Chapter Text
It starts as all horrible, terrible, very bad things do: perfectly normal. It really was one of those perfectly normal, boring nights. Or, Tim supposes, as normal and boring as it can get when you’re running around with Batman until midnight. Patrol was fine, albeit a bit slow. Ever since that new character, Red Hood, showed up on the streets of Crime Alley, Bruce had been very specific and strict about Tim staying within his eyesight. Which was fine by Tim. Contrary to popular belief, when someone has an old Joker alias and threatens to ‘clip the new Robin’s wings’, Tim isn’t eager to leave Batman’s side. Even though for some reason, Bruce keeps expecting him to disobey, or disagree, or fight back.
And yeah, maybe Tim could handle himself against this up-and-coming crime lord. But he’s not exactly eager to find out. So he stays within one hundred feet of the bat at all times, as told, and sure, patrol is a little more boring now, but that only means he doesn’t have any excuses to stay at the manor.
Which is fine. It’s always been fine. Tim doesn’t live at the manor—he knows that. He only ever stays when he’s hurt, or looking so dead on his feet that Alfred demands it. Sure, Bruce always extends an invitation, but Tim knows Alfred well enough to know what instilled manners were drilled into Bruce as a child. And Tim also knows what an overstayed welcome is.
So Tim returns to the Drake Estate.
Home. Or something.
He climbs in his third floor bedroom window, avoiding the cameras and avoiding making a sound. It’s ingrained in Tim now, which branches to grab on the oak by his window, where to put his feet on the slippery, wet roof. At least soon he’ll be able to change from his now drenched civvies and into his warm pajamas. Just one more step—
Tim slides open the polished glass, tumbling unceremoniously but quietly through the now open frame.
Of course, it didn’t matter how quiet he’d been, sneaking in. Because his dad was already standing in his room, waiting for him.
“Shit,” Tim mumbles, without thinking. It’s the sort of slip-up that only ever happens around his dad. He used to be such a well-behaved kid, and tries to be a well-behaved Robin, for Batman. But there’s something about his father that makes Tim act too quick, too fast, too loud. Maybe it has to do with the loss of Tim’s mom? Something, something, grief? Something, something, anger?
Who knows.
All Tim knows for sure, in this moment, is that he needs to shut the fuck up and apologize.
“Dad,” Tim starts, “I am so sorry—I didn’t mean to make you worry. I should have called, I was at Ives’—”
Not true. Tim hasn’t seen Ives outside of school in years. And they don’t talk much in school, either.
“Stop.” Jack’s voice is steel, cold and empty as it always is, these days. But there’s something else. Worry, maybe? “Stop. Lying.”
Nope. Not worry. Rage.
“I…” Tim blinks. Jack’s lip curls.
“I know what you’ve been doing. What you run off to do, in the middle of the night.”
No he doesn’t. He can’t. Of course he doesn’t. The thought is absurd, laughable—
“You’re Robin, aren’t you.” It’s not a question. Which is good, because Tim’s brain screeches to a lurching stop and he could not have answered it if he tried. “Christ. I always knew you were a failure…but this. This, of all things?”
Tim opens his mouth, but no words come out.
“I can’t believe it! A criminal, under my roof! A lying, deceitful, ungrateful, miscreant!”
“Hold on,” Tim interrupts, thoughts coming to him at last.
“No, I will not hold on, Timothy. I raised you better than this! Janet raised you better than this!”
Dad always likes to bring up Janet when it’s convenient. When they’re in an argument, or Tim forgets to do the dishes. Never anything about grief, though. Tim wonders if Jack misses his wife. Tim wonders if he misses his mom. He’s not sure of either answer.
Jack looks Tim up and down, a look of disgust on his face that Tim hasn’t seen since that one time in seventh grade when Tim mentioned a ‘pretty’ boy in his class. (He never did again, after that. He hadn’t even meant it in the gay way, at the time. Not that that had mattered to his father.) Jack storms from the room with a scoff, and Tim realizes distantly he was maybe supposed to say something. Explain, maybe.
But he’s been caught, and Tim doesn’t know what to do. He genuinely does not know what to do.
“Dad!” Tim shouts after him, feet coming unglued from the floor as he rushes to follow him down the stairs. It’s not until they reach the living room that Jack finally stops, turning around, looking rabid and angry.
“And, on top of everything, it’s Bruce Wayne that you’re off spending your nights with—”
Wait. No. He can’t know. How could he possibly have figured that out, how could he—
“Is he so much better than I am, Timothy? Your real father?”
“What?” Tim asks, feeling like maybe he hit his head on his way up to his room, or perhaps he’s fallen into some sort of dream world.
“Stupid, insipid, Brucie Wayne. Explain it to me, Timothy, because I really don’t understand. Did I not give you everything you ever wanted? Did we not provide you with more than enough? You’re not exactly the street trash he usually brings in—”
“Don’t you dare—”
“But you are just his type. Is that it? Tell me, is it before or after you go out in those ridiculous costumes that he makes you suck his di—”
”Stop! What are you—God, I don’t—he would never—and we’re not,” Tim forces himself to take a deep breath. His anger and confusion will not help him defend himself, here. “I know that you’re surprised. I understand. But you can’t accuse me—or him—of things like that. I go out because I help protect the city. I save people. I help save Gotham.”
“He has you diving off buildings dressed like some sort of fish—”
“It’s a Robin. I know you know that,” Tim huffs.
“What does it matter?! I won’t allow this in my house. I knew you were hiding things, you’ve always been a lying brat, but this, this criminal business—”
“I am not a criminal! I save people!” Tim defends automatically.
Jack shakes his head slowly, and Tim has to force himself not to shrink under the red of his gaze.
“This crusade is done,” he says. “And you will pay the price for it. You and our horrible, manipulative neighbor.”
“Excuse me?” Tim asks, because how does Archeologist Jack Drake plan on taking on the literal Batman? Robin? Maybe. Tim? Sure. But Batman? Never ever ever.
It’s only then that Tim notices papers, scattered across the coffee table, with words like ‘sell’ and ‘Wayne’ and ‘Robin’ and ‘identity’. It’s only then that Tim notices what is very much the beginnings of a contract.
“What—what is this?” Tim abandons the unflinching eye contact with his father in favor of picking up and leafing through the pages. He turns slowly back to his dad. “What is this?”
“Well-deserved compensation,” Jack answers, attempting to snatch the papers. Tim takes a step back, out of his reach. “For my worry and strife.”
“This is a business agreement,” Tim realizes aloud. “You’re…you’re planning to sell our identities.” He looks up from the papers, aghast and for the first time in a long time, truly afraid. “You’re planning to sell…us.” The words taste like sand on his tongue, a new, unrealized fear lacing through his veins.
“There’s no need to overreact, Timothy. I am doing what is right—”
“If you really believed we were criminals you’d go to the police,” Tim says shortly. “You are doing this for the only thing you ever actually cared about—money.”
His father sputters for a moment.
“How dare you! Look around! Does it look like we are hurting for money?”
No. But they never have been. And Dad loves it, no matter how much they get.
Jack reaches again for the papers and Tim shoves him back. His instincts tell him to fight, to keep this secret buried, to burn these pages or maybe call Batman or all of the above. It clashes with the fact that he’s in his own clothes, his own home, with his own dad as the possible threat.
“Give them here, Timothy.”
“No! You can’t tell anyone about this, it would put a lot of people in serious danger. Including you, dad.”
“Oh, now I’m your dad!”
“Oh my God,” Tim suppresses a roll of his eyes, but only because he is worried about looking away for even a moment.
“Give them back. That’s an order.”
“An order?” Tim asks, in disbelief. “Since when do you give me orders like that?”
“Since when do you go off into the night with billionaires doing God knows what? The world has become a very strange place within the last twenty-four hours.”
“Oh, come on, you know what we're doing! You see it on the morning newspaper every day!”
“Maybe. Or maybe you’re off fucking rich men because I accidentally raised a f—”
And that’s when Tim punches his dad.
It’s the first time Tim has ever punched his dad. He wishes, for one absurd moment, that he’d done it a lot earlier. Years earlier.
And then Jack has recovered from the shock and it’s his turn to throw a punch.
Now, Tim is Robin. And Robin, however much he may hate it, is still pretty small for his age. Which means roughly eighty percent of his gimmick is dodging, fighting with surprise, constant movement. Take the wrong hit and you’re laid off for the rest of the fight. Robin dodges punches with skill and ease and oh, so much practice.
But Robin is also Tim. And Tim sees his Dad’s fist coming for him for the first time and he just…freezes.
He takes the hit.
He’s pummeled nearly to the floor with the force of it, knees weak at the surprise, but he doesn’t go down because he’s Robin and Robin doesn’t let the bad guys win. So when Jack grabs Tim’s entire head, trying to ready another attack, Tim comes in swinging.
He pushes his dad at the chest as his legs sweep his knees, and the punch that follows is one of his regular combo moves.
For a brief second, Tim wonders how his night might have gone, if it had been anything but this. If patrol had been more interesting, or Tim more likeable, and he’d stayed at the manor. If Tim hadn’t gone out at all. If Tim wasn’t Robin, or maybe possibly the scary gay thing that his father so clearly feared he was.
All these possibilities, a hundred different outcomes, flash behind Tim’s eyes in a second. Then the second ends, and Jack Drake is hitting his head against the corner of the coffee table on his way to the ground.
Tim’s evening goes from very bad to straight-up nightmarish. His dad doesn’t make a sound, besides the thump of his body as it hits the floor.
Tim’s fist is still curled, upward, knuckles beginning to crack from the force of throwing two hard punches unwrapped. His entire body is shaking, and he’s blinking hard, and his dad is very, very, quiet.
“Dad…?”
He takes the step forward to get to Jack’s side, leaning down. His father doesn’t move.
“Dad?”
Tim turns over his father and sees blood pooling out of his forehead. It felt like the punch was only three seconds ago, but a lot of blood has gathered under Jack for only having been three seconds.
“Dad!” Tim tries to shake him, a little, to get him to open his eyes. All that medical training, all that first aid…it disappears from his brain just as his words had earlier. His dad isn’t responding or moving and fuck fuck fuck what has Tim done?
Okay. Okay. Tim needs to calm down. He needs to breathe.
Except his father isn’t breathing. How can Tim breathe if his father isn’t? He can’t do it, he can’t do it, he can’t—
He needs to check his pulse. He needs to check his pulse.
Tim cannot remember how to check a pulse. It should be knowledge he is sure of, an action he can do half-asleep. But he feels like he’s underwater attempting to perform some complicated surgery and where Tim is sure he is supposed to put his two fingers, both on Jack’s neck and wrist, there is no beat and so Tim must be doing it wrong.
He needs to stop the bleeding. That’s always important, Tim remembers distantly. Except the blood is thick and dark and slow and Tim knows that’s not a good sign. That’s a very very not good sign. But he tries, using his own sweater, tries so hard to make it stop.
And it does. The blood does stop.
The blood stops, Tim knows, because the heart is no longer pumping, because it’s no longer beating, and Tim still can’t find a pulse—
He shakes his dad some more, and tries to listen for his breath, but maybe Tim is hyperventilating too loudly because he can’t hear anything but his own choked gasps.
His dad is dead.
His dad is dead.
His dad is dead, and Tim just killed him.
“Oh, God, oh my God, oh my God….” His hands find their way to his hair, and he pulls at the strands tightly, trying hard to stay conscious.
It really was one of those perfectly normal nights, not so long ago. Except now Tim’s still rain-drenched civilian clothes are covered in his father’s blood, and it’s all so wet that he’s not sure which is which. And there’s blood on the carpet, and on the coffee table, which is bad because Janet loves this carpet and this coffee table and she will be so mad about them when she finds out. Except oh, no, she’s dead. She died and she’ll never know about the carpet and the coffee table because she’s dead and now Jack is too. And Tim’s a murderer.
Tim just murdered someone.
Tim just murdered his dad.
He should call for help. An ambulance, maybe, except that Jack is already dead and it’s Tim’s fault and ambulances are too expensive anyway and his dad would be mad at the bill except he wouldn’t because he’s dead. Or maybe just the police. Maybe Tim should call the police. Except they would ask why Tim killed his dad and then they’d see the papers and then Tim would have given up Batman’s identity.
Batman.
Tim should call Bruce. Of course he should call Bruce. He shouldn’t have even followed Jack down those stairs, should have called Bruce from the safety of his room when everything was horrible but better than this and his father was mad but alive.
Tim should call Bruce.
He should.
But Bruce lost his parents so young, right in front of him. And now Tim just killed his own, like the ungrateful brat Jack always seemed to think he was. And Bruce would know, because he always knows, who did it. Bruce would know it was Tim. And Bruce only has one rule that he cares about more than anything else.
He would take Robin away from Tim.
He would hate Tim.
Tim is already an orphan. Tim just became an orphan. Tim just made himself an orphan. And Tim might go into foster care, or maybe Batman would send him to jail, but whatever it ends up being, Tim would be absolutely, positively, totally, alone.
And Tim is selfish, because he was alone for his whole life. He was alone when he was four, and he met Dick Grayson, and he had to lie and say that his parents were waiting outside the tent when really they’d forgotten him at the circus. He was alone when he was seven, and his parents decided he could handle himself without a nanny, and Mrs. Mac only came over every Friday. He was alone when he was nine, and he figured out the bats’ identities, and he followed them and took pictures of them and pretended he was in on the jokes Jason would tell. He was alone when he was twelve, and Jason was suddenly gone and Tim’s hero was sending starving muggers to the ICU. He was alone when he was thirteen and Dick Grayson slammed the door in his face and Batman screamed at him to leave and he ignored them and stayed and now he’s Robin and he’s finally, finally, not so alone.
Tim is selfish. And he can’t be alone again.
He would rather die. And, he supposes, he would rather kill.