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Waking up is a surprise.
Usually, the surprise is that Tim fell asleep at all, because he is what could generously be termed an insomniac on the best of days, but he knows for absolute certain that he didn’t fall asleep this time, because the last thing he remembers is—
Hmm.
Being in the desert, having just been stabbed to death by Widower. Which does not in the slightest explain why he’s waking up in some bizarre version of the penthouse, in his civvies, definitely not having been stabbed recently.
In fact, he feels pretty good, all things considered.
Which is, of course, immediately suspicious, and made even more suspicious when he doesn’t find a batarang or anything else even vaguely weapon-shaped under his pillow.
In fact, there’s nothing in the room which indicates that he’s Robin—or not, now, which he’s still getting used to, because Dick just…got rid of him, replaced him with Damian fucking al Ghul just because Damian happens to be Bruce’s biological kid, the awful little viper.
No, that’s not fair. He’s a brainwashed awful little viper, and Dick has a soft spot for those, and apparently he doesn’t need Tim anymore, so. No more being Robin it is.
Getting himself vaguely upright enough to look around does confirm that he is in the penthouse that he closed up when he headed out to find Bruce, though it's different here—one wall is covered in a tastefully arranged set of photographs that look like he could have taken them but that he has no memory of taking, mostly of the Gotham skyline, and it’s missing the cheap shit flatpack dresser he got from IKEA because he thought it was funny, which has been replaced by a dresser that is definitely his taste but probably cost twenty times as much. At least.
It looks like if someone fabricated the room based on what they thought it would look like.
Some sort of telepath, maybe, who has trapped him here. But there are usually signs of that, foxing around the edges, too many fingers and not enough toes. This rendering, wherever he is, it’s perfect, details aside.
And then he opens the door to the kitchen and stops, because there’s a shirtless guy sitting at his table, one hand turning a mug of coffee around and around on a coaster as he reads the newspaper.
Tim doesn’t get the newspaper, at least not on paper.
Which is very much not the biggest foxing around the edges, because he also doesn’t have shirtless men sitting in his kitchen, especially not ones who say, casual as anything, “Hey, babe. Your dad called—apparently they rescheduled your board meeting for this morning because half the board got food poisoning at some charity thing last night, so he asked if I would let you sleep in.”
“Um,” Tim says, very intelligently.
“Oh,” the guy says, turning around in his chair with a smile, and it’s Bernard fricking Dowd of all people, but grown up and exceedingly attractive. “Sorry, I’m still trying to figure out who I’m allowed to call your dad. Bruce—am I allowed to call him that? Bruce called, said the board meeting, etcetera, etcetera.”
A half-naked Bernard Dowd is sitting in Tim’s fake-penthouse fake-kitchen, talking about Bruce as though he’s alive, and all Tim can manage to get out of his mouth is, “Why did he call you?”
“I think he was hoping if he called me, you would actually stay asleep until later than”—Bernard checks his phone—“eight fifteen in the morning. Which, uh, sorry, did my making coffee wake you? I was trying to be quiet, but your machine hates me.”
“It hates everyone,” Tim says reflexively, as though a single other person other than Alfred has been up here and made coffee with it, and it wouldn’t dare misbehave for Alfred. “I’m so confused.”
Bernard offers his mug over to him, and Tim approaches him to take it. He takes a sip from it, and it does taste like real coffee, made from the shit grounds he keeps in his freezer as opposed to the fresh beans Alfred put in a cabinet somewhere, likely in the hopes that if Tim had to take slightly more time to make coffee he would make less of it.
Unlucky for him, Tim is capable of doing his own food shopping.
Mostly.
“This tastes like real coffee,” Tim says out loud, not entirely on purpose, as though that will somehow reveal the spot where the telepath did fuck up, with tear away at the veil between this world and wherever Tim really is.
It does not accomplish that.
It does, however, accomplish Bernard grinning at him and saying, “If you can call it that. I thought you were rich enough to avoid something a step up from off-brand Folgers.”
“I.” Tim needs to sit down, which he does do, cradling the mug in his hands as a little bit of the coffee splashes his fingers. He licks them clean, one at a time, because he’s not one to waste coffee.
And then he notices Bernard watching him do it, and he feels his face start to get hot. Why, exactly, did the telepath stick a hot shirtless man in here with him? One who Tim had a crush on as a kid, even.
And then what Bernard actually said hits him, and he sits up straight to ask, “Did you say that Bruce called you?”
“I did.” Bernard stands up to pour himself a new mug of coffee, then walks back over to his seat. He trails his hand over Tim’s back as he walks.
Tim doesn’t know the last time someone has touched him in any way but with violence. He wants to curl up in it, bask in that simple sensation.
Maybe that’s really what the telepath is doing. Making him never want to leave.
“But Bruce…” Tim says, and then he stops. Drinks some more coffee. Thinks about it. “That really is some big-ass foxing.”
Bernard blinks at him. “What?”
“This is, you know.” Tim waves a hand. “Not actually real. My penthouse doesn’t actually look like this, I haven’t seen you in years, B is dead, and I just got stabbed in the desert, so. Foxing. Stuff that whoever stuck me in here got wrong.”
“There is so much to unpack there,” Bernard says, and he sounds real. He feels real, too, when he takes Tim’s hand in both of his. “Look, babe, I’m not sure what sort of dream you had, but you’ve been on a break from whatever you do with your family that I’m not supposed to know about for two weeks, and given that I just talked to Bruce on the phone twenty minutes ago, I can guarantee you that he’s not dead. Do you want me to call him? Have him come here?”
“No,” Tim says, dropping his head down on the table. “Just give me a few more minutes of pretending, will you?”
“Tim—”
Tim is so tired. “It would be cool if this were real,” Tim tells fake-Bernard in his fake-kitchen. “My imagination’s version of grown-up you is very attractive, and you’re sitting there calling me babe and calling B my dad after talking to him on the phone. Did you know that nobody knows I like guys other than Conner?”
“Okay,” Fake-Bernard says. “I’m going to go call Bruce.”
“Okay,” Tim says back. He picks his head up just enough to take a sip of his coffee.
It really does taste very real.
It’s only twenty minutes later when there’s a knock on the door, which feels like both an extremely long time and absolutely no time at all. Bernard is the one who gets up and gets it, and Tim keeps his head down on the table, because he doesn’t want to see the foxing. He doesn’t want to see fake-Bruce who doesn’t look quite like real-Bruce, who’s missing his scars or smiles his public smile or does some other thing that the telepath thinks is how Bruce acts.
But it sounds like real-Bruce when he says, “I appreciate you calling me.”
“Yeah, of course,” Bernard says. And then, “I’ll go hide in his bedroom, so you can talk about all the things that I’m not allowed to hear about. I’m still betting on organized crime, to be clear.”
“Noted,” B says, sounding amused, and then he walks over to Tim, his footsteps light in the way that they only are when he’s being Bruce and not Brucie, the public himbo face of Wayne Enterprises.
“If I look at you,” Tim says into the table, “then I can’t keep pretending that you’re not dead. Then Dick and the monster child will be right. So I’m going to keep my head where it is.”
“Okay,” B says, and he sits down where Bernard had been sitting. A door closes nearby. B puts his hand on Tim’s back. “What’s the last thing you remember?” he asks, and that’s Batman’s voice, it really is, it’s the voice he always used just for the Robins, and Tim wants to cry because he thought he had forgotten what that voice sounds like.
But he’s nothing if not well-trained, so instead of crying, he says, “You’re gone. Dick has the cape and he chose Damian. I’m—I’m the only one who thinks you’re alive, but I guess that doesn’t matter now, because the last thing I remember is Widower stabbing me in the stomach and leaving me to die. And then I woke up here.”
There’s a long pause, and Tim isn’t sure what he’s expecting, but it’s not for B to say, “They had to take out your spleen. That’s what his knife hit, and medical care where you were wasn’t great. But you found me. You brought me back. It’s been years, Tim.”
Tim jerks upright at that before he can help himself, and the Bruce sitting at the table next to him looks like real-Bruce, scars and all–a little older, maybe, but the lines on his face don’t look so deep, no matter how worried he looks.
“Prove it to me,” he demands. “Prove to me this isn’t fake.”
“Hard to prove a negative, kiddo,” Bruce says, but he looks thoughtful. “Hmm. We’ve gotten another few members of the family since then. You’re WE’s CEO and you’re good at it, despite the fact that you have about as much patience for the board as I do. You have been running the Titans, too, but you’re on a bit of an enforced hiatus because you didn’t sleep for almost a week straight and then started hallucinating small children following you around, which you then decided made you a liability to the team. A decision we’re all very proud of you for, because a couple years ago you would have just drank some more coffee and tried to power through.”
That is true.
None of that makes this real, though.
But none of the foxing is the right foxing, either—he’s been trapped in illusions before, and the problems aren’t in the tiny details but the big ones. Uncanny valley faces and walls that move and blurring in the periphery because it takes a lot of power to maintain a 360 illusion for all the senses, all the time.
These differences are—
They’re multiversal differences. They’re stepping halfway to the left differences, changing the timeline just a little differences, not the illusion is breaking down differences.
Which means that this might, somehow, be real.