Chapter Text
When Jason was small, his mother would get a few provisions from the main branch of the company she was working with. Normally, it’d come in a tightly wrapped box from somewhere in Addis Ababa around Thanksgiving, and Sheila would take half an hour just to chat in Oromo with the delivery guy since she would try to learn the language to better communicate with some of the patients she got. Jason didn’t understand much, but he’d often heard Sheila beam and exclaim, “Akkam!” whenever the guy came with the box.
Then they’d talk - after, Sheila would narrate the guy’s life in English just so Jason would be in-the-know - and then both mother and son would sit beneath the (very much needed) fan and divvy up their ‘loot’.
More often than not, Jason would claim the books, Sheila would gather the essential stationeries that would make paperwork less harder than it needed to be, and both of them would split a squashed cupcake before storing the rest in their humble minifridge for the tougher days. He still remembers the sweet tang on his tongue, and how the citrus frosting would be coating his hand because his mom didn’t really like frosting, so if Jason wants, he could have all of it.
Mama also didn’t like frosting, but on some days she was so sick that she couldn’t finish off a full cupcake. Jason hated comparing his mothers, but he can’t help but feel - not happy, but not unhappy? Relieved, maybe? - that his mama wasn’t here, drowning in her pain.
(Maybe she was with the angels, like the ones his dad said she was. Maybe she could be free of sinners like Willis and Jason and - and - and -)
Jason faltered, but willed his lungs to expand. Thinking about his family felt like picking at a scab. It felt like wiggling a tooth that’s hanging on by a thread of flesh: sore, but in a morbidly pleasant way.
“I can hear you thinking, hatchling,” the Squid, who Jason nearly called Nocturna many times during this impromptu trip, sighed in her funky glob-glubble way. “If I can, I could ease your mind by providing any answers that I can spare.”
Jason flicks his tail, overly conscious of the distance between the two of them . It’s not like he can see her very well, with how dark it’s gotten. Despite how his eyes are adjusted to the dark, she is just a glittering blur, and Jason has a sinking feeling that the Squid is well aware of how Jason cannot see her properly. Nocturna stays close, but not overbearingly so; if Jason would use both his arms and tail, he might crash into her.
That makes every bone in his body quiver, but it’s not a dreadful feeling, but rather one that makes him feel like a firecracker that’s been set alight - he’s about to burst into a thousand shimmering pieces but he just doesn’t know when. (It tastes like copper and looks like red and gold. It feels like his nails hooking on fabric, tough and rough on hands. It feels like a strange but familiar voice that is so fundamentally his, but at the same time it’s a kid that died in Ethiopia.)
“It’s-” Jason falters. It’s nothing the Squid can help with. Willis nor Catherine knew of this life, of these people, of these things, of the Cursed. Catherine believed in a God that never really helped, and Willis believed in a hope that never came.
But Sheila…
Pray to Salvator, his mom told him, her seafoam eyes darkening like a storm on the horizon of a raging ocean, I don’t ever have to.
“Do your - uhm. I mean. Does our kind associate with humans?”
The Squid glub-glubbed in consideration. “Stories come from somewhere. The Cursed do interact with humans to a certain extent, although it’s not encouraged anymore.”
“But it was?” Jason quizzed. He remembers The Little Mermaid. Thinks about Hans Christian Andersen. Thinks about sea foam and bald sisters.
Thinks about sea witches, and how they could make myth, human.
It has been a long time since Hans Christian Andersen had written it, The Little Mermaid. Jason can’t help but feel a strange dissonance as he tries to think of Andersen sitting on a ship, gazing into the eyes of the Cursed. He can’t help but think about motors and razor-sharp metal turbines in ships, so different compared to wood and cloth. Maybe that was why the rift, the slow mythification of Nocturna’s - and his, now, he can’t forget - kind: people got more advanced, while the Cursed stayed in stasis, not developing?
(Jason feels like he’s learning how to bandage and disinfect a wound. It feels like he’s learning how to use a can opener without cutting himself, learning to cook without burning himself. It’s like learning to save money and boot tires and learn how to push on despite the cold creeping on.
It feels like something new. It feels like he’s the one that’s been in stasis, floating instead of swimming.)
“You might be more aware than I am, but certain Cursed depend on blood for survival, and fish tend to be temporary solutions. While I consume the entire creature, others tend to simply eat what they find pleasant and leave the rest behind,” Nocturna’s freckles of light twinkled dangerously, like the predatory green over Jason’s eyes. “It’s quite barbaric,” she continued, voice as dark as the waters they were traversing, “And yet some find reason to destroy humans for their barbarity.”
“You defend humans?” Jason blurted, frowning at Nocturna. He hoped it came out less aggressive than he meant, but. But it was just the fact that he’d seen what humans can do, both as Jason Todd and Jason Fishboy/Cursed/Hatchling. And, well, Nocturna was a squid. People ate squids. Jason would hate people if they tried to eat him. If he was reduced to nothing but a delicacy on a rich bloke’s plate, a chunk of flesh as they’d ask oh, how’d you like your Jason? Rare or well done? Dead, raw? Fresh, flambéed?
For some stupid reason, Jason thinks of Minecraft. He thinks of the ink sacs squids drop when they’re killed. He thinks about Calamari.
“Not a lot,” Nocturna says, slow and careful. Copper hits Jason’s nose, and he really doesn’t care.
He thinks of stir-fry. Once, they’d put squid in it. Jason and Willis and Catherine had eaten it, but his mama couldn’t keep it down. Out of the three of them, Cathy had been the only one to reject the stir-fry. The squid-fry. The Nocturna-fry.
(The Jason-fry.)
“I find them fascinating,” Nocturna sighed, as if someone had asked about a pet that had run away. “Humans, they are constantly in search of something. Constantly discovering.”
Jason wonders how far that discovery goes, and the price it takes. People want to discover what squid tastes like, so a squid dies. People want to discover the oceans, so the land is razed and stripped bare. People want to see the stars, so they destroy the Earth.
Discovery, Jason thinks, is cruel, but wonderful.
“Were you,” Jason swallows. Thinks. Considers and says, “Human? Once?”
Jason feels more so than sees the squid stop; it’s so sudden that he crashes into her.
“The past is something we learn from,” Nocturna said, unfazed by being run over. By being living Calamari. By being living Stir-Fry. “But I do not live in the past. I live in the now.”
“Sorry,” he whispers, but he isn’t sure if it’s for the question, or for the subtle undertones of her answer.
“We best be going,” she continued, “We’re losing daylight.”
“What daylight?” Jason emptily quips, feeling like there’s an inferno blazing inside him, burning him. “It’s more like daynight, I guess.”
Silence falls, and they swim. They swim further from everything Jason knows. Far away from everything he knew. From what he thought he knew.
It is dark. It is dark and heavy, but not in the way a cape or a weapon or a secret is heavy. It feels like he’d been buried six feet under, and is left to claw his way out. He reaches into the dark and his fingers brush against something, but he can’t feel it until -
It burns. Fire and rage nip his fingers and forces him to withdraw, pain sinking its fangs into his spindle-thing fingers. The darkness betrays none of the heat, none of the maliciousness, none of the promised pain. Nothing is clear, and he isn’t sure why.
See him call out: voice hoarse and raw, like it had been used for hours. Something clogs it as he calls for help, hands cradled to his chest, black seeping into his lungs like-
Water. Flooding his senses and submerging him in liquid ice. Forcing his mouth open and pushing at his lips screaming let me in let us in let go let go letgoletgoletgo -
“Let’s go again,” He says. The pain pasts his fingers, creeps up, and up, and up. He feels overcooked, overboiled; a silly little prawn left in a pot to simmer. Everything is distant and murky, like he’s still in the bay.
But he knows. Knows this voice. Knows that hitch and that shrill, sharp purr at the raise of every vowel. For a brief moment, for a few days-minutes-years, that was the voice of god.
“Let’s go-” the voice says, warped and twisted, high pitch turning from madness to something real and scared and this, this is the real thing, the real nightmare, the real failure as the voice says: “-now, you have to run.”
Run. Run. Run. It echoes. Noise travels faster through liquid, because the molecules are tighter together when compared to gas. Scream in the Bay, drown and choke on it - it’s still distorted.
Run. Run. Run. The boy-soft voice screams. Noise travels fastest through solids. Molecules are packed so tight that they vibrate together, practically compact: vibrating and coexisting and you can never really hear anything through that grave dirt, can you?
The heat bursts back, burning and ugly. It doesn’t like being hidden. It doesn’t want to die.
Run, the voice says, I’m right behind you.
Something pulls at his shoulders, dragging, smoke stuffing down his lungs and coiling, squeezing, stealing life from him.
Choking. He can’t breathe. The rebreather lies at the bottom of Gotham Bay, and oh, how disappointed Mister Fox is going to be?
This is how it is supposed to be.
This thought is born, not by his hand nor mind, but by the collected consciousness of simply being. It resonates, through his body and bones and all the way to his tingling fingertips. It slides over him like a well-fitted jacket, like a childhood blanket, like a red-and-green-and-yellow mantle.
This is how it is supposed to be, the smoke in his lungs whisper back, and did you know, not a sound can be heard through the grave dirt of a child?
Choking, drowning, dying. A simple affair: one blink, you’re alive and fighting to remain that way, and the next you’re just. Gone. Bye-bye, birdie. Bye-bye, to beneath the tightly packed grave dirt and through the Bay water. Bye-bye, but does it have to be?
A boy grows out of a jacket, and gets a new one. Childhood blankets do not cover you anymore, college kid, so you get a duvet. Red, Green and Yellow are burned, so he turns it crimson and black like his blood and bruises.
Maybe Tim Drake should have died. Maybe he should have choked, drowned.
He didn’t. He changed the colours. He lived.
The black and the thoughts and the pain recedes. The ticklish tingles remain, soft and playful, like an ear-ringing - but smile-evoking - giggle of kids. Itchy in a grounding way, dew damp on his skin.
Not cuffs. Not water. Not grave dirt.
Green - green and every shade between - span across and beyond from where Tim is lying down. Sunlight pours in almost as if it were bathing the little sprouts and towering trees. Flowers and soft grass soothe Tim, cooling and calm, and generous in a way that the dark, fires and floods could never.
Green, in the grass. Green, in the leaves. Green, in the wide eyes of a boy who is still growing into them.
Damian, sitting with his legs crossed and the stupid tin box and a frown-scowl on his chubby face. Damian, with his charcoal stained hands, rubbing his cheeks in a weak attempt to rub off sunburn. Damian, with his cautious bantering and poorly-hidden empathy.
Damian, sneering. Damian, saying: “You think we wouldn’t find out?”
He says: “You think we’re that stupid?”
He glares: “You can’t hide what you are.”
Everything is green. Green grass. Green leaves. Green envy.
Tim thinks his tongue is rotten in his mouth. If he opens it, he would choke on it. Choke in the grass. On the grave dirt.
What do you mean, he forces through the Bay water dribbling through his lips. What are you saying.
Damian, green and charcoal-stained, narrows his eyes with the determination of a blazing inferno. The edges of his tin box melt, and the sun burns in his presence.
“We know what you are,” he says. Feverish, and yet eerily cool. Unperplexed, yet tense. Cruel, yet sympathetic. “You can’t hide,” he says, and the green, dewy grass is itchy under Tim’s hand - but it is grounding. “You can’t hide.”
When you scream through water, it’s distorted. When you scream through grave dirt, no one hears you.
“You can’t hide,” Damian snarls, all feral and wild, fiery and ambushing like a flood.
Tim is grave dirt. Tim is Bay water. Tim is -
Awake. He blinks out the spots in his eyes and feels sweat drying on the folds of his skin. Sunlight, raw and harsh, floods the room, and Tim tastes something bitter at the fact someone had come in and left his curtains open, that someone had gotten close enough to do that and he hadn’t even known.
It could have been Damian; it was a Saturday - no school for him tomorrow - and Tim stayed up late corresponding with Steph as she took to Gotham’s streets again, so he was exhausted enough to sleep through any (purposefully) silent pattering.
“Hope you’re doing good,” Steph had told him yesterday, wind breathing static into the comm link, as she joked; “Can’t say we miss you, but can’t say we don’t. How’s the Blud?”
The half-lie is still tingling on his tongue, even after his rest. Tim tries to brush it off, dragging down the taste with water and mouthwash, but he can’t forget the way frustration had bubbled in his throat and disgruntlement spoke for him: I’m doing fine. Haven is fine. We’re all fine.
Whether it was the jab or the fact that Glenny wasn’t coughing up information, Tim was done: he never really liked going away from Gotham, and Blüdhaven wasn’t even somewhere like San Francisco, where he’d be busy with his friends and team.
Here, in the Upper ‘Haven - a tiny portion of Blüd coast gifted to Majorie Wayne by her grandfather, Kenneth Wayne, just before her disownment and was lucky enough that the property remained in her name afterwards - everything was quiet. Serene. Absolutely horrifying.
Worst of all, Glenny What’s-Her-Last-Name - Majorie Wayne’s (previous) live-in housemaid and co-beneficiary of the sprawling mansion built on Upper Haven - was getting on Tim’s last nerve.
“Glenny,” Tim greets her every morning, borderline ritualistic, “You need to give me the book of Vampires.”
“Glenny,” he says, “You need to tell me about the talismans.”
“Glenny,” he cooly smiles through gnashed teeth, “You need to tell me about the connection between Sirens and Vampires.”
Glenny, Glenny, Glenny, why wouldn’t you just tell me, Glenny? Why wouldn’t she just give it to Tim when she knows he’s got some skin in this, some blood, some sleepless nights.
Glenny. Talk to him. Glenny. Glenny. Glenny.
(What are you so scared of, Glenny?)
Tim walks down to where said woman was devouring eggs and bacon and toast on the cool patio which gazes over the rough and unruly ocean. Her chair rocked, an awful creaking noise that did little to deter the beautiful expanse, as the roar of the sea battering the land drowned it all.
A full plate sat on the little glass table diagonal to the rocking chair. An empty chair resided next to her.
(Tim thinks of how fire is resilient. It does not want to die.)
“Glenny,” he says. Walks up to her peripherals. Tries to smile. “I-”
“First eat,” she motions, and Tim, resisting the urge to gnaw a hole into the soft flesh of his cheek, moves to do so.
He puts grave dirt in his mouth. He puts determination next. Both mix on his palate like cough syrup: disgusting, vile, and relieving. Chew the rot, swallow the courage. Rinse, repeat, and don’t choke on Bay water.
Rinse. Repeat. Realize the chair has stopped rocking, but the noise was just a churchmouse in the face of the raging ocean, so it was Tim’s fault he hadn’t noticed. Readjust.
“You’ve met one,” Glenny said, weary eyes skipping over sand and ocean and Bruce’s ugly orange Pinto he drives when it’s a Bruce thing, not a Brucie thing. She looks like a sailor staring down the face of the ocean after years of being land-locked.
Tim’s gone to confession like, once. His parents weren’t overtly religious, just Christmases and Easters and whenever they found a new church or had the time to. Tim follows in their footsteps, when Christmases and Easters aren't zero-days for Calanderman or other Rogues (or even petty muggings: prices go up during these times and people get desperate. Tim knows this, because Steph told him once. He feels bad stopping them, but he doesn’t really have a choice.)
Tim remembers, once. The confession. It’s like a smear in his memories, red and brown and yellow blurring in his inner mind. The tactile memory of his knees biting the wood of the Kneeler through the cushion remains most imprinted into his mind. Tim hated it: thinking about his sins, trapped in the past, rotating mistakes like the lost sock in the washing machine.
If any god was there, he didn’t know. The luster of an omnipotent being fizzled out by the time Tim was a year or two into his Robin tenure, especially when his friend was the granddaughter of a supposed god.
Tim didn’t know much, about faith and whatever, but he did know that a man doing penance looked like a man staring down a rope dangling from a ceiling fan, or a man holding a gun. It is a look that Tim has seen many times before - on Christmases and Easters and in the mirror - on others, other people carved out and filled with desperation and drunk on hope.
Some people are just like that, he guesses. Some people just need something for them to carry on.
Glenny, not a Catholic or Christian or anything, had that same look in her eyes. Hollow, despondent. She looks old when she stares out into the vague horizon. She looks like a puppet without a puppeteer. Tired, aimless, lost.
“Yes,” Tim whispers, throat dry. He’s never been good at this, the emotions. The comforting. If he stops her to ask what’s wrong, he’ll never know what she is going to say now. And his gut tells him to listen. It tells him to focus, because this might be the break you wanted, Tim-
“Yes,” she echoes to the morning sun that bounces off sea water. Blüdhaven is a peninsula, protruding from New Jersey like a sore thumb. Bays are also a part of the same ocean Blüdhaven is surrounded by, but for Tim, it’s just different. Out here, in Beach Town, no one will find you. No one will care, until your body washes up from anywhere between ‘Haven and Gotham.
That’s just how it is. That’s just how it was, until Nightwing came. That’s what makes Dick so important: the hope that you could be saved in this hell-town. It’s the same thing sinners look for in penance. It’s the same thing fluttering in Glenny’s eyes.
“Sirens, you see, are some of the more easier folk to find,” Glenny said, accent thick and lazy. “They function like you and me-”
“You and I,” Tim corrected as some sort of instinctive hindbrain reaction, but shut up the moment Glenny sent him a scalding look.
(Fire doesn’t like to die; it lives as embers and sparks until it is revived. It lingers at the door like death, like life, like chance. It doesn’t like to die, and Tim thinks that’s what he and Glenny have in common with that blaze.)
“You and me,” Glenny pointedly continued as she settled back into her obnoxious rocking chair, “we are two people in a community. A group, you could say.”
Tim nods, but she doesn’t really see. Her gaze is distant again, and he can’t help but wonder what is going on in that heavy mind of hers. Can’t help but wonder where she is.
“Folk like Sirens, the Cursed, are like that to some extent. They coexist, like any community would, but they are more traditional than we are.”
“Meaning?” TIm asks, and he thinks about the Mermaid subspecies. Thinks about the possible link between Vampires and Sirens. Thinks about all he’s read and all that he has not.
He cannot afford to not understand. It is a necessity at this point.
“Meaning, blood is important to them,” Glenny says. “Your blood is not mine, that sort of thing. You can’t be a part of a pack or pod if you don’t share blood.”
“That is,” Tim pauses, feeling the weight of drake - wayne on his lips before swallowing and resuming, “backwards as hell.”
“I hated the idea,” Glenny nodded somberly, “Miss Maj agreed, but she followed Cursed laws to the tee.” A bitter sigh escaped the old lady’s lips, long and exhausted. “Even when she took the girl in.”
“The girl?”
“Her name was Janet,” Glenny mumbled, and distantly, Tim wondered where the hollers of the ocean went.
“Janet?” his lips asked, but he wasn’t sure if it was truly his lips or a stranger’s.
“Yes, Janet.”
Tim’s hands shake, and that’s a side effect of the electricity that ran through his muscles and nerves and blood vessels when he was with the Joker. Not that he can remember much, besides the fact that it had hurt. Nothing more and nothing less: it is a fact to Tim as much as it was a fact to Bruce.
Doctors monitored the shaky hands for some time, but the stiffness in Tim’s knee was something they focused on more. Long-term damage was a big possibility, with fried nerve endings and boiled muscles. Lucky enough for him, the only lingering aches were from the covered up burns and phantom pains and the still-remaining stiffness in his knee.
You got lucky, Tim, his doctor, one Doctor Albert Yancy, had told him on one of their last few visits. A lot of people are not this lucky.
Thanks, Tim had smiled, all plastic, cheeks melting and teeth dry, means a lot, Albert.
Call him entitled. Call him bitchy. Call him traumatized. Tim really, really doesn’t give two shits: what matters was the fact that his fingers stuttered over his keyboard and - on the really bad days - he was reliant on a wheelchair or a crutch.
He couldn’t continue being Robin.
All rational thought left his mind. The news had been broken when he was in the cave after the first time in six, agonizing months. It was broken by the relentless, stubborn and detached gravel of Batman.
You are not Robin.
(You are no longer mine.)
It had been such a good day. One of the sparse days he was able to hobble without pain, the first day his hands were steady enough to properly write in neat cursive, his first visit back home after staying in a penthouse near the hospital to make physio better.
Call him needy. Call him desperate. Call him spoiled. Robin was his; no Batman and no Joker and no god can take it from him.
Spitting, cursing and rejecting a man like Batman, a man like Bruce, is almost equivalent to denying god, with red Kneeler-indents on knees and penance through a glass.
Forgive me father, Tim had thought, and told Bruce he’s not fucking entitled to make Tim’s choices, for I had sinned.
It has been too long since my last confession, Tim vaguely remembers whispering to an earthy brown and wood-covered room, and these are my sins.
Tim left, back to his hospital hotspot, back to his penthouse, back to his life with shaking hands that were still hands.
Tim is not sorry and he doubts he will ever be. Tim will never do penance because he’s going to hell regardless of forgiveness or not.
(Tim, the grave dirt. Tim, the living lightning bolt. Tim, the boy with a grave and a coffin made of bay water, the boy of baywater and the boy whose life is a miracle.)
“Janet?” Tim whispered, feeling the weight of a statue’s gaze on a sinner and a thousand volts bounding through his fragile flesh and boiling him alive.
His hands, stained with scrambled life and toasted death, are as still and quiet as his heart.
His lips, dry and cracked from dehydration unsated by vinegar, feels as distant as a boy who held manicured hands and played dress up because he was always so curious about how lipstick looked like smeared nosebleeds.
“Janet,” Glenny ridiculously enforced. “Janet Draper.”
Tim could not be Robin, after Ethiopia. After the shit knee. After Batman ruined it all. Tim was not, could not, be Robin, and that was final; for Bruce, at least. Nobody could have stopped Tim, not before, not now, not ever. He wasn’t one to let go, or choke and die and just lay down even though it was natural.
Like fire, Tim burns, and the byproduct of him breathing life into dying embers was on Alvin Draper.
Rich, self-centric, a prick.
Call Tim obnoxious. Call Tim petty. Call Tim poetic.
Alvin Draper could be those three, all three, any three. Alvin Draper was putty in Tim’s hands and nobody could take it from him. Tim created, moulded, burned and gave life to Draper.
Behold; the prick. The rich. The self-pity. The poetic, needy, desperate, spoiled, entitled, bitchy, traumatized - anything. That was Alvin: a Hyde, an Ernest, a cover. A scrapbook of personas that were summarised into a colossus of an identity.
But, more than an escape between a bookcase or grandfather clock, it was a sort of eulogy - memoriam of the woman who taught Tim how to be sweet yet sharp; his mother.
Janet Lynn Drake. Janet, with her gold-brown hair. Janet, with her crimson lipstick. Janet, who knew how to be a businesswoman more than a mother. Janet, who tried.
Janet, who knew Glenny. Who knew Majorie Wayne. Who knew of the Cursed.
(Damian, green and unnatural, sympathetic and degrading. Whispering. Whispering. Whispering.
We know, we know, we know.
What are you. What you are. You are what. )
“No,” Tim whispers, “No. That’s not right.”
Glenny places her plate down, and Tim realizes that she’s returned back to the here and the now. She contemplatively licks the egg and bacon grease off her fingers and Tim remembers, distinctively, Duke telling him that Ancient Greeks, post-meal, used to wipe their hands on bread and leave them for dogs and beggars.
Tim, the dog. Tim, the beggar. Tim, the victorious.
Tim, the son of Janet and a part of the world that always existed in his peripherals but he knew nothing of.
“She is your mother,” Glenny comments, because it is too certain for a question, “And you are your mother’s child.”
Tim, with his black hair. Tim, with his chapped lips. Tim, who looked with a detective’s eye before a human one. Tim, who never gave up.
“She came to me, to Miss Maj, when she was small,” Glenny continued, unmoving as the sea, worn down by age but no less resilient than the shore of shell and rock and life. “She saw what we saw, the reality of this world.”
Metaphysics. The study of the nature of reality. The study of man, the son of the bat, the vampire and the sirens and everything hidden yet there.
Think of fire: combustion with oxygen, fuel and a spark. Inferno. Death. Raze to make anew.
Think metaphysics: there is more.
Tim thinks, I should have given a shit about it.
Tim thinks. He does not want to be still, with food in his hand, just listening and watching the waves beach themselves. He thinks how his mother was: blue eyes and brown-ish hair. Sharp eyes and elegant clothes. Facades and secrets.
Tim cannot see it. Janet Lynn Drake, Cursed. Janet Lynn Drake, ostracised and dismissed by society. Janet Lynn Drake, living in Beach Town only to die.
It's just. It Doesn’t compute, to Tim. There’s no correlation. Nothing.
“Meaning?”
Glenny flexes her phalanges, one by one, finger by finger. Wonderment of the human body. Wonderment of fragility. Wonderment of existence.
“Janet. Not my blood, not Miss Maj’s, but rather a potential heir,” Glenny said, eyes floating to Tim. “A promising bridge, and a damned fool.”
Something ugly bubbles in Tim’s throat. Something vicious and feral stirs within him, mumbling don’t talk about us like that don’t you dare-
Tim, who is getting what he wants, shuts the hell up. Listens because all his years as Robin - and Then Some - have taught him that gold cannot compare to information, to knowledge.
(Detective before human, thought before emotion.)
“She fell in love with that bastard of a man, Drake,” Glenny scowls, “She fell in love and left our world because her darling was too fragile to comprehend it.”
“Jack?” Tim frowned. Drummed his fingers on the plate - tink tink tink - and realized, “He was human, normal.”
“No,” Glenny shook her head, and her hand tightened, yellow sunlight prominent on the white of her knuckles. A hint of green from the fairytale-esque garden. Distant blue from the frothy, raging ocean in the distance. A world, in a plane of aged and wrinkled skin. “No, Jack was. Well, he was sick.”
“Sick?” Tim spluttered. In all his years, his father had been in the peak of health - all the walks and hours at sites ensured he would not be too unfit. The only time Tim had seen him ill enough to be submitted to the hospital is when he was in the coma.
The only time he had seen his father gravely wounded was when a boomerang protruded from his chest, and the gore and life of his father stained the thin strips on concrete between the kitchen tiles: suffice to say, Tim cannot associate Jack and sick together.
(It’s like the idea of bay water and grave dirt. It’s the idea of god and man. Sin and forgiveness.)
“Janet wanted out. Out of the Cursed and out of our lives, and she didn’t want Drake to know,” Glenny sneered, lip curling as something between disgust and begrudging respect, “So, she made a deal and got an enchanted ring.”
“The wedding ring,” Tim fills in, and the house of cards catches fire and begins to collapse.
The shift, the temporary change in personality, the protectiveness over Tim - borderline smothering. His ring, an impersonal gold band, was one of the few things that remained of Janet, resting in the middle of his palm, on the mantel, in the nightstand.
“Yes, but Janet was never supposed to die,” Glenny nodded, and Tim remembers how empty it felt when the coffin was lowered, shivering in the gloomy and stormy Christmas Eve. Someone had carved out a piece of him and forgotten to fill it up with something. Fire doesn’t like to die, but it doesn’t mean it cannot be snuffed out.
Glenny says, “The ring could not impact Drake when it was not on him.”
Glenny shrugs, “That is the thing with talismans, you know.”
Glenny looks at him, eyes sharp and focused like a glacier, slowly moving to bury Tim and solidify him in the eaves of time. “Talismans,” she says, “Are objects of unimaginable power. They have the ability to change the genetic makeup of humans and animals alike with a heavy cost.”
The shadow, big and imposing, moving away from Batman, a missile on a target. A boy with burns playing in smoking rubble and swimming in Gotham with sharp claws and doe eyes.
“They cannot produce their own blood,” Tim guessed, bay water dribbling past his lips and fire dancing up his legs. Blood consists of plasma, red and white blood cells, and existence without it may be the reason it needs to be externally consumed. It was the only logical reasoning Tim can think of, and a strange blankness settles over Glenny’s face.
She turns back to the ocean. A sailor runs their hands on the taffrail, and it is not the sea that fills their lungs but rather the nostalgia. Glenny looks familiar: like Dick when he sees a trapeze; like Steph when she thumbs pictures of her mother; like Duke when he comes from the hospital; like Cass when she sees girls laughing and living their normal lives that they never really are grateful for; like Barbara when she untangles ribbons from dusty pointe shoes; like Damian when a cheongsam catches his eye.
Glenny looks like she’s longing for something just out of her reach. Words on the tip of your tongue but unreachable. Things at the tips of your fingers but worlds away.
She looks incredibly tired.
(Tim, no matter how much he doesn’t want to admit it, has always been shit at emotions.)
“Vampires are one of the oldest types of Cursed to exist,” Glenny simply says. There is no response to what Tim has said, nothing to pump the water out of his chest like Bruce had to pump out phlegm in the After. “But not the only.”
“How are they related to Sirens?” Tim asked, realizing that Glenny has been getting more and more vague, more and more closed off, more and more distant in that unknown land of hers.
“Disasters. Not to Cursed, but to humans - the Black Death, Smallpox, all sorts of illnesses. Vampires could not feed on sick humans because they thought the plague was in the blood. The Salem Witch Trials caused a few of the vampires to die - of suffocation and starvation, because their bodies were left and they were too weak to find food.”
Worry sparked in the back of Tim’s mind, but he did not know why - every world Glenny spoke was layered with passion and anger, disgust and rage as she continued: “The Italian wars nearly killed most of the Cursed, Vampires, Fae, Werewolves and even humans in Europe - no one was spared in the face of bloodshed.
“Napoleon, the Battle of Waterloo, Typhus, Eruptions, Cholera, Starvation, Earthquakes, fires. Name a horror and the world had it. Name a crime and your neighbour had committed it.”
Glenny sucked in a long, shuddering breath. Tim, who stared at the shrivelled prune of a woman, distantly realized she had said all of that without taking a breath.
“The population thinned. Hans Christen Anderson and Bram Stroker were one of the few people who met Cursed. Mary Shelley met a Cursed around Lake Geneva. The Loch Ness Monster went dark after the first sighting for protection,” she laughed, loud and bitter and Tim strained to hear her through her accent, “They died, Timothy. It was like the Toba Extinction, but with the Cursed.”
She fell silent, and Tim suddenly felt displaced. Here, look: a woman grieves for a species that is not her own. Here; a woman so intricately impacted by decades and lifetimes or disaster and suffering. Here; the only woman who has the answers Tim needs.
Look - look at this double-edged blade that Glenny and Tim hold. Look, they are both bleeding out, bleeding away, bleeding through.
To think this started with Gotham Bay and the Falcones. (Tim would point the blame on Joker, but if he’s willing to go that far back, he’d have to go just a bit further and have an entirely different person to blame.) To think that this started with Majorie Wayne with her house in the Upper ‘Haven, and her ridiculous, dying, and wonderful live-in maid, Glenny. To think Tim would have simply given up if she had not mention the talismans -
Wait.
“The - the talismans,” Tim whispered, and his body freezes like one does when a thousand and a million volts flood his body, “They - the vampires - used it to change their makeup to survive in the marine environment, to avoid, well, everything.”
Glenny smiles, as quick as a hummingbird but there none the less. Her emerald headscarf flutters in the lazy morning wind that smelled of a juxtaposing sea salt and morning dew.
“You are your mother’s child,” she whispered, crow’s feet and red blooming on her face, but her tone was one part pride and one part hatred, “So smart. So confident. So pathetic.”
“Shut up,” Tim blurted, feeling his face heat up as the sun flared the inferno. “I - we - she wasn’t pathetic.”
Glenny laughed, all sarcasm and pity. “Oh, please,” she snarled, “Janet was. She didn’t marry your father out of love, no. She wanted an escape and she took the first option she got.”
“That’s utter bullshit,” Tim snaps, and puts the plate away before he throws it into the front garden, “My mother loved Jack, you-”
“Did she?” Glenny laughed, “Do you think she was capable of such intimate love?”
“Yes.”
“Think again and answer honestly.”
Tim, choking on baywater. Tim, the dead boy. Tim, the Alvin Draper and the ex-Robin and the all the greys in between. Tim, a bloodhound whose nose is his crutch.
Tim, who knows what ash and poison tastes, a luxury on his vast palate, knows that yes will not and never be the right answer when it comes to his mother. It’s not as simple as that. He doubts that it ever will be.
He knows this: Janet Draper loved Jack Drake before and after they got married. Jack Drake and Janet Drake travelled the world for archeological expeditions. Janet Drake and Jack Drake had a child, fell out of love, and died - mostly in that order.
(Can you fall out of a love born from desperation?)
“I,” he swallows the bile and blood and belief and says, “I can’t.”
“The boy of many words,” Glenny teases, not too mean but not nice either. Both infernos are catching up, rigorous and frantic, dying and consuming all. “Left with none.”
Tim thinks of a Hello Kitty shawl and a tomato-red face. Thinks of hot chocolate and warm meals and tries to connect it with this poisonous, hate-filled woman rotting next to him.
(The worst thing is: he can see it. He wishes that he could not, but he has been burned one too many times to know that humans wear masks as often as the Bats do.)
“They,” he does not say loved. He does not say cared. He does not say tried. He chokes on them and whispers, “Are not important.”
“They will be. All of them will be.”
Tim looks at Glenny. Looks at the sea-weary sailor who knows nothing outside the belly of a ship. Looks at the way the yellow sun and blue ocean collides and crashes and paints her face a sickly green.
“You are yet a stranger in this world,” Glenny mumbles, eyes foggy and unseeing, voice faint yet accent thick, “You do not know what they will do if they find you.”
“What? Who?”
The tremors in Tim’s hands are worst than the Quake and it stretches to his shoulders - this entire being is shaking and shivering and all that courage and determination is prodding at the back of his throat. The porch becomes a metal dentist’s chair and the switch is flipped; the world smells of burning flesh and there’s lightning in this dead boy’s veins.
“They,” Tim sees more so than hears, “They who hunt. They who hurt. They who harm.”
The hand on the switch is covered with a lavender glove, so gentle and calm on the eye. For the longest time in the After, Tim could not recall the colour of the deceiving gloves. He even forgot that He Who Was Not Man wore them. It was funny then, to learn he had spent incomprehensibly long with the same two people and had simply forgotten what they looked like besides blood between his teeth and agony in his muscles.
They, who hunted him with a foolish, fool-proof act. They, who hurt and broke him down. They, who harmed and enjoyed the suffering.
Tim screams through that grave dirt, but no one hears. Tim screams through the lightning bolt, but no one cares.
“Glenny,” his rotting tongue flops out, hands vibrating so much he couldn’t even press his index and thumb together to grab the fragile woman, “Glenny, what are you saying? Glenny, who are they?”
The green is jarring against her pale, almost translucent skin. Tim thinks he can see the blood vessels on her face, beneath the green, green, green bay water. There is a thought, born not from his mind nor hand, but by the ridiculous problem of simply existing: Glenny is dying.
“You are running out of time,” she whispers, and it’s like a darkroom, except it is all emerald and lush green rather than soft crimson. “You need to find him. Trust what you are; it will all make sense.”
What are you? Why are you? Who are you?
Tim. Tim Drake. Tim Draper. Alvin Draper. Alvin Drake. Robin.
Your blood is not my blood, Tim thinks, yet it spills for me.
Alvin Draper, the prick and the bitch and the in-between, agrees. The monument to his mother, woman of many faces, agrees. The tribute to more than what the eye can comprehend agrees.
“Go,” Glenny smiles, and the ocean embraces the sailor whole, “build the bridge before it’s too late.”
The tide rushes, reaches, roars, and suddenly bay water and grave dirt and lightning is simply gone.
“Wake up, Jason.”
Mama used to tell him of how angels always had a sugary sweet voice, just like cupcake frosting. She used to tell him that, when he closed his eyes, the angels came and watched over him. That when he skinned his knees or elbows the angels came and kissed the wounds gently, softly.
Between the rosaries and praying, Jason wondered if Mama had been escorted by the same angels who looked after him. Wondered what she had done to impress them so much they took her from Jason.
“Wake up, Hatchling.”
Mom was different. She told Jason that there were no angels, to which Jason had already realized. No one spent their time of day to care about a boy with ratty shoes and a tire iron to his name. No one, other than some blonde doctor who may or may not be his mother, had given him a second glance. There was a boy who lost all and the world simply revolved.
Jason’s angels died with his mama, died when he was ten and was buried when he was twelve.
“Wake up, now!”
Jason startles to a rough and rude darkness. His eyes, which were sightseeing a land of tender nothings, struggled to adjust to the inky black expanse of the deep-sea world. There was nothing familiar with the sandy and rocky expanse beyond, and the way the scales of his tail pressed against the flesh was distantly painful. His travel buddy, the squid, told him it was the higher pressure at the depth they were at. Jason told her that he preferred being a three dimensional object rather than a fish-pancake, so could they take a break till his body feels more like his rather than a block of concrete?
Noting no significant change in his three dimensional-ness, Jason carefully rubbed the area around his eyes in a habit he had yet to break. “Noc- uhm, not to sound stupid, but where are we?”
The Squid - not Nocturna, Jason - did her little glub-gurgle chuckle as he began to stretch his tail, “We’re in the ocean, little Hatchling.”
“Oh,” he rolled his eyes, and raised his hands over his head before wincing at the pops and cracks it elicited. “Didn’t realize, thanks.”
“No problem, little one,” she cooed in a saccharine voice, “But we really must get moving.”
“Ugh, fine. Just give me a second.”
He wriggled out of his sand valley and shivered at the rolling unknown; he is beginning to understand why there’s a colour called marine blue. Nothing else matches this shade of nothingness, besides Nocturna, who shimmers in front of him.
“Ready?” she asks, and Jason thinks that angels could never follow him down to this depth without drowning in the emptiness of it all.
“Yeah,” he swallows, and holds out a hand that might be his, “Can you…?”
The stillness is like an explosion - quick and muffling. He does not know when it swallowed them whole and does not know when it stole his body from him. If he really tries, he can still feel the throb of his scales and the ache of squinting, but everything else is as faint as a daydream.
Then, a shift. A crack in the silence and a splinter in the black nothingness. Something cool loops around his wrist, and little puckers stick to his skin.
There is a tingle dancing along his arm and a heavy feeling in his chest, but when Nocturna whispers to him, Jason thinks Mama is smiling at him from her place with those who left him.