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i.
After everything is over—after Steph dies, and after Boomerang kills his father and Dana has a breakdown, and after he’s dragged himself to two funerals and screamed himself awake for several nights in a row—Tim takes back the mask, and moves to Bludhaven.
“Steph and my dad died in a war worth fighting,” he says to Bruce. “I won’t squander their sacrifice by quitting again. If you’ll still have me, I’m Robin, but...not here. There are too many ghosts in Gotham.”
“What’s your plan?” asks Bruce immediately.
He doesn’t ask Tim to stay.
Tim never expected him to.
ii.
Steph’s costume, while similar at first glance, was actually fairly different from his own. It was more armored, allowing for slightly less flexibility. It had a skirt and a headband and shorter sleeves, because she’d wanted it to be feminine. She had elbow pads. There were invisible pockets in the lining of her cape, and electrified batarangs hidden in the soles of her boots.
The remains of Steph’s costume are crumpled somewhere in the recesses of the Batcave. She never wore Tim’s, and he’s never touched hers.
None of that makes Tim feel like any less of a grave robber as he pulls on his leggings again.
iii.
Tim goes out as Robin seven nights a week, hurling himself through the streets until his legs ache and it’s hard to stay upright. He covers his bruises and dark circles with makeup and goes to school. He doesn’t answer his phone when the Titans call because he doesn’t have anything to say. He doesn’t sleep and he doesn’t eat and the whole time he can hear her screaming.
iv.
In the early mornings, on the rare occasion that he actually falls asleep before his alarm goes off, he dreams about her. She weaves in and out of his dreams, laughing on a roof, dancing in the park at night, and then—as those dreams inevitably change to nightmares—dying in Leslie’s clinic without him even knowing she was ever injured, breathing slower and slower until she stops entirely.
When he’s dreaming he hears her say, “you don’t look too hot, sweetie,” and thinks he’d give anything for her to call him that again, just one more time.
Then he wakes up.
“Rise and shine, Boy Wonder,” says Steph.
v.
In his memories, Steph is giggling and calling him Alvin. Steph is leaning out her window to kiss him as the sun comes up. Steph is saying something important but he isn’t listening because her hood is down and she’s beautiful. Steph is hanging upside down with hair in her mouth. Steph is singing out-of-tune. Steph is laughing and laughing and laughing and—
Not here anymore.
Probably.
vi.
“Girl of my dreams,” he mumbles, half conscious, and she laughs, nasal and sudden and familiar and real.
vii.
He hears her whoop whenever he leaps off a skyscraper. He hears her laugh whenever he lands a good hit on a mugger. He hears her blow raspberries and mutter when Batman says something particularly condescending.
The most she ever speaks is when he takes too much of a risk, when he comes just a little too close to joining her on the other side of the veil. He hears her yelling at him, snapping no sense of self-preservation and you are not replaceable and we need you here, I need you here in her furious, cracking, beautiful voice.
Tim starts taking more risks.
viii.
He wasn’t with her when she died. Bruce was. Bruce had been the one to rush her to the clinic, and so Bruce was the one that Leslie called to say that Steph was running out of time.
Bruce answered that phone call while Tim was standing barely ten feet away. Leslie told Bruce Stephanie is going to die, and Bruce hung up and told Tim to go home and take a nap.
Tim hadn’t known. Nobody had said anything about how severe her injuries were, only that she had some, and surely someone would have said something if it was as bad as all that? Surely somebody would have told him, if the girl he loved so desperately was going to die. Everybody knew how much Spoiler meant to Robin, however rocky their relationship may have been at the time.
So Tim had trusted his mentor. He went home, as ordered, and went to sleep. And then he woke up, and Steph never did.
ix.
“I never planned on being Robin for this long, you know,” Tim says into the darkness, because it’s four in the morning and he’s so lonely, and she’s there anyway so he might as well talk to her. She always was a good listener. “I was going to give it up once Batman didn’t need me anymore. When he was better. I was going to go back to my normal life.”
“You still can,” Steph murmurs from somewhere to his left.
Outside, an ambulance screams by. Tim pulls his blankets tighter around him.
“Can I?” he says.
x.
"I don't understand." He talks to her all the time now, whenever he's alone, and he knows it's bad but he can't stop. "Why are you here?"
“I go where you go," she says.
xi.
Tim starts finding strands of long, blonde hair all around the apartment.
He lives alone.
xii.
The first time he actually sees her he’s in the shower, struggling to scrub paint out of his hair after one of his weirder fights.
“It’s easier with dish soap,” she tells him helpfully.
She’s in her Spoiler costume. Her mask is off and her hood is down, hair falling out of its ponytail. Her eyes are very blue and exactly how he remembers them.
“You’re not real,” Tim says, even as he reaches for her. “I’m hallucinating, or—ghosts aren’t real. They’re not. They’re not. ”
“Okay, Tim,” says Steph, indulgent and amused. His hand goes right through her. “If you say so.”
xiii.
She stays by him all through patrol for the rest of the week, chattering nonstop in his ear and standing too close and occasionally focusing long enough to say something vaguely relevant.
If Tim puts all of his energy into not thinking about it, it’s just like old times.
xiv.
“Hey, Dick,” he asks on a stakeout, watching Steph put up her ponytail three feet away, “do you ever think that ghosts could be real?”
“if they were,” says Dick reasonably, “don’t you think you would have seen one by now?”
xv.
Tim misses her.
He thinks about her constantly: the best memories, the worst ones, the memories that wouldn't be special except that he was with her. He thinks about what she would be doing if she was alive. What they would be doing, the two of them, together.
He has nightmares every time he manages to get to sleep. There’s an ache in his chest that never goes away. He would do anything for her to be alive.
But she's not, so he'll take what he can get.
xvi.
“Face it, Boy Wonder,” she tells him. “You’ve got a case of the Stephs.”
xvii.
"If I die," he asks her, handcuffed to a pipe in a warehouse for the second time that summer, "will you be there?"
"Be where?"
He wiggles his lockpick out of the tip of his glove. "Wherever dead people go, I guess."
Steph's voice goes sharp. "I don't know," she says. "It doesn't matter. You're not gonna die."
He doesn't.
xviii.
Tim remembers a lot of things about Stephanie Brown.
He remembers how she kissed him, and the way her fingers fit between his. He remembers her weird pregnancy cravings, and how she always wanted to be somebody with a consistent skincare routine but never quite actually was. He remembers the weight of her sleeping head on his shoulder or lap.
He remembers her infuriating inability to ever admit her mistakes. He remembers all those times she’d dumped him, furious and red-faced, but then she’d always come back, hadn’t she, and so he was always there for her to come back to—
He remembers her laugh, the way it bubbled up out of her chest like it was a surprise even to her.
But besides all of that—besides her weird music taste and the brick to his face and her short temper and those long, perfect nights—what Tim remembers about Steph is that he’d loved her.
xix.
“It wasn’t how I thought it would be.”
“What?” Tim says, distracted by an essay that’s due in first period. The clock reads 4:14 AM.
“Dying,” Steph elaborates.
His fingers still on the keyboard, halfway through typing symbolism.
“It didn’t hurt,” she says. “I was on so many painkillers at the end. It was just…”
“Scary?” guesses Tim.
“No. Lonely.” She looks down at her hands, then over at him. “I asked Bruce if you were mad at me,” she says quietly. "I wished you were there."
“I’m sorry,” Tim whispers. Steph doesn’t respond.
There is nothing else to say.
xx.
Tim’s not proud of it, but—
He was angry at her, when she died.
Before that night, Steph had survived a million things that she shouldn't have. She'd survived her father and all of his abuse. She'd survived a plague that was followed by an earthquake that was followed by a gang war in a dead city, and then childbirth a few months later. She'd survived years of fighting crime at night, wearing a homemade costume that shouldn't have even protected her from a splinter. There were so many terrible things that she’d seen and been through and done, but Steph always made it out alive. She always did.
Until she didn't.
Tim had begged her back then, time after time, no matter how mad it made her— hang up the cape. go home. please go back to normal life and stay in at night and stay alive —because he had known, even then, that her luck couldn’t hold forever. He wishes more than anything that he could have been wrong.
She was just so reckless. She never thought things through and she never considered her own safety and it was so incredibly stupid of her to steal those plans from the Cave. It’s not Steph’s fault that she's dead except that it kind of is, and Tim hates her for it no matter how hard he tries not to.
All he ever wanted was for her to be safe.
xxi.
“Everybody always asks if you believe in ghosts,” Steph muses, sing-song, “but no one ever asks if the ghosts believe in you.”
She’s hanging upside down from the low rafters above him, close enough to kiss. She’s smiling a little, blue eyes against gold hair against purple fabric. She looks solid. She looks alive.
She’s not.
“Well,” Tim says, tired, “do you?”
“Do I what?”
“Believe in me.”
Steph’s face softens. “Yeah,” she says, all traces of humor gone. “Yeah, Tim, I believe in you.”
xxii.
Sometimes he thinks he made her up. Not the ghost her, the actual her, the one he used to kiss in the dark and eat ice cream on the rooftops with. It seems like a hazy dream now. He can't remember how it felt to be happy like that.
xxiii.
"This is the first time you’ve ever been older than me," she says when he turns seventeen. "Neat, huh?"
The birthday cake Alfred baked tastes like ash in his mouth.
xxiv.
When Jason Todd leaves Tim unconscious in a pool of his own blood, he wakes up somewhere else. Purgatory, he guesses, or something like it. The space between life and death.
Steph is there. She always is.
“Get up,” she says.
Tim is so tired. “I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. You have to.”
“I don’t want to do this anymore.”
“Too bad,” she responds, stubborn as always. "You don't get to die, Tim. They need you. So get off your ass and do your job."
“Steph?” he whispers.
“What?”
His chest feels empty. “I miss you.”
Steph sighs. “I know you do," she says.
She offers her hand. Tim takes it, then hesitates.
"When I wake up," he says, "will you still be there?"
"Be where?"
"With me."
Steph's hand is warm in his. "I'm always with you."
"Yeah, but will you still—you know—be there?"
"I'm dead, Tim," she says flatly, which isn't an answer at all. "But you're not, so wake up."
She pulls him to his feet.
xxv.
“Do you believe in ghosts?” Steph asked him once, when they were fourteen and fifteen with their whole futures ahead of them, and Tim laughed.
“Don't be ridiculous,” he said.