Archive of Our Own ^beta

When Jason gets the call, he doesn’t even know who it is at first. 

The caller ID comes up as “Shithead”, something Jason suspects he found funny at the time but is now entirely unhelpful. Whenever he doesn’t like someone he’ll put some lowbrow insult as their contact name— Fuckface, Douchebag, Asshat, Bitchboy, Dickwad , just to name a few. The unfortunate flaw with this system is that Jason doesn’t like a lot of people, leaving him with an overwhelming plethora of ambiguous contacts. 

Shithead could be anyone, really. Bruce, or Dick, or Steph, or even Roy. Whoever it is, Jason knows he probably doesn’t have to bother with phone etiquette—not that he has the etiquette to muster in the first place, because it’s the asscrack of dawn and he’s just been yanked from his REM cycle. So he doesn’t make any attempts to hide his annoyance when he says a short, clipped, “What?” 

There’s a pause. Jason hears static, possibly a digitized breath. Then Shithead speaks: “Hello?”

Jason doesn’t recognize the voice instantly. He waits for Shithead to say something else. When this doesn’t happen, Jason probes, “Yeah?”

“Sorry—uh—is this a bad time, Jason?”

Jason can’t tell if this is meant to be a joke. The time , to be exact, is 3:17 in the fucking A.M., which would be a bad time for even the most masochistic psychopath in Arkham. “Why d’you ask?”

“It’s just, you sound kind of upset,” Shithead says. There’s a slight waver in his voice, like he’s nervous about this. 

“Who is this?”

Another pause, longer this time. “Um. It’s Tim.” 

Jason finds himself very awake suddenly. 

He sits up in bed, already feeling his blood starting to run about two degrees hotter than usual. That can’t be right, he thinks. That doesn’t make any sense. The last conversation he had with Tim Drake, face-to-face, was at the Tower, nearly a year ago, and that conversation had ended with Jason slicing Tim’s throat open. It was safe to say that they hadn’t exactly gotten off on the right foot, and after that, Jason didn’t exactly expect for any semblance of a normal friendship with the kid to be possible. Not that he wanted one anyway. So what he can’t figure out is—“Why the fuck are you calling me at three in the morning?”

“I sort of need your help.” Tim’s voice is casual, conversational. Like he’s just calling up a classmate for homework answers, and not the person who attempted to murder him less than a year ago. 

“Sort of?” Jason echoes, growling the words. 

“I need…” Tim trails off, as though he can’t quite bring himself to finish that sentence. As though he can’t bring himself to need anything. Jason recognizes that bristling instantly, a feeling he’s far too familiar with himself. “Sorry. I just. I didn’t know who else to call.”

And. Okay. That’s strange. Jason can’t imagine any reason why he wouldn’t be at the very bottom of Tim’s emergency contact list. Unless: “Are you dying?” he asks, suspicion creeping into his voice. 

Tim huffs out a small laugh at this, but it’s flat, devoid of humor. “No. I’m fine. I’ve just—uh, I’ve run into a hitch, and I could use some backup right now.”

Hitch. Backup. It doesn’t go over Jason’s head that Tim is very deliberately using the vaguest terms possible. Meaning he’s avoiding something. “You can’t ask the Bats for backup?” Tim is silent for a moment too long. “What, are you in a fight with them or something?”

“No!” Tim says, sounding a little startled, like even the suggestion is a foreign concept to him. Knowing him and his spinelessness, it probably is. Jason doubts Tim’s ever talked back to Bruce in his life. “That’s not—no. I just didn’t… I don’t think they’d help me with something like this. I figured you’d know how to deal with this a lot better.”

There it is again. The tiptoeing around the subject. Jason furrows his brow. “What would this be, exactly?”

“Uh,” Tim says. “I’d prefer not to say right now.”

Jason almost wishes they were having this conversation in person, because this is the moment where he would chuck his phone straight at Tim’s head and hope to draw blood. “I’m not about to get my ass up in the middle of the night for some cryptic bullshit you won’t even tell me about, Replacement,” he snaps. 

Jason can practically hear Tim cringe at this. “Sorry,” Tim says. “I’m just… not sure it’s safe to say on the phone.” 

Jason can’t suppress his own sneering laugh at this. “Who do you think you’re talking to? This line isn’t monitored. Whatever you need to say, you can say it here.”

There’s a silence, and Jason can tell what Tim’s thinking through it: he’s wondering whether this is actually the truth. Whether the phone line really is secure or not. Whether Jason’s lying. Whether he can trust Jason. And, hell, Jason can’t blame him for his hesitance—he knows he sure doesn’t trust Tim. 

But just when Jason thinks that Tim is going to say, Never mind , and hang up, there’s another hitching breath over the line. And then Tim says, “I need you to help me get rid of a body.”

Jason’s head goes abruptly silent. Any annoyance or frustration or anger that was buzzing there slides away. “Holy shit,” he says. “You killed someone?” Already he’s thinking about the ramifications of what this means. That Robin murdered somebody. Not just Robin, but his supposedly perfect upstanding citizen fucking replacement Robin—

“ No,” Tim cuts in, cleaving that train of thought straight through the middle. Jason can’t tell if he’s disappointed or relieved about this, and he doesn’t care to introspect. “No, I—of course not.”

“Whose body is it?” 

When Tim speaks, his tone is frank and unaffected. The tone you’d use to read out a weather forecast. “My father’s.”

Jason stares unblinkingly into the darkness for a long moment. Then he hangs up the phone. 

So here’s the thing: Jason doesn’t feel guilty about the incident at the Tower. 

He knows he’s supposed to. Or at the very least that everyone expects him to. Bruce and Dick have made that unceasingly clear. On occasion they’ve even made the leap of empathy on his behalf; Jason can recall more than one instance where Bruce has mentioned Tim, then said, I know you feel bad about what you did to him… 

Maybe Jason should feel flattered that Bruce assumes he has a conscience. That, like any normal, functional human being, he feels a little bad for having beat a fifteen-year-old within an inch of his life. But Jason, unfortunately, is not a normal, functional human being. He didn’t feel bad about it then, when he was splitting the kid’s face open, and he certainly doesn’t feel bad about it now. 

He doesn’t feel guilty. He doesn’t owe Tim any favors. He doesn’t feel like he has to make anything up to him. 

So it’s not guilt that brings him to Tim’s house in the dead of night; it’s morbid curiosity. Tim dropped him a pin shortly after Jason hung up the phone, which Jason didn’t bother responding to. It only takes him about fifteen minutes to arrive. 

When he does, he’s a little surprised by the neighborhood. Granted, he doesn’t know much about Tim and his upbringing other than the sparse details that get filtered down to him through Bruce and Dick. But he was under the impression that Tim came from a lot of money. The neighborhood isn’t small, by any means, nor are the houses in it—but it’s definitely not the sweeping, fuck-you-money manor Jason thought he’d find. It’s not even gated. 

He parks his car in the driveway and then heads up to the door. He knocks, waits a few seconds. There’s no response. 

He knocks again, more impatient this time, letting his knuckles crash noisily against the door. “Tim?” he calls out, loud enough for Tim to hear inside, but not too loud so as not to wake any neighbors. That’s the very last thing either of them would need right now. 

Again, he’s met with a still silence—only this time there’s a loud thumping noise, like something heavy falling to the ground. Jason’s mind instantly supplies an image to accompany the noise—Tim keeling over, dying from some unknown injury—and Jason thinks, fuck it. For the record, he doesn’t care if the kid dies or not, but he also doesn’t really want to have to deal with two corpses tonight if Tim really has gone and dropped dead next to his dad. He grabs a lockpick from his belt and jams it in the keyhole before throwing the door open. 

Tim’s there, crouching on the living room floor and jumping like a startled animal as Jason strides in. “ Jesus!” Tim yelps. His eyes are huge, the whites drowning out the irises. His gaze settles on Jason, and then—impossibly—the kid fucking relaxes , some anxiety draining from his shoulders as he slumps. “Oh. It’s just you.”

“ Just me?” Jason can’t hide his bewilderment as he shuts the door. “Last time I checked, I nearly killed you the last time I saw you, and now you’re relieved to see me?”

“Thanks for the reminder, I’d almost forgotten,” Tim says dryly. He pushes a sweat-damp lock of hair from his eyes and sits back on his heels, and Jason gets a glimpse around him. It makes sense suddenly why Tim is on the floor—there’s a rolled-up bundle of carpet sitting beside him. “Sorry for not getting the door. I thought you were the police. I, uh. I didn’t think you were coming.”

Jason arches a brow. “You literally called me,” he reminds him sharply. 

Tim throws up his hands, defensive. “You hung up!” he counters. 

“I hung up after I let you finish filling me in. I thought the rest was implied.”

“You didn’t even know who I was when I called you,” Tim says. 

Jason hums in agreement. “Yeah.”

“You don’t have my contact saved on your phone?”

“It is saved,” Jason tells him. At Tim’s puzzled look, Jason clarifies: “As ‘Shithead’.”

Tim stares at him. “Really nice,” he says flatly.

“So.” Jason steps over, nudges the edge of the carpet with his boot. “What’s the story here?”

Tim reaches up, scratching the back of his neck idly. “I thought you were the police,” he repeats. “So I just sort of panicked and tried to hide it, but I don’t really know how you’re supposed to do that, because, well. I’ve never done this before. Obviously. Uh, but I saw the carpet thing in a movie once, I think—have you ever seen Room?—”

“Not that story,” Jason interrupts, impatient. “I meant the fucking—what happened to your dad, Tim?”

Tim blinks. “Oh,” he says. “Uh, he was shot. I was sleeping and I woke up from the sound. I think they used a silencer, so the neighbors wouldn’t hear, but it still woke me.” He gestures vaguely at the sides of his head. “Trained ears and all that.” 

Jason is trying—and failing miserably—to figure out what the hell this kid’s deal is. Tim delivers all of this information without any sort of sentimentality or difficulty; Jason has seen coroners show more emotion for complete strangers. “Who shot him?”

“I’m not sure,” Tim says. “They’d already taken off by the time I came downstairs. But I have a pretty strong feeling they were involved with my parents’ business.” When Jason shoots him a prying look, Tim elaborates: “My parents got their money doing a lot of… shady things. And they pissed off a lot of the wrong people doing it. Even after Dad retired and we downsized, we’d get weird letters in the mail, or we’d have sketchy visitors at night… so. It seemed like he knew something like this was coming.”

Jason processes all of this. “So you’re sure this isn’t…”

“A Robin thing? No.” Tim shakes his head. “They didn’t want me—I don’t even know if they knew I was in the house. They came here to kill my father, that’s all.”

That’s all. The words knock around discordantly in Jason’s skull, and he wills them to settle down. He bends down next to the rolled-up carpet. “You mind if I take a look?”

Tim shuffles aside to make room, inviting him forward. One of the very first protocols any of them learn is to always, always check a dead body for a pulse. But there’s a solid chance Tim could be in shock, and Jason thinks it’s probably better to err on the side of caution and double-check Tim’s work. He unrolls the carpet just enough to get a look at the body, and he freezes. 

The body is—it’s gruesome. To say the least. Jason’s no stranger to violence or gore, but this is certainly far from the prettiest corpse he’s seen. Tim was right—his father was shot—but Tim failed to mention where. There’s a massive, gaping cavity tearing through the man’s face, one of his eyes completely eviscerated from its socket. Fragments of skull and brain matter are sprayed over what’s left of his face. 

Jason quickly rolls the carpet back up, for both his and Tim’s sake. He realizes sluggishly, in the beat afterwards, that he didn’t check for a pulse, but he knows with a rare certainty that he doesn’t have to. 

“You saw the body?” Jason asks. It’s a stupid question—of course Tim saw it. Tim was the one who found it, who rolled it into the carpet in the first place. But there’s a second question wrapped up in his strangled tone, which is: Are you okay after seeing the body? 

Tim just purses his lips, almost indignant. “This isn’t the first time I’ve seen a corpse before, Jason.”

Right, Jason thinks, but it’s the first time the corpse has been your own fucking dad. He doesn’t say this out loud, but he does survey Tim carefully with his eyes, trying to assess whether Tim really is in shock or not. It’s the only plausible explanation he can think of for why Tim is acting so odd. 

“Okay,” Jason says slowly. “So—remind me why you didn’t call the police? Or Bruce?”

Tim glances down at his hand, where he anxiously picks at a scab with his thumbnail. No, not a scab, Jason realizes upon closer inspection—a stray spot of blood. “My mom’s dead,” Tim says. “So if anyone finds out about this, I’ll have to get passed around the foster system or end up in a home, and either way it’ll be a huge scene and I don’t want to draw any attention in case someone finds out about Robin, or—”

“Wait.” Jason holds up a hand, pinches the bridge of his nose with the other. “What are you talking about? Why would you end up in the foster system?”

Tim blinks. “That’s what happens to orphans.”

“Yes, thank you for enlightening me,” Jason sneers. “I was talking about Bruce, dipshit. He’d take you in, right?”

Tim’s gaze drifts to the side. “I’m not like you or Dick,” he says. “I’m not his son.”

Jason bristles at this. For a moment he thinks Tim’s making fun of him, and his vision flashes red. His son. Jason hasn’t felt like Bruce’s son in a while, and he’s certain Tim’s just twisting that knife. 

But when he searches Tim’s face, he doesn’t find any cruelty or any hard edges. Tim just looks—tired. Defeated. Like a caged animal. 

“I can’t tell if you’re fucking with me,” Jason says. “Bruce would adopt you, obviously.”

“He wouldn’t,” Tim says in a quiet voice. When Jason opens his mouth to protest, Tim says something that silences every thought in Jason’s brain: “He told me he wouldn’t.”

Everything that Jason thought he knew about Tim Drake reconfigures itself in his head. For months now he’s carried around an image of Tim Drake as a perfect little rich boy, the heir to a corporate empire, the subject of all of Bruce Wayne’s attention and affection. Now that image shatters as he looks at Tim Drake kneeling next to his father’s dead body in a carpet, back turned to the Bats, calling an enemy for help out of fear of utter displacement. 

Jason says, “Let’s get him into the car.” 

Tim’s instincts were right in calling Jason for help; this isn’t the first time Jason’s disposed of a body before. 

Except the other times, Jason didn’t have an audience with him—especially not an audience that happens to be a direct family member of the deceased. Normally Jason would deal with this in a much more thorough, much more efficient way. Chop the body into pieces, or stuff it in a meat grinder, or dissolve it in acid, or burn it in a furnace. But even Jason doesn’t have the heart, or the guts, to do any of that to Tim’s father’s body right in front of Tim. 

At the same time, he knows they can’t risk getting caught, so he settles for a safe bet: the Gotham Harbor. The Harbor’s so huge that it’s virtually impossible to comb completely, and so filthy that nobody would suspect any unusual waste being dumped into it. And more importantly, it allows Jason to preserve at least some of Mr. Drake’s dignity. 

The nice thing about it being four-in-the-ungodly-fucking-morning is that it’s still plenty dark out, and the Harbor is empty when they get there. Jason pulls over at a vacant spot and unbuckles his seatbelt. When Tim starts to do the same, Jason shoots him a look. “What’re you doing?”

Tim freezes like a scolded dog. “Coming with you…?”

“Absolutely not.” Jason reaches over and yanks the seatbelt out of Tim’s hand before strapping it back over Tim, ignoring Tim’s petulant Hey! at this, because there’s no way in hell he’s going to let Tim watch his own dad sink to the bottom of Gotham Harbor. “I’m going to deal with this, and you are going to stay here and wait and chill the fuck out for one second.”

“It’s my problem,” Tim protests. “You shouldn’t have to deal with it alone. I mean, you shouldn’t even have to deal with it in the first place.”

“Damn right I shouldn’t,” Jason agrees gruffly. “Stay here. Don’t make me repeat myself.” He pauses, then: “And turn your seat warmer on.” 

Tim shoots him an icy look, but he grudgingly obeys. Satisfied, Jason climbs out of the car and shuts the door. 

He makes work of the body as quickly as possible, unwrapping it from the carpet and then binding it tightly with metal chains. When he’s made sure that the bindings are secure, he submerges the corpse into the water. He stands in the cold wind and watches the corpse disappear, sinking like an anchor until it’s lost beneath the murky depths of the harbor. It leaves a faint trail of blood, so coppery that it renders itself a muddy brown in the water, and within a minute that disperses too, and then there is no trace at all. The body is gone, and what happened tonight is gone too. 

Jason takes a breath, collecting his thoughts before he walks back into the car. Tim is watching him closely as he climbs back inside and shuts the door. “How’d it go?” he asks, as if Jason has just gotten back from fucking summer camp.

“It’s fine,” Jason tells him, voice clipped. “I took care of everything. Nobody’s going to find him.”

Tim lets out a shaky exhale. “That’s good,” he says, leaning back into his seat. 

Jason can’t help himself from asking anymore, because this whole thing is so ridiculously, outlandishly absurd: “Are you, like—is something wrong with you?”

Tim swivels his head around to look at him. “What?”

“I mean, are you like, brain damaged, or in shock, or psychotic, or just really fucking weird?” Tim furrows his brow at this, so Jason goes on: “It’s just that you seem completely fine.”

Tim’s lips tug into a puzzled frown. “Should I… not be?”

“Not after your dad’s been fucking murdered, no,” Jason hisses. He says the words as harshly as possible this time, not trying to soften any blows, hoping that hearing the word “murder” out loud might elicit any kind of reaction from Tim. But Tim just blinks tiredly before reaching out and turning his seat warmer up another level.

“Well,” Tim says. “I don’t really know. I mean. My father wasn’t exactly the best parent, so.”

Something in the way he says this makes Jason’s chest contract. “He hit you or something?”

“No,” Tim says quickly. Then he pauses, curling his fingers into a fist. “Well—only once. Not hard or anything. I’m not… that’s not what I’m getting at. He wasn’t abusive . I just wasn’t close with him. He was never around, never talked to me, so… nothing’s gonna change, I guess.” He shrugs. “Life is going to be exactly the same without him as it was with him.” 

“Still, he’s—he was your father,” Jason says. “You’re allowed to be a little shaken up, dude. You depended on him.”

At this Tim stiffens. “I didn’t depend on him,” he says. “I don’t depend on anyone.” 

And yet he called you, Jason’s brain supplies helpfully. Worse, it starts trying to shove a bunch of fucking feelings down Jason’s throat at this, and Jason tries his best to tamp them down, because he is not about to feel anything that isn’t anger towards Tim fucking Drake. 

But he can’t bring himself to muster any anger now as he watches Tim pick at the dried blood under his nails. Jason just lets out a weary breath and says, “I’m driving you home.” 

They get back in the car and they drive. Tim doesn’t say anything, and he won’t stop fucking scraping at the blood under his fingernails, and it’s so quiet that Jason can actually hear the sound, like a mouse’s nails on a tiny chalkboard. A few minutes in, Jason can’t bear it any longer and he turns the music on. Tim actually goes still at this, lowering his hands. “This is your music?” he says. 

“It’s my car.”

“I mean, like—this is from a playlist? That you made?”

“Something wrong with that?”

“No,” Tim says. “It’s just. You don’t really seem like a Mazzy Star person.”

Jason snorts at this. “What kind of person do I seem like?”

“I shouldn’t say.”

“I’m not going to kill you for saying.”

“You’ve tried over less,” says Tim. There’s a brief pause, and then he winces. “Oh my god. I didn’t mean to say that out loud. I mean I did, but—it was a joke—”

Jason lets out a full laugh this time, so loud it drowns out the music. “Relax,” he assures Tim. “It was funny.” More than funny, actually. It’s sort of relieving hearing someone make light about it, because everyone else tiptoes around the topic like it’s a landmine. But, Jason realizes, it’s nobody else’s right to talk about like this, only theirs. He’s surprised that it actually feels sort of nice. Like they’re confidants, in a fucked-up way. 

“I guess, like, more punk. Or death metal, or emo stuff.”

“Emo stuff.”

“Like, MCR.”

“I’ve changed my mind,” Jason says. “Jump out of the car.”

Tim laughs this time, and Jason realizes it’s the first time he’s heard Tim laugh all night—or ever, really. The sound of it makes Jason suddenly aware of Tim’s age. It was easier to forget when Tim was crouched over a rolled-up corpse, his expression robotic and clinical, but now it’s glaring, upsetting. This is a sixteen-year-old in Jason’s car. A sixteen-year-old who woke up to a gunshot this morning and found his father with his brains blown out. Fifteen when Jason attacked him. 

Tim’s house is exactly the same as they left it. No police cars, no suspicious, prying neighbors. Tim must take this in at the same time, because he exhales in relief beside Jason. 

As they pull up to the house, Tim unbuckles his seatbelt, then pauses. “Sorry again for making you do all this.”

Jason stares. “You apologize a lot.”

“Sor—” Tim stops himself. “Yeah. Just a habit, I guess.”

A habit from what, Jason doesn’t ask, but he can gather up a pretty good idea. He might not be a bright little boy detective like Tim, but he can put together pieces when they’re handed to him on a silver platter. He thinks of Tim growing up in a house where his parents were never around, seeking attention that was never there, constantly apologizing for his own burdensome existence. 

“You could just thank me instead,” says Jason. He’s half-joking, because he knows Tim doesn’t owe him gratitude for anything, not after the Tower. It’s going to be a pretty long time before that scale is evened out. 

But to his surprise, Tim doesn’t even hesitate before saying, “Thank you, Jason. Seriously.” 

Jason’s so caught off-guard that he just sits for a couple seconds in silence, gripping the wheel. “Yeah,” he says at last, “whatever.”

Tim gets out and shuts the door. Jason hangs back for a minute, watching Tim make his way up his porch steps before letting himself into the house with a key. Simple as that. Like he’s returning home from a long day at school. 

Jason tries not to imagine what happened after he drove away. 

He tries not to imagine Tim waiting and listening for the sound of Jason’s car to disappear into the distance. Then turning to that huge, empty house, completely alone. Scrubbing blood from the floor tiles, using his fingernails to get between the cracks. Picking up scattered pieces of skull like fucking Jackie O. 

He doesn’t feel bad for Tim. Obviously not. He didn’t feel bad when he broke the kid’s nose, or when he sliced his blade through his neck. The kid’s a leech, a fucking insect. Sure, what happened to his father was objectively horrifying, but being orphaned in a traumatic way is practically a rite of passage for the Bats at this point. Nobody else has ever been pitied for it, so why should he pity Tim? 

He thinks about what Tim said to him at the harbor: This is my problem. He was right. This is so completely not Jason’s problem. 

It’s not Jason’s problem. So he shouldn’t be spending any time thinking about it. 

But, inexplicably, inscrutably, he does. As the next few days pass, Jason thinks about Tim going back to his regularly scheduled programming as usual. Putting on his costume, going on patrol, hanging out with the Bats, pretending like nothing’s wrong. Living in a world where the only other person who knows about his father’s violent murder is Jason fucking Todd, of all people. This is the sort of thing that drives people insane, that causes psychotic breakdowns. 

Jason keeps his phone close at hand during these days, finds himself checking the time practically every twenty minutes. He realizes belatedly that what he’s checking for is any news from Tim. A text, either from him or from Bruce or Dick, some kind of update to assure him that Tim hasn’t curled up and died from shock or trauma yet. But this never comes. 

Not your problem, not your problem, not your problem, Jason reminds himself, resolute, but eventually that resolution wears thin and he winds up opening up his texts himself. 

Jason: Everything fine over there? Nobody’s found anything?

Shithead: hi yeah everything’s fine 

Jason: Keep me updated if anything happens

Shithead: ok. thanks 

Shithead: is my name still shithead on your phone

Jason: What do you think

Another few days pass with no word. Jason knows he’s done all he can now, and he’s not Tim’s babysitter, for god’s sake. It’s not his responsibility to check up on him, even if Tim really has gone off the rails. 

He finds himself showing up at Tim’s house the next week anyway. This time he goes in the middle of the day, and the daylight makes the house look more like a house and less like an abandoned haunted mansion, which comforts Jason slightly. He knocks on the door and Tim answers this time.

“Jason?” Tim looks astounded, as if Jesus Christ himself has appeared on his doorstep. “What are you doing here?”

“Making sure you’re not dead.”

Tim narrows his eyes. “Why would I be dead?”

“I don’t know.” Jason runs a hand through his hair, feeling sheepish, exposed. “I just didn’t want you to do something stupid, like blow your brains out, or something.”

“My brain’s intact, thanks.” Tim doesn’t seem to be lying. He doesn’t look like he’s depressed, or spiraling, or struggling with—anything, really. He’s wearing respectable clothes, a button-up with trousers, his hair’s been combed. Clearly he’s up and walking. 

The whole thing seems dumb suddenly. Of course Tim’s alive, of course he’s perfectly fine. He went out of his way to explain as much, and now Jason’s here looking like a complete idiot, worrying over Tim, who doesn’t need or want his help. 

He’s about to turn and leave when he takes a closer look at Tim’s face, and— “Have you been sleeping?” he asks suspiciously. 

Tim levels him with a Really? look that makes Jason feel geriatric. “I never sleep, Jason.”

“Okay. But you’ve got, like, serious bags under your eyes. Worse than your usual.”

Tim yawns. “I’ve been working on a case,” he explains. “A drug bust. I haven’t been the best at keeping track of time.”

Understatement of the century. He looks seriously exhausted, and it’s not just that—his face looks more gaunt, too. His cheeks are slimmer, every bone more pronounced. As if he wasn’t enough of a stick to begin with. “Have you been eating?”

Tim hesitates for a moment too long before saying, “Yes.”

Jason crosses his arms. “Get in the car,” he orders. 

Tim insists that he doesn’t want anything, which Jason responds to by ordering enough food to feed the five thousand. They slide into a booth and Jason watches Tim stare down at his burger and fries. “Staring at it isn’t going to make it go away,” Jason tells him. 

“I’m really not hungry.”

“Famous last words.” Jason nods toward him. “Come on. Don’t insult me after I just paid good money for all that.”

The only thing worse than eating, apparently, is the thought of insulting Jason, because Tim picks up his burger and takes a cautious bite. Jason monitors him as he chews, making sure he doesn’t try to pull a fast one and spit it out into his napkin or something. Then Jason finally breaks the silence by asking, “How’s this week been for you?”

“Good,” Tim says. “Busy.”

“With the drug bust?”

“That and school.” 

Right—Jason had nearly forgotten that Tim’s still in school. As if he needed another reminder of how young Tim is. “What’re you reading right now?”

Tim gives him a strange look, like he isn’t sure if he heard Jason correctly. “Uh. Gatsby?”

Jason nods his approval. “Good one.”

“It’s just alright so far.” Tim plucks an onion out of his burger, which Jason cheerfully takes off of his hands.

“Just wait ‘til you get to the end. It gets crazy.”

Tim hums, ambivalent. “We’ll see.”

Jason takes a moment to try and think of a natural segue into this next bit of conversation, but he gives up eventually. “And has it been… okay? In the house?”

“Same as always.” Tim peels another onion out of his burger. “Like I said, he was never around, so.”

“And you’re still not planning on telling the Bats at all.”

“Absolutely not.” 

Jason sighs, leaning back in the booth. “Jeez. I knew Bruce could be cold, but I didn’t realize he could be such a dick.”

Tim looks up at this, startled by the accusation. “What? No, he’s not.”

Jason narrows his eyes. “He actually told you he wouldn’t adopt you? To your face?”

Tim gnaws at his lip. “He didn’t say it in a mean way,” he says. “It was more, like. He just said he doesn’t really have the time. And, uh, that it might look suspicious anyway, if anyone were to find out.”

“Yeah,” Jason deadpans. “That’s fucked, dude.” 

Tim shakes his head. “I don’t blame him. I’m practically eighteen already, so there wouldn’t really be a point.”

Jason stares. “You’re sixteen.”

“Yeah, but like, that’s almost seventeen.”

“Tim. You’re fucking sixteen.” 

“My point,” Tim emphasizes, “is that there’s no logical reason for me to get adopted. People adopt kids so that they can, like—change things for them. You know? Give them a loving home, help them grow up in a healthy environment, or whatever.”

“So?”

“Well, the damage has kind of already been done in that department.” Tim shrugs. “It’s like, this is the hand I got dealt. This is just how I turned out. A bunch of paperwork isn’t exactly going to undo that.”

This is how I turned out. The way Tim says this makes Jason think of botched haircuts, fucked-up paintings. He has a murky, distant memory of Alfred setting down a tray of overdone cookies at the table and saying bashfully, I apologize for them turning out this way. His tone then is the same as Tim’s, now. 

“It’s not about the paperwork,” Jason grits out. “The legality of it doesn’t matter. It’s about you having a home, a family to come back to.”

“But I’m—”

Jason already knows exactly where Tim’s head is at, so he cuts him off. “How old you are doesn’t matter. You could be fucking thirty and I’d be telling you the same thing.”

Tim is quiet for a moment. Then he says, “What about you, then?”

“What about me?”

“Why haven’t you moved back into the manor?”

Jason feels his chest tighten. “That is not the same thing at all.”

“You’re right, it’s not the same thing,” Tim agrees. “They’re actually your family.”

“Some family,” Jason says with a dark scoff. “Seems like they moved on from my death just fine.”

Tim frowns at his cheeseburger. “None of them were fine after what happened to you. They still aren’t, honestly.”

“Bruce had no issue replacing me.” 

“Bruce more than anyone,” Tim argues. “You don’t even know, Jason. How he was when you were gone. It got really bad.”

Jason isn’t sure how to respond to this, or how he feels about it in the first place. It doesn’t exactly bring him joy to hear that Bruce had a hard time when he was gone. It didn’t feel good thinking Bruce moved on without a care in the world, either. Grief is a sick motherfucker, he thinks. Makes losers out of everyone. No one leaves feeling good about anything. 

He has a feeling this conversation isn’t going anywhere. It seems like they’re at a standstill—neither of them are willing to concede. So he just stuffs his hands into his coat pockets and says, “Have you gotten to the part at the hotel?”

“What?” says Tim. 

“When Tom and Gatsby get into that fight.”

“Oh,” Tim says. “No. I just finished the part where Gatsby’s chucking all the shirts at Daisy…”

They lapse into a simple, meaningless conversation, about Gatsby, then about Catcher in the Rye, and The Scarlet Letter, and Huck Finn. Jason’s surprised by how easy and light it is. Even when they’re arguing over whether Holden Caulfield is insufferable or not, there’s no real heat behind it, more playful than anything. 

It dawns on Jason that this is the sort of friendship they could have if it weren’t for everything else. If they’d met in a universe where neither of them knew Bruce or put on the Robin mask. Or maybe this is the sort of friendship they can still have now, despite. 

When Jason pulls up to Tim’s house again, he says, “You know you can text me if you ever need help with anything.”

“Okay,” Tim says. Then: “Can you maybe change my contact name to not Shithead?”

“Yeah,” Jason says, “once you stop being a shithead.”

Shithead: saw you at the record store today

Jason: ??? I wasn’t at the record store

Shithead: you were. i saw you

Jason: No the fuck I was not

Shithead: explain this then

Shithead: <image_4129.jpg>

Jason: Is that fucking Gerard Way. 

Shithead: caught in 4K!!! 

Jason: Wtf

Shithead: if you’re not an MCR fan then how do you know gerard way????

Jason: Has anyone ever told you that you have too much free time on your hands

Shithead: that’s what some like to call being a detective

Jason: Go read your book 

Because Jason’s entire life is one big fucking joke, he runs into Tim on patrol, of all places. 

He’s doing his usual comb of the city when he spots a figure perched on a warehouse rooftop. He’d recognize the familiar canary yellow of that cape anywhere. Not too long ago the sight of Tim in this costume would have his blood boiling; now the most he can muster up is a faint annoyance. 

He drops down onto the rooftop, a few feet away from Tim. Tim doesn’t seem to hear him at first, which is strange, especially considering that Jason wasn’t making any particular effort to be discreet. It’s only after Jason clears his throat that Tim startles and spins around. He exhales once he sees who it is. “Hood,” he greets. “Hi.”

“Did I scare you?” Jason says, amusement creeping into the question. 

“I didn’t hear you.”

“I wasn’t exactly being quiet. Thought you had trained ears, and all that, ” Jason says, mimicking Tim’s words from a couple weeks ago. 

Tim doesn’t seem to catch this callback, or otherwise is just not interested. He gives a small, vague hum as he turns his attention back to the dimly lit warehouse lot below. Jason nods in his direction. “What’re you up to?”

“Surveillance,” Tim responds. He gestures vaguely with a pair of night-binoculars. “For the case I’ve been working on.”

Jason glances around. “Where are Batman and Nightwing?”

“They’re not here.” Tim lifts the binoculars to his face and gazes out into the dark lot, where a car is pulling up. Two men go out to greet it, both carrying rifles. “Man, I knew it,” Tim sings triumphantly under his breath. 

“What do you mean they’re not here? You came out here alone?”

Tim lowers the binoculars. Then his face brightens as he says, “Oh, I finished Gatsby. You were right. It got better.” 

“Answer the question, Robin.”

The smile fades from Tim’s face, and his gaze falls away. “I’ve been working on this case mostly by myself.”

“They didn’t want to help you or something?”

“I haven’t really been talking with them much the last couple weeks.” Tim says this hurriedly, like he’s trying not to dwell on this topic for too long. He lifts the binoculars to his face again. 

“I thought you didn’t want to draw any attention to yourself.”

“I don’t.”

“And you don’t think they’ll notice you’re working yourself into the ground?”

“I’m doing perfectly fine,” Tim says offhandedly. Then he frowns, mutters, “Shit.”

“You know, you can’t avoid them forever,” Jason starts to say, when suddenly Tim yelps, “Hood, get down—!”

Jason sees the flash of gunfire a moment before he hears the shot. Tim yanks him down to a crouch beside him while Jason makes quick work surveying the area. The inside of the lot is a no-go, then; they’ve been spotted. No point in wasting any more time up here. “Come on,” he hisses at Tim as he scales the rooftop down on the other side. 

It’s an easy climb, and in less than five seconds, Jason has dropped down from the fire escape onto the asphalt below. Tim drops down a moment later, but when his legs hit the floor, he stumbles suddenly. Jason reaches out and grabs him by the arm, steadying him. He doesn’t even pull Tim very hard, so he’s surprised when the kid lists sideways into him, like he has all the weight of a piece of paper. 

“What the fuck is wrong with you?” Jason demands. “You take a hit or something?”

“No,” Tim says. Through his mask, Jason can see him doing these weird hard-blinks, squeezing his eyes shut then opening them again, almost like he’s trying to clear spots from his vision. “Sorry, I just. Got dizzy.”

“If I find out you’re hiding an injury right now, I swear to god—”

“I’m not,” Tim insists, pushing Jason’s hands away. Jason hadn’t even noticed that they’d started to hover, like a goddamn mother hen. What the fuck, he thinks, is this kid doing to me? “Seriously, I’m fine.”

Jason wants to press the issue further, but then there’s a distant shout from in front of them. They look up—a group of gunmen is rushing toward them. “You better be, ‘cause we’ve got company,” Jason hisses, before launching himself forward into the fray. 

The fight goes well for all of thirty seconds. If Jason were here alone, this would be a fucking wipe. But he’s here with Tim, and even worse, Tim is operating at roughly twenty percent right now. Even from the corner of his eye, as Jason works his way through the men, he can see Tim stalling, his movements sloppy, his reflexes sluggish. And then, while Tim is busy incapacitating one of them, Jason sees another one in the distance take aim with his rifle. 

“Tim, on your left,” Jason shouts as he kicks another man down. Out of his peripheral vision, he can see that Tim’s barely even moved, still completely fixed on his stupid fucking fistfight. “Tim, fucking move!” 

There’s no time anymore, and Jason’s body makes the decision before his brain really gives it permission to. He throws himself at the assailant, slamming an elbow into the side of the guy’s head. He hears the gun go off. 

Jason gets to his feet, breathing hard. The gunman doesn’t get up. Jason turns around to Tim, who is watching with wide, vacant eyes, his face ghostly pale. “Let’s get the hell out of here,” Jason hisses. 

Tim nods, and the two of them get as far away from the site as possible, sprinting down streets and tearing past blocks. They only stop for breath once they’ve reached an alley that’s tucked well away. Between breaths, Jason demands, “The hell were you doing back there?”

“Sorry,” Tim says. He’s really breathing hard, and it sounds strained, like there’s a faint rattle in his chest. “I’m just. A little off my rhythm tonight.”

“Then you shouldn’t have come here alone without backup, dumbass,” Jason growls. He wants to get more upset but finds that his energy is rapidly sapping out of him for some reason, and then suddenly he doesn’t even have the energy to stay upright, and he’s slumping against the alley wall. The world tilts around him and he blinks a couple times, becoming suddenly aware of how blurry his vision’s become. 

The next time he blinks, Tim is speaking to him, although the words are refusing to piece themselves together, and all he can really make out is the shrill, squeaking tone of Tim’s voice. 

“Stop talking,” Jason says, although it lacks any of his usual fire. “Your voice’s fuckin’ annoying.”

This time he’s able to make out more of the words by reading Tim’s lips. Tim looks worried for some reason, his brow furrowed in consternation while his hands move frantically. “Shit,” Tim is rambling, “when did this even happen?”

Jason’s about to ask what even happened when his gaze slides over to his side, and he sees why Tim’s hands were moving. Tim has a roll of gauze stuffed up against Jason’s arm, where there is, like, a fucking shitload of blood soaking his sleeve. “What the fuck,” Jason mumbles. It feels like he’s talking through a mouthful of cotton. 

He feels something sliding across his back and then he realizes sluggishly that it was the wall, and now he’s sitting uncomfortably against it while Tim crouches over him, putting pressure on the wound. “Did I get fucking shot?” Jason demands. He manages to sound angry at this, which he’s proud of. 

“Grazed,” Tim says.

“Why the hell’zit bleeding like this, then?”

“You’ll—you’ll be fine. Just hang on, okay? I already called Batman.”

“You called fucking Batman?” 

“What else did you want me to do!”

“You’re the worst,” Jason gripes as his vision starts to grow dim. “Like, I seriously can’t stand your ass.”

“Hey, stay awake,” Tim urges. “B and N will be here soon, okay? Just keep your eyes open.”

“Don’t tell me what to do,” Jason mutters, and out of pure spite, he closes his eyes. 

When Jason wakes up in the Manor, Bruce and Dick are both sitting next to his bed like it’s two years ago and this is totally normal for them, and before he can think better of it he says, “You’re fucking joking.”

Instantly Bruce and Dick snap into action. Dick leaps to his feet and chirps, “Hey, Jay,” while Bruce leans forward and touches Jason’s uninjured arm and says, “How are you feeling? Do you need more morphine?”

“Back off,” Jason grumbles, slapping Bruce’s hand away. He’s too tired to put any real force behind it, which is a shame. He glances down at his arm, the one that was bleeding Carrie-levels of blood the last time he was awake; it’s bandaged now, and the site doesn’t hurt much, more achy than anything. “Was that bullet—”

“It was just a graze,” Dick confirms. “You’ll be back on your feet in no time.”

“It was bleeding like crazy,” Jason recalls, and Bruce nods. 

“It nicked an artery,” he explains. “It could have gotten dangerous, but Tim called us quickly, so you’ll recover just fine.”

Jason sits up. “Where is Tim?”

Bruce and Dick’s eyes flick towards one another briefly at the mention of his name, and both of them are wearing the same pinched expressions. “What?” Jason demands. 

“He left,” Bruce says. “We, uh. We got into a bit of a tiff earlier.”

“A tiff?”

Bruce sighs. “I threatened to bench him. He got upset.”

“What?” Jason practically lurches out of bed. “You can’t bench him. Why the hell would you bench him?”

Bruce and Dick both look surprised. “Honestly, I would’ve thought you’d be happy to hear it,” Dick says with a sheepish grin. “Considering your feelings towards Tim.”

Jason elects to ignore this. “You can’t bench him,” he repeats, all the petulance of a kindergartner.

“It’s not like I want to,” Bruce says, sounding exasperated. “But what happened last night was unacceptable. Going out to do a bust, alone, with no backup? Getting you hurt?” 

His breath catches a bit at this, like even thinking about this is upsetting to him. Jason sees his fist curl around the bedsheet. 

“I’m fine,” Jason assures him. “Don’t be so dramatic, B, it was just a graze.”

But Bruce’s gaze remains harsh and raw, like he’s being split open. “When we got there, I thought for a second—there was so much blood—” He stops there, shaking his head fiercely. “It could have been a lot worse. We’re lucky it wasn’t. But Tim needs to answer for acting that reckless. Not to mention how distant he’s been the past month. I can’t have a Robin who refuses to communicate with me.”

“Are you serious?” Jason demands, voice rising with his incredulity. “You’re punishing him for, what, one stupid mistake and for being distant? The kid’s fucking grieving, no shit he’s distant! And you can’t even give him a break?”

He’s so riled up that it takes him a few moments to register Bruce and Dick’s appalled expressions, and even then, he’s not totally sure why they look like they’ve been struck by lightning. But then—“Grieving?” says Dick. 

Shit. “It’s nothing,” Jason says lamely, because he’s not really sure how to backpedal on this one. “Just—give the kid some grace, is all I’m saying.”

“Jason,” says Bruce, somehow managing to sound patient and authoritative at once. 

Jason exhales, defeated. “Look, I’m not supposed to tell you.” 

“Not supposed to tell us what?” Dick sounds like he’s already on the verge of tears somehow, which is ridiculous, because Jason hasn’t even said anything yet. 

“Tim’s dad is dead,” Jason says. 

A shocked hush falls over the room. Bruce says, in a low voice, “Jack? Is dead?”

Jason rolls his eyes. “If Tim’s dad’s name is Jack, then yes, Bruce, Jack is fucking dead. Jesus. It’s like everyone has brain damage in this family.”

“What—how—when did this happen?” Dick asks. His eyes are wider than Jason’s ever seen them.

Interrogation mode kicks in, and Jason systematically moves through each question one-by-one. “He was murdered. Shot in the face in his own—in Tim’s house. Tim thinks it was someone involved with his parents’ business.” He takes a short breath, then finishes: “A little over two weeks ago, now.”

Dick sits back down in his chair next to Bruce, massaging his temples. “ Two weeks ,” Dick echoes, sounding breathless. 

“He told you this,” Bruce says slowly. “But not us.”

“Well, he needed my help getting rid of the body—”

“ What?!” Bruce and Dick exclaim at the exact same time. 

“—would you both take a fucking Xanax?” Jason snaps. “I did a good job, alright? Nobody’s finding that shit.”

“That,” Dick says, sounding horrified, “is not the thing that concerns me here, Jay.”

“But he doesn’t want anyone else to know—you guys included—because he doesn’t want to end up in the foster system for the next two years of his life,” Jason concludes, ignoring Dick. “Which means that you guys cannot tell anyone. Alright? I don’t care how much of a pity party you want to throw for him.”

“Why would he end up in the foster system?” says Bruce, brow furrowed. 

Jason wants to throw something at him, he really does. The nerve of this guy. “Maybe because you told him that, you piece of shit,” he growls. 

Bruce looks like he’s been stabbed. “I never told him that.”

“You told him you wouldn’t adopt him,” Jason says, “which is actually probably worse—”

“No, I—Jay, lad, I never said anything of the sort,” Bruce repeats, more firmly this time. 

All of the air sucks out of the room at once. Jason tries to wrap his head around this, but it’s spinning. Everything is backwards, nothing makes sense. He looks to Dick for help, thinking maybe Bruce is just misremembering, but Dick’s expression is the same as Bruce’s: confused, hurt, heartbroken. 

Jason says, “You mean you…”

“I’d adopt him in a heartbeat,” Bruce says. “Of course I would.” 

Jason slumps back into the bed. He inhales through his nose, closes his eyes, and thinks with absolute clarity: I’m actually going to kill the fucking brat this time.  

Bruce doesn’t end up putting Tim on the bench. Jason discovers this because he finds him on patrol again, only this time, he doesn’t land on the roof. He lunges straight for Tim, knocking the kid flat onto his back before shoving his knee between his ribs. 

Tim flails under him, gasping. “Jas— Hood?” he wheezes, eyes wide with alarm. “What— ow —what are you doing?!” 

“You fucking liar,” Jason hisses through his teeth. Tim makes a haphazard grab at his face, but Jason just grabs Tim’s wrist and pins it against the roof. 

Tim struggles, but his attempts are weak, even for him. “What?”

“This whole time you’ve been spinning this pathetic little sob story. Making me think you didn’t actually take my place after all, that Bruce hated your guts for some reason—and I actually fucking believed it.”

Tim freezes under him, going rigid. “You said you wouldn’t tell Bruce.”

“Yeah, well, I’m glad I fucking did, because now I know you’ve been lying to my face,” Jason snarls. “Thought you could get me on your side? Is that it? You figured, Jason’s so fucked in the head, he’ll buy whatever bullshit I sell him?”

“ No ,” Tim croaks out in protest. “No, of course not.”

“Then what the fuck was your angle, exactly?” Jason demands. “Were you just trying to cause problems for everyone? Are you some kind of sadomasochist? Is that it?”

Tim sucks in a breath. The moonlight catches on the corner of his eye, and Jason realizes belatedly that it’s a tear. Tim—no surprise here—is too stubborn to even let a single tear escape. 

“I’m sorry,” is all Tim says. No explanation. Nothing. 

Jason releases his wrist. It falls back limply to the roof: zero fight, zero energy. 

“I told you to stop saying that,” Jason says. Then he shakes his head, disbelieving. “I can’t believe I actually felt sorry for you.” 

He stands up. Tim sits up, but otherwise doesn’t move, just stares at the roof like he’s catatonic. “Don’t ever call me for help again,” Jason snaps. “Lose my number if you know what’s good for you. Got it?”

Tim says in a hollow voice, “Okay.” 

Jason doesn’t turn back to look at him as he takes off for the city. 

True to his word, Tim does not contact Jason. For all of three days. 

Jason’s in the middle of watching American Psycho on cable when his phone rings this time. For what it’s worth, it’s eight P.M., which is a hell of a lot more respectable than three in the morning. 

Knowing this doesn’t do much to quell the annoyance that kicks in when Jason reads the contact name. He lets it ring for a while, chanting at himself, Don’t answer, don’t answer, don’t answer. 

This wouldn’t have even been a decision, a few months ago. A few months ago, Tim could have been disemboweled in a fucking ditch somewhere and Jason still wouldn’t have wittingly picked up the phone. 

Jason makes a compromise with himself: ten seconds. He’ll give Tim exactly ten seconds, on the off chance that Tim is, in fact, disemboweled in a ditch somewhere and in need of urgent medical attention. Ten seconds. He picks up the phone and grits out, “What.” 

He waits. There’s no reply, but he can hear Tim breathing into the receiver. Four seconds pass. Five. Six, then—

“Jay?” Tim says finally. 

“ Yes?” Jason demands, impatient. 

“Is—is that you?” Tim’s voice sounds strange. Slurred, almost drunk. 

“You called me,” Jason reminds him. “Obviously it’s me.” 

“S’nd weird.”

“What?”

“You sound weird.”

“Hanging up now,” Jason is starting to say, when out of nowhere Tim says, “Jay, my dad’s back.”

Jason’s fingers twitch involuntarily around the phone. For a second he isn’t sure if he’s misheard, but then he thinks he wouldn’t mishear something like that. “ What?”

“He’s—he’s here. In the house.” Tim takes a wheezing breath, starting to babble now. “Dad. My, my dad. I—don’t know how, but, he, he was back there again, where I first found him when—when—”

For a brief moment, Tim’s panic seems to seep through the receiver, seizing Jason by the lungs. People don’t come back from the dead, he thinks—but then again, Jason’s here as living proof otherwise, and he technically didn’t check for a pulse, did he, even after he told himself he would—but then Jason steels himself, getting a grip. No. Whatever Tim thinks is happening, his father is at the bottom of Gotham Harbor right now. 

“Tim,” he says, trying to keep his voice as even as he can. “Listen to me. That’s not possible. I watched him sink. He’s not coming back.”

“No, no, no,” Tim’s saying, nearly incomprehensible. His words sound completely garbled, almost like he’s drowning on air—this, Jason realizes, is not how a coherent person sounds. “He’s here. He won’t go away.” 

Tim’s clearly hallucinating, Jason deduces, under the influence of something. If Jason didn’t know any better he’d think Tim was on drugs. But Tim’s way too much of a goody two-shoes for that. 

Unless, Jason thinks with a jolt, unless he didn’t go under willingly. Like, for example, Fear Toxin. 

“Tim,” Jason says, already putting on his coat. “Where are you?” 

Tim doesn’t even seem to hear the question. “I don’t want him here,” he says, dangerously close to a sob. “But. But. I don’t want him gone either.”

Now that Jason’s initial panic over the possibility of zombie-Jack-Drake coming back for vengeance like the fucking vampire Lestat has dissipated, his head clears, making way for action. This, he can handle. Fear Toxin’s all in a day’s work. He still has Tim’s location pin from before. He pulls it up and sees that Tim is, in fact, at home—at the very least he wasn’t hallucinating that. 

“I’m heading over, Timbo,” he says as he gets into his car. “Alright? So just sit tight.” Tim doesn’t respond this time, and when Jason glances down at the phone, he realizes that Tim’s hung up. Tim doesn’t pick up the phone again as Jason continues ringing him on the drive over.

When he gets inside, he discovers that his suspicions were correct: Tim’s dad’s body is nowhere to be found. But then again, neither is Tim. “Tim,” Jason yells. “You in here? Hello?”

He’s met with silence, the sound of his own voice echoing throughout the emptiness of the house. God, he doesn’t know how Tim can stand living alone in a place like this. “Tim,” he repeats, once again to silence. 

Then there is a sound—a faint thump from upstairs. Jason briskly climbs the stairs, following the noise to a closed door. He doesn’t knock before opening it.

It’s a bathroom, and sure enough, Tim’s here. He’s slumped over the toilet bowl, his head limp over one shoulder. If he’s noticed Jason all but kicking the door down, he doesn’t show it, completely unmoving. 

Jason approaches him with some caution—if he’s hopped up on Fear Toxin, he could be dangerous, ready to lash out at anything he sees as a threat. “Hey, Timbers,” he says. “Jesus. You’ve seen better days, haven’t you?”

Tim’s head finally lolls toward him at this, but his eyes are unfocused, glazed over. “Jase?” he mumbles, or attempts to—the name comes out like he’s speaking around a handful of marbles. 

“In the flesh.” Jason steps forward now, no longer wary of getting attacked. Even if Tim was paranoid, he doesn’t pose much of a threat if he can barely even lift his own head. “What’s going on? You get a face full of gas or what?” 

“Why’re you…” Tim’s brow furrows. His face is flushed, bright splotches of red, sweat sticking his hair to his forehead. “What…”

“Come on. You gotta talk to me here.” He reaches down to pull Tim up into a proper sitting position—and nearly drops him, because, okay, what the fuck. What the fuck. 

“What the fuck,” Jason swears, out loud this time. He puts a hand against Tim’s clammy forehead—it feels like he’s touching a stove, for god’s sake. Even as disoriented as he is, Tim writhes with discomfort, struggling to pull himself away from Jason’s touch. “Tim, you’re fucking boiling . What—?” 

Then—the pieces come together. The bags under Tim’s eyes. The fact that Jason never actually saw Tim finish his cheeseburger. The way Tim was acting on patrol last week: dizzy, sluggish, uncoordinated. 

It’s been three weeks now since his dad was murdered. Three weeks during which, Jason surmises, Tim has not eaten or slept. This isn’t Fear Toxin talking—it’s a fever. Tim is sick. Really sick. Tripping-fucking-balls sick. 

Jason curses as he glances around the bathroom. “Do you have a thermometer?” No response. When he looks back at Tim, Tim’s eyes are rolling back and forth across the room lazily, like two loose marbles. Jason desperately taps at Tim’s face again, trying to elicit any sort of response, but Tim just lies there, fucking wheezing, like his lungs are being shredded through a garbage disposal. “Tim. Tim. Hey.” 

He needs to take Tim’s temperature, like, yesterday. Jason places the back of his palm against Tim’s forehead again and tries to make an educated guess; if it’s anywhere close to how it feels, Tim’s burning well over 102 at this point, especially if he’s already delirious like this. Jason has zero doubts that whatever it is, this is a dangerous, brain-damage kind of fever. This is the kind of fever that kills people, Jason thinks. Especially children. Which. Tim is, and. Fuck. 

His brain stutters, stubbornly refusing to give him any sort of emergency protocol. Should he get him in a bath? Roll him over so he doesn’t choke on his own vomit? He can’t think, he can’t think, he can’t think. Then there is one singular intelligible thought amidst all the clutter and noise, and it’s: Call Bruce. 

Jason pulls out his phone, looking through his incredibly unhelpful contacts— Fuckface, Douchebag, Asshat, Bitchboy— before finally stopping on Dickwad. He makes an educated guess, which is really the best he can manage right now, and he dials. 

It only rings twice before the call picks up: “Hello? Jay?” Dick’s voice. 

Relief washes over Jason, so intense he feels almost dizzy with it. “You’re Dickwad,” Jason says, practically giddy. 

Dick makes a noise. “Excuse me?” 

Under different circumstances Jason would be absolutely reveling in this. “I’m with Tim right now,” he says instead, straight business. “He’s sick, really sick. It looks bad.” 

“He’s sick?” Dick repeats, voice shrill even through the phone. In Jason’s lap, Tim makes a noise of discomfort and tries to move away from the loud sound. Jason can’t help but feel a little relief—at least Tim’s responding to something. Jason considers holding the phone right up to Tim’s ear just to snap him out of it. “Sick, like—”

“Crazy high fever. Delirious. He called me hallucinating, thinking his dad’s corpse was in his room—” 

“Oh, Jesus.” Jason hears movement on the other line. “Okay—shit. We’ll prep an IV with cold saline for him. You’re at his house? Do you have your car—?”

“On it,” Jason says. “I’ll be there in ten.”

He hangs up, briefly detaches himself from Tim to grab a bath towel and run it under cold water. Then he presses it over Tim’s face, hoping to draw some kind of lucidity from the kid. Instead he just gets a weak groan. 

“Tim,” Jason urges. “I’m gonna lift you up, alright? Just so that I can get you to the car.”

“N, no,” Tim moans, because of course the only thing he can contribute is his own utter uselessness. “Don’t wanna leave.” 

“I can leave you here to die, if you’d prefer,” Jason says lightly. He knows the joke will completely go over the kid’s head, but he isn’t sure how else to deal with all of this. 

But then Tim sighs and says, almost dreamily, “You want me dead.” Despite the intense heat radiating off of Tim, Jason’s blood turns ice in his veins at what Tim says next: “I want me dead.”

Before Jason can begin to unpack all that, Tim gives a sudden, violent lurch. Jason yelps in alarm, preparing to get a lap full of the kid’s puke. But instead Tim just gags, his chest heaving while nothing comes out. Jason realizes he’s probably far beyond dry heaving at this point—he wonders if there’s even any fluid left in Tim’s body to expel. 

“Okay, fuck this,” Jason says after Tim, thank god, has finally stopped making those awful retching noises. “Up we go. Come on.”

He hoists Tim over one shoulder, trying not to think too hard about how easy it is to lift him. He can feel Tim’s ribcage against his arm, the bones barely veiled by his skin, and the heat radiating off of him is enough to make Jason start to sweat. Tim’s in and out of consciousness the whole way to the car, even after Jason cranks up the A/C as cold as it will go, to the point where Jason starts to shiver. He steals a cautionary glance at Tim, limp in the passenger’s seat, lashes fluttering. The sight makes Jason feel nauseous himself. 

Jason tries to summon any part of his past ire towards Tim. It would make things a lot easier, he thinks, if he didn’t somehow get wrangled into caring this much. He shouldn’t care this much. 

He thinks back to what Tim said in that car ride home, the night they dumped the body in the river: I don’t depend on anyone. But somehow they’re both still here. 

Jason has been back to Wayne Manor more in the past two weeks than he has in the past year. Last time he wasn’t awake for the arrival, and this time he barely remembers it. Everything happens quickly, in a rapid blur: he pulls his car up, he hauls Tim out of the passenger’s seat, is vaguely aware that Tim is no longer even slightly conscious and sags against him like dead weight. Bruce, Dick, and Alfred are all waiting at the door, and then everything’s moving and everyone’s moving and Tim’s not in his arms anymore and Alfred and Dick are bringing him to another room and Jason tries to go in but then there’s a hand pulling him back, stopping him, as he watches the door close in front of his eyes and hears machinery moving around inside. He blinks, and then he’s not in front of the door anymore, he’s sitting in a chair in the foyer and Bruce is speaking to him, saying, “It’s alright, Jay, he’s going to be alright.”

This finally seems to trigger Jason somewhat back into himself. “He’s not alright,” he snaps. He glances down, sees that Bruce’s hand is on his shoulder, and yanks his arm away angrily. “That kid is seriously fucked in the head, Bruce, seriously.”

“We didn’t catch him too late,” says Bruce. “There shouldn’t be any lasting brain damage—”

“Not what I meant. He’s, like, incredibly messed up.” Jason drops his head into his hands, taking a breath, trying to collect all of the scattered pieces of himself. Then, muffled through his hands, he says: “He did this to himself, you know.”

Bruce frowns. “What do you mean?”

“He only got like this because he was practically starving himself,” says Jason. “Not sleeping, either. I noticed that he looked peaky during patrol, but I didn’t realize… I should’ve realized sooner.” Jason pauses, then says: “Didn’t you notice anything?”

Bruce purses his lips. “Tim’s… he’s a very hard worker,” he says. “Sometimes it’s difficult to tell when he’s just absorbed in a case, or when he’s…”

“Suicidal,” Jason finishes. 

Bruce looks up like he’s been electrocuted, eyes wide. “No,” he says, the word rushing out. “What? Tim’s not—no.”

“I don’t care what you think, or what he thinks,” Jason says, jabbing a finger in the direction of the sickbay. “That was suicidal at worst and self-destructive at best. Either way the kid clearly doesn’t give two shits about himself.”

“I think he can be careless,” Bruce says delicately, like he’s tiptoeing around live wire. “Reckless, maybe, but—”

“He said he wanted to die.” Jason tries not to shudder at the memory. “When I was. Earlier.”

For some reason Bruce’s expression softens, and he reaches for Jason’s shoulder again, as if somehow Jason’s the one who needs comfort right now. Again Jason shrugs him off hotly. “He was delirious, Jay,” Bruce says. “You said so yourself. He didn’t know what he was talking about.”

“He thinks I want him dead.”

Bruce’s lips quirk up wryly at one side. “In all fairness, chum, I sort of thought you did, too.” 

He says this lightly, and it should make Jason laugh. Instead Jason just grips his own elbows, digging his fingernails into his coat for something to ground him. “I don’t,” he says. “I. I never did. Not really. I know you won’t believe me, but I was never trying to kill him, B.” Jason’s throat tightens, the words choking him. “I just wanted to hurt him. Because I wanted to hurt you. Because it wasn’t—fair, that I was the one doing all the hurting, it just—it wasn’t—”

“I believe you,” Bruce says softly. He reaches out once more, tentatively this time, to place a hand over Jason’s knee. 

This time Jason lets it happen, swallowing past the lump in his throat and waiting for his vision to unblur. “You probably shouldn’t,” he says gruffly. 

Bruce sighs, not unhappily. “I know.”

They sit for a moment in silence like this, Bruce’s hand moving in imperceptibly small circles over Jason’s knee. 

“He told me he was fine,” Jason says after a while. “He didn’t even seem upset or anything. He’s been texting me fucking shitposts, for god’s sake.” He ignores the way Bruce’s brow furrows ever so slightly at the word shitpost. “I mean, I asked him constantly, but he was so—he just kept saying that he wasn’t even close to his dad, so it didn’t matter.”

Bruce purses his lips. “Tim can be prideful, like that,” he says. “He doesn’t like to let people know when he’s struggling. He probably didn’t even recognize the amount of grief he’s been dealing with.” 

“I didn’t know grief could be, like.” Jason gestures vaguely. “A physical thing.”

“Grief destroys,” Bruce says without missing a beat. “Physically, mentally, emotionally. It breaks you down on a molecular level.” He pauses, then says: “It nearly destroyed me too.”

Jason goes still. He remembers Tim offhandedly mentioning that Bruce was in a bad place when Jason was gone, but he didn’t think… “You mean you got like this? When I was…” 

“Jason, you,” he starts, and then his voice falters, and he has to catch himself. When he looks at Jason, his expression is a complicated tapestry, love and sadness weaving in and out of each other. “You made me understand why animals sometimes die of heartbreak.”

They take shifts watching Tim while they wait for his fever to break. This turns out to be a horrible idea when Bruce and Jason both fall asleep during theirs, a byproduct of all the exhausting emotions they’ve had to sort through today, and an even worse idea when Jason wakes up to the sound of the window sliding open. When he opens his eyes, Tim is staring back at him like a kid with a cookie jar, one leg slung through the window. 

Jason is on his feet in an instant. “ Tim fucking Drake,” he shouts. 

Tim responds by trying to hurriedly push himself further through the window. Jason responds to this by lunging forward and all but slinging the kid over his back like a sack of potatoes.

“Put me down,” Tim cries.

At this point, Bruce is awake and alert too, now, standing and looking alarmed. “Jason,” he exclaims. 

“He was trying to fucking escape!”

Tim gasps for breath next to his ear. “Jay—’m really dizzy—”

Right, fuck. Jason had nearly forgotten about that entire part. He puts Tim down with a little more care on the bed. While Tim catches his breath, his eyes keep darting back to the window, like he’s still considering making a break for it. 

Jason looks over at Bruce, who’s wearing an exhausted look, more judgmental than Jason would like. “He was trying to escape,” Jason repeats defensively. 

“I wasn’t,” Tim protests weakly. 

“You’re still eying the window, dipshit.”

“He’s not thinking straight, Jason,” Bruce reminds him. 

A pang of guilt hits Jason—he’d forgotten about the delirium, too—but then when he looks back at Tim’s face, he sees that Tim isn’t nearly as flushed as he was when Jason found him in the bathroom. Even more damning: Tim’s eyes are more focused now, focused enough to very pointedly avoid Jason’s scrutinizing gaze. With mounting suspicion Jason snatches the thermometer off the bed stand and storms over, grabbing Tim roughly by the head. 

“Hey,” Tim starts to say, but Jason has already made up his mind that he’ll check his hypothesis and beg for forgiveness if he’s wrong. Which he is not, because when he pulls the thermometer out, it reads one hundred on the dot. Still slightly feverish, not nearly high enough to mess with Tim’s line of thought. 

“His fever broke,” Jason snaps, showing the reading to Bruce. “He’s thinking perfectly fucking straight.”

Bruce’s face falls. He looks to Tim, lost. “Tim?”

Tim shoots Jason a venomous glare. “Judas,” he accuses. 

“Dumbass,” Jason fires back. 

Tim sighs, reaching up to rub at his temple. “I wasn’t escaping,” he says. “I was just… leaving?”

“Why?” Bruce says, sounding wounded. 

“I don’t want to overstay my welcome.” 

“You’re always welcome here,” Bruce says. He crosses over to sit down at the chair beside Tim. “You know that.”

“I know,” Tim says, but his tone is hollow, empty, unconvincing. 

Bruce watches him, his eyes devastated. “I feel like… I’ve let you down,” Bruce says, sounding distraught about this. “Have I done something to make you feel that… that this isn’t your home?”

“No. This isn’t about—” Tim makes a frustrated noise. “You haven’t done anything wrong, Bruce.”

“Then, what—”

“This isn’t my home. I don’t want to impose on you.”

“You’re going through a lot right now,” Bruce says. “You’re not imposing on anyone.”

“But I’m not going through a lot,” Tim argues.

“Tim,” Jason says impatiently, “your dad just died.” Bruce gives him a pointed look for his bluntness, but Jason can’t really find it in himself to care right now.

“And that shouldn’t affect me!” Tim retorts, voice rising to a shout, when he’s cut off by a coughing fit. Bruce rubs his back while he wheezes. Once he’s caught his breath, Tim looks up again—this time the anger’s all gone, replaced by a miserable, bone-deep weariness. A look far too aged for a sixteen-year-old. 

“I don’t get it. It shouldn’t affect me. I should be fine. I—barely even knew my dad, so—” Tim's voice splits suddenly, fracturing as he draws in a shaky breath. “So why is it doing this to me?”

“You’re allowed to grieve,” Bruce says. “Even if you didn’t know him very well, he was still your father, Tim. And that’s an enormous loss.”

A tear escapes one of Tim’s eyes. He wipes it away quickly, almost immediately, but Jason still sees it, and he feels relieved that he did. 

“I know I’ll never be able to replace him,” says Bruce. He swallows hard. “And I understand that… you don’t want me to be your father. But I can make other arrangements, Tim. I can help you sort out any legal matters if you really want to live on your own.”

Tim’s fingers curl into his bedsheets so hard that his knuckles go white. “I don’t,” he says quietly. “That’s the problem.”

“What is?” Jason says.

“I want it too much.” Another tear falls, but Tim barely seems to register it now, his hands quivering as they grip onto the sheets. “And—I’m not supposed to. I’m not family. I’m. I’m not anyone’s family, now. I can take care of myself. I’ve always taken care of myself.” 

Bruce reaches out and brushes Tim’s tears away with his thumb. “You don’t have to anymore, Tim,” he says, and Jason can see the moment Tim breaks, like tempered glass. “I’m sorry it’s taken this long.” 

Bruce wraps an arm around Tim and holds him while he comes apart, heaving sobs that Jason suspects he’s been holding in since the moment he found his dad, or possibly even longer, probably longer. None of them speak. They just sit with each other as Tim cries, until finally he slumps against Bruce, exhausted.

“Will you stay, Tim?” Bruce asks, hope coloring his voice. “At home?”

Tim’s eyes find Jason’s. His voice is rough from fatigue and sickness, but he still manages to say, “He should, too.” 

Jason nearly flinches. Then Bruce is looking at him, too, both of them looking like deer caught in headlights, and Jason understands suddenly why Tim tried to jump out of the window earlier. “Asshole,” Jason says. “Don’t push your avoidance issues onto me.”

“Jason,” Bruce starts.

“ No.”

“Jay,” says Tim, giving him that stupid goddamn Tim look, and. Fuck. Fuck everything. 

Jason gives a chagrined sigh, looking at the ceiling like this is the worst thing that has ever happened to him. 

“Maybe,” Jason says, “ maybe, I’ll come by every now and then, between work, to make sure you’re not doing something idiotic. That’s the best you’re gonna get from me, alright?”

He expects some kind of disappointment from Bruce, but instead, Bruce puts an arm around his shoulders too. When Bruce looks at him, it’s like he’s brought him fire from the heavens. “Your best is the best that I could ever ask for,” Bruce says. 

Shithead: dick said you’re coming over for dinner tomorrow?

Jason: I said I’d think about it 

Shithead: so you’re coming over for dinner tomorrow

Jason: Not surprised by your illiteracy

Shithead: D: 

Shithead: DDD: 

Shithead: fine. I’ll ask alf to give your garlic bread to me then

Shithead: since you won’t be around to eat it

Jason: Don’t you fucking dare

Shithead: see you tomorrow! :)

He changes the contact name in his phone from Shithead to just Tim . It’s a start.