ve never been his favorite Robin. Also, not an admirer. Torture is functionally useless, as there’s no actual indication that torturing people for information will make them more likely to be truthful. Studies actually show they might lie more often, as they’ll say anything to make it stop. I just like to know about things.”
Jason is silent for a good handful of seconds. Tim can’t see his eyes, but he somehow knows he’s being sized up, but he can’t fathom what Jason could be looking for in him.
He’s used to it, though. Back in those early days with Bruce, whenever he’d catch him out of the corner of his eye, Bruce was looking at him like he was a particularly tricky puzzle to solve, searching for something in Tim’s face. Tim would always look back, guileless, eyes tracing the paths Bruce’s gaze made, silent, always silent. In the beginning, Tim thought Bruce had been looking for any indication that Tim didn’t really want to be Robin, that he didn’t mean his words, but — eventually, he knew. He couldn’t have become Robin without knowing.
What? Tim asked, one night during patrol. He was still getting used to the domino mask, and the glue they used to fix it upon his face was irritating his skin, but he’d never say it. It was dark and humid, as it so often is in Gotham, and Batman’s cowl all but disappeared in the shadows of the street they were patrolling, barely reflecting any light from the flickering lampposts along the sidewalk. Tim had caught Bruce’s gaze on him again, a prickling on the back of his neck.
Bruce froze, almost imperceptible to anyone but Tim. For half a second, his mouth hung open, as if he were about to say something. Tim kept looking back at him, half-annoyed. And then Bruce looked away, face half-melted in shadow. cleared his throat. He didn’t look back at Tim, but he said, The way you just said that, just — reminded me of something.
Someone, he hadn’t said, and there was no need to. There was never any need to, because Tim has always known what he is. He’s always known what he is here to do.
“Well, I s’ppose you’re right, little bird,” Jason says, eventually. He tilts his head back so it’s resting against the ledge of the building, as if he were here to stargaze. There are no stars in Gotham: the sky is a dark, dark gray, and the only light that shines is from the lamplights on the street below them. “Most pain is useless.”
(And yet it’s so easy to inflict. You don’t have to mean to do it or even want to do it. And Jason wants to, or he once wanted to, body alight with white-hot pain, world a dizzying, sickening green; let the splinters of his mind explode outward for once, hurt something else outside of him. It hurt so much to die, he remembers, it all hurt so much, and it’s not the sort of thing he can verbalize to anyone, no one who would care or who he wouldn’t hurt, in turn, by speaking of it.
He’s tried. Dick, the asshole. His stricken face, guilty, he’s always so guilty and bleeding all over everything. It’s always so hard to hurt Dick because of all his guilt; everything Jason throws at him just blops and vanishes, like a stone thrown in a lake. Dick had said, I wish this had never happened to you, I wish it had happened to me instead, and it did nothing; it was like soothing the pain of an injury but doing nothing to dress the wound. What fucking good would it have done if it had happened to you? Jason shot back, and disappeared before Dick’s guilt could swallow him whole.
There is a comfort in pain, a familiarity to it. There doesn’t have to be a way in or a way out; it’s over, it’s happened. And if it’s referring to his anguish, it’s just a thing. The shape of a gun, or a knife. It’s just a thing, small and hardened into a stone in his chest. He’s so used to breathing through the ache that he can barely recall what it was like to be without it anymore. If he stops, it becomes unbearable, and so he rarely stops. He trains. He patrols the streets as Red Hood.
He looks at the Replacement and sees a child. Sees himself, four years out of time, an image superimposed, past leaking into the present. If he picked up a knife and cut into the air, he could easily see the old day running just underneath this night, Robin looking up through the domino mask, always too small in uniform, hair dark and tousled, painfully young. He can’t recall ever being this tiny, but Timothy Drake is all lean and wiry out of a small growth spurt, still unsure where to put his gangly limbs, and Jason is so used to the pain in his chest.
He didn’t create Robin, he reasons. He can’t have possibly cursed it — can’t have made a title into a tragedy, an omen, a promise. No more dead Robins has to mean something other than foreshadowing, even if in certain lights Jason still sees the red of the cape stained with blood.
He’s been reading too many Greek tragedies as of late, morbidly, and he can’t help but see traces of it everywhere. The essence of tragedy is that it is inevitable. Not only have you been dead since the beginning, you’re dead before the story starts. A Greek sentiment: Of course. Everyone has their part to play. He has to put us to death, and we have to bury our brother. That’s how the roles were cast. What do you want us to do about it?
Jason has been both dead and alive since the beginning. He was always going to be buried in the place he died, and he was always going to come back the way he did.
If you believe in the narrative, that is. If you just believe in Jason, the person, you can think whatever you’d like, and imagine a hundred different scenarios in which nothing terrible ever happened. Stories about boys like Jason never end with them growing old. The moment he stepped into that airport all those years ago should be considered solid and undeniable evidence that time machines will never exist, because if they did, at some point in the future, someone who loved Jason would have already gone back to that exact moment to stop him from leaving Gotham. And they’re far more plentiful than he believes, the people who love him.)
“Pain is useless?” Tim repeats. “Considering your track record, I find it hard to believe. I mean, hard to believe that you believe that.”
“Well, you don’t know much about me, do you?” Jason says, but his tone is weird — like he realizes the hypocrisy of his words almost immediately, because he doesn’t really know much about Tim either. He flicks a few pebbles with his finger, and they bounce off the metal generator in front of them, the muffled bang-bang-bang too loud in the night. “I don’t deal in pain, I deal in anger. In violence, if you want to talk semantics. Anger has a purpose, and violence is nothing but strategy, little bird. Pain is just a consequence.”
Tim feels the phantom sting on his throat, on his ribs. He flexes his gloved fingers to try and expel it.
He doesn’t understand the purpose of anger. He grew up with an angry man in his house, which means there will always be an angry man in his house; and yet anger has always eluded him, melting off his skin too quickly, gone under the wave of some other emotion before it even has time to fully form. He can hold a grudge like it’s a hand, but he can’t conjure up a point in time where he was truly, incandescently angry, an anger that didn’t morph into sadness, that didn’t crumble under regret.
Tim sits down beside Jason, though there are a few feet of distance between them still. He tries to make himself as small as as unobtrusive as possible, a bit fascinated, still, by what seems to be a real, honest to God conversation between them. Jason glances at him when he moves, but says nothing. Instead, he reaches up and tugs off his helmet, leaving nothing but the red cowl on, the domino mask covering his eyes. His hair is sweaty and mussed, clinging to his forehead where it isn’t pressed flat from being under the helmet so long.
Tim is frozen, jaw a bit slack, as Jason sets down the helmet in the space between them, crunching slightly on the gravel of the roof. Perspiration clings to the back of Tim’s neck, the metallic tang of the breeze coating the back of his throat.
You never take off a layer of protection around someone you consider an enemy.
Fucking hell.
Instead of lingering too much on the meaning that seems to weigh down around them, Tim says, “I can understand violence as a strategy. But I don’t see how anger serves any purpose. Anger makes you reckless, just like any other emotion would. If you care too much, you lose sight of what matters.”
“Ha,” Jason says, humorlessly. “And why the fuck would I pride myself in not caring about anything?”
“I didn’t say you shouldn’t care,” Tim protests. He uncrosses his arms, only to be wont of something to do without it, so he adjusts himself to be sitting criss-crossed, hands firmly on his knees. “None of us would be out here if we didn’t care. I just meant compartmentalizing. Emotion clouds your judgment.”
“Why is a ten-year-old talking to me about compartmentalization,” Jason asks, seemingly at the sky at large.
“I’m fifteen.”
“Right. That helps.”
Tim huffs. He catches himself rubbing absently at his cheek, a nervous habit he thought he’d long grown out of. “Are you really just taking a minute?” he asks, dubiously, because it’s been much longer than that, and Jason has yet to move from where he’s sitting. He knows Red Hood has a lot of cronies and allies who can keep things running smoothly in his place for a bit, and statistically he’s out in the field himself less often than the Bats — at least from what they can track — but Tim’s not used to what seems like downtime during patrol hours. Stakeouts, like what he’s doing (very poorly, one may say, but then again it’s a slow night), are one thing, but Jason’s just… there. Knees pulled close to his chest, chin resting on his hand.
He narrows his eyes. “Are you lying about not being injured?”
“Why the fuck do you care?” Jason asks, but not quickly enough that it sounds like he’s trying to distract Tim. He doesn’t seem to be in pain, and the blood on his suit is dry and is likely not his, so not lying. Apparently.
“Just ruling out possibilities,” Tim says. “B would hate me if he knew I let you bleed out, even if it wasn’t on purpose.”
“Right,” Jason says, after a pause. “As if he could hate you.”
Unbidden, Tim echoes it back. “As if he could hate you.”
Jason freezes in the middle of running a hand through his hair. “I’m so not doing this with you right now, Replacement.”
Tim doesn’t fail to note the switch to Replacement, and he doesn’t know how to feel about it. He’s known, from what he’s been told about Jason in the past few years, that he was very expressive, but after his first encounter with Jason-as-Red-Hood, he didn’t think he’d have remained as such: so easy to read in the inflections of his voice, in the twist of his brow.
“You’re on my roof,” Tim deadpans, quoting Jason’s words from earlier. “And as far as I recall, you’re the one who started talking.”
“You’re too close to Crime Alley, is what you are,” Jason rasps. “You should head back to Bristol if you still value your wings, birdie.”
“And you,” Tim stresses the word, “are still talking to me. So you either want something, need something, or — I don’t know. I don’t know, and I don’t like not knowing, so why don’t you just cut to the chase? You can’t just be trying to have a therapy session, or whatever the fuck this is.”
“My job doesn’t offer health insurance, much less for mental health plans.” Jason runs both hands over the sides of his hair, mussing it up even more. In the gloom, his white streak looks a dark, dirty gray. “Maybe I’m in need of one of those.”
“What, a masked vigilante seeking psychological help?” Tim asks, flatly. “That’s not allowed. They’ll have to revoke your permit.”
Jason laughs.
It’s a nice laugh. It makes him sound very young. Tim looks at him, a bit stricken, because he’s always thought of his Robin as many things, but young was never one of them.
Maybe that was his mistake.
Tim shifts a little in place. “Do you really think,” he says, “that pain is useless?”
The look Jason levels him is unreadable, even without the cowl shielding his features. It hits Tim, quite suddenly, of the image they paint here, Robin and Red Hood, side by side on a rooftop, no weapons in sight, faces still covered. He wonders if he’d ever be brave enough to talk to Jason outside a costume; he’s never done it before. It’s easier like this, when Jason can’t really see his face. Can’t see Tim. He sees Robin. That’s all anyone ever sees.
“Most pain is useless,” Jason corrects, adding weight onto the word. “It doesn’t save you. And it can’t absolve you.”
“Absolution,” Tim echoes. “Is that what Red Hood is looking for? I wouldn’t have pegged you as someone who believes in a higher power.”
“Red Hood believes in nothing,” Jason says, dismissively. And that — hurts, somehow, because Robin has always believed in everything, in hope, in doing the right thing, in using your voice to stand up for others who can’t do it themselves. He knows Jason went through a lot, knows Jason — has literally tried to kill him before, but Tim doesn’t understand. Robin, at his core, believed in wonder.
“I thought you believed in justice, at least,” Tim says, choosing his words carefully, “if not in anything or anyone else.”
“I believe in justice as a possibility,” Jason says, and his voice sounds a bit rough. “In something you chase after, that keeps you going. but it’s just as useless as pain. Neither can bring the dead back to life.”
“You’re here,” Tim points out in spite of himself. Jason’s undeath is not the most easily breached of topics, so he’s prepared for barbed defensiveness, but — Jason’s hand twitches, his shoulders draw up, and whatever his face is doing behind the cowl, it has him quiet for several seconds.
Then Jason says, “You can’t bring people back from the dead, even if you can bring people back from the dead.”
Tim blinks. “That doesn’t make any sense.”
Jason looks askance, away from him — at Gotham, at the expanse of dark gray sky above them, too fog-filled and polluted to be a proper night blue. “Dying,” he says, “is a very inconsistent concept, when you’ve done it but come back from it. It’s final. You’re dead. There’s nothing. Death is absence. But then you’re back, alive again, and.” He doesn’t trail off, exactly. It’s more like the words die at his throat. “Some things don’t come back. You die and you come back, but you don’t, not really. You’re not the same, you won’t ever be. You can’t come back from the dead. What they wanted back — you can’t give it, you don’t have it anymore.”
A dusty, yellowed-out memory unravels in the back of Tim’s mind. The blue light from the screen, the back of the couch, the murmuring of the news. His mother’s voice, which he so often fears he’ll eventually forget. Dead means you can’t go home anymore.
And Tim gets it. He thinks. He’s never died, of course, maybe come close to it, and even from those near-misses he’s felt he’s come back differently; he’d be barely recognizable to the twelve-year-old who first put on the Robin suit. And maybe what Tim really hates is that death is the one thing he can’t understand no matter how much he tries, because he’s always been there for the aftermath of it but not the fact of it, not of someone he really cared about. He’s intimate with what death leaves behind, he’s intimate with absence, but he’s also alive. Jason might be one of the only people on the planet who knows what death really is, and he also knows Jason will never be able to explain it in a way that means anything to someone else.
There they sit on the rooftop, the ghost and the haunted. There’s a bright, silver blur up on the sky that might be the moon.
“Does it matter?” Tim asks, after a long, metallic silence.
Jason looks at him sharply. “What?”
“Does it really matter, that whatever you had before, you don’t have it anymore? Maybe you came back different, maybe you feel like you did. Of course time passed and so many things changed. But time would have passed anyway. Even if nothing terrible happened, you still would have changed anyway, in some irrevocable way, because everything changes.” Tim wraps his arms around his knees, tapping some grounding patterns into his ankles, because Jason’s gaze is just so intense.
“I’m not saying it doesn’t matter that you died. I can’t talk about that, you know no one can possibly say anything to you about that because you died. You can’t — you say B and Nightwing are too attached to who you used to be before, that they have to accept you’ve become something else, but… so are you. It wouldn’t hurt you so much if you didn’t care. You see all the things you don’t have anymore because you miss who you used to be. You wish you could still be him. But you — you won’t ever be that again. You are who you’ve become.”
Tim is so, so thankful for the cowl, for the mask. He’s often mused about the nature of masks, of how much the cowl gives you, how much it takes away, all the weight behind one piece of cloth. And yet he’s glad, because he doesn’t think he’d be able to say any of that if he and Jason could see each other’s faces. He doesn’t want to know what Jason’s eyes look like behind the cowl now.
He expects anger. They’re well past the point in which Jason should’ve grabbed his helmet and stormed out; honestly, Jason should’ve gone somewhere else the moment he noticed Tim on this rooftop, and Tim can’t for the life of him figure out what it means that not only did he not leave, but he decided to stay, and he started talking, and.
Tim trusts Jason, despite the blood in his mouth. He doesn’t dare think Jason trusts him in turn.
But he’s glad he can’t see Jason’s face.
There’s some scuffling in the alley below them, but neither of them move. Tim has long since muted his mic, and comms have been suspiciously silent, even for a quiet night. Dick is in town at the same time as Bruce, and there hasn’t been a hint of squabbling between them in hours, which is unheard of. No one has called for Robin for the past hour as well, which is also a bit strange, but not alarming. It’s a quiet night; if there was trouble, they’d hear it before they saw it.
Tim’s eyes flicker to his left, and the red light of a security camera blinks back at him, almost as if winking. He purses his lips to keep himself from sighing.
Seems like Oracle has decided a talk was overdue.
“You know,” Jason rasps, and Tim almost jumps out of his skin. “I never thought I’d see the day. A Bat who’s good with words. I thought you were flunking English, but that was a pretty nifty speech, Replacement.”
“I’m not flunking English,” Tim says indignantly, which is only a half-lie. “And how would you know? Are you keeping an eye on my school records? That’s creepy, not even B does that.”
“He should, your grades in humanities are deplorable,” Jasons says. Before Tim can process the implications of that statement, he heaves out a sigh, cracking his knuckles with loud pops. On Red Hood, it should look intimidating, but Jason just kind of looks uncertain.
“Um,” Tim says. In spite of himself, he shuffles a bit closer, knowing he’s scratching up the bottom of his suit, and nudges Jason’s foot with his own. “I meant what I said. I don’t always — I’m very good at lying, but I wasn’t lying just then.”
Jason laughs again. He’s been doing that a lot tonight, but it never sounds happy. “Thank you for the heads-up,” he says. “I guess B needed one Robin that didn’t wear his heart on his sleeve. It was always a liability anyway. The heart’s an anchor. If you’re Robin, if you want to fly, you can’t carry any extra weight.”
Tim frowns, feeling a bit unmoored. “No, that was the best part about Robin,” he says, so firmly he surprises both himself and Jason. “Robin was good, and kind, and he cared about everything and wore his heart on his sleeve. That’s what made him Robin. I can’t,” he swallows, “I’ve never been able to do all of that, it’s different for me. But don’t say that. Robin’s heart was the best part about him. It’s — it’s the best part about you.”
Sorry, he almost says as a follow-up, because Jason just stares. It’s almost familiar. He’d apologize so often after he started training with Bruce, and Bruce would also just stare at him just like this. He wonders if Jason knows he has the exact same habit of tilting his head that Bruce does, that he flexes his hands the exact same way. It reminds Tim that Jason lived with Bruce for years. That Tim has never been part of the family the same way Jason and Tim are, and that if he died, he wouldn’t leave as many empty spaces behind.
A sliver of moonlight seeps through the hazy clouds, and the light cuts Jason’s face in three parts, casting the rest of him in sharp relief. He hasn’t moved from where Tim nudged him, and they’re almost knee to knee. Tim realizes this is probably the closest he’s ever been to Jason — well, other than when Jason slit his throat, which was necessarily a close-up event.
“You talk like that so often,” Jason says, and Tim blinks, because to be honest, he’d never really felt like Jason was really listening whenever he spoke, at least not enough to recognize patterns. “Like I got killed, but Robin’s the one that died. You’re Robin. Jason Todd might be dead, but you’re not.”
“On the field, I’m Robin,” Tim agrees, softer than he intended. This is the truth, after all. “But I’ll never be Robin, not the way you were. You were — you were my hero.”
Jason takes that as one would take a punch to the jaw, with a sharp inhale and the clenching of teeth. “Don’t put me on a pedestal, kid,” he says tersely. “I haven’t been a hero in a long time.“
“It doesn’t matter what you are,” Tim tells him, as if it were that simple, and maybe it is. “It’s what you were to me. It’s what I — I never really wanted to be a hero, just having one was enough for me, but then you were gone and there was an empty space that needed to be filled, and no one. No one would… Batman needed a Robin. You hate to hear his name, I know, but he needed you, like I needed you, and so I—“
“You decided to become me,” Jason completes. “You decided to become Robin.”
It’s not as derisive as it was when he first called Tim his replacement. He doesn’t know if that’s better or worse. He never meant to become Jason, or to replace him, because really, it wasn’t about Jason at all, it was about Robin. Because Robin is a thing, a title, as much or sometimes more than it is the kid behind the cowl. A symbol, just like Batman: Gotham has built its own mythology around them, and whatever Batman and Robin do, they inevitably act within the constraints of the city’s belief, because at the end of the day, it isn’t about who they are, but about what they mean.
Tim didn’t become Robin for Jason’s sake, or even for Bruce’s sake. He became Robin because that’s what Batman needed. It wasn’t until much later that he’d be faced with the sheer magnitude of the grief Bruce bore for Jason, that he’d begin to chip away the mythos and start to see the sixteen year old beneath the tragedy mask, the grieving father in the wings.
To Tim, the world is this way, and then it is not; he tries to organize everything, knowing the world is filled with disorder, and yet he can’t fathom anything he doesn’t understand. He reconstructs from memory what’s been broken; he makes do with what’s at hand.
He doesn’t mean to be cruel, but sometimes he is anyway.
Jason is looking at him again, inscrutable. “That’s a nasty sense of responsibility you’ve got there, kid,” he says, after a moment. “Better be careful. It might turn into a fatal flaw.”
“Uh-huh,” Tim mutters. “I’m not a character in a Greek play. And you’re one to talk about fatal flaws. You literally died.”
“Metaphorically, metaphysically.” Jason shrugs. Something in his shoulder pops when he moves, and he makes a face. He pulls up a leg close to his chest. Like this, in the half-gloom, it almost feels like they’re the only two people awake during a sleepover, when the whole entire world is asleep, and Tim immediately feels childish when he thinks it. He’s never even been to a sleepover before. “Life isn’t a narrative, it doesn’t follow the same rules, and yet narrative is self-fulfilling, because we need it in order to comprehend life. The hero dies because of his fatal flaw.”
Tim hums under his breath. Jason would have liked college, he thinks. He’s extremely smart. It hurts something awful in his chest.
“I never wanted to be a hero,” Tim says again, because he feels he has to; he’s never said it to anyone else out loud. Sure, Batman isn’t so much a hero as he is a vigilante, but everyone knows it’s not about what you are, but about what you do, and what others see you as. Batman is a hero, as is Nightwing, as Batgirl was, as Oracle is. As Robin. And Robin is Tim, now. Tim is Robin.
He couldn’t ever say it. Bruce would’ve sent him straight home, probably, or Dick would’ve looked at him with those stupid sad eyes of his and told Tim this was not his responsibility and he could not be Robin, but that would never be true. Of course it’s Tim’s responsibility, regardless of if he made it his or not. Anyone who feels responsibility isn’t free.
Jason says, “Good.”
Tim blinks at him, but Jason is looking elsewhere. His hands are tightly clenched over his knees, and his gaze is faraway, like he’s remembering something. “Good,” Jason says again, roughly, and he turns to Tim. “Don’t be a hero. Heroes die. That’s the narrative. The hero dies because there’s nothing else to do. The hero dies in an accident, the hero dies trying to save everyone but himself, the hero dies in front of a crowd, in front of no one, the hero dies alone, the hero dies in the best story, the hero dies off-stage. I was a hero,” Jason all but spits out the word. “I saved people, and I helped them, and I thought I was making the world a better place. I was loyal to Batman, I was loyal to Gotham, to those I loved, and I was loyal to my mother, and it got me killed. So don’t be a fucking hero, Tim. It’ll keep you alive. Believe me.”
His hands are clammy but his face is overwarm, pulse beating rapidly on his wrist, his neck, his chest. He looks at Jason, stricken, but Jason is already clambering up to his feet, stumbling a bit over legs that’ve probably grown numb from sitting on concrete this whole time. Tim can’t move, hands still wrapped around his knees, shoulders slack from the intensity of Jason’s vitriol, the control over his breath gone.
“Fuck this,” Jason mutters, rubbing both hands over his cowl like he’s trying to fend off a headache. “That’s too much for one night. I need a beer or twenty. Jesus fucking Christ.”
Tim looks down at his Robin suit, the colors seemingly muted in the night. For the first time in a very long time, he feels like a kid playing dress up. He’d changed the original design of the suit, of course, but he’s suddenly hit with this intense sensation of wrongness, like his body doesn’t belong to him, like he’s eyes on a head and nothing else, watching, just watching. He has to tighten his hands into fists as hard as he can, fingernails lightly scratching the reinforced cloth of his gloves, for a semblance of grounding.
When he glances up, Jason is standing there against the skyline, the moonlight almost a halo behind him, casting his entire front into shadow. He has his arms crossed over his chest.
“I didn’t mean to freak you out,” he says, and it’s perhaps the gentlest voice Tim’s ever heard from him. “ I’ve said my piece about what happened during our first meeting, and I. Fuck, I’m lucky you even look at me after that. But there were things I said that I still mean, kid, even if I shouldn’t have gone about it that way. Being a hero gets you killed. And you’re a pain in my fucking ass, but I don’t want you to die.”
“Could’ve fooled me,” Tim rasps, absently running over the healed-over scar on his throat, and Jason winces.
“I deserve that.”
“I don’t want you to die either.”
At that, Jason looks bewildered. “I’m not going to die. Not again.”
“You talk about narratives and symbolisms,” Tim says, and he makes it to stand up as well, pins and needles running up and down his legs. “But in practice, when it comes down to it, Red Hood is just as much of a masked vigilante as Robin is. You say that being Robin killed you, and yet you come back to it anyway.”
If Tim didn’t know any better, he’d say Jason was grinning under the cowl. “Like a pig to slaughter, baby bird,” he says cheerily, and Tim can’t help but smile in turn.
It’s all a bit fucked up. He knows, logically, no one had ever expected him to forgive Jason so easily, but really it isn’t easy, it’s the hardest thing. Forgiveness, like grief, is not a process that has an end point. No one would ever come up to Bruce and ask him if he’s done grieving his parents — anyone who would understands nothing about what it means to lose someone. Anyone who’d ask Tim how far along he is in forgiving Jason understands nothing about what it means to love someone and be hurt by them; to be shown regret, rather than apologized to; and then to choose forgiveness, knowing it’ll be something you’ll spend your whole life doing.
He bends down and picks Hood’s helmet up from the ground, then hands it to Jason, who takes it, but doesn’t put it on immediately. He looks at Tim for a very long time, but even standing so close, Tim doesn’t feel afraid anymore. Jason is a lot taller than him, so he has to tilt his head up a bit to look back at him, just as he does to Bruce.
“You know,” Jason says, quietly. “There’s probably better brothers out there to have than me.”
“I wouldn’t know,” Tim replies, a bit confused. “I’ve never had brothers before.”
Something pained flashes in Jason’s eyes. “Yeah, you have.”
“Oh,” Tim says. He doesn’t know what to do with his hands. He’s never made it to this part of the conversation without running away, and now that he’s here, he only finds half of the genuine terror he expected to find. “I don’t know what it means to have brothers. I don’t know how they’re made.”
“That’s not the part that matters,” Jason tells him. He takes a few steps back, looking as tired as he was when he first set foot on this roof. He glances heavenward, twirls his helmet from one hand to the other, then snorts. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” he asks, seemingly to himself, as though he were quoting something.
He then looks at Tim, and the gaze settles over him, heavy with meaning. “You’ve got wings now, Replacement,” he says. “Be a bird and not Icarus.”
He puts the helmet back on, cracks his neck, and then he’s gone. Up to the ledge then down, metal grapple finding another fire escape to connect to, and he doesn’t look back.
You’ve spent too long reading up on Greek myths, Tim thinks, a bit faintly, if you’re too superstitious to even look over your shoulder. I’m not going to disappear. I’m right here.
(In a dream, Tim apologizes to everyone he meets. Instead of introducing himself, he apologizes. He apologizes for not knowing why he’s still alive. He’s sorry. He’s so sorry. He asks for forgiveness. He’s incapable of articulating what for, if asked. In a dream his brother kills him, in a dream he tries to die. In a dream God says, I have never made brothers before. I thought this was how they were made. Two brothers standing in a field is enough for a tragedy to start. Two brothers standing in a field make a body where none existed.)
Tim breathes. In for four times, hold, out for four, hold. He shakes out his legs to regain proper feeling into them, hops a few times in place to get his heartbeat going. A quick glance down to the alley shows no more movement, not that he expected anything tonight, regardless. He’s already formulating some explanation for going dark on comms for so long, that is if Oracle hasn’t come up with something already. He hopes so. His head feels like it’s full of cotton.
He taps back into the comms line, turns on his mic. “I’m on my way back.”
There’s nothing for a good long seconds, and he prays to all Gods that may or may not be real that he won’t be met with a barrel of questions about going dark for the past hour, because he doesn’t think he has it in himself to come up with a good enough lie right now. His heart feels tender and bruised, like a fruit that’s been picked up too many times and is about to go bad.
Perhaps Babs has done something, because nothing of the sort happens. Dick’s voice chimes in a few seconds later. “Copy that,” he says, sounding too cheery for having just spent the past hours patrolling Gotham alongside Bruce. “Come back home, baby bird.”
“Right,” Tim echoes. The word is painted red in his dry mouth. “Home.”
(Am I my brother’s keeper?, asks his brother’s murderer.
Everyone’s a keeper of their dead.)
“I felt the red-winged man gaze, I heard him speaking. I know who you are, he said, there are two ways this can go, no, three ways. I don’t want to count the ways, I said, I just want to finish it. I need to get to the end. His wings lifted and sank. Oh my darling, he said, you’re a long way from the end.”
iii.
“You’re up late,” Tim says.
From his place on the kitchen table, Dick does a poor imitation of a grin, eyes almost squeezing shut. “One could say I’m up early.”
“There’s still about a half hour left before it becomes ambiguous enough,” Tim says, heading straight to the fridge and ruffling around the back for an energy drink, which he remembers half-heartedly hiding behind some leftovers earlier in the day. There’s no actual hiding being done from Alfred, all-seeing and all-knowing as he is, but Tim can deal with a few disappointed sighs and pointed glances. He grabs the can and has to resist the urge to press its cool surface against his tired eyes. “For now, it’s still very late, even for you.”
All Bats are used to being up into the wee hours of the night, as it’s the nature of the job, but none of them seem to approach switching the daytime for the nighttime with the same glee that Tim does. Even Bruce, when he’s off the clock (which has been known to happen, once in a blue moon) will retire to bed at a reasonable hour, and Dick, despite his alias, is a morning person. Tim tries to fit all his derision into the two words.
Which is why it’s strange to see him up at a quarter past three in the morning on a Wednesday, especially when he’s benched due to a sprained ligament on his knee, which had earned him a lot of needling from Alfred regarding cool-down stretches after patrol, and a good cackle from Jason over the comms about Dick having old-people bones now. Barely a day over twenty-five, Dick had gritted out.
Yeah, Jason had drawled in response. As I said, old.
Worry not, Master Dick, Alfred had said, patting his good knee. When you’re young, everyone past a certain age is ancient history.
Something pained flashed over Dick’s face, and then Bruce called Tim over to give his report, and Tim had seen nothing else.
Tim narrows his eyes at Dick, eyeing the nervous way he’s tapping his mug, his leg elevated on a cushion on the opposite chair, pants rolled up and brace on his knee, eyes heavy. Something cold trickles down the back of his spine at the thought of Dick having been crying, because Tim has never known what to do when adults cry around him, or when they’re in pain, or when they need comfort. His chest tightens, and he kind of wants to leave the room immediately.
He remembers being very young and sitting beside his mother on her bed, after she and his father had some disagreement that ended with slamming doors. When Janet Drake cried, it was always a silent affair, handkerchief dabbing at her eyes in a poised manner, shoulders barely shaking. And yet the pain in her eyes as she looked at Tim always comes back to haunt him, her gaunt and desolate expression, so similar to how Bruce would look at him after Jason died. What should I do, Timothy? she’d say. What did I do to deserve this?
Life is not often about what you deserve. But Tim was always too small to grasp at those big questions; he still feels too small now, too small when Bruce would push him too hard during training, too small when he’d sit down with Tim on the gym mats afterwards and hold his head in his hands.
But it’s ingrained in him, despite the fear, so Tim says, slowly, “Are you okay?”
Dick glances at him, then down at his mug. Whatever is in it, it’s long grown cold. He shrugs, then takes a sip. “In due time,” he says, which, okay. Everyone in this family is always finding new and creative ways to talk around their feelings. What does that even mean?
Tim closes the fridge, nervously rolling around his energy drink between his hands without cracking it open. The light in the kitchen is dim, only a lamplight around the corner of the microwave, near Alfred’s pile of cookbooks. It’s a yellowish-orange, coloring everything in a dreamlike glow akin to trembling candlelight, and it makes every shadow seem bigger than it is. Dick’s expression is almost indiscernible in the off-light.
“Are you just coming back from patrol?” Dick asks.
“I’m off tonight.”
“Right. That’s right, two nights off a week for Robin. ”
“Three during finals season,” Tim offers, and succeeds in making Dick crack a smile.
“Yeah, I know,” he says, a bit fondly. “That was instituted when Jason flunked a chemistry test because he’d been up ‘til almost dawn because of patrol. We didn’t talk much at the time, but I remember him complaining about it the week after, that Bruce was treating him like a little kid.”
There’s this tone Dick gets whenever he talks about Jason, and it has never changed, not even after Jason came back from the dead. Like he’s trying to keep his voice light, but the undercurrent of sorrow beneath each of his words is too noticeable, the slight hitch of breath before setting every sentence in past tense. It’s not like the grief can just halt to a stop, Tim thinks, because it almost never does, and people never come back.
But Jason did. And still, this is still how Dick talks about him — he used to, he did, he asked, he’d tried, he wanted. He’ll slip in front of Bruce and say, I don’t think he would’ve agreed with you, and then he’ll glance at the corner of the room and see Jason looking at him, not saying anything, just looking. Then Jason will say something really witty and stupid, emphasizing all verbs in the present, and Dick will just stand there and look pale, like he’s just seen a ghost.
Tim can’t really fault Jason for keeping himself at arm’s length, when his brother still talks about him like he’s dead. And he also can’t fault Dick for feeling haunted, because ghosts are largely metaphorical, and in the grand scheme of things, the fact that Jason isn’t dead anymore doesn’t matter, because he still died.
Dick drums his fingers against his mug again, a light tapping that sounds way too loud against the quiet of the house.
The braver thing would be to step forward and take a seat next to him, ask him what’s really wrong. But Tim is only brave every other day, and he’s only a decent person in his best moments, and he doesn’t really want Dick to tell him what’s wrong, because he isn’t sure he’ll be able to shoulder it. Everything is so heavy in this family. It almost makes him miss the empty rooms of the house he grew up in, the lightness of absence, of silences that weren’t sagging with meaning, because there was no one else there for it to mean anything to.
“You and Jason look a lot alike, in certain lights,” Dick whispers, eyes boring a hole onto the surface of the table. “Whenever I was here, he’d always come down to complain on his nights off. We didn’t have much in common, I think, but we could spend hours complaining about Bruce. When I heard your footsteps, I thought it was him, for a moment. ”
Tim raises an eyebrow in spite of himself. “Sorry to disappoint.”
Dick doesn’t rise to the bait, not that Tim expected him to. Jason makes him angry, Bruce makes him explode, but Dick Grayson has never raised his voice at Tim. On worse days it annoys him to no end, but Tim isn’t really itching for a fight right now. There’s something leaden about this night, which feels sirupy-slow like honey, the few colors about oversaturated and unreal. Perhaps Tim is just tired.
“Is that why you’re still awake?” Tim asks. “Thinking about the past? You know it’s no good to do that.”
“God, you sound like Alfred,” Dick mutters, rubbing at his temple. “It doesn’t help to be here. But I live in a walk-up apartment and need to rest my leg, so.”
“I can complain about Bruce, if you want,” Tim tells him, half-meaning it. “For old time’s sake?”
Dick smiles at him, but it’s very sad. “You’re not Jason, baby bird,” he says, and Tim swallows the instinctive hurt that rises in him at the words. He’s not Jason, he won’t ever be, and Robin is Frankenstein’s monster, made out of the parts of different boys, dead or not. “You’re Tim,” Dick continues, “and that’s great. You can complain about Bruce if that’s what Tim wants, and you don’t have to try and make me feel better. That’s not your responsibility. You’re my little brother.”
Tim stares at him, jaw slack. Dick stares back, frowning.
“What?” he says.
Tim licks his dry lips. “You’ve never called me your brother before.”
Dick’s expression grows from uncomprehending to alarmed, then to horrified, and then he settles into guilt, which seems to be a default emotion for him these few months since Jason came back. “Didn’t I?” he asks, softly. “But - you knew, yeah?”
The energy drink is growing lukewarm between his clammy hands. Tim swallows and says, “There are probably better brothers out there. To have, I mean. I can just be Robin. I don’t have to be family.”
It keeps coming up, a motif, a reminder. When Tim became Robin, Dick was so far away, and Jason was dead, and all there was was Bruce, who wasn’t and wouldn’t ever be his father. He’d resigned to the fact that his Robin would be a lonely thing, a partner to Batman and Batman only, beginning and ending there; instead, he’s found that to be Robin is to be inextricable from those who were Robin before him, and these days it feels less like being haunted than it feels like he’s stumbled upon something much bigger than he could have possibly comprehended. Robin is not Robin alone, and Batman doesn’t even factor into the equation.
He looks at Dick, and it’s like two mirrors set opposite, reflecting each other endlessly; it’s the same to look at Jason, whenever he’s wearing the Robin suit he can never just see himself. He has never had brothers before, and he doesn’t understand what it means to have them. To be the youngest, to be the oldest. Tim’s only ever been alone.
Dick looks back at him, something very sad and very vulnerable in his face. “Robin,” he says, quietly, “can be replaced. But no one can grow me a new brother. You could never again be Robin and you would still be my brother. I may not have been born knowing you, but that’s not the part that matters. You’re still my little brother.”
“And what,” Tim starts, but his voice fails. He clears his throat and says again, “What does it mean, to be your brother?”
(Here’s the thing: Dick hates Jason sometimes, for coming back, and immediately keeping him from ever coming to terms with all he did and all he has failed to do. Here’s the thing: the only thing Dick hates more than Jason is himself. Here’s the thing: it’s been years, right, it’s been some three or four odd years, one and a half since Jason has been here again, and all the time Jason is always right there, and still Dick cannot stop missing his brother like a little kid.
Here’s the thing: did Dick ever really hate Jason for hurting Tim, for wreaking havoc upon their family, for betraying the memory he had of him, or does he hate Jason for leaving him alone? Does he hate that it took death to make him realize he’s never done enough, that he’s always been a poor excuse for an older brother? Does he hate that Jason is now here, forever living proof of all of Dick’s failures, whereas if he had just stayed dead, Dick would’ve eventually found some sort of absolution?
You can’t reason with a ghost, they’ll only give you what you want to be given, and Dick wanted to be forgiven. Jason, alive, is able to offer him nothing but reminders of all that Dick wasn’t.
Dick was responsible for Jason, once, and he wasn’t enough. He wasn’t there when he died, but that doesn’t matter. Some nights, in his dreams, Dick kills him, over and over again. In others, he sits down for dinner with his dead brother, and it’s the last dream he ever wants to have.
You cannot keep your brother alive if you keep your mouth shut. You cannot keep your brother alive.)
Dick opens his mouth. Closes it. It looks like he’s trying to swallow something down, maybe his heart. Says, “It means I will always be there to take you home, and it means you can always come home. It means it’s my job to keep you safe. It means I—”
He doesn’t say the final words. It’s okay. Tim doesn’t expect him to, has never heard them said inside this house, but that doesn’t mean he hasn’t ever felt their meaning.
“Yeah,” Tim says, roughly. He dips his head. “Me too.”
Dick’s smile is a small shining thing, a thin layer of ice over a lake on a clear morning. Fragile, but a sight to see.
Tim coughs a little. “I have to — I should go to bed.”
Dick’s smile gains a little strength, perhaps at how awkward Tim is being, but he can’t help it. “With that amount of caffeine in your hands?”
“Put your money where your mouth is and throw away your cold coffee, Dick.”
“Oh, tou-fucking-ché,” Dick says, making absolutely no move to get up from his chair. “Goodnight, baby bird.”
“Goodnight,” Tim replies. And then, before he can convince himself otherwise, he torpedoes straight into Dick’s side and wraps his arms around his shoulders, burying his cold nose in Dick’s neck. He’s about to let go and make his grand escape, when Dick’s hands settle around his shoulderblades for a moment, before the rest of his arms wrap around Tim as well, and Tim. Well, Tim feels tiny.
“This is part of it too, you know,” Dick says, and his breath ruffles the back of Tim’s neck. “Of being a brother. The hugs. You can always — I’m always here.”
Tim closes his eyes very tightly. “Me too.”
He thinks back to Jason’s words. Am I my brother’s keeper?
Yes, Tim thinks. Yes.
They stay there for however long it takes. Time doesn’t really pass, stuck on this warm, orange-ish page in the middle of the blue night, quiet like a dream, softer than either of them are used to. No one notices Bruce standing in the doorway, and he’s gone before either of them muster up the will to let go of each other. He walks backwards into the next room, takes off the cowl, and sits down on an armchair. He takes off his heavy boots, and the metal links make a loud noise against the hardwood floor, bang-bang-bang.
He thinks of his children, the dead and the living. We have to practice losing everything. No one teaches you what to do with the things that come back to you, so you’re only adept at opening your hands and letting go, and then all you touch slips from your grasp, be it a partner, be it your child. And in the end life isn’t about what you deserve, and rarely about what you mean. Isaac did not forgive his father, after all, for trying to kill him, even if commanded by God. It doesn’t matter, it was still his father holding the knife. Bruce is always the one holding the knife.
But in the other room, two of his children are holding each other. Two brothers in a room are enough for a story to start, or end.
At night, his dreams are red and raging. He’ll remember, in due time, to do something human with it.