Chapter Text
Bruce is looking at him, and Tim does not squirm.
“You shattered that mans kneecaps.”
Tim nods, jerkily, meets Bruce’s gaze just as coldly and apathetically as he gets it back. His glove crinkles in the silence, where he digs his thumb into his finger to stop it from shaking. He fights the childish urge to put his domino back on.
“He could have killed me.”
“He could have.” Bruce admits, pained, and Tim feels his eyes flick to the side of his head for the briefest of seconds, barely perceptible if Tim hadn’t been anticipating it, hadn’t been anticipating the glance at the chunk of hair shorn off above his ear. He digs his thumb in harder.
“Was I supposed to wait until he drove that knife into my skull?”
“I understand,” He doesn’t.
“I understand that it was a close call –“ He doesn’t –
Bruce stops himself. “Explain it to me.”
“He could have killed me. So I took him down.”
“He was already down. You were safe. And you still chose –“
“I chose to protect myself.”
There’s a pause, and it’s long, and Bruce considers him very carefully, impassive as usual, and Tim does not squirm.
“That man will likely never walk normally again.” Bruce says plainly, with the finality that spells out that the talk is over but the conversation certainly is not, and the disappointment is so clear in his voice.
Tim doesn’t shrug, and takes the dismissal with a silent nod and leaves. Bruce doesn’t stop him.
Later that night, Tim silently sobs in a chair in the bathroom in Alfreds private quarters as the man gently crops his hair to an even length, cold metal brushing his skull the way that knife had, cruel mocking laughter ringing in his ears along with the buzz of the shears.
He doesn’t look in the mirror when it’s done, can’t can’t can’t look, and eventually cries himself to sleep on Alfreds tiny couch, wrinkled hands softly stroking his brow but mercifully avoiding his hair completely.
When they get home, Tim goes straight upstairs, steps carefully measured to not seem rushed or petulant, and the disapproving silence that follows him from the foyer is fine, it’s fine, it’s-
The first thing he does is look into his own mirror, like it’ll make anything look different than the mirror at the salon and the smudged window at the bookstore they went to after and if anything it’s worse, it’s worse in the familiar spot to see how much skinnier his face looks, how wide his forehead seems, how –
How different he looks, how much smaller he’ll look in front of everyone in a grade full of people older and bigger than him, how much he doesn’t look like Tim anymore -
Cut it all off, had been the demand to horrified silence, the smell of the plastic cape oppressive as his hair caught into it. Cut it down so it looks respectable again.
When the call to dinner comes from downstairs, Tim scrubs the tears from his eyes and face and hiccups down the halfhearted sobs still wanting to make their way out.
None of this matters, he reminds himself as he smiles in the mirror, face cracked in half by an expression that looks like someone who doesn’t know him painted on there, wrong and unnatural.
She’d told him to tame it, and he’d tried, tried against the waves that always popped up in the slightest of humidity, the tangles that crept in whenever it was windier, and –
She told him to tame it, and he didn’t do a good enough job, and -
He smiles under the fluorescent lights again, and again, and again, until it finally looks somewhat genuine, and finally makes his way down, ready to show his mom he’s not upset, but happy even.
When he cries himself quietly to sleep that night, he doesn’t know if his parents bought the act or just chose to ignore the emotions that he knows had no choice but to shine through his eyes, and he’s not sure which one hurts more.
Tim doesn’t know why he froze.
Even now, as Damian loudly protests a good ten feet away from the medical bed he sits on that Tim could have easily swerved out of the way, as Dick frowns and tests the edge of the knife buried to the hilt in the flesh of his arm, as Tims teeth chatter in his skull, as his wet hair drips down onto his bare back, cold cold cold against the air in the cave –
“You’re shivering, Timmy, here –“
He doesn’t know why.
Dick pulls a blanket over his shoulders, making sure it doesn’t skim past the knife, and it helps just barely, and he clenches his fingers in the soft fabric so hard his knuckles go white and ache, ache all the way to his heart –
“Tim. Look at me, bud –“
Something is ringing in Tims ears and his skin is wet against his boxers, his knee is still damp and shiny under the white light –
“Tim, breathe –“
Warm fingers gently hold his jaw and tilt his face up and Tim meets Dicks eyes just as he realizes he’s gasping, he’s shivering like a leaf and simply he can’t breathe right, and –
Someone’s saying something about shock and maybe it’s Dick because his mouth is moving but Tim, Tim can’t hear a thing but the sound of that mocking laugh, that high voice protesting innocence, the feel of metal piercing flesh, the panic heavy in his chest, water raining down over him, the feel of the shower curtain tangling in his skin –
When Tim wakes up, the knife is gone, there’s a bandage around his arm and Dicks concerned face swimming in his vision.
They try to sugarcoat it, but Tim can’t ever be dissuaded, and that night he sits in the cave alone and watches muted footage of himself dissolve into a full blown panic attack right there on the medical bay cot, watches himself bury his hands in his too-short wet hair with hysterical breaths and pull, blood soaking into the gauze packed around the knife still in his shoulder -
Everyone onscreen flutters around him uselessly but onscreen Tim is blind and deaf, lost to the panic he thinks he can still taste in his throat, and it only stops when Alfred finally jabs a sedative into his neck.
Tim watches and watches and watches it on a loop until he can convince himself its an actual memory, and only then does he let himself slip out of the manor and back to his apartment.
It’s only when he’s in his own bed, at the very edge of unconsciousness, alarms and security set at maximum levels, that he registers that there’s no shower curtain in the showers in the cave.
It doesn’t matter, really.
He doesn’t know it right then, but he never spends another night in the manor again.
When the door to his bathroom basically caves in from the force of the fist banging on it, Tim makes the fatal mistake of startling in the shower and getting tangled up in the shower curtain in his haste to get out and –
He calls out, he does, he thinks he even makes his voice rise up past the bitter panic enough to be heard over the shouting at the door, he tumbles out and rips out half the curtain from the rod as he falls and stumbles drenched into some boxers and straight to the door.
Tim’s mostly dry but shaking from the cold by the time his dad storms out, a new hole in his wall.
Next time you don’t answer the door, he'd said, hand fisted in Tim's wet hair as he hovered over him, I’ll really make you regret it.
He needs to –
Dry his hair. His scalp stings from the spot he’d been grabbed. Grab some clothes. Dry boxers. His skin feels tacky –
He shouldn't have -
He shouldn't have left the back door unlocked when he came home. Shouldn't have -
Oh. There’s still shampoo in his hair, dripping down his neck and over his chest. Get back under the spray and rinse it out -
Tim doesn’t do any of those things. He sits on his toilet, shower still running next to him, staring half unfocused at the shower curtain crumpled on the ground.
He doesn’t dare close his door.
Tim watches his siblings, huddled together under the staircase – the hushed whispers, flowing over each others words into an incomprehensible mess that he knows only they can understand, the mischievous smiles, Damian hanging casually over Dicks shoulders even though they’re not even talking to each other, and –
You look ridiculous, Timothy -
He can go join them. He could walk right over and huddle in with them, let Steph try and get away with unsuccessfully stealing his watch for the millionth time, he can even see where Jason would shift over to make room for him, they –
They would be happy to see him. They would –
Timmy! You look so grown up! I'll miss the mullet, even though you clearly stole it from me -
Tim shifts his eyes back to the man he was talking to, who’s named John of all things and looks so much like his dad it makes Tim want to weep. He nods to show he’s listening even though he’s really not, glances down at the watch on his wrist again, almost identical to the one he dad wore until Tim finally got it handed to him in a cardboard box of personal effects, where it now sits in his drawer, and –
You look like a proper man now, Tim, like a proper Drake, looks like your mom had the right idea -
That watch had dug into his palm when dad had squeezed his wrist so hard Tim had had to choke down a sob, the marble floor gleaming in his eyes because he hadn’t meant to wander away, he’d just gotten caught up talking to David who was new to Gotham and at his first gala and that watch had left red welts as his dad had tightened his grip in his hair under the guise of petting it, got right into his ear so no one else could hear, and Tims heart had thundered in his throat under the onslaught of humiliation and what did I even do -
That is not your family, we are.
Not-Dad shifts and the gold of his watch glimmers and he’s giving Tim an odd look as Tim blinks back into the present.
“Everything alright, son?”
If Tim can be proud of one thing, it’s the fact that he doesn’t break at the words.
That is not your family.
He excuses himself with a surely pitiful response and goes the opposite way from the staircase, past the doors past the halls past the foyer and straight out the private entrance in the kitchen into the warm night.
“What the hell is going on with you??” Jason yells, demands, something stricken in his voice as he squeezes Tims bloody jaw between warm fingers, and Tim can almost imagine the wide eyes behind the helmet, sees the tension in those broad shoulders as they crouch over him, crouch over his body crumpled against the brick wall Jason had propped him up against –
Boy, what the hell is going on with you, Jack Drake demands as he glares down at Tim, glares at him with so much hatred Tim feels it in his bones the way he’d felt the warm hug he’d been folded into this morning, glares glares glares until he finally turns and clamps his hands around the tv on his blue wall and pulls –
Jason shakes his jaw oh so gently and Tim laughs and laughs and laughs around the blood dribbling out of his mouth and waits for those hands to start cracking his bones right until it all goes black.
Jason’s eyes are haunted where they look at him from his chair in the med bay when Tim wakes up.
“You didn’t call for backup.” He says, and surely that can’t be concern in his voice, something helpless and confused that makes Tim want to roll over and go back to dreamland despite the horrendous pain in his side from the broken ribs he’d gotten before Jason had pulled him out.
“Tim." Oh, he’d still been talking. "Why were you begging me to stop? Stop what?”
Nice buzz, babybird. Got sick of your forty minute showers?
Tim meets his eyes again, chest fuzzy in the way it's been for weeks now, and finds he doesn’t even care to think about what he’d meant.